Today’s News 24th April 2021

• The Reasons Why Leftists Will Never Successfully Disarm Americans
  The Reasons Why Leftists Will Never Successfully Disarm Americans

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  Gun confiscation has always been the Holy Grail of totalitarian regimes. Without disarmament, fully centralized control of a population is not possible. And though it is true that not every evil regime seeks to disarm every single citizen (at least not right away), they always disarm the people they specifically intend to hurt the most.

  

  For example, gun control advocates today like to point out that the Third Reich in Germany did not disarm the entire German population. This is a rather bizarre position for leftists as they continually wail and scream about Nazis around every corner and behind every tree, but they will STILL defend their gun grabbing policies by arguing that the Nazis were not as bad as conservatives assume. Of course, what they rarely mention is that the Nazis DID disarm millions of people; most of them Jews and political opponents under 1938 German gun laws.

  The National Socialists disarmed the people they planned to destroy. It’s not hard to figure out why; they didn’t want their targets to be able to fight back. They allowed their political supporters to keep their weapons legally; this is not a relaxation of gun laws, in fact, it’s the reverse – It is selective enforcement of gun confiscation based on ideological loyalty.

  Hilariously, leftists in the US when confronted with this fact double down on their gun control arguments. Instead of admitting their foolish error they will say: “Yes, the Nazis disarmed the Jews and others, but having guns would have made no difference in saving their lives…” And there you have it – The most backwards circular logic of all time. If Jews and others owning guns was not a deterrent to their slaughter, then why would the Nazis bother disarming them in the first place? Leftists have no answer to this question.

  They are trying to argue against facts using a hypothetical; really, how would they know? Maybe owning guns might have saved the lives of millions of people the Nazis had deemed enemies of the state? Maybe it would have acted as a deterrent to the Holocaust? Maybe the Nazis would have been afraid to expand tyranny into Europe if they had to worry about their own population fighting back and disrupting their momentum? Maybe, WWII would have never happened? We could argue hypotheticals all day long…

  What we do know for certain is that disarmament is ALWAYS one of the first steps by totalitarians in cementing their control of a population, and this is most common among the biggest political killers in modern history – And no, it’s not the Nazis; it’s the communists.

  While a debate rages over the exact number of deaths attributed to communist governments, it is estimated that they are responsible for approximately 65 million to 100 million murders over the course of the last century, a genocide beyond anything history has ever seen before. These deaths were caused by direct means, such as shooting dissidents, or indirect means, such as imprisoning dissidents until they died from complications, or stealing food supplies from rural communities and allowing them to starve en masse.

  Stalin in particular declared any theft of state property a crime punishable by death. He then at the same time declared that all production including food production was state property. So, if you eat food that was not granted to you by the state, you are stealing, and could therefore be shot. See how that works?

  None of this would have been possible without gun control and confiscation laws put in place before the larger genocide was enacted. In 1918 the Bolsheviks and the Council of the People’s Commissar mandated that Russian citizens turn in their firearms under penalty of prosecution. Gun restrictions and penalties were increased over the years until WWII, when the Soviets were loath to arm their own population in response to Nazi invasion. In fact, the ease by which the Nazi army rolled through the Eastern front was partly due to the disarmament of the Russian population.

  Communist governments only allow people to have firearms in their hands when they are fighting against the ideological and foreign foes of the regime. You are allowed to be cannon fodder for the elites, you are not allowed the means to defend yourself from those same elites.

  Americans (primarily conservative Americans) have an in-depth understanding of this dynamic. While leftists are more concerned with rewriting history to their benefit, we are more concerned with learning from it. We know where gun control leads, and so did the Founding Fathers of our nation, which is why they codified gun ownership into the US constitution as an inalienable right under the 2nd Amendment. Here are the reasons why leftists, globalists and communists will NEVER be able to disarm the American population as they have done in previous nations…

  We Know The History Of Gun Control

  As noted above, we have studied the history of tyrants. There is no tyranny that has ever existed that did not try to disarm the population, or disarm the portion of the population the government intended to enslave or destroy. Leftists froth at the mouth trying to re-imagine history in a way that circumvents or ignores the tyranny issue when it comes to gun control. They are wasting their time.

  They are never going to convince conservatives and moderates that gun confiscation was not a key step in the establishment of various tyrannies in modern history. All the mental gymnastics and manipulation, all the energy they spend trying to rationalize away genocide as somehow “inevitable” regardless of gun rights – it’s all for nothing. We are far smarter then they are. We are well versed in the legacy of gun control, and this makes their tactics useless.

  We Understand Incrementalism – We Know All The Tricks

  The level of dishonesty involved in gun control advocacy is astonishing. Leftists often use lies as a means to gain political capital; if they were completely honest about their intentions they would not receive much support from the general population for their efforts. Gun grabbers are very careful in most cases to use phrases like “common sense” when talking about new restrictions. They try to refrain from admitting what they really want is complete disarmament, at least, they tried until recently.

  Incrementalism was the name of the game for decades, but in the past year they are going for broke. Some leftist politicians are openly admitting their true goals, because frankly the song and dance wasn’t working and they know conservatives aren’t going to allow any further encroachment on their rights.

  I find it interesting that leftists are so astonished at our refusal to compromise on any further gun restrictions. They seem to think that any new violent shooting buys them new gun control capitol. Maybe that’s how things used to work, but not any longer. Frankly, these shootings are irrelevant to our gun rights. Punishing everyone for the crimes of a handful is no longer acceptable to conservatives because we know that if we give gun control advocates an inch, they will take a mile.

  Kamala Harris, now Vice President of the US, is one of the many Democrats now openly seeking mandatory government buybacks of firearms and the dismantling of gun rights. However, it was Beto O’Rourke who really took the mask off when it came to the true intentions of gun grabbers.

  Joe Biden is famous for his statements admonishing military grade weapons in civilian hands and telling people that a “double barreled shotgun” is “superior” to the AR-15 for home defense. Obviously, a two shot weapon with a limited effective range of around 50 yards or less makes it very difficult to fight back against government tyranny. And, we all know that eventually even the shotguns would be taken away.

  Biden’s specific focus, though, seems to be Red Flag gun laws, which allow authorities to confiscate firearms from people not involved in criminal activity, and this is based on hearsay testimony and without due process. Criteria includes any “suspicion of mental illness”, which is completely subjective. Conservatives have been accused of mental illness because they oppose Covid lockdowns, they question vaccine safety, they question the legitimacy of Global Warming fear mongering in the media, etc. ANYTHING could be labeled a mental illness by the state and therefore make a person susceptible to Red Flag confiscation.

  This is targeted incrementalism and selective enforcement of gun control, much like that used by the Nazis. Red Flag laws allow the government to attack political and ideological opponents one at a time and disarm them, just as the Nazis selectively targeted their political opponents for disarmament. We know where all of this is going. We’ve seen it before.

  BLM Race Riots

  Despite the false claims of the mainstream media, we have seen first hand the destruction and insanity perpetrated by Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter. They are anything but “peaceful”, they are dangerous in their lack of intelligence and logic, and their social justice ideology is a cancer that infects and debilitates every vital organ of Western civilization.

  In his movie ‘Platoon’, Oliver Stone’s character Chris Taylor says: “Hell is the impossibility of reason”. If this doesn’t describe the social justice movement today then I don’t know what does.

  If a group of people is determined to make every single tragedy about racism and “white supremacy” despite all facts to the contrary, and then use those tragedies as an excuse for mass violence, then they are zealots, and zealots cannot be reasoned with. They are cultists with a mission, and they will do anything to accomplish that mission.

  In this case, the mission of Marxists within BLM and the globalist foundations that fund them (like Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundation) is to destroy the very fabric of America, “burn it to the ground”, and then rebuild it into an unrecognizable husk devoid of principles or freedom.

  Yeah, I don’t think conservative gun owners are going to go along with that. Burning down their own neighborhoods is one thing, but they have tried to spread beyond the borders of their own garbage cities in the past, and we aren’t going to allow them to act violently. For this reason alone, conservatives will never disarm.

  The Control Agenda Is Out In The Open

  There is a reason why leftists and globalists are so obsessed with taking away combat ready firearms from Americans, and it’s not about “saving lives”. These weapons act as a deterrent to full blown tyranny. As long as they exist, our ability to take back our other rights and freedoms exists.

  If anything has convinced gun owners of the need for firearms, it has been the past year of pandemic fear mongering. What have we learned so far? Well, we are now fully aware of the “Great Reset” agenda, which has been promoted nonstop by the World Economic Forum and various political leaders. This agenda calls for years of economic lockdowns and medical mandates, forced vaccination, medical passports without which a person might be completely removed from the economy, a new cashless society, a shared economy in which you will “own nothing and like it”.

  The medical or vaccine “passports” are particularly disconcerting. For one, governments don’t necessarily have to enforce them right away. Rather, they can simply allow their corporate partners to demand said passports from anyone that wants to get a job or shop in their stores. Once this system is ingrained into the consumer world, governments can then step in and make passports a legal requirement. Eventually, the passports give the establishment the ability to control and micro-manage every aspect of every individual life. Without compliance to every whim, the technocrats can easily void your passport, and then you die from poverty and starvation.

  This would be impossible to do in a country where a majority of the population is armed. I think it’s safe to say most Americans do not want to live in the dystopian world that the globalists at the WEF envision, and we will fight to ensure it does not happen.

  Tyranny Is Enforced By Armed Men On The Ground

  My favorite mantra of gun grabbers is the claim that “Your AR-15 isn’t going to help you against an Abrams tank or a predator drone”. These people don’t understand how totalitarian systems function. In order to control a population, you have to have loyal troops on the ground…everywhere. Not only that, but you also need loyal civilians, a large percentage of the population, to act as your eyes and ears and sometimes brute force. And finally, you need anyone who might oppose you to be afraid to take action to defend themselves. You need them docile and passive.

  There are a lot of moving parts to tyranny, and tanks and planes are secondary to basic manpower. And where there are troops and others enforcing tyranny, there are numerous targets. Where there are firearms, there is a means to eliminate a tyrant at the top of the pyramid with a single well placed bullet. Furthermore, you don’t need armored vehicles and stealth jets to fight tyranny; what you need is a good firearm to remove the people driving and flying those machines. A smart rebel might even take those weapons for his own arsenal in the process.

  A lot of gun owners are also military veterans, and they have seen how things played out in places like Afghanistan, where all the military might in the world was ineffective against tribesman with old AK-47s and roadside IEDs. It’s about force of will along with minimal necessary firearms. Guerrilla wars are not fought in terms of battles, they are fought in terms of attrition. Americans understand this better than most.

  For all these reasons and more the gun grabber ethos is essentially pointless. They can have total dominance in the federal government, they could have every state government on their side and pass hundreds of laws and executive orders making every gun owner a criminal, and it still would not matter. We will not budge, we would rather fight.

  Elitists and leftists just don’t seem to get it. Maybe it’s the way their brains work. Maybe they just can’t comprehend the idea that some people will not compromise certain freedoms no matter the cost. They think everyone has a limit; that everyone has a price. They think anyone can be bought, or that anyone can be leveraged into submission. The truth is, many of us can’t. Some of us have no price, and we cannot be compelled to comply.

  We are the people that keep freedom alive, and totalitarians are terrified of us; gun grabbing is merely a natural extension of their fear and doubt. Wherever an oligarchy is seeking to disarm the population this is a sure sign they are about to grasp for even more control, and they are afraid that the population might dethrone them. And honestly, they should be afraid.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 23:40

• Robo-Dogs Spotted At SpaceX's Texas Launch Facility 
  Robo-Dogs Spotted At SpaceX’s Texas Launch Facility 

  A pair of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs were spotted Thursday wondering SpaceX’s Texas launch facility. 

  

  Twitter user “BocaChicaGal,” who is part of the website NASASpaceFlight.com, tweeted a video from SpaceX South Texas launch site, located in Boca Chica approximately 20 miles east Brownsville, Texas, showing two Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs walking the launch site. 

  Zeus and Apollo are enjoying a walk about at the Boca Chica launch site. 🚀@NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/MAKMwYmV6N

  — Mary (@BocaChicaGal) April 22, 2021

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

  BocaChicaGal said the robots’ names were “Zeus and Apollo,” but did not point out which. In the past, these four-legged robots have been spotted roaming past wreckages of Starships. 

  

  It’s not clear the goal of today’s mission, but one of the robots had an inspection sensor mounted on its rear. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 23:20

• The State-Corporate Convergence In Our State Of Emergency
  The State-Corporate Convergence In Our State Of Emergency

  Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

  Perhaps the most pressing matter today for advocates of freedom is the prospect of the Left completing the institution of a totalitarian state. There is no other way to read the multiprong approach and the political maneuverings that political operatives are taking to rule under “Biden.” I put “Biden” in quotation marks here because the current president of the United States is not a singular person named Joe Biden. It is a central executive committee consisting of party rulers and advisers, plus corporate-state apparatuses.

  Make no mistake, the power grab that the Left is undertaking poses the most grievous threat to liberty in recent history, regardless of its effects on the Republican Party.

  

  The signals could not be any clearer. In addition to the swath of executive orders, clearly composed by executive committee members and aimed at either ingratiating and expanding the Democratic Party’s base or extending federal power, the Democrats have initiated a growing body of laws which would, if passed, ensure uniparty rule for the foreseeable future.

  These include especially H.R. 1, or the For the People’s Act, passed by the House. Should it pass the Senate (with the eradication of the filibuster), H.R.-1 would grossly favor Democratic candidates in federal elections. Notwithstanding the expansion of the Democratic base through various means, including overriding existing voter ID laws in many states and mandating that all states allow mail-in ballots without IDs, it would further centralize federal election oversight and, according to the Institute for Free Speech, “[e]xpand the universe of regulated online political speech (by Americans) beyond paid advertising to include, apparently, communications on groups’ or individuals’ own websites and e-mail messages.”

  The legislative maneuverings include the ‘‘Judiciary Act of 2021,’’ which would simply expand the Supreme Court to twelve members plus the chief justice. This move, which would amount to adding four Democrat-approved justices, would essentially effect a legislative takeover of the Supreme Court, as the Democratic-controlled Supreme Court would increasingly “legislate from the bench” and likewise expand the power of the Democratic-controlled legislative and executive branches beyond official perimeters. The odds of its passage, as is, are slim, but the overture is indicative of an attempted power grab not seen since FDR.

  But the most conspicuous sign of the nearing consolidation of totalitarian government is the effective merger of corporate and state functionaries, with corporations and other organizations acting as appendages of the government and enforcing corporate-state desiderata. The indications of this merger are so many and sundry that any exhaustive recounting of them would entail a book-length treatment.

  But take, for example, the calls by Congressperson Maxine Watters (D-CA) that “protestors” “get more confrontational” if the Derrick Chauvin verdict is unacceptable. Given the widespread rioting since George Floyd’s death, Watters’s language is a call to nationwide insurrection. Yet this language meets the approval of the corporate-government-media complex, despite the Left’s insistence that Trump had done just that before the Capitol breach. Libertarians should take note of the double standard not as a sign of the continued diminishment of the Republican Party but of a doublespeak characteristic of totalitarian regimes.

  The most conspicuous example of a corporate-state merger is the extension of governmental power to corporations and other organizations with the covid crisis response measures, which have now exceeded lockdowns and masking to include the issuance of vaccine passports that corporations and other organizations may enforce or are already enforcing. The best hope for resisting these totalitarian measures is a refusal on the part of state and local governments to allow such corporate implementations of governmental dicta.

  The old saw that “these are private companies” does not hold water, because clearly these corporate bodies have been enrolled as state apparatuses. Operation Warp Speed was rolled out by the federal government and has enlisted private organizations—first and foremost Big Pharma—to execute it. The state has enabled Big Pharma to profit enormously by instituting a state-of-emergency regime which in the US makes non-FDA-approved vaccines legal. On the other hand, Big Pharma—along with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—legitimizes the state-of-emergency regime, which in turn augments state power.

  The enrollment of corporations in the scheme to vaccinate the population and to require such vaccinations for social participation should not be considered in terms of the prerogatives of private organizations but as part of the incursions of the state into private industry. What we are witnessing, and should be resisting, is a merger into a corporate-government complex, wherein government can bypass the legislative branch and enforce unpopular mandates by colluding with corporations and other organizations to make “policy.”

  Perhaps the most egregious element of this corporate-state stranglehold on the population is the participation of Big Digital and the mainstream media. Big Digital conglomerates eliminate media outlets and voices that challenge the official covid narrative, including information about lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations, although the official narrative has not only changed willy-nilly but also has been proven factually wrong, as well as socially devastating. Big Digital and the media serve both the state and Big Pharma by eliminating oppositional views regarding the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, and by pushing fear-inducing propaganda about the virus and its ever-proliferating variants.

  As I have written in Google Archipelago, Big Digital must be considered an agent of a leftist authoritarian state—as a “governmentality” or state apparatus functioning on behalf and as part of the state itself. “Governmentality” is a term that should become well known in the coming days and weeks. I adopted the term from Michel Foucault and have emended it to refer to corporations and other nonstate actors who actively undertake state functions. These actors will be doing this in droves with vaccine passports, which will vastly augment state power under a state-corporate alliance.

  Similarly, other major corporations perform state-sanctioned roles by echoing and enforcing state-approved ideologies, policies, and politics: indoctrinating employees, issuing woke advertisements, policing the opinions of workers, firing dissidents, and soon demanding vaccine passports from employees and customers.

  The overall tendency, then, is toward corporate-state monopolization over all aspects of life, with increasing control by approved principals over information and opinion, economic production, and the political sphere. As the consolidation accelerates, the broad global state will require the elimination of noncompliant, disaffected, and “untrustworthy” economic and political actors. In the United States, with the elimination of political opposition, the tendency is toward uniparty rule, and with it, the merging of the party and state into a singular organ.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 23:00

• Crypto Investors Are Spending Millions Buying NFTs On Virtual Real Estate
  Crypto Investors Are Spending Millions Buying NFTs On Virtual Real Estate

  With the invention of non-fungible tokens during the midst of an insane real estate boom fueled by the Fed’s ongoing coke-bender of a stimulus package, it was only natural that crypto “investors” would start buying up virtual real estate. 

  In the virtual world, now being called the “metaverse”, people aren’t just spending $69 million for digital art, like Vignesh Sundaresan recently did. They are also spending on “land, buildings, avatars and even names” as NFTs, Reuters reported. 

  Sundaresan counts himself among the world’s biggest NFT investors, amassing a $189 million fund of NFTs and digital assets. 

  Anand Venkateswaran, aka Twobadour, who runs the Metapurse fund, said: “The current Cambrian explosion of NFTs that you see is all about acquisition – people want to buy up NFTs, gobble as many of them as they can. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real explosion will happen when they’re able to … experience these NFTs as they were intended. If it’s a plot of virtual land, you ought to move around in it, have an immersive experience in it.”

  Corporations are starting to join the party, as well. For example, Atari said it’s going to be launching its own blockchain-based virtual world. Frederic Chesnais, head of Atari’s blockchain division and the company’s former CEO, told Reuters online environments would be “very very big”. NFT real estate could fetch millions eventually, he said.

  

  The most well known blockchain-based environments are Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, Somnium Space and The Sandbox. Decentraland sports $50 million in total sales, and has sold patches of “land” for as much as $572,000 and $283,567. There were 334 buyers in March in Decentraland and monthly sales volumes blew past $4 million, up from $767,000 in February. 

  The “rush” is being compared to the early days of snapping up domain names. 

  Another NFT investor named “Whale Shark” has a portfolio of more than $20 million in “assets”. The $60,000 he shelled out for real estate in “The Sandbox” is now worth about $400,000. Meanwhile, Decentraland’s MANA currency has itself risen more than 3500% over the last year. 

  Twobadour said: “All of virtual land and these virtual spaces are basically real estate on which experiences will start to centre, on which attention will start to focus. That’s where all of the attention is and that’s monetisable in a million different ways.”

  But it isn’t all optimism. Ben Nolan, founder of the virtual world Cryptovoxels, said: “I expect that there’ll be a crypto winter in the next couple of months, the whole NFT boom will explode and then all the value will absolutely collapse. Doing NFTs as an investment or as a way to make money is really ill-advised.”

  “Do I think most people will use virtual worlds? Probably not, but I think a lot of people will and I think NFTs are a big part of that growth. Actually walking around with another person in a virtual space and looking at art together is a really nice way to spend time.”

   

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 22:40

• The United States Of 2 Americas
  The United States Of 2 Americas

  Authored by John Mills, op-ed via The Epoch Times,

  If you haven’t noticed, the United States is reorganizing itself into two Americas – blue and red. Although there is a president of the United States, state governors are in many ways now driving the national narrative in this new America.

  

  The president and the vice president are who they are now because six Republican-controlled states forwarded questionable electoral votes, and Vice President Mike Pence missed a historic opportunity to challenge those votes. The current president and vice president seem trapped in foggy and abstract ideological slogans rather than providing executive leadership. Vague generalities and virtue signaling aren’t replacements for executive leadership.

  And who are the true executive leaders of the two Americas? Florida and Texas on one side, California and New York on the other side. Their governors essentially dominate the bully pulpit formerly occupied by a sitting president. Many of the rest of the American states have aligned with one side or the other.

  The American political conversation has become a modern Dr. Seuss’s “Sneetches With Stars” on steroids as Americans are now beginning to group, assemble, and march separately according to our ideologies. Both sides have equal ownership of this behavior – neither side should be excused or let off the hook on this matter.

  Two Americas/Two Systems

  A part of this blue/red separation is the manifest “Digital Apartheid” that is being applied by the blue side to the red side to create two social media systems. This Digital Apartheid is pervasive and driven by the new, vicious, lockstep, “social justice” mantra that has taken over the automatons who lead U.S. social media.

  We are experiencing an unprecedented shakedown by groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa who broadcast through their relentless bullhorn of social media and old media.

  There are now two business systems in America – blue and red. Many of the businesses that lead major market sectors have now revealed themselves to be de-facto thought police to enforce Social Justice.

  MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is the poster child of this, as he has been targeted for elimination by the self-appointed high priests of “wokism.”

  We’re also finding out there are two financial systems in America, as those with capital now act as the gatekeepers of who receives capital and who is excluded. Bank of America has become “Bank of who I decide to allow access to the capital system.” That’s a far cry from the intent of their founder who wanted to make sure all had access. The modern bank staff has now become an appendage of the virtue-signaling synchronized chorus.

  There are now two media systems in America. The Hollywood award shows are now a Roman circus of self-loathing, lecturing, and virtue signaling. Few are watching these award shows, in fact, few are watching legacy media as ratings collapse.

  It’s curious from an agnostic business perspective how CNN even survives at this point in time. Somehow, the citizen’s pocketbook is being fleeced by corporations and advertisers who recycle ad revenue through “woke” media to keep them alive when it’s patently obvious the viewership has imploded—but that’s the beauty of the new era of crony capitalism (which is a transition phase to socialism).

  The citizens of our nation have consciously or unconsciously chosen sides. If you’re angry at yourself for not being woke enough and have righteous virtue-signal signs in your yard lauding BLM, you’re likely on the blue side. If the drivel of virtue signaling makes no sense to you, you’re probably on the red side.

  US Population Relocates

  The biggest manifestation of this rapid reset of America into blue and red camps is the incredible internal movement of Americans.

  Americans are moving to Texas from California in significant numbers. California has seen its first decline in population since 1900. Americans are on the move, and it’s mostly from blue to red, with Texas and Florida receiving the refugees from New York and California. My dreams of a large, inexpensive home in Florida have evaporated with the rise in home prices in my target localities.

  I would suggest the numbers are even greater than what is being reported. This type of socio-economic data traditionally lags in reporting due to the time it takes to collect, aggregate, sort, and analyze. I would say there is easily six months to a year of lag in this reporting.

  Last year, I found it difficult to find data on the population flows. Yet, at the same time, anecdotal data pointed to a strong movement not yet reflected. I was in New York in July 2020 and was shocked by the abandoned streets, yet little data pointed to movement at that time.

  The data is starting to hit now. Among blue locales, Washington state is still showing population gains—I would suggest they’ve hit their apogee and will start down the backside of an arc as Seattle expands its footprint of boarded-up stores and restaurants, and major companies leave, as well as population.

  We’re seeing the beginnings of the “Detroit Syndrome” on scale in blue states as Americans vote with their feet. The common refrain from conservatives is “I’m concerned this will flip Texas and Florida!” I, however, prefer to look at this from an optimistic perspective as an opportunity.

  Where Are We Headed?

  Despite the attempts of the current administration to transform American society with uncontrolled borders, I see unanticipated consequences of the Blue strategy that will work in the red state’s favor. Big Government’s plans always go awry and deliver unintended consequences.

  Trend lines are bad for blue—the elites can socially engineer all they want—their blue states are collapsing because of the brilliant plans of the leaders of the four corners of deceit in modern America: Big Tech, Big Finance, Big Government, and Big Academia.

  By fortifying Washington, D.C.—in a way that is eerily reminiscent of the American Civil War—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has rendered fortified our capital of diminishing relevance. Austin, Tallahassee, and most importantly, Mar-A-Lago, are now the centers of gravity for America.

  Big Tech can manipulate search results all they want, they are now living in their self-made Ministry of Truth and will go the way of MySpace and the Sears catalog as innovators such as  Lindell and others establish alternatives.

  The real game, the one that I haven’t mentioned yet, is the fast-approaching showdown with China. Red states, in many ways, control the world’s food and energy supplies—both of which China is desperate for. The third leg of strategic essentials for national success is access to the world’s capital markets, and financial firms are beginning to exfiltrate to red areas from New York.

  China is estranged from access to capital, which is the lifeblood of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Hopefully, the evolving United States is able to deter open conflict with an increasingly isolated CCP, but if kinetic conflict begins, likely nothing will be off the table for the CCP, and the blue states are still highly concentrated with their diminishing populations, which make them very vulnerable to additional biological, and God forbid, nuclear strikes from the CCP.

  Bottom line, let blue wallow in their destructive and nihilistic French Revolution bloodbath of trying to out virtue signal each other. They’ll never be happy, never satisfied, and seem to be removing themselves from the gene pool on their own accords. The rest of us can focus on defeating the CCP.

  *  *  *

  Retired Col. John Mills is a national security professional with service in five eras: Cold War, Peace Dividend, War on Terror, World in Chaos, and now, Great Power Competition. He is the former director of cybersecurity policy, strategy, and international affairs at the Department of Defense. On Gab: @ColonelRETJohn. On Telegram: Daily Missive

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 22:20

• 'Ever Given' Crew Could Be Stranded For Years Amid Court Battle 
  ‘Ever Given’ Crew Could Be Stranded For Years Amid Court Battle 

  Ever since Egyptian authorities seized “Ever Given,” the massive container ship that notoriously blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week and demanded hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from its owners, the world has forgotten about the vessel and its crew. But as the ship is moored on the side of Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the Suez Canal for nearly a month. New concerns mount that Ever Given’s owners might be unwilling to pay the court-ordered fine, which could strand the vessel for months if not years.

  According to The Guardian, crew members trapped on commercial vessels involved in international disputes are not uncommon. The British newspaper details the fate of one sailor who’s been trapped on an abandoned container ship moored off the Gulf of Suez for two years. 

  Mohammad Aisha is the custodian of the 4,000-tonne MV Aman. The vessel is involved in a prolonged legal battle to sell the vessel and pay the crew. 

  It is surprisingly common for ships and their crews to be stranded and sometimes abandoned due to disappearing owners, pay disputes and management troubles – widespread enough that the International Labour Organization maintains a database of cases of abandoned seafarers. – The Guardian

  

  Last week, representatives from the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), an umbrella union representing seafarers, checked on the crew’s wellbeing of Ever Given as it appears the court battle could be a long-drawn-out process. 

  For the ITF and its partners at the National Union of Seafarers of India (NUSI), the priority in the case of the Ever Given is ensuring that the 26-person Indian crew are protected as a legal battle rages around the ship. It is now at anchor in the Great Bitter Lake after it was dislodged from the banks of the Suez Canal. – The Guardian

  Last week, an Egyptian court ordered Ever Given’s Japanese owner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha, to pay a whopping $916 million in damages due to the six-day blockage. Ahram Gate, a state-run website, reported early last week that Egyptian authorities seized the vessel until owners pay the fine. 

  Ever Given’s Current Location (as of 0944 ET Friday) 

  

  The compensation payment Egypt seeks includes lost revenue from the ships that would have transited the waterway during the blockage and damages to the canal and the equipment and labor to dislodge the mega container ship from the canal’s bank. 

  According to Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA), Ever Given’s owners are contesting the compensatory damages, and “they do not want to pay anything.” That’s where things could get complicated in court and why Ever Given and its crew of 26 Indians could be moored in the Great Bitter Lake for an extended period. 

  “Figuring this out between all the international corporations and insurance companies and government agencies could take years,” said Jalopnik, adding that the ship, “sailing under the Panamanian flag, owned by a Japanese company, operated by a German company, staffed by Indians and stuck in Egypt has no international guarantees of rights for its workers not to end up in a kind of floating solitary confinement.”

  It’s anyone’s guess when the Ever Given court battle will be solved.  

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 22:00

• DARPA's Aerial Dragnet Hunts Drones With Drones
  DARPA’s Aerial Dragnet Hunts Drones With Drones

  Via Southfront.org,

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing the Aerial Dragnet.

  

  It is a system that provides a wide-area surveillance capability that uses sensors mounted on drones to detect, classify and track small drones in dense urban environments.

  DARPA’s Aerial Dragnet program aims to achieve the technically difficult goal of detecting and tracking small UAS in urban terrain. The program seeks innovative technologies to provide persistent, wide-area surveillance of all UAS operating below 1,000 feet in a large city. While Aerial Dragnet’s focus is on protecting military troops operating in urban settings overseas, the system could ultimately find civilian application to help protect U.S. metropolitan areas from UAS-enabled terrorist threats.

  “We’re using drones to find drones, essentially,” Paul Zablocky, a program manager with the DARPA Strategic Technology Office said, during a C4ISRNET Conference on April 21st.

  The government is concerned about the various dangers posed by small UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems), which can be armed with explosives or used to collect sensitive information.

  “A small drone certainly poses a threat, and we’ve seen that at airports. We’ve seen on the news where they’ve been equipped with explosives. We’ve seen them used for ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capabilities. And these can be used against our soldiers as well as civilian populations, so there’s certainly a threat there, and they are widely available,” explained Zablocky.

  DARPA wants Aerial Dragnet to eventually be able to interface with C-sUAS (Counter Small Unmanned Aerial Systems), passing along its tracking data from optical sensors, acoustic sensors and inexpensive radars so that the weapon system can defeat the threat.

  Aerial Dragnet was tested in San Diego in 2019 and more recently in Rosslyn, Virginia.

  The San Diego event was the first test of the system in a dense urban environment, and Zablocky said he was surprised how much clutter showed up in the data. Using data from that test, DARPA has been able to refine its signal processing algorithms, he said.

  Essentially, DARPA is done testing the system, and it is looking into transitioning the program to another organization for further testing and development.

  “We’re in conversations now with transitioning that program over. There’s still a lot of research and development to do,” said Zablocky. “So we’ve brought down a lot of the risks. We’ve — as I said — collected a lot of data and have a much better understanding of what needs to be done, but to really turn this into a capability or product will still take some work, so we are in conversations with various organizations to pick it up and continue to run with it.”

  As per the tender that’s currently posted by DARPA, the system’s capabilities and specifications are set out.

  “DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals for persistent, wide-area surveillance of small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in urban terrain on a city-wide scale. Proposals are solicited for a scalable network of sensors on aerial platforms performing threat-agnostic UAS detection, classification, and tracking by looking over and into complex terrain.

  Aerial Dragnet seeks to perform persistent wide-area surveillance of multiple small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in urban terrain on a city-wide scale. Small UASs are rapidly becoming low-cost aerial platforms for hostile reconnaissance, targeting, and weapon delivery.”

  This is important, since the US expects to fight more in an urban environment in the future.

  “In future urban battlegrounds, U.S. forces will be placed at risk by small UAS which use buildings and naturally-occurring motion of the clutter to make surveillance impractical using current approaches. The rapid proliferation of commercial UAS with increasing endurance and payload capacity drives the need for a future urban aerial surveillance system that can detect, track, and classify many different UAS types at longer ranges in urban terrain.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 21:40

• LA Judge Orders City, County To Offer All Skid Row Homeless Shelter By Fall
  LA Judge Orders City, County To Offer All Skid Row Homeless Shelter By Fall

  A Los Angeles federal judge on Tuesday ordered the city and county to offer some form of shelter or housing to the entire homeless population of skid row by October, according to the LA Times.

  

  The order by Judge David O. Carter – a preliminary injunction granted to plaintiffs in the case last week – also requires the city and county to offer single mothers and their children on skid row a place to stay within 90 days, help families within 120 days before the Oct. 18 deadline for the rest of the homeless population in the area. The city must also put $1 billion into an escrow account to fund the program.

  It is unknown whether the city or county will challenge the order, which were found to have wrongly focused on permanent housing at the expense of more temporary shelter, “knowing that massive development delays were likely while people died in the streets,” according to the report.

  “Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks, and highway systems due to the inaction of city and county officials who have left our homeless citizens with no other place to turn,” wrote Carter in his 110-page brief which was ‘sprinkled with quotes from Abraham Lincoln and an extensive history of how skid row was first created.’

  “All of the rhetoric, promises, plans, and budgeting cannot obscure the shameful reality of this crisis — that year after year, there are more homeless Angelenos, and year after year, more homeless Angelenos die on the streets,” the briefing continues. According to the report, over 1,300 homeless people died in Los Angeles county last year.

  In the last homeless count in January 2020, more than 4,600 unhoused people were found to be living on skid row — about 2,500 in large shelters and 2,093 on the streets. They account for only slightly more than 10% of the city’s overall homeless population, and it’s not clear what Carter’s order might mean for other parts of the city.

  The judge wrote that “after adequate shelter is offered,” he would allow the city to enforce laws that keep streets and sidewalks clear of tents so long as they’re consistent with previous legal rulings that have limited the enforcement of such rules. That appears to only apply to skid row.

  He also ordered the county to offer “support services to all homeless residents who accept the offer of housing” including placements in “appropriate emergency, interim, or permanent housing and treatment services.” The costs would be split by the city and county, he said. -LA Times

  The county previously attempted to wiggle out of the case, arguing that it was solely a matter for the city to handle, and that the county had been ‘aggressively responding to homelessness’ already without any direction from the court. County attorneys argued that they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars through a sales tax and other measures. 

  Outside counsel for the county, Skip Miller, said that the push for an injunction “is an attempt by property owners and businesses to rid their neighborhood of homeless people,” adding “There is no legal basis for an injunction because the county is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on proven strategies.”

  The plaintiffs, the LA Alliance for Human Rights, are ‘ecstatic’ about the ruling, according to their attorney, Matthew Umhofer, who said that the judge’s order was exactly what they were seeking when they filed the case.

  “This is exactly the kind of aggressive emergency action that we think is necessary on the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles,” said Umhofer.

  Read the rest of the report here.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 21:20

• 14 Months Later: A Pathway Forward
  14 Months Later: A Pathway Forward

  Authored by Paul Alexander via The American Institute for Economic Research,

  Is there a chance to recover and to effectively vanquish Covid-19, at least to end the pandemic and return to normal lives again?

  We function here as prognosticators and contrarians that seek to inform and share and to learn, and we thus argue yes, and while we were blindsided and there were grave initial mistakes and some very consequential such as the very flawed and botched initial testing by the CDC that left the United States vulnerable and flying blind and allowed the virus to seed for 4 to 5 weeks initially, the following are the key components of the Covid-19 response that should have been enacted from inception (save 3-4 weeks initially to understand the pathogen) and which should be urgently implemented based on the experiences over the last 14 months or so. In our opinion. 

  

  We offer this as a pathway forward and ask that we consider these as we try to deal with essentially failed approaches thus far, and use our common sense and deductive reasoning and logic to interpret the science and make informed decisions. We call on the medical experts who inform governments to likely for the first time, use some common sense and logic and some critical thinking; if it is all about the science, we implore the medical decision-makers to follow the data and science and to use it and use critical analysis of the data; we argue they have not; these decision-makers must understand the impact of their policies and stopping Covid ‘at all costs’ is not a policy and not attainable; if a policy is devastating and causing great harm to the population, you stop it, you do not harden it and reapply it as that is patently absurd and harmful; as such, we also ask our decision-makers to conduct the appropriate hazard analyses and cost-effective analyses.

  Our pathway forward is as follows:

  1. Properly and strongly protect the high-risk elderly persons with medical conditions and vulnerable persons e.g. frail persons with comorbid conditions, obese persons; elderly persons in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, long-term care facilities etc. are most at risk for severe illness or death from Covid-19 and they must be protected as a basis for any response to work; staff infecting nursing home residents remains the key breach in transmission and the rate-limiting step and has to be focused on immediately; stop staff from entering the nursing homes and infecting residents (sequester staff on site for one to two weeks at a time with no prejudice if they cannot, or use nursing home students or nearby hotels for residence to control transmission); we have failed to secure our nursing home residents and we have caused tens of thousands of deaths and we still continue to not secure the nursing homes

  2. Immediately end all societal lockdown, shelter-in-place, mask mandate, and school closure policies; we must reopen all of our economies in the US, Canada (provinces such as Ontario), UK etc. as there are tremendous harms to these economic closures; there are catastrophic costs to these policies and evidence accumulated across one year now strongly suggests that these are highly ineffective and do not work; they are absolutely baseless and without merit; stop relying on hypothetical ‘worst case scenario’ projection models, as they have been incredibly inaccurate and grossly flawed; the crushing harms and devastation from these far outweigh any benefit and the harms are most pronounced among the poorer in society who are least able to afford the restrictions; the lockdown itself kills people, destroys families, prevents education of our children; child abuse is being missed by closed schools and the lockdowns promotes child abuse; lost jobs cause stress in the household and with closed schools, children are vulnerable as the visibility is gone and this is catastrophic; there is near zero risk to children from Covid and we are harming them by school closures, it was one of the most devastating misapplications of public policy; most of the decisions made by the governments and their medical advisors including Dr. Fauci who I have much respect for, are illogical, absurd, irrational, nonsensical, specious, and in most part reckless and have caused far greater harms with their policies

  3. Isolate ONLY the sick/symptomatic persons (no isolation of asymptomatic persons); stop contact tracing where the virus has already spread extensively as it confers no benefit; stop isolating persons who are not sick/not symptomatic (are asymptomatic); stop wide testing of asymptomatic persons

  4. Foster improved hand-washing hygiene and improved sanitation

  5. Promote and offer early ambulatory outpatient therapeutics including combined and sequenced antivirals and anti-infectives and for some drugs as prophylaxis (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, doxycycline, bromhexine, colchicine, favipiravir, quercetin etc.), corticosteroid (budesonide, dexamethasone, prednisone and methylprednisolone etc.), and antithrombotic drugs (aspirin, enoxaparin etc.) as needed for those who do become ill, especially high-risk persons and those in congregate settings such as nursing homes, assisted living facilities, long-term care facilities etc.; we recognize that future research would clarify and define the benefit of these early treatments; we believe that it is not possible to overstate the philosophy that since early in-center treatment with already available medications (repurposed) in nursing homes and similar settings is associated with a large reduction in mortality among nursing home residents, there can be no scientifically sound reasons, nor moral rationale for not utilizing these forms of treatment; we are trying to prevent hospitalizations and save lives and strongly believe that this approach can be impactful and merits strong consideration; the accumulating early treatment evidence is compelling and deserving of very serious consideration and study as a therapeutic option, given this emergency. To do otherwise is to fail our patients 

  6. Vaccines should be mainly available to those over 70 years of age who are high-risk and only after shared decision-making with their clinicians whereby patients can make informed decisions and consent to being fully informed; offer vaccines to high-risk front line medical staff who interact with high-risk persons; we however believe that this pandemic could have been and can be ended without vaccines e.g. via the simultaneous use of combined strong protections of the elderly and high-risk, early outpatient treatment, isolation of the sick only, hand-washing hygiene, and allowing the low-risk portion of the population to become infected naturally and harmlessly with reasonable precautions as part of normal living; a vast amount of our views on this is based on the lack of safety data and testing for these vaccines, leaving us unable to judge the future impact; we are already seeing adverse effects and even deaths recorded due to the vaccines

  7. Thus, vaccines are not to be given/prioritized for those under 70 years of age who are healthy, and at no time be given to young persons e.g. those under 19 years of age; no vaccines are to be administered to pediatric/children age e.g. 6 months to 19 years or so as there is no evidence to support vaccinations; the benefits do not outweigh the risks

  8. Begin immediate testing for T-cell immunity before vaccinating the designated group, if we are vaccinating the higher-risk persons; we do not vaccinate persons who have active infection or who have recovered from infection

  9. Routine public service announcements (PSAs) are to be given on the benefits of Vitamin D supplements for persons with darker skin colours and those confined within congregate settings for prolonged periods, as well as messaging about the benefits of weight loss for those overweight and obese

  10. Use a more reliable test other than the RT-PCR test and if this is to be used, use a positive threshold cut-point or cycle count threshold (Ct) of 25 cycles/amplifications and below to denote a positive case (infectious and possibly pathogenic); above Ct of 25 denotes nonculturable, nonviable virus and essentially prior infection or viral dust or fragments

  11. Allow and foster the low-risk persons in the population e.g. infants, children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults and all those who are reasonably healthy with no serious medical conditions, to live unfettered normal lives with sensible precautions so as to allow for natural exposure immunity; it is this portion of society that will substantially help develop population level ‘herd’ immunity (either via natural exposure, a vaccine, a combination of both, or even from therapeutics such as early treatment that reduces symptoms and thus transmission)

  12. Recognize that asymptomatic spread is rare if at all and urgently provide messaging to the public that all persons who get infected are not at equal risk of severe illness or death; that there is an age gradient to severity of outcomes e.g. 25-year old David who is a healthy male is not at the same risk of severe illness or death if infected with SARS-CoV-2 as 80-year old Janet who is very sick with 2 underlying medical conditions such as renal disease and cardiovascular disease and who is obese

  13. Recognize that a more ‘focused’ pandemic response (Great Barrington Declaration) approach that is targeted to age and risk is the best approach; ‘one size does not fit all’ when we are devising a pandemic response

  14. Ensure hospitals are equipped and do not get overwhelmed

  15. Understand that the immune systems of children are developing and being set for life and as such, we must allow them to engage freely with the environment; we may be damaging their immune systems long-term and we must allow their immune systems to be taxed and tuned up daily; children must not be confined indoors as transmission is far greater when confined indoors and it is just common sense

  16. End masking and social distancing in any manner for children given their near zero risk of infection or spreading Covid virus as well as their exceedingly low risk of severe illness or death if infected; the science behind 6-feet social distancing was not there and was pseudo-science, embarrassingly weak and fear-based

  17. Stop the mass media hysteria and fear about variants and mutations, as this is a good aspect, as when viruses mutate they typically mutate to much milder versions; the vast majority of people who are infected do not have a serious problem with Covid; infections are not important and a serious problem and one may argue ‘who cares’ about that number; what is critical is not the fear over infections, it is the hospitalization, ICU use, and deaths, not the number of infections; we need to get a grip and stop the fear mongering; if the infections do not result in consequential cases that need hospitalization or end in death, then we must stop the misinformation, hysteria and fear to the public

  *  *  *

  Contributing Authors

  • Paul E Alexander MSc PhD, McMaster University and GUIDE Research Methods Group, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada elias98_99@yahoo.com

  • Howard C. Tenenbaum DDS, Dip. Perio., PhD, FRCD(C) Centre for Advanced Dental Research and Care, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada howard.tenenbaum@sinaihealth.ca

  • Dr. Parvez Dara, MD, MBA, daraparvez@gmail.com

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 21:00

• "That's How Crazy The Market Is" – A "Virtually Unheard Of Trade" Spotted In Lumber
  “That’s How Crazy The Market Is” – A “Virtually Unheard Of Trade” Spotted In Lumber

  On Monday we highlighted a remarkable fact about the buying frenzy in the US lumber market: lumber futures were up for 16 consecutive days, a stretch without a down day since March 26, and while they did dip on Tuesday, the have more than recovered this latest decline, and are now up 19 of the past 20 days.

  

  This surge in lumber prices to record highs, which was driven by an unprecedented shortages coupled with soaring demand by homebuilders…

  

  … has also translated to unprecedented events in the supply chain, with Bloomberg today reporting a remarkable episode showing how extreme America’s shortage of lumber has become: For the first time in recent memory, a lumberyard was the one selling wood to a supplier.

  Needless to say, this kind of trade – where a customer sells goods to its traditional supplier – is virtually unheard of.

  MaterialsXchange, a Chicago-based digital trading platform for physical wood products, reports that the trade involved a lumberyard selling about 30,000 square feet of oriented strand board, or OSB ( a cheaper stand-in for plywood that is widely used to make house floors and walls).

  “Building materials are moving from company to company in nontraditional flows,” said MaterialsXchange co-founder and CEO Mike Wisnefski. He added that prices have gotten so high that some homebuilders are being forced to cancel projects, leaving certain lumberyards with a little “excess inventory.”

  On Wednesday, his company brokered another OSB sale involving a US East Coast lumberyard selling to another one in Arkansas at $1,500 per 1,000 square feet, surpassing a record $999 that was reached at the end of March, based on Random Lengths pricing.

  For those confused, Bloomberg explains: in a normal world, wholesale distributors buy lumber from sawmills and sell that to the yards that homebuilders frequent. But lumber markets today are anything but normal with futures surging by more than 60% to record levels this year as the entire timber supply chain collapses under the weight of soaring demand from people renovating their homes and buying bigger ones. As a result, sawmills can’t keep up with orders. Truck shipments have been delayed. And distributors are running short on product.

  “That’s how crazy the marketplace is,” said RCM Alternatives lumber analyst Brian Leonard, who has covered the industry for 35 years and had previously never heard of lumberyards selling to distributors. “Obviously it shouldn’t happen. You never push product back up the chain but you can today because of the volatility of the market.”

  Furthermore, “reverse” trades like the one that occurred earlier this month will push wood prices even higher. Distributors buying back supply from yards will inevitably mark up prices to the customers they resell to, “potentially creating a vicious cycle that continues to stoke what has already proven to be an unrelenting lumber rally”, according to Bloomberg.

  And, as we discussed earlier this week, soaring lumber prices are directly translating into much higher prices for new homes, making housing – where prices have already exploded thanks to the Biden stimulus and the Fed’s ZIRP – even more unaffordable.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 20:40

• The Rising Threat Of Nuclear War Is The Most Urgent Matter In The World
  The Rising Threat Of Nuclear War Is The Most Urgent Matter In The World

  Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,

  US Strategic Command, the branch of the US military responsible for America’s nuclear arsenal, tweeted the following on Tuesday:

  “The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.”

  The statement, which STRATCOM called a “preview” of the Posture Statement it submits to US Congress every year, was a bit intense for Twitter and sparked a lot of alarmed responses. This alarm was due not to any inaccuracy in STRATCOM’s frank statement, but due to the bizarre fact that our world’s increasing risk of nuclear war barely features in mainstream discourse.

  #USSTRATCOM Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option. pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L

  — US Strategic Command (@US_Stratcom) April 20, 2021

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  STRATCOM has been preparing not just to use its nuclear arsenal for deterrence but also to “win” a nuclear war should one arise from the (entirely US-created) “conditions” which are “neither linear nor predictable”. And it’s looking increasingly likely that one will as the prevailing orthodoxy among western imperialists that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost rushes headlong toward America’s plunge into post-primacy.

  The US has been ramping up aggressions with Russia in a way that has terrified experts, and it looks likely to continue doing so. These aggressions are further complicated on increasingly tense fronts like Ukraine, which is threatening to obtain nuclear weapons if it isn’t granted membership to NATO, either of which would increase the risk of conflict. Aggressions against nuclear-armed China are escalating on what seems like a daily basis at this point, with potential flashpoints in the China Seas, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, India, and any number of other possible fronts.

  STRATCOM commander Charles Richard told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that China’s nuclear capabilities are advancing so rapidly that they’re not even bothering with intelligence vetted more than a month ago in their briefings because it’s probably already out of date, urging an upgrade in America’s nuclear infrastructure. Richard reportedly testified that a portion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been recently primed for ready use.

  The fact that those in charge of US nuclear weapons now see both Russia and China as a major nuclear threat, and the fact that US cold warriors are escalating against both of them, is horrifying. The fact that they’re again playing with “low-yield” nukes designed to actually be used on the battlefield makes it even more so. This is to say nothing of tensions between nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India, between nuclear-armed Israel and its neighbors, and between nuclear-armed North Korea and the western empire.

  While China keeps the majority of its forces in a peacetime status, increasing evidence suggests China has moved a portion of its nuclear force to a Launch on Warning (LOW) posture and are adopting a limited “high alert duty” strategy. @US_Stratcom testimony at SASC right now.

  — Barbara Starr (@barbarastarrcnn) April 20, 2021

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  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has the 2021 Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, citing the rising threat of nuclear war:

  “Accelerating nuclear programs in multiple countries moved the world into less stable and manageable territory last year. Development of hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missile defenses, and weapons-delivery systems that can flexibly use conventional or nuclear warheads may raise the probability of miscalculation in times of tension. Events like the deadly assault earlier this month on the US Capitol renewed legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear nations, however, have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks. By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war — an ever-present danger over the last 75 years — increased in 2020. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats — what we called ‘the new abnormal’ in 2019 — tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.”

  In a recent interview with Phoenix Media Co-op’s Slava Zilber, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft nuclear policy specialist Joe Cirincione described a ramp-up in weapons technology among all nuclear-armed nations in the world, the future of which he described as “bleak”:

  “We right now have a global nuclear arms race. Each of the nine nuclear-armed nations are building new weapons. Some are replacing weapons that are getting old. Others are expanding their arsenals. But all of these new weapons represent new capabilities for these countries. So you’re seeing a qualitative and a quantitative arms race that is completely unchecked.

  “If you look at the data that’s collected by the Federation of American Scientists, for example, you see that — since the 1980s at the height of the Cold War — we have slashed the global nuclear arsenals. We went from a world in 1986 where there were almost 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world down to where we are now where there’s just about 13,500 nuclear weapons. Tremendous progress. 85% reduction in the stockpile…

  “But it’s flattened out. There really haven’t been significant reductions for years. The 2010 New START agreement was the last successful arms control agreement. That was 11 years ago. There’s been no reduction agreement since then. There’ve been no talks about new reductions agreements. Now I think the future of arms control is bleak. It’s bleak. And I see no interest really in a new round of arms control either from the United States or from Russia. So I’m pessimistic about our prospects.”

  As I all too frequently find myself having to remind people, the primary risk here is not that anyone will choose to have a nuclear war, it’s that a nuke will be deployed amid heightening tensions as a result of miscommunication, miscalculation, misfire, or malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war, thereby setting off everyone’s nukes as per Mutually Assured Destruction.

  The more tense things get, the likelier such an event becomes. This new cold war is happening along two fronts, with a bunch of proxy conflicts complicating things even further. There are so very many small moving parts, and it’s impossible to remain in control of all of them.

  People like to think every nuclear-armed country has one “The Button” with which they can consciously choose to start a nuclear war after careful deliberation, but it doesn’t work that way. There are thousands of people in the world controlling different parts of different nuclear arsenals who could independently initiate a nuclear war. Thousands of “The Buttons”. It only takes one. The arrogance of believing anyone can control such a conflict safely, for years, is astounding.

  A 2014 report published in the journal Earth’s Future found that it would only take the detonation of 100 nuclear warheads to throw 5 teragrams of black soot into the earth’s stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun and making the photosynthesis of plants impossible. This could easily starve every terrestrial organism to death that didn’t die of radiation or climate chaos first. China has hundreds of nuclear weapons; Russia and the United States have thousands.

  This should be the main thing everyone talks about. There is literally no more urgent matter on earth than the looming possibility that everyone might die in a nuclear war.

  But people don’t see it.

  On a recent Tucker Carlson Tonight appearance, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard did a solid job describing the horrors of nuclear war and the very real possibility that it could be inflicted upon us due to America’s insane brinkmanship with Russia. She spoke earnestly about how “such a war would come at a cost beyond anything we can really imagine,” painting an entirely accurate picture of “hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering, seeing their flesh being burned from their bones.”

  Gabbard is correct, and was right to give such a confrontational account of what we are looking at right now. But if you read the replies to Gabbard’s tweet in which she shared a clip from the interview, you’ll see a deluge of commenters accusing her of “hyperbole”, saying she’s being soft on Putin, and admonishing her for appearing on Tucker Carlson. It’s like they can’t even hear what she’s saying, how real it is, how significant it is.

  People’s failure to wrap their minds around this issue is a testament to the power of normalcy bias, a cognitive glitch which causes us to assume that because something bad hasn’t happened in the past, it won’t happen in the future. We survived the last cold war by the skin of our teeth, entirely by sheer, dumb luck; the only reason people are around to bleat “hyperbole” is because we got lucky. There’s no reason to believe we’ll get lucky in this new cold war environment; only normalcy bias says we will. Believing we’ll survive this cold war just because we survived the last one is as sane as believing Russian roulette is safe because the guy passing you the gun didn’t die.

  It’s also a testament to the power of plain old psychological compartmentalization. People can’t handle the idea of everything ending, of everyone they know and love dying, of watching their loved ones die in flames or from radiation poisoning right in front of them, all because someone made a mistake at the wrong time after a bunch of imperialists decided that US planetary domination was worth rolling the dice on the life of every terrestrial organism for.

  But mostly it’s a testament to the ubiquitous malpractice of the western media. It’s inconvenient to the agendas of the imperial war machine to have people protesting these insane cold war games of nuclear brinkmanship, so their media stenographers barely touch on this issue. If mainstream journalism actually existed, this flirtation with nuclear war would be front and center in everyone’s awareness and people would be flooding the streets in protest against their lives being toyed with as casino chips in an insane all-or-nothing gamble.

  This is so much bigger than any of the petty little things we spend our mental energy on from day to day. It’s bigger than whatever your number one pet issue is. It’s bigger than your disdain for Moscow or Beijing. It’s bigger than my disdain for the US empire. It’s bigger than our political opinions. It’s bigger than whatever argument we might be having on the internet. It’s bigger than whether or not we’ve got a problem with Tulsi Gabbard appearing on Tucker Carlson.

  Because once the nukes start flying, none of that will matter. None of it. All that will matter is the fact that this is all ending. If you open the door and see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, all of your mental priorities will rearrange themselves real quick.

  

  We should not be in this situation. There is no good reason governments should be playing these games with these weapons. There is no good reason we can’t just get along with each other and collaborate toward a healthy world together. Only the psychopathic agendas of power-hungry imperialists perpetuate this insane balancing act, and it benefits none of us ordinary people in any way.

  The rising threat of nuclear war is the most urgent matter in the world, and it’s absolute madness that we’re not talking about it all the time.

  Let’s do what we can to change that.

  *  *  *

  New book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix.

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

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  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 20:20

• Top Twelve Political Donors Give $1 Out Of Every $13
  Top Twelve Political Donors Give $1 Out Of Every $13

  Just twelve political donors are responsible for $1 out of every $13 in contributions to federal candidates and committees since the 2010 election cycle, according to a watchdog group Issue One, which wants less money in politics.

  

  Together, the donors and their spouses donated $3.4 billion to all federal candidates, according to Bloomberg, citing the nonprofit. 

  Of the biggest donors, six were aligned with Republicans and six with Democrats. Topping the list were two donors who also self-financed their 2020 Democratic presidential campaigns: former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. In total, Bloomberg gave $1.4 billion in the period and Steyer $653 million. -Bloomberg

  The heavy donations began after the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allowing for unlimited independent spending to influence elections. The Court ruled that independent spending on elections was protected under the First Amendment – which led to unlimited spending by Super PACs, “setting off an arms race of fundraising by groups seeking to influence elections,” according to the report.

  “Our government can’t be responsive to all Americans if our elected officials are beholden to the elite donor class,” said Nick Penniman, the founder and chief executive officer of Issue One.

  Big political donors tend to live in just a handful of wealthy zip codes. The top areas for campaign contributions are home to 2.5 million people, less than 1% of the U.S. population, but they accounted for 20% of the $45 million donated to federal candidates and committees. -Bloomberg

  Other top Democratic donors include Paloma Partners hedge fund founder Donald Sussman, who gave $98 million, and Renaissance Technologies Founder James Simmons and his wife Marylin, who have donated $96 million.

  The top GOP donors have been the late Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, giving $523 million, followed by Uline owners Richard Uihlein and wife Elizabeht, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin.

   

   

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 20:00

• Buchanan: Is America Led Today By Anti-Americans?
  Buchanan: Is America Led Today By Anti-Americans?

  Authored by Pat Buchanan,

  How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation?

  Consider.

  After his long night of prayer for “the right verdict” to be pronounced — Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts — Joe Biden stepped before the White House cameras to tell us what it all meant.

  

  George Floyd’s death, said Biden, “was a murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism… that is a stain on our nation’s soul — the knee on the neck of justice for Black Americans.”

  Astonishing. Biden is saying that when Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes as the life drained out of him, the world, for once, was getting a good, close look at the diseased soul of America.

  What Chauvin was doing to Floyd, said the president of the United States, is a reflection of the kind of justice America delivers to Black Americans.

  This is no aberration, Biden was saying. This is the routine reality.

  Biden was introduced by Kamala Harris, who said much the same:

  “America has a long history of systemic racism. Black Americans and Black men in particular have been treated throughout the course of our history as less than human.”

  At Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield delivered what The Wall Street Journal called, “a recitation of America’s sins (that) could have come from China’s Global Times.”

  Said Thomas-Greenfield:

  “I have… seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles. … Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist.”

  What our diplomat to the world is saying is that our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are interwoven with white supremacy and that America, to this day, continues to breed racists.

  Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a Congressional Black Caucus event after the verdict, turned her eyes heavenward in gratitude:

  “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice….For being there to call out to your mom — how heartbreaking was that … And because of you … your name will always be synonymous with justice.”

  Implication: Floyd died to redeem America of her original sin of racism.

  All in all, quite a commentary on our leaders.

  For, again, our president and vice president are saying that this people and country still suffer from a sickness of the soul that dates back to its formative days.

  The 1960s radicals who vilified our country as “Amerika” were rightly called “anti-American.” Today, the difference between what they said about America and what our highest elected leaders are saying is hard to discern.

  Our enemies have picked up on this. In Anchorage, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Beijing out for repression in Hong Kong and “genocide” in Xinjiang, China’s foreign minister was right back in his face.

  You Americans should look to your own sins and clean up your house before lecturing the world on political morality, he said. Today, that Chinese foreign minister could cite Biden and Harris as his chief witnesses that America is a nation sick in its soul.

  We hear our leaders’ attacks on America. Where is their defense?

  What other nation has provided the same measures of personal and political freedoms and material blessings for 40 million Black people as has the United States?

  If people of color are treated “as less than human” in America, as Harris says, why are so many people of color seeking desperately to get across our Southern border to build their future here?

  What is the real truth about race in America that goes unmentioned in the mainstream media’s endless hunt for encounters between Black men and white cops?

  The main perpetrators of violent crimes against Black Americans — are other Black Americans. Black men, ages 16 to 40, are 3% of the U.S. population but commit roughly a third of America’s violent crimes.

  Defund police, restrict police, remove police and you will get more of what the police prevent — crimes, especially violent crimes, in your community.

  When Biden and Harris spoke of “systemic racism” afflicting our society, they were not describing their enlightened selves. And it was Hillary Clinton who identified the people the leftist elites have in mind:

  “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. … Some of those folks… are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

  What Clinton, Biden and Harris are all saying is that, though the moral sickness of racism pervades our society, we are the vaccinated ones.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 19:40

• Used Car Prices Continue To Soar, Smashing Records Amid "Decimated Supply"
  Used Car Prices Continue To Soar, Smashing Records Amid “Decimated Supply”

  Used car prices in the U.S. continue to skyrocket as a result of both the country’s economic recovery and an ongoing supply crunch. 

  The Manheim U.S. Used Vehicle Value Index has continued to soar through the month of April, to a new record, as a result of the worsening of a semiconductor shortage, low lot inventories, and a continuing post-Covid “boom”. 

  The index was up 6.8% in the first 15 days of April, Bloomberg noted. The index is up an astounding 52% from the same time last year to 191.4. 

  

  The data, which is put together by Cox Automotive, “takes into account all U.S. sales through Cox’s Manheim automotive auctions that fall in to one of 20 different market classes”.

  Cox Chief Economist Jonathan Smoke commented about the spike:

   “Demand is perfectly stimulated from improving consumer sentiment, recovering jobs, accumulated pandemic savings, tax refund season, and American Rescue Plan cash payments.

  Supply was decimated last year by COVID-19 shutdowns reducing new vehicle production, and used supply was reduced from strong demand last summer.

  Production remains limited as supply chains struggle to overcome issues like the semiconductor shortages.”

  Recall, we pointed out at the beginning of this month that low inventories and chip shortages had prices re-accelerating in 2021 – at a stunning rate – after a brief pause from October to December. 

  From 1995 to the end of 2019, used-vehicle prices have risen at around a 1.5% to 2.0% per annum (admittedly with some pops and drops along the way). The last year has seen prices rising at around 15% per annum… and April’s 6.1% spike MoM sent the year-over-year change in prices up a stunning 52.2%. 

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  As we detailed previously, the current semiconductor shortage at automotive assembly plants and very light dealer inventories, especially in pickup trucks, is driving marginal demand here.

  While many market observers suggest this pricing rebound should be viewed as a short-term phenomenon, WardsAuto.com notes that the trend has stubbornly continued.

  And while low inventories have meant transaction volumes are admittedly much lower than they have been in the years leading up to 2020, this is another example of the importance of the used-vehicle segment in supporting the automotive industry’s recovery in the wake of a tumultuous pandemic year.

  The low-inventory scenario on the new-vehicle side of the market has been, and will continue to be, particularly tough, limiting the mid- to-long-term outlook for used-vehicle supply.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 19:20

• Playing Fast And Loose With Numbers
  Playing Fast And Loose With Numbers

  Authored by Joakim Book via The American Institute for Economic Research,

  Journalism is hard. To portray the world accurately to a layman audience without delving into the complexities and nuances of the universe we inhabit, writers must always simplify, explain, and make difficult content relatable for their readers. You can do this well and comprehensively, and you can do it poorly. 

  Often, writers simplify and give concrete examples with the best of intentions, even though I don’t put it past some of the activist writers out there to fudge what they portray and fidget with the details. But what really strikes a nerve with me is when writers end up misleading so grossly that their readers walk away with a completely twisted view of the world. The late Hans Rosling was a master at pricking the bubbles that these mistakes had created in our heads.  

  I have summarized his perhaps most valuable advice to Always Be Comparing Thy Number; never let numbers stand alone; always have readily available comparisons that let you answer the crucial questions: is that a lot? What was it last year? Ten years ago? Do informed researchers think it’s a lot?

  Most of us don’t walk around with easily comparable frameworks for what’s a large and small number in areas we know nothing about – how many people normally die in car accidents or from medical errors, how long the Amazon River is or how much ice there is in the world. Implicitly or explicitly, we rely on fact-checking journalists to tell us in the process of covering the crucial topic they’re writing about. 

  Too often, they don’t. And not only do they neglect their professional role, they tend to make our misunderstandings worse when they actually engage in contrived comparisons. In any story that includes climate change this tendency seems to have gone completely haywire (maybe the covidocracy can give it a run for its money). 

  Far from being settled, climate science is tricky: we don’t know well what happens to global temperatures when atmospheric CO2 doubles (“climate sensitivity”); we can’t properly model clouds and cloud formation, crucial for how much of the sun’s incoming heat will be reflected away; the range for best-guesses as to what the global temperature rise over the coming century will be is vast (maybe 1° Celsius – maybe 5° Celsius) – so vast, in fact, that it hardly warrants a quantification. 

  Yet, the science is “settled,” we hear, and we must “listen to the scientists.” 

  

  The Sea Level Rise, the Olympic Swimming Pools, and the Football Fields

  But the worst crime are the subtle throwaway lines that journalists tuck onto their coverage of impending doom that give a completely mistaken impression about the future of the world.

  Let’s start with the Amazon. 

  The Amazon forest is huge. So huge, in fact, that few of us can even fathom how mind-bogglingly huge it is: numbers just won’t do it justice – does anyone have a reference point for what 5.5 million square meters look like? The main Amazon River, not considering its countless tributaries, is some 6,400 km long: traveling at a comfortable 20 km/h (12.5 mph), it would take you a good two weeks of traveling day and night – probably more because of weather, currents, and debris. The area of the forest itself is the size of all U.S. states west of the Mississippi (minus Alaska): from the Gulf to the Canadian border, the Pacific to the Mississippi, all covered in forest. 

  In addition to that, we have the Cerrado, an area south and east of the Amazon the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, that’s technically tropical savannah but few of us would hesitate calling it forested. 

  When the scientific journal Nature has a headline that reads “deforestation rate in 2020 is the greatest of the decade,” they’re not lying. The BBC even trumped them a little by slapping “deforestation ‘surges to 12-year high’” on unsuspecting readers. So, we get the impression that Brazilian deforestation is really bad:

  

  Source: INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research

  Here I overlaid a simple trendline and a ten-year moving average for illustration. The 11,000 km2 deforested last year was indeed the highest since 2008, but is dwarfed by what routinely came before it. More importantly, we must ask: is it a lot? If your target rate of deforestation – in the poorest areas of a relatively poor country, mind you – is zero (which it shouldn’t be), it looks like things are not just terrible but going the wrong way. A longer, and wider, perspective tells you otherwise. 

  It didn’t take long before BBC’s science editor, David Shukman, brought up the familiar “football field-per minute” metric. The area deforested last year was around 1,552,320 standard British football fields, or over 4,000 of them each day, for just under 3 football fields a minute. While Shukman and countless others have tried to make the topic visually understandable for a layperson – we can imagine the size of three adjacent football fields – our imagination is quickly swamped by a “massively large area that I can’t even grapple with.” Quickly, when we scale those minutes to hours and days, we get the impression that huge areas of this important forest is melting away faster than ice cream on a hot summer’s day. 

  But we already know that the Amazon forest alone is some 5,500,000 m2 large, the portion within Brazil’s borders some 4,000,000 m2. What was deforested last year, then, was less than 0.3% of the Brazilian forest left standing. Now, does it still sound like an incredibly vast amount? If we estimate that farmers and loggers deforest a similar amount in the next few years, and we ignore potential runaway feedback processes for a minute, Brazilians have enough forest for 360 years. We know enough about economic development and Kuznets curves to know that Brazilians won’t mindlessly deforest the Amazon for that long.

  Yet, the picture the reader carries with them is one of runaway deforestation rather than a mild return to longer-term trend.  

  The world of ice isn’t much better.

  Here we don’t employ the unhelpful and unscientific metric of football fields per minute, but Olympic swimming pools to gauge the amount of meltwater – or sea meter equivalents to compare amounts of ice (mostly in Antarctica and the Greenland Ice Sheet, or ‘GIS’). 

  The Guardian, always ready to deliver alarmism, reported that the GIS lost a record 530 billion metric tons of ice in 2019. Again, we’re faced with a number we can’t relate to. Is that a lot? The journalist kindly calculated that it’s about 1 million tons of ice per minute, but that still doesn’t quite cut it – where can I store a million tons of ice? Enter the swimming pools. Think seven of them, in some gigantic swimming facility, filled to the brim with Greenland ice. OK, I can somewhat picture that amount of ice. But then we add seven more pools the next second; and seven more, the next. Quickly we run into the same problem we did with the football fields: this is just a massive amount of ice that’s melting. The images flash before our eyes: an ice-free world, the extra water in the oceans sweeping over our cities and drowning us all, Day After Tomorrow-style.  

  For some unfathomable reason, the journalists forgot to report how incredibly large the GIS is – not to mention Antarctica at something like 10x its volume. The ice sheet that covers 80% of Greenland is a dome of permanent ice, 1.7 million m2 and some 2-3 km thick at its peak. Comparing it in size to U.S. states, it’s something like the area of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana combined, covered in kilometers of ice. Estimates put it at 2.85 million cubic kilometers of ice, from which we last year lost about 530 km3. That’s 0.02% of the ice sheet. Unless I displaced a few zeros somewhere – which wouldn’t even change my argument – the GIS has enough ice left to fill more Olympic swimming pools than the dollar values of all the assets in the world (where each dollar’s value represents one Olympic swimming pool of ice). It’s, um, a lot. 

  A listener to British statistician and economist Tim Harford’s show More or Less wondered about a figure he had heard in the media of 70 meters of sea level rise if all of Antarctica melted. Bethan Davies at University of London helps explain that if all the ice in the West Antarctica, East Antarctica, and Antarctic Peninsula ice sheets were to melt, we’d be looking at something like 58 meters rise in global sea levels. In her defense, Davies quickly dispelled any notions of that happening: zero, nada, zilch. Antarctica’s vast ice sheets probably will contribute to sea level rises over the next century, but nothing like the 50+ meters that scary hypothetical calculations like those conjure up – with walls of ocean water suddenly battering down our coastal lands. 

  Still, journalists keep talking about a future without ice, about ice-free summers in the Arctic, and casually throwing in “sea level rise if x were to melt completely” as if x was in any danger of melting away entirely over anything but geological time frames. This places the completely wrong ideas in their readers’ heads and gravely misinforms the public about the world. 

  

  Doctors abide by the “First, do no harm” promise. Maybe journalists should too.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 19:00

• Under Armor Rescues Billionaire Kevin Plank's Shaky Port Covington Project
  Under Armor Rescues Billionaire Kevin Plank’s Shaky Port Covington Project

  Former Under Armor founder Kevin Plank’s Port Covington project in Baltimore City is one of the largest urban revitalization projects in the US. Earlier this week, Under Armour, announced plans to move its global headquarters to Port Covington, effectively saving the billionaire from a forced exit of the project by Goldman Sachs, according to Baltimore Brew. 

  Plank’s Port Covington project is a much different one than what was initially announced in 2016. Plank personally bought up all the land in the area and sold it in 2016 to the athletic footwear and apparel maker for $70 million. During that period, a series of bonds issued by Baltimore City left taxpayers on the hook for $137 million. 

  On Monday, Under Armor announced a scaled-down version of the Port Covington project. The move saved the billionaire from a forced sale of his land around the project area. Several years ago, Plank entered into a joint venture agreement with Goldman Sachs in return for construction financing.

  The venture notes that if Under Armour “determines not to proceed with the development of its headquarters or moves its headquarters anywhere that is not within the Port Covington peninsula,” Goldman Sachs has the ability to force Plank to sell his Port Covington property. Now it’s important to note that Plank owns everything north of Cromwell Street and west of Hanover Street, while Under Armour owns the land south of Cromwell Street. 

  Here’s Goldman’s legal jargon titled “Under Armour Exit Event” that explains what happens if Under Armor doesn’t commit to Port Covington:

  

  Monday’s press release was timely since the land has sat dormant for seven years with the initial promise of building a city within a city. What becomes more evident is that Plank needed to show Goldman Sachs some progress the land would be developed. 

  

  Plank’s vision from the start was a moon shot. The project has since been drastically scaled down. Under Armour’s current CEO Patrik Frisk blamed it on a “post-Covid reality.” Their newly proposed Port Covington headquarters will be much smaller than 2016 designs, mostly due to today’s hybrid work environment. 

  So how much scaled back? 

  Well, in 2016, Plank promised Under Armour would build a 3.9 million-square-foot campus at Port Covington. He even said the city within the city would add 10,000 plus jobs to the community. Now the company has committed to 310,000 square feet of new space and has shrunk its workforce after years of layoffs to 1,700. The addition of local jobs is expected to be a fraction of what was initially proposed. 

  

  Plank also said Baltimore would receive $6.9 billion of offices, apartments, retail district, and affordable housing, all under original designs. This was more than enough for the city of Baltimore to issue a $660 million of city-backed TIF (tax increment) bond financing for the project.

  From the beginning, the project seemed too good to be true. After 2016, the company’s equity tanked amid layoffs, restructurings, and accounting probes by the SEC. 

  After Plank was removed as CEO from the company in late 2019 and demoted to executive chairman and brand chief – his private real estate venture, Sagamore Development, was also rebranded as the Weller Development Co., operated by two of his close associates, as he took a step back. Though likely pulling the strings in the background. 

  For Plank to access the TIF bond, he would need Under Armour to commit to building at Port Covington. Such a move would allow him to refinance $77.5 million in property mortgages and receive $25.3 million in “soft costs” he claims to have spent on engineering, architecture, and lobbying costs for the project.

  Billionaire Plank was “saved by the bell,” or instead, a press release. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 18:40

• "Bubble Markets… If Only There Were Signs": Here Are BofA's Bull, Bear And Base Cases For 2021
  “Bubble Markets… If Only There Were Signs”: Here Are BofA’s Bull, Bear And Base Cases For 2021

  The recent bearish reversal in fund flows, which earlier this week saw hedge funds sell stocks on 7 of the past 8 days (according to Goldman Prime, a development which we correctly predicted would lead to a violent short squeeze as today’s all time high in the S&P demosntrates) following record fund inflows which saw more equity inflows in the past 5 months than in the prior 12 years…

  

  … and resulted in record gross and net hedge fund leverage…

  

  … has itself reversed, and according to the latest EPFR data compiled by BofA, in the last week there was renewed investor euphoria with $14.6BN inflows into stocks ($10.6bn into ETFs, $4.0bn into mutual funds), $13.7BN into bonds, $8.7BN into cash, and $0.1BN into gold. In short: every risk asset was bought, even gold (it is unclear what the source of the new funds was but it may well have been proceeds from crypto liquidations).

  The latest weekly burst of stock buyng pushed BofA’s private clients to a total $3.2 trillion in AUM, of which a record 64.3% was in stocks, 18.1% debt, 11.3% cash. Of note: the bank’s high net worth clients are buying financials, energy, HY, while selling healthcare and gold.

  

  And yet despite the renewed risk on sentiment, BofA’s prorpietary “Bull & Bear Indicator” dipped again to 7.1 from 7.2, and well below its Reddit-mania inspired high of 7.7 in February.

  

  Latest weekly flows aside, Hartnett then takes readers through his latest and greatest Bull, Bear and Base cases which are as follows:

  Bull Case

  • Q1 taper tantrum: credit & stocks weathered 100bps jump in bond yields in Q1and hit to speculative froth.
  • CIO’s vs CEO’s: $2.5tn into bonds since ’08 vs just $1.1tn into stocks; CEO’s not CIO’s have driven stocks higher past decade via $6.3tn buybacks; in coming years CIO’s could drive bond to equity rotation.
  • Warp speed ≠ warp speed: warp speed vaccinations not leading to warp speed reopening = policy stimulus for longer.
  • Breadth & Value: 1557/3042 global stocks still >20% below all-time highs.
  • Markets lead Macro: $30tn stimulus = $50tn jump in global stock market cap…PMIs >60, EPS >30%, GDP >6%; Fed knows this…bubble in stimulus = bubble in markets.

  Bear case:

  • “Events, dear boy, events”: credit events (GME, Greensill, Archegos) increasing in frequency; speculation conviction dangerously high… XBT, SPACs, IPOs, NFTs, COIN,FOMO…if only there were signs.
  • Markets lead Macro: Wall St inflation = Main St inflation… -ve for EPS as higher input prices combine lower consumer purchasing power (watch housing as lead indicator).
  • From 3Ps to 3Rs: Positioning, Policy, Profits drove massive returns past 12months; rising Rates, Regulation, Redistribution (aggressive “War on Inequality”taxation of corporate profits, capital gains, wealth) to drive modest/negative assetreturns next 12 months.
  • Valuation: credit spreads at floor of long-term ranges; US trailing PE >29x vs 15xaverage past 100 years, forward PE 22x vs 15.5x average (Chart 8).

  

  • The Great Taper:  Bank of Canada begins Great Tapering…pace of Big 4 centralbank purchases (Fed, ECB, BoJ, BOE) forecast to fall from $8.5tn in 2020 to $3.4tnin 2021 to $0.4tn in 2022 (Chart 9).

  

  Finally, here is BofA’s own base case:

  • Ceilings & Floors: 2% “ceiling” for GDP & CPI of past decade now new “floor”… higher nominal growth = higher yields = commodities>credit, RoW>US,small> large, value>growth.
  • Own Inflation Assets: secular lows in inflation & rates = real assets > financial assets; note annualized return from art = 9% (contemporary art 14%) past 35 years

  

  • Own Defensives & LoLs: Q2 “pain trade” = bonds outperforming stocks as worst Q1 ever for 30-year Treasury & 3rd best ever YoY gain for SPX in Mar; use “pain trade” to position for inflation, tapering, taxation… sell bonds, tech, any momentum comeback vs quality; BofA Investment Clock says next 6 months…
    • 1. buy US defensives (utilities & staples) as market hedge Q2, macro hedge H2;
    • 2. buy RoW Last of Laggards (LoLs)...UK/EU banks/resources, Japan consumer, China/EM banks/industrials as vaccine allows RoW H2 reopening.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 18:20

• Watch: Chaos In Jerusalem After Jewish Settler Groups Chant "Death To Arabs" During Ramadan
  Watch: Chaos In Jerusalem After Jewish Settler Groups Chant “Death To Arabs” During Ramadan

  Violence has erupted in and around the walled ‘old city’ section of Jerusalem during Muslim holidays after on Thursday night far-right Jewish groups staged a large demonstration at the Damascus Gate where they loudly chanted “death to Arabs”. 

  Counter-protests by Palestinian youth quickly broke into fights between the two groups and clashes with police, as security services attempted to disperse rioters. Reuters reports on Friday that “After a night of violence in Jerusalem, Israeli police made over 50 arrests and Palestinian medics said 100 were injured during Ramadan clashes in the contested city at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

  Hundreds of mostly orthodox Jewish youth marching through downtown Jerusalem towards Damascus Gate, amid chants of “Death of Arabs!” pic.twitter.com/k8Rh85lAaJ

  — Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) April 22, 2021

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

  A number of journalists and commentators are observing the Jewish mobs are essentially seeking to ethnically cleanse the old city – which many Israeli’s deem the authentic capital of Israel – by way of a mass pogrom. 

  Here’s more via Reuters on the clashes, which have been nightly since the start of Ramadan:

  Police deployed armored vehicles spraying foul-smelling skunk water towards the two groups – Palestinians gathered around Jerusalem’s historic Damascus Gate and hundreds of right-wing Israelis several hundred meters away.

  Clashes and other violent incidents between Palestinians and Israelis have occurred nightly since the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

  Palestinians say police have tried to prevent them from holding their usual Ramadan evening gatherings outside Damascus Gate, an historic landmark on the north side of the Old City and adjacent to several Palestinian neighborhoods.

  Hundreds of far-right Israeli activists took to the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday night chanting “death to Arabs” and “Arabs get out. pic.twitter.com/nr84PjFQZP

  — Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) April 23, 2021

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  Despite the Muslim-Jewish tensions, this area of Jerusalem has historically had a large Palestinian Christian presence, also including Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians as well. 

  The ultra-nationalist Jewish groups were filmed Thursday night entering the old city’s streets while vowing to kick out Palestinian families.

  This sparked multiple instances of Palestinians attacking Jewish individuals on the streets in return, as horrific footage shows…

  Police spox says Jewish man in disturbing video was pelted by rocks while driving and was attacked when he attempted to escape the mob on foot. His car was incinerated. (Not Wadi Joz, but near Rockefeller Museum not far from Damascus Gate.) pic.twitter.com/kV19Qr6SRq

  — Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) April 22, 2021

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  Cars and trash bins were also set on fire overnight; however, the chaos turned to an uneasy calm by daytime Friday, which saw thousands of Muslims enter al-Aqsa Mosque for prayers. 

  Watch Israelis chanting ” Death to Arab” in the occupied Jerusalem.

  Dozens of Palestinians were injured in clashes pic.twitter.com/zJnMT81PBX

  — Muhammad Smiry 🇵🇸 (@MuhammadSmiry) April 23, 2021

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  Palestinian Muslims have in the past clashed with Israeli police at Damascus Gate over attempts to organize public worship events there. The city is on edge headed into the weekend, as more protests are expected. 

  In one week tens of thousands of Christians, including foreign pilgrims from Greece, Russia, and across Eastern Europe are expected in Jerusalem for the Orthodox Church’s Easter (Pascha) celebrations, which is likely to cause further tensions with Jewish settler groups. 

  Meanwhile, things look to continue into Friday night and the weekend…

  Palestinians protest near the al-Aqua mosque in Jerusalem pic.twitter.com/YXxuEoj7hs

  — Ali Özkök (@Ozkok_A) April 23, 2021

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  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 18:00

• Biden's Global Climate Summit Kicks Off Full-Tilt Wealth Redistribution
  Biden’s Global Climate Summit Kicks Off Full-Tilt Wealth Redistribution

  Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

  Yesterday (Thursday April 22) was Earth Day.  To mark the occasion, President Biden hosted something called a virtual Leaders’ Climate Summit.

  

  The leaders of major carbon emitting nations joined virtually and pledged to decarbonize the global economy.  Biden even said he’d launch an international climate finance plan to underwrite it.

  The virtual summit was a bullet point in Biden’s January 27, 2021, climate crisis executive order.  The stated intent of the order is:

  “…to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad while creating good-paying union jobs and equitable clean energy future, building modern and sustainable infrastructure, restoring scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking across the federal government, and re-establishing the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.”  

  The virtual summit, as far as we could tell, was a grand exercise in flattery and flagellation.  It was also a smoke and mirrors cover for something entirely different.

  Here at the Economic Prism we find the term ‘climate crisis’ to be disingenuous.  Weather is weather.  Sometimes there are fires and floods and hurricanes and blizzards and heatwaves.  There always has been.  Always will.

  The fact that weather is now somehow a climate crisis is big government seizing an opportunity to remold the world nearer to the heart’s desire.

  You see, the supposed climate crisis has nothing to do with saving the whales.  Like all good central plans, it has everything to do with wealth redistribution.  A key feature involves cancelling certain industries while propping up others, like solar and wind power generators.  It also involves capturing and redirecting massive amounts of capital.

  What to make of it…

  Arsonists

  Cheap, abundant, clean energy is a commendable goal.  We’re all for it.  And if it creates new jobs and industries, all the better.

  But like all of mankind’s top achievements, private inventers – through ingenuity, experimentation, and repetition – stand the best chance at really attaining it.  Curious individuals will triumph through relentless trial, observation, testing, refinement, and ultimate discovery.  We have it on good authority of new breakthroughs occurring in this realm each and every day.

  Team Biden-Harris, and their army of planners, won’t get us anywhere close to cheap, abundant, clean energy.  That’s not their goal either.  Their goal is massive wealth redistribution.  And to help bring this to fruition they’re putting arsonists in charge of fighting fires.

  For example, last month the Federal Reserve, the central bank to the U.S. government, created a Financial Stability Climate Committee and a Supervision Climate Committee.  According to Fed Governor Lael Brainard:

  “Climate change and the transition to a sustainable economy also pose risks to the stability of the broader financial system.  So a second core pillar of our framework seeks to address the macrofinancial risks of climate change.”

  Treasury Secretary, and former Fed Chair, Janet Yellen, is also hip to the climate crisis.  This week the Treasury Department announced its plans to fight climate change through fiscal policy.

  The Treasury is even creating something called a “Climate Hub” to save us from the weather.  John E. Morton, an Obama administration retread, and climate finance buff, will be the new hub’s leader.

  It’s an important new position at the Treasury Department, if you ask Yellen.  Because Yellen considers climate change an existential threat.  She even offered the following insights:

  “The steep consequences of our actions demand that the Treasury Department make climate change a top priority.  Finance and financial incentives will play a crucial role in addressing the climate crisis at home and abroad and in providing capital for opportunities to transform the economy.”

  You can see where this is going, right?

  Biden’s Global Climate Summit Kicks Off Full-Tilt Wealth Redistribution

  The central planners are setting the stage for epic, government directed renewable energy boondoggles.  A full-tilt raid on the public purse that will make everyone rich – except you.  Printing press money will be distributed to mega solar and wind generation programs as a matter of monetary and fiscal policy.

  What’s lost in all this is central bankers, more than anyone else, are responsible for polluting the earth and filling it with carbon emissions.  As a group, the finger prints of central bankers can be found all over the degradation of the environment and emissions of greenhouse gases.  Yet now, it’s as if these arsonists are being put in charge of fighting fires.

  The connection between central bankers and carbon emissions may seem a bit abstract at first.  But it’s really not.  Central bankers, including the Federal Reserve, provide credit.  Moreover, through their policies of unrelenting credit expansion they provide excess credit.

  The flipside of credit, remember, is debt.  And debt comes with borrowing money.  And borrowing money pulls production and consumption from the future into the present.

  Thus, if you take a chart of global CO2 emissions over the last 80 years and compare it with a chart of U.S. Debt and Rest of the World Debt, the trajectories bear an uncanny resemblance.  Correlation does not imply causation, and we haven’t done a regression analysis to confirm it…

  But we have a hunch that without the explosion of central bank created credit over the last 100 years, and the relentless production and consumption binge it has fostered, greenhouse gas emissions would be far less.

  Printing press money and unlimited debt, courtesy of central bankers, has resulted in trillions in wasteful spending…not to mention financing of endless wars.  These actions, no doubt, step down with a weighty carbon footprint.

  Indeed, there’s something remarkably insincere about the Federal Reserve and the Treasury lining up behind the supposed climate crisis.  They’re the grossest polluters of all!

  And Team Biden-Harris, under the guise of climate crisis, have established a coordinated attack with the Fed and Treasury to redistribute wealth and muck with the lives of millions unconditionally.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/23/2021 – 17:40

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