Apr 20

Today’s News 20th April 2021

  • Britain To Deploy 2 Warships To Black Sea As "Solidarity" With Ukraine
    Britain To Deploy 2 Warships To Black Sea As “Solidarity” With Ukraine

    Turkey’s NTV channel is confirming a Sunday Times report that said the UK is preparing to sail two warships into the Black Sea via the Bosporus starting next month amid continued fears that a major confrontation between Russia and Ukraine could break out. 

    “Putting the ships off the coast of Ukraine is intended to show solidarity with Kiev and Nato allies in the region after the President Biden decided to cancel the deployment of two American warships to the Black Sea last week for fear of escalating the crisis over the massing of Russian troops,” The Sunday Times wrote. 

    File image via The Telegraph

    Biden had canceled the US warship deployment after a phone call with Russia’s Putin, wherein the US president also expressed willingness for a face-to-face summit at some point in the summer – an overture that angered hawks, given it put the White House in a “weak” position due to no conditions being agreed to ahead of such a high level bilateral summit

    According to further details in The Sunday Times:

    One Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will peel off from the Royal Navy’s carrier task group in the Mediterranean and head through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, according to senior naval sources.

    RAF F-35B Lightning stealth jets and Merlin submarine-hunting helicopters are to stand ready on the task group’s flag ship, the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, to support the warships in the Black Sea should they be threatened by Russian warships, submarines or aircraft. HMS Queen Elizabeth has to stay in the Mediterranean because an international treaty prohibits aircraft carriers from entering the Black Sea.

    The Montreux Agreement of 1936 dictates that foreign powers passing through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles straits must notify Turkey two weeks ahead of time before their passage.

    Interestingly, the Royal Navy had plans for near-future Black Sea missions prior to current tensions and Russia’s troop build-up in Crimea and near the Ukrainian border. But this new deployment is now being recast as “solidarity” toward Ukraine. The announcement further came days after Russia closed the Kerch Strait to all foreign military vessels, essentially cutting off the Ukrainian Navy’s access to the Black Sea. 

    Britain’s Ministry of Defence was cited as saying for example: “The UK and our international allies are unwavering in our support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. We are working closely with Ukraine to monitor the current situation and continue to call on Russia to de-escalate.”

    “Our armed forces continue to support Ukraine through our training mission Operation Orbital, which has trained over 20,000 members of the armed forces of Ukraine, and the UK-led Maritime Training Initiative,” it added.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/20/2021 – 02:45

  • UK Labour Leader Kicked Out Of Pub By Anti-Lockdown Landlord
    UK Labour Leader Kicked Out Of Pub By Anti-Lockdown Landlord

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer was kicked out of a pub in Bath by an irate landlord who tore into him for supporting the Conservative government’s economy-wrecking lockdown policy.

    Starmer’s visit to the Raven didn’t go as planned as owner Rod Humphreys launched into a verbal tirade about the idiocy of COVID-19 restrictions while asserting he was “incandescent” with rage.

    The landlord showed Starmer a chart while making the point that the average age of a COVID death was 82 years and 3 months compared to the average age of death in the UK which is 81 years.

    “Do you understand we have fucked our economy because old people are dying,” said Humphreys before going on to point out that the UK had a similar total death rate in 2008.

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    “You’ve failed me – I’ve been a Labour voter my entire life,” Humphreys told Starmer as the politician tried to skulk away.

    “You have failed to be the opposition, you have failed to ask whether lockdown was functioning, thousands of people have died because you have failed to do your job and ask the real questions.”

    Humphreys then scolded Starmer for failing to oppose children wearing masks in schools when there’s “never been any evidence for it.”

    A second clip shows Humphreys demanding Starmer leave his pub after the politician and his security team tried to enter the premises.

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    The Labour Party is supposed to act as the “opposition” to the ruling government, and yet it has voted with the Tories on every single COVID-19 lockdown policy, at some points arguing that the restrictions should have been even more severe.

    Starmer subsequently addressed the incident on Twitter with a smarmy tweet that encouraged people to register to vote.

     

    Register to vote for a party that supports the exact same policies as the ruling government?

    Genius.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/20/2021 – 02:00

  • Oceania Takes On Eurasia And Eastasia
    Oceania Takes On Eurasia And Eastasia

    Submitted by South Front,

    The emerging US strategy appears to be centered on imposing a regime of isolation on Russia and China with the aim of ultimately effecting regime change in both countries through a combination of political, economic, and military measures. The military component consists of building up naval, aerial, and space capabilities for blockade and strike directed at these two countries and any countries aligned with them. The ongoing shift of US military capabilities away from protracted land warfare toward naval and aerial long-range strike using hypersonic weapons and swarming munitions, evidenced by the US Marine Corps’ shedding of its tanks and heavy artillery and the US Army opting for long-range missile arsenals and even anti-ship capabilities, indicates a preference for “non-contact” warfare in the future, with client states being assigned the role of “bleeding” in future conflicts. The fact that even the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior military advisory body to the civilian leadership, a US Army four-star general himself, argues that in the future the US Army will need to have its funding reduced in order to facilitate the US Navy’s improbably ambitious expansion plans, is very telling in and of itself.

    NATO’s obsession with so-called “Anti-Access/Area Denial”, or A2/AD “bubbles” supposedly being built by Russia and China in order to protect their territory from NATO’s aggression in locations such as Kaliningrad Region, Crimea, Hainan Island, and other locations, is indicative of the offensive nature of NATO’s operational planning which is plainly inconvenienced by the notion of putative targets being able to shoot back. The development of drone swarms and hypersonic munitions, together with the desperate emphasis on deploying as many of the clearly flawed F-35 stealth fighters as possible, is all part of the technological arms race intended to give offense an advantage over defense.

    But technology is only one part of the puzzle. The other is that deep-strike technologies require, well, “access” to politically open airspace which may not always be available. Moreover, US deep-strike capabilities may also rely on bases located in client states that would become targets of counterstrikes. That the possibility, indeed the strong likelihood of such retaliation exists was suggested by Russia’s warning to NATO in advance of the post-Douma false-flag operation cruise missile strikes against Syria that, should Russian forces or facilities be targeted, the Russian military would not limit itself to downing the munitions.Instead it would also go after the launch platforms (meaning aircraft and warships) as well as bases from which they were operating. In that context, it would have meant NATO air and naval bases in Greece, Italy, and as far away as Spain, which homeports four US Navy destroyers at Naval Station Rota. One way or the other, the message was received by NATO and no Russian forces or facilities were targeted. But the precedent was established, and we can assume it will be followed in any future confrontations.

    Which means that United States’ ability to launch strikes against Russia or China, their forces and bases both on and outside its national territory and airspace, will also be limited by client states’ unwillingness to suffer retaliatory strikes.

    This creates a major diplomatic challenge for the United States, which is relegating its “allies” to the role of punching bags forcing to accept retaliatory blows following its own strikes. The sheer size of Russia and China combined means that the challenge varies from region to region.

    Here the situation is relatively the easiest for the US, given the proximity of Alaska where a major military build-up is taking place, including anti-ballistic missile defenses, forward-basing of strategic bombers, and plans for major F-35 permanent deployment in addition to the air-defense F-22s already stationed there. However, these bases have pretty limited reach, even with aerial refueling for the F-35s, which means that to reach targets closer to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk US forces would have to rely, one way or another, on bases in Norway, Iceland, and even Greenland. The likelihood of the relevant political authorities giving assent to the use of these bases in support of strikes against Russian forces or assets in the Arctic reasons appears to be low. Given these countries’ economic interests in the Arctic and the effectiveness of the Arctic Council at managing the problems of the region, it does not appear likely that Norway, Denmark, or Iceland, would go so far as to risk being a target of Russian military retaliation, and the inevitable end to that international organization which would follow. While Sweden and Finland are also making noises about joining NATO, which would enter huge swaths of airspace to “access” by US aircraft and missiles on their way to Russia, the prospect of becoming a target of retaliation has so far kept them from joining that organization outright. One, however, should not discount the possibility of existence of various secret agreements and arrangements that are being kept from these countries’ populations.

    Here the United States has two countries that are actually willing, at the governmental level if not popular one, to absorb Russian retaliatory strikes. These are Poland and Romania which have already agreed to host components of US National Missile Defense system, and which are all but guaranteed to give the US whatever “access” it needs in case of an operation against Kaliningrad or Crimea, respectively. The restraining factor here is the fact both of these countries happen to be members of the European Union and will remain such for the foreseeable future in spite of earlier US efforts to split the union by peeling off first Great Britain, and then Eastern Europe. While not members of the Eurozone, they are nevertheless part of the common market and open border zones, and serve as the preferred destination for “outsourcing” by Western European firms seeking to avoid Eurozone’s high labor costs (which creates its own set of problems). The pressure on North Stream 2 and indeed on all EU-Russia economic and political ties is motivated by the desire to eliminate the political resistance to the free use of EU’s airspace for offensive military operations against Russia and its targets. So far it has had little success, and has even elevated North Stream 2 issue to the level of question whether Germany is in any way a sovereign country. United States is also exerting indirect pressure on Germany by actively courting France as its “preferred” continental interlocutor at the expense of Germany. However, the economic benefits of EU-Russia collaboration have proved greater than anything the United States could provide to offset them, and Biden’s own version of “America First” policies is unlikely to be more attractive than Trump’s.

    To make matters worse, Poland’s and Romania’s proximity to Russia have meant a certain unwillingness to place major US military bases there, meaning that even when it comes to operations by bombers based in the United States, some of their support functions would be performed by military units based in Germany, Italy, and Great Britain, rendering them vulnerable to retaliatory strikes as well.

    Here, if anything, the situation is even worse for the US than in Europe’s case because there does not appear to be a single country that is an equivalent to Poland and Romania in the sense of having political leadership willing to make their country a hostage to Washington’s military planning. The relevant countries where US currently has bases include Japan and South Korea, neither of which views their relationship with China as a zero-sum game. Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, do not show signs of giving the US a blank check in any situation other than a major threat to their own vital interests by China. The political resistance would mean pushing US support infrastructure to as far as Guam, which is too far and too poorly developed to sustain large-scale carrier battle group operations in eastern Pacific or South China Sea. Even Australia, which has a strong Sinophobic lobby and which moreover self-identifies as part of the “Anglosphere”, is on the fence regarding the desirability of granting unfettered access to Australia’s bases and airspace for the purpose of operations against China.

    The difficulties United States are experiencing at providing the political preconditions for the implementation of their ambitious aero-naval-space blockade and strike capabilities demonstrate the importance of traditional diplomacy to national security. Russia’s outreach to the European Union, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as China’s oft-maligned “Tiger diplomacy” have created a situation in which US military power is functionally displaced by political considerations. It does not even appear that the US leadership is fully aware of the reasons for the ineffectiveness of its military power, otherwise it would not be sending badly overworked aircraft carriers on “double-pump” deployments or keep decades-old strategic bombers on what looks like a repeat of permanent patrols, though this time without nuclear bombs onboard. This is, however, what a multipolar world looks like and will look like going forward. Biden administration’s agreement to extend the New START with Russia for five years without preconditions, over the objections of such hard-liners as Victoria Nuland, suggests there is some reluctant recognition that the world is shifting toward a more equitable distribution of power and wealth.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 23:50

  • WHO Rejects Vaccine Passport For International Travelers
    WHO Rejects Vaccine Passport For International Travelers

    In a statement released following a virtual briefing on Monday, the WHO’s Emergency Committee on international health standards officially recommended that governments avoid making vaccine passports mandatory, a trend that is already catching on in the UK.

    Specifically, the committee advised governments “do not require proof of vaccination as a condition of entry, given the limited (although growing) evidence about the performance of vaccines in reducing transmission and the persistent inequity in the global vaccine distribution. States Parties are strongly encouraged to acknowledge the potential for requirements of proof of vaccination to deepen inequities and promote differential freedom of movement.”

    To justify this position, the WHO cited both limited data on vaccine effectiveness in reducing transmission, along with the deep inequalities in availability that the WHO has long complained about, while at the same time enabling the man is perhaps, more than anybody, responsible for the fact that poor nations will likely wait years for adequate vaccine supplies.

    As we have reported, this man’s name is Bill Gates.

    Incidentally, the Committee also exhorted governments to do whatever they could to support Covax, the WHO-sponsored and Gates-designed program to supply enough jabs to vaccinate the populations of more than 130 countries. However, the program hasn’t managed to allocate nearly enough vaccines, and many poorer nations – beyond the 92 officially eligible for aid via Covax – have no idea where vaccine supplies will come from, sine the choice to respect patent law has created massive international supply bottlenecks. Instead of allowing an “open vaccine” that could be produced anywhere, emerging markets must compete for jabs on the free market.

    After telling governments to try to keep quarantine restrictions for travelers within the bounds of common sense, the WHO added that governments should also work to “Reduce the financial burden on international travelers” whenever possible while enforcing quarantine measures.

    Meanwhile, over in the US, CDC Director Dr. Walensky, whose fearmongering has launched her to front-page coverage in the past, warned that COVID cases have continued to climb even as vaccination numbers have risen, a reality that hasn’t escaped millions of Americans, who are walking on with their masks on as if nothing has changed.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 23:30

  • The Age Of Over-Abundant Elites
    The Age Of Over-Abundant Elites

    Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

    I’ve been reading Peter Turchin’s “Ages of Discord”, which tries to look at patterns of societal strife that he found in previous, pre-industrial civilizations such as Rome and France, and examine how it holds up in a post-industrial era. It bears some resemblance to other cycle theories like Strauss and Howe’s “Fourth Turning” or other long-wave models like Kondratiev Waves (K-Waves). The basic premise behind these ideas are that societies undergo cyclical or pendulum-like dynamics between relatively steady states of prosperity and stability, the internal dynamics of which then produce the conditions that precipitate reversions into turbulent periods of strife and chaotic change.

    The important thing to keep in mind is that to that the likes of Turchin and other historical statisticians, the periods of societal discord that they try to map may look like this:

    Turchin: Long-term dynamics of sociopolitical instability in France, 800–1700 (data from Sorokin 1937).

    But when experienced in real life look more like this

    St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 1572 by François Dubois

    If there’s one thing in this highly polarized world that everybody probably does agree on it’s that we are almost certainly already in one of these periods of discord right now.

    What I’m finding most interesting from Turchin’s take on this isn’t that periods of stability are not terminated by resource depletion (a la the climate alarmists), or any other “limits to growth” per se. While population growth in pre-industrial societies may bump up against “neo-Malthusian” limits, it sets up a counter-cyclical decline in population growth. How these forces interact in a transition from stability to chaos is that an over-abundance of elites creates a situation of the political class splitting into factions and fighting over the spoils of what is now a shrinking pie in terms of real economic wealth:

     “According to this theory, population growth in excess of the productivity gains of the land has several effects on social institutions. First, it leads to persistent price inflation, falling real wages, rural misery, urban migration, and increased frequency of food riots and wage protests.

    Second, rapid expansion of population results in elite overproduction—an increased number of aspirants for the limited supply of elite positions. Increased intra-elite competition leads to the formation of rival patronage networks vying for state rewards. As a result, elites become riven by increasing rivalry and factionalism.

    The above passage made me think of the 2016 US election, one that was framed as a populist political outsider taking on the Washington DC swamp… however as Turchin notes, somewhat uncannily….

    “all these trends intensify, the end result is state bankruptcy and consequent loss of military control; elite movements of regional and national rebellion; and a combination of elite-mobilized and popular uprisings that expose the breakdown of central authority.”

    MAGA, Democratic Socialism, BLM, whatever comes next all have in common extremely well off elites (millionaires and billionaires) talking up a populist game against some ostensibly amorphous “Establishment”, to which these crusaders are loathe to admit their own membership.

    Regional governors and in increasingly more cases, entire police forces are essentially “going rogue”. It all sounds in the ballpark of what Turchin is talking about.

    Then the media makes useful idiots of us all, reframing as existential battles between good and evil what are really just internecine conflicts between elites who regard everybody else as serfs (in much the same way that I have always privately remarked that World War 1 was, at it’s core, a family squabble among a pan-European dynasty that ruled by divine right).

    Via Brookings Institute: The Family Relationships that couldn’t stop World War 1

    Which brings us to today, which Turchin doesn’t assert, but I couldn’t help but notice another uncannily prescient remark:

    “epidemics and even pandemics strike disproportionately often during the disintegrative phases of secular cycles”

    Global lockdowns and fiscal stimulus are once again framed as public safety and societal stabilizing measures. However as come commentators (thinking specifically of Danielle Di Martino) observed: The financial system was screwed, and the central bankers needed Covid because they were about to pull a Hail Mary to save a rapidly deteriorating financial system.

    The Great Pivot: Covid-to-Climate

    What’s probably coming next: ubiquitous climate change alarmism, can be understood to mean there aren’t enough private jets to go around, and it was even getting crowded in First Class.

    Everything coming out of unaccountable policy institutes like the WEF and the mainstream media are just reframings of what Turchin calls “elite overproduction” such that the rabble believes the revocation of their civil liberties and the decline in their living standards is necessary and just.

    What are the alternatives?

    Maybe neo-Malthusianism has its place, given The Climate? This is an important point because the signs are already around us that as the pandemic fizzles The Great Pivot will be from COVID-to-Climate.

    For starters, numerous environmental and ecological scholars and thinkers who are concerned about humanity’s effects on the ecosystem are vehemently opposed to climate alarmism, finding it destructive and self-defeating. This warrants multiple separate articles but I’ll mention Michael Shellenberger’s “Apocalypse Never” and former Under-Secretary for Energy under Obama, Steven Koonin’s “Unsettled Science”. The latter isn’t out until next month, but Dmitri Kofinas just had him on Hidden Forces, I strongly suggest listening and sharing it.

    The coming New Green Deal style clampdowns will make global lockdowns look rather benign, despite an abundance of evidence that lockdowns did nothing to change the actual trajectory of COVID.

    Lockdowns vs no-lockdowns. From Tom Woods’  “COVID Charts that CNN Forgot”

    The coming Climate Emergency will embark on some fool’s errand like “15 months to cool 1.5C”, and it will probably be announced from some Davos-style ecological summit on Richard Branson’s private island that all the participants arrived at via super-yachts.

    Because as per Turchin, this is final stage that transitions us into a period of chaos and instability:

    ‘First, the elites become accustomed to ever greater levels of consumption. Furthermore, competition for social status fuels “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen 1973 [1899]). Thus, the minimum level of consumption necessary for maintaining the elite status exhibits runaway growth.

    Second, the numbers of elites, in relation to the rest of the population, increase. 

    The third consequence is that the twin processes of declining living standards for the commoners and increasing consumption levels for the elites will drive up socioeconomic inequality. As a result of the growth in elite appetites and numbers, the proportion of the total economic pie consumed by them will increase. However, there are limits on how far this process can go. Eventually, increasing numbers of elites and elite aspirants will have to translate into declining consumption levels for some, leading to the condition that has been termed elite overproduction (this is reminiscent of population growth leading to overpopulation). Intraelite competition for limited elite positions in the economy and government will become more fierce.

    I emphasized the part that provides the most telling signal of them all. If you pay attention to the argument Turchin has been laying out, left to itself, an expanding population with expanding consumption will hit some sort of Neo-Malthusian limit and then begin to reverse under its own constraints.

    But this dynamic doesn’t happen at the elite level. The capstone class of society simply continues getting larger and consuming more of the economic pie and owning more of the wealth, exacerbating wealth inequality. The elites are not constrained by limits, until there is nothing left to leach from the underclass and they come into conflict with each other.

    Then, well, things need to get serious. We need a world war, or a global lockdown, or a climate emergency to keep the rabble in line so that the people on top can finish sorting out the spoils.

    (It is important to note: I’m not saying this is all planned. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. It’s a dynamic. The people impelling these shifts probably really do think they’re benefactors of humanity and that they deserve to sit atop of it. Divine right persists to this day.)

    How about this instead?

    What would restore a semblance of natural constraints around both overproduction and overconsumption (and with it externalities like pollution and habitat destruction) would be lifting all artificial attenuators on market signalling. That means: subsidies, bail-outs, governments picking winners and losers, central planning and management by “experts”, all of it has to go.

    We have to deal with reality as it is, not as our models insist it is supposed to be. We have to re-gear public policies as responses to facts on the ground as opposed to doubling down on failed models (lockdowns aren’t slowing the spread? Lockdown harder! Masks don’t work? Double masks!)

    How about seeing a governor or a premier come out and say this:

    “Neither lockdowns nor masks seem to be working, for the next six weeks we want as many people as possible to load up on Vitamin D and Zinc”. We’re going to greenlight Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and we’re going to launch an operation Warp Speed to study any and all alternative approaches”

    In any society in which the incentives were such that the ruling class was really trying to solve the problem at hand, this would have happened without any prompting.

    Any business or any tribe that has to weigh trade-offs and can’t externalize their failures would have looked at alternatives to failed models because they would have no other choice.

    But the elites and the political class? They get paid either way. They get exemptions. They get priority. And when their “public service” is over, they walk through the revolving door into Big Corporate directorships, lobby firms and think tanks.

    All they have to do is get the public to ratify their own servitude every few years, and the elites have the entirety of Big Tech and the Corporate Media to brainwash the public that it’s in their best interests to do it.

    In our current age, the dynamics Turchin explored were not mathematically precise and he acknowledged that there would be nuances and subtleties in applying these to a post-industrial age:

    While the overall dynamics are complex, the dynamical feedbacks between variables, that is, mechanisms that generate the dynamics, are often characterized by a high degree of determinism.

    He is probably onto something that these societal dynamics have set an age of discord in motion, one myself among others have been saying for awhile will be remembered as the end of the age of the Nation State.

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 23:10

  • US Issues Rare "Cognitive Warfare" Photo As Navy Shadows Chinese Carrier
    US Issues Rare “Cognitive Warfare” Photo As Navy Shadows Chinese Carrier

    In a rare move the United States Navy has released a photo on Sunday of one of its warships shadowing a Chinese aircraft carrier in the East China Sea, which is said to have occurred days ago.

    Currently both countries have carrier strike groups in the region amid heightened tensions between Beijing and Washington. The newly issued photo set shows the USS Mustin shadowing the Liaoning carrier group in what’s clearly a strong “message” to China’s military. 

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    The image further shows the US ship’s captain, Commander Robert J Briggs, and his deputy Commander Richard D Slye observing the Liaoning in a casual manner.

    The Chinese carrier is seen a few thousand meters away…

    Via SCMP

    The South China Morning Post (SCMP) cited a regional military expert to say it was clearly a form of provocative “cognitive warfare” by the US side: 

    The United States military has engaged in a form of “cognitive warfare” following the latest encounter between its warships and the Chinese navy.

    Both countries have deployed aircraft carrier strike groups to the East and South China seas, led by the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the Liaoning, respectively.

    According to the key quote, “In the photo, Commander Briggs looks very relaxed with his feet up watching the Liaoning ship just a few thousand yards away, while his deputy is also sitting beside him, showing they take their PLA counterparts lightly,” Lu Li-shih, recently of Taiwan’s Naval Academy in Kaohsiung, commented to the SCMP.

    “This staged photograph is definitely ‘cognitive warfare’ to show the US doesn’t regard the PLA as an immediate threat,” the analyst added. 

    PLA’s Liaoning carrier, via Reuters

    While such ‘shadowing’ maneuvers in the region are nothing new, the ‘messaging’ of the photograph is indeed unusual (with one of the commander’s feet up, which can be interpreted as an insult being directed at the Chinese side), suggesting a heightened propaganda campaign is now playing out.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 22:50

  • Taibbi: An Afghanistan Veteran Looks Back On The "First Postmodern War"
    Taibbi: An Afghanistan Veteran Looks Back On The “First Postmodern War”

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    I first met Adrian Bonenberger in 2014, after he completed two tours in Afghanistan. He’d published Afghan Post, a painful epistolary memoir about his experiences. Bonenberger started that book a breezy, confident, idealistic young officer, but as he came across more cruelty, waste, and corruption, started to break down, second-guessing not only the mission but himself, i.e. why he’d volunteered.

    The Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle, or MRAP

    At the outset of Afghan Post Bonenberger referenced everything from the illustrated versions of The Odyssey and The Iliad he read as a kid, to All Quiet on the Western Front. But after years of head-scratching missions, circuitous contracting schemes, and lies sent down from above (and demanded in return), he seemed to realize, unpleasantly, that his experience was less Homer and more Catch-22.

    He laughs some, but mostly the absurdity crushes him. A selection of passages gives a snapshot of his progression:

    My life is in near-perfect harmony… This is what I’ve been aiming for, a sense of balance, of co-existing with the world. My job at this instant is precisely what it needs to be, no more, no less. I’m a good commander, man… Life feels correct.

    We aren’t here to defeat the enemy; that’s impossible with our resources. We’re here to occupy them, to distract them from the women wearing blue jeans in Kabul.

    No matter how many rifle-bearing insurgents we kill, they only seem to increase in numbers and proficiency.

    I just want to keep bashing away at the Taliban until they quit. I refuse to stop. I will break them with constant patrolling…

    What are we doing. This makes no sense. I feel my grasp on humanity slipping away. The army believes the solution to this is behavioral health. We’d do better with some religious/moral equivalent — sadly, our own multi-faith shepherd/ expert does not provide me with anything like the type of certainty I’d need to get me through this or buck-up.

    He unravels, and as the diary goes on, seems to become more concerned with his own mental survival than with making sense of the mission, which becomes little more than an absurdist plot point. By the end, he writes, “Afghanistan is sending me out, as though I never set foot here, utterly unchanged,” adding:

    The landscape is so harsh and unforgiving — on the one hand, the people I see trying to drag a living from the dust seem like heroes or madmen — on the other hand, they move slowly and without obvious desperation — it’s only after a great deal of time spent around them that you realize this transcends the fatalist predisposition of their culture… These people are the embodiment of despair; life without hope of improvement, waiting for an early death from disease, accident, or murder.

    Can’t wait to leave this place and these thoughts behind.

    I thought of Adrian after Joe Biden announced that “I have concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war.” The question that faded from view by the end of Adrian’s two tours was one of the first Biden addressed.

    We went to Afghanistan, President Biden said, “to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.” And “we did that. We accomplished that objective.”

    Is that true? Less than a day after Biden’s speech, even would-be allies of the administration like former Clinton adviser Richard Clarke were saying that there was a “high probability” the Afghan government would fall, and Westerners would soon be chased out by the Taliban, in scenes likely to recall the scrum for helicopter seats in Saigon in 1975.

    Is Clarke wrong? If not, what was the point? Was there ever one? I asked Adrian’s perspective, as a former soldier:

    Matt Taibbi: Do you believe it? That we’re leaving?

    Adrian Bonenberger: I’m just going to go full Charlie Brown and say, yes. Yes, I do. I think they’re going to leave. Hold the football, Lucy. Here I come.

    MT: What were some of the first things that concerned you about the mission?

    Adrian Bonenberger: The first time I went, I was a first lieutenant. I think I became a captain after I got back from the first deployment. That was with the 173rd Airborne. It was a very kinetic deployment… The terrain wasn’t as bad where we were. Most of the KIAs, the people who died were hit by IEDs in Humvees.

    On that first deployment, I got to see the Humvees swapped out for MRAPs [eds. note: Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle]. I remember reading all this stuff about how Humvees were terrible, and they were. They broke down all the time. They weren’t designed for 15,000 pounds of armor. They were not designed for a mountain environment. In this desperate attempt to field stronger-armored vehicles, we got MRAPs, which are these giant, lumbering mine-resistant vehicles.

    I didn’t realize at the time, but it was a $50 billion expedited program to swap out every up-armored Humvee with MRAPs. What they didn’t know when we got the MRAPs was that here we are, on the border of Pakistan with a bunch of roads that we built that barely supported Humvees, so when we get these MRAPs… I was actually in a rollover in one.

    There was a fill that collapsed because we were driving over in a vehicle that weighed about 40,000 pounds. The Humvee weighed 20,000 pounds. We blamed the Afghan contractor at the time. It sounds psychotic, but we were like, “Oh, yeah. The Afghans built this substandard road. It’s their fault.”

    That felt so emblematic. It feels to me today so emblematic. We only had those MRAPs in service for five years. We spent $50 billion bucks for a five-year rental, and then sold them to police stations across America. Those MRAPs that did fuck-all for us in Afghanistan are now what the police are using, presumably, for their small towns.

    MT: That’s via the 1033 program, where the Pentagon sells its surplus equipment to localities?

    Adrian Bonenberger: Exactly.

    MT: I remember in Iraq, they recalled the original Humvees and had heavier doors put in, I think to repel rockets.

    Adrian Bonenberger: Right.

    MT: So in Afghanistan, they did that, and then switched out the replacement Humvees for the MRAPs?

    Adrian Bonenberger: When they up-armored the Humvee, they surrounded these things with armor, because obviously, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want, per the ridiculous claim by Donald Rumsfeld.

    That armor was good at protecting you against RPGs and bullets. We were getting shot at, and I remember vehicles coming back from patrols, all of them had been shot up, and all of the windows were just spider-webbed, but the bulletproof windows would stop the bullets. The problem was when they started putting IEDs in the road, it would channel the blast through the cabin, and ended up just killing everybody in it. The thing that was good at keeping the bullets out ended up being the worst possible design for IEDs.

    MT: Because it kept the blast inside the vehicle?

    Adrian Bonenberger: Exactly.

    MT: They didn’t figure that out until later?

    Adrian Bonenberger: I just don’t know, man. So many times, so much of our policy, so much of how we… I mean, if we even had a policy, it was reactive and responsive. It seems impossible that nobody, no chemist or no engineer, said, “Hey, if a bomb hits the bottom of this, it’s going to turn these guys into Campbell’s Soup.” Nobody was in the room that said, “This is only solving this one problem, but this other problem, it’s going to make it much bigger.” Insurgents, not being stupid, are probably going to figure that out.

    With the MRAP, the big thing was the V-shaped hull. It’s going to be V-shaped on the bottom so the explosion will go around it. Well, I think that certainly helped. That was better, and I saw IEDs that definitely would’ve killed people in Humvees, not kill people in MRAPs, but it didn’t do away with the problem of IEDs. It created this other problem of these vehicles are so fucking heavy, you couldn’t drive anywhere without rolling over and almost dying in a different way.

    MT: Did they have to build new roads?

    Adrian Bonenberger: I think what happened was we just left. We just got out before they could do that stuff. Eventually, yes, they would’ve had to have built the new roads, which we wanted to do anyway. Yeah, I think we were there for another two or three years in that place where my first deployment happened, and then we left. We haven’t been back.

    That’s Taliban. The Taliban own that area now. They’ve owned that for a decade.

    MT: Are there other contracting issues you remember?

    Adrian Bonenberger: We only had the MRAPs for a few years. By the time I went back, they were already getting swapped out for something called the M-ATV, an off-road vehicle on steroids. It was a lot better.

    There’s always a new vehicle.

    Another crazy angle was that Biden bragged in a 2020 campaign ad about his involvement in the MRAP push, and the myth of their effectiveness is so complete nobody interrogated the claim. I imagine if anyone registered it in Trumpland it was to grudgingly concede that Biden had played a leading role in fielding MRAPs, which they probably imagined was a good thing. 

    Another thing that I remember very vividly was when I was a commander on my second deployment, we had these crypto devices that would fill the radios so the radios could talk to each other via encryption. It’s not like the Taliban had signals, units, or anything else, but we were doing these things in case we ever fought a military that did have the capacity to crack encryption.

    We would do this very religiously, and they’re these black boxes that you could throw them on the ground, they wouldn’t break. Everybody knew how to use them. Everybody had been trained on them, and they were a line item on my inventory as a commander, like $4,800, $4,900 bucks apiece. About $5,000 bucks apiece.

    I think we had three months left on deployment when a contractor came into the office one day and said, “Hey, you’re getting new crypto devices.” I looked at them and they looked like… Do you remember, I think they’re called pen pilots…

    MT: Palm pilots?

    Adrian Bonenberger: Palm pilots. That’s it. It looked like a palm pilot. This is the very end of 2010, early 2011, I already had soldiers who had smartphones. When we would get up to Tajikistan, and they could get cell coverage, they would be posting their statuses. I may be one of the earliest commanders to deal with the problem of a soldier posting on social media in the field. It was like, “Dude, text your girlfriend, whatever — I get it, but please do not give away our position to the enemy.”

    Anyway we get these palm pilot things that are supposed to be the latest and greatest, and we were a week away from going out on a pretty long mission, a week-long operation, and so I told the contractor, “Thanks. We don’t really need these. Why don’t you just give these to the unit that’s training right now to replace us? They’ll have some time to get comfortable with them.”

    His response was, “Maybe I didn’t explain myself. You’re getting these. I’m here to train you.”

    I went to the battalion commander, and said, “This makes no sense to me. I don’t have time to train everybody in my unit for these silly new devices that look fragile, they look like palm pilots. I’m very skeptical here.”

    He answered, “My hands are tied. These are ours.” Basically, the contractor training you on these is now your commander, for all intents and purposes.

    Now it’s $12,000 bucks a pop instead of $5,000 bucks a pop. I’ve heard subsequently that they are actually a far superior device to that original black box, but just the way it was done right before an operation was… I only had time for one soldier, the smart RTO guy, I think his dad was a professor at Princeton, to learn it. He enlisted for dubious reasons. He figured out how to do it, and he just was “the guy who did it,” because nobody else could figure out how to do it.

    For the rest of the deployment, there was one guy who knew how to use the device, and whenever there was a new code that came out, he had to run around the battlefield, or drive around updating everybody’s communications stuff, which is the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. It also endangered lives. But, that to me was a very tangible example of the military not being there to do a thing, but as a receptacle, as somebody who was required to purchase expensive new stuff that was not wanted or even really needed at that moment.

    MT: So it was the tail wagging the dog?

    Adrian Bonenberger: That’s exactly right. The tail was wagging the dog.

    MT: What was your conception of why you were there?

    Adrian Bonenberger: They got bin Laden in May, 2011, which was probably the time we should’ve gotten out. The most generous explanation for our being there was that we were trying to get him and punish him for 9/11, and then we got him. Then we were still there, for no clear reason. We were all okay with that. I’m okay with that, apparently. That happened ten years ago.

    Ten years ago next month. We’re still there.

    MT: I remember in the book of fiction you co-edited, The Road Ahead — I think it was Roxana Robinson in the introduction who talked about how when she asked soldiers if it bothered them that WMDs hadn’t been found, they gave her unexpected answers. What was the understanding in Afghanistan among the people you served with about why you were there? Did they care?

    Adrian Bonenberger: That’s a great question. I think it really gets to the heart of the problem with Afghanistan. I was talking with Will Mackin, who was with the SEALs and wrote a really beautiful collection of short fiction… I was telling him that I think the wars on terror have been the first post-modern wars, which sounds so buzzy and annoying, like, “Shut the fuck up, nobody cares about that. That’s dumb.”

    But, there is no explanation for why we’re there. If you ask ten people why we’re in Afghanistan, or why we’re in Iraq, even, you’ll get ten different answers that are equally plausible. That wasn’t the case in Vietnam. You agreed with why we were in Vietnam or disagreed with it, but we were there to stop communism. A blisteringly stupid and failed idea, but our being there was related to communism in one way, shape, or form. You’ll find people who will explain to you that Afghanistan has nothing to do with terrorism, that it’s about minerals, or it’s about China, or it’s the great game, or it’s Bin Laden.

    MT: Or women’s rights now.

    Adrian Bonenberger: Women’s rights was a way that I rationalized being in Afghanistan. It’s a powerful rationalization. There were a couple of girls that I saw wearing blue jeans at the end of my second deployment, and that reduced me to tears, because soldiers get sentimental about dumb stuff, and that seemed like it was validating a narrative that I’d constructed in my head that was important to me.

    But is that why we were there? No. No, absolutely not. That’s not why we went. That’s not why we stayed.

    That’s what some people may think and say in the op-ed pages so that people feel better about us being there, much in the same way that that’s how I felt good about being there when I was a commander. That’s not why we went. We went to get bin Laden, I think, ultimately is what most people will say, or said at the time. That isn’t why we went there, but that’s the story that’s probably closest to the truth.

    The Taliban got caught up in it because they refused to hand him over, and nobody said no to the United States of America under George W. Bush. You say no, it’s time to go.

    MT: Time to smoke you out of your hidey-holes.

    Adrian Bonenberger: Right.

    MT: What about the Afghanistan Papers story in the Washington Post? Did you and other vets talk about that when that came out? Military leaders were telling the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that the war was so expensive in lives and money, and wasn’t getting things done. But the public story was different. What was your reaction?

    Adrian Bonenberger: Reading it all laid out there, they just lied. The thing that I’m most worried about right now is, I’m already seeing it around the edges. Biden made the announcement this week, and you see email threads and you see it on Twitter, people are like, “But, what about all the progress? What about all the money that we’ve spent?” It’s just like, “Guys, you’ve been deluding yourselves.”

    There was this thing that we did, the officers did. It was kind of a joke to us, and I just didn’t put two and two together. It’s called Red, Amber, Green Trackers. The joke was you would have these maps of your AO or your area of operations, and the places that the Taliban had were red, and then were permutations of this, so red-trending-amber meant that the Taliban had it, but maybe there were a couple of guys there that you could work with, whatever.

    Amber was we patrol there, and we’re trying to flip it green. Amber-trending-green is like, “Oh, the Taliban haven’t blown us up here for a few months, and we built them a well.” Then, green is just like, “We got this. The Afghans have it.” The colors would change sometimes. I think blue became a permutation that I saw later. The joke anyway was you would get to the end of the deployment, and all of the red places were listed as red-trending-amber, or amber, and all the places that were amber were now amber-trending-green or green, and all the places that were amber-trending-green were green, 100%. You give it to the next unit, and it all turned red again. It would downgrade one.

    MT: They were juking the stats.

    Adrian Bonenberger: I saw that and I didn’t think to myself, “This is dumb.” I knew it was dumb. It was more like, “This is fraud.”

    This should be illegal. We just all kind of did it all the time. We talked about it, and it’s not like this is a secret. The fact that people were seeing this in the Pentagon and were just like, “Oh, yeah. Of course, we’re just going to keep doing this forever.” There was no plan, and the metrics changed every deployment. They still wanted body counts, EKIA, enemy killed in action.

    These frauds, the context changes, but it’s the same.

    MT: It sounds like Daniel Ellsberg in his book “Secrets,” when he was talking about a tour with John Paul Vann. They had a similar system. I think it was something like, if the local South Vietnamese commander could sleep without a guard at his door at night, then that area was green. He found that every area that had been designated X was actually X minus one, or X minus two, security-wise… Was that basically what was going on?

    Adrian Bonenberger: 100%. The only difference being, and this is one of the saddest things to me… Afghanistan, a parade of sad memories, the eternal bitch-fest… It might’ve been two years ago, it might’ve been three years ago, when SIGAR stopped doing a certain type of report, during Trump’s presidency, because they didn’t have access anymore essentially. They still did the report, but they were like, “Look, we can’t go out and survey 80% of these places, because they’re under Taliban control. We’re going to attempt to do a QA/QC* of projects as they happen. We’re still going to be active in Kabul, but we just can’t get to half of these places.”

    I saw that, and I remember thinking, “This should be headline news.” If we can’t go anywhere, we’re already out of Afghanistan in a sense. We’re not there. We can’t even establish what is being done with the building that cost $50 million or $100 million bucks to build. What else would you call that, except fraud?

    It’s as if somebody justified that thing being built. Oh, it’s a hospital. It’ll be great. Was it being used as a hospital? You go down there, and the Taliban are using it as a school or a madrassa or whatever. Honestly, at this point, I don’t care. I’m glad that it’s being used for something, but don’t say that it’s going to be a hospital if it’s not going to be a hospital. Just say, “We’re paying for madrassas.” That’s fine. Maybe that’s what Afghanistan needs? I don’t know.

    MT: Did you see that? Would they build something, or bid out a contract for something, and it would turn into something else?

    Adrian Bonenberger: My second deployment, the first mission I was on was a company-plus mission, maybe a battalion-minus mission, to QA/QC a school that had been built for, I believe, $20 million. It had been completed, but we needed to do a final review of it. It was in Taliban-held territory. We had to fight our way all the way out to QA/QC it. We did that, and determined that the Taliban was using it as a recruiting station!

    Then, we fought our way out. I was never able to get back there. At the very end, we probably could’ve gone back out there if we wanted to. We really did “pacify” the province, because of the Afghans. The Afghans did all the heavy lifting. It didn’t last long. It was not something that you can transit again a year or two later, but for that moment, it was. But what is it being used for today? If we’re lucky, it’s being used for that. If we’re not lucky, it’s being used for something worse.

    MT: Was that mission just to determine if that building was being used correctly?

    Adrian Bonenberger: Yes, and it wasn’t.

    MT: There was an article by William Arkin in Newsweek recently, arguing that just because the uniform boots on the ground may be withdrawing, doesn’t mean we’re leaving. We’ve already started to shift to a system where a lot of the people who are actually engaged in an occupation aren’t even in the country, because they’re operating remotely, and/or they’re private contractors who don’t wear uniforms. Or, they work for some enforcement agency like the DEA or the FBI.

    Did you see that process start to evolve while you were there?

    Adrian Bonenberger: The most compelling argument against our leaving on a certain level is that it at least leaves the military as some type of official mechanism. Yeah, we’re going to read about them being there. There’s a way to tell when a soldier dies, at least.

    I remember when Thomas Ricks went on Fox News, and the Fox guy was trying to rake him over the coals over something, and Tom asked, “Do you know how many contractors have died in Iraq?”

    He paused for a second, and he said, “No.” Tom said, “Nobody does. There’s no way to know. We think 500 to 700 died,” but that’s a private company. They keep their own statistics. We will never know how many contractors died in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s no legal mechanism for determining that, and as a result, we’re just not going to know. Historians hundreds of years from now may be able to mount lengthy campaigns to figure it out. That’s a problem.

    The DEA wanted me to do raids on certain militias that were smuggling weapons and drugs, and I refused point-blank. I said, “That’s not my problem. That’s Afghanistan’s problem.”

    Internally, I figured out, I would’ve drawn the line on human smuggling, like if I found out that one of my Afghan partners was trafficking humans or slaves, I’d say, “We can’t work together. You’re my enemy now.” But with weapons and drugs, I don’t even think drugs should be illegal in this country, so why would I do anything there? But the DEA would ask me to pull security for their raids, and I’d say, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

    Imagine one of the soldiers dying on that mission. You either would’ve had to lie about it and say that the Taliban was actually there and the Taliban ambushed us, or you’d have to explain that you were doing Colombia-style drug raids on an ally, because the DEA wanted it. It’s so complicated. It makes no sense. It made no sense to me then, and I’m proud that, however sneakily I accomplished it, I stood up for what was right.

    MT: What’s your prognosis for what happens now?

    Adrian Bonenberger: The Taliban already have, by fairly conservative estimates, the run of 80% of the country. So the Taliban are already there. I think the hope with Afghanistan was always going to be that we could support the Afghans who are interested in a non-Taliban government for enough time for them to get their act together.

    If we continue to support them diplomatically and economically, they have a chance, but in the same way that the USSR supported their communist administration in Kabul for I think two or three years before the USSR fell apart. It held on. It wasn’t doing great, but it was doing okay. I think we can achieve that.

    If we can’t, then that’s the most damning indictment possible of everything that we did there, including the things that I did there that I thought were good, and was doing for the right reasons. It means that all of that was just pissing in the wind. The next time we do this, I hope we’ll keep that in mind and do it better, or not at all.

    * Quality Assurance, Quality Control

    You can find Adrian Bonenberger’s book Afghan Post here. He also co-edited The Road Ahead, a collection of “fiction from the forever war,” and co-edits The Wrath-Bearing Tree, which he describes as “a little independent site that tries to promote good content and be subversive.”

     

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 22:30

  • Pentagon Now Says Russian Troop Build-Up Near Ukraine "Bigger" Than In 2014
    Pentagon Now Says Russian Troop Build-Up Near Ukraine “Bigger” Than In 2014

    On Monday Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby for the first time gave a US military assessment of Russia’s troop build-up along Ukraine’s eastern border that goes significantly beyond prior statements. 

    Kirby said of the Russian military build-up that “it is certainly bigger than the one in 2014,” however without providing a specific number. Russia insists the buildup is for training, but it is “not clear to us” that this is the only purpose, he added according to Politico’s Lara Seligman. Kirby described that “over the past couple of weeks, officials have continued to see an increase in Russia’s buildup of troops on the border with Ukraine,” Politico’s Pentagon correspondent added. 

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    Ukrainian government officials late last month had been the first to accuse the Kremlin of destabilizing and saber-rattling with a major troop deployment to Crimea and near the border with war-torn Donbass, setting off a renewed diplomatic crisis between Moscow and the West.

    Kiev ultimately charged that Russia was preparing for an “offensive” into Ukraine’s sovereign territory in support of pro-Russian separatists fighting Ukraine’s military in the country’s east. While the conflict had smoldered since the height of fighting in 2014 and 2015, which has taken over 13,000 lives over a half-decade, late last month four Ukrainian soldiers were reported killed in shelling by separatists. 

    The Economist has recently voiced the biggest concern out of Western allies as follows: “The last time that Russia gathered so many troops on Ukraine’s borders, it went on to invade the country and annex Crimea.”

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    The Pentagon’s new assessment that the Russian troop build-up goes beyond 2014 levels comes a week after Secretary of State Antony Blinken first said “We’re now seeing the largest concentration of Russian forces on Ukraine’s borders since 2014.” He had issued the words from NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, saying further “That is a deep concern not only to Ukraine, but to the United States” – comments backed by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.

    Meanwhile also on Monday the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell issued an astoundingly high estimate and accusation of Russian troop numbers in the area:

    Initially, Borrell told reporters that “there’s more than 150,000 Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian borders and in Crimea,” and doubled down on the figure later before his services had to correct it in the transcript, saying the real figure was over 100,000.

    Nevertheless, Borrell said that “the risk of further escalation — it’s evident.”

    He said that a “spark” could set off major war at any time. “It is the highest military deployment of the Russian army on the Ukrainian borders ever. It’s clear that it’s a matter of concern when you deploy a lot of troops,” Borrell said. “Well, a spark can jump here or there.”

    Josep Borrell

    Ukrainian leaders have been urging Western countries to make clear to Russia that it will pay a price for its “aggression” – while President Volodymyr Zelensky has lobbied for a ‘fast-tracking’ into NATO membership, considered a Russian ‘red line’. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 22:10

  • "We Made History Today" – NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter Makes First Flight On Mars 
    “We Made History Today” – NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes First Flight On Mars 

    After some delay, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter was given the “all-clear for takeoff” on Sunday. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent instructions for the Mars helicopter to liftoff. By early Monday morning, history was made and would make the Wright brothers proud as Ingenuity lifted off on the Red Planet.

    JPL tweeted Ingenuity “made history today by being the first craft to achieve controlled, powered flight on a planet beyond Earth.” 

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    During today’s historic ascent, JPL released the first photo from the flight. 

    The 4-pound helicopter rose a little more than 3 meters, hovered briefly, and returned to the surface. Ingenuity’s altimeter shows flight time and altitude reached. 

    NASA’s rover Perseverance tweeted a short GIF of Ingenuity’s flight. Throughout the day, more images and pictures will be released. 

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    “We can now say we’ve flown a rotorcraft on another planet,” MiMi Aung, NASA’s Ingenuity program manager, told her team earlier this morning in the flight control room. “We together flew on Mars. We together have our Wright brothers moment.”

    She added that “We don’t know from history what Orville and Wilbur [Wright] did after their first successful flight. But I imagine the two brothers hugged each other. Well, you know, I’m hugging you virtually.”

    Ingenuity’s initial flight was scheduled for April 11. A problem occurred on the helicopter’s onboard computers that engineers on Earth were able to correct. 

    Mars’s super-thin atmosphere is just 1% the density of Earth’s, making it more challenging for the helicopters’ blades to spin around 2,500 revolutions per minute to generate lift. For comparison, on Earth, most helicopters operate at about 450-500 revolutions per minute.

    As for future flights, at least five are scheduled in the coming weeks. Each flight will be more complex, operating at higher altitudes and longer flight times. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 21:50

  • China Says It Has No Desire To Replace Dollar As Global Reserve Currency With Digital Yuan
    China Says It Has No Desire To Replace Dollar As Global Reserve Currency With Digital Yuan

    Apparently all it takes to replace a global reserve currency is a digital currency alternative just waiting to be released any moment… and a deep-seated desire to do so.

    As regular readers know, China is leaps and bounds ahead of every other central bank and indeed plans to release a digital Yuan in the near future, but for now it supposedly has no interest in dethroning the dollar as the reserve currency… at least according to China.

    According to Bloomberg, which last weekend reported that the Biden administration is “stepping up scrutiny of China’s plans for a digital yuan, with some officials concerned the move could kick off a long-term bid to topple the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency”,  People’s Bank of China Deputy Governor Li Bo said the goal for internationalizing its currency is not to replace the dollar, and the efforts to create a digital yuan are aimed at domestic use.

    “For the internationalization of the renminbi, we have said many times that it’s a natural process, and our goal is not to replace the U.S. dollar or other international currencies,” Li said on a panel at the Boao forum Sunday according to Bloomberg. “I think our goal is to allow the market to choose, to facilitate international trade and investment.”

    “Allowing the market choose” is, of course, a passive-aggressive way of saying that while China does not want to overthrow the greenback with its digital yuan, the market may have other plans, and if it so choose to overthrow the reigning reserve currency… then so be it.

    As a reminder, in a recent note discussing the upcoming disruption from CBDCs, Morgan Stanley said that central bank digital currencies “have the potential to disrupt the international payments system. If a country’s CBDC gains acceptance for international transactions, significant advantages could accrue to the issuer country in financing costs and control over financial transactions, similar to the US dollar’s privileged role today. Some central banks like the ECB and the PBOC see the move towards digital currency as an opportunity to raise the international status of their currencies and increase their use in cross-border payments.”

    And this is precisely what China wants, even if it can’t say so explicitly for fears of provoking a retaliation from the Biden admin. So instead of openly challenging the US with its plans of a “weaponized e-Yuan”, Beijing is hoping to downplay its full potential, if only for the time being:

    “The motivation for the e-yuan, for now at least, is focusing primarily on domestic use,” Li said. International “interoperability is a very complex issue and we are not in a hurry to reach any particular solution yet,” although there could be cross-border use “in the long term,” Li said.

    The central banker said that the PBOC is planning to test the cross-border use of the digital yuan at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, where it could be used by both domestic users as well as athletes and visitors from overseas.

    Speaking on the same panel at China’s high-profile Boao Forum, Agustin Carstens, general manager of Bank for International Settlements, said there was huge potential in the cross-border use of digital currencies as they could make foreign exchange transaction and payment settlement extremely efficient. He said countries can explore various ways to achieve international interoperability, including making different systems compatible and creating connectivity links among the systems.

    While the digitization of the yuan could benefit its use in cross-border transactions, the key factor in determining the currency’s global role is whether China will relax its capital controls, said Shen Jianguang, chief economist at JD.com Inc. “If you want to have a global reserve currency, you need to allow foreigners to hold it, to use it.”

    Which, incidentally, is also in the works: as we reported two weeks ago, China is already quietly “encouraging more capital outflows to ease pressure on yuan“, and in what may be the biggest transformation yet, earlier today we noted that following years of crackdown on crypto, Beijing now calls bitcoin an “investment alternative.”

    “I think it is quite significant and is definitely different to their previous statements or positions on public cryptocurrencies,” Vijay Ayyar, head of business development at cryptocurrency exchange Luno, told CNBC by email.

    “Governments are realizing that it is a viable and established, yet growing, asset class and need to regulate it. China regulating crypto would be another massive boost to the industry in China and globally,” Ayyar said, talking about the motivation behind the PBOC’s shift in tone. To be sure, China is not alone in changing its mind about bitcoin: over the past 4 years, Bitcoin has transformed from being purely a retail-favored asset and has become more mainstream in the financial world, gaining interest from institutional investors. Major corporations such as Tesla and Square in the U.S. have purchased large sums of bitcoin.

    Besides easing on its capital firewall, China will also need to allow its citizens to buy more foreign assets, further develop its financial markets and allow greater exchange rate flexibility in order to push for the internationalization of yuan, Shen said in an interview at the forum.

    China has seen a flood of capital flows into its financial markets since last year, boosting the amount of yuan traded globally. Yet, in the context of its vast markets, foreign ownership of local stocks and bonds remains relatively low at around 5% and 3% respectively. And while the yuan’s share of global payments and central bank reserves is still only about 2%, it is rising the fastest of all major currencies.

    “The digital yuan is a means to help monetary policy efficiency and cross-border usage with partners that tend to trade with China in goods and services, less so the major economies like the U.S.,” said Stephen Chiu, Asia FX and rates strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Digital or not, it’s not so easy to move the dollar’s dominance, be it as a trade settlement or reserve currency.”

    But while the real reason for the digital yuan was hinted at, the panel concluded with China playing coy and claiming its (soon the be gold-backed) digital currency won’t be a challenge to the USD.

    “The initial plans for a digital currency weren’t motivated by considerations of cross-border use” said former People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, who noted that there are many issues with using a digital currency across national borders. International use could affect monetary policy independence, and it’s important it isn’t used for crime, he said on the same panel in Boao.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 21:30

  • Florida Gov. DeSantis Signs "Anti-Riot" Bill Into Law, Creating Tougher Penalties For Non-Peaceful-Protesters
    Florida Gov. DeSantis Signs “Anti-Riot” Bill Into Law, Creating Tougher Penalties For Non-Peaceful-Protesters

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill that intends to crack down on violent protests and riots in the state.

    DeSantis, a Republican, signed the so-called “anti-riot” measure in Polk County, saying it is “the strongest anti-rioting, pro-law enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”

    The signing comes in the midst of protests, riots, looting, and arson incidents in several major cities around the United States in the wake of an officer involved-shooting death in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Meanwhile, a verdict is expected to be handed down by a jury in the murder trial of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, who was seen kneeling on George Floyd before his death—which sparked months of riots and demonstrations.

    The law, known as HB1, increases criminal penalties for assault, defacing monuments, and vandalizing public property during riots. Local governments that interfere with law enforcement trying to contain violent demonstrations would be penalized. Meanwhile, a citizens’ appeal process will be set up when counties and cities try to reduce their respective budgets of police forces.

    On Monday, DeSantis said in the signing event that the left-wing cries of “defund the police” that echoed throughout Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year is an “insane theory” and is “not going to be allowed to ever carry the day in the state of Florida.”

    Democrats and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have said that the law is designed to intimidate Black Lives Matter and related protesters.

    “The bill was purposely designed to embolden the disparate police treatment we have seen over and over again directed towards black and brown people who are exercising their constitutional right to protest,” said Micah Kubic, the executive director of ACLU of Florida, in a statement.

    The law went into effect immediately after DeSantis signed the bill on Monday.

    Demonstrators participate in a protest in Miami, Fla., on June 12, 2020. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    According to the text of the bill, other new measures include changing the definition of what a “riot” is in the state of Florida. A riot will be defined as a violent public disturbance involving three or more people acting with a common intent that causes damage to public property or injuries—or can cause imminent injury or damage.

    The law creates a new second-degree felony—”aggravated riot”—which takes place when a riot has more than 25 people involved, causes grievous bodily harm, or more than $5,000 in damage to property. It would also be used if participants have or threaten with a deadly weapon or block roadways by force or by the threat of force.

    Florida state Sen. Danny Burgess, a Republican who sponsored the measure, said the law defines the difference between a peaceful demonstration and a riot.

    “Not only did we do that to put the public on notice as to what constitutes a riot, but also to make it clear to both protester[s] and law enforcement where that line in the law is drawn,” said Burgess, according to Newschannel8.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 21:10

  • NY Requires Nursing-Home Workers To Sign Paperwork If They "Opt Out" Of COVID Jab
    NY Requires Nursing-Home Workers To Sign Paperwork If They “Opt Out” Of COVID Jab

    Now that nearly 130MM Americans have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, the CDC announced Monday that all adults aged 16 and over across the US are now eligible to receive the vaccine.

    Almost 130MM people 18 or older have received at least one dose of a vaccine, or 50.4% of the total adult population, the CDC pointed out. Almost 84MM adults, or about 32.5% of the population, have been fully vaccinated.

    What’s more, Dr. Anthony Fauci hinted on Sunday that the US government will likely move to resume use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine this week, though possibly with restrictions or broader warnings about the rare, but potentially deadly, blood clots.

    The news comes just as demand for vaccines in the US appears to be reaching an inflection point, as more states report growing stockpiles of unused jabs as demand for vaccinations tapers off.  Dr. Scott Gottlieb has warned that a demand crisis might be at hand in the US, putting the entirely theoretical 70% herd immunity threshold out of reach – at least temporarily.

    Clearly, public health officials across the country are starting to worry about waning vaccine demand, because after nearly half of New York nursing home workers refused the vaccine, the state’s Department of Health us taking steps to pressure nursing homes to get these compliance numbers up. While some health care workers say they haven’t yet had an opportunity to get the jab, Zero Hedge has been chronicling reports about health-care workers declining the jabs in surprising numbers, in states from California to New York and elsewhere.

    Like the old saying goes, “sh*t rolls down hill,” and as the state leans on nursing homes to raise staffer vaccination numbers, the homes are being required to force employees who refuse the vaccine to sign “paperwork” affirming their decision.

    As the New York Post reported last night, New York’s health department brass are now requiring nursing homes in the state to give every worker an opportunity to get vaccinated. And if they refuse, they must sign paperwork recording their decision to “opt out” of the vaccination process. Nursing homes that don’t comply could face serious fines, according to the New York Post.

    Nearly half of New York’s nursing home workers haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine — so the state Department of Health is now putting more pressure on the facilities to bridge the gap, The Post has learned.

    Health department brass issued new guidance late Thursday that requires nursing homes to offer “an opportunity to receive” the jab to all consenting residents and staff by April 29 and within two weeks of a new hire or a new admission, records obtained by The Post show. Both staff and residents who opt out will need to sign paperwork acknowledging that they are declining. Facilities that don’t comply with the new rules may be penalized up to $2,000 per violation, the DOH

    […]

    They’re trying to get people vaccinated and they’re trying to incentivize it,” said Michael Balboni, the Executive Director of Greater New York Health Care Facilities Association, said of the new requirement.

    Only 60 percent of workers in the facilities statewide have gotten the shot since December – and just 56 percent of staff in the five boroughs have received the vaccine, the latest DOH vaccination numbers show.

    By comparison, 80 percent of nursing home residents statewide have been vaccinated and 73 percent in the city have gotten the jab.

    One nursing home official claimed the guidelines were released without enough consultation and argued that facilities might have trouble meeting the 2-week vaccination rule simply because they don’t have enough jabs. But as we noted above, there could be other reasons – even justifiable reasons – why nursing home workers refuse the vaccine.

    While it’s not clear what immediate purpose this paperwork would serve, the ominous notion that the state will be taking names of those who refuse could be interpreted as an implicit threat for a large subset of the state’s health-care workers (and a group that was severely impacted, with vast numbers catching the virus last spring as it tore through state nursing homes while Gov. Andrew Cuomo shopped around his book deal).

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 20:50

  • Musk Goes "All In": Claims Data Says Autopilot Not Engaged In Fatal Houston Wreck
    Musk Goes “All In”: Claims Data Says Autopilot Not Engaged In Fatal Houston Wreck

    Earlier today, we reported about a Tesla Model S wreck that killed two men when the vehicle with “no driver” slammed into a tree and caught fire. It appeared to be an obvious instance where Autopilot and/or Full Self Driving could and would be the “front and center” suspect for the wreck.

    The story itself also caught fire on Monday, denting Tesla’s stock to the tune of 3.4% during the cash session. 

    Then came what can only be described as either a baffling truth, given that nobody was in the driver’s seat of the car, or an all-in moment (as one Twitter user called it): Elon Musk took to Twitter Monday to assert in a tweet that data logs “recovered so far” show Autopilot was not enabled in the car and that Full Self Driving had not been purchased on the vehicle.

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    Leaving out the unknown of what “so far” means and how it basically negates Musk’s point, the Tweet is stunning for a couple of reasons:

    1. The fact that nobody was in the driver seat of the car makes Autopilot the “Occam’s Razor” explanation for the wreck. The NY Times also wrote earlier in the day that the men in the vehicle had discussed Autopilot before leaving for their drive together.
    2. It comes off as a preemptive PR effort to potentially mitigate and/or influence the outcome of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)’s look into the wreck.
    3. If it turns out that Autopilot was, in fact, off, the circumstances behind the wreck become even more baffling. But if it turns out that one of the regulators finds that Autopilot and/or FSD was on during (or seconds before) the wreck, Musk may need further PR efforts to repair the harm it could do to him and/or his brand. Several people on social media have brought this up:

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    Additionally, it has already been noted that these type of preemptive suggestions prior to investigations are frowned upon by regulators:

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    To get to the bottom of all this, Mark Herman, Harris County Constable Precinct 4, told Reuters that the police will serve search warrants on Tesla Inc on Tuesday to secure data from a Model S that crashed in Texas.

    He was responding to a tweet by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said, “Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled.”

    Herman appeared quite skeptical: “If he is tweeting that out, if he has already pulled the data, he hasn’t told us that” Herman told Reuters. “We will eagerly wait for that data.”

    “We have witness statements from people that said they left to test drive the vehicle without a driver and to show the friend how it can drive itself,” Herman said according to the Reuters report.

    Needless to say, This could be very troubling for Musk.

    Recall, the Tesla slammed into a tree near Hammock Dunes Place in the Houston Area, a local NBC affiliate reported. The wreck was in the “Carlton Woods subdivision near the Woodlands,” the report says. According to authorities, “the vehicle failed to negotiate a cul-de-sac turn, ran off the road and hit the tree.”

    Of the two occupants, one was seated in the passenger seat of the front of the car while the other was seated in the passenger seat of the back of the car.  NBC says it is “trying to determine whether the vehicle may have been in automatic driving mode due to the victims’ seating, but that information is not available yet.”

    A reported 23,000 gallons of water needed to be used to extinguish the flames because the Tesla’s battery “kept reigniting”. Two federal agencies will investigate the deadly crash of a Tesla Model S over the weekend near Houston, Texas, in which local authorities said no one was behind the wheel. 

    The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are aware of the fatal Tesla crash that killed two, which occurred on Saturday night in Spring, Texas. Both agencies are sending investigators to conduct a safety analysis. 

    “NHTSA is aware of the tragic crash involving a Tesla vehicle outside of Houston, Texas. NHTSA has immediately launched a Special Crash Investigation team to investigate the crash. We are actively engaged with local law enforcement and Tesla to learn more about the details of the crash and will take appropriate steps when we have more information,” the NHTSA told local news KHOU11 in a statement. 

    And the NTSB tweeted Monday afternoon that their investigation team, “in coordination with the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable’s Office,” will “conduct a safety investigation of the fatal Apr. 17, 2021, Tesla vehicle crash near Spring, TX.”

    NTSB also said their “investigation would focus on the vehicle’s operation and the post-crash fire. NTSB investigators will arrive in the area later this afternoon.” 

    Sitting across the table from regulators, Musk has once again pushed “all in”. So far, he has been able to defy the odds and suck out. Will that remain the case?

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 20:30

  • Chauvin Judge Blasts "Abhorrent" Maxine Waters' Words; Says May "Result In This Whole Trial Being Overturned"
    Chauvin Judge Blasts “Abhorrent” Maxine Waters’ Words; Says May “Result In This Whole Trial Being Overturned”

    Update (2015ET): It’s been quite a few days for the millionaire south-central LA congresswoman. First she incites violence and questions the US judicial system, then violence takes place resulting in injuries, then she is denigrated for actions, and turns around and blames white supremacy for what she did and said. But, to be frank, all of that pales into insignificance relative to what could possibly happen next.

    Having exclaimed that “we’re looking for a guilty verdict… as far as I am concerned it’s first degree murder,” Maxine Waters may be in hot water as the judge in the very same case regarding the death of George Floyd issued an ominous statement as the two sides finished closing arguments and handed the case to the jury.

    Critically, Chauvin’s defense raised several concerns with the judge over outside influence impacting the jurors judgement… and that’s when the fireworks began.

    As Townhall.com’s Spencer Brown details, Chauvin’s lawyers pointed out that jurors were not sequestered during the case and therefore may not be free from outside influence in the form of news updates they may have inadvertently or purposefully seen along with ongoing violence in the community surrounding the Chauvin trial and approaching verdict.

    Among their concerns, Chauvin’s defense team pointed to Waters and her appearance with demonstrators in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, over the weekend.

    Even though the judge denied the defense’s motion for mistrial, he highlighted the damage her rhetoric may have done, saying “Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.”

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    The judge continued with a scorching message for Rep. Waters and other elected officials who have engaged in what he slams as “abhorrent” behavior disrespecting the rule of law and giving their opinion in a way that is inconsistent with their oath to the Constitution: (emphasis ours)

    I’m aware of the media reports. I’m aware that Congresswoman Waters was talking specifically about this trial and about the unacceptability of anything less than a murder conviction and talking about being confrontational, but can you submit the press articles about that.

    This goes back to what I’ve been saying from the beginning. I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function.

    I think if they want to give their opinions, they should do so in a respectful and in a manner that is consistent with their oath to the Constitution, to respect the co-equal branch of government.

    Their failure to do so I think is abhorrent, but I don’t think it’s prejudiced us with additional material that would prejudice this jury. They have been told not to watch the news. I trust they are following those instructions and that there is not in any way a prejudice to the defendant beyond the articles that were talking specifically about the facts of this case.

    Ultimately saying he trusted jurors to follow his instructions to them, the judge denied the defense’s motion for mistrial, adding “a congresswoman’s opinion really doesn’t matter a whole lot.”

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    Let’s hope he is right. Presumably, no lessons will be learned from his comments as Waters will simply look at the color of the judge’s skin and reject his criticism as simple systemic racism…

    *  *  *

    What’s the first thing Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) did after conservatives called her out for crossing state lines to incite violence in Brooklyn Center, MN, hours before the National Guard and police were targeted in a drive-by shooting?

    Why, play the victim of course.

    In Monday comments, Waters ripped GOP lawmakers for criticizing her – saying they are trying to “send a message” to white supremacists.

    “I am nonviolent,” Waters told The Grio on Monday following a tweet by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) – who accused her of condoning political violence and using “dangerous rhetoric” when she told protesters to get more confrontational.”

    “Maxine Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis — just as she has incited it in the past. If Speaker Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week,” McCarthy tweeted on Sunday.

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    In response, Waters said: “Republicans will jump on any word, any line and try to make it fit their message and their cause for denouncing us and denying us, basically calling us violent … any time they see an opportunity to seize on a word, so they do it and they send a message to all of the white supremacists, the KKK, the Oath Keepers, the [Proud] Boys and all of that, how this is a time for [Republicans] to raise money on [Democrats’] backs”.

    Waters then said that she’s “not worried that they’re going to continue to distort what I say.”

    “This is who they are and this is how they act,” she continued. “And I’m not going to be bullied by them.”

    Of course, as constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley notes – Waters may have hoisted herself by her own petard. Read on…

    *  *  *

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    With rioting continuing in Brooklyn Center, Minn. and around the country, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, went to Minnesota and told the protesters that they “gotta stay on the street” and “get more confrontational.”  The statement is ironic since Waters is one of the House members currently suing former President Donald Trump and others for inciting violence on January 6th with his words on the Mall.  Waters insists that Trump telling his supporters to go to the Capitol to make their voice heard and “fight” for their votes was actual criminal incitement. Conversely, Waters was speaking after multiple nights of rioting and looting and telling protesters to stay on the streets and get even more confrontational. There was violence after the remarks, including a shooting incident where two National Guard members were injured.

    Waters has now guaranteed that she could be called as a witness by Trump in his own defense against her own lawsuit.

    Waters’ most recent words could well be cited in the ongoing litigation over the January 6th riot on Capitol Hill. As I have previously discussed, the lawsuit by House members and the NAACP may prove a colossal mistake. It is one of a number of lawsuits, including a lawsuit filed by Rep. Eric. Swalwell, D-Cal, that could ultimately vindicate Trump shortly before the next election. While it is possible that members could find a trial judge to rule in their favor, these lawsuits should fail on appeal, if they get that far. Moreover, they would fail under a lower standard of proof than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard in criminal law. Such a result would eviscerate the claim that Trump was guilty of criminal incitement in his speech.

    After the riot, various legal experts appeared on news channels to proclaim that this was a strong if not conclusive case for criminal incitement. Trump was clearly guilty of criminal incitement. CNN legal analyst Elie Honig declared “As a prosecutor I’d gladly show a jury Trump’s own inflammatory statements and argue they cross the line to criminality.” Richard Ashby Wilson, associate law school dean at the University of Connecticut, said “Trump crossed the Rubicon and incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol as Congress was in the process of tallying the Electoral College vote results. He should be criminally indicted for inciting insurrection against our democracy.” District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine then thrilled many by declaring that he was investigating Trump for a possible incitement charge.

    As I have previously written, these statements ignored both the elements of that crime and controlling case law. Notably, while these and other experts insisted that the crime of incitement was obvious and public on Jan. 6th, there has been no charge brought against Trump despite over four months. Why?

    The reason is that an actual criminal case would lead to a rejection of not just the charge but the basis for the second Trump impeachment. Trump’s Jan. 6 speech would not satisfy the test in Brandenburg v. Ohio, where the Supreme Court stressed that even “advocacy of the use of force or of law violation” is protected unless it is imminent. Trump did not call for the use of force but actually told people to protest “peacefully” and to “cheer on” their allies in Congress. After violence erupted, Trump later told his supporters to respect and obey the Capitol Police.

    Now Waters, Swalwell, and others are rushing in where wiser Democrats fear to tread. These civil lawsuits actually raise claims like the infliction of emotional distress that were directly and unequivocally rejected by the Supreme Court. In 2011, the court ruled 8-1 in favor of Westboro Baptist Church, an infamous group of zealots who engaged in homophobic protests at the funerals of slain American troops. In rejecting a suit against the church on constitutional grounds, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.”

    Yet, Waters is not more deterred by the actual case law in this area than the legal experts on CNN and MSNBC. Indeed, Waters has gone further and insisted that Trump should not only be charged with criminal incitement but actual “premeditated murder.” She stated, “For the President of the United States to sit and watch the invasion and the insurrection and not say a word because he knew he had absolutely initiated it – and as some of them said, ‘he invited us to come.”

    That bring us back to Brooklyn Center this weekend. Violence and looting have been unfolding around the country, including the near the area where Waters was speaking. Yet, she called on people to stay in the streets and get more “confrontational.”  She added that there would be no acceptance of court decisions to the contrary in the Chauvin case: “We’re looking for a guilty verdict. If we don’t, we cannot go away.”  Protesters have not only been camped around the courthouse but the home of a witness in the Chauvin case was targeted. (It turned out to be his former home). Critics could charge that Waters’ statement and these protests are meant to intimidate witnesses or influence the trial — just as critics charged that Trump was attempting to intimidate or influence Congress.

    After Waters remarks, protesters confronted reporters in a tense scene. Also protesters descended upon the home of the prosecutor responsible for the second degree manslaughter charge against the officer who killed Daunte Wright. Also the Minnesota National Guard was fired upon, injuring at least two Guardsman.  That is not to say that Water incited such actions but that the same claimed nexus could be raised in making such an allegation as was done in the Trump impeachment.

    In my view, those words are political speech and should not be subject to criminal sanctions. However, I felt the same way about Trump’s speech (which I condemned as he was giving it on Jan. 6th as reckless). I also rejected prior claims against Waters like when she encouraged protesters to confront Trump officials in restaurants and “push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” It is all protected speech.

    Yet, that standard cannot be selectively applied to some but not all riots or protests. Waters was encouraging protesters to continue to fight for what they believe in. Her over-heated rhetoric could easily be seen by some as an invitation or endorsement for rioting.  However, criminalizing such speech would shred the guarantees of free speech in our country.

    Carl Jung once said that “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves”. That certainly seems to be the case with Waters and Trump. It is also why Waters could prove the only witness that Trump needs to call to defeat her own lawsuit.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 20:29

  • Japan's Hardest-Hit Regions Push For COVID State Of Emergency As Olympics Safety Review Looms
    Japan’s Hardest-Hit Regions Push For COVID State Of Emergency As Olympics Safety Review Looms

    President Biden has given his uneasy blessing to Japan and Tokyo’s resolution to hold the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, which is set to begin in just a few months. Still, it’s looking unlikely that the President will attend in person, and as the level of attendance looks increasingly uncertain, yet another Japanese prefecture has asked to declare a state of emergency as COVID cases climb.

    Osaka Gov. Hirofume Yoshimura reportedly asked the Japanese government to declare a full-fledged state of emergency for Osaka, while other reports noted that Tokyo could ask restaurants to shut during the next emergency, which follows tighter restrictions introduced by the capital city earlier this month.

    Yoshimura isn’t alone: Tokyo is also considering a similar state-of-emergency request, Governor Yuriko Koike told reporters late on Sunday, in a step backwards as Japan scrambles to bring the pandemic under control ahead of the Summer Olympics.

    Here’s more from Reuters:

    A recent surge in COVID-19 cases could see major parts of Japan slide back into states of emergency with authorities in Tokyo and Osaka looking at renewed curbs to stop the spread.

    The new wave of infections complicates preparations for the Tokyo Olympic Games, which are due to start in July having already been postponed due to the global coronavirus outbreak last year.

    Japan this month put Osaka, Tokyo, and eight other prefectures under “quasi-states of emergency” aimed at controlling the spread of COVID-19 with shorter business hours for restaurants and bars and stronger calls for teleworking.

    But those measures have done little to reverse the trend so far, with Osaka reporting a record 1,220 cases on Sunday, two weeks after those restrictions took effect as a mutant strain fueled the spread.

    “The fruits of these measures should be appearing now,” Osaka Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura told reporters in comments carried online.

    “Medical services are also in a dire state, and we’ve decided that we need a state of emergency. We need stronger measures such as those that would stop the movement of people,” he said, adding that Japan’s third-most populous prefecture would make the formal request to the government on Tuesday.

    Back in Tokyo, Koike said “Taking pre-emptive action is crucial right now,” Koike said.

    Tokyo reported 543 new cases on Sunday, the 18th straight day of seven-day increases.

    As COVID cases climb in Japan, the IOC, which organizes the Olympics and could ultimately quash the Games if it feels necessary, is preparing to decide whether to move ahead with the Games, or abandon them (at tremendous cost to the Japanese economy). Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, will attend a torch relay ceremony in the western city of Hiroshima on 17 May and meet prime minister Yoshihide Suga the next day, Kyodo, one of several large Japanese news agencies, reported over the weekend.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 20:10

  • The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And They Just Got Caught
    The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick’s Death. And They Just Got Caught

    By Gleen Greenwald, first posted on Substack

    Just as with the Russia Bounty debacle, they will never acknowledge what they did. Their audience wants to be lied to for partisan gain and emotional pleasure.

    U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks during a congressional tribute to the late Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who lies in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on February 3, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

    It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

    So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died — and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible. Just watch a part of what they did and how:

    As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.

    But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was (without Sicknick, the only ones killed were four pro-Trump supporters: two who died of a heart attack, one from an amphetamine overdose, and the other, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot point blank in the neck by Capitol Police despite being unarmed). So crucial was this fairy tale about Sicknick that it made its way into the official record of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, and they had Joe Biden himself recite from the script, even as clear facts mounted proving it was untrue.

    Articles on this Substack, Feb. 16, 2021 and Mar. 5, 2021

    Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as “Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.

    For the crime of trying to determine the factual truth of what happened, my character was constantly impugned by these propagandistic worms, as was anyone else’s who tried to tell the truth about Sicknick’s tragic death. Because one of the first people to highlight the journalistic truth here was former Trump official Darren Beattie of Revolver News and one of the few people on television willing to host doubts about the official story was Tucker Carlson, any doubts about the false Sicknick story — no matter how well-grounded in truth, facts, reason and evidence — were cast as fascism and white supremacy, and those raising questions smeared as “truthers”: the usual dreary liberal insults for trying to coerce people into submitting to their lies:

    Because the truth usually prevails, at least ultimately, their lies, yet again, all came crashing down on their heads on Monday. The District of Columbia’s chief medical examiner earlier this morning issued his official ruling in the Sicknick case, and it was so definitive that The Washington Post — one of the media outlets that had pushed the multiple falsehoods — did not even bother to try to mask or mitigate the stark conclusion it revealed:

    The first line tells much of the story: “Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes a day after he confronted rioters at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the District’s chief medical examiner has ruled.” Using understatement, the paper added: “The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death.”

    This definitive finding from the medical examiner not only rids us of the Fire Extinguisher lie but also the second theory to which these media outlets resorted once they had to face the reality that they spent weeks spreading an outright lie (needless to say, they provided no real accountability or even acknowledgement for the fact that they did spread that Fire Extinguisher tale, instead just seamlessly moving to their next evidence-free claim). They changed their story to claim that pro-Trump protesters still murdered Sicknick, not with a fire extinguisher but with bear spray, which video shows at least one protester using in his vicinity.

    The problem with that theory is that bear spray is not usually fatal, and the medical examiner’s findings ruled out the possibility that this is what caused his death:

    In an interview with The Washington Post, Francisco J. Diaz, the medical examiner, said the autopsy found no evidence the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants, which Diaz said would have caused Sicknick’s throat to quickly seize. Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries….

    Diaz said Sicknick suffered two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by a clot in an artery that supplies blood to that area of the body. Diaz said he could not comment on whether Sicknick had a preexisting medical condition, citing privacy laws.

    So there goes that second fairy tale. The Post did note the medical examiner’s observation regarding Sicknick’s participation in defending the Capitol that day that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.” That of course is true: just as it is true for the two pro-Trump supporters who had heart attacks that day and the other pro-Trump supporter who died from too much amphetamine in her system, having a stressful encounter as a police officer likely played a role in why someone would have two strokes the following day. But police officers are trained for stressful encounters, and that obviously is a far cry from being able to claim that any pro-Trump supporter murdered Sicknick.

    I’ll have much more on this story as it unfolds. A significant amount of media accountability is warranted. But you’re seeing why there is so much resentment and so many attacks on platforms like this one that permit journalists to report and analyze facts and dissect media narratives without being constrained by liberal orthodoxies and pieties and while remaining immune from liberal pressure tactics: it’s one of the few ways that real dissent to their lies and propaganda can be aired.

    The New York Times, in a now-”updated” article, Jan. 8, 2021

    Truth matters. Noble lies are never justified no matter the cause, especially in journalism. But these employees of corporate media outlets have been taught the exact opposite model: that their primary obligation is to please and flatter the partisan agenda and political sensibilities of their audience even if it means lying or recklessly spreading unproven theories to do it. That is their profit model. And they have trained their audiences to want and expect this and that is why they never feel compelled to engage in any self-critique or accountability when they get caught doing this: their audiences want to be lied to — they are grateful for it — and would prefer that they not admit they did it so that their partisan interests will not be undermined.

    What is most depressing about this entire spectacle is that, this time, they exploited the tragic death of a young man to achieve their tawdry goals. They never cared in the slightest about Officer Brian Sicknick. They had just spent months glorifying a protest movement whose core view is that police officers are inherently racist and abusive. He had just become their toy, to be played with and exploited in order to depict the January 6 protest as a murderous orgy carried out by savages so primitive and inhuman that they were willing to fatally bash in the skull of a helpless person or spray them with deadly gases until they choked to death on their own lung fluids. None if it was true, but that did not matter — and it still does not to them — because truth, as always, has nothing to do with their actual function. If anything, truth is an impediment to it.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 19:47

  • Lordstown Motors' "Endurance" All-Electric Pickup Fails To Endure Baja Race
    Lordstown Motors’ “Endurance” All-Electric Pickup Fails To Endure Baja Race

    Lordstown Motors’ electric pickup truck, Endurance, did not endure too long in the SCORE San Felipe 250 in San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico, on Saturday. 

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

    The electric vehicle startup hyped its entry into the Baja, Mexico event for weeks, only completed less than 40 miles of the 280-mile course before withdrawing. 

    According to automobile news website Autoevolution, the Endurance only completed 14% of the course until it had to meet up with a portable charging truck. The vehicle was stationary for 2.5 hours. 

    Before the 40-mile (64.3-km marker), GPS tracking on the Endurance showed the e-truck slowing down. Shortly afterward, it veered off the racecourse to meet up with the Lordstown truck carrying the charging station on a nearby highway. TFL Truck reports that it stayed in the same spot for 2.5 hours, recharging and/or undergoing repairs.

    As for what happened next, we won’t know until Lordstown issues a clarification in this sense.

    Shortly after, Endurance withdrew from the race. The exact reasons have yet to be provided by the company.

    “What a ride we have had getting to the SCORE International San Felipe 250,” Lordstown’s Facebook page read. “The Endurance’s hub motors, battery pack and software performed very well today, and everything we did and experienced in Mexico has provided us with valuable insights into how the Endurance’s technology performed and responded to the demanding and treacherous conditions.”

    “We are stopping here and taking our incredible learnings back to Lordstown. Thank you to everyone at Lordstown Motors, our partners at Brenthel Industries and Elaphe Propulsion Technologies, and all of our champions – your hard work, dedication and passion for the Endurance is the reason we made it to Mexico, and the reason we’ll keep going as we continue into our Beta builds ahead of start of production in September.”

    Throughout April, Lordstown hyped its entry into the San Felipe 250 race. Perhaps, the hype was an attempt to attract new interest into the company’s stock, which has fallen 71% since mid-February. Shares on Monday slumped 8%. 

    Lordstown Investors and future buyers of Endurance should question the company’s technology as it could barely finish an offroad race. After this past weekend’s race, Endurance might need a name change.

    … and remember short-seller Hindenburg Research recently published pictures of the Endurance breaking down last year.

    Hindenburg has also published a report titled “The Lordstown Motors Mirage: Fake Orders, Undisclosed Production Hurdles, And A Prototype Inferno,” which accused the company of “fake orders.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 19:30

  • China Launches New App Allowing Citizens To Report Others For Expressing "Mistaken Opinions"
    China Launches New App Allowing Citizens To Report Others For Expressing “Mistaken Opinions”

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    China’s Communist government has launched a new app that encourages citizens to report dissidents for expressing “mistaken opinions” on the Internet.

    The new platform will target anyone who criticizes the dictatorship’s ruling CCP, disputes the official version of the country’s history or engages in “misinformation.”

    The new website and app was proudly unveiled by China’s Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), with authorities calling on users to play an “active role” in helping to identify “malicious people distorting facts and confusing” others.

    “For a while now, some people with ulterior motives…have spread historically nihilistic false statements online, maliciously distorting, slandering and denying Party, national and military history in an attempt to confuse people’s thinking,” the announcement said.

    “We hope that most internet users will play an active role in supervising society…and enthusiastically report harmful information.”

    As Didi Rankovic notes, “It’s also unsurprising because it comes ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CPP), when messages and narratives will have to be kept particularly “clean.”

    China already operates an onerous social credit score system that bans people from using transportation and engaging in other basic functions of society if they commit minor infractions like jaywalking or buying too much junk food.

    Given that social media mobs in the west, routinely aided by journalists, already conduct witch hunts that lead to people being socially ostracized, deplatformed and left unemployed for expressing “mistaken opinions,” are we really that better off than Chinese dissidents?

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 19:10

  • Lumber Hasn't Had A Down Day Since March 26… And It's Sending Home Prices Soaring Even Higher
    Lumber Hasn’t Had A Down Day Since March 26… And It’s Sending Home Prices Soaring Even Higher

    Less than a week ago, we published an article explaining that the ongoing “Supply Chain Collapse Leads To Lumber Frenzy, Soaring Home Prices.” Since then the lumber buying frenzy has gotten even more out of control, with prices surging another 12%, and as Bloomberg’s Aoyon Ashraf points out, “lumber hasn’t had a down day since March 26 and keeps hitting all-time highs with few signs of stopping.” In an amusing comparison, Ashraf also notes that while Lumber futures have climber a staggering 58% in just the past month since bottoming on March 16, “Bitcoin has fallen 3% and S&P 500 returned only 5% over this period” (of course, any comparison that is not goalseeked and stretches further beyond just a few weeks will show bitcoin trouncing lumber, but we get the idea).

    Ashraf then echoes what we said last week, namely that “the reason for lumber’s meteoric rise is simple: low supply and surging demand. Slow ramp-ups at sawmills, trucking delays and worker shortages all are feeding into it.” The Bloomberg reporter than boldly suggests that going long lumber is a safer choice than bitcoin:

    Meanwhile, with opaque assets such as Bitcoin, it’s quite a bit harder to explain why it moves the way it does. This makes lumber a relatively safer choice.

    Well, maybe not for those who have been long bitcoin since 2015 but in any event it is true that lumber is at the forefront of reflating assets, and what makes it especially problematic is that one can’t build houses without lumber. Hence: even higher home prices.

    As WIS10 News reports, leaders with the Building Industry Association of Central South Carolina and Central Carolina Realtors Association say the rising price of that material plays into the rising cost of homes, which have already soared at the highest pace since Feb 2006 (according to the Case Shiller National Home Price Index).

    In Richland and Lexington Counties, Consolidate Multiple Listing Service data shows the median price of homes went from $189,900 in March 2020 to $218,000 a year later. That’s a 14.8% jump. Building association Executive Director Earl McLeod pointed to the pandemic, during which mills shut down or slowed production.

    “At the same time demand for new homes increased. People were being told to stay at home, people wanted to be at home. There was a tremendous demand for new homes. That coupled with less production and high demand created a surge, so lumber prices have substantially increased,” he said.

    Pointing out the painfully obvious, Realtor Association Executive Officer Taylor Oxendine said the supply and demand of homes are out of balance. Currently, there’s not enough supply. He said the price of lumber has impeded construction, which would be needed to lower the price.

    “That’s made it more expensive to build homes in these new developments, meaning the supply can’t meet the demand here,” he said, adding that the costs have had to be passed onto homebuyers.

    Builder John Streven said affordability is a goal for his projects, but the rising cost has forced him into tough conversations with customers.

    “I don’t have any control over this. There’s nothing that I can do. All we can try and do is see how can we help defray some of that cost, mitigate against it, but there is, it’s that feeling there is no control because the control is in the hands of a few very large manufacturers,” he said.

    The American Wood Council claims to represent 86% of the Structural Wood Products industry and released this statement in March on the issue:

    By Chris Joseph | April 15, 2021 at 6:16 PM EDT – Updated April 16 at 10:11 PM

    COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) – Lumber is a crucial part of many homes, and a short supply is making those homes more expensive.

    The National Association of Home Builders reports the price of lumber has climbed 180% since last spring.

    Association data shows 1,000 board feet went from roughly $400 in June 2020 to $1,100 in April.

    Leaders with the Building Industry Association of Central South Carolina and Central Carolina Realtors Association say the rising price of that material plays into the rising cost of homes.

    In Richland and Lexington Counties, Consolidate Multiple Listing Service data shows the median price of homes went from $189,900 in March 2020 to $218,000 a year later. That’s a 14.8% jump.

    Building association Executive Director Earl McLeod pointed to the pandemic, during which mills shut down or slowed production.

    “At the same time demand for new homes increased. People were being told to stay at home, people wanted to be at home. There was a tremendous demand for new homes. That coupled with less production and high demand created a surge, so lumber prices have substantially increased,” he said.

    Realtor Association Executive Officer Taylor Oxendine said the supply and demand of homes are out of balance. Currently, there’s not enough supply.

    He said the price of lumber has impeded construction, which would be needed to lower the price.

    “That’s made it more expensive to build homes in these new developments, meaning the supply can’t meet the demand here,” he said.

    The costs have had to be passed onto homebuyers.

    Builder John Streven said affordability is a goal for his projects, but the rising cost has forced him into tough conversations with customers.

    “I don’t have any control over this. There’s nothing that I can do. All we can try and do is see how can we help defray some of that cost, mitigate against it, but there is, it’s that feeling there is no control because the control is in the hands of a few very large manufacturers,” he said.

    The American Wood Council claims to represent 86% of the Structural Wood Products industry and released this statement in March on the issue:

    “Despite the many challenges presented by the pandemic, wood products manufacturers are responding to the high demand by producing wood products at levels not seen since before the Great Recession. Production output of wood products is the highest it’s been since 2007, according to the Federal Reserve Board.

    At the beginning of the pandemic, wood product manufacturers were operating under the same uncertainty as the rest of the country. Many curtailed production in anticipation of worker shortages and reduced demand. At the same time, many wholesale and retail lumber customers significantly reduced their inventory levels. But then, the need for wood products quickly rebounded as people stayed home and tackled DIY projects, restaurants rushed to build outdoor accommodations, and many states declared home building an essential industry allowing construction to rapidly resume. New home sales are up over 19 percent year-over-year as demand for single-family homes have increased during the pandemic and mortgage rates have remained low.

    The industry has quickly responded and put in extensive worker health and safety protocols to protect the 450,000 employees across the industry and prevent large scale shut-downs due to COVID exposures. Many wood products mills are back at pre-pandemic production levels or higher, with some operating seven days a week.

    Additionally, many wood products companies have continued to make significant investments in improving the throughput of their existing mills and building new mills in the U.S. since the sharp rebound in demand in the second quarter of 2020. These investments will create additional supplies in 2021. However, new equipment lead times remain long in many cases, engineering and construction resources are constrained, and additional production often requires environmental permitting reviews, so near-term relief during the spring building season from new production is likely to be limited.

    Constraints in supply and transportation have also continued, which are issues facing manufacturers of all kinds, and it has proven difficult to rebuild the near-zero inventories up to meet the renewed retailers’ and wholesalers’ demands. Some mills have taken temporary curtailments or reduced shifts due to localized COVID outbreaks and quarantines. All of this has been further exacerbated by constraints on log supplies resulting from recent extreme weather events, some of which also caused production downtime.

    While the wood products industry is far from the only one facing supply chain challenges, we have worked hard to protect our workforce through significant health and safety measures to stay in production.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/19/2021 – 18:50

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