Today’s News 22nd June 2023

• Watch: Russians Use Drone Tank Loaded With Explosives To Destroy Ukrainian Front Line
  Watch: Russians Use Drone Tank Loaded With Explosives To Destroy Ukrainian Front Line

  If the Ukraine conflict has taught us anything in the past year, it’s that drone technology is quickly becoming the force multiplier of choice for offensive and defensive operations.  Though, it’s also evident that drone tactics have yet to be refined, with a lot of trial and error left to be accomplished.  

  So far, drones are mainly a joint mission tool used in support of operations rather than being at the center of operations.  Much fanfare has been spread in the corporate media about Ukraine’s use of drones to drop ordnance into otherwise well protected Russian trenches, but what about Russia’s use of drones?  Though reports are limited by the fog of war and propaganda, it would appear that Russia has found a way to remotely control armored vehicles such as tanks packed with heavy explosives.  

  In the following video, a Russian drone tank is reportedly sent against a Ukrainian forward line.  The tank hits a landmine and stalls 100 yards from its objective and Ukrainian soldiers hit the vehicle with an anti-tank missile.  However, what the soldiers do not know is that the tank is laden with over 6 tons of explosives.  The resulting shockwave rips through the Ukraine line.

  The strategy is rather brilliant in its simplicity.  Even if a drone tank does not reach its intended target, it can clear a path through enemy mines and the blast effect could still tear a hole in enemy lines.  Beyond that, Ukrainian soldiers will be second guessing any attempts to destroy Russian tanks at close range in the future.

  It is tactics like this, combined with Russian air superiority, that seem to have stalled the very counter-offensive that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been promoting for many months.   

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/22/2023 – 02:45

• Germany's Anti-Immigration AfD Hits New Polling High Of 20%
  Germany’s Anti-Immigration AfD Hits New Polling High Of 20%

  Authored by John Cody via Remix News,

  The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is more popular with voters than ever before, soaring to 20 percent of the vote in the latest Sunday poll, released every week by INSA on behalf of Bild newspaper. It has never reached this level in an INSA poll before, with the AfD’s steady weekly ascent in popularity shaking the German political establishment.

  

  The poll shows that the AfD improved by half a percentage point compared to last week’s poll, leaving it tied with the Social Democrats (SPD) and only 6.5 points behind the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU).

  In the poll, the CDU and FDP each lost half a percentage point, bringing both parties to 26.5 and 7.5 percent, respectively.

  AfD politicians celebrated the polling results, with Martin Hess posting on Twitter: “Record! In the ‘Sunday Question’ survey by the Insa Institute, our AfD comes to 20 percent nationwide. That puts us on par with the ruling SPD and only 6.5 percentage points behind the Union.”

  Rekord! In der vom Insa-Institut erhobenen „Sonntagsfrage“ kommt unsere AfD bundesweit auf 20 Prozent. Damit liegen wir gleichauf mit der regierenden SPD und nur noch 6,5 Prozentpunkte hinter der Union.https://t.co/G1qI05HdDu#Insa #AfD #Union #SPD #Ampel #Ampelkoalition #CDU pic.twitter.com/KRTqb6FY8n

  — Martin Hess (@Martin_Hess_MdB) June 19, 2023

  Perhaps just as important for the AfD as its recent polling high is the increase in voter potential, or in other words, the number of voters willing to vote for the party. This figure has increased substantially year-over-year, with 30 percent of Germans now saying they could imagine voting for the AfD.

  The AfD is also enjoying a huge increase in voters who will “definitely” vote for the party, with 15 percent of voters now falling into this category. This represents a doubling of this figure year-over-year and shows the party has grown its base of support.

  This growth has all occurred despite constant threats of the part being banned, a virtual blackout of AfD politicians on the country’s powerful state-funded political talk shows, police raids, and mass surveillance of members.

  The rise of the AfD has led to sharp debates within the country’s political and journalist class. As Remix News reported last month, AfD’s surge has likely been driven by a broad range of factors. Germany is facing a significant inflation and economic crisis, as well as a migration crisis. The INSA poll shows that 34 percent of voters describe themselves as “angry citizens” and among AfD supporters, 70 percent describe themselves that way.

  “The AfD is currently catching those sections of society for whom the Union does not distinguish itself clearly enough from the traffic light coalition,” said INSA’s chief, Hermann Binkert.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/22/2023 – 02:00

• The Reset: When Will Globalists Attempt To Introduce Their Digital Currency System?
  The Reset: When Will Globalists Attempt To Introduce Their Digital Currency System?

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  I want you to imagine, for a moment, a future world in which everything we now know about functioning and surviving within the economy is completely upended. This world has gone fully digital, meaning people live within a cashless society where physical monetary interactions are abandoned or prohibited, replaced by CBDCs. All transactions are tracked and traced, nothing is private any longer unless you are operating as a criminal within a black market.

  

  By extension, production is overtly suppressed and micromanaged. Small businesses are a thing of the past, and only a select group of major corporations working directly with government are allowed to operate. It’s not just that cash is outlawed and that everyone must rely on a digital ledger, the very data pathways and networks that we use to transfer funds are also controlled. Much like the SWIFT data network, the globalists have the ability to lock down internet payments, individual accounts and business accounts and deny people the ability to move funds from one place to another.

  In the meantime, AI-based monitoring systems sift through millions of transactions every minute, searching for “anomalies.” The algorithm is designed to identify anyone who has found a way around the data tracking – People who want to remain anonymous.

  The internet still exists, but it’s a shell of its former glory. The population uses it regularly to complete necessary tasks and to research information, but data providers are severely restricted. Cryptocurrencies are not an option as an alternative to the CBDCs because trading them online immediately sets off red flags for the AI-in-the-sky.

  Only government approved websites are allowed to exist, with extensive rules limiting what they can do and what they can say. AI chatbots provide the public with most of their information, and the globalists control the parameters of the chatbots. People only ever hear the news that the elites want them to hear. All contrary data is eliminated. It’s not so much banned, rather, it is simply omitted from the record until the people who remember it are long gone.

  It might sound like science fiction, but ALL of this technology already exists and is currently being tested by globalist institutions including the Bank for International Settlements and the IMF.

  Not long ago during the covid pandemic scare, organizations like the World Economic Forum began widely promoting a concept called the “Great Reset.” It was an agenda sometimes whispered about in banker conferences as far back as 15 years ago, but now the Reset was being promoted openly in the media and at Davos.  It’s a new economic paradigm, a revolution in which AI runs everything, humanity is relegated to a limited number of vital jobs, and a new brand of technological socialism rules our lives. Private property would be cast aside and the populace would live day-to-day within a “shared economy” in which no one owns anything and everything is borrowed from the collective system.

  The Reset, or the 4th Industrial Revolution as they sometimes call it, would be the start of a new terrifying age of feudalism. It’s a return to the oligarch and peasant model, a return to enslavement. The average person would only be allowed to work as a means to survive, never to accumulate wealth for the future. And each peasant’s survival would be utterly dependent on their access to the system, which could be taken away with the push of a button.

  The primary stepping stone to this dystopian nightmare would be a global digital currency system. Without a cashless society, the globalists would have no power to enforce the other elements of their Reset. But when and how will they implement this monstrosity, and why would anyone embrace it?

  Globalists tend to operate in stages of incrementalism, but sometimes they exploit dramatic crisis events in order to frighten the population into compliance with policies that would have taken decades to institute otherwise. We saw this clearly with the pandemic; most of the Reset concepts were revealed to the public during this time, perhaps because the globalists thought they had it in the bag and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. This even included consistent talk of cashless systems to “prevent the spread of covid on physical dollars.”

  But, covid with its tiny Infection Fatality Rate failed to frighten people enough and the opportunity fell apart. Today, the question is when will they try again?

  Most globalist organizations consistently mention the year 2030 as their timeline for finishing the numerous projects they have in place, including the “Great Reset” along with multiple climate and carbon taxation goals. The WEF calls it “a social contract to transform our world by 2030.” The UN simply calls it “Agenda 2030.”

  This means the establishment wants to have their control grid in place within seven years or less. That would be impossible without a bone rattling crisis of epic proportions, but first they would have to introduce a number of future mechanisms as a trial run. That way, when disaster does occur the public will be acclimated to the solutions that the elites will ask them to adopt later.

  In the case of digital currencies, crypto has already received wide exposure in popular media. Most people don’t own crypto and hardly anyone uses it, but they have all heard of it. CBDCs will likely ride the crypto wave and will be presented as a “safer and more stable” crypto option.

  For now, Australia seems to be the primary guinea pig for fielding CBDCs to a large western population. Their pilot programs are set to finish this summer and international transactions have been accomplished using the eAUD unit. Though, they have not revealed when they might introduce the currency to Forex markets or the citizenry. The point is, the system exists, and can be copied and adopted by any other nations.

  At bottom, globalists know that countries like America will not accept a fully cashless system without a complete collapse of their existing currency and economy. It’s just not going to happen otherwise, and I have doubts that many Americans will accept such a system even after a collapse. The majority of Americans, 59%, say they like to have cash with them for various purchases.

  Though western consumers make payments more often with bank cards, they still enjoy having physical money when they want it. The implications of intricate digital surveillance of every single purchase and transfer of funds is not lost on a large portion of the population. People know that if they give the government a telescope into their wallets eventually that information will be used against them. Take away the option of anonymity and millions of people will resist, even if they have nothing in particular to hide.

  Conversion to a cashless system would require calamity and force, a full spectrum crisis throughout the US and much of the western world in the next few years, along with another few years or more of reconstruction to bring in CBDC mechanisms.  Small businesses would have to be removed from the picture, leaving only major corporations which could then refuse to accept cash as a means of payment from consumers.  This would be one method of expediting the cashless system, along with outright government confiscation of physical paper.

  That said, there is another rather blunt way to push Americans into CBDCs that the globalists seem to be expediting – The death of the dollar’s world reserve currency status.  Only five years ago skeptics argued that the dollar would be king for many decades to come.  Today, those same people are eerily quiet as the IMF announces their own global CBDC called the “UMU” and BRICs nations quickly move away from the Greenback in bilateral trade.  If the US dollar loses a majority of its buying power through inflation and the loss of reserve status, it may be easier to convince the populace to abandon it for a digital replacement.

  If we take the globalist timeline of 2030 as an effective limiter, this would mean another crisis even more pervasive than the covid pandemic would have to take place soon in order for the elites to get what they want. The longer they wait, the more people become educated on their agenda and the less likely it will be to succeed.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 23:40

• These Are The World's Most Competitive Economies (US Falls To 9th!)
  These Are The World’s Most Competitive Economies (US Falls To 9th!)

  This year’s World Competitiveness Ranking, published by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) evaluates 64 economies based on more than 300 indicators across four broad categories: economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency and infrastructure. The indicators are a mix of hard data, which accounts for two thirds of the final ranking, and survey results, which account for the remaining third of the results.

  As Statista’s Felix Rivhter details below, the ranking covers large parts of Europe as well as North America, while leaving some white spots in South America, Asia and, most notably, Africa with just two African economies evaluated this year.

  As in previous years, Europe dominates the competitiveness ranking with European economies in the top 10, including all three top spots.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  While Asia also has three economies in the top 10, its largest economies China, India, Japan and South Korea are notably absent. Instead it’s Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong who reach the highest scores in the region.

  While Denmark managed to stay in first place after its rise to the top last year, Ireland leapt from 11th to second place, with Switzerland stuck in neutral in third place.

  What springs to mind when looking at this year’s top performers is the fact that all of them are relatively small economies, enabling them to react faster in today’s fast-paced globalized economy.

  “Navigating today’s unpredictable environment requires agility and adaptability,” Christos Cabolis, the WCC’s chief economist explains.

  “Countries which excel are building resilient economies, such as Ireland, Iceland, and Bahrain. Their governments are also able to adapt policies based on current economic conditions in a timely fashion.”

  The same cannot be said of the United States with its federal system and slow-moving legislative process, which partly explains the U.S. economy’s gradual decline from the top of IMD’s annual ranking.

  Having held the top position uninterrupted from 1997 to 2009 and not fallen out of the top 3 until 2017, the world’s largest economy ranks ninth this year after sitting in 10th place from 2020 through 2022.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  While that may sound bad considering the United States’ status in the world, it still makes the U.S. the highest-ranked among the world’s largest economies with Canada the only other top 10 economy (in terms of GDP) to make the top 20 in the 2023 Competitiveness Ranking.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 23:20

• Innovate, Don’t Litigate, To Solve The Climate Crisis
  Innovate, Don’t Litigate, To Solve The Climate Crisis

  Authored by Ryan Costello via RealClear Wire,

  Over the past several years more than two dozen cities and states across the United States have taken to the courts in a misguided attempt to address climate change. While it’s vital that state and local officials work towards effective solutions on this growing challenge, these lawsuits are not the right course of action. They not only lack merit but are harmful to the development of future innovative energy technologies and usurp the Congressional authority to create and implement environmental policy.

  

  A thorough examination of the facts demonstrates that these cases, which seek to hold energy producers financially liable for purported damages from the effects of climate change, lack any legal basis. 

  The allegations are baseless that the energy companies currently facing legal action deceived government officials and leaders on climate risks. Hundreds of thousands of scientific papers that studied the risk of climate change were published on the matter between 1980 and 2014 and no less than “246 Congressional hearings on climate change involving 1,595 congressional testimonies between 1976 and 2007 alone” were held according to one court filing. It’s hard to square that fact with the notion that the public was allegedly “deceived” about the risks of climate change. 

  Meanwhile public nuisance claims – allegations that fossil fuel production has contributed to climate change events that have supposedly harmed communities – have failed time and time again in court.

  In addition, greenhouse gas emissions are global and the fact that every single person uses products made with fossil fuels makes these allegations impossible to prove. That’s why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in dismissing New York City’s lawsuit in 2021, noted the city “wishes to impose New York nuisance standards on emissions emanating simultaneously from all 50 states and the nations of the world.” It’s reasons like this why New Hampshire legislature recently voted to jettison a proposal to pursue similar climate lawsuits. Lawmakers there reasoned the lawsuits penalize energy producers in the U.S. but absolve major polluting countries like China.

  The attorneys bringing these actions are operating under the specious assumption that their efforts will have a significant impact on the climate and are simultaneously hoping for jackpot justice. But the reality is that by suing these energy companies, they are undermining the very partners the country will need to work with to usher in a greener energy future. 

  Energy producers have led the way in the effort to advance clean energy technology, but such legal action disincentivizes that objective. Natural gas, for example, is among the leading contributors to lowering carbon emissions and my home state of Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer in the U.S. The EIA found the transition from coal to natural gas in the power sector led to a reduction of carbon emissions by 32 percent in America from 2005 to 2019. 

  Meanwhile, investments by energy producers in carbon capture and storage (CCS) hubs have made the U.S. a leader in this space. With 80 facilities expected to be operational by 2030, International Energy Agency data shows the U.S. could see CO2 capture capacity increase five-times to more than 100 metric tons of CO2 annually. Restricting the financial resources of some of America’s leading innovators – an intended goal of the litigation – is a damaging approach that will prevent future technological advances such as these.

  Instead of counterproductive lawsuits, public officials should be focusing on Congressional efforts to create public-private partnerships with energy producers to curb climate change. The great strides the natural gas revolution has made in curbing emissions, for example, demonstrates how the intersection of government funding and private innovation offers a much more promising pathway to a green energy future.

  As federal Judge for the Northern District of California William Alsup put it when he dismissed two climate lawsuits in 2018, “the problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.” To put it another way, Congress is the only branch of government that can provide accurate direction when it comes to setting climate policy. Now that the U.S. could be facing the very real scenario of a confusing and contradictory patchwork of state court-driven climate policy decisions, it is more important than ever that legislators step up to create a federal climate policy.

  Ryan Costello represented Pennsylvania in the House of Representatives from 2015-2019. During his time in Congress, he served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and was a member of the Climate Solutions Caucus. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 23:00

• Federal Judge Strikes Down Arkansas Law Barring Child Gender Transitions
  Federal Judge Strikes Down Arkansas Law Barring Child Gender Transitions

  A federal judge has struck down a trailblazing Arkansas law barring gender transitions for children. The law was the first of 20 such measures enacted by conservative legislatures across the country.

  “Tuesday’s ruling…is the first final judgment from a trial court in a challenge to such a ban,” writes Chris Geidner at Law Dork. 

  While similar laws in Alabama, Florida and Indiana been hit with temporary injunctions, Judge James M. Moody Jr — who was nominated to the federal bench by Barack Obama — issued a permanent injunction on the Arkansas version, handing a major victory to plaintiffs led by the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter.  

  

  Moody’s 80-page ruling makes clear that he fully bought the argument that children are well-served by having their breasts removed, receiving puberty-blocking drugs and otherwise having their bodies irreversibly altered before reaching the age of majority, declaring: 

  “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing.” 

  Moody ruled that the outlawing of so-called “gender-affirming care” violated the due process and equal protection rights of children. He also declared that a prohibition on doctors referring children to other providers for gender transition procedures violated the doctors’ First Amendment rights. 

  “Science, medicine, and law are clear: gender-affirming care is necessary to ensure these young Arkansans can thrive and be healthy,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas. 

  Moody also found problems with the experts who testified for the state, saying some lacked necessary qualifications, and one “struggles with the conflict between his scientific understanding for the need for transgender care and his faith.”

  The law was enacted in 2021, with the Arkansas legislature overriding the veto of then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is now a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

  As he vetoed the law, Hutchinson said “denying best practice medical care to transgender youth can lead to significant harm to the young person.” He also said it troubled him that the law didn’t grandfather children were were already in the midst of hormone treatments. 

  

  Current Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, “This is not ‘care’ – it’s activists pushing a political agenda at the expense of our kids and subjecting them to permanent and harmful procedure. Only in the far-Left’s woke vision of America is it not appropriate to protect children.”

  Huckabee Sanders said the Arkansas attorney general will appeal the ruling.  However, “the case will be heading to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which already upheld the initial preliminary injunction against the law,” writes Geidner. He also notes that Moody’s finding of facts in the case — including that “transgender care is not experimental care” — will be highly significant, as findings of fact are generally accepted by appellate courts.  

  The ruling comes a week after an 18-year-old California woman sued Kaiser Permanente and four doctors for rushing her into a mastectomy at age 13 — along with puberty blockers and testosterone treatment — in an effort to turn her into a man. Kayla Loydahl said doctors’ high-pressure tactics included the use of a line that’s widely employed by practitioners in the field — telling her parents “it’s better to have a live son than a dead daughter.”

  “The hardest part was being sold something that I believed was going to help me and make me feel better, only to do it and come out on the other side not feeling any better,” said Loydahl. “I could always have waited, but I can’t undo it.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 22:40

• Health Officials Put Americans On Notice Over West Nile Virus
  Health Officials Put Americans On Notice Over West Nile Virus

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Authorities across the United States have issued notices about West Nile virus, a deadly disease that can be spread via mosquitoes, after more positive cases have been reported.

  

  In a recent instance, Iowa’s Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the state’s first case of West Nile virus in an older adult, who was not identified, in Plymouth County.

  “Warm summer weather means Iowans are spending more time outside, which increases the risk of mosquito bites. Bites from infected mosquitos are the primary method in which humans are infected with the virus,” the department said in a June 16 statement.

  The statement added, “Anyone infected with [West Nile virus] may not experience any signs or symptoms of the virus, however, some experience mild symptoms that can develop into more serious ones.”

  People who experience mild signs and symptoms of a West Nile virus infection generally recover on their own, but serious symptoms require immediate medical attention, the department added.

  Widespread Cases

  The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services announced in June that the first human case of the virus was found in the Three Rivers Public Health District, near Lincoln. The person who tested positive was not hospitalized, said the agency, adding that residents of Dodge, Saunders, and Washington counties should limit their time outside at dusk and dawn when mosquitoes are most active.

  

  Nevada health officials, too, issued a news release confirming West Nile virus-positive mosquitoes in the 89074 ZIP code, which includes parts of Henderson, a city within the Las Vegas metropolitan area.

  “The positive mosquito results illustrate that West Nile Virus is active in Southern Nevada and that residents need to be vigilant about eliminating mosquito breeding sources while also protecting themselves from mosquito bites,” said District Health Officer Dr. Fermin Leguen.

  In Texas, the Harris County Public Health Mosquito Vector Control Division confirmed a mosquito sample tested positive for West Nile virus in the county, which encompasses Houston. The sample was taken from a trapping site in the 77005 ZIP code, according to officials.

  “Our comprehensive mosquito surveillance program is key to identifying the presence of the virus in our community and guides our control efforts to help us better protect our residents. West Nile virus has been in our area since 2002,” mosquito control Division Director Dr. Maximea Vigilant said in a news release. “During the summer months, we remind our residents to enjoy the outdoors but remember to protect themselves and their families from diseases transmitted by mosquitoes.”

  Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows 13 cases so far across the United States as of June 13, reported in Arizona, Oregon, Wyoming, Nebraska, Illinois, South Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Four of the 13 cases were reported in Arizona. There were 1,126 cases of the virus reported in all of 2022, CDC data shows.

  

  Some Infections Dangerous

  There are no vaccines or medicines to deal with the virus, which is a member of the flavivirus genus. About 1 in 5 people who are infected develop a fever and other symptoms, while about 1 in 150 people develop a serious illness that can be deadly.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 22:20

• Conservatives Wonder Who Navy Is Trying To Recruit With Petty Officer Drag Queen 'Stunt'
  Conservatives Wonder Who Navy Is Trying To Recruit With Petty Officer Drag Queen ‘Stunt’

  Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  It was a rough summer for drag queens, with uproars over public library story hours and bruising boycotts against Jack Daniel’s for promoting drag shows in its advertisements routinely making news.

  

  Meanwhile, conservative across the country, as they prepared to vote in 2022 midterms, were expressing discomfort—and for some alarm—over what many saw as a seemingly-pugilistic promotion of transgender and LGBTQ+ rights, vowing to restore “normalcy,” if possible, with their ballots.

  It was also a rough year for military recruiting. Of three of the U.S. military’s largest branches, only the Air Force met its 2022 recruiting goal. The Army missed by 15,000 and the Navy fell shy even after lowering its quota, increasing its enlistment age to 41, and relaxing other standards.

  So when the Navy in October chose to promote a sailor who weekends as a drag queen as one of its social media “digital ambassadors” as part of its recruitment strategy, many questioned how the sea service—so reliant on signal intelligence—didn’t see all the blinking red lights, or hear all the bells, all the whistles, all warning this just might not be a good marketing idea.

  As things turned out, the Navy did, in fact succeed in making Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley the face of a well-publicized campaign.

  But instead of promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as a recruiting tool, as the Navy apparently intended, YN2 Kelley became Congressional Republicans’ favorite poster prop in arguing that his celebration is why many young Americans—especially those among conservative constituencies—are turning away.

  Called Onto Congressional Carpet

  During a March hearing before the House Armed Services Committee Military Personnel Subcommittee, Chair Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), a Navy veteran, said when asked why a sailor who sidelines as a drag queen was used in a recruitment marketing program, the Navy’s response was that the “digital ambassador” program didn’t exist.

  “We are facing a historic recruitment crisis and instead of focusing efforts on strengthening our force, the Biden administration is forcing ‘wokeness’ on our service members,” the congressman said. “Navy leadership knew this was a ridiculous and embarrassing stunt, and that is why they initially denied involvement with the program.”

  In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Banks and Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) demanded to know why the Navy “incomprehensibly believed that this ‘woke’ campaign should become the defining face of the service” and warned that “perception is driving reality, and both current and former service members are alarmed at a culture putting ‘wokeness’ before training and combat effectiveness.”

  Banks and Alford requested that DOD provide “instructions that govern performing in or authorizing drag shows” and “any rules and regulations for service members engaging in such activity while actively serving in the armed forces.”

  In a May 3 letter to Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Budd (R-N.C.) requested “more information regarding the Navy’s use of … a TikTok drag queen to help reach potential recruits on social media.”

  Rubio and Budd also chastised the Navy for “the promotion of a banned app” in its digital ambassador TikTok videos than ran until April. The “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” was signed into law Dec. 29, 2022.

  The senators expressed concern regarding “behavior that many deem inappropriate in a professional workplace” and could also potentially “push misinformation or narratives favoring the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

  “Where does the Navy draw the line on promotion of the personal activities of its influencers?” Rubio and Budd ask. “Would the Navy enlist burlesque dancers or exotic dancers to reach possible recruits?”

  The Navy’s only response has been a blanket statement: “Much like the country we serve, our Navy is stronger when we draw upon our diverse resources, skills, capabilities and talents. We remain committed to an inclusive environment.”

  But the pressure could be forcing changes in the Department of Defense (DOD) and within the individual branches, the conservative Heritage Foundation Center for National Defense Director Thomas Spoehr told The Epoch Times.

  “Just the other day, Lloyd Austin decreed there would be no more drag queen shows on military installations. That came as a surprise to me, I thought they were heading down the path that we’re going to have drag queen story hour at the installation library.”

  ‘In-Service Transitions’

  During an October Heritage Foundation forum, a National Independent Panel on military service and readiness, chaired by Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) and featuring former Trump administration National Security Adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, took aim “at the politicization and the progressive policies that civilian officials in the [Biden] administration are imposing on the military.”

  Those policies were initiated by a series of Biden executive orders, most notably two that revoked former President Donald Trump’s September 2022 order restricting DEI-related training in the military and banning transgender people from enlisting.

  The revised policies restored the DOD’s 2016 policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or an individual’s identification as transgender.

  In April 2021, the DOD followed with the 22-page Instruction 1300.28 that outlined rules for “in-service transition for transgender service members.”

  The instruction states the DOD and the branches “will institute policies to provide service members a process by which they may transition gender while serving. These policies are based on the conclusion that open service by transgender persons who are subject to the same high standards and procedures as other Service members with regard to medical fitness for duty, physical fitness, uniform and grooming standards, deployability, and retention is consistent with military service and readiness.”

  To qualify for “transition,” an active-duty service member must be diagnosed with “gender dysphoria,” which is a mental health condition in which people believe their biological sex and gender identity do not match.

  “Gender transition begins when a service member receives a diagnosis from a military medical provider indicating that gender transition is medically necessary, and then completes the medical care identified or approved by a military mental health or medical provider in a documented treatment plan as necessary to achieve stability in the self-identified gender,” the DOD instruction states.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 21:40

• Pro-COVID-Mandate Scientists Use The "Expert" Fallacy To Avoid Fair Debate
  Pro-COVID-Mandate Scientists Use The “Expert” Fallacy To Avoid Fair Debate

  If there is one thing the covid lockdown event has shown with extreme clarity, it’s that a large number of people within the scientific community are easily swayed (or easily bought) when it comes to government narratives.  The level of false information spread by numerous medical and scientific “professionals” over the course of the past few years has been staggering.  

  They have been proven wrong on almost every significant risk factor, from the effectiveness of masks to the effectiveness of lockdowns and even the effectiveness of the covid vaccines.  Now, one could argue whether or not they were aware at the time that they were wrong, but the fact remains that a large number of them refuse to this day to admit fault.  They continue to insist that they were right despite all the evidence to the contrary.  

  The issue of denial among the covid devout has been brought to the forefront once again with recent media attacks against Joe Rogan and his podcast featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as candidate in the Democratic primaries in 2024.  RFK is a well known skeptic of covid mandate policies and an outspoken critic of the unchecked emergency vaccine rollout.  The questions he presents and the arguments he makes are very similar to those the alternative media were pressing from the very beginning of the pandemic, but as a presidential hopeful RFK garners a level of public recognition that is apparently frightening to the establishment.

  The corporate media has engaged in a coordinated assault on Kennedy, demanding that his interview with Joe Rogan be censored by Spotify as well as social media platforms on the grounds that he was “spreading dangerous medical misinformation.”  Avid covid cultists including a doctor and well known defender of big pharma by the name of Peter Hotez piled on the bandwagon, dismissing RFK’s information and making the usual accusations of “conspiracy theory.”  

  

  In turn, Joe Rogan suggested that if Hotez was so confident that RFK was misinforming the public then he should be willing to debate the issue properly and openly.  In exchange, Rogan would donate $100,000 to the charity of Hotez’s choice.  The response by Hotez is typical of people that aggressively support covid mandates and vaccine requirements – He ran away.  

  Peter, if you claim what RFKjr is saying is “misinformation” I am offering you $100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if you’re willing to debate him on my show with no time limit. https://t.co/m0HxYek0GX

  — Joe Rogan (@joerogan) June 17, 2023

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  Since then, Hotez and the media have engaged in a form of gaslighting in order to deflect away from the debate, suggesting that he has come “under attack” because people dare to ask him questions.  

  This is the classic response of the pro-mandate crowd – Throw as many hatchets as possible at anyone who strays from the government and big pharma narrative, all from the safety of their laptops and the corporate media megaphone.  Then, play the victim when they are challenged and create a circus to distract from the fact that they were the original attackers.

  To summarize the situation down to it’s core:

  Hotez: Joe Rogan is spreading misinformation!

  Rogan: I’ll give you $100k for the charity of your choice to come on my show and prove that it’s misinformation.

  Leftist Media: Joe Rogan is bullying Hotez!  Censor him!   

  However, beyond the attempts by Hotez to “count coup” and jab at RFK while hiding behind the MSM, a much more insidious propaganda message is at play.  Namely, the claim that there is no need for Hotez or any doctor or scientist to defend their positions in an open debate with anyone who is not also an “expert” in their field.  In other words they are using the appeal to authority ploy, also known as the expert fallacy.

  The expert fallacy is an argument based on an uncritical appeal to expert opinion, pointing to the shame that (in the expert’s opinion) the other person ought to feel at challenging their expertise.  Some call this the “Genetic Fallacy” – Judging an argument by its source rather than by its content.

  It is a kind of high priest syndrome, a way for establishment approved puppets to declare themselves immune to confrontation from anyone they do not deem to be their peers.  The problem is, pro-mandate doctors and scientists often attack their peers as well when they release contradictory information, accusing them of being unprofessional and anti-science.  

  This happened across the country at the height of the covid frenzy and many doctors were threatened with losing their license to practice.  In California, the state even passed a law that makes it possible for the government to dictate what is and what is not covid misinformation and punish any doctors who go against the grain.    

  This creates a climate of fear within the scientific community and stifles dissent.  Ultimately, there are few “experts” willing to step forward to debate the merits of the covid response because they are afraid they will be ostracized.  Meaning, the only people left to debate are the peasants outside of the scientific priesthood, and those people aren’t fit to shine the shoes of men so high as Hotez, right? 

  This elitist attitude leads to scientific dictatorship.  America came so close to the nightmare of medical tyranny it was palpable.  And, the faulty science and the medical “experts” that promoted it helped to push our society to the edge.

  

  The expert fallacy, all the wailing and the whining and the victimhood, it’s all a means of distraction.  A way to avoid admitting they are afraid to debate the merits of their arguments; a way to avoid matching data with data and exploring who was really right and who was really wrong.  Scientists and medical professionals should not be opposed to debating the facts with anyone, ever.  Their goal should be the truth, even if it means admitting they are wrong at times.  When a scientist is afraid to argue the facts, especially with people they are willing to publicly admonish, it suggests that they are acting on ideological biases and avoiding fair scrutiny of those biases.  It suggests that they are not real scientists.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 21:20

• The Waterworks Of Money
  The Waterworks Of Money

  Authors: Carlijn Kingma (cartographer), Thomas Bollen (investigative journalist) and Martijn van der Linden (professor New Finance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences).

  The money system visualized as an irrigation system

  Most countries are dealing with a ‘cost of living crisis’. High inflation is eating into the budgets of ordinary people, which were already tight. Over the past decade wages have fallen sharply behind compared to corporate profits and shareholder remuneration. Meanwhile the collapse of US banks and the bailout of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse show that financial instability remains an ongoing threat.

  And there may be more skeletons in the closet. Not only within the tightly regulated banking sector, but also at ‘non-banks’. In April 2023 Klaas Knot, chair of the Financial Stability Board, warned for the known unknowns at other financial institutions: ‘If they are hidden for a very long period of time, sometimes the problem then grows so big, that it only becomes unhidden or visible when it’s too big to deal with.’

  The problems of cost of living and financial instability cannot be seen in isolation from the design of our money system.

  Floods and droughts

  The money system is to the economy what an irrigation system is for farming lands. Just as irrigation helps crops grow, money allows the economy to flourish. But if the architecture is fragile, or the sluices and floodgates are mismanaged, severe droughts will cause hardship and suffering.

  During the past decade the super-rich and large corporations could borrow at record low interest rates. In 2019 hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio warned of the consequences of what he considered a ‘broken system’. He pointed out that while ‘money is essentially free for those who already have money and creditworthiness’, it’s ‘essentially unavailable’ to those who don’t. This, he explained, contributes to the widening wealth gap, opportunity gap, and political divides we see today. The financial sector flooded certain parts of the economy while other parts remained parched.

  During the pandemic the floodgates were opened even further. Although some free paychecks were sent to the people at the bottom of society – in the US for example several programmes were rolled out to support the unemployed – the chasm between the poor and rich grew further. The easy money boosted the markets for yacht-backed-loans and securities, dividends, share buy-backs, and M&A deals to new highs in 2021 and 2022. This came at the price of higher inflation. Ordinary citizens in many countries now struggle to make ends meet. Even despite pay raises, their real wages (accounting for the net effects of inflation) have further declined.

  

  The two-tiered state

  Fixing the design flaws within society’s irrigation system is not a commercial or technocratic task, but a democratic one – or as the American economist John H. Cochrane succinctly put it: ‘We voters need to tell our politicians which kind of central bank we want.’

  The same applies for other parts of our money system; the payment infrastructure, the tax regime and the investment of our pension savings. Who gets the power to create and allocate new money––and for what purposes? How can we make large corporations pay their fair share of taxes instead of shifting the burden to family businesses? And what needs to be done if we want the rules of a market economy to apply for the banking sector as well? Answering the big questions that shape our economy, requires continuous political engagement.

  In a democracy, the power to design the money system––and the laws and institutions that govern it––is ultimately in the hands of the people. However, in practice there is a big obstacle impeding the democratic process. ‘In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates,’ wrote US financial journalist Matt Taibbi in 2009. Taibbi tried to raise awareness of the dangers of ‘financial illiteracy’. He argued that by making finance needlessly complex, the bankers transformed our democracy into a ‘two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.’ Anyone unfamiliar with the jargon of economists, bankers and tax experts is excluded from the public debate on how our monetary system should work.

  Why reform is necessary

  After every crisis, the consequences of this exclusion become visible. In the aftermath of 2009, ordinary citizens footed the bill for the bank bailouts––the US Treasury spent 420 billion dollars and European countries roughly 1.6 trillion euros (Estimated costs of bailouts by EU member state governments €1.6tn, US $426.4bn. Howarth, D., and S. James (2022). Banking Politics: Structural Reform in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Meanwhile, the bankers were negotiating the conditions of their own rescue packages and drafted future regulations.

  The actual power over our monetary architecture is in the hands of a small and exclusive group – often employed by, or with close ties to the financial sector. In essence, they propped up the existing banking architecture, without addressing the fundamental design flaws that make it so fragile. When former American president Barack Obama signed the new banking regulations in 2010 he said: ‘There will be no more tax-funded bailouts. Period.’ However, in 2023 the US government had to dip into the public purse again to save four large banks from bankruptcy, and prevent ‘contagion’ to the rest of the financial system. Privatizing profits while socializing risks and losses has become standard practice.

  The Waterworks of Money

  In his 2009 polemic Taibbi concluded: ‘There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.’ To put the power back into the hands of the people, we need to demystify the world of finance.

  With this mission in mind, we (cartographer Carlijn Kingma, investigative financial journalist Thomas Bollen, and professor New Finance Martijn van der Linden) worked for two and half years to map ‘The Waterworks of Money’, an architectural visualization of our money system that bypasses the economic jargon. Kingma spent 2300 hours drawing this map by hand, based on in-depth research and interviews with more than 100 experts––from central bank governors and board members of pension funds and banks to politicians and monetary activists.

  In an animated video, we walk you through a metaphorical representation of our money system, its hidden power made manifest.  Only if ordinary citizens develop their own vocabulary to participate in the debate about our money system, can they tell their politicians which kind of ‘financial irrigation system’ they want.

  The Waterworks of Money is at the moment exhibited in Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and reproductions can be seen at the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale. For more info, see waterworksofmoney.com

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 21:00

• "A Non-Negotiable": UPenn Swimmer Says Team Was Silenced From Speaking Out About Transgender Teammate Lia Thomas
  “A Non-Negotiable”: UPenn Swimmer Says Team Was Silenced From Speaking Out About Transgender Teammate Lia Thomas

  A former teammate of transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas has broken her silence and spoke out this week about how the university silenced her and her teammates on the issue. 

  Former swimmer Paula Scanlan told Fox Business host Stuart Varney that she was directed not to talk to the media about the issue, a wrap up of the interview by The Daily Caller reports. 

  Scanlan told Varney: “Our university actually just didn’t really have any conversations with us at all about our concerns with the situation happening, and then once it was already a media storm, and Thomas was already breaking all these records, that’s when they came in and told us, please don’t talk to the media, this is a non-negotiable and provided us with counseling services if we objected.”

  

  “They brought in a whole panel of individuals, someone from the LGBT Center, someone from the psychological services and a bunch of people from the athletic department,” she continued. 

  Scanlan added: “The governing body of swimming called FINA, they actually put in a rule that said, if you don’t transition before the age of 12, you are not allowed to compete internationally. So in terms of Lia Thomas, or another — another individual that’s like that going to the Olympics, that’s not going to happen. But in terms of the NCAA, the NCAA hasn’t changed any of its policies regarding transgender individuals. It’s about a year of testosterone blockers and hormone replacement therapy, and then you’re good to go to compete on the women’s team.”

  Scanlan joins a growing chorus of female athletes – and specifically swimmers – speaking out against having to compete against biological men in their sport. 

  Recall, back in April 2023, former U of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was assaulted by a pro-trans crowd at a speech at San Francisco State University after speaking up about having to compete against (and share a locker room with) biological males. 

  

  Her husband, Louis Barker, said she had to be barricaded in a room for nearly three hours to protect herself after. 

  He said: “She told me she was hit multiple times by a guy in a dress. I was shaking. It made me that mad. It makes me sick to feel so helpless about it. She was under police protection and was still hit by a man wearing a dress.”

  Gaines wrote on Twitter after the incident: “The prisoners are running the asylum at SFSU…I was ambushed and physically hit twice by a man. This is proof that women need sex-protected spaces. Still only further assures me I’m doing something right. When they want you silent, speak louder.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 20:40

• First Ever US Bill To Counter Beijing’s Forced Organ Harvesting Signed Into Law In Texas
  First Ever US Bill To Counter Beijing’s Forced Organ Harvesting Signed Into Law In Texas

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

  Texas has signed into law a bipartisan bill to combat the Chinese regime’s criminal practice of forced organ harvesting, making it the first U.S. state to counter the abuse through legal means.

  

  Under SB 1040, signed by state Gov. Greg Abbott on June 18 and taking force on Sept. 1, it will be illegal for health insurance providers to fund organ transplants originating from China or any other country known to have involvement in the practice of forced organ harvesting. The bill had passed unanimously through both the state’s legislative chambers last month.

  Under the Chinese regime’s watch, the practice of forcibly harvesting vital organs from living individuals for profit has grown into a flourishing industry, and has added to the abuse of vulnerable groups such as detained adherents of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, a faith group with tens of millions of following that has faced Beijing’s relentless persecution campaign since 1999.

  State Rep. Tom Oliverson, a primary sponsor of the bill, said he thanked Governor Abbott for “allowing Texas to be the first to take a strong stand against the immoral and detestable practice of forced organ donations in China.”

  “With this law we send a strong message to Beijing that all human life is precious and worthy of protection,” he told The Epoch Times.

  Oliverson recalled meeting with Falun Gong practitioners years ago, who showed him websites of hospitals in China advertising to the world that live donors were standing by as the country’s medical sector looked to attract organ transplant tourists.

  “I was just horrified. Just absolutely, unbelievably horrified,” he said in an interview. While Oliverson has worked to advocate for organ transplantation ethics to make sure that people are voluntary donors here in the United States, he said he has “never seen a case where somebody who was conscious, awake, and able to sign a consent on their own but did not wish to be an organ donor was being forced to be an organ donor.”

  “That just sounded like something out of a movie,” he said.

  

  Oliverson has since worked on several other measures, including SCR 3, a resolution unanimously adopted in April 2021 to condemn Beijing’s “vile practice of forcibly removing human organs for transplant.” In March, he co-introduced TX HB3914, a bill aiming to ban the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, the state’s cancer research funder, from giving grant money to an applicant who may source an organ from a hospital in China.

  To Oliverson, stopping health insurers from putting their funding behind China-sourced organs is key in shutting off such non-consensual organ transplant tourism. Having organ transplant surgery is so expensive that an overwhelming majority of Americans rely on health insurance to do so.

  The idea, he said, is to “basically choke off the ability” for someone to get paid for participating in the abuse in China or anywhere else in the world.

  “The best way to be successful in terms of shutting it off is to make it not economically successful for a country that doesn’t view human beings as human beings, but obviously sees them as a source of revenue,” he said.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 20:20

• Disney Chief Diversity Officer Latondra Newton Quits After Pair Of Box Office Bombs
  Disney Chief Diversity Officer Latondra Newton Quits After Pair Of Box Office Bombs

  Yes, we are at that point in the identity politics/DEI cycle where companies – in addition to CEOs, COOs, CIOs, and so on – now have Chief Diversity Officers; and no, that paragon of youthful grooming, Disney, no longer has one. That’s because the chief diversity officer and senior vice president of Disney, Latondra Newton, is leaving her role after more than six years, Deadline reported citing an internal memo.

  

  Coleman wrote that Newton “decided to leave The Walt Disney Company to pursue other endeavors.” Newton plans to join the corporate board of another company and focus on the creative company she owns. It wasn’t clear if she would hire Alissa Heinerscheid, best known for single handedly destroying Bud Light and Tranheuser Busch with her Dylan Mulvaney influencer campaign.

  Newton had, since 2017, led Disney’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, coordinating with various teams to produce entertainment “that reflects a global audience and sustains a welcoming and inclusive workplace for everyone,” as per a profile on the company’s website.

  Her time at Disney included co-signing with Bob Iger and Bob Chapek the May 2020 memo to Disney staff in the wake of the George Floyd killing, titled “Resolve in the Time of Unrest.” In it, the trio pledged “to use our compassion, our creative ideas and our collective sense of humanity to ensure we are fostering a culture that acknowledges our people’s feelings and their pain. We also realize that now more than ever is the time for us all to further strengthen our commitment to diversity and inclusion everywhere.”

  Before Disney, Newton was Group Vice President, Social Innovation and Chief Diversity Officer. Toyota Motor North America, Inc. and Chief Program Officer, Toyota Mobility Foundation, Toyota Motor Corporation. She began her career at Toyota in 1991.

  Newton’s departure follows two high-profile ultra-woke box office bombs. “The Little Mermaid,” which has been a box office failure after its release last month, featured Black American singer Halle Bailey as Princess Ariel, highlighting the woke company’s desperate attempts to rewrite history. The movie needs to gross over $560 million to reach its production and marketing threshold.

  This was followed by an even more catastrophic release of the Disney Pixar movie Elemental that features a non-binary character using they/them pronouns; The production, which also features characters ‘tackling’ racism and xenophobia, ranks as one of the lowest box office debuts for a Pixar movie ever. They spent around $200 million making it. It opened with a $29.5 million recoup.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 20:00

• House Votes To Censure Adam Schiff
  House Votes To Censure Adam Schiff

  It has not  been a good day for the Congressman from California.

  First he was ‘owned’ by John Durham, while the democrat attempted a character assassination, and now the House of Representatives voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on June 21, a week after an initial resolution to do so was tabled.

  

  The tally was 213-209. Six voted “present.”

  Adam Schiff is officially the 26th member of Congress to be censured in American history!

  The Democrats are a classy bunch. They kept interrupting McCarthy as he tried to read the resolution.

  How these people can defend Schiff is beyond me… pic.twitter.com/kzk3wPV7M1

  — Jane Public (@JanePublic55) June 21, 2023

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  Democrats cheered “Adam, Adam, Adam” in deferrence to his ‘sacrifice’? Who knows…

  House Democrats go berserk, interrupting Speaker McCarthy numerous times as he attempts to read the resolution censure to Rep. Schiff, chanting “Shame!”

  McCarthy fed up reminds Democrats, “I have all night.” pic.twitter.com/81uPBCOY94

  — Mona Salama  (@ByMonaSalama) June 21, 2023

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  The resolution, introduced by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), blasts Schiff for allegedly perpetuating misinformation against former President Donald Trump.

  #WATCH | Rep. Anna Paulina Luna @repluna about Rep. Adam Schiff censure bill: pic.twitter.com/O78sl0091f

  — VOZ (@Voz_US) June 21, 2023

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  With the passing of the resolution, Schiff has been referred to the House Ethics Committee for investigation.

  As Jackson Richman reports via The Epoch Times, the resolution was privileged and therefore triggered a House vote. In last week’s vote, 20 Republicans joined 205 Democrats to table the initial resolution.

  The revised resolution was similar to the initial one, with the notable difference being that it did not have a $16 million fine for Schiff should he be held accountable by the House Ethics Committee for his alleged “falsehoods, misrepresentations, and abuses of sensitive information.”

  The new resolution, like the tabled one, condemns Schiff, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for perpetuating the notion there was collusion between former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. That was debunked by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2019, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz later the same year, and special counsel John Durham in May. The $16 million fine is half of the taxpayer cost of the Mueller probe.

  Durham testified on June 20 at a closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence Committee and also gave evidence in a public hearing today in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

  Additionally, the new resolution did not state that “Schiff used his position and access to sensitive information to instigate a fraudulently based investigation, which he then used to amass political gain and fundraising dollars.”

  House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave credence on June 15 to the 20 House Republicans that joined Democrats in tabling the initial resolution.

  “I think everybody knows my thoughts of Adam Schiff,” McCarthy told The Epoch Times.

  “That’s why I removed him from [the House Intelligence Committee]. … You have a number of members on principle that sat and argued for the last four years with President [Donald] Trump that you had to have due process and voted that way. And I think a number of them believe that they should [have] gone to [the House Ethics Committee] first.”

  Ahead of the vote on the revised resolution, Schiff appeared defiant on the House floor.

  “To my Republican colleagues who introduced this resolution, I thank you. You honor me with your enmity. You flatter me with this falsehood,” he said.

  “You who are the authors of the Big Lie about the last election must condemn the truth-tellers and I stand proudly before you. Your words tell me I have been effective in the defense of our democracy and I am grateful,” continued Schiff. “And yet this false and defamatory resolution comes at a considerable cost to the country and to the Congress.”

  Following the vote on the revised censure resolution, McCarthy, who has expressed contempt toward his fellow Californian, called Schiff to the well of the House floor that is below the dais where the clerks and speaker preside.

  “Will the gentleman from California present himself in the well? By its adoption of House Resolution 521, the House has resolved that Representative Adam Schiff be censured,” said McCarthy.

  “That Representative Adam Schiff forthwith present himself in the well of the House for the pronouncement of censure,” said McCarthy after Schiff went to the well.

  “That Representative Adam Schiff be censured with the public reading of this resolution by the Speaker.”

  With a strike of the gavel, McCarthy concluded the censure.

  In interviews on June 20 with The Epoch Times, Republicans were in favor while Democrats expressed opposition to the censure resolution.

  “This guy’s for however many years been walking out of classified briefings and saying to the press, ‘I heard that President Trump, I was told that President Trump did this, this, this, this or this,’” said Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), referring to Schiff.

  “So one, if members of Congress had to fill out an SF-86, like every other normal American to get a security clearance, he would have his denied, revoked, whatever, in about 10 seconds.”

  An SF-86 is the application to obtain a security clearance.

  “And so I think that’s well worth censuring, given that it’s a direct violation of his duties to keep it simply on that,” said Mast.

  “So I could say a lot about the guy. None of it nice.”

  Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) said Schiff “lied to the American people … for years. He was extremely destructive, and I believe that he needs to be held accountable.”

  But Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) remarked that the censure would be “in-kind contributions” to Schiff’s 2024 Senate campaign to succeed retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

  Also coming to her fellow Californian’s defense, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), said Schiff “has done good work honorably” and that “the effort to try and change a policy dispute into some kind of sanction is unprecedented and unwise.”

  Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) stated simply, “I believe that good behavior should be rewarded and bad behavior should be censured.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 19:42

• Raytheon CEO Explains Why China Has US Military By The Balls
  Raytheon CEO Explains Why China Has US Military By The Balls

  Raytheon Chief Executive Greg Hayes admitted last week that Beijing effectively has the US military’s supply chain by the balls thanks to its reliance on rare earths and other materials which come from, or are processed in, China.

  

  According to Hayes, Raytheon has “several thousand suppliers in China,” because of which “decoupling … is impossible.“

  “We can de-risk but not decouple,” he told the Financial Times, adding that he thinks this is the case “for everybody.”

  “Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative,” Hayes continued, adding “If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries.”

  Hayes’ comments underline the difficulties facing western manufacturers amid growing friction between China and the US and its allies.

  Beijing in February imposed new sanctions on both Raytheon and US defence peer Lockheed Martin for supplying weapons to Taiwan. Hayes has also been placed under sanctions. 

  The sanctions have had little commercial impact as the groups are not allowed to sell military equipment to China. Raytheon, however, has a substantial commercial aerospace business in the country through its engine subsidiary, Pratt & Whitney, and aviation systems and cabin equipment specialist Collins Aerospace. It has about 2,000 direct employees in China. -FT

  Hayes said that the company is looking “to take some of the most critical components and have second sources but we are not in a position to pull out of China the way we did out of Russia.“

  That said, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand makes a solid point – that this makes war with China “less likely.”

  This is hilarious. The boss of Raytheon, one of the US top weapons manufacturers, says the company has “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling . . . is impossible”.

  We need China to fight China… Actually good news, makes war less likely.https://t.co/HngUrIBwAv

  — Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) June 21, 2023

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  Except that they have all the leverage and we have have Joe Biden.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 19:20

• LGBT Schoolbooks For Kindergarten, Elementary Students At Center Of Parents' Lawsuit
  LGBT Schoolbooks For Kindergarten, Elementary Students At Center Of Parents’ Lawsuit

  Authored by Ross Muscato via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  “Pride Puppy!” is one of the more than 20 books with an LGBT theme that the largest school district in Maryland approved, in the fall of 2021, for instruction of students in kindergarten through fourth grade. 

  

  The 32-page illustrated storybook–which the publisher lists as appropriate for 3- to 5-year-olds, and grades preschool through kindergarten, tells the story of a family outing to an LGBT pride parade where the family’s dog gets lost … and thankfully found.  

  At the end of the book, there is an exercise in which students match images on the pages to a glossary of words and terms, among them “intersex,” “[drag] king,” “[drag] queen,” “leather,” and “lip ring.” 

  Another storybook, “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope,” is also part of the Montgomery County Public Schools LGBTQ+ curriculum. The book, recommended for ages 4 to 8, tells the story of Penelope, born a girl, but feeling that she is really a boy.  

  Early in the book, Penelope’s older brother, called Big Brother, is having trouble understanding his sibling’s transgenderism. “This doesn’t make sense,” he says.  “You can’t become a boy.  You have to be born one.” And then Penelope and Big Brother’s mother embraces them both and whispers: “Not everything needs to make sense. This is about love.” 

  Parents Demand a Say

  “Pride Puppy!” and “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope,” and other “Pride” storybooks, and the lessons that make up the LGBT curriculum for kindergarten and elementary school students in Montgomery County, are at the center of a lawsuit brought by a group of parents against the Montgomery County Board of Education. 

  The parents who are the lead plaintiffs include Muslims, Catholics, and a Ukrainian Orthodox.

  In the lawsuit, Mahmoud v. McKnight—filed on May 23 in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland—the petitioners aren’t contesting the texts or the lessons. 

  What the plaintiffs seek is for parent “opt-out” rights—that have previously been honored by the Montgomery County public school system and are law in Maryland and 31 other states—be protected. Parents want their rights upheld to be notified of lessons and materials that may be in conflict with or be offensive to the religious beliefs of their families, and then choose whether or not their child will read or be exposed to related media and teachings. 

  The Montgomery County Board of Education though has chosen not to notify parents in advance of the curriculum and lesson plans, and not to avail parents the opportunity to opt their children out of certain lessons, the lawsuit alleges. 

  Representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit is the powerhouse religious liberty law group Becket.

  “Here we have a religiously diverse group of parents, different faith traditions, who are united around what is a core American principle–which is the right of parents to direct their children’s religious upbringing,” William Haun, senior counsel for Becket, told The Epoch Times.  

  “These parents are citizens of Montgomery County, and they, like all other parents in Montgomery County who send their children to Montgomery County Public Schools, have had the ability historically to get advance notice and opt their children out of any kind of instruction that would burden their ability to hand on their religious beliefs to their children.”

  Haun said that the Montgomery County Public Schools did not explain why, after the Pride storybooks were added to the curriculum, the parental opt-out right was removed and would not be permitted. 

  “The Pride books start as early as pre-K and present one-sided issues around gender ideology and gender transitioning and sexual orientation,” said Haun. “And now going forward the parents aren’t allowed to opt out their children.”

  He cited the book, “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope,” which is read to 3rd graders in Montgomery County Public Schools.

  “Teachers are directed, when they’re discussing the book in class, if a child were to say, I thought, if you’re born a boy, you’re a boy; if you’re born a girl, you’re a girl. The county suggests that teachers say that language comes out as hurtful, and that when a child is born, parents and doctors are just taking a guess about whether you’re a boy or a girl,” Haun said. 

  “It’s only based on how you feel.” 

  The Epoch Times has reached out to the Montgomery County Public Schools and the authors and publishers of “Pride Puppy!” and “Born Ready” for comment.  

  Controversy Across America

  The lawsuit filed against the Montgomery Board of Education comes during a time of heightened national controversy and discussion involving and related to LGBT-themed books in public schools and in the children’s section of libraries. 

  Liberals and progressives argue that LGBT lessons and subject matter in education are needed and a long time in coming. They say it is appropriate to teach and familiarize kids with LBGTQ+ topics, for it fosters understanding and acceptance at an early age, and also helps young people as they deal with their own sexuality and gender identity. 

  Traditional and conservative factions, however, regard a considerable portion of the LGBT school syllabus and curriculum as a targeted agenda of indoctrination of the young and impressionable that overrides values and virtues that hold together and undergird healthy family and community, while exposing children to issues of sexuality before they are psychologically and emotionally ready. 

  Each side accuses the other of overreach.

  Lawsuits, legal action, book bans and restrictions, and upset parents abound. 

  Six days prior to the suit being filed against the Montgomery School Board, a Florida public school district found itself served with a suit charging it with suppression of free speech for banning and restricting access to books in its libraries.  

  Plaintiffs in the suit are two parents of students in the district, the publisher Penguin House; five authors who each had a book banned or placed on restricted access; and PEN, the national member-based nonprofit group that represents writers and advocates for free speech. The defendants are the Escambia County School District and the Escambia County School Board.

  At a public school board meeting in Laramie, Wyoming, on June 5, concerned parents delivered the type of emotional and angry testimony that has been on display at open school committees and school board meetings across America. 

  Several parents told the Laramie County School District 1 Board of Trustees that its opt-out policy and procedure intended to prevent children access to certain books was ineffective. Parents explained that their kids still accessed and were exposed to books that the parents had selected as those that should not be available to the children.

  “I’ve been a mother of four children in this district since 2007,” said Patricia McCoy. “I am here tonight to speak on behalf of myself and many other parents who not only disagree with our current opt-out policy but are extremely upset that our children are not being protected and instead are being sexualized, indoctrinated.”

  McCoy continued and caused a stir when she read a sexually explicit passage from a book that she said was one of the books recommended for her 14-year-old daughter.

  As McCoy recited the vulgar passage, a member of the school board interjected, “Mam.”

  McCoy shot back: “Oh, is that not appropriate?” 

  “It’s not appropriate,” said the board member.

  McCoy then told the board that its “opt-out” policy was not working, and not being honored and observed.

  “I fill out your opt-out forms every single year, and it’s a joke—they don’t get followed. They don’t get followed at all. People are talking to my children when it specifically says not to.

  “You don’t want us to stand here and read this to you because it’s going to make you uncomfortable to hear it. But our kids have access to it every time they walk in the library. It’s disgusting, it’s disrespectful, and I hope, hope, that you are going to protect our children.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 19:00

• The Atlantic Is On Fire
  The Atlantic Is On Fire

  Parts of the Atlantic Ocean are experiencing an “exceptional” marine heatwave, sparking concerns about marine life impacts off the coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland, while scientists — particularly ones who monitor hurricanes are worried about an active season in the tropics. 

  Meteorologist Colin McCarthy tweeted, “We are witnessing one of the most extreme marine heatwave events ever recorded in modern history.” He said a 4,000-mile-long stretch of superheated water extends from the coastal waters off of West Africa to the coastal waters just south of Iceland. 

  A ~4,000 mile long stretch of severe marine heatwave conditions extends all the way from the coastal waters off of West Africa to the coastal waters just south of Iceland.

  We are witnessing one of the most extreme marine heatwave events ever recorded in modern history. pic.twitter.com/OExUnItRI7

  — Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) June 19, 2023

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

  Parts of the North Sea are experiencing the highest temperatures in decades. Some areas are under category four marine heat wave – defined as “extreme,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Water temperatures in some areas are 9 Fahrenheit above average levels for this time of year. 

  ‘Beyond extreme’ by definition.

  Ireland and the British Isles are at the epicentre of a major marine heatwave. We have not seen the North Atlantic look like this in modern records.

  Marine heatwaves are categorised from 1 to 5. There are hotspots hitting category 5. pic.twitter.com/2lle3hrsGv

  — Scott Duncan (@ScottDuncanWX) June 19, 2023

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

  “The eastern Atlantic, from Iceland down to the tropics, is much warmer than average. But areas around parts of north-western Europe, including parts of the UK, have among some of the highest sea-surface temperatures relative to average,” Stephen Belcher, the Met Office’s chief scientist, said in a statement.

  Met Office Chief Scientist Professor Stephen Belcher said, “May 2023 has seen the highest temperatures of any May since 1850.”

  The heatwave is “very exceptional,” Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, told CNN. He said it’s “currently the strongest on Earth.”

  Richard Unsworth, an associate professor of biosciences at Swansea University in the UK, said the Atlantic heatwave is “totally unprecedented.” 

  Scientists alarmingly indicate that superheated water might adversely affect marine life because warm water holds less oxygen. 

  Forecasters said the abnormally hot waters in the tropical area of the Atlantic could already be responsible for two disturbances heading towards the Caribbean Sea. 

  

  Some areas in the Atlantic have recorded temperatures only seen during peak hurricane season in September, indicating this could be a long hot summer ahead. 

  Meteorologist Ben Noll said these much warmer than average waters in the topics are happening in an area known to be a “breeding ground for hurricanes.” 

  This map highlights (🟡) where current sea surface temperatures are warmer than they would typically be during *September*!

  In other words, yellow areas indicate where the sea is as warm right now as it would normally* be in three months time!

  It includes large swaths of the… pic.twitter.com/kkd0GS5SJG

  — Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) June 17, 2023

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

  “The Atlantic is definitely on fire,” Micheal Fischer, an assistant scientist with the University of Miami-NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, told Miami Herald. 

  There could be several causes for rising sea surface temperatures, with the weather phenomenon El Niño underway that tends to have a warming effect around certain parts of the world. Some have also said the lack of dust from the Sahara, which usually cools parts of the Atlantic by reflecting sunlight. 

  Two consequences of the marine heatwave in the Atlantic could be devastating marine wildlife on the coasts of Europe and increased tropical disturbances in the North American region. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 18:40

• Pentagon Paying The Price For Going 'Woke'
  Pentagon Paying The Price For Going ‘Woke’

  Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The directive came from the top: A memo from the U.S. secretary of defense ordering Pentagon leaders and the commanders of the six military branches to review and recommend changes to “policies, programs, and processes that may negatively affect equal opportunity, diversity, and inclusion for all our people.”

  

  A month later, the secretary issued a second memo, titled, ‘Immediate Actions to Address Diversity, Inclusion, and Equal Opportunity in the Military Services,’ outlining a “three-pronged approach” for implementing those recommendations.

  The secretary called for reviews to ensure diversity in promotions, prohibit pregnancy-based discrimination, bias awareness, “bystander intervention in response to improper remarks or other communications made by peers or superiors,” and a Workplace and Equal Opportunity survey to “include metrics concerning harassment and discrimination, extremist groups and activities.”

  The Secretary was Mark Esper. The President was Donald Trump. It was the pandemic summer of 2020 and there was violence on the streets in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

  As Esper—who Trump would later fire via a November Tweet—was installing expanded focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training in the armed forces during the summer of 2020, the Democrat-controlled House and split Senate were deliberating the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (FY21 NDAA), the annual defense budget.

  Congress incorporated Esper’s initiatives into the spending plan, adding a requirement for the Department of Defense (DOD) to establish a “Chief Diversity Officer” and “Senior Advisors for Diversity and Inclusion” within each branch to advise on “training in diversity dynamics and … leading diverse groups effectively.” The NDAA also called for renaming military bases bearing the names of Confederate generals.

  The Trump administration, meanwhile, was objecting to DEI-related training being imposed on all federal employees, not just uniformed military. A September 2020 directive from the Office of Personnel Management required agencies to identify any training on topics such as “critical race theory” or “white privilege.”

  Trump that same month issued an executive order prohibiting federal funding for training on “divisive concepts” with specific reference to prohibiting teaching, instructing, or training on these concepts within the uniformed services. Ensuing OPM guidance required that it approve all such training programs “before being used.”

  Nevertheless, Congress adopted the FY21 NDAA encoding the enhanced DEI training into statute. Outgoing President Trump vetoed the defense budget, citing a host of objections, including the removal of Confederate generals’ names from military bases.

  In their final act of 2020, the House and Senate overrode Trump’s veto in supermajority votes and adopted the defense budget. It went into effect Jan. 1, 2021—three months after the fiscal year began and three weeks before President Joe Biden would enter the Oval Office.

  On Jan. 20, 2021, the day he was inaugurated, Biden issued an executive order revoking Trump’s September 2022 directive and lifting its restrictions on DEI-related training in the military.

  In June 2021, Biden issued another executive order to “enable Federal employees [including DOD], managers, and leaders to have knowledge of systemic and institutional racism and bias against underserved communities, be supported in building skillsets to promote respectful and inclusive workplaces and eliminate workplace harassment, have knowledge of agency accessibility practices, and have increased understanding of implicit and unconscious bias.”

  Conservatives had argued for years that DEI training, as it was being implemented in the military, was a misguided attempt to impose political correctness with little relevance in the ranks and was, in fact, hurting morale and exacerbating tensions, potentially degrading force readiness.

  With Democrats in control of the House and the Senate knotted at 50-50, those 2021-22 objections got nowhere. DEI proponents, largely progressives, argued the military has always been in the forefront of societal change, and that the new programs were merely updates of 1971 programs that were last addressed in 1997.

  Conservatives were further agitated when Biden’s newly appointed Secretary of Defense, former U.S. Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, ordered a 60-day stand down “to address extremism in the ranks” in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol protest.

  Two factors have changed the tenor of the debate in 2023—Republicans regained a narrow majority in the House in the 2022 midterms and the military is experiencing its most significant recruiting shortfalls in the half-century history of the all-volunteer force.

  

  Recruiting Shortfalls Give GOP a DEI Wedge

  Only the Marine Corps and newly created Space Force met recruiting goals in 2022 while the three largest branches fell short, or marginally attained reconfigured goals.

  The Pentagon projects that trend will continue in 2023 in what it calls the “most challenging recruiting environment in the 50 years of the all-volunteer force,” primarily because of a strong job market and quality-of-life issues.

  The Army missed its 2022 recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, or 25 percent of its target, leaving the nation’s largest military force 7 percent smaller than it was two years ago.

  The Navy fell shy even after lowering its recruiting quota, increasing its oldest enlistment age to 41 from 39, and relaxing other standards, including for those with criminal backgrounds.

  The Air Force met 2022 goals but anticipates missing its manpower objectives for the first time since 1999 by as much as 10 percent in 2023.

  The Army estimates it will fall at least 20,000 soldiers short of its ideal 485,000 active-duty force in 2023. It has lowered its goal to 452,000.

  Even military academies are seeing shortfalls. Applications to attend the Air Force Academy dropped by 28 percent for the class of 2026, the Naval Academy by 20 percent, and West Point by 10 percent.

  In addition to a strong job market and perceived quality-of-life issues, the DOD cites two other factors aggravating recruitment efforts.

  Only 23 percent of 17-to-24-year-old Americans are eligible, or capable, of serving because of obesity, low test scores, criminal records, and behavioral health issues, the Pentagon states.

  Plus, it notes, surveys show only 9 percent of the nation’s military-age population has “a propensity to serve” in public service, including the armed forces, underscoring a growing “civilian and military cultural divide” where more than 80 percent of those now serving in the military come from families of military veterans.

  During congressional hearings through winter and spring, senior military leaders said the recruitment shortfalls follow a historic pattern when competition from the private sector for workers increases.

  In a May 11 hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Defense Subcommittee, Austin said “headwinds” fostered by “two years of Covid” are also impairing recruitment.

  “It is not the first time we have seen challenges in recruiting,” he said, noting he was a recruiter himself at one point in his Army career. “I am optimistic” that the military will get out of “this trough” and attract the people needed to fill its lower ranks again soon.

  Congressional Republicans, while acknowledging those claims, say the DOD is purposely overlooking another reason some young Americans, especially constituencies that traditionally have filled the all-volunteer ranks, are not signing up: the Biden administration’s imposition of mandatory expanded DEI training and other “woke” programs, such as support for transgender members.

  “Asking young Americans to put their lives on the line for a nation they are required to acknowledge is inherently racist” is not a good recruitment strategy, Heritage Foundation Center for National Defense Director Thomas Spoehr told The Epoch Times.

  Right now, the former Army lieutenant general said, “military leaders will have to fight a perception of political indoctrination” to meet recruitment quotas.

  Spoehr said “direct ‘cause-and-effect’ studies on the impact of woke policies such as these do not exist,” but suggested “common sense” dictates they are hurting recruiting.

  “Is anyone surprised that potential recruits—of whom many come from rural or poor areas of the country—don’t want to spend their time being lectured about white privilege?” he asked.

  

  The Retention Rebuttal

  Pentagon leaders and branch brass have refuted GOP claims regarding DEI’s alleged influence on recruiting and readiness by stating there is no anecdotal or statistical evidence to support the contention.

  During more than four months of hearings, various DOD officials also blunted House Republicans’ claims by touting highest-ever military retention rates; if DEI was such an onerous issue, they insist, those who’ve been subjected to the training wouldn’t be reenlisting at three times the rate of decades ago.

  Spoehr said the key stat not detailed is how many completing a first enlistment are signing on for another. Otherwise, it’s no surprise that those who’ve chosen to make a career in the military are making a career in the military.

  “People in the military are not free agents,” he said, noting they often have car loans, mortgages, children in school like everyone else. “To some degree, they are invested already in service, in their pension plans. They’re not at complete liberty to leave. They will leave when they can. I do not take a lot of stock in retention” arguments.

  When retention outpaces recruitment, Spoehr warned, it is indicative of things “getting out of whack” with a force that “gets older, gets more costly. The military is a pyramid. You need a lot of junior people.”

  Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) also dismissed the Pentagon’s defense of DEI by citing retention. Just as the DOD claims there is no data to support claims that DEI is hurting recruiting, it is avoiding asking questions about the programs in surveys canvassing prospective recruits about motivations to join or not join.

  For instance, he told The Epoch Times, he and others have asked the Navy if “they regularly collect data on why people are not enlisting? And, why they are not reenlisting? And, they don’t have it. Navy leadership may have their own opinions, their narratives” that no data could change.

  A second reason, Waltz said, is “a so-so economy … have you seen the bonuses they are offering?”

  Overwhelming Anecdotal Evidence

  The first Green Beret ever elected to the House, Waltz is a West Point graduate and 26-year Army combat veteran who continues to serve as a colonel in the Florida National Guard.

  He emphatically refutes the Pentagon’s contention that there isn’t ample anecdotal evidence that DEI is depressing recruitment.

  “One of the things that I hope you can impart,” he told The Epoch Times, “is this is not an issue that a bunch of Republican lawmakers are making up or exacerbating for political reasons. This is coming from the ranks.”

  For instance, Waltz said, “I would never have known the Air Force suggest to cadets that they shouldn’t say ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ or ‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend.’ I would not have known that West Point was asking cadets to discuss their ‘white rage.’ This is coming from the service members.”

  And he knows contacting a congressional representative about perceived injustices is frowned upon. “I would have been petrified as a cadet to go to a congressman” with complaints, Waltz said. “They feel they have no avenues to express discomfort.”

  Spoehr “was not aware” of DEI as a recruiting and readiness issue until he saw a 2021 Gallup poll “detecting this big drop in loss of confidence in the U.S. military” that cited “the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, DEI programs, and support for transgenders to enter without restrictions.”

  That, he said, was followed by an October 2022 analysis that maintained “wokeism” was the “chief worry of grizzled American veterans today.”

  Spoehr wrote in an American Heritage column that month that veterans were alarmed by “the weakening of [the military’s] fabric by radical progressive (or ‘woke’) policies being imposed, not by a rising generation of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness.”

  During a House Oversight Committee March 28 subcommittee hearing, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) said people in southern states, always a mainstay in military recruiting, are not happy with the “‘wokeism’ permeating the Pentagon.”

  “Southern families, conservative families, we are not going to encourage our young men and women to join the military and endure this stuff,” he said. “In society, ‘woke’ is a social discussion but in the military, ‘woke’ is weak—and that is the problem.”

  The Pentagon refuses to see this disconnect, Higgins said. He waved printouts of two Epoch Times articles documenting how, according to the Navy and Marine Corps, three of its biggest challenges are “climate instability, COVID’s ongoing impact, strengthening a naval culture of inclusiveness and respect.”

  “What’s happening now is families are holding our youngsters back. Families are saying, ‘Don’t join!’” he said.

  The nation’s military leadership is a “laughingstock,” Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Texas) said during the hearing. “The administration’s intent in clear—cleanse the military of conservatives, and the consequences are devastating.”

  “The U.S. Army has fallen 15,000 soldiers short of its recruitment goal this year,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in a tweet. “Maybe we ought to stop imposing vaccine mandates, preferred pronouns, and ‘woke’ education training on them. Just a thought.”

  A 2021 Military Family Advisory Network (MFAN) survey of more than 8,600 military families revealed those now serving were less likely to recommend their children enlist. Quality of life was the top-cited concern. MFAN’s survey do not ask questions about politics.

  But in testimony before Congress, Independent Women’s Forum Senior Fellow Dr. Meaghan Mobbs said the MFAN survey confirms what her group is hearing from veterans encouraging family members not to follow in their footsteps.

  “Such a precipitous drop in such a short period of time is alarming,” she said, attributing that decline to DEI and ‘wokeism.’ “Unfortunately, it will be many years before the full effect of such a decrease will be known, and it will take at least a generation to fix.”

  

  The Warrior Act

  Critics maintain the Biden Era Pentagon is also relying on the fact that, as most veterans will recount, there’s always some form of “baloney”—not their most commonly-used ‘b’ word—that soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardians, and Marines must endure during their time in the military.

  Sure, Waltz said, it’s “just more nonsense, nothing new. That is what the services do. ‘Really, this is not that many hours, it’s a big picture thing.’”

  But DEI is not about fostering awareness and respect for each other, he said, it’s an indoctrination of the best of America’s youth.

  “When you are imposing this stuff on very young 18- and 19-year-olds, it has an impact over time,” he said.

  Waltz has filed a bill, the ‘Working to Address Recruiting and Retention to Improve Our Readiness (Warrior) Act,’ that he says will “provide much-needed reforms to prevent the Biden administration from further politicizing the Department of Defense and improve military readiness.”

  The bill would require the DOD to institute “a hiring freeze of Equal Opportunity and Equal Employment Opportunity personnel at a ratio of 1:2,000 EO/EEO staff to uniformed service members.”

  It would require the DOD to audit DEI programs “that have caused greater division within the force. These programs are diverting focus and resources away from lethality and readiness against our potential adversaries.”

  The audit will require the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, listing all FY22 DEI programs and expenses by Dec. 1.

  “The report shall include a description of the purpose of the program and how many man-hours were spent participating in the program, billets and personnel (both civilian and uniformed) dedicated to each program, and the total costs associated with each program,” the bill states.

  In the interim, the bill would bar “the use of appropriations to fund DOD race-conscious selections, assignments, accessions, or promotions,” prohibit “the instruction or propagation of critical theories, such as critical race theory as part of military training or at the service academies,” ban “the use of non-merit-based criteria in the consideration for selection for the military service academies,” and suspend “the use of appropriated funds to investigate extremism in the military.”

  The bill would require “a cost/benefit analysis be submitted to Congress before funds are appropriated … that affirms the proposed policies or programs will improve war-fighting capabilities and there is no less expensive alternative available.”

  Waltz’s proposed ‘Warrior Act’ seeks a more complete audit of DEI programs than those the Pentagon has provided in response to Republican requests since 2021.

  In response to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and 11 other GOP senators, a 2022 letter from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Army Gen. Mark Milley estimated the armed forces dedicated nearly 6 million hours and about $1 million in additional expenses to DEI training sessions in 2021.

  “This averages to just over 2 hours per Service member in a total force of 2.46 million members and is comparable to other Joint Force periodic training requirements,” Milley wrote in the letter.

  The GOP senators said they were “alarmed” by the data and accused Biden of being “more focused” on enacting a woke agenda in the military than on confronting America’s adversaries.

  Their math took the Pentagon estimate and factored in the less than 100 documented cases of “extremism” reported during the span, calculating that 58,000 hours of DOD manpower hours were expended in training for every instance.

  During the March 28 hearing before House Oversight & Accountability Committee’s National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, Veterans on Duty, Inc. Chair Jeremy Hunt testified that the Pentagon’s DEI program “subjects some service members to 11-week resident DEI training classes—despite the military’s history of leading the fight against discrimination.”

  Hunt, a West Point graduate and former Army officer who is black, said his alma mater now “lectures cadets about ‘addressing whiteness,’ while the Air Force Academy has started the bizarre practice of appointing cadet DEI officials.”

  He said the army spent $114 million on DEI in 2022 and “in some cases we are paying these ‘DEI bureaucrats’ $200,000 a year” despite there being “no data to determine if it actually works, which we know it doesn’t, and whether there was any type of underlying data that necessitates the dramatic increases of this programs.”

  Spoehr said he believes Waltz’s bill will gain traction and be adopted because Democrats, even the progressives who lobby for DEI, are beginning to realize it could be affecting recruitment.

  “I do, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Just the other day, Lloyd Austin decreed there would be no more drag queen shows on military installations. That came as a  surprise to me. I thought they were heading down the path that we’re going to have drag queen story hour at the installation library.”

  Spoehr said there is bipartisan concern about “military recruiting and readiness in the context of countering China. People are taking this seriously. [Waltz’s] bill, I can see it succeeding.”

  

  Bunch Of ‘Baloney’

  Retired Navy Capt. Frederick J. Passman, Continental Commander of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS), said mere presence in the military teaches people to “make sure that we respect various opinions.”

  Stressing he was not speaking on behalf of the NOUS, which he emphasized is “apolitical and nonpartisan,” Passman told The Epoch Times that under current DEI protocols, “I feel very grateful for having been in when I was and to have served in the time that I did.”

  He regards DEI training as “rocks and shoals” that place “too much focus on things that don’t have anything to do with the accomplishment of the mission. It is taking time taking away from mission accomplishment.”

  A warship drilling to fight—and to survive a fight—will foster “good teamwork” and doing so is “part and parcel … of a successful command,” he said.

  “The break-way times for specific types of training evolutions that aren’t related to mission accomplishment creates confusion and distractions and is counter-productive,” Passman said, noting what especially “bothers me” is “gender identification. Superiors being called on the carpet because they didn’t use the proper pronoun for a subordinate? That is unacceptable.”

  And besides, he said, in the terms of the Navy, it already has a cadre of skilled “attitude adjustment” specialists—the chiefs, the veteran enlisted non-commissioned officers who are the lifeblood of every ship, every squadron, every fleet.

  “The best solution is what has always worked. Let the chiefs administer ‘attitude adjustment training,’” Passman said. “Back in the day, you got ‘sea lawyers’ who end up mysteriously ‘tripping down the ladder to the boatswain’s locker.’ After a few years, they become excellent sailors. That is considered totally unacceptable these days.”

  Paul Gagne of the Massachusetts NOUS, a retired chief who administered plenty of on-the-job “attitude adjustment” training during his Navy career, said the whole DEI conversation is a bunch of “baloney.”

  “I’m an old chief raised by old chiefs. I’m not going to sugarcoat this: The reality is the people you need to recruit are going to turn away,” he told The Epoch Times.

  He also pointed a broadside to GOP politicians who may also need some “attitude adjustment.”

  “I’m really tired of the ‘politi-speak,’ the ‘wokeism’ talk, the labels, the whole conversation,” Gagne said. “It’s not hard. It’s very simple. If you want a certain type of people in your service, market your recruiting to them.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 18:20

• Google Cloud Launches New AI-Powered Anti-Money-Laundering Product For Big Banks
  Google Cloud Launches New AI-Powered Anti-Money-Laundering Product For Big Banks

  Money laundering is a major issue for financial institutions. Banks have long relied on humans to monitor rules-based systems that detect suspicious transactions. These legacy systems yield very low rates of identifying suspicious activities. Google Cloud wants to change the game by introducing an artificial intelligence-powered product designed to turbocharge the detection of money laundering.

  Current Anti Money Laundering (AML) monitoring products rely entirely on manually defined rules, which yield low rates of identifying illegal activities, ranging from drug and human trafficking to terrorist financing. These systems consume significant resources that have to monitor billions of transactions. 

  

  Google Cloud’s AML is a consolidated machine learning (ML)-generated customer risk score versus the legacy rules-based transaction alerting system financial institutions use. The risk score uses the bank’s data, including transactional patterns, network behavior, and Know Your Customer (KYC) data, to identify instances and groups of high-risk retail and commercial customers. The AI can quickly deliver more accurate results and alleviate the workload for banking units that monitor suspicious transactions. 

  AML AI can outperform current systems in detecting financial crime risk. Google provided an example of its Cloud customer HSBC which can now detect two to four times more true positive risk, enhancing its ability to detect suspicious activities. 

  • Increased risk detection: AML AI can outperform current systems in detecting financial crime risk. Google Cloud customer HSBC found that they can now detect two to four times[5] more true positive risk, enhancing their ability to identify and prevent money laundering activities.
  • Lower operational costs: AML AI minimizes wasted investigator time by reducing alert volumes and providing explainable outputs that speed up individual investigations. In fact, HSBC saw alert volumes decrease by more than 60%.
  • Improved governance and defensibility: AML AI provides financial institutions with auditable and explainable outputs to support internal risk management. This approach is now in production in several geographies, each with their own regulatory requirements.
  • Improved customer experience: By increasing precision and significantly reducing false positives, AML AI minimizes the need to engage with customers for additional compliance verification checks.

  AML AI has helped HSBC improve detection capability, deliver more accurate results, and significantly reduce batch processing times for its customer base. 

  “Google Cloud’s AML AI has significantly improved HSBC’s AML detection capability. Google’s models are already demonstrating the tremendous potential of machine learning to transform anti-financial crime efforts in the industry at large.

  “By enhancing our customer monitoring framework with Google Cloud’s sophisticated AI-based product, we have been able to improve the precision of our financial crime detection and reduce alert volumes meaning less investigation time is spent chasing false leads. We have also reduced the processing time required to analyze billions of transactions across millions of accounts from several weeks to a few days,” said Jennifer Calvery, Group Head of Financial Crime Risk and Compliance at HSBC.

  With the successful launch of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google is flexing its artificial intelligence capabilities for financial institutions to detect suspicious activity more accurately and efficiently. This advancement will likely result in banks decreasing the size of their fraud units as AI does most of the work. 

  Well, you’re beginning to see AI is poised to become the next ‘big brother,’ which could explain why banks and governments are advocating for a cashless society. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 06/21/2023 – 18:00

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