Mar 23

Today’s News 23rd March 2021

  • The 15th Century Medici Bank Is Getting A 21st Century Re-Launch And Also Will Serve Crypto Firms
    The 15th Century Medici Bank Is Getting A 21st Century Re-Launch And Also Will Serve Crypto Firms

    The Medici Bank name, most notably associated with the 15th century banking giant in Italy that, at the time, was the largest and most respected banking institution in Europe, is getting a reboot by one of its descendants.

    Prince Lorenzo de’ Medici, who is part of the same Italian banking family that ran the original Medici bank, has opened a new Medici Bank in Puerto Rico. And it’s getting a 21st century upgrade as a crypto-friendly institution.

    The new Medici Bank has been  “born out of frustration with the current financial services landscape” and is going to “offer faster, cheaper and more transparent services” as well as serving cryptocurrency firms, according to CoinBase. 

    Lorenzo de’ Medici founded the bank alongside former managing director of Americas at Fidor Bank, Ed Boyle. Boyle also previously worked for American Express and now serves as the CEO of Medici, while de’ Medici sits as Director. 

    Boyle told CoinDesk that the bank has already “obtained an International Financial Entity (IFE) license from Puerto Rico’s Office of the Commission of Financial Institutions” and that the bank isn’t seeking an FDIC charter in the U.S. 

    de’Medici’s announcement said: “The original Medici Bank of Florence, founded by my family in the 14th century, revolutionized the world’s economy. Many of their innovations that drove the development of international commerce — like holding companies, double-entry bookkeeping, and letters of credit — are still in use.”

    “The Medici Bank of today will be a reawakening of that innovative spirit; we are re-imagining modern-day banking by leveraging technology that creates seamless, digital customer experiences and expands financial opportunity across global markets,” he concluded. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 02:45

  • Ukraine Between Biden And A Hard Place
    Ukraine Between Biden And A Hard Place

    Authored by J.Hawk exclusively for SouthFront,

    Joe Biden’s extensive interest in Ukraine during his tenure as Obama’s vice president meant that US attention toward the country would be instantly elevated in the eyes of the new administration. The Burisma scandal which implicated Hunter Biden and which became a problem for Joe Biden on the campaign trail, combined with Biden’s own apparent frailty and avoidance of extensive public engagements, have meant that Biden is yet to have a telephone conversation with Zelensky.

    Whether he deliberately chose to outsource Ukraine policy to his trusted advisors or they are taking initiative in order to fill the vacuum of power left by their boss’ incapacity, US-Ukraine policy has taken a number of new twists and turns in the less than two months of Biden Administration.

    End of Indirect Control?

    Biden Administration’s actions so far indicate a certain degree of impatience with the goings-on in Kiev which is behaving in an all too independent fashion on many issues. Kiev’s decision to nationalize Motor Sich, an aircraft engine manufacturer whose purchase was sought by Chinese investors robbed Ukraine of a significant influx of badly needed hard currency, took place after Washington expressed displeasure at Chinese companies’ foothold in Ukraine and moreover access to Soviet-era technologies attractive to China’s aerospace industries. This action was taken in spite of considerable risk of Chinese retaliation, which took the form of China’s Foreign Ministry informing its Ukrainian equivalent that it would no longer respect its wishes concerning economic activities in the Crimea, something that Chinese firms have shied away from so far. US Embassy in Kiev’s instant endorsement of Zelensky’s shutdown of three opposition TV stations and the placement of sanctions, in violation of Ukraine’s own laws, on one of Ukraine’s opposition leaders Medvedchuk on the grounds that they were involved in spreading so-called “Russian disinformation” suggests that Washington was at the very least aware of the move and may have even prompted it. US sanctioning of Igor Kolomoysky on the basis of his corrupting Ukraine’s politics indicates that Zelensky has not gone far enough in fulfilling Washington’s wishes. In doing so Washington demonstrated it is willing to publicly humiliate Zelensky should he fail to display appropriate deference to its wishes. The question at this point becomes, in what direction will Washington push Zelensky? How far, what means will Washington use to get its way, and to what extent will Zelensky resist?

    Giving War Another Chance?

    The greatest service that Ukraine could render Biden’s administration is by launching an all-out assault on Novorossia. A pitched battle between Ukrainian and DPR/LPR forces would instantly create necessary headlines, provide additional pretexts to condemn Russia and introduce more economic sanctions, and deliver the outcome that no amount of phony poisonings of Navalny could, namely the suspension or even shut-down of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that has become a thorn in the side of the Anglo-Saxon powers and a matter of national self-assertion for Germany. A major military campaign involving several brigades supported by airpower and the now-operational Bayraktar TB-2 drones in an effort to replicate Azerbaijan’s success against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh would place Moscow before the unenviable choice of abandoning the Donbass to its fate or committing its regular military forces to battle in Novorossia’s defense.

    Whether Ukraine’s political leadership is willing to undertake such a desperate measure, in a country whose president suffers from a 20% approval rating and which has seen extensive recent protests against the increase in utility payment rates, is another question. On the one hand, Ukrainian troop movements on the Donbass have generated considerable attention, and exchanges of fire between Ukrainian and Novorossian forces appear to have continued at an elevated pace in the past several weeks. At the same time, no extraordinary measures such as the recall of reservists or closure of borders in order to prevent military-age males from leaving the country have been observed. While Ukraine’s Rada is considering laws making draft evasion more harshly punishable, these laws will not have an immediate impact, and appear to be a reaction to the failure to build up a professional army of volunteers or even to give the draftees a positive reason to serve. It has even been pointed out that the Ukrainian troop movements have been so ostentatious and lacking in even elementary efforts to preserve concealment and surprise that they represent a “war of nerves”, an exercise in brinksmanship, and possibly an effort to simulate action for the benefit of Washington, rather than genuine preparations for an offensive. A train carrying a reinforced tank company that has been spotted slowly passing three different railroad crossings in eastern Ukraine over the course of several days looks like an operation staged for the benefit of ubiquitous smart phone cameras.

    Therefore the likelihood of Ukrainian military opting for a large-scale offensive remains low due to fear of heavy and pointless losses which might cause Ukraine’s military morale to collapse, with unpredictable consequences. Small-scale raids to capture select positions, shelling of Novorossia’s towns and cities, even a staged atrocity, remain more plausible and attractive from the political point of view. Ukraine’s most dangerous military capability is represented by Bayraktar drones, cruise missiles like the Neptun, and short-range ballistic missiles currently in service and being developed, because their use would not entail the danger of major Ukrainian personnel losses. Moreover, Novorossia’s forces would be hard pressed to retaliate against such strikes in kind, Russian efforts to do so would be highly provocative internationally, and moreover carry the risk of causing Ukrainian civilian casualties. Fortunately for Novorossia, the drone park remains fairly small and the drones themselves are vulnerable to Novorossia’s air defenses, while the cruise and ballistic missiles are still years from large-scale operational deployment. The sort of missile bombardment that would represent genuine threat to Novorossia’s unrecognized republics is still years away, if not beyond. By the time they are, Novorossia’s forces will likely have their own means of retaliation in the form of barrage munitions, also referred to as “suicide drones” that could be produced on the spot in Donetsk and Lugansk. However, Ukraine’s current capabilities are sufficient to launch provocations, including through bombardment of civilian targets as was the case in Mariupol in 2014.

    The Blackmail Factor?

    That Ukraine’s military is unwilling to risk another mis-adventure against Novorossia is evident enough, as is Zelensky’s reticence to go down in history as the president who destroyed Ukraine. These considerations are unlikely to be salient for decisionmakers in Washington who need Ukraine to advance US interests, rather than US to advance Ukraine’s. But the lengths to which Washington is willing to go to pressure Zelensky are still unclear, though the possibility of outright blackmail has raised its head when a prominent Maidan propagandist Dmitry Gordon announced that on March 15, the “Ides of March” immortalized by the assassination of Julius Caesar, would face a trial of historic proportions once a certain bombshell news story were revealed. While March 15 came and went with no bombshells or even duds, Gordon did reveal that the event consisted of a Bellingcat “investigation” into the SBU plot to lure Wagner PMC contractors into Ukraine in order to have them put on trial. The “bombshell” aspect of the Bellingcat effort is that the plot failed because of a highly placed source in Zelensky’s own presidential cabinet who leaked it to Russian intelligence services. Considering Bellingcat’s reputation as a firm which does info-warfare “hits” on designated targets, and Gordon’s hyping of the impact of the film once it becomes public, one has to consider the possibility Bellingcat is part of a campaign to blackmail or even oust Zelensky from office should he fail to satisfy Washington’s demands. According to Gordon, the movie’s release is planned for early April, which presumably gives Zelensky a bit of extra time to deliver the goods.

    As noted above, Zelensky has taken a dim view of Washington’s meddling in Ukraine’s affairs, though it remains to be seen whether he is able to stand up to even his own national security officials who ostensibly are subordinate to him but in reality take orders from Washington. Lacking an independent power base that allowed Poroshenko to resist Washington’s initiatives in “reforming” Ukraine’s economy, Zelensky may yet prove the ideal president from Washington’s perspective, if not Ukraine’s.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 02:00

  • 10 Killed, Including 1 Cop In Boulder Grocery Store Shooting; Suspect In Custody
    10 Killed, Including 1 Cop In Boulder Grocery Store Shooting; Suspect In Custody

    Update (2359ET): The death toll is now up to 10 people, including a police officer.

    “I thought I was going to die,” said meat department employee Alex Arellano, 35, who heard a series of gunshots and witnessed people running toward a nearby exit.

    The deceased officer has been identified as 51-year-old Eric Talley, who joined the department in 2010 according to the New York Times.

    Dean Schiller, who posted a live video from the scene shortly after the shooting began, said he heard about a dozen shots and saw three people who appeared to be wounded — two in the parking lot and one inside the supermarket.

    As officers secured the building, more than a dozen people were led out of the supermarket, a King Soopers in a residential area a couple of miles south of the campus of the University of Colorado. The grocery store usually draws a mix of families and college students. -NYT

    *  *  *

    In what is being billed as the second major mass shooting in the US since the country’s COVID-plagued economy started to reopen in earnest, six people – including a police officer – were killed inside a Colorado grocery store on Monday afternoon.

    Speaking during a press briefing held just minutes after SWAT police confronted another armed suspect inside an apartment near a high school in Boulder, police confirmed details from the earlier shooting, including the fact that a cop had been killed by the shooter, who was taken into custody.

    Video of SWAT officers confronting the second suspect, reportedly named Thomas Hanger, is already circulating on social media. People nearby were warned to shelter in place.

    Monday’s attack took place outside a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. In addition to the shooter, a second person of interest, who was injured, was taken into custody at the scene, according to Boulder Police Department Commander Kerry Yamaguchi.

    Officers A law enforcement source told ABC News officers were responding to a report of someone being shot in the parking lot, and when they arrived at the scene, the suspect opened fire on them using a long gun. Back up in the form of other agencies, including the SWAT team, quickly arrived. ABC News also confirmed that the death toll is at six. Officers are waiting until family members have been notified to release a final death toll, along with names for the victims.

    “Without that quick response, we don’t know if there would have been more loss of life,” Yamaguchi said.

    The commander and Boulder District Attorney Michael Michael Dougherty said at the news conference that they will be releasing more information on the deceased victims, including the exact number of victims soon, as they are still notifying families.

    Video from the attack, including one shot showing the suspected shooter being taken into custody, have been circulating online.

    Watch the full evening press briefing from the Boulder police below:

    The shooting notably follows roughly one week after another shooting in Georgia directed at three massage parlors and spa, where 8 victims, including Asian women who worked at the spas, were killed. That attack prompted the media to declare that mass killings, which had disappeared from the headlines during the pandemic, have returned in the US.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:59

  • The New Normal "Reality" Police
    The New Normal “Reality” Police

    Authored (somewhat satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

    So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council, I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a “serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of “criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension” and cause “offline harm.”

    Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you’ll be issued this warning:

    Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content” watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.

    Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).

    First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.

    What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a “dangerous individual.” Instead, they punished anyone who tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.

    Here’s the “dangerous” post in question. (If you’re particularly sensitive to “terrorist” content, you may want to put on your “anti-terrorism” glasses, or take some other type of prophylactic measures to protect yourself from “offline harm,” before you venture any further.)

    The photo, which I stole from Gunnar Kaiser, is of an art exhibit in Düsseldorf, Germany. My commentary is self-explanatory. As you can see, it is extremely “dangerous.” It literally radiates “offline harm.”

    OK, before you write to inform me how this was just the work of a dumb Facebook algorithm, think about what I described above. If an algorithm was preventing sharing and suspending people’s accounts based on keyword spotting, it would have censored my original post, and presumably suspended my account. Or, if Facebook has an algorithm that recognizes certain “dangerous” phrases, and then censors or suspends the accounts of people who share a post including those phrases, but doesn’t censor the original post or suspend the account of the author of the post … well, that’s kind of strange, isn’t it?

    In any event, shortly after I posted it, I started seeing reports like this on Facebook:

    Those are just a few examples, but I think you get the general idea.

    The point is, apparently, the Corporatocracy feel sufficiently threatened by random people on Facebook that they are conducting these COINTELPRO-type ops. Seriously, think about that for a minute. I am not Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. I’m not even Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi. I’m a midlist-level author of unusual literature, and a political satirist, and a blogger, basically, and yet Facebook, and their partners at the Atlantic Council, and AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, and Moderna, and who knows which other global corporations and transnational, non-governmental entities like the WEF and WHO, consider someone of my lowly status enough of a threat to their “New Normal” narrative to warrant the attention of the Reality Police.

    Now, let me be clear about who I’m talking about when I’m talking about the “Reality Police.” Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council is only one example, but it is a rather good one. Here’s a quick profile of the Atlantic Council …

    “The Atlantic Council of the United States was founded in 1961 as a think tank and anticommunist public relations organization to prop up support within the US for NATO in the post-World War II era … [its] current, honorary and lifetime directors list reads like a bipartisan rogues gallery of American war-criminals, including Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. James Woolsey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. Among the former Atlantic Council chairman have been Obama administration officials James L. Jones, (national security advisor) and Chuck Hagel (secretary of defense). The chairman of the council is Brent Scowcroft, the retired US Air Force officer who held national security and intelligence positions in the Nixon, Bush I and Bush II administrations. [It] is funded by substantial government and corporate interests from the financial, defense and petroleum industries. Its 2017 annual report documents substantial contributions from HSBC, Chevron, The Blackstone Group, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Ford Motor Company, among many others. Also listed is Google Inc. in the $100,000 to $250,000 donor category. Among the largest council contributors are the US State Department, The Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the UK, and the United Arab Emirates. Other contributors include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Boeing, BP, Exxon and the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.” — Kevin Reed, World Socialist Website

    These are the folks that are policing “reality” (the “reality” they have manufactured, and are manufacturing moment by moment), deciding what officially happened, and didn’t happen, and what it means, and who qualifies as an “authoritative news source,” and “fact-checking” everything we see on the Internet. It’s not a bunch of pimply-faced IT nerds writing sloppy code in Menlo Park. It’s GloboCap and the Military-Industrial Complex.

    If you’re one of my “New Normal” ex-friends and colleagues (or one of my Facebook or Twitter trolls) who, for some unknown reason, is still reading this column, perhaps on your way to get experimentally “vaccinated” or report one of your neighbors for not wearing a mask or being outdoors without a valid reason, this is who has manufactured your “reality” and the so-called “science” you claim I am “denying,” even as reality stares you in the face …

    This did not begin with the “New Normal,” of course. Every system of power manufactures its own “reality” (totalitarian systems more fanatically than others). No, I’ve been writing about the manufacturing of “normality,” and the War on Dissent and Populism that GloboCap has been relentlessly waging on anyone and everyone opposing its hegemony or refusing to conform to its ideology, since back when I was still writing heretical columns like this for CounterPunch … before the editors saw which way the wind was blowing and ideologically purged its roster to get back into the good graces of GloboCap (following which ideological purge, Google restored it to the ranks of “real news”).

    And that is how reality-policing works. It’s a bullying operation, basically. The entire “cancel culture” phenomenon is. “Cancel culture” is a silly name for it. We are talking about a global empire imposing total ideological conformity (or, in simpler terms, its version of “reality”) on the entire planet through fear and force. The Nazis referred to this process as Gleichschaltung.

    Global capitalism has reached the stage where it no longer needs to tolerate dissent (any kind of dissent, from any quarter) to maintain the illusion of “freedom and democracy,” because there is no alternative to global capitalism. It is everywhere. There is nowhere to run or hide. When the Reality Police find you, and threaten to “cancel” you, you have two choices … obey or be vaporized.

    If you’re a Palestinian, a Syrian, a Yemeni, the president of an uncooperative African country, or some other type of non-Western person, you might very well be physically vaporized. For Westerners, vaporization is less dramatic and final. You will simply be disappeared from the Internet, fired from your job, socially ostracized, deemed a “dangerous individual,” a “racist,” an “anti-Semite,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “white supremacist,” a “domestic terrorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” a “Covid denier.”

    If you’re a member of the independent media, or a prominent activist, or a lawyer, or doctor, or just someone with a big social media platform, and have not seen the “New Normal” light, you will be demonized, demonetized, deplatformed, censored, and subjected to the type of creepy COINTELPRO-type tactics I described above. If you don’t believe me, just ask Robert F. Kennedy, Rainer Fuellmich, Vanessa Beeley, Whitney Webb, James Corbett, Ken Jebsen, Cory Morningstar, The Last American Vagabond, Geopolitics & Empire, The Centre for Research on Globalization, OffGuardian, and countless other people and outlets that have challenged the official “New Normal” narrative.

    Or have a look at this “warning” you get on Twitter if you attempt to read anything published by OffGuardian …

    I could go on and on with this, and I’m sure I will in future columns. It’s kind of the only story at the moment, the changeover from simulated democracy to pathologized-totalitarianism as the governing structure of global capitalism. For now, I’ll just leave you with one more image in this already overly pictorial column. Don’t worry, it’s been thoroughly “fact-checked,” so there’s no need to read or question the fine print (even though I have a feeling you will) …

    Do watch out for those “unrelated coincidences.” Some of them, I hear, can be rather nasty.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:40

  • Human Traffickers Made Up To $14 Million Per Day In February Border Rush: Report
    Human Traffickers Made Up To $14 Million Per Day In February Border Rush: Report

    Human trafficking organizations sending men, women and children over the US-Mexico border to take advantage of President Biden’s backfiring immigration policies earned as much as $14 million per day in February, according to Fox News, citing sources within the US Border Patrol.

    “Trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industrym,” according to just-retired Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal, who had been with the agency for 30 years. “A lot of these vulnerable populations use their life savings. Some are essentially indentured servants and they’re working off this debt for a long period of time. In other cases, some of these migrants are asked to transport narcotics or some form of crime to work off a different part of their debt.”

    The human smuggling windfall comes as U.S. taxpayer costs for the border crisis continue to spike, topping $5 million a day, based on 2019 figures provided by Health and Human Services that put daily “influx” shelter costs at $800 per migrant. Additionally, last week the Biden administration awarded a $86 million contract for hotel rooms to hold 1,200 migrant families as the crisis exceeds ICE holding capacity.

    Additional costs will include overtime and hotel costs for the hundreds of agents reassigned to Texas from other areas. For context, in 2019 Congress appropriated an extra $4.6 billion to handle a similar migrant surge. In 2014, Congress gave President Obama an extra $2.7 billion to deal with his border crisis. –Fox News

    According to the report, human traffickers are paid a portion up front, and typically paid the rest over time by the worker, their family, or an employer. The initial funds cover food, shelter, transportation, and a coyote (guide) to lead them over the border and into the United States.

    Earlier this month, 13 people were killed in California when the SUV they were in collided with a semi-truck. The deceased were believed to have been illegally smuggled across the border.

    “We pray for the accident victims and their families during this difficult time,” said El Centro Sector Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino in a news conference following the accident. Agents, he said, believe the deceased individuals were part of a larger group of about 44 migrants who were smuggled through a hole in the fence near Calexico, a California city that lies along the border and is next to the Mexican city of Mexicali.

    Bovino added that an “initial investigation into the origins of the vehicles indicate a potential nexus to the aforementioned breach in the border wall,” while adding that “human smugglers have proven time and again they have little regard for human life.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:20

  • The Six-Year Epic Failure: Riyadh’s Crusade On Yemen
    The Six-Year Epic Failure: Riyadh’s Crusade On Yemen

    Submitted by South Front,

    Six years of the Saudi-led war have passed in Yemen, and it keeps going with no sign of a peaceful solution on the horizon. The “occasion” was “commemorated” with a briefing by Ansar Allah, or as they are popularly known – the Houthis. Some impressive numbers were shared.

    Houthi spokesperson Yahya Sari said that the Saudi-led coalition carried out more than 266,150 airstrikes throughout these 6 years. The predominant number of those strikes targeted Yemeni citizens, homes, cities and other infrastructure.

    On the side of the Houthis, at least 1,348 separate missile operations were launched, with nearly 500 being behind enemy lines on key military facilities of the Kingdom and the UAE. In total, the Houthi Air Force carried out 12,623 raids with drones. In 2021 alone, Ansar Allah has carried out 1,464 operations, including 124 attack operations, and the rest reconnaissance.

    The Ansar Allah ground forces carried out 12,366 combat operations throughout the years. When it comes to losses, the Houthis didn’t share theirs. They claimed that over the 6 years, the Saudi-led coalition had suffered some significant losses. In total, more than 240,000 fighters were either killed or injured.

    This includes UAE forces, Sudanese mercenaries, Saudi armed forces, as well as the troops of the Yemen puppet government.

    As expected, the update focuses more on what the Houthis achieved and what Saudi Arabia has lost, but it has been an open secret that Riyadh’s intervention in Yemen hasn’t been a glowing example of success.

    In just the past few days, leading up to March 22nd, the Houthis carried out a significant attack on Aramco oil facilities. A refinery was struck by 6 suicide drones. The Saudi Ministry of Energy claimed that the attack caused a fire that was “quickly” controlled by the refinery’s staff. Satellite imagery, however, showed the damage to be much more extensive than Riyadh let on.

    Saudi Arabia, on its part, released footage of its airstrikes on Ansar Allah in the Marib province. The videos presented 17 pinpoint airstrikes by Riyadh warplanes on vehicles and positions on several fronts of the province. The Saudi-led coalition also released a video showing precision airstrikes on a cave supposedly used by the Houthis to store suicide drones. It is purportedly located near Yemen’s capital Sana’a.

    In spite of these videos, and the Saudi attempt to present the situation in a somewhat positive light, the Saudi-led coalition has been slowly retreating in Marib.

    Six years of war have passed in Yemen, in which massive amounts of funds were “invested” by Riyadh to fight a war that it still can’t even go near winning.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:00

  • Richest 1% Of Americans Hiding 20% Of Income From IRS
    Richest 1% Of Americans Hiding 20% Of Income From IRS

    America’s richest 1% aren’t paying taxes on up to one-fifth of their income, according to Bloomberg, citing a new study which concludes that US tax evasion is far more widespread than previously estimated.

    The authors of the study found that while random audits can detect some tax evasion, the IRS misses more sophisticated schemes to avoid reporting income – including offshore structures and private business entities. According to the report, if the Treasury was able to collect the unpaid income tax from the top 1%, revenue would increase by $175 billion per year – which is roughly twice the amount Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants to slap on the rich with a prospective wealth tax (and which would promptly move offshore as well).

    Last week, IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig told a House panel that audit rates for high-income taxpayers have dropped precipitously over the past decade due to staff shortages among the group which audits wealthy individuals.

    “We stress that our estimates are likely to be conservative with regard to the overall amount of evasion at the top,” the authors wrote, adding that while basic audits can uncover discrepancies between income reported by employers and tax returns, private business profits and complex investment partnership schemes are far more difficult to identify.

    The hidden income at the top means that income and wealth inequality could be more skewed than researchers have previously estimated, the authors concluded. The study was conducted by two IRS researchers, John Guyton and Patrick Langetieg, and three professors: Daniel Reck of the London School of Economics, Max Risch of Carnegie Mellon University, and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley. -Bloomberg

    The solution? The researchers suggested that the IRS deploy “additional tools” to “effectively combat high-income tax evasion,” which could include more specialized audits and whistleblowers. We assume the latter means rewards for dropping the dime on one’s employer.

    Congress is currently discussing allocating more funding to the IRS after years of budget cuts, so that the tax collection agency can hire specialized auditors and improve their technology – while also allowing them to collect more data from banks and financial institutions.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 22:40

  • Leviathan Mobilizes For Decisive Battle
    Leviathan Mobilizes For Decisive Battle

    Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Globalist forces are being mobilised to win a last battle in the ‘long-war’ – looking to break-through everywhere.

    In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, contends that western élites are experiencing a collapse of authority deriving from a failure to distinguish between legitimate criticism and – what he terms – illegitimate rebellion. Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off. And the disparity between the myth and public experience of it became only too evident.

    Writing in 2014, Gurri foresaw that the Establishment would respond by denouncing all evidence of public discontent, as lies and disinformation. The Establishment would, in Gurri’s telling, be so constrained within their ‘bubble’ that they would be unable to assimilate their loss of monopoly over their own confected ‘reality’. This Establishment denial would be made manifest, he argued, in a delusional, ham-fisted authoritarian manner. His predictions have been vindicated with Trumpist dissidence denounced as a threat to ‘our democracy’ – amidst a media and social platform crackdown. Such a response would only confirm the suspicions of the public, thus setting off a vicious circle of yet more “distrust and loss of legitimacy”, Gurri concluded.

    This was Gurri’s main thrust. The book’s striking feature however, was how it seemed so completely to nail the coming Trump and Brexit era – and the ‘anti-system’ impulse behind them. In America, this impulse found Trump – not the other way around. The point here essentially being that America no longer saw Red and Blue as the two extended wings belonging to the bird of liberal democracy. For something around half of America, the ‘system’ was rigged towards a profiteering 0.1%, and against them.

    The key point here surely is whether the élites’ Great Re-set – to reinvent themselves as leaders of the ‘re-vamped’ values of liberalism, overlayered by a newly up-dated, AI and robot-led, post-modernity – is destined to succeed, or not.

    Continued ‘westification’ of the globe – the principal component to ‘old’ liberal globalism – though tarnished and largely discredited, remains mandatory, as made clear in the cogent reasoning recently advanced by Robert Kagan: Absent the justifying myth of ‘seeding democracy across the world’ around which to organise the empire, the moral logic of the entire enterprise begins to fall apart, Kagan argued (with surprising frankness). He thus asserts that the U.S. empire abroad is required – precisely in order to preserve the myth of ‘democracy’ at home. An America that retreats from global hegemony, he argues, would no longer possess the cohesive binding to preserve America as liberal democracy, at home either.

    Gurri is ambivalent on the élite’s ability to stick fast. He both asserts that “the centre cannot hold”, but then adds that the periphery had “no clue what to do about it”. The public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities, and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust”, where outsiders can “neutralize, but not replace the centre” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern”.

    There may indeed be some truth in this latter observation, yet what is happening today in the U.S. is but one ‘battle’ (albeit a key one) in a longer strategic war, reaching far back. The notion of a New World Order is nothing new. Imagined by globalists today, as before, it remains a teleological process of the ‘westification’ of the globe (western ‘universal values’), pursued under the rubric of (scientific) modernism.

    What sets the current Great Re-set apart however, is that it is a later, more updated, version of Western values — not the same Western values as they were yesterday. The reek of colonialism has been exorcised from the imperial project through the launch of war on ‘white supremacy’ and on racial and social injustice. Global leadership has been recast as ‘saving the planet’ from climate change; saving all humanity from the pandemic; and safeguarding us all from a coming global financial crisis. Mothers’ milk. Who would resist such a well-intentioned agenda?

    The current Great Re-set is a process of metamorphosis – a change in Western values, and paradigm. As Professor Dugin writes:

    “And this is important — it is a double-process to update the West itself – and [at the same time], to project an updated version to the world beyond. This is a kind of postmodern combination of the Western and the Modern”.

    But its essence – the root to this meta-historical struggle – always has been the world order, open society focus on dis-embedding humans from all forms of collective identity. Firstly, to dis-embed Renaissance Man from his notion of being a microcosm interpenetrating within a vast surrounding, living macrocosm (this aim being largely achieved via the advent of empirical Scientism); then the de-coupling from Latin Catholicism (via Protestant individualism); and lately, liberation from the secular nation-state (through globalism). And finally, we reach the shedding ‘late-stage’ – the severance from all collective identities and histories, including ethnicity and gender (both now to be self-defined).

    It is the passage to a new kind of liberalism, one that sweeps gender and identity into full, liquid fluidity. This latter aspect is not some secondary ‘accessory’ or add on – it is ‘something’ essentially embedded within in the logic of liberalism. The logic is inescapable. And the ultimate logical end to which it leads? Well, to the dis-embedding of the subjective self into trans-humanism. (But let’s not go there; it is dark – i.e. being human is to impose the subjective on the objective – “We need to liberate the objects from the subjects, from humanity, and explore the things as they are – without man, without being a tool of man”).

    And here, Gurri’s insight is salient: The plan is out of control, and becoming progressively more bizarre. The American unipolar moment is ‘done’. It has created oppositions of various kinds, both abroad and at home. Conservative and traditional impulses have reacted against the radical ideological agenda, and crucially, the 2008 Financial Crisis and near collapse of the system foretold to the élites of the ultimate coming end to the U.S.’ financial hegemony, and concomitantly to America’s primacy. It forced a critical juncture.

    Now they are at a crucial impasse. When they speak about Re-set, this means a forced return to the continuation of the agenda. But it is not as straight-forward as it seems. Everything seemed almost primed to fall into place twenty years ago; yet now, the Establishment is having to fight for every element of this strategy because everywhere they encounter a growing resistance. And it is no insignificant resistance. In America alone, some 74 million Americans reject the cultural war being waged on them.

    Fyodor Dostoevsky described in The Demons the consequence to all this severance from meaning, as discovered at the deepest levels of the collective human psyche. Transcendence? ‘You can’t just be rid of it’. Yearning for meaning; for knowing who we are, is hard-wired into the human psyche. In the Demons, its denial and rejection leads only to warped violence (including child-rape), wanton destruction, and other extreme pathological behaviour.

    Dostoevsky originally envisioned Demons as a political polemic, but horrified by news reports of a Russian nihilist leader’s orchestration of a pointless political murder, Dostoevsky fictionalised the story, hoping to shed light on how the sensitive, genteel, well-meaning Russian secular liberals of the 1840s had prepared the way for their 1860s generation of radicalized, ideology-maddened children bent on tearing down the world.

    In a sense, Dostoevsky’s exploration of the psychology of secular liberal Russians in the 1840s (who passed on their criticisms of the establishment to the next generation) were somehow forerunners to the Woodstock generation of the 1960s – of easy-going, spoiled youth in search for meaning and transcendence from boring ‘reality’ through music, sex and drugs. Both produced angry children driven by hate towards a world conspiring constantly to frustrate their vision of how things ‘should be’.

    If asked why Western culture has been trapped in an oscillating dynamic between liberalism and nihilistic radicalism for roughly two centuries with no end in sight, Dostoevsky would probably answer that it is because of our dis-embedding from the deeper levels of what it means to be human. This loss inevitably creates pathologies. (Carl Jung came to the same view).

    So will the Re-set be realised?

    The élites still cling to westernisation (‘America is back’ – although no-one is greatly enthused). The obstacles are many and growing. Obstacles and crises at home – where Biden visibly is shedding authority. U.S. decision-making seemingly lacks a ‘Chair’, or shall we say, a functioning ring-master. Who is in charge of foreign policy? It is opaque. And America itself is irreconcilably split and weakened. But also, for the first time, the U.S. and EU are increasing seen abroad to be inept at managing the most simple of affairs.

    Nonetheless, the globalist call to arms is evident. The world clearly has changed during the last four years. Globalist forces, therefore, are being mobilised to win a last battle in the ‘long-war’ – looking to break-through everywhere. Defeating Trump is the first goal. Discrediting all varieties of European populism is another. The U.S. thinks to lead the maritime and rim-land powers in imposing a searing psychological, technological and economic defeat on the Russia-China-Iran alliance. In the past, the outcome might have been predictable. This time Eurasia may very well stand solid against a weakened Oceana (and a faint-hearted Europe). It would shake Leviathan to its foundations. Who knows what might then emerge from the ruins of post-modernity.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 22:20

  • ECB Finally Ramps Up Bond Purchases After Pledging To Fight Rising Yields
    ECB Finally Ramps Up Bond Purchases After Pledging To Fight Rising Yields

    After three weeks of consecutive disappointments from the ECB (see here and here), when the central bank would purchase fewer bonds in the open market via QE despite jawboning its readiness and eagerness to purchase more, and then making it official two weeks ago when the ECB formally announced it would conduct purchases under the PEPP at a “significantly higher pace”, Christine Lagarde’s bank finally delivered on its promise to boost the pace of emergency bond-buying to offset the economic threat of tighter financial conditions from higher yields.

    The ECB revealed today that net purchases settled last week (through March 17) jumped by €21.1 billion, up from €14 billion the week prior and the most since the start of December (the figure is reduced by redemptions, with the the gross value of purchases set to disclosed on Tuesday). According to Bloomberg, the latest weekly purchases were higher than the €18 billion weekly net average since the program started last year.

    This suggests an increase in the PEPP pace following the March ECB meeting of around €5bn/week, according to Goldman analysts who notes that a more precise assessment will emerge through time, as weekly data is partial and can be distorted by undisclosed reinvestment flows. Goldman expects net purchases to run at an elevated pace of €20bn/week through Q2 and to gradually fall thereafter. In the meantime, they believe that policy intentions will be conveyed by ECB communication rather than weekly financial statements.

    “We again caution against over-interpreting weekly data points, as they remain a noisy signal of policy intentions, especially since both ECB President Lagarde and Board Member Schnabel have underscored that the PEPP pace should be assessed over longer horizons” Goldman’s Sven Jari Stehn wrote in a note to clients. Going forward, he expects a relatively inertial week-to-week net purchase pace in Q2 “and a gradual reduction of the purchase pace after a reassessment at the June Governing Council in conjunction with fresh inflation projections; in the meantime, we look to ECB communication as the clearest signal of policy intentions.”

    The acceleration in debt monetization was widely expected after the ECB’s recent announcement, when the central bank decided to significantly increase buying under the program – due to run for at least another year – after a global bond sell-off spurred by reflation bets because of massive U.S. fiscal stimulus.

    The faster purchases came after weeks in which traders and bank officials expressed concerns about rising rates, yet official data showed no sizable or sustained pickup in buying. As Bloomberg notes, “officials fear that Europe’s extended virus lockdowns and a slow vaccination rollout mean it isn’t ready to cope with higher borrowing costs.”

    Commenting on the acceleration in QE, Bloomberg economist David Powell said that “the new pace of purchases may be enough to prevent bond yields from rising further, but it’s unlikely to reverse the recent increase.”

    Sure enough, the report had little impact on market rates with German bunds holding marginally higher on the day, with 10-year yields dropping one basis point to minus 0.31%. Those on their Italian peers were steady at 0.66%, with the spread between the two hovering above this year’s lows. The euro rose 0.2% to $1.1925.

    The recent selloff in European bonds has been triggered by a surge in US yields as a result of expectations that the overheating economic recovery will reignite inflation and could lead to a premature rate hike.

    On Monday, ECB President Christine Lagarde said in a blog post that the near-term outlook remains uncertain, and reiterated her promise to keep financing conditions favorable.

    She said the central bank would measure its progress using “a joint test that appraises the prevailing financing conditions against the euro area’s economic and inflation outlook”. It has €900bn of capacity left under PEPP, its main crisis-fighting tool, which is due to run until at least March 2022.

    “We retain the option to adjust the pace of purchases at any point in time in response to potential changes in market conditions,” she said. “While much progress has been made and we can see light at the end of the tunnel, we cannot be complacent.”

    But Klaas Knot, head of the Dutch central bank and ECB governing council member, indicated PEPP could be wound up earlier than expected if the pandemic was contained quickly and the economy rebounded strongly. “As long as we are in a situation with contact restrictions, it’s clear that the pandemic emergency purchase program won’t stop,” Knot, who heads the Dutch central bank, said in a press conference. “But if we make good progress with vaccinations, that moment will come somewhere later this year.”

    Quoted by the FT, Peter Schaffrik, RBC Capital Markets global macro strategist, said: “Whilst it seems clear that the ECB is able to make European fixed-income markets outperform versus, say, the US and the UK, it is less clear whether they can stand in the way of higher bond yields in general.” Still, Schaffrik said the ECB could already “feel vindicated” after real yields, adjusted for inflation, remained “well anchored” on eurozone sovereign bonds and returned close to record lows after the central bank’s last meeting two weeks ago.

    Analysts noted that the ECB has taken a different tack to its peers, as the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have not joined it in pushing back against rising yields.  “The ECB, as the one central bank to have pledged to actively counter the rise in bond yields, is left in a pickle,” ING analysts said.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 22:00

  • In Syria, The War Of Hunger Is Taking Over From The War Of Guns
    In Syria, The War Of Hunger Is Taking Over From The War Of Guns

    Authored by Patrick Cockburn via The Unz Review,

    Great dollops of hypocrisy invariably accompany expressions of concern by outside powers for the wellbeing of the Syrian people. But even by these low standards, a new record for self-serving dishonesty is being set by the Caesar Civilian Protection Act, the new US law imposing the harshest sanctions in the world on Syria and bringing millions of Syrians to the brink of famine.

    Supposedly aimed at safeguarding ordinary Syrians from violent repression by President Bashar al-Assad, the law is given a humanitarian garnish by naming it after the Syrian military photographer who filmed and smuggled out of the country pictures of thousands of Syrians killed by the government. But instead of protecting Syrians, as it claims, the Caesar Act is a measure of collective punishment that is impoverishing people in government and opposition-held areas alike.

    Bad though the situation in Syria was after 10 years of warfare and a long-standing economic embargo, the crisis has got much worse in the nine months since the law was implemented on 17 June last year. It has raised the number of Syrians who are close to starvation to 12.4 million, or 60 per cent of the population, according to the UN.

    Already, more than half a million children under the age of five are suffering from stunting as the result of chronic malnutrition. As the Syrian currency collapsed and prices rose by 230 per cent over the last year, Syrian families could no longer afford to buy basic foodstuffs such as bread, rice, lentils, oil and sugar.

    “The war of hunger… scares me more than the war of guns,” says Ghassan Massoud, the Syrian actor famous for playing Saladin in the 2005 Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven. A politically neutral and popular figure in Syria, Massoud is quoted as saying that government employees are earning 50,000 Syrian pounds ($13/£9) a month when they need 800,000 Syrian pounds to survive. “I am a vegetarian but I do not accept that a citizen is not able to eat meat because a kilo costs 20,000 Syrian pounds.”

    The Caesar Act threatens sanctions on any person or company that does business with Syria and thereby imposes a tight economic siege on the country. Introduced just as the Covid-19 epidemic made its first onset in Syria last summer and soon after the implosion of the Lebanese economy to which Syria is closely linked, the law has proved the final devastating blow to Syrians who were already ground down by a decade of destruction.

    It was supposedly aimed at Assad and his regime, but there was never any reason to believe that it would destabilize them or compel them to ease repression. Since they hold power, they are well placed to control diminished resources. As with the 13 years of UN sanctions directed against Saddam Hussein between 1990 and 2003, the victims were not the dictator and his family but the civilian population. Iraqi society was shattered, with results that are still with us, and the same is now happening in Syria.

    “Sanctions and other measures that are meant to penalise repressive rulers usually wind up hurting ordinary people the most,” concludes the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

    I wrote in the 1990s that sanctions were killing more Iraqis than Saddam, but the defenders of the embargo would claim that its critics were aiding the Iraqi leader and, if there really was significant civilian suffering, it was all his fault. The same discredited arguments are now used today to justify the Caesar Act, though it hits people living in the 30 per cent of Syria outside Assad’s rule just as much as it harms them in the 70 per cent under his control.

    A university teacher in government-held Latakia on the Mediterranean coast says that she is trying to survive on a salary worth the equivalent of $18 a month. She is eating less and depends on fruit and vegetables from relatives who are farmers. In Damascus, people say that Covid-19 spreads easily because they do not have the money to buy both food and masks.

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    In rebel-held Idlib, where people face both bombing and Covid-19, one woman said that she thought that 95 per cent of people were worse off because of the pan-Syrian economic collapse. Even in former Kurdish areas now occupied by the Turkish army, the inhabitants are paying to be smuggled across the border into Turkey where they can get jobs that pay them a living wage.

    The newscasts and overviews of the Syrian conflict broadcast or published this week on the 10th anniversary of the start of the Syrian conflict in March 2011 make little mention of the Caesar Act and the merciless consequences of sanctions. This is par for the course because embargoes do not kill dramatically or publicly like bombs and bullets – and they can even be portrayed, as they are in the present instance, as a non-violent measure designed to help civilians.

    Syria is locked into a toxic stalemate in which the main players are outside powers who consult only their own interests whatever their tear-stained protestations to the contrary. Looked at from a strictly military point of view, Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, has won the war and controls most populated areas. The Kurds, backed by the US, hold a large chunk of northeast Syria, but they have been ethnically cleansed from two enclaves by Turkey. The Turks protect several million Arab civilians opposed to Assad crammed into part of Idlib province close to the Turkish border.

    The US and its allies may denounce Assad but it is a long time since they thought it feasible, or necessarily in their interests, to overthrow him. They fear that if he did fall, Syria might collapse into Libyan-type chaos and be taken over by jihadis. But since they also want to deny Assad, Russia and Iran a complete victory, they are content to see the present grim situation long continue.

    An argument in favor of sanctions is that they would ultimately force Assad to make concessions and bring an end to the war. But they have had precisely the opposite impact according to the UAE, which is likely to play a central role in any negotiations to bring about a permanent peace. Earlier this month, the foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan declared that “to keep the Caesar Act as it is today makes this path [towards resolving the crisis] more difficult”.

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    President Biden does not want to be sucked further into the Syrian morass and is unlikely to take the initiative. Much of the US foreign policy establishment think that the US made a mistake after 9/11 in focusing on wars in the Middle East when it should have been confronting China.

    Allowing Syria to fester while enforcing an economic siege embodied in the Caesar Act means that millions of Syrians are sinking ever deeper into misery and despair. A state of “no peace, no war”, in which there are no final winners and losers, is attractive to foreign powers, but Syria at present is like a rickety house of cards that may collapse at any moment.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:40

  • Border Facility Photos Leak Revealing Hundreds Of Children Huddled In "Terrible Conditions"
    Border Facility Photos Leak Revealing Hundreds Of Children Huddled In “Terrible Conditions”

    Photos from inside a US Customs and Border Protection overflow facility have leaked, revealing hundreds of children huddling on the floor of eight ‘pods’ – each of which are supposed to hold 260 people – yet one of which had over 400 unaccompanied male minors crammed together, according to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who provided the photos to Axios to raise awareness about the situation.

    The photos, taken over the weekend by someone else, come amid a media embargo by the Biden administration, which has refused to allow press into the facilities to observe and document what’s going on.

    Ahem:

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    Cueller, who toured the Donna, Texas facility but did not take the photos himself, described the setting as “terrible conditions for the children,” who he said need to quickly be moved into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services – which is currently at capacity due to a surge of migrants into the United States following President Biden’s pro-illegal policies.

    More via Axios:

    • Border Patrol agents are “doing the best they can under the circumstances” but are “not equipped to care for kids” and “need help from the administration,” he said.
    • “We have to stop kids and families from making the dangerous trek across Mexico to come to the United States. We have to work with Mexico and Central American countries to have them apply for asylum in their countries.”
    • As of Saturday, there were 10,000 migrants in CBP custody overall. Nearly half were unaccompanied minors — thousands of whom had been waiting for more than 3 days in border patrol facilities, according to government data provided to Axios by another source.

    “I have said repeatedly from the very outset a Border Patrol station is no place for a child,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a Sunday interview on CNN – discussing the situation he helped to create. “That is why we are working around the clock to move these children out of the Border Patrol facilities into the care and custody of the Department of Health and Human Services that shelters them.”

    Project Veritas, meanwhile, has also obtained exclusive footage from inside the facility.

    How will Biden’s water carriers defend this?

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:33

  • Dozens Of Chinese-Owned Factories Have Been Torched By Myanmar Protesters
    Dozens Of Chinese-Owned Factories Have Been Torched By Myanmar Protesters

    In yet more sanctions actions out of the White House Monday (following anti-China human rights related sanctions), Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced fresh measures against members of Myanmar’s military for the continuing crackdown on pro-democracy protests after the Feb. 1 coup d’etat led by the army.

    Myanmar’s chief of police, Than Hlaing, and its Bureau of Special Operations commander, Lt. Gen. Aung Soe, along with two army units will be hit with sanctions “for being responsible for or complicit in or having directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in, actions or policies that prohibit, limit, or penalize the exercise of freedom of expression or assembly by people in Burma,” Blinken said, using the official US name for Myanmar. 

    Blinken cited the use of lethal force against peaceful protesters which has included charges that over the past days the above mentioned units spearheaded “the Burmese security forces’ planned, systemic strategies to ramp up the use of lethal force,” according to Blinken’s statement. 

    Chinese-owned factories burned in the industrial area of Hlaingthaya in Yangon last week, via EPA-EFE

    “The United States continues to call on the military regime to release all those unjustly detained; stop its attacks on civil society members, journalists, and labor unionists; halt the brutal killings by its security forces; and return power to the democratically elected government,” Blinken added.

    International reports over the weekend have counted at least 230 people dead as a result of protest unrest and clashes with police – a number which could be far higher amid communications and internet blockages in various parts of the country. Earlier this month security forces were increasingly observed restoring to ‘live fire’ to disperse large demonstrations in major cities.

    Reuters meanwhile has noted the resistance in the streets has grown fiercer: “Demonstrators in Myanmar maintained their dogged opposition to military rule on Sunday despite a rising death toll, with two more people killed as the junta appeared equally determined to resist growing pressure to compromise.”

    The junta is defending its imposition of martial law given an alleged spate of arson attacks on Chinese-owned factories, particularly in the garment production hub of Yangon. At this point dozens of Chinese-owned businesses have been reported either vandalized or torched amid growing anti-China sentiment among the protesters. Beijing is seen as quietly supportive of the military coup despite official condemnations of the unrest from its embassy.

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    Within the past two weeks there’s been well over 30 Chinese factories attacked by mobs of protesters, some of which was met with live ammo used by security forces, resulting in deaths: 

    The Chinese embassy urged Myanmar’s ruling generals to stop violence and ensure the safety of people and property.

    China’s Global Times newspaper said 32 Chinese-invested factories were “vandalised in vicious attacks” that caused damage worth $37 million and injuries to two Chinese employees.

    This had resulted in one of the worst single days of bloodshed a little over a week ago, which “came in the Yangon suburb of Hlaingthaya where security forces killed at least 37 protesters after arson attacks on Chinese-owned factories, said a doctor in the area who declined to be identified.”

    Many protesters have claimed that security forces are actually behind the fires set to Chinese businesses. They say the military has relied upon ‘agitators’ to taint the popular street protests and bring China closer to its side. Beijing has urged calm while at the same time calling on state forces to protect the Chinese community and its property there.

    Monday’s latest US sanctions are not the first announced punitive measures against members of the national army; however, they are the most extensive, given as they target two entire military units.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:20

  • It's All Just Displacement: Freddie deBoer
    It’s All Just Displacement: Freddie deBoer

    This illuminating piece on modern journalism by Freddie deBoer comes highly recommended by the likes of Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Bari Weiss and others. You can subscribe to Freddie’s substack column here.

    Authored by Freddie deBoer via Substack

    Displacement – Displacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the defense is displaced aggression. If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source without consequences, they might “take out” their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.

    Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

    Things are bad, folks:

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    Life in the “content” industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive. There are staff writers at big-name publications who produce thousands of words every week and who make less than $40,000 a year for their trouble. There are permanent employees of highly prestigious newspapers and magazines who don’t receive health insurance. Venues close all the time. Mourning another huge round of layoffs is a regular bonding experience for people in the industry. Writers have to constantly job hop just to try and grind out an extra $1,500 a year, making their whole lives permanent job interviews where they can’t risk offending their potential bosses and peers. Many of them dream of selling that book to save themselves financially, not seeming to understand that book advances have fallen 40% in 10 years – median figure now $6,080 – and that the odds of actually making back even that meager advance are slim, meaning most authors are making less than minimum wage from their books when you do the math. They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision. They live in fear of being the one to lose out when the next layoffs come and the game of media musical chairs spins up once again. They have to pretend to like ghouls like Ezra Klein and Jonah Peretti and make believe that there’s such a thing as “the Daily Beast reputation for excellence.”

    I have always felt bad for them, despite our differences, because of these conditions. And they have a right to be angry. But they don’t have much in the way of self-awareness about where their anger really lies. A newsletter company hosting Bari Weiss is why you can’t pay your student loans? You sure?

    They’ll tell you about the terrible conditions in their industry themselves, when they’re feeling honest. So what are they really mad about? That I’m making a really-just-decent guaranteed wage for just one year? Or that this decent wage is the kind of money many of them dream of making despite the fact that, in their minds, they’ve done everything right and played by all the rules? Is their anger really about a half-dozen guys whose writing you have to actively seek out to see? (If you click the button and put in your email address, you’ll get these newsletters. If you don’t, you won’t. So if you’re a media type who hates my writing, consider just… not clicking that button.) Or do they need someplace to put the rage and resentment that grows inside them as they realize, no, it’s not getting better, this is all I get?

    It’s true that I have, in a very limited way, achieved the new American dream: getting a little bit of VC cash. I’m sorry. But it’s much much less than one half of what Felix Salmon was making in 2017 and again, it’s only for one year.

    You think the writers complaining in that piece I linked to at the top wanted to be here, at this place in their career, after all those years of hustling? You think decades into their media career, the writers who decamped to Substack said to themselves “you know, I’d really like to be in my 40s and having to hope that enough people will pitch in $5 a month so I can pay my mortgage”? No. But the industry didn’t give them what they felt they deserved either. So they displace and project. They can hate Jesse Singal, but Jesse Singal isn’t where this burning anger is coming from. Neither am I. They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions and were surprised to find that they’re drifting into middle age without anything resembling financial security. I feel for them as I feel for all people living economically precarious lives, but getting rid of Substack or any of its writers will not do anything to fix their industry or their jobs. They wanted more and they got less and it hurts. This isn’t what they dreamed. That’s what this is really about.

    What makes this niche platform worthy of a week-long media meltdown? They’ll suggest that this is about the political impact of Substack. What political impact? The combined influence of the writers they’re attacking is small. The combined audience of the writers they’re attacking is small. The combined wages of the writers they’re attacking is small. Substack is a tiny company that 99% of Americans have never heard of. The conservative media is immense and well-funded and more equipped to survive economic downturns than the progressive media. And that world is filled with people who actually, openly believe the terrible things we’re falsely accused of believing. They’re the ones endangering vulnerable groups. They come into the homes of a huge swath of the country and spread hateful propaganda. Why on earth would you invest 5 minutes of your anger on me, when Breitbart exists? What rational sense does that make?

    My own deal here is not mysterious. It’s just based on a fact that the blue checks on Twitter have never wanted to accept. I got offered money to write here for the same reason I got offered to write for The New York Times and Harper’s and The Washington Post and The LA Times, the same reason I’ve gotten a half-dozen invitations to pitch since I started here a few weeks ago, the same reason a literary agent sought me out and asked me to write a book, the same reason I sold that book for a decent advance: because I pull traffic. Though I am a social outcast from professional opinion writing, I have a better freelance publishing history than many, many of my critics who are paid-up, obedient members of the media social scene. Why? Because the editors who hired me thought I was a great guy? No. Because I pull traffic. I always have. That’s why you’re reading this on Substack right now.

    I’ve been given opportunities because I’ve proved profitable to media businesses and like all businesses media businesses only care about profit. The important question for my critics should thus be why I’ve been successful in the ideas market when I represent the rejection of many of their values. Since the line between professional and personal relationships has completely collapsed in the industry, media people think that any professional success must represent an endorsement of the writer as a person. (The question they ask about me is often “how did a guy nobody likes get published everywhere,” betraying the assumption that being well-liked should be the only criterion for getting published.) But popularity has nothing to do with me consistently getting work in the industry. I turn writing into clicks and clicks into cash. That’s not complicated.

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    Nor is it complicated how I’ve generated a public reputation. It never seems to occur to them that constantly having Twitter meltdowns about me raised my profile in ways I never could have accomplished without their help. You think Substack would have even heard of me if I only did what I spend most of my writing time doing, producing long ruminative essays about education policy or obscure books or the psychic wounds of 21st century culture? If you’re mad that I’m getting economic opportunity now, why did you play my game over and over again for the past 12 years1?

    I have no idea if I’ll stay at Substack after this year. If the money is still good, I probably will. If it’s not, I probably won’t. If the Twitter hive succeeds in getting a purge going that gets me kicked off the platform, that’s cool too. I’ll just do other things. Whether I am allowed to serve out the length of my contract with Substack will have absolutely no impact on the integrity of the news industry or its finances. So, again: who are you really mad at? Me? What do I have to do with your broken industry? Why are you constantly tweeting about Substack and not the private equity creeps who are destroying your livelihood?

    A really important lesson to learn, in life, is this: your enemies are more honest about you than your friends ever will be. I’ve been telling the blue checks for over a decade that their industry was existentially fucked, that the all-advertising model was broken, that Google and Facebook would inevitably hoover up all the profit, that there are too many affluent kids fresh out of college just looking for a foothold in New York who’ll work for next to nothing and in doing so driving down the wages of everyone else, that their mockery of early subscription programs like Times Select was creating a disastrous industry expectation that asking your readers directly for money was embarrassing. Trump is gone and the news business is cratering. Michael Tracey didn’t make that happen. None of this anger will heal what’s wrong. If you get all of the people you don’t like fired from Substack tomorrow, what will change? How will your life improve? Greenwald will spend more time with his hottie husband and his beloved kids and his 6,000 dogs in his beautiful home in Rio. Glenn will be fine. How do we do the real work of getting you job security and a decent wage?

    Who’s your real enemy? Me? Matt Taibbi? Or your boss, your employer, your industry, your economy, your country? Think it over, really. I have much, much more sympathy for the average writer or journalist than people would think. It’s an important profession and many of them individually, when you peel them off from the pack, are lovely people. I hope all of them get financial stability, including the ones who constantly scream about me online. (Even Noah Blatarsky.) I want media to be healthier than it is, financially and otherwise. I want media workers to have higher pay and better benefits and more job security and powerful unions. In part because if they did they’d be more independent and media desperately needs more independence.

    But how do things get better in that way? Only through real self-criticism (which Twitter makes impossible) and by asking hard questions. Questions like one that has not been credibly confronted a single time in this entire media meltdown: why are so many people subscribing to Substacks? What is the traditional media not providing that they’re seeking elsewhere? Why have half a million people signed up as paying subscribers of various Substack newsletters, if the establishment media is providing the diversity of viewpoints that is an absolute market requirement in a country with a vast diversity of opinions? You can try to make an adult determination about that question, to better understand what media is missing, or you can read this and write some shitty joke tweet while your industry burns to the ground around you. It’s your call.

    Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you – college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.

    In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

    And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and wrong. So maybe try and look at where your problems actually come from. They’re not going away.

    Now steel yourselves, media people, take a shot of something strong, look yourself in the eye in the mirror, summon you most honest self, and tell me: am I wrong?

    * * *

    This is an aside, but here’s the stats from the median post on this blog so far in terms of total views:

    And here’s the post I wrote to deliberately enflame the anger of media Twitter, prompting a lot of people to say “there goes Freddie again, he’s crazy, he’s embarrassing himself,” etc:

    I suspect the people who keep doing me this favor have understood this dynamic for a long time, but ignoring me (which hurts my interests) gets you 0 likes and retweets from peers and having a fit about me (which helps my interests) gets you many.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:00

  • Theranos 2.0? Founders Of 'Poop Testing' Startup Indicted In $60 Million Fraud Scheme
    Theranos 2.0? Founders Of ‘Poop Testing’ Startup Indicted In $60 Million Fraud Scheme

    The founders of a now-bankrupt San Francisco startup that analyzed fecal samples to compare consumers’ gut microbiomes have been indicted on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, health care fraud, and money laundering after allegedly bilking investors and health insurance providers, according to federal prosecutors.

    Zachary Schulz Apte, 36, and Jessica Sunshine Richman, 46, co-founded uBiome in 2012, offering a direct-to-consumer service called “Gut Explorer,” according to SFGate. The service initially cost less than $100.

    The company grew to include “clinical” tests of gut and vaginal microbiomes, which were aimed to be used by medical providers so uBiome could seek up to $3,000 in reimbursements from health insurance companies. The federal indictment states that uBiome sought upwards of $300 million in reimbursement claims from private and public health insurers between 2015 and 2019. The company was ultimately paid more than $35 million for tests that “were not validated and not medically necessary.” -SFGate

    After meeting in 2012 through the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences Garage, a UCSF-affiliated incubator, Apte and Richman founded uBiome and received funding from Silicon Valley investors, including 8VC in San Francisco and Andreessen Horowitz, which hold 22% and 10% stakes in uBiome respectively.

    The pair’s endeavor generated quite the buzz for a time – with Richman even being named “innovator” winner in Goop’s “The Greater goop Awards” as uBiome’s valuation topped $600 million.

    In 2019, right as uBiome began its ‘death spiral,’ Apte and Richman were married (and can’t testify against each other). In May, the FBI raided their offices in San Francisco – leading to the company suspending all testing and putting the pair on administrative leave. Just one month after filing for bankruptcy in September of that year, uBiome went into liquidation and shut down.

    Much like the high-profile collapse of Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos blood-testing business, prosecutors allege Apte and Richman assured investors their medical tests were reliable when, in fact, they weren’t. The couple “painted a false picture of uBiome as a rapidly growing company with a strong track record of reliable revenue through health insurance reimbursements for its tests. UBiome’s purported success in generating revenue, however, was a sham,” the SEC wrote in a complaint.

    Apte annd Richman are also accused of falsifying documents, concealing facts about their billing model, and lying when asked by insurance providers – as well as defrauding investors.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 20:40

  • WeWork Nears Deal With Shaq-Backed SPAC Despite Losing $3.2 Billion Last Year
    WeWork Nears Deal With Shaq-Backed SPAC Despite Losing $3.2 Billion Last Year

    The fact that potential investors were even taking meetings with the WeWork management team is a sign of just how few suitable takeover opportunities remain in a market that has been saturated by SPACs (following a decade-plus post-crisis bull run where rock-bottom interest rates and oodles of free money ensured that VCs and private equity titans like Apollo have already picked the bones). But now the troubled office-space rental company, which has been shouting into the void about a management-led turnaround strategy, has just offered some more details into just how desperate SPAC management is to close a deal.

    Just look at how many SPACs have launched over the past 16 months. And the average deal size has increased since the start of the year..

    …as SPACs increasingly seek to merger with larger targets.

    We first heard that WeWork management was looking to try and hitch a ride on the SPAC boom (incidentally, the news hit around the same time that SoftBank reportedly was considering launching its “Vision Fund 2” as a SPAC) last fall. Then in January, it was reported that the company was in talks with not one, but several, teams of potential suitors.

    Well, fast forward a couple of months, and those eager suitors have apparently gotten a peak at WeWork’s finances, and they’re about as bad as can be expected. According to the FT, the company lost $3.2 billion last year, which ironically was an improvement over the prior (non-COVID-plagued) year 2019. Still, WeWork is pitching for $1 billion in new investment along with the stock-market listing that has long eluded it (as a reminder, the IPO was shelved in 2019 after the company saw its private valuation slide from nearly $50 billion to less than $10 billion in a matter of weeks).

    In one encouraging sign, the improvement in WeWork’s losses during the plague year resulted from the company slashing operating expenses from $2.2 billion to just $49MM. However, we’re not certain how encouraging that number actually is, considering that WeWork would almost certainly need to ramp up spending once clients start returning to its offices. According to the company’s “Project Windmill”, WeWork is hoping to go public at a valuation of $9BN.

    But more interesting than the numbers is the identity of WeWork’s suitor. The FT reports that BowX Acquisition Corp, which raised more than $420MM back in August, is one of the SPACs interested in acquiring WeWork as its target. Basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal is a BowX advisor, one of a multitude of celebrities who have glomed onto the craze. WeWork and BowX hope to obtain the additional $1BN WeWork is hoping to raise by lining up institutional investors (a common maneuver employed by SPACs, most of which recruit institutional capital to supplement the money they have raised from investors).

    While the $9 billion valuation that WeWork is pitching is much reduced from the astronomical figure it succeeded in achieving (thanks largely to SoftBank), some things about WeWork never change. 

    WeWork is once again pitching itself to investors not as a conventional bricks and mortar landlord but as a high-tech platform, as it did in 2019. The documents seen by the FT describe the business as a “worldwide property technology platform” and an “asset light platform for managing and orchestrating flexible space”.

    Still, the FT notes that some investors are skeptical of WeWork and its projections.

    Projections in the documents include a fast rebound in occupancy to 90 per cent – well above WeWork’s pre-pandemic level – by the end of 2022 and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation of $485m next year.

    One investor pitched on the WeWork deal cast doubt on the company’s projections, which also forecast that revenues would climb from $3.2bn last year to $7bn by 2024. 

    And we don’t blame them. The notion that WeWork’s occupancy rates will top 90% by the end of next year seems unlikely, since freelancers and upstart companies can save more money by simply continuing to work from home.

    But at the end of the day, that probably doesn’t matter many of the people negotiating with WeWork. SPACs have two years to get a deal done, or face the prospect of returning money to investors. Once the money is raised, the SPAC’s sponsors can cash out.

    Which means the most critical factor driving SPAC deal flow is the availability of eager dupes, not the availability of compelling opportunities.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 20:20

  • Japanese Semi Plant Fire To Have "Major Impact" On Already-Bottlenecked Auto Industry
    Japanese Semi Plant Fire To Have “Major Impact” On Already-Bottlenecked Auto Industry

    Semiconductor supply shortages continue to sting the automotive industry globally. 

    On Monday morning a fire at a semiconductor factory in Japan had the entire industry jumpy and was sparking “further concerns over chip supply shortages for the industry,” according to Bloomberg. The fire took place at a clean room at Japanese company Renesas, a major provider of auto chips. 

    Renesas’ CEO, Hidetoshi Shibata, said that “the incident is likely to have a major impact on the car industry”.

    Two-thirds of the affected production lines were making automotive chips, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal also wrote that the effect could have wide-ranging reach:

    Mariko Semetko, a credit analyst at Moody’s Japan, said the fire was likely to damp the recovery of global auto production this year, while auto makers said they were still assessing the impact.

    Mr. Shibata said the company was trying to make up for the lost production at other plants but didn’t know whether that was possible. The company estimated the revenue losses at the equivalent of $160 million a month.

    Names like Toyota, Volkswagen and Continental will be on watch heading into the beginning of the week, as they are all customers of Renesas. Bloomberg also reports Monday morning that names like BMW, Daimler and Stellantis, in addition to auto-exposed chipmakers like Infineon, STMicro and Melexis, could all be negatively affected by the fire. 

    We have written about the shortage has wreaked chaos on the auto industry so far in 2021.

    Recall, just days ago we noted that Samsung was the latest to join the chorus of companies stating they were being negatively affected by the shortage. The company said the current crisis is “very serious” and that it “poses a slight problem” for the electronics company heading into the second quarter. The company continues to try and address supply issues, Reuters reported that CEO and mobile chief Koh Dong-jin said at Samsung’s recent annual general meeting.

    In fact, there are also rumors that Samsung is considering skipping its usual Galaxy Note launch this year due to the ongoing chip shortage, according to 9 to 5 Google. Koh is quoted as saying:

    Note series is positioned as a high-end model in our business portfolio. It could be a burden to unveil two flagship models in a year so it might be difficult to release Note model in 2H. The timing of Note model launch can be changed but we seek to release a Note model next year.

    Recently, we also wrote about how difficult it was becoming for U.S. companies to export chipmaking hardware to China due to trade restrictions. We also documented weeks ago how critical Taiwan would be in getting the semiconductor industry back up and running. We noted that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing was rushing to try and build new facilities through the Chinese New Year in order to meet demand. 

    TSMC is one of the biggest suppliers of chips to company like Apple, Google and Qualcomm. As a result of a worldwide shortage in chips that was brought on due to the pandemic, they are now rushing to try and get a new factory in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan built. Construction the new facility will take place throughout 2021, with completion expected in 2022. 

    Earlier in 2021 we noted that the semi situation had been turning dire and was now being referred to as the “most serious shortage in years”. Qualcomm’s CEO said last month that there were now shortages “across the board”. 

    And it wasn’t just Qualcomm executives speaking out: other industry leaders warned in recent weeks that they are susceptible to the shortages. Apple said recently that its new high end iPhones were on hold due to a shortage of components. NXP Semiconductors has also warned that the problems are no longer just confined to the auto industry. Sony also said last week it may not be able to to fully meet demand for its new gaming console in 2021 due to the shortage. Companies like Lenovo have also been feeling the crunch.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 20:00

  • Propaganda Watch: Dr Fauci Children's Book On The Way
    Propaganda Watch: Dr Fauci Children’s Book On The Way

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    CNN weirdo Brian Stelter announced with Glee Sunday that Dr Anthony Fauci is the subject of a new children’s book titled  “Dr. Fauci: How A Boy From Brooklyn Became America’s Doctor,” prompting many to immediately label it a propaganda campaign.

    Stelter claimed that the book, written by Kate Messner and published by Simon & Schuster, “tells you something about media,” appearing to take credit for the thing.

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    In a follow up written article, Stelter described Fauci as being “immortalized” in the book, with Messner noting “I’m really hopeful that curious kids who read this book — those we’re counting on to solve tomorrow’s scientific challenges — will see themselves in the pages of Dr. Fauci’s story and set their goals just as high.”

    Fauci, who has repeatedly flip flopped and lied about the use of masks and admitted that there is no science behind lockdowns, has been ever present on CNN and every other pro-lockdown news bilge station for the past year.

    The book was reportedly written with Fauci’s input and consultation.

    The book publisher’s website states “Before he was Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci was a curious boy in Brooklyn, delivering prescriptions from his father’s pharmacy on his blue Schwinn bicycle.”

    It continues, “His father and immigrant grandfather taught Anthony to ask questions, consider all the data, and never give up – and Anthony’s ability to stay curious and to communicate with people would serve him his entire life.”

    Many took to social media to express their opinions…

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    And finally…

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 19:40

  • Cali Couple Who Paid $560,000 Cash For New Home Can't Get Covid-Squatter To Leave
    Cali Couple Who Paid $560,000 Cash For New Home Can’t Get Covid-Squatter To Leave

    Imagine buying your dream home, arriving at it to move in, and finding out there’s a squatter that won’t leave. 

    That was the case for Tracie and Myles Albert, who recently bought a 4 bedroom home in Riverside, California and found out the hard way that the seller wasn’t quite ready to hand over the keys. 

    More than a year after buying their home on January 31, 2020, they have yet to be able to get inside their property. “It’s just draining, emotionally and financially,” Tracie told Fox 11. 

    Chris Taylor, the real estate agent who sold the home to the Alberts, said: “He needed $560,000 from the sale of his house in two weeks and he called me on a Sunday, so in traditional real estate there’s no way of doing that unless the buyer’s a cash buyer.”

    He continued: “It’s genuinely unfathomable to me that we live in a state where something like this is even possible. They closed escrow on this home January 31, 2020.”

    Myles Albert said: “It took us scrambling to get everything we had, our life savings put together and a hard money loan on top of it to make that happen. We own the house, outright. That’s our house and it’s all in a contract, written, legal, done. He’s been paid the money in his account. How could we have no rights to go into our home?”

    He continued: “They have this case under a COVID tenant situation, of no evictions when it doesn’t fall under that at all. This transaction went through in January 2020 before any of that, it isn’t a renter who was getting thrown out. It’s the guy who collected all of this money.” 

    Tracie said: “I tried watering the lawn one time and he came out and ripped my sprinkler lines, ripped all the wires. The Palm trees are dying, everything was beautiful and everything is dying.” Law enforcement told her husband: “If you were in Arizona, if you were in Nevada, this wouldn’t be a problem, you would just go take your house back. But in California, like our hands are tied, even though we’re on your side, there’s nothing we can do.” 

    And the Alberts aren’t the only such example of this type of situation. Attorney Dennis Block told Fox: “This year alone, we’ve handled at least 7 maybe 8 cases of this exact type of situation.” 

    “This person is not a tenant, it’s a previous owner who is enjoying the benefits of the money that was transferred to his account but of course doesn’t want to move out of the premises that he no longer owns,” Block concluded.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 19:20

  • Want A Job? Get A Shot!
    Want A Job? Get A Shot!

    Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

    Mask tyranny reached a new low recently when a family was kicked off a Spirit Airlines flight because their four-year-old autistic son was not wearing a mask. The family was removed from the plane even though the boy’s doctor had decided the boy should be exempted from mask mandates because the boy panics and engages in behavior that could pose a danger to himself when wearing a mask.

    Besides, four-year-olds do not present much risk of spreading or contracting coronavirus. Even if masks did prevent infections among adults, there would be no reason to force children to wear masks.

    Mask mandates have as much to do with healthcare as Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screenings have to do with stopping terrorism. Masks and TSA screenings are “security theater” done to reassure those frightened by government and media propaganda regarding coronavirus and terrorism that the government is protecting them.

    Covid oppression will worsen if vaccine passports become more widely required. Vaccine passports are digital or physical proof a person has taken a coronavirus vaccine. New York is already requiring that individuals produce digital proof of taking a coronavirus vaccine before being admitted to sporting events.

    Imagine if the zealous enforcers of mask mandates had the power to deny you access to public places because you have not “gotten your shot.” Even worse, what if a potential employer had to ensure you were “properly” vaccinated before hiring you? This could come to pass if proponents of mandatory E-Verify have their way.

    E-Verify requires employers to submit personal identifying information — such as a social security numbers and biometric data — to a government database to ensure job applicants have federal permission to hold jobs.

    Currently, E-Verify is only used to assure a job applicant is a citizen or legal resident. However, its use could be expanded to advancing other purposes, such as ensuring a potential new hire has taken all the recommended vaccines.

    E-Verify could even be used to check if a job applicant has ever expressed, or associated with someone who has expressed, “hate speech,” “conspiracy theories,” or “Russian disinformation,” which is code for facts embarrassing to the political class.

    Many employers will be reluctant to hire such an employee for fear their businesses will become the next targets of “cancel culture.” Those who doubt this should consider how many businesses have folded under pressure from the cultural Marxists and fired someone for expressing an “unapproved” thought.

    Politicians and bureaucrats have used overblown fear of coronavirus to justify the largest infringement of individual liberty in modern times. Covid tyranny has been aided by many Americans who are not just willing to sacrifice their liberty for phony security, but who help government take away liberty from their fellow citizens.

    The good news is that, as it becomes increasingly clear that there was no need to shut down the economy, throw millions out of work, subject children to the fraud of “virtual” learning, and force everyone to wear a mask, more people are turning against the politicians and “experts” behind the lockdowns and mandates. Hopefully, these Americans will realize that, in addition to coronavirus lockdowns and mandates, the entire welfare-warfare-fiat money system is built on a foundation of lies.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 19:00

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