Today’s News 1st May 2022

• The People Behind DHS's Orwellian "Disinformation Governance Board"
  The People Behind DHS’s Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board”

  Authored by Jeff Thompson via The Organic Prepper blog,

  A “Disinformation Governance Board” has just been created and is going to be run by the Department of Homeland Security. Their primary goal is going to be to “police” what is deemed to be “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

  

  No clarification has been given as of yet as to what this policing will mean, but it has been pointed out that the creation of this new Disinformation Governance Board is going to have the full strength of the DHS behind it.

  DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “the goal is to bring the resources of (DHS) together to address this threat.”

  Nina Jankowicz has been chosen to head up the new disinformation office as the executive director.

  Nina Jankowicz

  

  Nina Jankowicz

  Jankowicz received her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. A full list of the staff at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University can be found here.

  Some of the current faculty/staff members within the Walsh School of Foreign Service are:

  • Rebecca Katz

  • Shantayanan Devarajan

  • Thomas Banchoff

  • Madeleine Albright

  Jankowicz also spent time previously working with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (also called the Wilson Institute) in the past as a disinformation fellow. A full listing of their staff can be found here.

  Some of the current staff members, faculty, and associates at the Wilson Institute include:

  • Cynthia Arnson – Director of the Latin American Program

  • Shihoko Goto – Director for Geoeconomics and Indo-Pacific Enterprise/Deputy Director of the Asia Program

  • Duncan Wood – VP for Strategy and New Initiatives; Senior Advisor to the Mexico Instituted; Interim Director of the Global Europe Program

  • Lonnie Bunch III – Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

  She also previously worked with the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry with the Fullbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship, where she offered advice and oversaw the Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute.

  In addition to her past work history, Nina is also the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, published in 2020, and a book that was just published this month, How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back.

  How to Lose the Information War

  Within this book, Nina discusses what she learned during her time with the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry and Belarus as she worked to combat “Russian information warfare tactics.” The book examines five different nations and the policies they pushed to counter “misinformation” in what is claimed to be a fight for “the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.”

  (If you’re looking for information on how to starve the beast, check out our free QUICKSTART Guide.)

  How to Be a Woman Online

  Here, Nina says that toxic masculinity has poisoned the internet against women, particularly women who aren’t white. She argues from the standpoint that something needs to be done against these men to keep them from saying these things.

  When interviewed by NPR about this book, Nina said, “And I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities all around the world…”

  Nina went on within the interview to advocate for stronger consequences against men online who say things that are deemed to be wrong.

  “…we frankly need law enforcement and our legislatures to do more as well,” Nina said. She later went on to add, “really any law enforcement of consequences against abusers would make such a big difference because part of the reason this happens right now is that hardly anything ever happens to the people who are levying the abuse.

  The announcement

  News about the new taxpayer-supported agency was released to the American public by Alejandro Mayorkas during the House Appropriations Subcommittee as the 2023 budget for the Department of Homeland Security was discussed. 

  This came about after Representative Lauren Underwood (?) asked Mayorkas what he was going to do to combat “misinformation campaigns” aimed at people who aren’t white.

  

  Lauren Underwood

  Underwood said that not only was disinformation a “huge threat to our homeland,” but that “foreign adversaries attempt to destabilize our elections by targeting people of color with disinformation campaigns.”

  She went on to add, “A newer trend that we saw in the 2020 election and already in the 2022 midterms is that disinformation is being heavily targeted at Spanish-speaking voters, sparking and fueling conspiracy theories.”

  “DHS and its components play a big role in addressing myths and disinformation in Spanish and other languages. Can you share what steps you’ve taken and what future plans you have to address Spanish-language myths and disinformation through a department-wide approach?”

  Mayorkas’ response was the reveal of the DGB.

  He not only revealed that the DGB was in the process of being created but said that there were a number of other “different offices engaged in this critical effort,” one of which is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

  

  Alejandro Mayorkas

  Rob Silvers, the Undersecretary of Policy, and Jennifer Gaskill are stated to be involved in heading up the new agency, in addition to Nina Janckowicz.

  She pushed propaganda designed to help Joe Biden out of a scandal 3 weeks before the 2020 election.

  The Senate must act to stop her from doing more damage. https://t.co/tHyABHrLmM

  — Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) April 27, 2022

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  Trump talking about how he would “put out that fire” in Portland is the language of authoritarianism. It means the violent clearing of protestors, arrest without cause, abuse of human rights. That’s now law enforcement, that’s lawlessness.

  — Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) September 30, 2020

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  Organic Prepper’s response to this unconstitutional attack on the free press… We’ve decided to be proactive rather than reactive. While we hope the censorship doesn’t go too far, our website has already been targeted in the past. We tried then to play their game and post non-controversial, valuable preparedness advice without the hot button topics. But it didn’t matter – they still defunded us. This time, we’re playing OUR game and vow to continue bringing you the same information we would have without a Ministry of Truth threatening our livelihood. We’d like to introduce The Official Newsletter of the Apocalypse. This PDF will be sent to you once per month, on the 15th, and it will contain all the articles published on The OP over the previous month. You can save it to your computer, print it out, or download it to your USB archive. We’ve made this as affordable as possible while still covering our costs. Subscriptions during our presale begin at a mere $4.14 a month. Our first newsletter will come out May 15th. If you order now, during our presale, not only do you get a lower price, but you’ll also get January, February, and April’s content absolutely free. You can choose either a yearly or monthly subscription. The presale price is only available for a few days. Should we encounter a worst-case scenario that shuts down the website, then we would be able to get you the content that *would* have been published with the option of receiving it more frequently than once a month. We won’t be silenced easily. This is how we’re fighting back.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 23:30

• Which US State Drinks The Most Beer?
  Which US State Drinks The Most Beer?

  Beer consumption spans almost the entire world, and is a staple in much of the United States.

  As Visual Capitalist’s Polly Eaton details below, when stacked up next to other alcoholic beverages, beer is America’s preferred drink of choice, closely followed by wine and spirits. In fact, it is the fifth most-consumed drink overall in the country, behind coffee, water, soft drinks and tea.

  At the end of 2021, beer in the U.S. was a $94.1 billion industry. Alongside massive multinational conglomerations, it is also driven by over 9,000 breweries of different types.

  This visualization, created by Victor Dépré of Hypntic Data, maps the consumption of beer by gallons per capita across the U.S. using data from Top Agency and The Beer Institute.

  

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  What is Beer?

  Beer is produced from the fermentation of combined water, malt, and yeast. It was first produced 12,000 years ago with the emergence of grain agriculture.

  Today, beer is made from several different malted grains: wheat, corn, rice, oats, and most commonly, barley. Hops, a type of flower, are added for flavor, balancing out the malt’s sweetness with a bitter taste while also preserving the beer’s freshness and giving a good amount of foam.

  American Beer Consumption By State

  So which states drank the most beer, and what was their preferred brand?

  The annual consumption stats come from the Beer Institute’s Brewer’s Almanac report, while the preferred beer of choice was compiled by Data Agency’s 2021 Beer Rankings report, which is based on a combination of surveys combined with Google search analysis from all over the country.

  New Hampshire took the top spot in 2020, outdrinking other states with 41.5 gallons of beer consumed annually per capita. In contrast, the lowest consuming state was Maryland which only consumed 19.7 gallons per capita, about half as much.

  The most popular beer?

  Despite the growing trend of craft breweries in some states, the most popular beer across the country was Budweiser of Anheuser-Busch, which took the top spot in 23 states.

  

  Which State Has The Most Breweries?

  Each state also has varying numbers of breweries operating within, and there are many different types.

  Larger breweries, including those run by some of the world’s largest companies, are also called macrobreweries. They are usually defined as having an annual production greater than 6 million barrels of beer, compared to craft breweries and other types of microbreweries which have a lower annual production.

  Craft breweries are also usually independently owned, and through both positioning and general perception, have come to be associated with specialties and originality, adding unique and interesting ingredients to traditional brews.

  

  California has the highest number of breweries in the country, more than double any other state, at 1,466.

  On the flip side, Mississippi has the fewest breweries, with the most recent Beer Institute’s 2021 almanac only listing 26 in the entire state.

  Beer Sales During the Pandemic

  Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, commonplace items saw massive spikes in sales across the world.

  As lockdowns were implemented and people were forced to stay at home, household items like toilet paper, soap, and pastas began to disappear from store shelves at alarmingly fast rates. Beer was no exception, and sales have continued to increase, going up by 8.9% in the U.S. since 2020.

  This is a worrisome fact to many researchers, as it could be a strong indicator that alcohol was used as a coping mechanism against anxiety and isolation felt during the pandemic. This rise could be a result of increased consumption, but may also indicate increased stockpiling.

  Regardless of why beer sales increased, it will be interesting to see which way the trend swings with the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions and the attempted return to normalcy in the months to come.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 23:00

• CDC Reports First Human Case Of Avian Influenza
  CDC Reports First Human Case Of Avian Influenza

  By Becker’s Hospital Review

  A Colorado man has tested positive for an H5 bird flu virus, the first such case in the U.S., health officials said April 28. 

  

  The Colorado health department said the man, who is younger than 40, had been working on a commercial farm with poultry that, according to the CDC, was presumably infected with H5N1.

  He reported fatigue as his only symptom and is now in isolation and being treated with the flu antiviral drug oseltamivir. 

  It’s unclear whether the exposure resulted in an infection, according to statements from the health agencies. Officials from the Colorado health department said a positive test result came from a single nasal specimen. The CDC confirmed that result April 27, though it said repeat testing has been negative. 

  “Because the person was in close contact with infected poultry, the virus may have been present in the person’s nose without causing infection,” the Colorado health department said. The CDC said whether the positive test was the result of “surface contamination of the nasal membrane” cannot be determined now.

  “The appropriate public health response at this time is to assume this is an infection and take actions to contain and treat,” the CDC said, adding risk to the general public remains low. 

  The CDC has been monitoring H5N1 outbreaks among wild birds and poultry since late 2021.

  The agency said it has been tracking the health of more than 2,500 people with exposure to infected birds, and this marks the only detected case. The first such human infection caused by the predominant group of H5N1 viruses now circulating was reported in the U.K. in December. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 22:30

• Shanghai Ship-Jam Spells Supply Chain Trouble
  Shanghai Ship-Jam Spells Supply Chain Trouble

  China’s tough new lockdown measures have led to a major backlog of cargo and container ships in front of Shanghai’s port. With employees unable to go to work, the world’s largest container port is having to manage with significantly fewer staff.

  As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, the scale of the problem, using a map of the area on April 28, as provided by FleetMon, an online tracking portal for ships.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  In terms of container throughput, Shanghai’s port is the largest in the world. 47 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs, unit of measure for container sizes) were handled there last year. To put this into perspective, the largest port in Europe is in Rotterdam, and had only 15.3 million TEUs handled there in that same year. This Statista graphic provides an overview of the world’s largest cargo ports.

  FleetMon uses ships’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) signals to display traffic volume. These are important in shipping for the exchange of navigational data via radio. Every ship over 20m has to transmit an AIS signal. It transmits, among other things, call name, vessel type, GPS position, dimensions and similar data.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 22:00

• Michigan Investigated Hundreds Of Doctors, Nurses Over COVID-Related Complaints
  Michigan Investigated Hundreds Of Doctors, Nurses Over COVID-Related Complaints

  Authored by Alice Giordano via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Hundreds of nurses and doctors, including a chief medical examiner, have been investigated by the state of Michigan on COVID-related allegations ranging from videotaping a wedding where some guests weren’t wearing masks to telling trick-or-treaters not to get the vaccine.

  

  Authorities dismissed many of the complaints. Dozens are still pending, with a number referred for disciplinary action. Some have been referred to the Michigan Attorney General’s office for criminal prosecution.

  An allergy and asthma specialist is the subject of one of the referrals sent to the attorney general. The complaint accuses the doctor of prescribing “a lethal dosage” of ivermectin.

  Copies of the complaints, which total more than 500, were provided exclusively to the Epoch Times. The Pacific Justice Institute obtained the records through a FOIA request. The institute represents some of the accused nurses and doctors.

  The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs received and investigated the complaints. Those they have investigated have either been dismissed or referred to its enforcement division for disciplinary action or the AG’s office. Many are listed as still being listed “under board review.” The list provided to the institute includes complaints as recent as February 24, 2022.

  One of the nurses the Pacific Justice Institute represents is Holly Austin, a college nursing professor who holds a doctorate in nursing.

  She faced the revocation of her license by the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs for speaking at a public school board meeting in December of 2021 as a parent against plans to reinstitute a mask mandate at her children’s school.

  Dave Peters, a staff attorney with Pacific Justice Institute, told The Epoch Times he was shocked when the state continued its investigation into Austin even after he submitted a 100-page response to the state’s allegations that she was spreading misinformation.

  “I remember not long ago that such actions by government authorities or anybody else would have had the entire journalist community howling about suppression and chilling free speech, ” said Peters, who also holds a master’s degree in medicine.

  According to documents Peters provided to The Epoch Times, it took the state more than a year to close the investigation against Austin. The state concluded in a March 3, 2022 letter “that following a thorough review and investigation,” it had “determined a violation of the Public Health Code cannot be substantiated.”

  More than 200 doctors and nurses found themselves under investigation just for expressing concerns about the COVID vaccine or for not wearing or promoting the wearing of masks. One doctor was reported for shaking hands with someone who wasn’t wearing a mask; another was the subject of a complaint for claiming he had a bad reaction to the COVID vaccine.

  In February, Ljubisa Dragovic, Chief Medical Examiner for Oakland County, found himself under investigation by the state for performing autopsies without wearing a mask.

  “When you are working in an environment with deceased individuals there is no active sneezing or coughing on the part of the cadavers. It was nonsense,” Dragovic told The Epoch Times, “you can’t get or give COVID to a dead person.” Dragovic said he couldn’t wear a mask because his glasses would fog up, and he couldn’t see what he was doing.

  “The last thing you want to be is blinded while using a sharp scapula,” he said.

  Dragovic, who is fully vaccinated and believes in wearing masks around live patients and co-workers, said he spent about two hours answering questions from investigators for the Michigan Medical Licensing Board.

  According to Dragovic, another medical examiner filed the complaint. The person was “totally crazed with fear over COVID,” Dragovic said. That doctor was hired at the height of the pandemic to perform autopsies but refused to do so out of fear he would contract COVID-19, even locking himself in his office at times. He eventually quit, according to Dragovic.

  The complainant only filed the allegation a year later after Dragovic refused to give the doctor a job reference.

  Peters says the case is an example of how the state investigations had nothing to do with keeping the public safe.

  “This was used to kill free speech to intimidate people into submission,” he said, “period.”

  Dozens of the complaints were againt doctors who issued mask waivers to children. Three nurses were accused of falsifying proof of vaccines, including one who allegedly did so for a friend for a cruise.

  The licensing board referred complaints against two physicians and two chiropractors to the Michigan Attorney General’s Office for “not following COVID-19 safety precautions.”

  The board investigated several physicians and nurses for either promoting or prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.

  The complaint against Austin cites an email she wrote to the Brighton School Board that included a compilation of research she had conducted on the harm of wearing masks. She cited over 200 studies.

  “I implore you to be informed of the current literature regarding masks and their ineffectiveness to decrease the transmission of COVID-19, the potential and inherent harms of masks on our pediatric population, and the short term and long term sequelae to our youth with continued mask mandates,” Austin wrote.

  Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about the investigations.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 21:30

• "Not The Right Fit" – Disney Exec Who Led Anti-Florida-Bill Response Leaves Firm After 3 Months
  “Not The Right Fit” – Disney Exec Who Led Anti-Florida-Bill Response Leaves Firm After 3 Months

  The Disney executive who sculpted the company’s response to Florida’s parental rights bill has left his position after just three months on the job.

  

  Disney’s (now former) new head of corporate affairs, Geoff Morrell, said in a statement to his team that:

  “It has become clear to me that for a number of reasons it is not the right fit,” adding that,

  “After talking this over with [Disney CEO] Bob [Chapek], I have decided to leave the company to pursue other opportunities.”

  Morrell’s efforts to position the company against the bill have arguably backfired as Florida Republicans led by Gov. Ron DeSantis stripped Disney of special privileges the company has enjoyed in that state for several decades.

  Another example of ‘get woke, go broke’?

  

  Kristina Schake, hired earlier this month, will replace him as head of communications, Disney said in a statement Friday. She is a former public relations director for Instagram and served as a spokeswoman for First Lady Michelle Obama. 

  We can only imagine how strong her virtue-signaling game is…

  Read Chapek’s memo to staff, obtained by Deadline:

  Team-

  I am writing to share the news that Geoff Morrell, our Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. Fortunately, the strength and experience of our existing leadership team—including relatively new all-star hires—means there is no shortage of talent to guide our reputation-driving functions. With Geoff’s departure, I am pleased to share the following changes:

  First, Kristina Schake will lead The Walt Disney Company’s communications efforts, serving as our Executive Vice President, Global Communications reporting directly to me. In this expanded role, Kristina will have oversight for corporate and segment communications and continue to be our chief spokesperson. Our business segment and content communications leads will continue to dual report to both division leadership and corporate communications, now led by Kristina.

  We are incredibly fortunate to have Kristina with us at this important time. Her 30-plus years of experience includes roles leading President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine education program, communications for Instagram, and leadership positions in political campaigns and the Obama White House. Kristina has a strategic approach and collaborative style, as well as relentless optimism and a strong appreciation of our brand and its place in the world. These attributes will be invaluable as she works to protect and enhance our reputation, and I am thrilled to be working with her more closely.

  Next, Government Relations and Global Public Policy will now be led by our General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez. Since joining the company earlier this year, Horacio has integrated seamlessly into the Disney family, and has quickly become a valued advisor to me and the leadership team on a wide range of issues. His extensive experience leading these areas will be incredibly useful in driving our efforts.

  In addition to his current direct reports, Susan Fox, Senior Vice President for Government Relations, and Yvonne Pei, Senior Vice President, External Relations, Greater China, will join Dorothy Attwood, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy, in reporting directly to Horacio.

  Finally, Jenny Cohen, Executive Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility, will now report solely to me in her role leading our CSR and ESG efforts. Jenny is a strong leader, and has done incredible work modernizing our approach in key areas like environmental sustainability, community investment, and philanthropy.

  I am incredibly confident in this team, and look forward to working with them and all of our leadership to set Disney’s course for the next 100 years of extraordinary entertainment and experiences.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 21:00

• Tverberg: The World Has A Major Crude Oil Problem; Expect Conflict Ahead
  Tverberg: The World Has A Major Crude Oil Problem; Expect Conflict Ahead

  Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

  Media outlets tend to make it sound as if all our economic problems are temporary problems, related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, world crude oil production has been falling behind needed levels since 2019. This problem, by itself, encourages the world economy to contract in unexpected ways, including in the form of economic lockdowns and aggression between countries. This crude oil shortfall seems likely to become greater in the years ahead, pushing the world economy toward conflict and the elimination of inefficient players.

  To me, crude oil production is of particular importance because this form of oil is especially useful. With refining, it can operate tractors used to cultivate crops, and it can operate trucks to bring food to stores to sell. With refining, it can be used to make jet fuel. It can also be refined to make fuel for earth moving equipment used in road building. In recent years, it has become common to publish “all liquids” amounts, which include liquid fuels such as ethanol and natural gas liquids. These fuels have uses when energy density is not important, but they do not operate the heavy machinery needed to maintain today’s economy.

  In this post, I provide an overview of the crude oil situation as I see it. In my analysis, I utilize crude oil production data by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) that has only recently become available for the full year of 2021. In some exhibits, I also make estimates for the first quarter of 2022 based on preliminary information for this period.

  [1] World crude oil production grew marginally in 2021.

  

  Figure 1. World crude oil production based on EIA international data through December 31, 2021.

  Crude oil production for the year 2021 was a disappointment for those hoping that production would rapidly bounce back to at least the 2019 level. World crude oil production increased by 1.4% in 2021, to 77.0 million barrels per day, after a decrease of -7.5% in 2020. If we look back, we can see that the highest year of crude oil production was in 2018, not 2019. Oil production in 2021 was still 5.9 million barrels per day below the 2018 level.

  With respect to the overall increase in crude oil production of 1.4% in 2021, OPEC helped bring this average up with an increase of 3.0% in 2021. Russia also helped, with an increase of 2.5%. The United States helped pull the world crude increase down, with a decrease in production of -1.1% in 2021. In Section [5], more information will be provided with respect to crude production for these groupings.

  [2] The growth in world crude oil production shows an amazingly steady relationship to the growth in world population since 1991. The major exception is the decrease in consumption that took place in 2020, with the lockdowns that changed consumption patterns.

  

  Figure 2. World per capita crude oil production based on EIA international data through December 31, 2021, together with UN 2019 population estimates. The UN’s estimated historical amounts were used through 2020; the “low growth” estimate was used for 2021.

  Figure 2 indicates that, up through 2018, each person in the world consumed an average of around 4.0 barrels of crude oil. This equates to 168 US gallons or 636 liters of crude per year. Much of this crude is used by businesses and governments to produce the basic goods we expect from our economy, including food and roads.

  A big downshift occurred in 2020 with the COVID lockdowns. Many people began working from home; international travel was scaled back. The reduction of these uses of oil helped bring down total world usage. Changes such as these explain the big dip in crude oil production (and consumption) in 2020, which continued into 2021.

  Even in 2019, the world economy was starting to scale back. Beginning in early 2018, China banned the importation of many types of materials for recycling, and other countries soon followed suit. As a result, less oil was used for transporting materials across the ocean for recycling. (Subsidies for recycling were helping to pay for this oil.) Loss of recycling and other cutbacks (especially in China and India) led to fewer people in these countries being able to afford automobiles and smartphones. Lower production of these devices contributed to the lower use of crude oil.

  On Figure 2, there is a slight year-to-year variation in crude oil per capita. The single highest year over the time period shown is 2005, with 2004 not far behind. This was about the time many people think that conventional oil production “peaked,” reducing the availability of inexpensive-to-produce oil.

  [3] Crude oil prices dropped dramatically when economies were shut in, beginning in March 2020. Prices began spiking the summer and fall of 2021, as the world economy attempted to open up. This pattern suggests that the real problem is tight crude oil supply when the economy is not artificially constrained by COVID restrictions.

  

  Figure 3. Average weekly Brent oil price in chart prepared by EIA, through April 8, 2022. Amounts are not adjusted for inflation.

  An analysis of price trends suggests that most of the recent spike in crude prices is due to the tightness of the crude oil supply, rather than the Ukraine conflict. The Brent oil price dropped to an average of $14.24 in the week ending April 24, 2020, not long after COVID restrictions were enacted. When the economy started to reopen, in the week ending July 2, 2021, the average price rose to $76.26. By the week ending January 28, 2022, the average price had risen to $90.22.

  Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The Brent spot price on February 23, 2022, was $99.29. Brent prices briefly spiked higher, with weekly average prices rising as high as $123.60, for the week ending March 25, 2022. The current Brent oil price is about $107. If we compare the current price to the price the day before the invasion began, the price is only $8 higher. Even compared to the January 28 weekly average of $90.22, the current price is $17 higher.

  Saying that the Ukraine invasion is causing the current high price is mostly a convenient excuse, suggesting that the high prices will suddenly disappear if this conflict disappears. The sad truth is that depletion is causing the cost of extraction to rise. Governments of oil exporting countries also need high prices to enable high taxes on exported oil. We are increasingly experiencing a conflict between the prices that the customers can afford and the prices that those doing the extraction require. In my view, most oil exporting countries need a price in excess of $120 per barrel to meet all of their needs, including reinvestment and taxes. Consumers would prefer oil prices under $50 per barrel to keep the price of food and transportation low.

  [4] Food prices tend to rise when oil prices are high because products made from crude oil are used in the production and transport of food.

  History shows that bad things tend to happen when food prices are very high, including riots by unhappy citizens. This is a major reason that high oil prices tend to lead to conflict.

  

  Figure 4. FAO inflation-adjusted monthly food price index. Source.

  [5] Quarterly crude oil data suggests that few opportunities exist to raise crude oil production to the level needed for the world economy to operate at the level it operated at in 2018 or 2019.

  Figure 5 shows quarterly world crude oil production broken down into four groupings: OPEC, US, Russia, and “All Other.”

  

  Figure 5. Quarterly crude oil production through first quarter of 2022. Amounts through December 2021 are EIA international estimates. Increase in OPEC first quarter of 2022 production is estimated based on OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report, April 2022. US crude oil production for first quarter of 2022 estimated based on preliminary EIA indications. Russia and All Other production for first quarter of 2022 are estimated based on recent trends.

  Figure 5 shows four very different patterns of past growth in crude oil supply. The All Other grouping is generally trending a bit downward in terms of quantity supplied. If world per capita crude oil production is to stay at least level, the total production of the other three groupings (OPEC, US, and Russia) needs to be rising to offset this decline. In fact, it needs to rise enough that overall crude production growth keeps up with population growth.

  Russian Crude Oil Production

  The data underlying Figure 5 shows that up until the COVID restrictions, Russia’s crude oil production was increasing by 1.4% per year between early 2005 and early 2020. During the same period, world population was increasing by about 1.2%. Thus, Russia’s oil production has been part of what has helped keep world crude production about level, on a per capita basis. Also, Russia seems to have made up most of its temporary decrease in production related to COVID restrictions by the first quarter of 2022.

  US Crude Oil Production

  Growth in US crude oil production has been more of a “feast or famine” situation. This can be seen both in Figure 5 above and in Figure 6 below.

  

  Figure 6. US crude oil production based on EIA data. First quarter of 2022 amount is estimated based on EIA weekly and monthly indications.

  US crude oil production spurted up rapidly in the 2011 to 2014 period, when oil prices were high (Figure 3). When oil prices fell in late 2014, US crude production fell for about two years. US oil production began to rise again in late 2016, as oil prices rose again. By early 2019 (when oil prices were again lower), US crude oil growth began to slow down.

  In early 2020, COVID lockdowns brought a 15% drop in crude oil production (considering quarterly production), most of which has not been made up. In fact, growth after the lockdowns has been slow, similar to the level of growth during the “growth slowdown” circled in Figure 6. We hear reports that the sweet spots in shale formations have largely been drilled. This leaves mostly high-cost areas left to drill. Also, investors would like better financial discipline. Ramping up greatly, and then cutting back, is no way to operate a successful company.

  Thus, while growth in US crude oil production greatly supported world growth in crude oil production in the 2009 to 2018 period, it is impossible to see this pattern continuing. Getting crude oil production back up to the level of 12 million barrels a day where it was before the COVID restrictions would be extremely difficult. Further production growth, to support the growing needs of an expanding world population, is likely impossible.

  OPEC Crude Oil Production

  Figure 7 shows EIA crude oil production estimates for the total group of countries that are now members of OPEC. It also shows crude oil production excluding the two countries which have recently been subject to sanctions: Iran and Venezuela.

  

  Figure 7. OPEC crude oil production to December 31, 2021, based on EIA data. Estimates for first quarter of 2022 based on indications from OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report, April 2022.

  If Iran and Venezuela are removed, OPEC’s long-term production is surprisingly “flat.” The “peak” period of production is the fourth quarter of 2018. The fourth quarter of 2018 was the time when the OPEC countries were producing as much oil as they could, to get their production quotas as high as possible after the planned cutbacks that took effect at the beginning of 2019.

  Strangely, EIA data indicates that production didn’t fall very much for this group of countries (OPEC excluding Iran and Venezuela), starting in early 2019. The 2019 cutback seems mostly to have affected the production of Iran and Venezuela. It was only later, in the first three quarters of 2020, when COVID restrictions were affecting worldwide production, that crude oil production for OPEC excluding Iran and Venezuela fell by 4 million barrels per day. Production for this group then began to rise, leaving a shortfall of about 900,000 barrels a day, relative to where it had been before the 2020 lockdowns.

  It seems to me that, at most, production for the group of OPEC countries excluding Iran and Venezuela can be ramped up by 900,000 barrels a day, and even this is “iffy.” Iraq is reported to be having difficulty with its production; it needs more investment, or its production will fall. Nigeria is past peak, and it is also having difficulty with its production. The high reported crude oil reserves are meaningless; the question is, “How much can these countries produce when it is required?” It doesn’t look like production can be ramped up very much. Furthermore, we cannot count on continued long-term growth in production from these countries, such as would be needed to keep pace with rising world population.

  

  Figure 8. Crude oil production indications for Iran and Venezuela, based on EIA data through December 31, 2021. Change in oil production for first quarter of 2021 is estimated based on OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report, April 2022.

  Figure 8 suggests that, indeed, Iran might be able to raise its production by perhaps 1.0 million barrels a day when sanctions are lifted.

  Venezuela looks like a country whose crude oil production was already declining before sanctions were imposed. The cost of production there was likely far higher than the world oil price. Also, Venezuela has oil debts to China that it needs to repay. At most, we might expect that Venezuela’s production could be raised by 300,000 barrels per day in the absence of sanctions.

  Putting the three estimates of amounts that crude oil production can perhaps be raised together, we have:

  • OPEC ex Iran and Venezuela: 900,000 bpd

  • Iran: 1,000,000 bpd

  • Venezuela: 300,000 bpd

  • Total: 2.2 million bpd

  The shortfall of crude oil production in 2021, relative to 2018 production, was 5.9 million bpd, as mentioned in Section [1]. The 2.2 million barrels per day possibly available from this analysis gets us nowhere near the 2018 level. Furthermore, we have nowhere to go to obtain the rising crude oil production required to support the rising population with enough crude oil to supply food and industrial goods at today’s consumption level.

  [6] Eliminating, or even reducing, Russia’s crude oil production is certain to have an adverse impact on the world economy.

  Figure 9 shows the step-down in crude oil production that occurred in early 2020 and indicates that the world’s oil supply is having difficulty getting back up to pre-COVID levels. If Russia’s crude oil production were to be eliminated, it would make for another step-down of comparable magnitude. Major segments of the economy would likely need to be eliminated.

  

  Figure 9. Quarterly crude oil production through first quarter of 2022 divided by world population estimates based on 2019 UN population estimates. Crude oil amounts through December 2021 are EIA estimates. Crude oil production estimates for first quarter 2022 are as described in the caption to Figure 5.

  [7] When there isn’t enough crude oil to go around, the naive belief is that oil prices will rise and either more oil will be found, or substitutes will take its place. In fact, the result may be conflict and elimination of segments of the economy.

  Our self-organizing economy will tend to adapt in its own way to inadequate crude oil supplies. Eventually, the economy may collapse completely, but before that happens, changes are likely to happen to try to preserve the “better functioning” parts of the economy. In this way, perhaps parts of the world economy can continue to function for a while longer while getting rid of less productive parts of the economy.

  The following is a partial list of ways the economy might adapt:

  • Fighting may take place over the remaining crude oil supplies. This may be the underlying reason for the conflict between NATO and Russia, with respect to Ukraine.

  • COVID lockdowns indirectly reduce demand for crude oil. A person might wonder whether the current COVID lockdowns in China are partly aimed at preventing oil and other commodity prices from rising to absurd levels.

  • Some organizations may disappear from the world economy because of inadequate funding or lack of profitability.

  • Additional supply lines are likely to break, allowing fewer types of goods and services to be made.

  • The world economy may subdivide into multiple pieces, with each piece able to make a much more limited array of goods and services than is provided today. A shift toward the use of other currencies instead of the US dollar may be part of this shift.

  • World population may shrink for multiple reasons, including poor nutrition and epidemics.

  • The poor, the elderly and the disabled may be increasingly cut off from government programs, as total goods and services (including total food supplies) fall too low.

  • Europe could be cut off from Russian fossil fuel exports, leaving relatively more for the rest of the world.

  [8] Countries that are major importers of crude oil and crude oil products would seem to be at significant risk of reduced supply if there is not enough crude oil to go around.

  Figure 10 shows a rough estimate of the ratio of crude oil produced to crude oil products consumed in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. On an “All Liquids” basis, the US ratio of crude oil production to consumption would appear higher than shown on Figure 10 because of its unusually high share of natural gas liquids, ethanol, and “refinery gain” in its liquids production. If these types of production are omitted, the US still seems to have a deficit in producing the crude oil it consumes.

   

  Figure 10. Rough estimate of ratio of crude oil produce to the quantity of crude oil products consumed, based on “Crude oil production” and “Oil: Regional consumption – by product group” in BP’s 2021 Statistical Review of World Energy. Russia+ includes Russia plus the other countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

  Perhaps all that is needed is the general idea. If inadequate crude oil is available, all of the countries at the left of Figure 10 are quite vulnerable because they are very dependent on imports. Russia and the Middle East are prime targets for countries that are desperate for crude oil.

  [9] Conclusion: We are likely entering a period of conflict and confusion because of the way the world’s self-organizing economy behaves when there is an inadequate supply of crude oil.

  The issue of how important crude oil is to the world economy has been left out of most textbooks for years. Instead, we were taught creative myths covering several topics:

  • Huge amounts of fossil fuels will be available in the future

  • Climate change is our worst problem

  • Wind and solar will save us

  • A fast transition to an all-electric economy is possible

  • Electric cars are the future

  • The economy will grow forever

  Now we are running into a serious shortfall of crude oil. We can expect a new set of problems, including far more conflict. Wars are likely. Debt defaults are likely. Political parties will take increasingly divergent positions on how to work around current problems. News media will increasingly tell the narrative that their owners and advertisers want told, with little regard for the real situation.

  About all we can do is enjoy each day we have and try not to be disturbed by the increasing conflict around us. It becomes clear that many of us will not live as long or well as we previously expected, regardless of savings or supposed government programs. There is no real way to fix this issue, except perhaps to make religion and the possibility of life after death more of a focus.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 20:30

• The Countries With The Best (And Worst) Work-Life Balance
  The Countries With The Best (And Worst) Work-Life Balance

  Mexicans are among those struggling most with their work-life balance, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, Colombians’ and Costa Ricans’ lives aren’t really in balance either. The United States and the United Kingdom also performed pretty poorly, coming in 13th and 14th out of all 38 OECD member countries (plus Russia, Brazil and South Africa) covered in the Better Life Index for 2020.

  Cultures of overwork also led to undesirable results in South Korea and Japan.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  At the other end of the spectrum, people in Italy enjoy the best work-life balance.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Unsurprisingly, the most important aspects for a healthy work-life balance is the amount of time people spend (not) at work, how many people work very long hours and how much time remains for leisure. The authors of the Better Life Index note that “evidence suggests that long work hours may impair personal health, jeopardise safety and increase stress.”

  Employed Italians had the most time for leisure and personal activities in the survey, while only 3 percent of employees in the country worked very long hours (50 or more hours a week).

  In comparison, 10.4 percent of American employees worked very long hours, causing the United States to rank much lower (29th out of 41 countries in the running).

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 20:00

• Russian Cyber Attacks Fail To Materialize After Biden Warned 'It's Coming'
  Russian Cyber Attacks Fail To Materialize After Biden Warned ‘It’s Coming’

  Authored by by Kyle Anzalone & Will Porter via The Libertarian Institute, 

  One month after President Joe Biden warned Americans to prepare for cyberattacks from Russia, a US official said that Washington still has yet to detect any. 

  The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has assessed that Russia has not breached US systems, with agency head Jen Easterly saying the administration has “not seen attacks manifest here.”

  

  “To date, we have not seen specific attacks on the US. What we are concerned about is the fact that Russia’s malicious cyber activity is part of their playbook,” she said in a statement on Thursday. 

  Easterly did mention that American economic penalties could provoke Russian cyber operations in the future, despite the lack of such breaches to date.

  “We are very concerned that as the war drags on, there may, in fact, be retaliatory attacks given the very severe sanctions we have imposed on the Kremlin, the US and our allies,” the agency head continued. 

  In a March 21 speech, Biden told Americans that “the magnitude of Russia’s cyber capacity is fairly consequential, and it’s coming,” ominous warning of major hacks on the horizon. The Biden administration has issued several similar alerts that have failed to materialize. 

  The White House has warned for months that Moscow could deploy chemical weapons and has even shipped protective equipment to Kiev’s forces to prepare for such an attack.

  WATCH: Biden nonchalantly says Russia is about to conduct a cyberattack against the United States.

  “It’s coming.” pic.twitter.com/t0W90Sbkai

  — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 21, 2022

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

  On April 6, however, a series of unnamed US officials told NBC News that “there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine,” adding that Washington hurled the accusation merely to “deter Russia from using the banned munitions.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 19:30

• Twitter's $17 Million Per Year Censorship Czar Could Get Axe Under Musk
  Twitter’s $17 Million Per Year Censorship Czar Could Get Axe Under Musk

  Twitter’s censorship czar Victoria Gadde – who broke down in tears last week during a conference call to discuss Elon Musk’s purchase of the company – stands to lose her job which paid $17 million last year, as Musk is reportedly planning to cut jobs and executive pay as part of the takeover.

  

  Musk expressed “no confidence” in Twitter’s current management following the announcement of his plans to buy the company.

  That said, the 48-year-old Gadde – who was behind decisions such as Zero Hedge’s February 2020 ban for peculating that Covid-19 may have emerged from a Wuhan Lab, and former President Trump’s ongoing ban, has a reported $12.5 million severance package, according to the NY Post.

  Musk shared a flowchart last week based on a 2019 appearance by Gadde on “The Joe Rogan Experience” where journalist Tim Pool absolutely wrecked her over anti-conservative bias.

  pic.twitter.com/1CE7rjBrNH

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022

  Musk also called Twitter’s decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story – another ‘buck stops with Gadde’ decision – “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

  The piece was banned by major social media sites in the weeks before the election, with Twitter justifying accusations of censorship by labeling the story “content obtained through hacking that contains private information.”

  Many mainstream outlets also tried to discredit the Post’s article, before later reporting on its veracity long after President Joe Biden was elected. -NY Post

  Fortunately for Gadde any any other Twitter employees who gets the axe, they can simply start their own Twitter.

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 19:00

• Escobar: The Empire Of Lies, Operation Z, & The New Global Chessboard
  Escobar: The Empire Of Lies, Operation Z, & The New Global Chessboard

  Authored by Pepe Escobar,

  The only antidote to propaganda dementia is served by sparse voices of reason, which happen to be Russian, thus silenced and/or dismissed.

  

  Especially since the onset of GWOT (Global War on Terror) at the start of the millennium, no one ever lost money betting against the toxic combo of hubris, arrogance and ignorance serially deployed by the Empire of Chaos and Lies.

  What passes for “analysis” in the vast intellectual no-fly zone known as U.S. Think Tankland includes wishful thinking babble such as Beijing “believing” that Moscow would play a supporting role in the Chinese century just to see Russia, now, in the geopolitical driver’s seat.

  This is a fitting example not only of outright Russophobic/Sinophobic paranoia about the emergence of peer competitors in Eurasia – the primeval Anglo-American nightmare – but also crass ignorance about the finer points of the complex Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership.

  As Operation Z methodically hits Phase 2, the Americans – with a vengeance – have also embarked on their symmetrical Phase 2, which de facto translates as an outright escalation towards Totalen Krieg, from shades of hybrid to incandescent, everything of course by proxy. Notorious Raytheon weapons peddler reconverted into Pentagon head, Lloyd Austin, gave away the game in Kiev:

  “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

  So this is it: the Empire wants to annihilate Russia. Cue to War Inc.’s frenzy of limitless weapon cargos descending on Ukraine, the overwhelming majority on the road to be duly eviscerated by Russian precision strikes. The Americans are sharing intel 24/7 with Kiev not only on Donbass and Crimea but also Russian territory. Totalen Krieg proceeds in parallel to the engineered controlled demolition of the EU’s economy, with the European Commission merrily acting as a sort of P.R. arm of NATO.

  Amidst the propaganda dementia cum acute cognitive dissonance overdrive across the whole NATOstan sphere, the only antidote is served by sparse voices of reason, which happen to be Russian, thus silenced and/or dismissed. The West ignores them at their own collective peril.

  Patrushev goes Triple-X unplugged

  Let’s start with President Putin’s speech to the Council of Legislators in St. Petersburg celebrating the Day of Russian Parliamentarism.

  Putin demonstrated how a hardly new “geopolitical weapon” relying on “Russophobia and neo-Nazis”, coupled with efforts of “economic strangulation”, not only failed to smother Russia, but impregnated in the collective unconscious the feeling this an existential conflict: a “Second Great Patriotic War”.

  With off the charts hysteria across the spectrum, a message for an Empire that still refuses to listen, and doesn’t even understand the meaning of “indivisibility of security”, had to be inevitable:

  “I would like to emphasize once again that if someone intends to interfere in the events taking place from the outside and creates threats of a strategic nature unacceptable to Russia, they should know that our retaliatory strikes will be lightning fast. We have all the tools for this. Such as no one can boast of now. And we won’t brag. We will use them if necessary. And I want everyone to know about it – we have made all the decisions on this matter.”

  Translation: non-stop provocations may lead Mr. Kinzhal, Mr. Zircon and Mr. Sarmat to be forced to present their business cards in select Western latitudes, even without an official invitation.

  Arguably for the first time since the start of Operation Z, Putin made a distinction between military operations in Donbass and the rest of Ukraine. This directly relates to the integration in progress of Kherson, Zaporozhye and Kharkov, and implies the Russian Armed Forces will keep going and going, establishing sovereignty not only in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics but also over Kherson, Zaporozhye, and further on down the road from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea, all the way to establishing full control of Nikolaev and Odessa.

  The formula is crystal clear: “Russia cannot allow the creation of anti-Russian territories around the country.”

  Now let’s move to an extremely detailed interview by Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, where Patrushev sort of went triple-X unplugged.

  The key take away may be here:

  “The collapse of the American-centric world is a reality in which one must live and build an optimal line of behavior.” Russia’s “optimal line of behavior” – much to the wrath of the universalist and unilateralist hegemon – features “sovereignty, cultural and spiritual identity and historical memory.”

  Patrushev shows how “tragic scenarios of world crises, both in past years and today, are imposed by Washington in its desire to consolidate its hegemony, resisting the collapse of the unipolar world.” The U.S. goes no holds barred “to ensure that other centers of the multipolar world do not even dare to raise their heads, and our country not only dared, but publicly declared that it would not play by the imposed rules.”

  Patrushev could not but stress how War Inc. is literally making a killing in Ukraine: “The American and European military-industrial complex is jubilant, because thanks to the crisis in Ukraine, it has no respite from order. It is not surprising that, unlike Russia, which is interested in the speedy completion of a special military operation and minimizing losses on all sides, the West is determined to delay it at least to the last Ukrainian.”

  And that mirrors the psyche of American elites:

  “You are talking about a country whose elite is not able to appreciate other people’s lives. Americans are used to walking on scorched earth. Since World War II, entire cities have been razed to the ground by bombing, including nuclear bombing. They flooded the Vietnamese jungle with poison, bombed the Serbs with radioactive munitions, burned Iraqis alive with white phosphorus, helped terrorists poison Syrians with chlorine (…) As history shows, NATO has also never been a defensive alliance, only an offensive one.”

  Previously, in an interview with the delightfully named The Great Game show on Russian TV, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had once again detailed how the Americans “no longer insist on the implementation of international law, but on respect for the ‘rules-based world order’. These ‘rules’ are not deciphered in any way. They say that now there are few rules. For us, they don’t exist at all. There is international law. We respect it, as does the UN Charter. The key provision, the main principle is the sovereign equality of states. The U.S. flagrantly violates its obligations under the UN Charter when it promotes its ‘rules’”.

  Lavrov had to stress, once again, that the current incandescent situation may be compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis: “In those years, there was a channel of communication that both leaders trusted. Now there is no such channel. No one is trying to create it.”

  The Empire of Lies, in its current state, does not do diplomacy.

  The pace of the game in the new chessboard

  In a subtle reference to the work of Sergei Glazyev, as the Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union explained in our recent interview, Patrushev hit the heart of the current geoeconomic game, with Russia now actively moving towards a gold standard: “Experts are working on a project proposed by the scientific community to create a two-circuit monetary and financial system. In particular, it is proposed to determine the value of the ruble, which should be secured by both gold and a group of goods that are currency values, to put the ruble exchange rate in line with real purchasing power parity.”

  That was inevitable after the outright theft of over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves. It may have taken a few days for Moscow to be fully certified it was facing Totalen Krieg. The corollary is that the collective West has lost any power to influence Russian decisions. The pace of the game in the new chessboard is being set by Russia.

  Earlier in the week, in his meeting with the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, Putin went as far as stating that he’d be more than willing to negotiate – with only a few conditions: Ukrainian neutrality and autonomy status for Donbass. Yet now everyone knows it’s too late. For a Washington in Totalen Krieg mode negotiation is anathema – and that has been the case since the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine meeting in Istanbul in late March.

  So far, on Operation Z, the Russian Armed forces have used only 12% of its soldiers,10% of its fighter jets, 7% of its tanks, 5% of its missiles, and 4% of its artillery. The pain dial is set to go substantially up – and with the total liberation of Mariupol and the resolution one way or another of the Donbass cauldron there is nothing the hysteria/propaganda/weaponizing combo deployed by the collective West can do to alter facts on the ground.

  That includes desperate gambits such as the one uncovered by SVR – Russian foreign intel, which very rarely makes mistakes. SVR found out that the Empire of Lies/War Inc. axis is pushing not only for a de facto Polish invasion to annex Western Ukraine, under the banner of “historical reunification”, but also for a joint Romanian/Ukrainian invasion of Moldova/Transnistria, with Romanian “peacekeepers” already piling up near the Moldova border.

  Washington, as the SVR maintains, has been plotting the Polish gambit for over a month now. It would “lead from behind” (remember Libya?), “encouraging” a “group of countries” to occupy Western Ukraine. So partition is already on the cards. Were that ever to materialize, it will be fascinating to bet on which locations Mr. Sarmat would be inclined to distribute his business card.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 18:30

• $2 Billion Hedge Fund Loses Nearly Half After Carvana Plummets 75% In 2022
  $2 Billion Hedge Fund Loses Nearly Half After Carvana Plummets 75% In 2022

  For a vivid example of a hedge fund that prospered and grew, expanding relentlessly with the blessings of the Fed’s ZIRP and QE but now that QE is on idefinite hiatus and the Fed’s put is gone and successful “investing” actually requires more skill than just putting cash into high beta names and praying that the Fed will keep BRRRRing, is imploding look no farther than CAS Investment Partners, a Westport-based hedge fund which had “grown” more than 1000% sine its inception in October 2012 yet which has lost nearly half of its assets in just the past four months, thanks to a heavily concentrated portfolio of stocks, but mostly novelty used care dealer Carvana.

  CAS – which is based on the initials of its 40-year-old founder, Clifford Sosin – had built up a huge (for a smallish hedge fund) 3.3 million share stake in Carvana in 2019 and early 2020, one which grew to over $1 billion in August 2021 when CVNA stock topped $350 and accounted for a quarter of the fund’s AUM as of March 31. However, since then things have gone from bad to worse, and after dropping to $250/share by year-end, Carvana has plunged another 75% in 2022, before tumbling another 10% on Friday as traders grow concerned that the company equity may be worthless and a debt-for-equity swap is inevitable (and there is a lot of debt to be swapped) especially if the used car market is just now starting to crack.

  The crash in CVNA shares, and the resulting collapse in the CAS hedge fund, must have prompted a barrage of angry and or concerned investors phone calls, which culminated on Friday in a 25-page letter (attached below) written by Sosin, in which he writes (over and over) that Carvana’s troubles are transitory and that all will be well soon:  “Carvana’s challenges, especially when coupled with the precipitous decline in its stock price, clearly seem terrifying,” Sosin wrote in the Friday’s letter. However, “I believe that in due time we will look back at them as bumps in the road on the company’s path to success.”

  Sosin, who started his career in the Houlihan Lokey restructuring group in 2004, then worked at Silverpoint and UBS before starting off on his own in 2012 – declined to comment to Bloomberg.

  Carvana, which was once a pandemic darling, has since fast fallen out of favor. Its first-quarter results revealed a deepening cash burn, stemming from surges in used-vehicle prices and capital spending. Meanwhile, after peaking a few months ago, used car prices appear set to plunge in the coming months now that the US consumer is fully tapped out.

  Used car prices. pic.twitter.com/O6R6iLHRH8

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 12, 2022

  Adding insult to injury, earlier this week Carvana struggled to raise $3.3 billion in the junk bond market and had to revamp a junk-bond offering, adding a bankruptcy-friendly make whole provision.

  Not looking good for CVNA https://t.co/itWOMmB6as

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 27, 2022

  Those new bonds tumbled to 96 cents on the dollar in their first day of secondary trading even after Apollo Global swooped in to buy roughly half of the sale…. or rather because Apollo swooped in, in a move many speculate is a signal Apollo will control the fulcrum security, and thus the post-reord equity, in the coming Chapter 11 filing.

  

  And while we wait for the (used) wheels to come off the Carvana bullish narrative, we go back to what we said at the top, namely how this story may be indicative of the reversal of fortune for “hedge” funds who never actually had to hedge, or do any work for that matter in a world where the Fed did all the work for them, and how now that the Fed is no longer there holding hands, how everything is imploding. Indeed, as Bloomberg notes, “for CAS, 2022 is a stark contrast to its previous performance. Its fund hasn’t had a down year since launching in October 2012, and in 2020 it returned a record 96.5%.”

  

  Desperate to avoid a flood of redemptions, in his 25-page letter Sosin focused entirely on Carvana, and acknowledged its weak unit volume, but said it should accelerate when the industry normalizes (which may take a while since the US economy is only just now entering a recession). He added that the company should generate profits of $100 million annually from its acquisition of Adesa Inc.’s U.S. car-auction business, which was financed with this week’s debt offering. Then again there is the $600 million in interest expense:

  “While the company’s $600 million of annual interest expense is largely fixed, and a certain level of fixed/ overhead costs are necessary to run the company, the company’s growth investments are under the management’s control.”

  Still, Sosin refuses to cut and run, writing that “Carvana has a great deal of latent margin potential,” and adding that “this potential should allow the company to pursue its growth ambitions, albeit at a slower pace of expansion, without meaningfully accessing the capital markets or counting on a significant used-vehicle industry recovery.”

  For now, the market clearly disagrees.

  But if Sosin fast and furious reversal of fortune is bad, it’s nowhere near as bad as the billionaire father-son duo behind the Phoenix-based Carvana. Ernie Garcia II and Ernie Garcia III have lost almost $14 billion combined so far this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The younger Garcia, the company’s chief executive officer, has lost about 73% of his net worth since the start of 2022.

  The senior Garcia began selling Carvana shares in late October 2020 as they climbed to around $200 each from their pre-pandemic level of about $90. The stock closed Friday at $57.96.

  “If Carvana works out as well as it could, they might be among the richest people on the planet,” Sosin told Bloomberg in a 2019 interview. Three years since that remark, he said the company still has a bright future.

  “I am not immune to mistakes, and I promise that when I eventually make a doozy I will put it here at the top of this letter,” Sosin wrote. “In this case, however, I do not believe I have.”

  For those who disagree, here is a list of CAS’s holdings: if and when the margin calls and forced selling comes, these are the names that Sosin will rush to liquidate to avoid a collapse of his hedge fund. Which is why others may decided to sell them first.

  

  Sosin’s full Carvana letter is below.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 18:00

• Shippers Are Back In The Driver's Seat On Rates
  Shippers Are Back In The Driver’s Seat On Rates

  By Michael Rudolph of FreightWaves.com

  This past week marked the first interruption of consecutive declines in the Outbound Tender Volume Index (OTVI) since early March.

  

  It is still too early to dance around the maypole, however, as this bounce has not yet erased the significant contraction seen in freight demand.

  

  Though OTVI climbed 6.6% over the past week, it faced easy comps as volumes were depressed in the week following Easter Sunday. On a year-over-year (y/y) basis, OTVI is down 16.75%. Comparisons on a y/y basis can be thorny because OTVI can be inflated by an uptick in tender rejections. At this time last year, OTVI was greatly inflated by rising tender rejections, whereas rejection rates have since nosedived to incredible lows.

  Looking at accepted tender volumes, which is OTVI adjusted by the Outbound Tender Reject Index (OTRI), we see growth of only 0.3% y/y as well as growth by 8.3% on week-over-week (w/w) basis — the latter w/w growth, again, came against easy comps. The y/y picture for accepted volume may not appear grim, but the overall freight market is historically strong during the run-up to summer. The current limping state of the market, on the other hand, should concern carriers.

  The Chinese government appears to be gearing up for extended COVID lockdowns in Shanghai and, given recent school closings, possibly Beijing. The Port of Shanghai is the busiest container port in the world; any disruptions to its operations would have severe ripple effects on global supply chains. At first glance, the Port of Shanghai does not seem to be majorly impacted by the ongoing lockdowns — average dwell times for exports are currently at a little more than two days, well below the average of three days over the past year.

  Part of these low dwell times can be explained by the lack of goods flowing into the port, as productivity at manufacturing plants and the movement of truck drivers are both heavily restricted by the lockdowns. There is a likely accumulation of goods that are languishing in nearby warehouses or that have yet to be produced by factories in Shanghai. This accumulation is a ticking time bomb: Once it is able to be delivered to the terminals, the port will be inundated with excess cargo and will then be unable to operate efficiently.

  Another cause for concern will be the limited supply of empty containers caused by restricted freight flow at Chinese ports. Shipments from China to Europe are already being delayed, inhibiting the gross number of containers that can be delivered, unloaded and, in turn, reloaded and shipped to the United States. Any curb on trade between Europe and the U.S. is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, a reduction in new vessel arrivals will allow East Coast seaports to tackle the backlog of cargo that is currently congesting them. On the other, this reduction could kick the can further down the line, as exporters on the East Coast would eventually have a limited supply of empty containers themselves. Whatever the case, the lockdowns in China are threatening to extend well into the summer.

  

  Of the 135 total markets, 100 reported weekly increases after volumes recovered from the Easter lull.

  Since last week was quite barren, freight demand this week faced favorable comps on a w/w basis. Volumes returned to the ports: Charleston, South Carolina, was up 23.4%; Los Angeles was up 7.77%; and Houston was up 4.96%. Volumes also returned to the largest markets: Atlanta was up 10.2%; Ontario, California, was up 6.63%; and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was up 6.41%.

  There were, however, a few markets to which this bounty of freight volume was not extended. Lakeland, Florida — the state’s largest market by outbound volume — was the only market in the state to experience contraction this week, with volumes falling nearly 2% w/w. The Indianapolis market, a Midwestern hub for manufacturing, saw volumes decline 2.14% w/w after a recent survey expressed Hoosier manufacturers’ concerns about their ability to overcome supply chain disruptions and to contend with the rising costs of material inputs.

  By mode: Reefer volume took a tumble this week as the Reefer Outbound Tender Volume Index (ROTVI) fell 6.7% w/w. Lakeland, Florida — the nation’s largest outbound market for reefer freight — saw its own ROTVI decline 3.1% w/w after a sharp rise and fall early in the week. Dry van volumes, however, bounced back and the Van Outbound Tender Volume Index (VOTVI) rose 6.9% w/w accordingly. In produce-heavy markets, such as those in the Southeast, reefer volumes should be sustained by seasonal patterns — after all, demand for food is fairly inelastic.

  Tender rejections finally fall to sub-10% levels and show no signs of slowing

  Although treading water above 10% at the beginning of the week, OTRI quickly fell into single-digit percentages before the week’s end. Excepting the onset of the 2020 pandemic, OTRI’s current trend marks both the steepest and longest decline in a non-holiday-affected period.

  

  Over the past week, OTRI, which measures relative capacity in the market, fell to 8.82%, a change of 138 basis points (bps) from the week prior. OTRI is now 1,634 bps below year-ago levels as it is decidedly established in single-digit percentages.

  One of the biggest pressures facing carriers is the uninterrupted rise of diesel prices. Carriers playing primarily within the spot market already are exposed to volatile rate swings and reduced demand for spot freight, but to make matters worse, they typically have to eat the cost of fuel as part of their all-in rate. Yet even carriers running contracted loads still face the pressure of diesel hikes, since they normally pay for fuel at the point of sale while fuel surcharges can take months to reimburse them. That period of waiting for reimbursement can be crucial, since other monthly costs cannot be deferred so easily: insurance expenses, maintenance costs and, if the carrier’s equipment is not paid off, debt servicing.

  Larger carriers often buy fuel at discount, wholesale prices and then charge elevated retail prices for their surcharges, but the trucking industry as a whole is dominated by smaller carriers. As of February 2021, of all the carriers registered with the FMCSA, a mere 2.6% operated fleets with 20 or more trucking units. Almost 92% had fleets of six or fewer trucks. So, while larger carriers might experience some insularity from diesel price hikes, the truckload market is altogether exposed to these fluctuations.

  

  The map above shows the Weighted Rejection Index (WRI), the product of the Outbound Tender Reject Index — Weekly Change and Outbound Tender Market Share, as a way to prioritize rejection rate changes. As capacity is finding freight, there are currently no blue markets that would normally be objects of attention.

  Of the 135 markets, only 24 reported higher rejection rates over the past week as carriers compete for loads amid quieter freight demand.

  By and large, capacity came back online during this week with only a few notable exceptions. As volume surged through the East Coast seaports, rejection rates rose as capacity did not meet demand. After a dramatic fall in tender rejections the week prior, Savannah, Georgia, saw rejections rebound by 159 bps to 6.73%. Similarly, the market of Charleston posted a rejection rate of 7.08% this week, up 82 bps from the previous week. These two markets host two of the fastest-growing container ports in the U.S., since they are increasingly an attractive alternative to congested seaports in Southern California.

  

  By mode: Despite falling 315 bps this past week, the Flatbed Outbound Tender Reject Index (FOTRI) shows clearer demand for flatbeds than its dry van and reefer counterparts. FOTRI currently sits at 29.22%, 304 bps higher on a y/y basis. In Illinois (and probably elsewhere), it was commonly joked that there were two seasons: winter and construction. Construction season is already well underway, with new residential and nonresidential construction heating up to levels not seen since 2006. Moreover, high crude prices are driving investment into oil drilling. Accordingly, flatbeds will be in great demand for the foreseeable future.

  Rejection rates in the other two modes, dry van and reefer, have continued along a protracted decline that began in early March. The Van Outbound Tender Reject Index (VOTRI) is now at 8.7%, 124 bps lower on a w/w basis and 1,642 bps lower y/y. Following the trend in ROTVI, the Reefer Outbound Tender Reject Index (ROTRI) is down 479 bps this week to 11.43%, a whopping 3,307 bps below year-ago levels. 

  Contract rates show signs of following spot rate trend, declining rapidly w/w

  The spot rate data available in SONAR from Truckstop.com is updated every Tuesday with the previous week’s data.

  

  The bottom has yet to be found on dry van spot rates. To borrow yet another analogy from roller coasters, any carrier wearing a waterproof poncho is painfully dry as it waits for the Splash at the end of the Mountain. Truckstop.com’s national all-in dry van spot rate, which is based on the top 100 lanes from Truckstop.com’s load board, fell 8 cents per mile this week to $2.94 per mile, including fuel surcharges and other accessorials. 

  This week marks the first time that the rate has fallen below $3 a mile since February 2021. For context, the national rate averaged around $2.10 a mile prior to the pandemic, almost 30% lower than the current rate. While the gap between then and now might seem insurmountable, keep in mind that spot rates have already fallen 23% from their peak in early January. Diesel prices will, however, continue to provide upward pressure on spot rates. In short, spot rates are unlikely to return to $2.10 a mile, but they might soon be moving into the same neighborhood.

  Of the 102 lanes from Truckstop.com’s load board, only 19 reported weekly increases, up from last week’s 13 lanes but not up enough to provide relief to carriers. The most drastic increases were found on peripheral lanes in New England: For example, Syracuse, New York, to Hartford, Connecticut, jumped 25 cents per mile to $4.39 a mile, well above the national average.

  Ever since the supply chain disruptions early in the pandemic, shippers have been increasingly shifting their contract bid cycles to shorter periods so as to keep better pace with a volatile market. Now that data has come in from the Q2 renegotiations, it is clear that shippers have realized their newfound pricing power. Contract rates, which are the base linehaul rate excluding fuel surcharges and other accessorials that are included in spot rates, fell 9 cents per mile to $2.81 a mile. This decline bodes ill for those carriers hoping that contract rates would insulate them from the rapid decline seen in the spot market. Nevertheless, contract rates are still up 16.1% y/y, so all is not yet lost for those carriers.

  There are also the backhaul lanes to consider, many of which have hit their floor on rates and are now steadily increasing. Of these lanes, Dallas to Los Angeles is one of the most interesting, since it shares some characteristics with a backhaul lane but not others. Dallas is currently the third-largest outbound market in the country, yet carriers are covering loads from it to Los Angeles at rates near their operational cost. Because of that razor-thin margin, spot rates (which include fuel surcharges) on this lane are mainly affected by shifting diesel prices. 

  As a result, FreightWaves’ Trusted Rate Assessment Consortium (TRAC) spot rate from Dallas to Los Angeles has risen only 2 cents per mile over the past week to $1.90 but has spiked by 52 cents per mile over the past six months. These increases translate to a 1.1% gain w/w and a 37.7% gain over a six-month period. Meanwhile, diesel prices have risen by a comparable 1.2% w/w and by 38.4% over a six-month period.

  

  The opposite is true for rates along headhaul lanes, where carriers had a comfortable margin above their operating costs. For example, the FreightWaves TRAC spot rate along the extremely dense lane from Los Angeles to Dallas has fallen 7 cents per mile over the past week to $2.71 a mile and has plummeted a staggering $1.38 per mile over the past six months. 

  

  With rejection rates continuing to fall as they have been, shippers have no incentive to keep increasing or even maintaining those contract rates set in previous quarters. Instead, shippers have firm possession of pricing power for the moment and, from the looks of it, will exercise it to the best of their ability. Except on lanes in which fuel cost is a significant factor, neither contract nor spot rates should be expected to reverse course anytime soon.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 17:30

• Buffett Blasts Bankers For Turning Stock Market Into "A Gambling Parlor"
  Buffett Blasts Bankers For Turning Stock Market Into “A Gambling Parlor”

  After a tumultuous week of violent lurches higher (but mostly lower), the S&P 500 has ended April with its worst start to a year since the start of World War 2…

  

  Vacation bookings are soaring, car sales are booming and Americans continue to spend with abandon, thanks to higher wages and brisk hiring; and yet, the economy unexpectedly contracted in the first quarter, led by trade deficits and a drop in inventory purchases.

  “The market is worried about a very fragile economic outlook, as it should be,” said Joe LaVorgna, chief Americas economist at Natixis and former Trump White House economic adviser.

  “The economy is fundamentally soft: The Fed is going to hike next week, the situation in Ukraine is not getting better and high inflation is cutting into costs.”

  All this chaos and divergence appears to have ‘triggered’ 91-year-old Warren Buffett who lambasted Wall Street for encouraging speculative behavior in the stock market, effectively turning it into a “gambling parlor.”

  

  Having announced that Berkshire Hathaway suffered a $1.58 billion loss in the first quarter of 2022 (a huge reversal from the nearly $5 billion gain it saw at the same period of 2021), Buffett spoke at length during his annual shareholder meeting Saturday about one of his favorite targets for criticism: investment banks and brokerages.

  “Wall Street makes money, one way or another, catching the crumbs that fall off the table of capitalism,” Buffett said.

  “They don’t make money unless people do things, and they get a piece of them. They make a lot more money when people are gambling than when they are investing.”

  Buffett bemoaned that large American companies have “became poker chips” for market speculation. As CNBC reports, he cited soaring use of call options, saying that brokers make more money from these bets than simple investing.

  Still, the situation can result in market dislocations that give Berkshire Hathaway an opportunity, he said:

  “That’s why markets do crazy things, and occasionally Berkshire gets a chance to do something.”

  98-year-old Charlie Munger also chimed in, warning that “It’s almost a mania of speculation.”

  “We have people who know nothing about stocks being advised by stock brokers who know even less,” Munger said.

  “It’s an incredible, crazy situation. I don’t think any wise country would want this outcome. Why would you want your country’s stock to trade on a casino?”

  CNBC noted that an audience member made an inaudible comment while he was talking.

  “Was that a banker screaming?” Buffett joked.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 17:00

• Johnstone: "Oh God It's Going To Get So Much Worse"
  Johnstone: “Oh God It’s Going To Get So Much Worse”

  Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

  Rightists have spent the last couple of days freaking out and invoking Orwell’s 1984 in response to something their political enemies are doing in America, and for once it’s for a pretty good reason.

  

  The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a “Disinformation Governance Board”, only informing the public about its plans for the institution after it had already been established.

  The disinformation board, which critics have understandably been calling a “Ministry of Truth”, purportedly exists to fight disinformation coming out of Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border. We may be certain that the emphasis in the board’s establishment has been on the Russia angle, however.

  White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in her patented “You’re such a crazy idiot for questioning me about the White House” manner, dismissed alarmed questions about what specific functions this strange new DHS entity was going to be performing and what its authority will look like.

  “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” Psaki said.

  “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”

  PSAKI: “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities. I’m not sure who opposes that effort.” pic.twitter.com/Z4xOv46RLT

  — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 28, 2022

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

  The answer to the question of “who opposes that effort” is of course “anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears.” No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.

  I mean, is anyone honestly more afraid of Russian disinformation than they are of their own government appointing itself the authority to decide what counts as disinformation?

  This important point has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle due to the utterly hypnotic ridiculousness of the person who has been appointed to run the Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, a carefully groomed swamp creature who has worked in Kyiv as a communications advisor to the Ukrainian government as part of a Fulbright fellowship, is being widely criticized by pundits and social media users for her virulent Russiagating and whatever the hell this is:

  You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation 💁🏻‍♀️ https://t.co/eGV9lpctYn pic.twitter.com/WVQFA2bPmq

  — Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) February 17, 2021

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

  Because of this person’s embarrassing cartoonishness, a lot more commentary lately has been going into discussing the fact that the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is run by a kooky liberal than the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a fucking Ministry of Truth.

  Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t think so.

  The real issue at hand is the fact that this new institution will almost certainly play a role in bridging the ever-narrowing gap between government censorship and Silicon Valley censorship. The creation of the DHS disinformation board is a far more shocking and frightening development than last year’s scandalous revelation that the White House was advising social media platforms about accounts it determined were circulating censorship-worthy Covid misinformation, which was itself a drastic leap in the direction toward direct government censorship from what had previously been considered normal.

  White House fact-sheet says part of the mammoth $33 billion spending package it’s requesting for Ukraine will be to “support independent media.” Because nothing screams “independent” like being directly funded by the US Government as part of its “information warfare” initiative pic.twitter.com/O3JshV1Mg9

  — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 28, 2022

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

  We should probably talk more about how as soon as people accepted that it was fine for government, media and Silicon Valley institutions to work together to censor misinformation and rally public support around an Official Narrative about a virus, the ruling power establishment immediately took that as license to do that with a war and a foreign government as well.

  Like, immediately immediately. We went from a massive narrative control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat. Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).

  We should probably talk more about this. We should probably talk more about how insane it is that all mainstream western institutions immediately accepted it as a given that World War II levels of censorship and propaganda must be implemented over a faraway war that our governments are not even officially a part of.

  It started as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, without any public discussion whatsoever. Like the groundwork had already been laid and everyone had already agreed that that’s what would happen. The public had no say in whether we want to be propagandized and censored to help the US win some kind of weird infowar to ensure its continued unipolar domination of the planet. It just happened.

  No reason was given to the public as to why this must occur, and there was no public debate as to whether it should. This was by design, because propaganda only works when you don’t know it’s happening to you.

  The choice was made for us that information is too important to be left in the hands of the people. It became set in stone that we are to be a propaganda-based society rather than a truth-based society. No discussion was offered, and no debate was allowed.

  In the middle of an election campaign, Defence Minister Peter Dutton tells Australians to “prepare for war”. He compared China with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Australia has no enemies, none, zero. But it speaks for its master in Washington. Read on:https://t.co/dSRhu5b23i

  — John Pilger (@johnpilger) April 25, 2022

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

  And as bad as it is, it’s on track to get much, much worse. They’re already setting up “disinformation” regulation in the government which presides over Silicon Valley, the proxy war between the US and Ukraine is escalating by the day, and aggressions are ramping up against China over both the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think imperial narrative management is intense now, wait until the US empire’s struggle to secure global hegemony really gets going.

  Do you consent to this? Do you? It’s something you kind of have to take a position on, because its implications have a direct effect on our lives as individuals and on our trajectory as a society. How much are we willing to sacrifice to help the US win an infowar against Russia?

  The question of whether we should abandon all hope of ever becoming a truth-based society and committing instead to winning propaganda wars for a globe-spanning empire is perhaps the most consequential decision we’ve ever had to make as a species. Which is why we weren’t given a choice. It’s just been foisted upon us.

  Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. By taking our control of information out of our hands without asking our permission and determining for us that we are to be a propaganda-based civilization for the foreseeable future, they have stolen something sacred from us. Something they had no right to take.

  Nothing about the state of the world tells us that the people who run things are doing a good job. Nothing about our current situation suggests they should be given more control, rather than having control taken away from them and given to the people. We are going in exactly the wrong direction.

  *  *  *

  My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

  Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 16:30

• NY Case Against Trump Implodes As Grand Jury Ends With No Charges
  NY Case Against Trump Implodes As Grand Jury Ends With No Charges

  New York’s grand jury case against Donald Trump is ending without charges for the ex-president, as a lengthy criminal investigation into alleged manipulation of property assets to secure tax advantages or better loan rates is set to expire this week.

  

  Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (D) inherited the case from former DA, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (who famously accepted campaign donations from Harvey Weinstein to quash a #MeToo investigation).

  According to the Washington Post, Bragg decided not to move forward and ask the grand jury to vote on charges – mostly because the new DA had major issues using former Trump fixer Michael Cohen as a star witness.

  Bragg has said he will announce when the investigation is over, noting that even after the special grand jury disbanded, other grand juries hearing a broad range of criminal cases in New York would be available to take action in this one if needed. -WaPo

  The expiration of the grand jury comes after two senior prosecutors (Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne) quit the case in February after claiming Bragg was stalling the inquiry. Cohen said he met with investigators from the DA’s office around a dozen times, but that nobody has contacted him since the two departures.

  According to Pomerantz, Trump’s ““financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people.”

  Meanwhile, attorneys for NY Attorney General Letitia James’ (D) office told WaPo that it’s unlikely a criminal case will be brought, despite a spokeswoman for James saying that the investigation is ongoing.

  James is looking into Trump’s business practices. On Monday, a lawyer from her office said a lawsuit could be filed in that case soon. Last week a judge held Trump in contempt for failing to provide James’ office with business records – fining him $10,000 per day until he complies. Trump’s attorneys are appealing the order, as well as another one from New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron which require Trump and two of his adult children to be deposed by James’ team.

  On Friday, Engoron rejected a bid by Trump to purge the contempt ruling after he and his attorneys submitted affidavits. The affidavits “fail to specify” who conducted searches for the requested documents, or where and when searches took place, the judge said. He called Trump’s two-paragraph sworn statement “completely devoid of any useful detail.” -WaPo

  Trump and team maintain they did nothing illegal regarding the Trump Organization’s asset valuations – accusing James of waging lawfare against him in a personal vendetta.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 16:00

• Why Is CDC Trying To Put A Mask On Your Face Again?
  Why Is CDC Trying To Put A Mask On Your Face Again?

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

  We know the wicked truth about Chairman Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.” He said this in 1957 while inviting anyone to criticize the Communist Party. There were cheers all around and the criticisms were unleashed. This lasted six weeks, after which many of the biggest critics were shot. It was a bait and switch. 

  It’s a brilliant tactic for evil regimes. Ferret out the enemy and then make them go away. 

  

  That’s not exactly what happened this week but the analogy works. A judge in Florida this week struck down the Biden administration’s transportation mask mandate. The opinion was highly technical and turned entirely on issues of administrative law. The judge ruled that the Public Health Service Act of 1944, the first ever to give the quarantine power to the federal government, did not authorize the imposition of universal mandates on what is really an article of clothing in the name of “sanitation.”

  Instead, what appeared to happen here was entirely arbitrary. The Biden administration wanted masks and the CDC imposed them, including with criminal penalties. For a full year, travelers have been hectored and threatened at every turn. 

  After the court decision, a hundred flowers bloomed in the form of air-born celebrations from coast to coast. 

  Will it last? Not if our rulers in DC get their way. 

  But let’s be clear about something. It’s about masks but more. The mask is a metaphor for all the controls, restrictions, impositions, mandates, closures, and resulting wreckage of the past two years. People hate them because they are so personal. More precisely, they are depersonalizing, which is precisely how the lockdown period of American history has felt the entire time. 

  We are our faces, to others and ourselves. Take that away and what are we? We are tools. We are pawns. We are lab rats for their experiments. Masks are dehumanizing because they are supposed to be. The mask has a very long history as a tool of subjection and enslavement. We all know this intuitively. 

  Therefore, the opportunity to throw it off was glorious. One evening an entire nation of travelers celebrated. Celebrating even more were the airline staff, flight attendants, and pilots. They have lived two years in these ridiculous things, which have nowhere been proven to work to crush a virus. Emancipation from them was a welcome relief. So too for workers around the country, whose interests have been consistently disregarded. 

  We found ourselves in the position of caste-like scenes in restaurants around the country: customers dining happily while being served by masked workers. This is inconsistent with the democratic and commercial ethos. 

  All the airlines as well as Amtrak announced it quickly, perhaps as a way of making it impossible for the Biden administration to roll it back. Even Biden himself said that the new rule is that everyone should do what they want. I guess he didn’t get the memo. 

  Hold one just one minute, said someone in the administration. We need to find out what the Department of Justice says. Then the Justice Department immediately kicked it to the CDC: they are in charge of “The Science” and so we’ll wait. 

  “The Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disagree with the district court’s decision and will appeal, subject to CDC’s conclusion that the order remains necessary for public health. The Department continues to believe that the order requiring masking in the transportation corridor is a valid exercise of the authority Congress has given CDC to protect the public health. That is an important authority the Department will continue to work to preserve….

  If CDC concludes that a mandatory order remains necessary for the public’s health after that assessment, the Department of Justice will appeal the district court’s decision.”

  What’s this about? The plaintiff Health Freedom Defense Fund issued a sharp statement: 

  “DoJ’s statement is perplexing to say the least and sounds like it comes from health policy advocates not government lawyers. The ruling by the US District Court is a matter of law, not CDC preference or an assessment of “current health conditions.”

  In the early days of the Biden administration, the PR decision at the top was that it would always “follow the science,” a statement that the new president said many times. This was supposed to be different from the Trump administration, at least after the summer of 2020 when the CDC lost control over the political side of the executive state. 

  On one hand, following The Science sounds good. However, if the “science” really means the bureaucracies and hence this slogan is just another way of passing the buck, there is a problem. The bureaucracies are unaccountable, and typically default to the safest and changeless route to preserve their power over the population. 

  Even so, following the DOJ’s announcement, there must have been moments of panic at the CDC. They had the hot potato and didn’t know what to do with it. Finally they settled on the usual strategy: they threw it to an anonymous committee. Then the committee came out with a statement unsigned by anyone in particular. 

  Instead of citing The Science, or claiming that they knew for sure that masks were great for people, the statement started with the following sentence: “To protect CDC’s public health authority….” Notice that this doesn’t say to protect public health. It says public health AUTHORITY. Those are certainly different things. 

  In any case, the decision was made. The CDC “has asked DOJ to proceed with an appeal.” Ah, there we go: throw that potato back at a different agency. The CDC has merely asked! So now the DOJ will appeal, as forced by the sloganeering of the Biden administration and the deference to the CDC. The results will certainly be terrible for the administration because the next court will agree with the previous court that there was never any legal basis for the mandate in the first place. 

  They could also issue a stay. That would be catastrophic for the Biden administration. Public anger would be out of control. Mao got away with this because he had total power. Biden does not. In fact, his poll numbers are awful. I’ve personally never seen an example of a sadistic government that is simultaneously politically masochistic. In other words, these people not only do not understand what’s good for the country; they don’t even know what’s good for themselves! 

  The words of the CDC statement are the chilling part. They care about their authority first and foremost, even only. This seems to be the view pervasive in Washington today, as a Cold Civil War heats up between the states and with Washington. Every day grows more intense. Every day, the conflict becomes more raw and brutal. There seems to be no end in sight because there will be no rollbacks, no apologies, no regrets, no admission that their “authority” was an overreach all along. 

  Will governments have learned their lessons? Look around! We live in a world burdened by extremely arrogant and immovable public agencies that have lost public trust. The administrative state is right now as angry as the public is at them. There is a peaceful solution here but it doesn’t seem to be on the table. 

  If I’ve learned anything new over the last two years, it’s about the strange way in which the ruling class is impervious not only to actual research but also to the will of the people, even when it shows up in devastating polls.

  They seem not to regard the celebrations after the judge’s decision not as a corrective but a challenge to overcome. 

  WATCH: Dr. Fauci tells me on #TheSourceKasie🕵🏻‍♀️ “This is a CDC issue, it should not have been a court issue.” @CNN pic.twitter.com/rZZyHnFqJ5

  — Kasie Hunt (@kasie) April 21, 2022

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  In an interview with @LesterHoltNBC from last night’s broadcast, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, addressed a judge’s decision striking down the CDC’s travel mask mandate. pic.twitter.com/7t31y9BSEX

  — NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) April 22, 2022

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  It’s all about…authority. Not public health but public-health authority. Who is in charge? That’s what’s really at issue. They say them and we say us. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 15:30

• Russia To Pull Out Of ISS Over Western Sanctions 
  Russia To Pull Out Of ISS Over Western Sanctions 

  Russia’s move to leave the International Space Station (ISS) was initially slated for 2025. The invasion of Ukraine and resulting Western sanctions have accelerated this departure. 

  Bloomberg cites media reports from two Russian state news agencies — Tass and RIA Novosti — that head of Russia’s space agency on Saturday announced Moscow will pull out of the ISS.

  “The decision has been taken already, we’re not obliged to talk about it publicly. 

  “I can say this only — in accordance with our obligations, we’ll inform our partners about the end of our work on the ISS with a year’s notice,” Roscosmos General Director Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview on state television. 

  

  Rogozin earlier in March “threatened to leave” the ISS over Western allies hammering Russia’s economy with devastating sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. This angered Moscow so much that they threatened to deorbit the ISS. 

  Moscow has halted deliveries of rocket engines to the US. Roscosmos recently refused to launch European satellites into low Earth orbit. 

  Rogozin’s Saturday interview provided no timeline on when Russia plans to exit the ISS. 

  The timing of Russia’s soon-to-be departure comes as Elon Musk’s SpaceX can ferry astronauts to the station. 

  The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict and fracturing of Russia and US relations in space is evidence of a new bipolar world emerging. It has pushed Russia and China loser together where a new space race will take shape: The West versus Russia and China. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 15:00

• "Toto, I Don't Think We're In Kansas Anymore"
  “Toto, I Don’t Think We’re In Kansas Anymore”

  Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

  Recently, an American colleague commented to me, “We no longer live in a democracy but a dictatorship disguised as a democracy.”

  

  Is he correct? Well, a dictatorship may be defined as “a form of government in which absolute authority is exercised by a dictator.”

  The US today is not be ruled by dictatorship (although, to some, it may well feel that way.)

  But, if that’s the case, what form of rule does exist in the US?

  At its formation, the founding fathers argued over whether the United States should be a republic or a democracy. Those founders who later formed the Federalist Party felt that it should be a democracy – rule by representatives elected by the people. Thomas Jefferson, who created the Democratic Republican Party, argued that it should be a republic – a state in which the method of governance is democracy, but the principle of governance is that the rights of the individual are paramount.

  He argued that, “Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty one percent can vote away the rights of the other forty nine.”

  At that time, Benjamin Franklin has been credited as saying, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.”

  Very well stated.

  As Americans still legally vote, and it may well be that the voting is not altogether rigged, the US could be regarded as a democracy. Of course, to be accurate, it could also be defined as a bureaucracy – rule by officialdom, and/or a plutocracy – rule by the very rich. Both of these descriptions are undeniably accurate.

  Another question that’s hotly debated is what sort of “ism” the US is living under. There’s a visible trend in new candidates to openly promote socialism. Historically, socialism has always been an excellent way to gain votes, as the socialist promises largesse to the average man that government will provide by robbing the rich. Not surprisingly, the average voter would find this prospect very attractive.

  Socialist candidates in the US today base their argument for socialism on the premise that “capitalism has failed,” and that premise is providing them with great headway. They claim that prosperity for the American people is almost non-existent; that the middle class is shrinking and the small upper class is growing ever-richer.

  These claims are undeniably true… but not because capitalism has failed.

  Vladimir Lenin stated that “Fascism is capitalism in decay.” He was quite correct. Fascism is a slow cancer that eats away at an economy. It transfers wealth to the largest, most politically influential corporations. Yet, the concept of fascism is greatly misunderstood today. Most anyone who decries fascism will describe symptoms such as jackboots and swastikas, but fail to offer an actual definition.

  For a definition, we might ask Benito Mussolini, the father of national fascism. He stated, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

  By defining the term, we can conclude that the US is no longer a capitalist country and hasn’t been one for a long time. The US began its slide into fascism in a major way around the time that income tax and the Federal Reserve were created – in 1913. These measures were the brainchild of the largest bankers of the day and the Fed still remains under the power of the major banks.

  Over the last century, the Deep State, which is corporatist in origin, has grown and has done a first rate job of introducing a combination of socialism and fascism, a bit at a time. This has slowly destroyed the economy, education and the national moral compass, not to mention achieving the utter corruption of the political system.

  By contrast, capitalism is a free-market system, in which the economy, unfettered by the interference of governments, finds its own level at any given time. It fluctuates naturally, based upon supply and demand, each correcting the other with regularity.

  But government edicts operate with force and permanence, constricting the natural flow of money, goods and services. Over time, regulations pile on top of regulations until the system becomes dysfunctional.

  Socialism, by its very nature, is a central restrictive force on the free market. Its logical conclusion is very visible in Venezuela today, where government regulation has produced such a stranglehold on the economy that it’s broken down in every way, resulting in dire poverty and even starvation.

  But, as stated above, in the US, the Deep State has been thorough in its presentation of the US economy as a capitalist economy. In doing so, they’ve provided the encouragement of full socialism in the political realm.

  In the near future, the economy will begin to collapse under the weight of growing fascism and socialism. However, the blame will be laid at the feet of capitalism.

  In my belief, the majority of Americans will be fooled into thinking that capitalism is the problem and that socialism will save the day. During the coming financial crisis, they’ll dive in with both feet.

  Voters, even many of those who are moderate, will support socialist candidates. The first national election that occurs after the crisis has begun will result in an overwhelming victory for socialist and other leftist candidates. The next president will provide a plethora of socialist “solutions” to counter “the damage done by capitalism.”

  But such a prediction does not require a crystal ball. This has happened many times before. The Athenian Republic ran into the same problem. The Roman Republic also deteriorated in this manner. As stated by Aristotle, “Republics decline into democracies and democracies decline into despotisms.”

  Quite so. It’s a natural progression.

  And so, it shouldn’t be surprising if the more imaginative American were to observe, worriedly, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  He would most certainly be correct. Like the flag in the image above, the founding principles have been turned upside down and the rights of Americans have been shredded. “America,” as a concept, no longer exists in the USA. Its vestiges remain, but soon, they too will be on the way out.

  Liberty always exists somewhere in the world, but it does tend to change location from time to time.

  Perhaps a final quote from late eighteenth century America would be of benefit – one from Thomas Paine.

  “My country is wherever liberty lives.”

  *  *  *

  Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country, but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay. In the years ahead, there will likely be much less stability of any kind. That’s precisely why, Doug Casey and his team just released this new report with all on details on how to can play your cards—both for prudence and profit. Click here to get the details now.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/30/2022 – 14:30

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