Today’s News 20th June 2022

• The Criminal Order Beneath The 'Chaos' Of San Francisco's Tenderloin
  The Criminal Order Beneath The ‘Chaos’ Of San Francisco’s Tenderloin

  Authored by Leighton Woodhouse via RealClearInvestigations,

  The epicenter of the political earthquakes rattling San Francisco’s progressive establishment is a 30-square-block neighborhood in the center of downtown known as the Tenderloin.

  

  Adjacent to some of the city’s most famous attractions, including the high-end shopping district Union Square, the old money redoubt of Nob Hill, historic Chinatown, and the city’s gold-capped City Hall, it is home to a giant, open-air drug bazaar. Tents fill the sidewalks. Addicts sit on curbs and lean against walls, nodding off to their fentanyl and heroin fixes, or wander around in meth-induced psychotic states. Drug dealers stake out their turf and sell in broad daylight, while the immigrant families in the five-story, pre-war apartment buildings shepherd their kids to school, trying to maintain as normal an existence as they can.

  “If you happen to be walking through the Tenderloin and you feel unsafe, imagine what it feels like to live there,” said Joel Engardio, head of Stop Crime SF, a civilian public safety group. “The Tenderloin has one of the largest percentages of children in the city. It’s untenable, inexcusable to ask them to confront this hellscape.” 

  “The Tenderloin is out of control,” said Tom Ostly, a former San Francisco prosecutor who used to work there and lives nearby. “It has never been worse than it is now.”

  Nancy Tung, a prosecutor who once handled drug enforcement in San Francisco, called it “ground zero for human misery.” Kathy Looper, who has run a low-income, single resident occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin for more than 45 years, said, “It feels like we’re in Gotham,” adding that she once considered putting a spotlight on her hotel roof and projecting a Batman signal into the sky.

  The crime and disorder of the Tenderloin may appear to be symptoms of deep and mysterious sociological forces. Chesa Boudin, who was ousted last week as San Francisco’s district attorney because of his lenient policies, argued, “We can’t arrest and prosecute our way out of the problems that are afflicting the Tenderloin.”

  But there is a fairly straightforward kind of order beneath the chaos: an illicit market economy operating in plain sight. The Tenderloin is home to two sprawling, overlapping transnational organized crime networks – one centered on drugs and the other on theft – which thrive in that neighborhood because of the near-total absence of the enforcement of laws.

  

  Crowded onto its street corners and inside the tents congesting the sidewalk, countless petty criminals play their roles in a structured and symbiotic criminal enterprise. Its denizens fall into four main groups: the boosters, typically homeless and addicted, who steal from local stores; the street fences who buy the stolen merchandise; the dealers who sell them drugs for the money they make from the fences; and, at the top of the stack, the drug cartel that supplies the dealers and the wholesale fences that resell the goods acquired by street fences. Each has a role to play in keeping the machine moving, and the police know exactly how to disrupt it.

  Experts say the city could, in fact, arrest and prosecute its way out of most of the problems in the Tenderloin if it chose to. It thrives, instead, as a zone of lawless sovereignty in the heart of a major American city – the criminal version of the area commanded by Seattle anarchists in the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, in 2020. Where those extra-legal districts were eventually dismantled, the Tenderloin’s structure is entrenched.

  The following portrait of the Tenderloin crime syndicate is based on dozens of conversations with law enforcement officers, prosecutors, recovering street addicts, parents of addicts, and community activists over many months, as well as direct observation of the area.

  “Everyone knows what’s going on. The cops, mayor, and D.A.,” said Tom Wolf, a recovering addict. “Everyone knows it’s organized and cartel-backed. They just don’t think it’s worth it to stop it, because nothing’s going to change anyway. They’ve surrendered.”

  

  The Dealers

  The drug pushers are easy to spot: Unlike the users, they look healthy and wear clean clothes. They’re almost universally young men, mostly Honduran (on the streets of San Francisco they’re called “Hondos”). You see them standing on street corners on every block in the Tenderloin selling pills out of prescription drug bottles and white and colored powders out of plastic sandwich bags – fentanyl, meth, heroin, cocaine.

  The dealers stand in packs of eight to ten on a corner, in their jeans and hoodies, with their stashes in their backpacks. According to both drug enforcement authorities and recovering addicts, each works for a different supplier and each supplier leads back to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. They compete for customers, but they also look out for each other: If someone tries to rob one of them, Wolf explained, they all jump in to defend him. Dealers have their assigned corners – like Turk and Hyde, across the street from a playground, or Golden Gate and Hyde, or United Nations Plaza. They mostly live in apartments on East Oakland’s International Boulevard, according to Ostly, and take the BART train to the Civic Center station each morning with the other commuters. Both civilians and police officers have observed them splitting up bindles of drugs and divvying up cash in plain view of commuters on the BART trains.

  During his tenure, Chesa Boudin resisted calls to prosecute these dealers, instead referring to them as victims of human trafficking. (Boudin, whose replacement is to be named by Mayor London Breed, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

  “There’s not a whole lot to support it,” Nancy Tung said of Boudin’s human trafficking claim. The dealers are usually smuggled into the United States by the cartel. When they arrive in San Francisco or another American city, they owe the cartel for getting them there – typically $10,000 to $15,000, which they can earn in a couple of weeks byselling the cartel’s drugs, both law enforcement and recovered addicts say. Once they repay the cartel, they’re free to do whatever they want. Usually, they stick with drug dealing, because no other job can make them that much money with so little risk. Dealers in the Tenderloin typically make about $1,000 a day for an eight- to 12-hour shift.

  Under Boudin, drug dealing was a low-risk business. Lou Barberini, a retired San Francisco police officer who worked narcotics in the 1990s and 2000s in the Tenderloin, said dealers used to shield drug deals with their hands or bodies as they sold them. Wolf, the recovering addict, said that before the pandemic, they would hold their drugs in baggies concealed in their mouths and spit them out when they made a sale.

   “Now,” Barberini said, “they display what they have in their hand, and the person will select what they’re going to buy.” The worst consequence of being arrested is losing your stash, so for high volume transactions they might duck behind a car. That’s about the extent of the precautions they feel it necessary to take.

  

  The Boosters

  The buyers, or addicts, are usually homeless and unsheltered, and, like the Bay Area, racially diverse. They’re often gaunt if they’re not obese, hunched over, in ill-fitting clothes draped across their limbs. They’re like a heat-seeking missile when looking for their next fix, and as listless as a nursed baby after they’ve found it. They would stand out in any other neighborhood, but in the Tenderloin it’s the non-users who are conspicuous, and the users who blend into the crowd.

  Finding drugs in the Tenderloin is about as hard as ordering a kebab from a food cart. On any corner, dealers holler out their inventory like hot dog vendors at a ballpark: “Green is fire! Shards! Chiva! Nickel!” (Translation: “The green pills or powder are great! I also have meth, heroin, and crack.”) Or “Fenty! Bars!” (As in: “Get your fentanyl! I got some Xanax!”) 

  The addicts often suffer from schizophrenia, depression, or bipolar disorder, which is often induced by meth. They are almost always unemployable. Cash flow is thus a daily concern. 

  Typically, they turn to professional shoplifting, known as “boosting.” Boosting is “basically a job” for addicts, said Lieutenant Kevin Domby of the California Highway Patrol. To fuel their addiction, boosters need to bring in up to $60 daily. Since they usually get a dollar or two per item, no matter the value of whatever they’re stealing, they have to steal as many as 60 items a day. There are roughly 6,000 homeless people in the Tenderloin and adjacent SoMa neighborhoods. (The last official, citywide count, in 2019, reported just over 8,000 homeless, and pretty much everyone says that figure has jumped in the past three years.) Tom Wolf estimated that about one in five of the homeless in the Tenderloin, or 1,200 people, are boosters. That means thousands, if not tens of thousands, of items are being stolen daily.

  “I still get letters from Target,” said Gina McDonald, a former addict and the mother of a Tenderloin user who’s now in rehabilitation. Her daughter started boosting years ago to feed her addiction, and her mom has been hearing from the retailers’ lawyers ever since.

  Like drug use and drug dealing, shoplifting has been effectively decriminalized in San Francisco, and some chains have reduced their presence in the city. California’s Proposition 47, passed in 2014, reduced shoplifting of less than $950 in goods from felonies to misdemeanors. On top of that reduction in severity, Boudin scaled back prosecution of these crimes.

  Together, Prop 47 and the DA’s non-enforcement policy have removed any incentive for police officers to make arrests for shoplifting, which, in turn, has made it far less likely that retailers will even call the police in the first place. For that reason, it’s difficult to estimate the actual scale of the problem. But you get a pretty good sense how normalized it has become.

  Today, in San Francisco, you can walk into a Walgreens, a Safeway, a Target or a CVS, take hundreds of dollars of products off the shelf in front of customers and employees, walk out the door, and then come back a few hours later and do it all over again. “We’ll see the same folks go into multiple retailers, multiple times a day,” said Ben Dugan of the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail. “The stores are their ATMs.”

  The Fences

  But stolen goods aren’t money, so the boosters take their goods to the fences. They’re often middle-aged Latino men or elderly Chinese men and women. Fences sometimes roam around the Tenderloin or United Nations Plaza looking for boosters, or they might work out of a nondescript storefront. Some sell the stolen goods out of their own stores in the Tenderloin or in Chinatown, while others source for larger wholesale fencing organizations that launder the goods through online retailers on Amazon, EBay, or Facebook Marketplace.

  Often, Domby says, fences will text the boosters on WhatsApp or Snapchat or on a private Instagram page and tell them what products they’re in the market for: Tide Pods or cold medicines with long expiration dates or makeup or razor blades. Then, the boosters fill those orders, stealing as much as they need to get their next fix. “Boosters will go into a pharmacy with a shopping list,” Dugan told me.

  The fences and the dealers work in a kind of synergy with each other – so much so that they sometimes collaborate directly. “The dealers will post up where the fences are,” Dugan said. “Fences will direct the thief to the drug dealers.”

  The fences, like the boosters they buy from, are the lowest rung on a towering totem pole. Most are middlemen. Some buy stuff not just from boosters but also from burglars and muggers. (In 2019, the San Francisco Police Department and then-District Attorney George Gascón retrieved more than $2 million in personal and commercial property from a couple that ran their fencing operation out of their Tenderloin camera repair shop.)

  Some fences sell the stolen goods directly to the public, laying boosted deodorant and frozen shrimp – so freshly stolen it hasn’t yet thawed – out on a blanket on the street in UN Plaza, or at the flea market in Berkeley. But more typically, they sell to a bigger fence, who can move a high volume of product out of the Tenderloin quickly and efficiently. Ostly compared street-level boosters and fences to street walkers in the prostitution business. A tier above the street addicts is a more specialized, entrepreneurial tier of boosters – the equivalent of escorts, per Ostly’s analogy. 

  

  The Larceny Industry

  There are at least two or three levels of fences above the street-level fences. At the top are the wholesale fences. They buy from the mid-tier fences who buy from the street-level fences who buy directly from the boosters, who use their paltry profits to buy drugs from the dealers.

  San Francisco’s addiction crisis provides the larceny industry with a permanent low-wage workforce. Drug addicts there and in other cities are, in effect, the exploited sweatshop workers of an international organized retail theft network that operates on an industrial scale.

  The fences at the wholesale level amass $100,000 to $200,000 worth of merchandise each day, which they sell to a “diverter.” The diverter repackages the stolen goods in counterfeit packaging and sells the products online. Nationally, just five diverters dominate the trade in stolen merchandise from the national drug store chains. Those five companies sell more than $20 million in product a year.

  Wholesale fences also sell their goods to fences overseas. Consumer electronics are often shipped to Vietnam or China to be sold in black markets there. Luxury accessories are sent to Russia.

  In 2020, a major multi-agency bust called Operation Proof of Purchase took down a $50 million fencing operation centered in the Tenderloin. When the police seized the warehouse in the North Bay, it took about 40 officers to photograph and box all the inventory, and numerous semi trucks and box trucks to move it all. Officers recovered more than $1.6 million in razor blades alone.

  The operation wasn’t just large, it was meticulous. “Just a terrifically organized operation for distribution,” said Lieutenant Domby, who assisted in the operation. “If a box was marked 400 boxes of pills for aspirin, there would be 400 boxes inside.”

  “The fences have better inventory control and logistics than the retailers they’re stealing from,” Ostly said.

  Wolf told me that the way the organized retail theft business operates is “common knowledge” on the street. “Even the street addicts know how this works,” he said. 

  

  ‘Nothing Has Been Done’

  Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly. The organized robberies and thefts they spawn create thousands more victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans whose local pharmacies keep shutting down or reducing hours, to retail employees who are laid off as those stores are closed.

  Ostly, who was fired by Boudin the day after he took office, believes the rampant criminality in the Tenderloin is “ninety percent because of Boudin.” Tung, who ran unsuccessfully in 2019 against Boudin, said, “San Francisco has completely lost the deterrent effect of prosecution. You have to have some reason for people not to commit crime. People are weighing what’s going to happen, and in San Francisco, nothing is going to happen to you—not if you sell drugs, even if you mix them lethally, not if you break into cars, stores, homes.” 

  Randy Shaw, who runs the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which operates many of the low-income, single-room occupancy hotels in the area, isn’t a fan of Boudin, but he says the city’s mayor and police department are largely responsible for the area’s problems. “Police have been blaming DAs since the 1980s; this is nothing new,” he said. “Chesa has done a great job taking the flack off the SFPD because all of the recall movement people want to make sure he’s blamed for everything,” he said before the June 7 recall vote. He said that after Mayor Breed invoked a “State of Emergency” in the Tenderloin last year (which has now lapsed), “there literally has been no increase in police at all. None. The crackdown she’s getting credit for in the national media has never happened. Nothing has been done.” Shaw wants to see the drug dealers arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned. Breed’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

  Joel Engardio of Stop Crime SF is also dismayed at what he sees as the human tragedy that city officials are allowing to unfold. “If you’re not going to arrest and prosecute the dealers, people are going to continue to die,” he said. “I don’t believe we should prosecute users. Users need help and treatment. But dealers are committing manslaughter every time they sell fentanyl.”

  Leighton Akira Woodhouse is a freelance reporter and documentary filmmaker. He writes at leightonwoodhouse.substack.com.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 23:30

• Republican Negotiator For Red Flag Laws Booed By Texas Crowd At GOP Convention
  Republican Negotiator For Red Flag Laws Booed By Texas Crowd At GOP Convention

  Republican Senator John Cornyn did not get a warm reception at a recent Texas GOP convention, highlighting mass conservative resistance to new gun control legislation.  Cornyn, to his credit, did not flee from the stage, but he did not address the main reason for the anger in the crowd; his participation in a bipartisan senate working group that seeks to undermine the 2nd Amendment with the ultimate concession of Red Flag laws handed to anti-gun Democrats. 

  Just as the mainstream media has done, the ten Republicans involved in the legislative effort have been very careful to avoid any thorough examination of what Red Flag laws really entail.  Essentially, they are engaged in lying by omission by keeping the details under wraps and misleading the public with claims that they merely want to take guns “out of the hands of mentally unstable people.” 

  This is NOT what Red Flag laws accomplish.  There are already laws in place which stop people who have been adjudicated mentally defective from purchasing firearms.  Red Flag laws allow authorities to confiscate guns from ANYONE that is accused of being a threat to themselves or others.  No court, no jury and no due process.  There are numerous cases being fought today by people in states with Red Flag laws who were falsely accused, and the process of getting one’s property back can be arduous.

  The potential for abuse of Red Flag laws is infinite.  Entire groups of people could be deemed a “threat” and lose their constitutional protections.  Cornyn was buried in boos because he has consistently tried to convince conservative voters that passing Red Flag laws is a necessary “compromise” to avoid more aggressive Democrat legislation.   This is a bait and switch strategy – Make gun rights advocates think that Red Flag laws are a minor concession in comparison to a total ban; then, use Red Flag laws to systematically institute a total ban on anyone the government doesn’t like. 

  There can be no compromise.  Give them an inch of rope and they will take a mile while hanging you with it.  The ultimate goal of gun grabbers is total confiscation, not “common sense” safety measures.  Red Flag laws are a Holy Grail for the confiscation agenda.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 23:00

• Outrage As Holocaust-Mocking Police Chief Gets $1.5 Million 'Bonus' For Displaying Nazi Insignia
  Outrage As Holocaust-Mocking Police Chief Gets $1.5 Million ‘Bonus’ For Displaying Nazi Insignia

  Authored by Jack Burns via The Free Thought Project,

  There used to be a time in America when displaying Nazi symbols would cause a person to be dragged in front of television cameras and federal boards of inquiry in an attempt to root out communists. Those days are long gone. But for one Washington State assistant police chief, displaying Nazi symbols and joking about the Holocaust earned him a massive pay day.

  

  The city of Kent in Washington State was forced to purchase the resignation of Assistant Police Chief Derek Kammerzell, instead of firing him. The strategic move on the part of the city allowed Kammerzell to resign instead of being fired. Had the city chosen to fire Kammerzell he would have likely been allowed to get his job back through arbitration.

  At the center of the scandal is Kammerzell who has been with the police department for decades. Kammerzell, according to the Seattle Times, was “first was disciplined in July 2021 after a detective complained that an insignia used by high-ranking generals in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich appeared on Kammerzell’s office door above his nameplate in September 2020.”

  Following an internal investigation it became clear Kammerzell knew full well the insignia “belonged to an‘Obergruppenfuhrer’ — a high official in Hitler’s dreaded paramilitary Schutzstaffel or SS, which was responsible for the systematic murders of millions of Jews and others in Europe during World War II.”

  At first, during the subsequent investigation, Kammerzell attempted to claim he had no knowledge the insignia was Nazi and suggested he got the idea to display it from a television series called “The Man in the High Castle”, a fictitious series the plot line of which built upon the notion the Nazis won the war and later occupied America.

  Kammerzell’s claim his insignia came from TV was later disproved when a photo surfaced of Kammerzell allegedly displaying the stiff-armed Heil Hitler salute.

  Kammerzell was later suspended for two-weeks, an action which drew outrage from the city, and members of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.

  The pressure from the community spurred the city to take action. Mayor Mayor Dana Ralph then called for Kammerzell’s resignation. The city then announced it would pay Kammerzell $1.5 million to resign. Interim city Chief Administrative Officer Arthur “Pat” Fiztpatrick later wrote in a statement that city officials:

  …strongly believe that settling this matter will be a substantial step toward meeting our commitment to the community and continuing with the excellent work the Police Department is doing.

  Yes, that’s right America. A Nazi sympathizer assistant police chief can display offensive Nazi insignias, employed for decades, be paid over a million dollars to resign, have the potential to get hired as a chief in another department, and the taxpayers must fund it all. Nothing spells freedom like loving Nazis and getting paid for it.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 22:30

• 1 In 4 Expats On The Verge Of Renouncing Citizenship
  1 In 4 Expats On The Verge Of Renouncing Citizenship

  Fed up with the red tape or troubled by their country’s trajectory, one in four American expatriates are either planning to renounce their citizenship or seriously considering it. 

  According to a survey of more than 3,200 expats in 121 countries commissioned by Greenback Expat Services: 

  • 6% of expats are making plans to renounce their citizenship

  • 20% are seriously considering it 

  • 42% wouldn’t rule it out

  • 32% say they’d never consider it 

  For those considering renunciation, the top reason for doing so—expressed by 40%—is a feeling that U.S. tax and account reporting requirements are too burdensome. Fifteen percent say they’re concerned about the current political climate; 10% say they’re disappointed in the direction of the U.S. government; 12% have married a non-U.S. citizen.

  There are only two countries on Earth that tax people based on citizenship rather than where they live: the United States and Eritrea. That means most U.S. expats have to file income tax returns with two countries. While the American tax code has some provisions to reduce double taxation, expats still have to file and 30% say they owed taxes last year.

  Aggravation with that approach is rising: 57% of expats say citizenship-based taxation should be repealed, a 10% increase over the 2021 survey.  

  There’s much more to the red tape than filing multiple tax returns. Expats also have to contend with two laws that compel additional financial reporting:

  The Bank Secrecy Act. This law’s Foreign Bank Account Reporting (FBAR) provision requires Americans to annually report foreign financial accounts, including bank accounts, mutual funds and brokerage accounts. It’s triggered if the total value of foreign accounts reaches $10,000 at any point in the year. 

  The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. FATCA is similar to FBAR, but it has much higher account-balance-triggers—in the hundreds of thousands. It’s also more complex. Forty-one percent of surveyed expats said they’re required to file under FATCA. 

  Some expats only have to file under FBAR; others, under FATCA. Some have to file under both. Each has its own form, and they go to two different entities. FBAR reporting is done via Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Form 114. FATCA requires sending IRS Form 8938 along with your income tax return. 

  Either way, rather than simply disclosing the values on a certain date, expats have to figure out the maximum balance over the whole year for each of the accounts. Since the reporting thresholds are expressed in U.S. dollars, that means doing conversion calculations to see if you need to file. If you blow the math, you face a stiff $14,489 penalty—and that’s if it’s deemed an “unwilling” error. Otherwise, the penalty is the greater of $129,210 or 50% of the balance of your account.   

  Importantly, FATCA creates reporting burdens not only for expats but foreign financial institutions too. For that reason, many foreign banks refuse to serve Americans. That creates headaches of another kind. 

  Renouncing isn’t free either: It costs $2,350, and if you’re considered a “covered expat”—which is triggered by, among other things, having a net worth north of $2 million—you’re subject to an exit tax.

  The record for citizenship renunciations came in 2020, when 6,705 Americans called it quits. In 2021, the number plummeted to 2,426. It’s not that expats were falling back in love with the empire: The empire effectively blocked the exits. Giving up citizenship requires a face-to-face meeting and U.S. embassies and consulates generally declared such meetings were too dangerous while Covid-19 was circulating.  

  

  Just as divorces go into the public record, so do citizenship renunciations. Each quarter, the IRS posts the names of every person who’s renounced their citizenship.  

  The Greenback Expat Services survey found 33% of expats are living abroad because of a significant other; 28% attribute it to a job relocation, and another 16% are there for the adventure or love of travel. Just 10% are certain they want to return to the United States permanently; 41% are unsure and 49% don’t plan to.  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 22:00

• Fauci Refuses To 'Stop Funding Chinese' Research With US Tax Dollars
  Fauci Refuses To ‘Stop Funding Chinese’ Research With US Tax Dollars

  Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was unable to commit to stop federal funding from going to Chinese scientific research, despite the U.S. intelligence community assessing the regime as America’s top adversary.

  

  Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), made the remarks while appearing virtually at the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing on June 16, during an exchange with Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).

  “The NIH is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020. In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars,” said the senator during the hearing. “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”

  Since 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a total of $8.3 million in grants to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its division National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, along with five top public universities in mainland China and Hong Kong, according to the NIH website.

  Although this amount doesn’t capture dollars later funneled to a Chinese institution through a U.S.-based organization, such as New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform coronavirus-related experiments that some experts said fit the definition of gain-of-function research, that is, experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a virus.

  Fauci, in response to Marshall’s question, said that the U.S. federal agencies “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”

  “So I don’t think I’d be able to tell you that we are going to stop funding Chinese,” Fauci said.

  “We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he continued, adding that “grants that go to foreign countries, including China, have State Department clearance.”

  “Dr. Fauci’s remarks prove that China is the drug he just can’t quit,” Marshall later told The Epoch Times about the NIAID head’s response.

  

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 21:30

• Did Europe's Latest (& Little Noticed) Anti-Russia Move Just Push The World Closer To WW3?
  Did Europe’s Latest (& Little Noticed) Anti-Russia Move Just Push The World Closer To WW3?

  Quite possibly the biggest Russia-West provocation of the entire four-month long war in Ukraine has occurred this weekend, but few in the media establishment seem to be taking notice of the singular event which has the potential to quickly spiral toward a WW3 scenario.

  Baltic EU/NATO member Lithuania has implemented a ban on all rail transit goods going to Russia’s far-western exclave of Kaliningrad, after transport authorities initially announced the provocative measure on Friday. “The EU sanctions list notably includes coal, metals, construction materials and advanced technology, and Alikhanov said the ban would cover around 50% of the items that Kaliningrad imports,” Reuters wrote.

  

  This has given way to fears of panic buying breaking out in Kaliningrad Oblast, which is Russian sovereign territory on the Baltic Sea, but which is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, and is thus reliant on overland shipping for passage via its EU neighbors.

  Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian oblast which has a total population of some one million people (with Kaliningrad city including almost 450,000 – and 800,000 total if outlying suburbs are counted) is urging calm:

  Urging citizens not to resort to panic buying, Alikhanov said two vessels were already ferrying goods between Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg, and seven more would be in service by the end of the year.

  “Our ferries will handle all the cargo”, he said on Saturday.

  Russian officials and media have long warned against what they dubbed Western aims to “blockade” Kaliningrad. Crucially, the EU enforcement measure being implemented from Vilnius marks a complete break in a three decade long treaty that’s been in effect…

  RUSSIAN-LITHUANIAN TREATY REGARDING KALININGRAD, 1993https://t.co/4LatUKPN6J pic.twitter.com/ahwCYWMt8c

  — The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) June 19, 2022

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  Ahead of the new Lithuanian transit ban taking effect, the state railways service was reportedly awaiting final word from the European Commission on enforcing it:

  The cargo unit of Lithuania’s state railways service set out details of the ban in a letter to clients following “clarification” from the European Commission on the mechanism for applying the sanctions.

  Previously, Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Mantas Adomenas said the ministry was waiting for “clarification from the European Commission on applying European sanctions to Kaliningrad cargo transit.”

  Brussels then ruled that “sanctioned goods and cargo should still be prohibited even if they travel from one part of Russia to another but through EU territory,” according to Rueters/Rferl.

  In Moscow’s eyes, this is tantamount to laying economic siege to part of Russia’s sovereign territory and one million of its citizens. When the EU first proposed the blockage of goods as part of the last major sanctions package in early April, Kremlin officials warned of war given Moscow would have to “break the blockade” for the sake if its citizens.

  One escalation step closer to WW3 today. The West by de facto putting Kaliningrad under seige is goading Russia to roll into the Baltics. https://t.co/Q6wIGz6xFb

  — Mark Sleboda (@MarkSleboda1) June 18, 2022

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  According to an April 6th statement in Russia’s TASS by a state Duma official:

  Statements from the West about a possible blockade of Kaliningrad is testing the waters, but Russia can ‘break the blockade’ in case these threats become a reality, it has an experience, Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy head of the Federation Council upper house’s Committee for International affairs, said on Wednesday.

  “I think that for now, this is a game, testing the waters . In case of a blockade, as they are saying, the Soviet Union knows how to break the blockades, we (Russia as the successor of the Soviet Union – TASS) have vast experience,” the senator said.

  “If they want to go to the length of making us break this blockade to save the lives of our people, who live there, we can do this,” Dzhabarov said in a video interview at the press center of Parlamentskaya Gazeta (Parliamentary Newspaper).

  He expressed hope, however, that the West “will have enough brains to opt against this”.

  Kaliningrad’s governor Alikhanov has already called on Russian federal authorities to prepare tit-for-tat measures against Lithuania in wake of the transit ban.

  The blockade of the Kaliningrad🇷🇺region may become a reason for the outbreak of war B/T Russia & NATO

  🇪🇺has published a PR on the fifth package of sanctions against🇷🇺
  The document,in particular, prohibits transit of goods by 🇷🇺&🇧🇾 transport operators through the territory of 🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/M7k2XAxP0S

  — Marialvw (@arktinentuuli) April 8, 2022

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

  “These steps are illegal and may entail far-reaching implications for Lithuania and the European Union. In particular, I would like to quote a few paragraphs from the Joint Statement on EU Enlargement, with references to international agreements, the documents which both the European community and the Russian Federation acceded to,” Alikhanov said Saturday.

  Additionally he cited a key condition that was part of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to the EU. He quoted the prior agreement saying that the Baltic state “will apply in practice the principle of freedom of transit of goods, including energy, between the Kaliningrad Region and the rest of Russian territory.”

  “In particular, we confirm that there shall be freedom of such transit, and that the goods in such transit shall not be subject to unnecessary delays or restrictions and shall be exempt from customs duties and transit duties or other charges related to transit,” Alikhanov quoted the Joint Statement further as saying.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 21:00

• China's Northeastern Black Soil Grain Field Is Alarmingly Depleted
  China’s Northeastern Black Soil Grain Field Is Alarmingly Depleted

  Authored by Mary Hong via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The fertile black soil in northeastern China, which the Chinese grain community relies on, is in an alarming state of  degradation due to over-use. Chinese researchers recently admitted that the area has lost a huge chunk of its productivity.

  It is the most important grain commodity base in China, affecting the country’s food security. This grain field is over 107 million acres, which is one-fifth of China’s arable land; the rice production accounts for at least a quarter of China’s total grain crop.

  That is, this land affects the food reserves that matter to hundreds of millions of people in China.

  

  Alarming Soil Degradation

  On June 15, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said that the rich black soil in the northeastern region has lost 20 percent of productivity, the Chinese media reported.

  Significant loss of soil and the organic nutrients in the soil from excessive use of the land are the main causes of the decreased productivity, said the report that came after an inspection by a regime high official.

  Li Zhanshu, chairman of the Party’s Standing Committee, led the inspection of the environmental protection in the northeastern province, Heilongjiang, from June 10 to 13.

  Li emphasized the importance of sustaining the black soil belt, according to the report by state mouthpiece, CCTV, on June 14.

  In fact, China has been continuously losing its rich and fertile black soil for decades. Heavy mechanization and fertilizer use since the early 20th century under the regime increased productivity but also caused tremendous damage to the rich soil.

  In 2021, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) released its first “White Paper on Black Soil Region in Northeast China, 2020.”

  The white paper revealed that in the past 60 years, the organic content of the black soil tillage layer has dropped by 33 percent, and in some areas by 50 percent.

  

  Black Soil is Poor Farmers’ Easy Money

  To protect the black soil, the regime intends to stipulate heavy punishment for illegal black earth trading and theft. However, as the local poor farmers know, the black soil is black gold—easy money for them. The illegal trading of black soil inside China has formed a highly profitable industrial chain.

  For instance, state mouthpiece Xinhua News reported in 2021 a case of illegal black soil trade covering more than 27 acres of soil that generated $53,000.

  Considering the fact that any industrial chain would not get an easy pass without the Communist officials’ recognition and protection, whether the newly stipulated regulation will have any effect remains to be seen.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 20:30

• "Fight Like Hell With A Smile On Our Faces": CRT Debate Spurs Parents To Run For School Boards
  “Fight Like Hell With A Smile On Our Faces”: CRT Debate Spurs Parents To Run For School Boards

  Authored by Terri Wu via The Epoch Times,

  As parents across the nation fight to have a say in their children’s public education, more are taking things into their own hands: running for local school boards.

  

  Sean Kaufman in Woodstock, Georgia, is one of them. And his journey began with a school assignment on the American dream.

  Before that, he never felt any reason to question what schools were teaching his children, and he would always check on whether his kids had done what their teachers had asked them to do.

  “It was this ultimate trust [in the school system],” said the father of three, a small business owner and part-time professor at a local university.

  During the pandemic, however, the virtual learning in public schools allowed him a closer look at what his children were learning.

  In November 2020, his middle child Aiden, then a junior at the Woodstock High School, got an assignment in his advanced placement (AP) English class to write a paper on whether the American dream was dead or alive. He was also assigned to peer review two other students’ essays.

  “Every single child wrote the American dream was dead. And that really bothered me,” Kaufman told The Epoch Times about the three papers he read.

  While Aiden wrote that the American dream was “dwindling” and “unable to be fulfilled by the current American society,” his classmates described the ideal in their essays as a “delusion,” “fallacy,” and a “broken dream.”

  One cited George Floyd’s death as the reason the American dream was “an illusion” and “broken.” The 46-year-old black man died after a police officer held his knee on Floyd’s back and neck while pinned to the ground in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. His death prompted mass demonstrations across the globe as protestors called for racial justice.

  Kaufman asked his son why wrote the essay in that way.

  “Dad, it’s easier,” replied Aiden. “They [the teacher] give you argumentative papers [papers provided for background]. Three say the American dream is dead, and one says it’s kind of alive.” And according to Aiden, if he “went along” with the main theme that the American dream was dead, the teacher wouldn’t ask him to defend his position.

  

  Kaufman thought his public health students at the Kennesaw State University might know more than high schoolers.

  During the same week, he conducted an ad hoc survey in class, “How many of you believe the American dream is dead?” He asked his class of about 25 students.

  “Ninety percent raised their hands,” said Kaufman. “I was just blown away.”

  He asked his college students what the American dream was. Not getting an answer, he defined it for them, “The American dream is, in this country, if you work hard, you sacrifice, and you never quit, you will find some type of success in your life.”

  After giving the students his definition, he tried again, “How many of you still believe the American dream is dead?”

  Still, 90 percent raised their hands.

  “If you believe the American dream is dead in this country, why are you sitting in a college classroom?” he asked. The class was silent. Students looked shocked, and one said he hadn’t thought about that.

  To Kaufman, associating the death of George Floyd with the end of the American dream reflects a tenet of critical race theory (CRT). “CRT believes that everywhere you are, the system is rigged against persons of color.”

  CRT is a quasi-Marxist framework that argues that America is systematically racist. Supporters say it’s a college-level theory course not taught in K-12 public schools, yet critics beg to differ.

  Kaufman is not alone in Georgia in believing in the American dream.

  In a June 2021 poll, eighty-one percent of voters in Georgia agreed with the following statement: “Children should never be taught that their destiny and inherent value depends on their skin color. Instead, American schools should be teaching American children about the American Dream that is available to them.” The Georgia statewide survey was conducted by Heritage Action for America, the grassroots and advocacy arm of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

  The percentages of agreement in Democrat, independent, and Republican groups were 62, 85, and 97, respectively. The survey’s sample size was 600, with 38 percent Democrats, 15 percent independents, and 41 percent Republicans.

  Running for School Board and Raising Awareness

  Fast forward to this February, an 11th-grade English language arts class assignment prompted Kaufman to file a formal lesson challenge and speak at the Cherokee County School Board meeting.

  The assignment asked students to read the book “Desiree’s Baby” by 19th-century American author Kate Chopin and write an extended ending. Students should “stay true to the tenet of the literary period” and write in the original third-person point of view or as any of the characters.

  In the short story written in 1893, Desiree, abandoned as a baby and raised by a wealthy family in Louisiana, married Armond, a son of a plantation owner. When it turned out that their baby’s skin was black, Armond blamed Desiree for being part black and drove her away. However, when burning Desiree’s belongings, he came across a letter between his parents that revealed the secret they kept from him: he was the one who was part black.

  Many students wrote from the perspective of Armond, according to Kaufman.

  He quoted one such writing during his speech at the February school board meeting, “Surrounding me were the negroes fueling the fire, their skin now a reminder that I was part of who they were.  I felt a horrid disgust inside of me. Oh, how I wished my skin would melt from my bones; I could never be one of them.”

  “What benefit is there, in my opinion, to make a child write as though he is a racist, bigoted slave owner hundreds of years later?” asked Kaufman.

  In response to his challenge, the school’s English department formed a review committee with members from the administration, professional learning community, and instruction personnel. A month later, the committee recommended the continuation of the assignment because students could choose any character’s point of view for their writing. It also suggested offering alternative assignments and hiding students’ names on papers during peer review at parents’ request.

  Kaufman didn’t think alternative assignments were the solution. And he didn’t believe the school board listened. Hence, he decided to run for the school board to become a voice for change.

  And no surprise, CRT is front and center in his first attempt at public service.

  Unlike in most states, some of Georgia’s school board elections are partisan. Kaufman was up against two other Republican candidates, Erin Ragsdale and Eric Richards, in the primary on May 24. The Republican incumbent didn’t run this time. None of the candidates got over half of the votes. Therefore, a runoff was scheduled for June 21, with early voting between June 13 and 17. The runoff winner will face the Democrat primary winner on Nov. 8.

  Kaufman finished second at the primary last month, earning him a seat in the runoff. A total of 6,493 votes were cast in the Republican primary, compared to 1,392 votes in the Democrat primary with only one candidate.

  Kaufman’s opponent Ragsdale, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, runs on “making the best [school district] even better.” She promised “continued support” of the district’s decision to ban CRT on her website.

  In May 2021, the county school district passed a resolution prohibiting the implementation of CRT. Kaufman said that many voters were thus confused and didn’t know that, although banned, CRT had been integrated into the schools’ teaching.

  “You integrate theory into class; you don’t teach the theory,” he said. “When people say, ‘CRT is not being taught,’ it’s a lie.”

  He said Democrats voted for his opponent because she wouldn’t change the status quo much. Primaries are open in Georgia, meaning voters can cross party lines to vote. The Epoch Times has reached out to Ragsdale for comment.

  “I love our children. Our children are born the way that they are born, and the way they are born is beautiful. They are perfect,” he said, explaining his determination to get CRT out of the county schools. “And to tell a child that the way they are born and the color of their skin dictates who they will be in this life, whether they will be an oppressed or an oppressor?

  “It breaks my heart.”

  After the primary, Richards, who ranked last, endorsed Kaufman. He had run his race on similar stances. If Kaufman can get the votes that previously supported Richards, he may reach the majority and defeat Ragsdale in the runoff. To achieve that, he has continued to post videos on social media, go door to door, and send mailers and text messages.

  “Every vote in runoff counts. Every vote,” he said. “It’s going to be decided very very closely. And I’m praying that Eric Richards’ voters get behind me.”

  However, losing the runoff wouldn’t mean the end of his efforts. He said he wanted to be the voice that brought about the change, “I have raised awareness in over 2,000 people in my community.”

  “That’s 2,000 people that believe and have been wakened and will continue to fight beside me as we continue to try and increase awareness about what’s happening in our community,” he added.

  

  ‘Are You For or Against CRT?’

  While the outcome of Kaufman’s runoff has still to be decided, halfway across the nation in the south, Stephanie Elad has won her seat in the Frisco Independent School District (Frisco ISD), an area about 30 miles north of Dallas, Texas. It was an open seat as the incumbent didn’t seek re-election. She campaigned on academic excellence and teacher retention, and ran as a conservative in the non-partisan race.

  Although she didn’t run with CRT as her number one issue or mention the term CRT much, it was the number one question she was asked during door-knocking on Republican-leaning voters. The first question they often asked her was, “Are you for or against CRT?”

  “Ninety-five percent of them wanted me just to say I’m against it,” she told The Epoch Times. “I would say I’m against it. And then my next statement was, ‘And we do have it here in Frisco.’”

  Some people said they knew, but most were surprised. Then, Elad would provide examples of what she believed to be “CRT inspired.” “One of our high schools did a ‘privilege walk’ last fall. All you had to do is to tell people about that, and they were horrified.”

  In a privilege walk, students usually stand in a straight line and step forward if they have certain privileges, such as being white and a male. It’s an activity stemming from the viewpoint that society doesn’t offer equal access to opportunities.

  The school board seat is Elad’s first public service job. Her journey began in April 2021 at a school board meeting. She had signed up for public comment to talk about mask mandates but decided to change her topic after the then-board president Chad Rudy told the audience: “Please keep the discussion down. We’re trying to get through our meeting tonight. This is our discussion.”

  “There was a comment made that this was your meeting. I think this is our meeting,” she told trustees on the school board. The audience applauded.

  “I think the parents and the taxpayers deserve a little more respect,” she added. “This is our meeting.” The audience cheered again.

  

  After that, people told her she should run for the school board. And she did. She announced the campaign in January and decided to “lean in” her conservative identity.

  She avoided getting into the debate whether CRT was or was not taught in Frisco schools but focused on the outcomes, such as sliding academic standards. For example, to her, the Integrated Language Arts (ILA) pilot program introduced in the 2021-21 school year that combined on-level and advanced-level learning into the same classroom to promote equity and inclusivity was an outcome of a CRT-inspired approach.

  The Frisco ISD serves 66,000 students and spans over two counties: Collin and Denton, which is more conservative than Collin. And all board seats are at-large, meaning they represent the entire ISD. This year’s school board election saw a big turnout of around 15,000, compared to 8,000 a year ago.

  Elad said everyone told her that, like many conservative municipal candidates before her, she would lose Collin and win Denton and that she needed to make sure the margin in Denton would compensate the loss in Collin. On the contrary, she defeated the runner-up—Dustin Paschal who identified student mental health issues as the biggest challenge—by 400 in Collin County and about 800 votes in Denton.

  “I have Democrats donate to me because they hate this [ILA pilot] program so much. Their kids are in it. Some of them have advanced kids, and some don’t,” she told The Epoch Times. “They just don’t like the program and the concept behind it. And they are concerned that it can spread to other subjects.”

  ‘Fight like Hell with a Smile on Our Faces’

  While both Kaufman and Elad run for an open seat, many candidates run against incumbents.

  “School boards incumbents lost at nearly twice the historical average,” Ballotpedia, a website that tracks election results, reported at the end of May. The finding was based on candidates who ran on at least one of the three “conflict issues”—identified as race in education, COVID-19 responses, or sex and gender in schools—in 141 school districts in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin’s school board elections held on April 5. And the sample size involved 334 seats in those 141 districts.

  “I think this might be the first time that people are actually paying attention to school board elections,” Virginia Beach City school board member Victoria Manning told The Epoch Times.

  “Often, people go to the polls, and we’re passing out our literature, and I say, ‘Do you know whom you’re voting for school board?’ And they look at me, dazed and confused, ‘What’s that?’”

  Manning, a realtor, won her election in 2016 and was re-elected in 2020.

  All three issues—race, COVID-19, and sex education—boiled down to parental rights to her. “Ultimately, it boils down to parents having to be the ultimate decision-makers, parents and guardians.”

  According to Tiffany Justice, co-founder of advocacy group Moms for Liberty (M4L), parents are “acting preemptively at their local level” to protect their children and not waiting to fight against “harms that they see coming down the pipe.”

  Founded in January 2021, M4L now has over 90,000 members in 195 chapters across 37 states, Justice said. A third of the total membership has been new since November. Hawaii, Louisiana, and Connecticut are the latest states with new chapters.

  Justice said that her organization continues to grow across the country, focusing on “unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend or protect their parental rights at all levels of government.”

  The battles were not all victories. M4L supported or endorsed over 40 school board candidates who won in the state of New York but also saw losses. For example, in Dutchess County, every candidate the organization endorsed lost.

  Justice described the journey as a “long road:” “We didn’t get to this place in America overnight, and it’s going to take time. But we have found that America’s government does not work without us involved.”

  Moms are getting creative, she said. She gave an example: at a chapter chair meeting in mid-May, one of the mothers said she got a meeting with the superintendent in her school district. Although angry, she made sure to sandwich her concerns with positive things she could say about the school district. And slowly, she found that the division leadership began addressing her concerns.

  “Our moms and dads know that we are fighting for the survival of America,” Justice told The Epoch Times. “There’s no greater national security threat to the United States than having a generation of children who are not able to read or discern [right from wrong] for themselves.”

  Her and M4L members’ responses? “Fight like hell with a smile on our faces. Get as many people out and encourage many parents to go out and vote to have their voices heard.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 19:30

• China And Japan Cut US Treasury Holdings As Federal Reserve Hikes Rates
  China And Japan Cut US Treasury Holdings As Federal Reserve Hikes Rates

  A strange narrative of “defeated inflation” is circulating in the mainstream in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s recent 75bps interest rate hike, but we’ve seen this kind of false optimism from the Fed and the media before.  Economists calling for a deflationary reaction might be holding their breath for a while as price inflation continues to climb for many months to come.  This consequence is reinforced by the decline in foreign investment in US Treasury bonds.

  Higher interest rates and the promise of increasing yields have not been enough to lure outside investors into treasury markets, with treasuries now facing the worst bond market collapse in half a century.  With the yield curve inverting once again, long term bonds are coming under scrutiny and the question now is:  How will the US government pay off its exponential debts without ongoing stimulus from the Fed and an ever increasing balance sheet?

  More printing means more price inflation, but no printing also means more price inflation.

  

  This uncertainty has led China to dump US Treasuries to the lowest level in 12 years, and Japan, once a stalwart pillar of US investment, is cutting their holdings as well.  Arguments can be made that this is part of molding currency markets to artificially increase or decrease exchange rates, but regardless of the reason, the decline in US treasuries along with the ongoing decline in the US dollar as the world reserve currency leads to one thing:  More inflation.

  Overseas dollar holdings are in the tens of trillions.  Estimates suggest that around 60% to 75% of all dollars are held in overseas coffers for use in international trade.  Failing US bonds indicate a trend towards a decline in dollar usage.  The end result would eventually be the reverse flow of dollars back into the US, causing even more inflation than we already have.

  The Fed’s 75bps rate hike is a drop in the bucket compared to what will be needed to slow the inflationary/stagflationary crisis.  Yield curve inversions can be a sign of coming recession, but not necessarily an end to price inflation.  Yet, mainstream economists are already predicting deflation back to balance?  This seems to be another disinformation campaign much like the “inflation is transitory” narrative of the past two years, which even Janet Yellen now admits was utterly wrong.  The reaction of foreign creditors does not suggest an end to inflation; in fact, it indicates the opposite.   

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 19:00

• In "Stunning Blow", Macron Loses Absolute Majority As Far Right, Left Surge
  In “Stunning Blow”, Macron Loses Absolute Majority As Far Right, Left Surge

  French President Emmanuel Macron was projected to suffer a “stunning blow” as Le Monde put it, by losing his absolute majority after major election gains by a newly formed left-wing alliance and a historic breakthrough for the far right, crippling his hopes of major reform in his second term.

  The run-off election was decisive for Macron’s second-term agenda following his re-election in April, with the 44-year-old needing a majority to secure promised tax cuts and welfare reform and raise the retirement age. His Ensemble! coalition was on course to be the biggest party in the next National Assembly, but with 234 seats, well short of the 289 seats needed for a majority, according to initial results by Ipsos-Sopra Steria for France Télévisions, Radio France, France 24-RFI-MCD and LCP Assemblée Nationale.

  

  If confirmed, the results would severely tarnish Macron’s April presidential election victory where he defeated Marine Le Pen to be the first French president to win a second term in over two decades. 

  Macron’s support base has shrunk after the past five years, with protests against his pension reform, social inequality and handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The 44-year-old won a second term in April’s presidential election, while National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen came second, handing the far-right its strongest score ever. Melenchon, who came a close third, emerged at the head of an emboldened left.

  The expected number of seats for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (89) amounts to a historic breakthrough. Only once under the Fifth Republic had the far right passed the threshold to form a group in the Assemblée (15 MPs), which allows for certain parliamentary resources and prerogatives. The only time this happened was in 1986, when Le Pen’s father Jean-Marine Le Pen led a group of Front National MPs for two years. They were elected in the only ever legislative elections using proportional representation.

  NUPES, the united left under Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is set to get 149 – 200 lawmakers, according to the pollsters, a strong progression from five years ago.  The center-right Republicans and their allies are set to get 60 – 80. Unlike in 2017, the left-wing parties formed an alliance before the election, agreeing on sharing electoral districts so as to avoid competing against each other in the election. The result means three of the four main parties (La France Insoumise, the Socialists, and the Greens) will each be able to form their own group. But the Communists, who are estimated at 13 seats, risk losing theirs. Conservative party Les Républicains (LR) are expected to win 75 seats, down from 101 in the previous legislature. But it is a significant improvement from the presidential election, when their candidate Valérie Pécresse scored 4.78%.

  While Nupes is unlikely to implement its economic program, which includes higher wages and cutting work hours on the back of massive public spending, the coalition will gain influence on parliamentary and public debates. At a time of climbing interest rates around the world, it has “the potential to undermine investor confidence in the French fiscal outlook,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Maeva Cousin.

  Falling short of an outright majority forces Macron – who will keep control of the executive branch but with far less power – into tricky partnerships with other parties on the right to force through legislation, putting much of his second-term agenda at risk.

  There could now potentially be weeks of political deadlock as the president seeks to reach out to new parties. The most likely option would be an alliance with Les Republicans LR.

  The president could cobble together alliances on specific topics – his position on raising the retirement age is similar to that of the with the center-right Republicans, for example. If that doesn’t work, he might also be tempted to use article 49.3 of the French constitution, which under certain conditions allows him to put a law in place even without approval from parliament.

  “He won’t be able to lean on the extremes, whether it’s the far right or the far left, which will oppose pretty much systematically every proposition from the government,” said Lisa Thomas-Darbois, a specialist in French politics at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

  The good news for the establishmentarian president is that the nightmare scenario – the left winning a majority and Melenchon heading the government – appears to have been excluded. The results are “far from what we hoped”, Budget Minister Gabriel Attal said on the TF1 channel, while Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti told BFM television: “We’re in first place but it’s a first place that is obviously disappointing.”

  Meanwhile, the number two of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, hailed her party’s performance as a “tsunami” – the National Rally looks to have made an important step in the decade-long effort by Le Pen to bring the party to the center of French politics. “The people of France have made Emmanuel Macron a minority president” National Rally acting head, Jordan Bardella, said on TF1 television, noting this was the party’s best ever score in legislative elections.

  The ruling party’s campaign had been shadowed by growing concern over rising prices while new Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne failed to make an impact in sometimes lackluster campaigning. French television reports said Borne, who was elected in Normandy, had gone to the Elysee to talk with Mr. Macron even before the projections were published.

  The jobs of ministers standing for election were also on the line under a convention that they should resign if they fail to win seats.

  In kneejerk response, the euro opened weaker in early Asian trading, quoted down as much as 0.4% to $1.0463 following the projected results, before paring losses. Traders see any gains for right-week parties in France as a risk for euro-area integration.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 18:30

• Inflation Is Everywhere: The Infamous Warren Buffett Charity Lunch Sold For More Than Four Times Last Year's Price
  Inflation Is Everywhere: The Infamous Warren Buffett Charity Lunch Sold For More Than Four Times Last Year’s Price

  Inflation is just everywhere…

  Even the infamous Warren Buffett charity lunch, wherein the “Oracle” auctions off lunch with him and the proceeds go to charity, is feeling the effect of inflation. The lunch, which is going to be to the last of its kind this year, cost the winner $19 million this year. 

  The 91 year old Buffett is going to meet with the anonymous donor at New York City steakhouse Smith & Wollensky, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. 

  The Journal noted that since the beginning of Buffett doing the charity lunch, he has raised “more than $53 million for Glide, a San Francisco charity that provides meals, healthcare and legal aid to homeless and other vulnerable individuals in the city”.

  

  Buffett is now 91 years old. He said of the lunch: “It’s been nothing but good. I’ve met a lot of interesting people from all over the world. The one universal characteristic is that they feel the money is going to be put to very good uses.”

  The sum of this year’s winning bid is more than 4x the year prior, when the lunch went for $4.56 million to a “cryptocurrency entrepreneur”. This year’s winner remains anonymous, according to the WSJ report. 

  As the report notes, other past winners have included Greenlight Capital President David Einhorn and Ted Weschler, who is now one of Berkshire’s portfolio managers.

  Cost of lunch with Warren Buffett:
  (winning bids in charity auction)

  2022: $19,000,100
  2019: $4,567,888
  2018: $3,300,100
  2017: $2,679,001
  2016: $3,456,789
  2015: $2,345,678
  2014: $2,166,766
  2013: $1,00,100
  2012: $3,456,789
  2011: $2,626,411
  2010: $2,626,311
  2009: $1,680,300…

  — Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) June 18, 2022

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 18:00

• The Bill Gurley Chronicles: Part 2
  The Bill Gurley Chronicles: Part 2

  By Alex of the Macro Ops Substack

  What if there was a way to distill all the knowledge that someone’s written over the last 25 years into one, easy-to-read document? And what if that person was a famous venture capital investor known for betting big on companies like Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, Discord, Dropbox, Instagram, and Zillow (to name a few)?  Well, that’s what I’ve done with Bill Gurley’s blog Above The Crowd. 

  Gurley is a legendary venture capital investor and partner at Benchmark Capital. His blog oozes valuable insights on VC investing, valuations, growth, and marketplace businesses.  This document is past two to the one-stop-shop summary of every blog post Gurley’s ever written, part 1 can be found here.

  February 2, 2004: The Rise Of Open-Standard Radio: Why 802.11 Is Under-Hyped (Link)

  Summary: WiFi will dominate wireless communications for the same reason Ethernet dominated networking and x86 dominated computing: high switching costs. This wide-scale adoption causes capital to flow into the standard as companies look to differentiate on top of the existing platform. In doing so, it further entrenches the “open-standard” incumbent. 

  Favorite Quote: “Open standards obtain a high “stickiness” factor with customers as a result of compatibility. Once customers invest in a standard, they are likely to purchase more and more supporting infrastructure. As their supporting infrastructure grows, their switching costs rise dramatically with respect to competitive alternate architectures. Customers are no longer tied simply to the core technology, but also to the numerous peripherals and applications on which they are now dependent. All of these things make challenging an accepted open standard a very difficult exercise.”

  March 24, 2004: All Things IP: The Future Of Communications In America (Link)

  Summary: South Korea and Japan are leading the world in broadband speed and connectivity. South Korea, for example, sports 80% broadband adoption. The US on the other hand, less than 50%. Different players battle for the future of US communication. Free services like Skype offer high-quality VoIP calls. But it’s the cable companies, with their mega-cable infrastructure, that lead the way. At the end of the day follow the money. Comcast went after Disney not because of distribution, but because of content.

  Favorite Quote: “Now, while voice should be free, that doesn’t mean that it will be free. The two conditions outlined above are nontrivial. First and foremost, it is not at all clear that we have enough competition in the U.S. broadband market. Innovations in the wireless market, particularly recent innovations around mesh architectures, have the opportunity to change this. As of right now, however, many users simply lack choice. Additionally, the many state municipalities around the country are eager to place their hands on VoIP. A poorly executed policy could in fact “increase” the long term pricing on voice services for all users (for example, would you really tax a free service?).”

  May 6, 2004: Entrepreneurialism And Protectionism Don’t Mix (Link) 

  Summary: Protectionism and entrepreneurialism don’t work together. One prides itself on open dissemination of ideas, talent and problems (entrepreneurialism). The other (protectionism) desires to keep what’s theirs and turn a blind eye to competition. There are seven reasons why these two ideologies don’t mix: it hurts the economy (comparative advantage), start-ups don’t receive government subsidies (that encourage protectionism), disincentivizes diversity, more start-ups start with a global presence, the hot markets are ex-US, it goes against our global open standards (WiFi, etc.) and its inconsistent with the entrepreneurial mindset. 

  Favorite Quote: “It is hard to imagine a successful entrepreneur arguing that he or she deserves a job over someone else that is equally skilled and willing to work for a lower wage. The entire spirit of entrepreneurialism is based on finding ways to do something better, faster, and cheaper. It is the whole nature of the game. If someone can do something better somewhere else, it simply means it’s time to innovate again – with intellect and technology, not politics.”

  October 19, 2004: The Revolutionary Business Of Multiplayer Gaming (Link) 

  Summary: Multiplayer gaming is an incredible business featuring five “Buffett-Like” business characteristics: recurring revenue (subscription pricing), competitive moats (switching costs), network effects/increasing returns, real competition with others and high brand engagement. Those that fail to realize the importance (and power) of the video game business model (40%+ operating margins) will miss a huge investment opportunity. 

  Favorite Quote: “Some skeptics argue that MMOG is still a “niche” business and that the same half-million users are migrating from Everquest to Ultima Online to City of Heroes. Under this theory, MMOGs will never be mass market and will never really “matter” in the $20 billion interactive entertainment business. However, with billion dollar businesses now dotting the NASDAQ, it becomes harder and harder to invoke such skepticism. And if new paradigms, architectures, and broadband speeds allow for titles that meet the needs of a wider demographic, ignoring MMOGs may be equivalent to ignoring the successor to television.”

  March 11, 2005: Believe It Or Not: Your State Leaders May Be Acting To Slow The Proliferation Of Broadband (Link)

  Summary: In 2005, rumors circulated that laws would pass eliminating a city’s right to offer telecommunications services to its citizens. Gurley suggested states should say “no way” to this offering, and opined six reasons why (straight from the post): 

  1. The primary reason for the proposition is to reduce or eliminate competition for incumbent telcos

  2. An oligopoly doesn’t make a marketplace

  3. Taking rights from municipalities will have negative overall impact on American innovation 

  4. Even if a city has no intention of deploying wireless services, it is still in that city’s best interest to retain the right to do so

  5. In 2005, isn’t it reasonable for a city to choose to offer broadband as a community service? 

  6. A founding American principle — localized government whenever possible

  Favorite Quote: “In what is ostensibly the cornerstone “democracy” on the planet, one would think that the citizens in each of America’s cities could simply “vote” on the services they believe make sense for their city to provide.  Running a wireless network in a city like Topeka, Kansas simply has no overriding impact on the state as a whole.  As Thomas Jefferson aptly wrote in a letter to William Jarvis in 1820, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform them.””

  March 21, 2005: The State Of Texas Refuses To Block Municipal Broadband (Link)

  Summary: Gurley’s post before this one did its job and Texas removed the harsh language around cities offering broadband access to its citizens. According to Gurley, the battle moved to Colorado. 

  Favorite Quote: “This proposed bill, in its original form, would prohibit a city from helping any new carrier whatsoever get started.  It’s a pure and blatant anti-competitive move.  It’s been modified slightly, but it is still one of the harshest proposals of any state, and once again created only to help the incumbent carriers by removing competition.  Consumers do not benefit from this language.”

  March 24, 2005: Texas Two Step – Backwards (Link)

  Summary: After celebrating the removal of restrictive broadband language three days prior, Texas reinserted the notion. What’s crazy is that the member who reinserted the language, Robert Puente, serves in a district where a large telco company has its headquarters. Hmm … 

  Favorite Quote: “It is shocking that these local reps really don’t care if broadband deployment in America continues to fall further and further behind the rest of the world.  Just shocking.”

  June 2, 2005: Texas Sets Key Precedent For Other States In Refusing To Ban Municipal Wireless (Link)

  Summary: It’s interesting that fixed broadband incumbents in Texas are so opposed to wireless broadband. The incumbents claim wireless is a weaker form of their product. But if it’s so weak, why do they want it banned from their state? Why won’t they let natural competition run its course? If it is indeed weak, there shouldn’t be a reason to impose sanctions and restrictions. 

  Favorite Quote: “The reason the pro-broadband movement was successful is because they organized, they gathered the real data on the success of municipal wireless deployments, and they were able to inform the citizens about this effort by the incumbents and their key legislators to use regulation to restrict competition.  They leveraged the Internet, blogs, and mailing lists, and made a huge difference.  The tech community also played a role with the AEA, the Broadband Coalition, and TechNet all speaking out against this effort to intentional slow technical progress.  These lessons and resources are now focusing on other states to ensure the Texas outcome.”

  July 12, 2005: DVD Glut (Link)

  Summary: Gurley saw the rise of TiVo and its effect on the DVD industry. Why would people pay for DVDs when they can record their favorite movies on TV and watch them whenever they want? There is no practical use for DVDs outside nostalgia and collection. 

  Favorite Quote: “Could it be that people are watching Shrek 2 on Tivo and saving that on Tivo for future viewing?  Could it be that other activities, such as Internet usage, is infringing on DVD time?”

  July 19, 2005: Do VCs Help In Building A Technology Platform? (Link)

  Summary: There are two important implications for venture capital’s lack of investment in Microsoft’s .NET platform. First, VCs are investing on the Open Platform. This is likely due to (what Gurley calls) “a more benign” platform. Such a platform allows for more creativity and application. Second, VCs aren’t investing in .NET applications because Microsoft’s simply going up the software vertical (owning each spot). There is a lack of opportunity within the existing .NET framework. 

  Favorite Quote: “Venture Capitalists look to the public markets for clues on where to go next.  There is no point in investing in technologies that don’t lead to liquidity events.  What the article stresses is that the majority of VC money these days is being spent on top of the Open Source platform rather than the Microsoft’s .Net platform.”

  July 22, 2005: Wifi Nation… (Link)

  Summary: This article gives us an excuse to talk about Innovator’s Dilemma. Clayton Christensen coined the term in his book with the same title. Wikipedia defines the term as, “the new entrant is deep into the S-curve and providing significant value to the new product. By the time the new product becomes interesting to the incumbent’s customers it is too late for the incumbent to react to the new product.” In short, WiFi is disrupting the incumbent broadband and their end consumers. Also, WiFi isn’t built for the incumbents. It’s built for the next generation. 

  Favorite Quote: “What you will see, and what many continue to deny, is that Metro-scale Wifi isn’t a theory, its a reality.  The networks are live.  They perform way better than EVDO or any cellular alternative. They are cheaper to deploy.  AND, there is huge momentum around more and more networks.”

  Years: 2006 – 2008

  April 5, 2006: Why SOX Will Lead To The Demise Of U.S. Markets (Link)

  Summary: Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) killed the small and micro-cap public market spirit. Like most regulations, the creators of SOX thought their stipulations would preserve the growth of public markets. Instead it stunted growth. SOX is an expensive requirement for smaller public companies. The costs disincentivize companies from going public. In return, US capital markets offer less opportunities than global companions. Will this lead to more money flowing overseas?

  Favorite Quote: “Ironically, the two gentlemen that created SOX did it with the intention of “preserving” U.S. capital market leadership. Their fear was that people viewed our markets as too risky, and so they created SOX to ensure that investors would “trust” our markets.”

  April, 2006: As Wifi Grows, So Do The PR Attacks (Link)

  Summary: There will always be haters when new technology replaces old, resentful incumbents. Can you blame them? WiFi completely destroyed their business model. Of course they’re going to run sham campaigns. But that’s the beauty of the Innovator’s Dilemma. WiFi doesn’t care about fixed broadband and incumbents. It’s serving its new wave of customers who want something incumbents can’t offer. Look for this in other up-and-coming technologies. 

  Favorite Quote: “Better performance than EVDO at a much lower cost.  You won’t stop this with an AP article.  Are their issues?  Sure, but I drop 5 cell calls a day in Silicon Valley and that technology (cellular voice) is over 25 years old.” 

  April 27, 2006: MMOs (MMORPGs) Continue To Rock (Link)

  Summary: Gurley again emphasizes the importance of MMO video games — particularly out of Asia. In fact, he mentions that Nexon (Japanese gaming company) plans to file on the JSE. Gurley believes the JSE filing is directly correlated with Sarbanes Oxley (from the article above). Regardless, the real winners in the video game industry are coming from Asia. Winning games will be based on community and entertainment, rather than pure competition. It’s no wonder Fortnite is so popular today. Gurley gave us clues almost 20 years ago. 

  Favorite Quote: “Many of the rising stars of multi-player interactive entertainment are more social than interactive. They also target much broader demographics than gaming ever dreamed of hitting. Consider three sites targeted at younger children and teens that are all doing extremely well — NeoPets, HabboHotel, and GaiaOnline (Benchmark is an investor in HabboHotel).”

  June 19, 2008: Back To Blogging (Maybe)… (Link)

  Summary: Gurley returned from his writing break to mention a few of his favorite reading sources. Gurley notes that he reads each of these websites every morning: 

  • TechCrunch

  • GigaOm

  • Marc Andressen’s Blog

  Favorite Quote: “The bottom line is I have been really busy. Busy with our investments here at Benchmark, and busy with three growing kids at home.  But in the end, I am quite fond of writing, and I have been inspired by some of the great writing of others.”

  June 30, 2008: Bleak VC Quarter? Why? (Link)

  Summary: June 2008 marked another dreary quarter for venture capital. Not one single VC-backed company went public. At first glance, this seems bad for venture capital. But looking deeper, it’s not venture capital that’s the issue. It’s the public market. Between regulations and SOX costs, small companies are opting to remain private at record numbers. As Gurley notes, fund managers want high growth and capital appreciation. But these small growth companies don’t want the issues of being a public company. 

  Favorite Quote: “This passionate desire to be public is completely gone in Silicon Valley. For reasons you could easily list – Sarbanes Oxley; 12b1 trading rules; shareholder litigation; option pricing scandals; personal liability on 10-Q filing signatures – it is simply not much fun being a public executive.”

  July 22, 2008: BAILOUT What? (Link)

  Summary: Fascinating how relevant this quote is for 2020. What we’ve seen from the US government during the COVID pandemic is a double-downed effort on its bailout precautions. Even going so far as to buy bond ETFs on the open market! Capitalism requires failure. It requires weak businesses to fall by the wayside in exchange for stronger competitors. 

  Favorite Quote: “Is our government really going to bail out equity investors in a failed business enterprise? I totally get keeping America afloat, but it is critical that failed businesses FAIL. They must FAIL. You can’t provide band-aids to equity failure. The whole system will come to a halt. Risk that pans out must result in failure. it is a crucial part of the system.”

  December 1, 2008: Benchmark Capital: Open For Business (Link)

  Summary: Gurley and the Benchmark team continued investing while the rest of their VC peers cowered in fear during the bowels of the Great Recession. Investing when others are fearful is not only a sign of a great VC firm, but any great company. 

  Favorite Quote: “I can’t speak for other firms, but make no mistake about…Benchmark Capital is wide open for business and we are eager to invest new capital behind great entrepreneurs.  Right now.  In this environment.  Today. You may wonder why I feel the need to make this pronouncement, and you may even consider this a stunt.  It is not.   We have made fourteen new investments this year, and are actively considering new investments each and every day.”

  December 5, 2008: Do VCs Help In Building A Technology Platform; Part 2 (Link)

  Summary: Microsoft offers three years of free software/service to startups. This is a clear signal that Microsoft understands the power of platforms and where companies choose to build their products. Otherwise, as Gurley notes, why offer it for free? This comes on the heels of three new cloud platform technologies entering the space: Facebook, Salesforce and Amazon AWS. VCs may not choose which platform wins, but they choose which platform gets capital. And to some, that’s the same thing. 

  Favorite Quote: “It obviously would be overstating it to suggest that VCs help “choose” the platform that wins. That said, it is a powerfully positive indicator if VCs show confidence in a new platform by shifting where they deploy their capital.”

  Years: 2009 – 2011

  February 1, 2009: Google Stock Option Repricing: Get Over It (Link)

  Summary: Retail investors, bloggers, and financial pundits argued that Google’s Stock Options Repricing hurt the “common” shareholder. Gurley thinks stock options shouldn’t matter because common shareholders gave up their rights (more or less) when investing in Google shares. The fact is, Google’s founder and original shareholder shares carry 9/10ths voting power. That means minority (aka second-class citizen) shareholders get 1/10th. In other words, deal with it. 

  Favorite Quote: “So my reaction to anyone who owns Google stock and is sore over this decision — Get Over It.  You bought a stock where you gave up the ability to vote on such things, and if you don’t like it, sell the stock.  But you have no right to complain, as the rules were laid out from the beginning.”

  February 11, 2009: Picture Proof Of The Innovator’s Dilemma: SlideRocket (Link)

  Summary: With a team of 3 engineers and a fraction of Microsoft’s budget, SlideRocket created (arguably) a better version of PowerPoint. According to Gurley, SlideRocket is a perfect example of the Innovator’s Dilemma. PowerPoint took (probably) billions of dollars in R&D and thousands of engineers to create. SlideRocket did it with 4 orders of magnitude less resources. 

  Favorite Quote: “One subtlety of this is that it allows others to catch up and basically recreate the same thing for a fraction of the cost.   In SlideRocket’s case, it appears that a team of 3 engineers with primary work done by the founder, have recreated PowerPoint (leveraging Flex of course).” 

  February 18, 2009: Just Say No To A VC Bailout: A Green Government Venture Fund Is A Flawed Idea (Link)

  Summary: Some VC investors wanted a bailout from the government during the GFC. Gurley originally thought this was a far-cry from a lone complainer. Then he read an article by Thomas Friedman suggesting the same thing: a bailout for VC targeted at green-tech companies. According to Gurley, VC bailouts are flawed for six reasons:

  1. There are no lack of capital in VC

  2. VCs don’t deserve a bailout

  3. Those that need bailout are (likely) bad ideas

  4. Excess capital hurts markets

  5. Good companies don’t lack for capital

  6. Use customer subsidies instead of government-backed VC investment

  Favorite Quote: “Great ideas have never suffered from a lack of capital availability.  Bringing extra government dollars to the investment side will only ensure that marginal and sub-par companies get more funding dollars, which historically has had a perverse and negative effect on the overall market.”

  February 22, 2009: Just Say No To A VC Bailout – Part 2 (Link)

  Summary: Continuing the rant from the previous blog post, Gurley hits on three main criticisms with Friedman’s cry for a VC bailout. First, Friedman suggested that the US Treasury give the Top 20 VC firms up to $1B to “invest in the best VC ideas”. When you consider the 2% annual fee each year that VC’s take, you’re effectively giving these firms an additional $4B in partners’ fees. Finally, Gurley hammers home the idea that to win in green-tech you need to incentivize the customer on the demand side. Create a positive ROI proposition for the customer to use the product or service. 

  Favorite Quote: “The key is to create an ROI positive investment for the end customer through subsidies.  Ethanol isn’t falling to succeed because of a lack of capital — it’s a problem with customer ROI.  Invest through subsidies in making the market huge and ROI positive.  Capital alone will not solve the problem as the ethanol case proves.”

  February 27, 2009: Perfect Online Video Advertising Model: Choose Your Advertiser (Link)

  Summary: Gurley reveals his “perfect online video advertising model” in which consumers can choose their advertiser. It works like this. Before an online premium or VOD show starts, the content creators present the consumer with a list of 4-9 sponsors for the programming. Then, the consumer picks which sponsor they’d like to see when the inevitable ad runs during their program. The benefit to this is that content creators would know their customers’ interests to the tee, which would allow them to raise prices on advertising channels (read: higher revenue). 

  Favorite Quote: “Just because I am a male between 18-24 and watching “Lost” doesn’t mean I want an XBOX.  You are more likely to guess that i might want it, but you would be 10X better off if I chose XBOX as my sponsor at the start of the show.  Then you would KNOW I have an interest — no more guessing. Making predictions is always a dangerous game, but I am fairly certain that this will be the video ad model of the future.  It makes way too much sense not to work.”

  March 2, 2009: Looking For Work: Are You An Insurance Agent? (Link)

  Summary: One of Gurley’s investments had an unusual circumstance during the GFC: they had excess demand for work. LiveOps, a virtual SaaS call center on the cloud, leverages a network of work-from-home call center operators. At the time of writing, LiveOps had 20,000+ live call-center agents working from home assisting companies like Aegon, Colonial Penn, and American Idol. 

  Favorite Quote: “Their core technology is a SAAS “contact center in cloud.” Just like anyone’s call center, it is a four-9’s operation that is highly resilient. What’s different, and very unique, is that the agents on the other end don’t actually work for LiveOps – they work for themselves. So far, over 20,000 “crowd-sourced” agents are now working from home on behalf of LiveOps customers – companies like Aegon, Colonial Penn, etc. One really cool customer example is American Idol. For Idol Gives Back, AI’s charity campaign, over 4000 LiveOps agents handled over 200,000 calls in less than five hours. Only a crowd-sourced play could handle such a ramp.”

  March 9, 2009: How To Monetize A Social Network: MySpace And Facebook Should Follow TenCent (Link)

  Summary: Social networks had trouble monetizing their websites. MySpace and Facebook failed to generate revenue like Yahoo, which did $7B at the time of writing. The problem wasn’t growing the userbase (both sites had tremendous user growth). It was the dependence on advertising to generate the lion’s share of their revenues. Gurley compares MySpace and Facebook to Tencent (700.HK). The two primary drivers of revenue for Tencent are digital items and casual game packages and upgrades. These are significantly higher-margin businesses than advertising. At the end of the day, social networks are social status symbols. This means if you want to leverage your business, you need to provide users with ways to improve their social status.

  Favorite Quote: “If you removed the Chanel logo from them, and offered them for $50 cheaper, you could not sell a pair.  Not one.  Why?  People are buying an image that they want to project about themselves.  Without the logo, they fail to make that statement.  The same is true for watches, clothes, cars, sodas, beers, cell phones, and many more items.  People care greatly about how they are perceived and are willing to part with big bucks to achieve it.  Digital items are merely the same phenomenon online.”

  March 26, 2009: Note To Timothy Geithner: Do Startups & Venture Capitalists Really Need More Regulation? (Link)

  Summary: The US government levied Sarbanes-Oxley on all public companies after the whole Enron, WorldCom saga. The purpose? Protect investors from future frauds. While the efficacy of “Sarbox” remains in question, one thing doesn’t: the cost on small public companies. Sarbox costs ~$2-$3M to implement. This makes it nearly impossible for small companies to go public because the Sarbox costs eat away all potential operating profits. Overburdening small companies could restrict the pipeline of new public IPOs. 

  Favorite Quote: “And remember that the largest companies in America that were created in the last 35 years (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, CSCO, INTC) were all small venture-backed companies at one point in time.  Do we really want to inappropriately restrain or throttle the future pipeline of such companies in America?”

  May 2, 2009: Swine Flu: Overreaction More Costly Than The Virus Itself? (Link)

  Summary: It’s amazing how relevant this blog post became during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gurley suggests that in some cases, overreacting to news (like swine flu) can have far worse consequences than the natural course of the virus itself. For example, Mexico’s economy teetering on the brink of insolvency as tourism represents a third of their economy. The argument for overreacting is that it prepares people for the worst-case scenario. Yet that decision has consequences. Consequences we can’t see, and might not see for a long time. 

  Favorite Quote: “Some people rationalize that this hysteria serves a noble purpose, in that it prepares us for the worse.  This, however, ignores the fact that there are tremendous real economic costs to overreaction, and that sometimes overreaction has far-reaching negative impacts which can be many times greater than that of the original problem.”

  May 8, 2009: Second Life: Second Most Played PC Title, #1 In Minutes/User (Link)

  Summary: Gurley’s investment in Linden Lab paid off big time in May 2009 when Linden’s hit game Second Life ranked as the #2 most-played PC title. The game trailed World of Warcraft in number of users, but ranked first in number of minutes played per user. Data like this further reiterates Gurley’s earlier claims that selling goods online (digital signs of social status) can make for a great business. It also shows people love distracting themselves from their everyday lives. 

  Favorite Quote: “The truth of the matter is that the company is quite large, it’s growing, it’s profitable,  it has hired a number of great people over this time frame, and as the data shows it’s kicking butt. Note that the data also shows SecondLife actually leads WOW in terms of minutes played per user.”  

  May 10, 2009: Bill Gurley’s Online Video Market Snapshot (Link)

  Summary: Gurley did an on Hollywood talk about the massive changes in the Online Video Market. The link has an 18-minute video where Gurley outlines five things that matter in the coming online video market battle: 

  1. Great content is super expensive

  2. Affiliate fees are a “huge fucking deal” 

  3. The Netflix Business model is widely misunderstood

  4. HBO and the NFL are incredibly well-positioned companies

  5. Wireless will not save the day 

  Favorite Quote: I didn’t have a favorite quote from this post as it was mainly a link to the video and slide deck. I highly recommend watching the video and scanning through the deck. It’s 18 minutes long but you can watch at 1.5-2x speed without issue. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 17:30

• 'Democracy Is At Stake' – Hillary Bails On 2024 Election Bid, Backs Biden Against Trump
  ‘Democracy Is At Stake’ – Hillary Bails On 2024 Election Bid, Backs Biden Against Trump

  “I felt a great disturbance in the Farce, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened…”

  We suspect that bastardized version of the infamous Star Wars line is how many Americans will feel having been told that former Secretary of State, and twice failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton says she will not run for president in 2024.

  During a lengthy and far-reaching lovefest interview with The FT, former President Bill Clinton’s wife was asked if she will run again in 2024, and gave her most unequivocal response to that questions yet:

  “No, out of the question,” Clinton replies.

  “First of all, I expect Biden to run. He certainly intends to run. It would be very disruptive to challenge that.”

  It appears that the Biden’s age (he’ll be 81 at the next election), infirmity, and record low ratings are not a worry for her (despite a growing number of Democrat operatives starting to privately – and publicly – distance themselves from the incumbent).

  Of course, her nemesis was not far from her thoughts as she responded:

  “I think if [Trump] can he’s going to run again,” Clinton replies.

  “Follow the money with Trump — he’s raised about $130mn sitting in his bank account that he used to travel around, to fund organising against elections… I don’t know who will challenge him in the Republican primary.“

  And then she apparently dared to question the results of her election loss against Trump (again):

  “Literally within hours of the polls closing in 2016, we had so much evidence pouring in about voters being turned away in Milwaukee and not being able to vote in Detroit.”

  “These states were run by Republicans so there was no way to find out the truth about any of them. I also believe in peaceful succession and transition and all of that.”

  And don’t forget what the Russians did via social media:

  “…all of the stuff that was convincing people that I was a murderer or a child trafficker”

  She qas quick to remind the interviewer about how she ‘won’ the popular vote by nearly 3mm (and Biden won by almost 7mm), which she then pivoted to what that means for 2024?

  “That tells you everything you need to know about Republican strategy for 2024. Even in his reptilian brain, Trump has to know that he lost this time. He refuses to accept it because it wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Then came the ominous warning of how bad things would be if Trump was in charge or ever is allowed to run for office again (oh, and how sexist Vladimir Putin is too?)

  “We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window,” she says.

  “Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”

  Be afraid America, be very afraid.

  

  “Ding, dong, the witch is dead…” though we are rather certain that this will not be the last we hear from the purple one.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 17:00

• Videos Of Americans Captured In Ukraine Broadcast On Russian TV – US Reviewing Footage
  Videos Of Americans Captured In Ukraine Broadcast On Russian TV – US Reviewing Footage

  Two American military veterans previously feared captured by Russia after they volunteered and fought for the Ukrainian army have appeared on Russian television, apparently as Prisoners of War (POWs).

  The videos were widely circulated Friday, which elicited a brief statement from the State Department, saying they had “seen the photos and videos of these two U.S. citizens reportedly captured by Russia’s military forces in Ukraine” and “are closely monitoring the situation.” The US is not disputing the accuracy of the footage, and the statement constitutes initial confirmation from Washington.

  The State Department said it had reviewed footage appearing to show two Americans captured in Ukraine. The department said the men, both U.S. military veterans who volunteered to fight in Ukraine, were “reportedly captured by Russia’s military forces.” https://t.co/Z7oPsRhG25

  — The New York Times (@nytimes) June 19, 2022

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

  The footage appears to serve as confirmation that 27-year old Andy Huynh and 39-year old Alexander Drueke are still alive, but are in Russian detention, the first such American POWs of the war, following a pair of British volunteer fighters being arrested and put on trial and handed death sentences in a pro-Russian Donetsk court earlier this month. 

  Russian state media, particularly RT, reported that the men were still alive and are under custody of Russian forces in the Donbas. Starting early last week the men’s families have sounded the alarm over their likely capture, describing that they lost all contact with the pair a week ago. The Hill on Friday reported on a video statement made by one of the detained US citizens as follows:

  “Mom, I just want to let you know that I’m alive and I hope to be back home as soon as I can be. So, love Diesel for me. Love you,” Drueke said in a video shown on RT, referring to his pet mastiff, according to NBC News.

  Drueke’s mother had just prior to the video emerging said to CNN that “they are presumed to be prisoners of war, but that has not been confirmed.” And CBS is now reporting that family members say the footage is authentic:

  The mother of one of two U.S. military veterans reportedly being held by Russian or pro-Russian forces told CBS News that Russian media images that were released appear to be of her son. 

  “Unmistakably under duress, but thank God they’re alive,” Bunny Drueke, Alex Drueke’s mother, told CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay.

  Drueke and Andy Huynh, who are reportedly in Russian custody, were both former military from Alabama, and were fighting in a squadron of foreign fighters alongside the Ukrainian army.  

  White House national security spokesman John Kirby in a briefing to reporters previously said that the US government “will do everything we can” to get Huynh and Drueke back.

  “This is a very serious event but among all bad things that happened probably the best thing that we can hear that they are alive.” @AnIllarionov reacts to the U.S. veteran releasing a hostage video after being captured by Russia in Ukraine.

  MORE: https://t.co/2ZJ2B9eUCl pic.twitter.com/OH67oXm7rk

  — Newsmax (@newsmax) June 18, 2022

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

  Additionally, 49-year old American veteran and foreign fighter Grady Kurpasi has also gone missing in Ukraine, though he wasn’t included in any Russian media videos.

  President Biden belatedly weighed in on Friday and more and more information emerged, telling reporters, “I have been briefed. We don’t know where they are.” That’s when he took the opportunity to urge Americans not to travel to Ukraine: “I want to reiterate, Americans should not be going to Ukraine now. I’ll say it again, Americans should not be going to Ukraine now,” he said.

  NEW: A new photo posted by a Russian blogger appears to show two American fighters with their hands tied behind their backs in the back of a #Russian military truck. The former U.S. servicemen are both from Alabama and were helping #Ukraine: https://t.co/8CMWJAciVX

  — #WVTM13 (@WVTM13) June 16, 2022

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

  Officials and some media pundits have expressed outraged over the newly emerged POW videos, saying it marks a severe violation of the Geneva Conventions and captured soldiers’ rights.

  Russia’s position has been that any foreign fighter captured on the Ukraine battlefield is a “mercenary” and thus is not subject to the Geneva Conventions. For example, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in a recent BBC interview stated, “I am not interested in the eyes of the West at all. I am only interested in international law. According to international law, mercenaries are not recognized as combatants.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 16:00

• Transportation Secretary Warns US May Act Against Airlines Over Cancellations
  Transportation Secretary Warns US May Act Against Airlines Over Cancellations

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that the federal government may take action against airlines on consumers’ behalf amid numerous flight cancellations in recent weeks, including more than 2,000 that were canceled on Saturday and Sunday morning.

  “That is happening to a lot of people, and that is exactly why we are paying close attention here to what can be done and how to make sure that the airlines are delivering,” Buttigieg said on Saturday, saying that he met with airline industry leaders late last week.

  Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, stated that his office would first determine how airlines handle increased travel associated with the Fourth of July holiday before the federal government takes any action. He also did not elaborate on what his agency may do.

  “Now we’re going to see how those steps measure up,” Buttigieg said.

  Some 2,700 flights were canceled on Memorial Day weekend, according to data from FlightAware. There were also cancellations on Saturday, June 18, and Sunday, June 19, with FlightAware saying that about 700 U.S. flights were scrapped as of Sunday morning. Some 1,300 flights were canceled Saturday, data shows.

  

  Major airline companies have already signaled that they have cut numerous flights over the summer up until Labor Day weekend over worker shortages.

  Southwest Airlines has canceled over 20,000 flights this season, and Delta Air Lines has cut over 700 flights since late last month, saying that it expects to cancel 100 flights per day between July 1 and Aug. 7 across North and South America.

  A letter posted by Delta pilots on June 16 said they have been flying a “record amount of overtime” hours amid cancellations.

  “At the current rate, by this fall, our pilots will have flown more overtime in 2022 than in the entirety of 2018 and 2019 combined, our busiest years to date,” the pilots said in their letter.

  “We empathize and share in your frustration over the delays, cancellations, and disrupted travel plans you’ve experienced. We agree; it is unacceptable.”

  Weather is always a wildcard when it comes to flying in summer, but airlines have also acknowledged staffing shortages as travel roared back faster than expected from pandemic lows. Airlines are scrambling to hire pilots and other workers to replace employees whom they encouraged to quit after the pandemic hit and as airline companies fired thousands of workers for not complying with their COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021.

  

  Travelers queue up at the north security checkpoint in the main terminal of Denver International Airport in Denver on May 26, 2022. (David Zalubowski/AP Photo)

  It takes months to hire and train a pilot to meet federal safety standards, but the Transportation Department sees no reason the airlines cannot immediately add customer service representatives to help passengers rebook if their flight is canceled. The government has its own staffing challenges.

  “The pilot shortage for the industry is real, and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said several months ago in a call.

  Some airline unions, however, said there is no pilot shortage. They said airlines are merely trying to extract more money from consumers.

  “The United States is producing a record number of pilots, yet some are still trying to claim we need to weaken aviation safety rules to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s so important we have frontline aviation safety experts—our pilots—on Capitol Hill this week to make sure decision-makers know the facts, and what’s at stake,” said Air Lines Pilot Association (ALPA) President Captain Joe DePete on June 7.

  Shortages at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of Buttigieg’s department, have contributed to flight delays in Florida. The FAA promises to increase staffing there.

  The Transportation Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, has created a roving force of 1,000 screeners who can be dispatched to airports where checkpoint lines get too long.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 15:30

• Russia Attacks US-Backed Fighters In Syria At American Outpost
  Russia Attacks US-Backed Fighters In Syria At American Outpost

  US military officials have told The Wall Street Journal that Russia forces have carried out multiple military operations against the US-led coalition in Syria this month. This included a Wednesday attack on the al-Tanf garrison along the Iraq border in southeast Syria, though so far it appears the operations have targeted American proxies, namely local Arab and Kurdish factions that US trainers have been supporting.

  Given that Russia informed the Americans of the attacks ahead of time via a military-to-military communications line, the Pentagon believes Russia “wasn’t actively targeting American troops but was harassing the US mission in Syria.”

  

  With al-Tanf, US officials described that “a combat outpost at the garrison” was hit in the Russian strike, but no US troops were there at the time, in an attack that appeared to target ”US-backed Maghawir al-Thawra fighters” – which Russia says was responsible for an earlier roadside bomb attack against its troops. There were no reports of casualties, as coalition forces quickly evacuated due to the prior Russian warning.

  It’s clear that this is perhaps the closest Russian and US forces have ever come to direct conflict, something the Pentagon has expressed a desire to avoid, but said Russia’s recent actions are a serious “provocation” and mark an escalation.

  “We seek to avoid miscalculation or a set of actions that could lead to unnecessary conflict: that remains our goal,” Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, the head of US Central Command said. “However, Russia’s recent behavior has been provocative and escalatory.”

  CNN added in a follow-up to the WSJ report:

  The initial US assessment is the Russian forces were likely ordered to notify the US ahead of time and conduct the airstrikes knowing they would not hit US troops and that the Americans would warn their allies, the officials said.

  But the Russians still likely achieved their goal of “sending a message” to the US that they can strike without being worried about retaliation, one official said.

  There have been a number of ‘close calls’ between US and Russian troops operating in Syria over the years. Russian forces are there at the invitation of the Syrian government, while President Assad has called the Americans hostile foreign occupiers and demanded they withdraw. Sometimes the rival convoys block each other in standoffs on key Syrian roadways near areas of the US occupation, which is heaviest in the northeast.

  

  However, some observers are seeing in this month’s strikes near US positions a deliberate signal that things are intensifying related to Ukraine, and the Kremlin is engaged in muscle-flexing in the face of the some 900 US troops still in Syria.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 15:00

• Conservatives Spend Big To Highlight Schumer’s 'Dangerous Threats'
  Conservatives Spend Big To Highlight Schumer’s ‘Dangerous Threats’

  Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),

  The would-be assassin has sat behind bars for a week, and coverage of his foiled plot to murder Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has receded from the headlines as inflation, a shaky stock market, and the Jan. 6 Commission all compete for that space.

  

  The story on the threats to the life of a member of the highest court in the land has increasingly been buried.

  But conservatives won’t let the frightening incident recede into voters’ memory banks. They are determined to lay the blame at the feet of Democrats, one prominent Democrat in particular.

  Judicial Crisis Network has cut a new attack ad highlighting previous rhetoric by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, warning Kavanaugh that there would be consequences if he voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The conservative legal group spent $300,000 to promote the spot in the Washington, D.C. market. Their intended audience: Schumer’s Capitol Hill colleagues.

  “1:00 AM. A man, armed with a pistol, arrives outside the home of a Supreme Court justice. He said he was there to kill,” an unseen narrator says as shadowy stock images play on screen. “Why? Dangerous political brinkmanship.”

  The ad then cuts to a clip of Schumer on the steps of the Supreme Court in March of 2020 shouting, “I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” It concludes, “Tell Democrats. Your words. Now a madman with a gun. Stop Threatening Judges.”

  Republicans have highlighted such incendiary rhetoric, attempting to draw a connection between careless words and an actual assassination plot. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, shared the clip of Schumer shortly after news broke of the failed plot, calling it “cause and effect.”

  Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino has followed suit. “Democrats are trying everything in their intimidation playbook in order to influence the Supreme Court’s rulings and secure their policy preferences,” she told RCP.

  Schumer already walked back his “whirlwind” comments. He did so shortly after making them. “I should not have used the words I used yesterday,” he said during a floor speech at the time, stressing that his remarks were political in nature, not personal.

  A spokesperson for the Senate Majority Leader told RealClearPolitics that his reaction to the failed assassination plot was relief and gratitude that the gunman was thwarted. “We are thankful law enforcement arrested this person,” the spokesperson said when asked about the whirlwind comments last Thursday. “Leader Schumer’s been clear that he supports peaceful protests.”

  Capitol Hill has been consumed of late with debates over political violence. The Jan. 6 commission began presenting its findings on the riots at the U.S. Capitol in prime time last week, while the GOP blasts the Biden White House for not doing more to cool tempers and keep protesters away from the homes of Supreme Court justices. American politics, more and more, can be described as a powder keg.

  Conservatives feel that the rhetoric of the left, compounded by what they see as a failure to police their own protestors, has heightened those passions to a dangerous degree. “Their tactics threaten the justices’ safety,” Severino said, “yet Democrats nonetheless unabashedly persevere with their dangerous political brinkmanship, encouraged by the far-left radicals in their party.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 14:30

• "Nasty Squeeze" On Deck: Last Week's Shorting By Hedge Funds Was "The Second Largest Ever"
  “Nasty Squeeze” On Deck: Last Week’s Shorting By Hedge Funds Was “The Second Largest Ever”

  Last week, when we observed that Monday (the day the S&P finally tumbled into a bear market) saw the the fifth largest ‘sell program‘ in history…

  

  … which was promptly surpassed by even more furious selling on Thursday when the TICK hit -2,057, the 4th biggest selling program on record…

  

  … we quoted Goldman’s Prime Brokerage according to which hedge funds – the so-called “smart money” at least until Melvin Capital showed everyone just how dumb said money really was – not only sold US stocks for a seventh straight day Monday but the dollar amount of selling over the last two sessions (Friday and Monday) exploded to levels never before seen by Goldman, which is remarkable because the bank’s records go back to April 2008 which means they capture the chaos from the Global Financial Crisis. In other words, we just saw a more frenzied liquidation than what took place in the immediate aftermath of Lehman!

  

  The data also prompted us to question how much of this was actual normal selling (i.e., closing out existing positions) vs short selling (betting on more downside).

  We now have the answer: according to Friday’s post-mortem note by Goldman trader John Flood (available to ZH professional subs) “in notional terms, this week’s shorting activity on our PB book was the second largest ever on our record (second only to the week ending June 12, 2008).”

  Here are some more details on recent hedge fund performance from Goldman’s Prime Brokerage courtesy of Flood:

  • The Goldman Sachs Equity Fundamental L/S Performance Estimate fell -4.61% between 6/10 and 6/16 (vs MSCI World TR -8.47%), the worst weekly returns since Jan ‘21, driven by beta of -3.99% (from market exposure and market sensitivity combined) and to a lesser extent alpha of -0.62%. L/S Equity HFs now down 19.02% on the year.
  • Fundamental L/S Gross leverage -3.6 pts to 166.1% (3rd percentile one-year) and Net leverage -3.6 pts – the largest week/week decrease since early January – to 46% (lowest since Oct ‘19).

  But here is the punchline: “In $ terms, this week’s shorting activity was the second largest ever on our record (behind week ending 6/12/08). Single Stocks/Macro Products were both shorted and made up 83%/17% of the $ short sales.”  For perspective, 9 of the 10 largest stock shorting weeks in Goldman’s record occurred in 2008 (weeks ending 6/12, 5/8, 6/5), 2020 (weeks ending 4/5, 3/5, 3/12), and 2022 YTD (weeks ending 6/16,1/6, 6/9); the week ending 2/25/21 was the other one.

  

  And predictably, following such massive shorting episodes, what follows traditionally has been a major squeeze: as Goldman’s table below shows, returns following 20% S&P 500 declines have typically been positive

  

  And while a squeeze now appears inevitable, the market will need much more than just technicals and positioning to recover, as the following chart shows: the current bear-market selloff has been the most violent and vicious ever!

  

  As Flood concludes, “while it certainly feels like we are primed for a nasty squeeze early next week…. I think play book remains to sell the low quality bear mkt squeezes whenever they appear…..and I think we will see more than our fair share of them.”

  His full note is available to professional subs in the usual place.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 14:00

• Efficacy Estimates For Pfizer’s Vaccine For Young Children Come Under Scrutiny
  Efficacy Estimates For Pfizer’s Vaccine For Young Children Come Under Scrutiny

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The efficacy estimates Pfizer has offered for its COVID-19 vaccine for young children are being dismissed as unreliable even as the shot is being readied to be administered to millions of American toddlers and babies.

  

  A Pfizer clinical trial for children aged 6 months to 5 years pegged the efficacy at 80.3 percent overall—82.3 percent for children aged 2 to 5, and 75.5 percent for kids 6 months to 2 years.

  But those estimates were determined “not to be reliable due to the low number of COVID-19 cases that occurred in study participants,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a statement on June 17.

  The estimates were based on just 10 COVID-19 cases—seven among kids who received a placebo, and three among those who received the vaccine. All occurred after Feb. 7.

  But they were portrayed as evidence the vaccine should be given to children across the country during meetings with vaccine advisory panels for the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this week.

  “High efficacy was observed in the course of this trial,” Dr. William Gruber, a senior vice president for vaccine clinical research and development at Pfizer, told panelists during a meeting on Friday.

  Gruber also showed a slide presenting the data.

  The low number of cases resulted in wide-ranging confidence intervals, which indicate how confident one can be in the numbers.

  The claimed efficacy is “a meaningless statistic,” Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Epoch Times in an email.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 06/19/2022 – 13:30

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