Today’s News 24th March 2021

• Moscow Declares "No Relations" With EU As Brussels Has Unilaterally "Destroyed" Ties
  Moscow Declares “No Relations” With EU As Brussels Has Unilaterally “Destroyed” Ties

  On the defensive following the latest wave of Western sanctions targeting the two countries, Russia and China are lashing out. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held a press conference to address the spiraling tensions while standing alongside his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi as a show of unity against Western attacks following a meeting in Guilin, China.

  This month the European Union (in coordination with the US and others) slapped Navalny-related “human rights violations” sanctions on multiple top Russian officials, while on Monday anti-China sanctions were announced over the Uighur crackdown. And somewhat underreported on the same day were EU sanctions against two Russian officials for “persecuting gay and lesbian people in the southern Russian region of Chechnya.”

  Lavrov on Tuesday issued his fiercest words yet, declaring the EU has “destroyed” Russia’s ability to have relations with Brussels. He said “there are no relations with the EU as an organization. The entire infrastructure of these relations has been destroyed by unilateral decisions made from Brussels.”

  

  However, he did emphasize that while relations with the bloc are essentially non-existent, a handful of individual countries are still seeking positive ties with Moscow as they remain “guided by their national interests.” 

  “If and when Europeans decide to eliminate these anomalies in contacts with their largest neighbor, of course, we will be ready to build up these relations based on equality,” Russia’s top diplomat added. 

  Lavrov went so far as to threaten the breaking off of any diplomatic contact with the EU altogether if it begins attempting to hit “sensitive parts of the economy” with punitive measures, adding the caveat that “of course we do not want to isolate ourselves from living in the world, but we must be ready for this. If you want peace, prepare for war.“

  Standing alongside Lavrov, Wang Yi Chinese Foreign Minister similarly rejected outside criticisms and attacks on both governments: 

  Wang sharply criticized coordinated sanctions against Beijing by the EU, Britain, the US and Canada over human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in China’s far western Xinjiang region.

  “Countries should stand together to oppose all forms of unilateral sanctions,” Wang said. “These measures will not be embraced by the international community.”

  Lavrov said Russia and China both viewed the US as seeking to rely on Cold War military alliances to undermine the “international legal architecture.”

  Interestingly, Lavrov highlighted that Moscow and Beijing see Washington as attempting to strengthen the West’s Cold War military alliances ultimately to undermine developing multi-polarity and the “international legal architecture”.

  By the time of the Tuesday joint Russia-China press conference, Beijing had retaliated with sanctions of its own on no less than ten European officials and four institutions charged with “damaging China’s interests”.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/24/2021 – 02:45

• COVID Restrictions To Remain In Place For Years, Says UK's Public Health Official
  COVID Restrictions To Remain In Place For Years, Says UK’s Public Health Official

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  Despite the UK’s largely successful rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, a public health official says masks and other social distancing restrictions are likely to remain in place for years because the public has become used to them.

  

  Mary Ramsay, the head of immunisation at Public Health England, said the measures would remain in place while other countries complete their vaccination programs, a process likely to take years.

  “People have got used to those lower-level restrictions now, and people can live with them, and the economy can still go on with those less severe restrictions in place,” said Ramsay.

  “So I think certainly for a few years, at least until other parts of the world are as well vaccinated as we are, and the numbers have come down everywhere, that is when we may be able to go very gradually back to a more normal situation,” she added.

  The doctor said that so long as people continue to be infected, the rules won’t be abolished.

  Ramsay’s comments once again highlight the fact that the plan never was to get “back to normal.”

  Now that Brits have allowed society to be permanently deformed, with polls routinely showing vehement support for lockdown and other pandemic rules, things are never going to be the same again.

  Having allowed the precedent that the government can put the entire population under de facto house arrest on a whim, look for the policy to be repeated over and over again with different justifications that have nothing to do with COVID-19.

  As we highlighted earlier this month, one of those justifications will be man-made global warming, with climate lockdowns set to become a regular reality.

  *  *  *

  In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/24/2021 – 02:00

• Escobar: Welcome To 'Shocked & Awed' 21st Century Geopolitics
  Escobar: Welcome To ‘Shocked & Awed’ 21st Century Geopolitics

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

  With a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the hegemon, we now have a brand new geopolitical chessboard…

  

  It took 18 years after Shock and Awe unleashed on Iraq for the Hegemon to be mercilessly shocked and awed by a virtually simultaneous, diplomatic Russia-China one-two.

  

  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (L) meets Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) in Beijing, China on March 23, 2021. Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry/Handout/Anadolu Agency

  How this is a real game-changing moment cannot be emphasized enough; 21st century geopolitics will never be the same again.

  Yet it was the Hegemon who first crossed the diplomatic Rubicon. The handlers behind hologram Joe “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Nance” Biden had whispered in his earpiece to brand Russian President Vladimir Putin as a soulless “killer” in the middle of a softball interview.

  Not even at the height of the Cold War the superpowers resorted to ad hominem attacks. The result of such an astonishing blunder was to regiment virtually the whole Russian population behind Putin – because that was perceived as an attack against the Russian state.

  Then came Putin’s cool, calm, collected – and quite diplomatic – response, which needs to be carefully pondered. These sharp as a dagger words are arguably the most devastatingly powerful five minutes in the history of post-truth international relations.

  In For Leviathan, it’s so cold in Alaska, we forecasted what could take place in the US-China 2+2 summit at a shabby hotel in Anchorage, with cheap bowls of instant noodles thrown in as extra bonus.

  China’s millennial diplomatic protocol establishes that discussions start around common ground – which are then extolled as being more important than disagreements between negotiating parties. That’s at the heart of the concept of “no loss of face”. Only afterwards the parties discuss their differences.

  Yet it was totally predictable that a bunch of amateurish, tactless and clueless Americans would smash those basic diplomatic rules to show “strength” to their home crowd, distilling the proverbial litany on Taiwan, Hong Kong, South China Sea, “genocide” of Uighurs.

  Oh dear. There was not a single State Dept. hack with minimal knowledge of East Asia to warn the amateurs you don’t mess with the formidable head of the Foreign Affairs Commission at the CCP’s Central Committee, Yang Jiechi, with impunity.

  Visibly startled, but controlling his exasperation, Yang Jiechi struck back. And the rhetorical shots were heard around the whole Global South.

  They had to include a basic lesson in manners:

  “If you want to deal with us properly, let’s have some mutual respect and do things the right way”.

  But what stood out was a stinging, concise diagnostic blending history and politics:

  The United States is not qualified to talk to China in a condescending manner. The Chinese people will not accept that. It must be based on mutual respect to deal with China, and history will prove that those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end.

  And all that translated in real time by young, attractive and ultra-skilled Zhang Jing – who inevitably became an overnight superstar in China, reaping an astonishing 400 million plus hits on Weibo.

  The incompetence of the “diplomatic” arm of the Biden-Harris administration beggars belief. Using a basic Sun Tzu maneuver, Yang Jiechi turned the tables and voiced the predominant sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the planet. Stuff your unilateral “rules-based order”. We, the nations of the world, privilege the UN charter and the primacy of international law.

  So this is what the Russia-China one-two achieved almost instantaneously: from now on, the Hegemon should be treated, all across the Global South with, at best, disdain.

  An inevitable historical process

  Pre-Alaska, the Americans went on a charming offensive in Japan and South Korea for “consultations”. That’s irrelevant. What matters is post-Alaska, and the crucial Sergey Lavrov-Wang Yi meeting of Foreign Ministers in Guilin.

  Lavrov, always unflappable, clarified in an interview with Chinese media how the Russia-China strategic partnership sees the current US diplomatic train wreck:

  As a matter of fact, they have largely lost the skill of classical diplomacy. Diplomacy is about relations between people, the ability to listen to each other, to hear one another and to strike a balance between competing interests. These are exactly the values ​​that Russia and China are promoting in diplomacy.

  The inevitable consequence is that Russia-China must “consolidate our independence: “The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal. So, we must reduce our exposure to sanctions by strengthening our technological independence and switching to settlements in national and international currencies other than the dollar. We need to move away from using Western-controlled international payment systems.”

  Russia-China have clearly identified, as Lavrov pointed out, how the “Western partners” are “promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries. Their policies run counter to the objective international developments and, as they used to say at some point, are on the wrong side of history. The historical process will come into its own, no matter what happens.”

  As a stark presentation of an inevitable “historical process”, it doesn’t get more crystal clear than that. And predictably, it didn’t take time for the “Western partners” to fall back into – what else – their same old sanction bag of tricks.

  Here we go again: a US, UK, EU, Canada “alliance” sanctioning selected Chinese officials because, in Blinken’s words, “the PRC [People’s Republic of China] continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.”

  The EU, UK, and Canada didn’t have the guts to sanction a key player: Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo, who’s a Politburo member. The Chinese response would have been – economically – devastating.

  Still, Beijing counterpunched with its own sanctions – targeting, crucially, the German far-right evangelical nut posing as “scholar” who produced the bulk of the completely debunked “proof” of a million Uighurs held in concentration camps.

  Once again, the “Western partners” are impermeable to logic. Adding to the already appalling state of EU-Russia relations, Brussels chooses to also antagonize China based on a single fake dossier, playing right into the Hegemon’s not exactly secret Divide and Rule agenda.

  Mission (nearly) accomplished: Brussels diplomats tell me the EU Parliament is all but set to refuse to ratify the China-EU trade deal painstakingly negotiated by Merkel and Macron. The consequences will be immense.

  So Blinken will have reasons to be cheerful when he meets assorted eurocrats and NATO bureaucrats this week, ahead of the NATO summit.

  One has to applaud the gall of the “Western partners”. It’s 18 years since Shock and Awe – the start of the bombing, invasion and destruction of Iraq. It’s 10 years since the start of the total destruction of Libya by NATO and its GCC minions, with Obama-Biden “leading from behind”. It’s 10 years since the start of the savage destruction of Syria by proxy – complete with jihadis disguised as “moderate rebels”.

  Yet now the “Western partners” are so mortified by the plight of Muslims in Western China.

  At least there are some cracks within the EU illusionist circus. Last week, the French Armed Forces Joint Reflection Circle (CRI) – in fact an independent think tank of former high officers – wrote a startling open letter to cardboard NATO secretary-general Stoltenberg de facto accusing him of behaving as an American stooge with the implementation of NATO 2030 plan. The French officers drew the correct conclusion: the US/NATO combo is the main cause of appalling relations with Russia.

  These Ides of March

  Meanwhile, sanctions hysteria advance like a runaway train. Biden-Harris has already threatened to impose extra sanctions on Chinese oil imports from Iran. And there’s more in the pipeline – on manufacturing, technology, 5G, supply chains, semiconductors.

  And yet nobody is trembling in their boots. Right on cue with Russia-China, Iran has stepped up the game, with Ayatollah Khamenei issuing the guidelines for Tehran’s return to the JCPOA.

  1. The US regime is in no position to make new demands or changes regarding the nuclear deal.

  2. The US is weaker today than when the JCPOA was signed.

  3. Iran is in a stronger position now. If anyone can impose new demands it’s Iran and not the US.

  And with that we have a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the Hegemon.

  In our latest conversation/interview, to be released soon in a video + transcript package, Michael Hudson – arguably the world’s top economist – hit the heart of the matter:

  The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China, what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that you’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give the wealth, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let the individuals run everything and, then we’ll lend them the money, or we’ll buy them out and then we can control them financially. And China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. And the fury in the West is that somehow, the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources, foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them as we are seeing in the near East. And you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now.

  To be continued. As it stands, we should all make sure that the Ides of March – the 2021 version – have already configured a brand new geopolitical chessboard. The Russia-China Double Helix on high-speed rail has left the station – and there’s no turning back.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/24/2021 – 00:05

• Comparing Luxury Investment Around The World
  Comparing Luxury Investment Around The World

  Do you enjoy the finer things in life? For many of the world’s wealthy individuals, acquiring luxury goods such as art, fine wine, and watches is a passion.

  Unlike traditional investments in financial assets, luxury goods can be difficult to value if one does not have an appreciation for their form. A rare painting, for example, does not generate cash flows, meaning its value is truly in the eye of the beholder.

  To gain some insight into the market for luxury goods, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu created the following infographic, using data from Knight Frank’s 2021 Wealth Report, to compare the preferences of nine global regions.

  

  Global Tastes in Luxury Goods

  To rank the most popular luxury investments in 2020, Knight Frank surveyed over 600 private bankers, wealth advisors, and family offices. The following table summarizes their findings, as well as each category’s growth according to the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index.

  

  Art was unmistakably the top category for 2020, ranking first in every geographic region except Africa and Asia, where it placed second instead. The global market for artwork was estimated to be worth $64 billion in 2019, and is often facilitated through auction houses such as Sotheby’s.

  In terms of asset appreciation, rare whiskeys have climbed the most in value over the past 10 years. Connoisseurs of this spirit will be familiar with distilleries like The Macallan, whose rare bottles can sell for more than a million dollars.

  Comparing Luxury Investment Between North America and Asia

  Below, we’ve compared the rankings of Asia and North America to get a better idea of how preferences can vary.

  The biggest differences here are watches, which ranked first in Asia but fourth in North America, and classic cars, which ranked second in North America but fifth in Asia. The remaining eight categories took similar spots across the two regions.

  

  Asia’s stronger preference for watches was likely driven by Chinese consumers, who are now the biggest buyers of luxury watches globally. Demand throughout the COVID-19 pandemic proved resilient, with exports of Swiss watches to China increasing by 17.1% between January and November 2020.

  Classic cars, on the other hand, may be more popular in North America due to the region’s longer automotive history. Two of America’s most iconic automakers, Ford and General Motors, have both been around for over a century!

  The Biggest Sales of 2020

  Here were some of the most extravagant and noteworthy luxury sales from 2020.

  Art

  Francis Bacon’s 1981 Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus was sold by Sotheby’s for $84.6 million in June 2020. A triptych is an artwork that is divided into three sections but displayed as a single piece.

  Other paintings by Francis Bacon have sold for even larger amounts. In 2013, Three Studies of Lucian Freud was sold by Christie’s auction house for $142 million.

  Classic Cars

  A 1932 Bugatti Type 55 Super Sport Roadster sold for $7.1 million in March 2020, making it one of the biggest classic car sales of the year.

  Founded in 1909, Bugatti has produced some of the world’s most sought-after cars. The French brand was acquired by the Volkswagen Group in 1998, and since then, has released numerous special edition cars with price tags reaching well into the millions.

  Handbags

  An Hermès Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Retourné Kelly 25 sold for $437,330 in November 2020, becoming the most expensive handbag ever sold at an auction. Founded in 1837, Hermès is commonly regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious makers of handbags.

  COVID-19 Dampens Luxury Investment

  When compared to 2019, total sales for Sotheby’s declined 16% in 2020, while Christie’s, another leading auction house, reported a 25% decline. Despite these decreases, executives remain optimistic.

  “The art and luxury markets have proven to be incredibly resilient, and demand for quality across categories is unabated.”

  – Charles Stewart, CEO, Sotheby’s

  The industry has been largely successful in transitioning to online operations, with Sotheby’s reporting that 70% of its auctions in 2020 were held online, up from 30% in the previous year.

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

• Could Biden's Stumble Be An Omen Of A Bigger Fall?
  Could Biden’s Stumble Be An Omen Of A Bigger Fall?

  Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

  It has not been a secret that much would be gained by those in the Kamala Harris camp if she were to replace Biden as President. Some people have even voiced the opinion this has been the game plan all along and Biden has simply been a pawn in the power game played by those pulling the strings. If such a scenario does unfold it will be most interesting to see how it unfolds. Will he fight being removed from office or resign? Would Biden be thrown under the bus or be treated as a sympathetic figure?

  

  Over the past few weeks, we have seen the media putting a positive glow upon Harris and pointing out how she has been busy communicating with foreign heads of state. This may be in an effort to fortify her status. We should remember as a first-term Senator she could muster little support during the primaries and her campaign had been left for dead. In fact, during her Presidential run, Harris came under a great deal of media criticism for things in her past. Still, recent media actions indicate she may be destined to become Washington’s next darling.

  Biden Stumbles Before A Bigger Fall?

  Media coverage of Biden’s stumble while climbing onto Air Force One and his verbal blunders could simply be an omen of what is about to come. In this case, it may be a lead-up to what many people have predicted will happen in the future. It circles around the idea that Joe Biden was far past his prime and has an expiration date stamped somewhere on his body just out of sight.

  

  It could be argued the media did little or nothing to expose this during the election. During that time Trump bashing occupied their focus. Biden’s fragility was not nearly scrutinized nearly as much as Trump’s health in 2016. At that time Trump was put under a microscope due to his age. Biden has a history of making verbal slip-ups and being a train wreck when he goes off-script but as he has gotten older claims of dementia have grown.

  No longer are Biden’s missteps seen as mere gaffs but as a sign his mental competence is on the wane. Largely overlooked in the past have been Biden’s slips referring to a Harris Biden Administration or President Harris. That being said, some in the media are now becoming more vocal over Biden not having a live news conference since the inauguration. Claims are even surfacing that he is hiding from the media and being tightly handled. Now that the left has full control of the White House it appears even some of those in the media that had so much to do with getting Biden elected are ready to push him off the stage.

  This bye-bye Biden, hello Harris theme has some rather strong ramifications for a country already strongly divided. With many Americans feeling Biden was thrust upon them against their will the idea that someone they are even less impressed with is unsettling. Most Americans don’t really know much about Kamala Harris. Sadly, to some people, the fact she is the United States’ first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, or the first African American and first Asian American vice president is more important than her qualifications or views.

  Unfortunately, Harris’s qualifications have little to do with what happens if and when Biden is put out to pasture. Still, kicking this issue down the road would be the best path forward and at least add credence to the idea voters were not duped into voting for a man that never should have been put in the oval office. In all honestly, regardless of how you feel about Joe Biden, the fact is the Presidency has not always been held by brilliant or honest individuals. In politics, such people are a rare breed.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 23:25

• "Like Taking A Vitamin Pill" – World's First Oral COVID Vaccine Nears Human Trials
  “Like Taking A Vitamin Pill” – World’s First Oral COVID Vaccine Nears Human Trials

  For the first time since the pandemic, a COVID vaccine in pill form is set to enter the first phases of clinical trials within months.

  The company working on the drug (a JV of Israeli-American Oramed Pharmaceuticals and India-based Premas Biotech), announced in a press release that it hopes to begin the first phase of clinical trials for its drug Oravax in humans by June.

  

  Oral vaccines are an option being assessed for “second-generation” vaccines, which are designed to be more scalable, easier to administer, and simpler to distribute.

  An oral vaccine could “potentially [enable] people to take the vaccine themselves at home,” Nadav Kidron, CEO of Oramed, said in the release.

  The capsules would become particularly useful if COVID-19 vaccines are eventually “recommended annually like the standard flu shot,” he added. 

  Prabuddha Kundu, co-founder of Premas Biotech, told Indian media that administering the vaccine would be “like taking a vitamin pill” and that “we are more than 100% sure that the technology works and is promising.”

  Results from the preliminary animal tests would soon be published in a scientific journal, he added.

  The news comes as Pfizer announces the beginning of human trials of a new anti-viral pill to treat the coronavirus that could be used at the first sign of illness.

  If it succeeds in trials, the pill could be prescribed early on in an infection to block viral replication before patients get very sick. The drug binds to an enzyme called a protease to keep the virus from replicating. Protease-inhibiting medicines have been successful in treating other types of viruses, include HIV and Hepatitis C.

  Among major drugmakers, Merck & Co. has one of the few coronavirus pills that is far along in human testing. Its experimental antiviral drug molnupiravir works by a different mechanism than the Pfizer drug and is in late-stage human trials.

  

  However, ‘pillifying’ the vaccine will make it easier to convince people to take the X doses per year we all ‘need’ for the rest of our lives.

  One word: Soma

  “Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 23:05

• H.R.1 – Is It Really "For The People"?
  H.R.1 – Is It Really “For The People”?

  Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,

  A lot has been written about H.R.1 — the so-called “For the People Act of 2021.” Former Vice President Mike Pence has opined on the bill. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal sounded the alarm back in January. The editors of National Review come right out and call it a “partisan assault on American democracy.”

  

  H.R.1 purports to, “expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.” The Bill is 791 pages long.

  Here are just a few of the more egregious federal power grabs in H.R.1 concocted against the 50 states that run elections under the U.S. Constitution:

  1. Ban voter ID laws and allow ballot harvesting;

  2. Expand Election Day to “election season” by mandating mail-in ballots be counted 10 days after the election would normally be over;

  3. Automatic voter registration of people who apply for unemployment, Medicaid, Obamacare and college, or who are coming out of prison.

  There is a lot more, and it gets worse. Substantially worse. There are First Amendment restrictions on political speech and on the support or opposition of a bill and/or a candidate. Remember: This is supposed to be “fortifying our democracy.”

  If you are interested in a “through the looking glass” annotated analysis of H.R.1 — then head over to the Brennan Center for Justice. They are happy to explain how those pesky constitutional rights can be whittled down to something more “fair” for everyone. For example, the Brennan Center analysis confidently assures readers about how H.R.1 “affirms Congress’ power to protect the right to vote, regulate federal elections, and defend the democratic process in the United States.” It seeks to airbrush Article I, Section 4 — The Elections Clause — from history and practice. The Clause directs and empowers states to determine the “Times, Places, and Manner” of congressional elections. H.R.1 would federally strangle the Elections Clause.

  In order to find our way out, it is helpful to know how we got into this terrible predicament. The foundation for the madness of H.R.1 is legal positivism, a thesis, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which states “that the existence and content of law depends on social facts and not on its merits.”

  H.R.1 is nearly 800 pages of meritless, militant, social engineering targeting the foundations of the U.S. Constitution, voting rights and political free speech — all dressed-up as being “for the people.”

  Authoritarians — socialists and communists of different stripes, geography and eras — like to use legal positivism because it allows enormous latitude to design, implement and (especially) enforce whatever they dream up as the way things ought to be. What better way to design a worker’s paradise? Or — hypothetically, of course — to make sure that a stolen election stays stolen, is never audited, and lays the groundwork for reproducible results for the next century?

  It’s neat and easy under legal positivism. Draft up a one-sided, detailed plan (loaded with outrageous schemes) of nearly 800 pages that NO ONE will read or understand. Ram it through the one-party legislature and have the same party’s president sign it into law. Presto! — cheating has become nice and “legal.”

  For readers who find this technique troubling, or wonder why it does not sound like the great tradition of debate and compromise described in our founding documents and political history, there is good reason. The United States was founded on a theory of Natural Law, which adheres to universal moral principles for ethical and legal norms of human conduct whether a particular government recognizes them or not — that is, essentially, the antithesis of legal positivism. There are now generations of Americans who have never been exposed to these ideas.

  The “mind wipe” of Americans for all that is authentic and real about the foundation of our country as a constitutional republic began through the education system. We allowed people like Howard Zinn to dictate the historical framework for understanding who and what we are as Americans for millions of high schoolers and undergraduates. An intellectual diet of relativism, critical theory, deconstruction and subjectivity. That delegation of our educational standards was reckless, lazy and stupid. When you do not know any better, how can you act any better?

  The co-opting and hollowing out of our education system is the main explanation for why and how we are wrestling with the loss of the Republic by legislative militancy, topped off with the Executive pen stroke.

  This is terribly serious stuff and no one is telling you WHY you are losing. There is a lot of hand-wringing and outrage, and rightly so. But that nagging feeling tormenting you about why America seems to be slipping away — and why everything you believed in is now being turned into a crime or a shaming social media joke — well, no one is explaining that to you. Until now.

  Now is the time to snap out of our Covid-induced somnolence and passivity. If President Joe Biden’s election “victory” wasn’t enough to get your attention — then H.R.1 must be. Please let everyone influential know, clearly and politely, exactly what you think.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 22:45

• USAF Spy Plane Makes Unprecedented Flight Off China's Coast 
  USAF Spy Plane Makes Unprecedented Flight Off China’s Coast 

  A reconnaissance aircraft operated by the USAF made the closest-ever flight on China’s coast on Monday, coming within 25.33 nautical miles, according to South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a think tank based in Beijing. 

  SCSPI said the USAF Boeing RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flew closer to China’s coast than ever before. The intelligence-gathering plane entered the South China Sea on Monday through the Bashi Channel to conduct reconnaissance operations on China’s southern coastal regions, the think tank said. 

  

  At one point, the spy plane was flying 25.33 nautical miles away from China’s coastlines, a new record, according to the think tank. A USAF spy plane’s usual distance is around 50 to 70 nautical miles, but the 25.33 nautical miles were unexpected. 

  

  The event comes days after the first meeting between the Biden administration and Chinese officials ended with hostility as it appears President Biden shows no sign of changing former President Trump’s aggressive policy. 

  “USAF RC-135U Combat Sent #AE01D5 just set a new record of 25.33NM, the shortest distance US reconnaissance aircraft have reached from the China’s coastlines, based on public data so far.” according to SCSPI. 

  USAF RC-135U Combat Sent #AE01D5 just set a new record of 25.33NM, the shortest distance US reconnaissance aircraft have reached from the China’s coastlines, based on public data so far.

  In addition, there was also a P-8A & an EP-3E spotted over the #SouthChinaSea, March 22. pic.twitter.com/uLv49u70Gv

  — SCS Probing Initiative (@SCS_PI) March 22, 2021

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

  Last week, SCSPI released its annual report on the US military operating in the South China Sea in 2020. It said USAF spy planes flew nearly 1,000 sorties in the highly contested waters last year. US bombers and warships have been increasing missions around China’s militarized islands in South China under the Biden administration. A move to exert “maximum pressure” on Beijing. 

  Bank of America’s analyst Francisco Blanch recently told clients in a note titled “Climate Wars” that a “great power competition between the world’s two largest economies, or between the world’s two largest military spenders, is set to continue for a long time.” 

  Blanch continued, “What form will it take next? For decades, America levered its economic and military might to secure global supply chains, including those of conventional energy resources in the Middle East and other key regions. China’s economy has converged and surpassed US GDP based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), but still lags in real GDP terms. Of course, its military might is still limited compared to that of the US on a broad range of metrics, and energy security of supply remains a key concern for the Chinese leadership. Yet with GDP in 2020 having contracted by 3.5% in America and expanded by 2.2% in China, the economic gap between the two superpowers is quickly closing.” 

  

  The Centre for Economics and Business Research, a UK-based consultancy group, believes China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy in 2028, five years earlier than previously anticipated, after weathering the virus pandemic much better than the US. 

  The threat of China overtaking the US in terms of GDP and military might have pushed the great power competition into hyperdrive as both countries modernize their militaries for potential conflict.  

  As global powers rise and fall, it appears the US and China are falling into Thucydides’ trap. War game simulations don’t appear promising for the US… 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 22:25

• "Our Defenses Are Down" – Border Agent Gives 'Insider' Account Of Over-Crowded Facilities
  “Our Defenses Are Down” – Border Agent Gives ‘Insider’ Account Of Over-Crowded Facilities

  Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times,

  The family-unit holding cells smell like urine and vomit. Fights break out in the unaccompanied-minor cells. Scabies, lice, the flu, and COVID-19 run rampant.

  

  Up to 80 individuals are squeezed into each 24- by 30-foot cell, and there aren’t enough mattresses for everyone. Sheets of plastic divide the rooms.

  “Any diseases that are in there, it’s being kept in there, like a petri dish. The smell is overwhelming,” a Border Patrol agent said, describing the conditions in a facility in south Texas.

  The agent, Carlos (not his real name), spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, for fear of repercussions.

  Border Patrol agents on the front lines are getting so frustrated that they’re now risking their livelihoods to reveal what’s really going on in the illegal immigrant processing facilities.

  

  One or two agents are left to control 300 to 500 people during a shift. No agent wants to report physical or sexual assaults between the aliens because they’ll get blamed for “letting it happen.” They’re also forced to separate a child from an extended family member because he or she is not a biological parent.

  The number of unaccompanied minors—children under 18 who arrive without a parent—is buckling the system. The law requires Border Patrol to prioritize unaccompanied minors and transfer them to the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours.

  “We’re getting them out of here as quickly as possible, but we are so overwhelmed right now,” Carlos said.

  “It used to be easy to get them out in 72 hours. Not anymore. They’re staying here for 10, 12 days. It’s horrible.”

  So far this fiscal year (from Oct. 1, 2020), Border Patrol has apprehended more than 29,000 unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally. In all of fiscal 2020, just over 33,000 were apprehended, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics.

  This year’s numbers are on a trajectory to surpass the 2019 crisis numbers, when 80,634 minors were apprehended.

  CBP declined to provide the number of unaccompanied minors currently being held. “In general, CBP does not provide daily in-custody numbers, as they are considered operationally sensitive because CBP’s in-custody numbers fluctuate on a constant basis,” CBP spokesman Nate Peeters wrote in an email to The Epoch Times on March 23.

  Health and Human Services confirmed on March 23 that its Office of Refugee Resettlement is holding approximately 11,350 children.

  CBP and Health and Human Services have opened several extra facilities to deal with the influx, with the latest being the San Diego Convention Center.

  Carlos confirmed that the majority of unaccompanied minors coming across the border already have parents or family members in the United States.

  “Everybody that shows up here – even if it’s a 3-year-old kid with no one around – they all have an address on them. And they’ll give it to you: ‘Here’s my address; this is where you are sending me,’” Carlos said.

  “And that’s what we do. This is the way we are being played.”

  Most of the unaccompanied minors come from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

  “We’re dealing with a different culture who’s not afraid to send all their kids under the age of five, knowing they’re going to get raped, knowing they’re going to get killed,” Carlos said.

  “You talk to the adults or the teenagers and they’ll tell you, ‘They raped three or four girls, and they kicked them off the trains.’ They’re going to die.”

  Two-thirds of migrants traveling through Mexico report experiencing violence during the journey, including abduction, theft, extortion, torture, and rape, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has been providing medical and mental health care for migrants and refugees in Mexico since 2012.

  Almost 1 in 3 women surveyed by MSF said they had been sexually abused during their journey—60 percent through rape.

  

  Border Patrol agents apprehend about two dozen illegal immigrants in Penitas, Texas, on March 11. 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

  Families Released

  A new directive from the Biden administration is allowing for family units to be released into the interior of the United States without a notice to appear—the paperwork that states the date an illegal immigrant must turn up in court to plead their case.

  “There’s no repercussions. I’m not even going to give you a court date. You don’t even have to show up at court if you don’t want to. It’d be nice, but you don’t have to. That word gets out immediately. And I mean overnight,” Carlos said.

  He said it’s now common knowledge that if you bring a child, you’ll be quickly released into the United States. They’re being transported all over the country, but popular destinations include Houston, New York, and California, as well as Maryland and Washington, D.C.

  “They’ll put them in a hotel for a couple of days until their flight is ready to fly them to where they are going. That’s tax dollars,” Carlos said.

  “There’s no end in sight. The people that we’re apprehending are warning us of the larger caravans that are on their way.”

  He said President Joe Biden’s rollback of the Trump administration’s border policies is the direct cause of the surge.

  “One hundred and ten percent. They were already ready before Biden was even in office. They knew that the doors were going to be open. And now we’ve got a point where we cannot stop it,” he said.

  The administration hasn’t allowed media to access the processing facilities and, according to agents, it’s even requiring that agents in the field move illegal aliens they apprehend onto private land to process them.

  “Keep trying until you find us on a public road. But we’ve been instructed to move all the traffic onto ranches to make sure there’s no public eye,” an agent said.

  “Biden’s strict on that. Trump was a different story. This administration is a no-go on media, I’m guessing because they don’t want to let the word out on what’s going on here on the border—to make him look good.”

  Carlos said the agency has stopped dropping illegal immigrants off directly at bus stations now. “We were given strict orders from Washington, D.C., that that ceases—it’s drawing too much attention,” he said.

  Now they drop the illegal immigrants nearby or at a local NGO facility near the bus station, he said.

  The administration hasn’t yet called the current situation a crisis, and Biden said on March 21 that he’ll visit the border “at some point.”

  

  Illegal border crossers, mostly from Central America, are dropped off by Customs and Border Protection at a bus station in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, on March 15, 2021. (CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

  ‘Our Defenses Are Down’

  Morale among Border Patrol agents has plummeted, Carlos said. “The attrition rate right now is ridiculous,” he said. “We don’t want to work for the Border Patrol anymore. It’s not the Border Patrol.”

  During the Trump era, agents felt “empowered” to do their jobs, he said. “Whatever deals he made, everything was working just fine. Now we’ve got this trash.”

  As agents get moved to deal with the increase in family units and unaccompanied minors, the smuggling organizations and cartels move drugs and other individuals through other, unpatrolled areas.

  “Our manpower is being depleted because we need to go babysit these people, move them as fast as possible to release them into the country,” Carlos said.

  “It’s ridiculous. We have no backup. We’re losing more than we’re catching. And it’s no secret.

  “Our defenses are down. So if there’s anybody that we should be worried about, they know this is the time to come in. They know it.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 22:05

• Largest Dry Cargo Ships Haul Unusual Loads As Dry-Bulk Market Squeezed
  Largest Dry Cargo Ships Haul Unusual Loads As Dry-Bulk Market Squeezed

  With global supply chains stretched thin, an unprecedented amount of fiscal stimulus circulates the world resulting in sharp demand spikes for raw materials, causing commodity and or product shortages, port congestion, container shortages, soaring shipping rates, and even delayed shipments. 

  Robust demand for commodities on the backs of record fiscal stimulus has tightened the global market for dry-bulk vessels. Shipments of timber and grain are being loaded on larger ships generally reserved for other cargo. 

  According to Platts shipping data, timber from Uruguay and grain from Brazil have been loaded on Capesize vessels, the largest dry cargo ships. These two commodities usually are transported worldwide via smaller vessels such as Panamax. 

  Panamax

  

  Genco Shipping & Trading Ltd. Chief Executive John Wobensmith told Bloomberg that “it just shows you how tight the overall dry-bulk market is, and it’s only going to get tighter.” He said soaring shipping rates are “not something that is for the next three months – this has got legs going well into 2022 because of the low supply situation.”

  Wobensmith said dry-bulk freight rates had averaged around $18k per day this year, up 40% from last year. Rates are expected to continue to climb into the second half of the year as volumes of commodities sourced from emerging markets will remain elevated. 

  Goldman Sachs’ economist Jan Hatzius agrees with Wobensmith’s view of supply chain distress extending into 2022. For more on Goldman’s perspective, read their latest note to clients titled “”Things Are Out Of Control” – There Is A Shortage Of Everything And Prices Are Soaring: What Happens Next.” 

  Even before the virus pandemic disrupted global supply chains, the dry-bulk industry was already under pressure, and ports observed declining cargo deliveries, according to Gerry Craggs, managing director at Stemcor S.E.A. Pte Ltd. It was only when government stimulus across the world supercharged demand in a way that supply chains were caught completely off guard with new orders. 

  “We’re in the phase of fiscal stimuli virtually everywhere in the world,” Craggs said in an interview Friday. “It’s driving up demand for virtually everything, and we see that effect in the steel sector and in commodities sectors.”

  Readers may recall we outlined how central banks and governments have overstimulated the global economy that will continue to exacerbate supply-chain disruptions.

  Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, recently warned he has “never seen anything like this,” while referring to the disruption of the global supply chain. 

  More disorder nears as President Joe Biden’s $1.9-trillion relief bill is making its way into the economy, expected to turbocharger consumer demand for products made overseas, which will only result in additional stress on the global supply chain. 

  Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Lee Klaskow noted last week that dry bulk had begun 2021 on a “high note. China and an expected global economic recovery have set up one the strongest opening quarters for dry-bulk demand in a decade.” 

  The lesson to be learned is that global supply woes are being amplified by government and central bank interventions to save the global economy. As a result of letting economies run hot, inflationary expectations worldwide are moving higher as government bond yields soar. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 21:45

• The Latest Manufactured Narrative: 'Anti-Asian Racism'
  The Latest Manufactured Narrative: ‘Anti-Asian Racism’

  Authored by Dennis Prager via WND.com (emphasis ours)

  If you rely on The New York Times, the Democratic Party or CNN – they are interchangeable – for your perception of reality, you now believe America is reeling from the latest expression of white supremacy: Anti-Asian racism.

  

  It is a lie, the purpose of which is to:

  a) Further demonize America.

  b) Further demonize white Americans.

  c) Further divide Americans by race and ethnicity.

  d) Reinforce – or create – the belief among Asian Americans that they are widely hated (and must therefore rely on the government and especially the Democratic Party).

  e) Engender ethnic identity among Asian Americans, most of whom have heretofore essentially considered themselves Americans who happen to be of Asian descent.

  Is there anti-Asian racism in America? Of course. Ethnic bigotry is a tragic part of the human condition. There is no country in which members of different races live that is bereft of ethnic or racial bigotry.

  Therefore, the only question decent, wise or honest people ask is: How much?

  And the answer in America is: very, very little.

  But the left lacks decency, wisdom and honesty. Therefore, it offers continuous reporting about anti-Asian racism, most of which so wildly exaggerates the issue as to constitute a lie.

  Let’s begin with last week’s attack in Atlanta, in which a 21-year-old white man murdered eight people in Asian massage parlors, six of them Asian Americans.

  Thus far, there is not a shred of evidence that the Asian Americans were killed because they were Asian. The reason the shooter killed them, according to those who knew him before the shootings and investigators who have spoken to him since the shootings, was that he had a sex addiction, for which he had already been in rehab, and had frequented some or all of the massage establishments he targeted, which he blamed for contributing to his addiction. As of today, there is also no evidence of the killer ever having expressed any anti-Asian sentiments on social media or in private conversation.

  Nevertheless, the lying media – a term that has become redundant – have portrayed the shootings from the moment they reported them as anti-Asian racism.

  Typical is this report in the Los Angeles Times: “Asian Americans and their supporters gathered Saturday across California and the nation in response to this week’s shooting rampage in the Atlanta area, which claimed eight lives, including six women of Asian descent.”

  The Atlanta lie is part of the greater lie that there is a national epidemic of white supremacist anti-Asian racism. On March 18, for example, The Washington Post reported: “Anti-Asian hate crimes have spiked 150 percent since the pandemic began, according to a recent study.”

  The study cited by The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and the other left-wing media is from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The 150% increase in anti-Asian American hate crimes is contained in its “Fact Sheet: Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2020,” according to which the number of anti-Asian American incidents rose from 49 in 2019 to 122 in 2020. So, the entire edifice of hate against Asian Americans is predicated on an alleged increase of 73 incidents.

  Given that there are about 330 million Americans, and assuming a different American was responsible for each of the 122 anti-Asian incidents, that would mean that 1 in every 2,704,918 Americans committed an anti-Asian incident. And “incident” includes perceived slights.

  As regards violent acts against Asian Americans, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from September 2019, blacks have committed the greatest percentage of violent crimes against Asian Americans. But the mendacious media do not report that.

  The New York Times, the leader in mass hysterias fomented by the left – hysteria is the oxygen of the left – printed this headline last week: “Attacks on Asian-Americans in New York Stoke Fear, Anxiety and Anger.” And the subhead reads: “Hate crimes involving Asian-American victims soared in New York City last year.”

  Focus on the word “soared” and you will appreciate the Times’ commitment to truth.

  If one reads past the headline – which most people do not – the article gives the actual numbers: “The number of hate crimes with Asian-American victims reported to the New York Police Department jumped to 28 in 2020, from just three the previous year.”

  You read that right: The number of incidents “soared” and “jumped” to 28. In a city of 8.4 million people, including, as of 2010, over 1 million Asian Americans. So, about 1 in every 300,000 New Yorkers committed a hate crime against an Asian American, and about 1 in every 36,000 Asian Americans living in New York was a victim of a hate crime. To put this number into perspective, the odds of your dying in a motor-vehicle accident are about 1 in 9,000.

  Another New York Times article, under the headline “A Tense Lunar New Year for the Bay Area After Attacks on Asian-Americans,” opens with this:

  “The videos are graphic and shocking. In January, a local television station showed footage of a young man sprinting toward, then violently shoving to the ground, a man identified as Vicha Ratanapakdee, 84, who had been out for a morning walk in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco. He later died.”

  The Times piece never reveals the name or race of the perpetrator: Antoine Watson, a 19-year-old black man.

  But, in what could be called “compound lying,” the Times did blame “former President Donald J. Trump, who frequently used racist language to refer to the coronavirus.”

  Of course, the Times did not provide an example of Trump’s racist language with regard to the coronavirus. One must assume that blaming the Chinese government for the virus or referring to the virus as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” is regarded as racist, even though virtually every prior epidemic was named after its city or region of origin: the “Spanish Flu,” “Hong Kong Flu,” “Ebola Virus,” etc.

  Meanwhile, the blanketing of the country with the Atlanta lie and the anti-Asian violence continues. The cover of this week’s Time features a drawing of a young Asian woman under the headline: “We Are Not Silent: Confronting America’s Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence.”

  It’s all a lie in service to the left’s hatred of America.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 21:25

• VW's North American Chief Says They Offer A "Counterbalance" To Tesla
  VW’s North American Chief Says They Offer A “Counterbalance” To Tesla

  VW’s North American Chief took to Bloomberg this week to continue the ongoing PR tour that the company is doing in hopes of keeping its stock price screaming and making itself a formidable player in the EV space.

  Scott Keogh used his appearance on national television this week to trade barbs with Tesla, who is undoubtedly in the legacy automaker’s crosshairs.

  “There never is someone who controls 85% market share, and that’s basically what Tesla has in the U.S. There is always a counterbalance,” Keogh said of Tesla. He continued to make the case that Volkswagen would benefit from its global scale and its strong dealership network, two things that – from an infrastructure perspective – Tesla can’t reliably fall back on. 

  Despite VW’s obvious target being Tesla, Keogh said that the company’s ID.4 electric SUV targets more traditional ICE vehicles, like Toyota’s RAV and Honda’s CRV. The SUV will be made in the U.S. starting September 2022.

  

  Finally, Keogh said that an ongoing patent dispute between LG Energy and SK Innovation will be “straightened out”.

  Recall, we have been closely covering Volkswagen’s ascent – not just in stock price, but in making a name for itself in the EV space – over the last couple weeks. Most recently, we wrote that Deutsche Bank said its EV business could be worth up to $230 billion. 

  Analysts led by Tim Rokossa lifted their price target for VW shares by 46% to 270 euros this week. Last week, VW surpassed SAP as the largest member of the DAX. 

  Rokossa said there is a “good chance VW’s EV deliveries surpass Tesla’s in short order as its ID.4 compact SUV is rolled out globally”. Meanwhile, VW has said that it plans on turning its factory outside Barcelona into an EV hub with goals of making more than 500,000 vehicles per year. 

  

  He also pointed to reduction of cost in items like batteries as key drivers of the financial bull case for VW:

  

  VW’s truck unit, Traton SE, also said it was boosting investments into electric technology from 1 billion euros to 1.6 billion euros in 2025. Traton Chief Executive Officer Matthias Gruendler commented: “The future of commercial vehicles won’t be shaped by diesel anymore but by electric trucks.”

  

  The note concludes:

  “While we keep our existing valuation model, we increase the applied multiple that we think the market will deem fair and introduce a blue-sky valuation of the BEV business separately with this note. Applying the multiples of EV pure plays such as Tesla or NIO on sales generated by the MEB platform would yield a value of almost EUR400 per share (DBe) and we even ignore the premium PPE and luxury J1 platform in that calculation. We also ignore the potential value creation from a Porsche IPO (DBe: worth >EUR60bn). Overall, given the earnings momentum and the greater credibility of its EV story, we remain on Buy and increase our TP to EUR270.”

  Recall, last week VW upgraded its profit guidance laid out plans for expanding the company’s EV offering out through 2030 which also includes dethroning Tesla as the reigning EV world champ. VW hosted its “Power Day” yesterday and revealed plans to build six “gigafactories” with a total capacity of 240 gigawatt hours per year. 

  “The company is aiming to achieve an operating margin between 7% and 8% after 2021. VOW also confirmed it is looking to finish the year at the upper and of a 5% – 6.5% range in 2021. Higher profitability will be achieved through lower costs with as much as 2 billion euros savings identified for 2023 compared to 2020,” the company said yesterday, according to StreetInsider. 

  Chief Executive Herbert Diess said on CNBC: “This period is probably the most crucial for the whole industry. Within the next 15 years we will see a total turnover of the industry. Electric cars are taking the lead and then software really becomes the core driver of the industry.”

  

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 21:05

• The COVID-19 Baby-Bust Is Here And It's Likely Permanent
  The COVID-19 Baby-Bust Is Here And It’s Likely Permanent

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

  Nine months after the pandemic began birthrates are falling in numerous countries.

  

  Plunging Birthrates

  Please consider the Covid Baby Bust.

  “All evidence points to a sharp decline in fertility rates and in the number of births across highly developed countries,” said Tomas Sobotka, a researcher at the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna. “The longer this period of uncertainty lasts, the more it will have lifelong effects on the fertility rate.”

  In the U.S., a survey by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization, found that one-third of women polled in late April and early May wanted to delay childbearing or have fewer children because of the pandemic.

  The Brookings Institution estimated in December that, as a result of the pandemic, 300,000 fewer babies would be born in the U.S. in 2021 compared with last year. 

  Birthrate Declines

  • Italy: -21.6%

  • France: -13.5%

  • Japan: -9.3%

  Likely Permanent

  No rebound followed the global financial crisis. The U.S. birthrate—after rising to its highest level in decades in 2007—plunged after the 2008 crisis and has declined gradually ever since.

  Not to worry. The Fed has a plan to make things more expensive for everybody. That will help, right?

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 20:45

• "You Can't Escape The Smell" – Mouse Plague Of Biblical Proportions Overruns Eastern Australia  
  “You Can’t Escape The Smell” – Mouse Plague Of Biblical Proportions Overruns Eastern Australia  

  New South Wales and Queensland are being overwhelmed by a biblical wave of mice, which have taken over homes, stores, farms, hospitals, and automobiles. These nasty little rodents are eating everything in sight, leaving a path of destruction. 

  Reuters said, “the Australian state of New South Wales is suffering their worst plague of mice in decades after a bumper grain harvest.” 

  “At night… the ground is just moving with thousands and thousands of mice just running around,” farmer Ron Mckay told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

  Mouse plague in Coonamble, video from the 6th Feb uploaded by Alice McGuire pic.twitter.com/yWTZOngIB9

  — Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) February 10, 2021

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

  The plague of mice has cost farmers millions of dollars. Here’s a video of hungry rodents swarming hay bales. 

  A plague of mice has been tormenting residents and farmers for a number of weeks in Australia.

  Watch more videos from Sky News: https://t.co/Q4Dl6FlIfd pic.twitter.com/xs3Yi8FFwH

  — Sky News (@SkyNews) March 19, 2021

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

  Multiple hospital patients have been bitten by mice in Australia as a plague of mouse sweeps New South Wales pic.twitter.com/idieijHIlQ

  — TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) March 19, 2021

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

  “It’s a real kick in the guts,” farmer Rowena Macrae of Coonamble told Queensland Country Life. “It’s so tough to watch.”

  In Gulargambone, north of Dubbo, Naav Singh, told The Guardian he catches hundreds of mice per night at the supermarket he works at. 

  “We don’t want to go inside in the morning sometimes. It stinks, they will die, and it’s impossible to find all the bodies … Some nights we are catching over 400 or 500,” Singh said.

  

  “It’s been going on for three months. It’s going to be really hard, and we have lost so many customers,” he said. 

  Pip Goldsmith in Coonamble told The Guardian she has caught at least 100 mice in her car and believes thousands are in her home. 

  “They stink whether they are alive or dead, you can’t escape the smell sometimes … it’s oppressive, but we are resilient,” Goldsmith said. 

  Local media said the mouse population continues to expand, and poisoning efforts have failed as dead ones end up in residential water tanks. The government is warning residents about the potential for bacteria in the water. 

  

  “You can imagine that every time you open a cupboard, every time you go to your pantry, there are mice present,” rodent expert Steve Henry told Reuters. “And they’re eating into your food containers, and they’re fouling your clean linen in your linen cupboard, they’re running across your bed at night.”

  Today on @GuardianAus TikTok: Mouse plague! https://t.co/v5pg45lxYc

  Follow us on @tiktokaustralia here https://t.co/N0a8j1jSMl #mouseplague #NSWFloods pic.twitter.com/oe890n9o6H

  — Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) March 20, 2021

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

  The mice can also transmit diseases such as hantavirus, leptospirosis, salmonellosis, tularemia, and the plague. 

  Local governments are weighing the option to spend tens of millions of dollars to exterminate the mice or let an eventual deep chill in temperatures with heavy rains wipe out the critters. 

  … and with the bubonic plague already surfacing in Africa – Australians should be on guard for a potential outbreak of disease. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 20:25

• On The Climate Front: Tensions Where Green Jobs Meet Blue Collars
  On The Climate Front: Tensions Where Green Jobs Meet Blue Collars

  Authored by Vince Bielski via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours)

  The construction workers who traveled to central Kansas to erect a wind farm for utility giant American Electric Power thought it would be a good job. Then they fell victim to the troubling side of the renewable power industry.

  

  The nomadic band of workers had come to the Flat Ridge III project from Texas, Michigan and other states to install 62 turbines with towers as tall as 300 feet using cranes and heavy machinery. But after a few months the project broke down. Subcontractor C2 Logistics Solutions stopped paying the crew, causing workers to protest and walk off the job. Some quit in disgust.

  At least 60 employees and possibly dozens more are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages, overtime and travel expenses, according to workers and a lawsuit against the company. “We still haven’t been paid, from the supervisors on down to the hands,” says David Saucedo, the former C2 general foreman who say he’s owed about $10,000. “You have to understand, I went late on my rent and car payments because I didn’t get paid.”

  Flat Ridge III is a cautionary tale as renewable power balloons into a big industry that may eventually employ a few million mostly blue-collar workers. The Biden administration stresses the good-paying jobs that await Americans in selling its plans for a fast expansion of clean power to curb climate change. Marketers burnish this upbeat image, with photos on company websites of men and women smiling under hardhats amid sunshine and blue skies.

  But that’s not the on-the-ground reality in many states today. Sure, skilled workers who hook up with established wind and solar contractors can make a solid middle-class living, particularly in a handful of states with strong labor practices like California, Minnesota and New York. Elsewhere, the influx of smaller operators and a lack of labor standards are spurring complaints about wage theft, starting pay as low as $10 an hour, scant training and safety lapses causing injuries and death, according to interviews with workers, union organizers, developers and state regulators.

  “Every little construction company wants to get into wind, but they don’t know what they are doing and sometimes they don’t have the money,” says Saucedo, who has built wind farms for big and small firms for eight years. “I hear lots of complaints about small companies that don’t pay, or pay late, and treat workers like dogs.”

  A Prevailing (i.e., Union-Scale) Wage

  Trade union leaders have taken the battle to Washington, pressing President Biden to keep his green-jobs promise. Their top priority in America’s clean energy transition is a set of labor standards – particularly a guarantee of a prevailing wage, says Yvette Pena-O’Sullivan, executive director of the 500,000-member Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA).

  A prevailing wage, which typically equals union rates and benefits, is about more than paychecks. It could transform the growing renewable industry by triggering the use of apprenticeship programs and attracting more skilled workers and reliable companies that invest in training, says Carol Zabin, an economist at UC Berkeley who researches low-wage labor markets and green energy.

  Climate politics come into play too. If Biden can deliver a win for construction workers, he may get something in return – less resistance from trade and utilities unions to his anticipated push to slash carbon emissions. Good union jobs in hundreds of uneconomical coal power plants and mines would be first in line to go.

  But a prevailing wage for clean energy, which could be part of the upcoming infrastructure package, is certain to face strong opposition in a divided Senate. Republicans and business groups have long denounced the country’s most prominent prevailing wage law, a Great Depression relic called Davis-Bacon. It applies only to federal public work projects such as highways but is touted as a model to use in the private renewable energy industry.

  Critics say Davis-Bacon distorts the market by boosting labor costs, which in turn can reduce the number of workers a company hires in order to control expenses. Budget hawks point out that repealing Davis-Bacon would save the government about 1% of what it spends on construction, or $12 billion in the decade ending in 2028, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

  

  Green energy workers make more money than Walmart clerks but less than union members doing similar tasks. A report commissioned by Environmental Entrepreneurs and other business groups found that in 2019 wind technicians made a median hourly wage of about $25 and solar installers somewhat less along with some health care and retirement benefits. The wages are above the national median average but not enough to support a small family in many states, according to the Living Wage Calculator created by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  “The vast majority of our jobs are high-paying, secure jobs,” says Erin Duncan, vice president of congressional affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association. “Over the next decade, the solar industry will be creating hundreds of thousands of careers.”

  The Labor Brakes on Breakneck Growth

  The industry posted another year of record growth in 2020, thanks to a combination of federal tax credits, state requirements for supplying clean energy and rapidly declining costs. It has installed 4,900 wind and solar farms in the U.S., at times working closely with unions, particularly when developers need a large skilled workforce for difficult projects. The 2020 deal between Denmark’s Orsted and North America’s Building Trades Unions to erect offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean was heralded by both sides as a breakthrough for labor-industry collaboration on clean energy.

  But labor issues threatened the industry’s ability to grow at the breakneck pace needed to meet Biden’s ambitious goal of cleaning the power grid of carbon emissions by 2035. The industry suffers from a shortage of managers, engineers, technicians and installers, with 83% of solar firms reporting difficulty in hiring the qualified employees they need, according to a 2019 jobs census from the Solar Foundation. The industry is trying to fill the gap by tapping groups like Hiring Our Heroes for military veterans who want training for solar jobs. “But we certainly don’t have the numbers of people that we need to facilitate the increasing growth of the industry,” Duncan says.

  The industry’s poor labor practices are part of the problem in luring blue-collar talent, says UC Berkeley’s Zabin. To keep costs in check, developers often rely on a peripatetic workforce of manual laborers, electricians, ironworkers and heavy-machine operators. They travel almost year-round from state to state and job to job, sleeping in cheap hotels and campgrounds. Many of them report to temporary staffing agencies and brokers, which — across various industries — often tend to depress wages and blur the lines of accountability when labor disputes over pay and unsafe conditions erupt, according to research by the National Employment Law Project.

  Job training would help these roving green workers build careers that can support a family. But training is hard to find other than at the biggest firms like GE and Vestas, says a worker who asked to remain anonymous. He dropped out of Southern Texas University for a wind job and was certified as a gearbox technician. But after five years in the business he’s stuck making about $25 an hour. “I love working in wind but I need to get to the right company that will give me the opportunity to learn,” he says.

  Occupational Hazards

  One major developer can spot a reckless contractor with poorly trained crews by the “crazy low bids” it submits. “There are some contractors with crews that put on Wild West shows,” says an executive at the renewables company who asked to remain anonymous. “Things happen on land where they’re not supposed to, equipment being in places where it’s not supposed to be, and there are safety issues too.”

  At least eight workers have died in the dangerous occupation of wind farm construction since 2008, according interviews with employees, filings with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and media reports. Workers are suspended from towers hundreds of feet in the air as huge cranes swing massive steel parts into place in sometimes windy and mountainous conditions. The deaths include a man in South Dakota who was run over by a semi-trailer truck and a worker in California who fell to the ground through an open hatch on a tower.

  Last year, a 24-year-old man suffered what authorities called a preventable death on a wind farm in Washington. He jumped into a deep and unshored-up trench to rescue a trapped co-worker when it collapsed and buried him alive. A group of workers spent hours trying to dig him out of an enormous dirt pile.

  

  Renewable Energy Systems Americas, a major player in clean energy, was among the companies fined a total of more than $500,000 for many safety violations. A state agency found that digging such a deep trench after days of rain without bracing the walls was a “recipe for disaster.”

  Most large firms like Mortenson and White Construction are known as safe operators that follow rules. But some companies disregard time-consuming safety procedures in order to meet milestones, such as quickly erecting 10 towers, to get paid.

  “In order to get these paychecks, they tell us to do really risky things,” says Grant Schermitzler, who has worked on many wind crews over the years. “In 42-mile-an-hour winds, above the legal limit, they have us lift tower parts with a crane. They don’t understand how dangerous it is. It happens all the time.”

  Big Labor Goes to Bat

  Unions often intervene to address safety concerns with employers. But they have only a very small presence in wind and solar construction because of the difficulties in organizing workers employed by temp agencies — workers who don’t stay in one place long enough for a union campaign, says Steve Schwartz, LiUNA’s director of organizing.

  So organizers resort to other tactics, such as going directly to developers and urging them to sign project labor agreements on wages, benefits and training in exchange for a skilled workforce. The agreements are widely used in California’s buildout of renewables. When developers in other states reject them, unions make their case to regulators — with mixed results.

  In Minnesota, where unions have long held sway over jobs, a perfect storm was brewing a few years ago. While coal plants in the state were set to be retired, thus eliminating union jobs, wind and solar projects were springing up and being built by traveling workers with out-of-state license plates.

  Union leaders complained to the state Public Utilities Commission. Developers had sold these projects to regulators as job creators for Minnesotans, but they weren’t getting the work, says Kevin Pranis, LiUNA’s marketing manager in the state.

  The PUC responded by telling developers to begin disclosing the local composition of their workforce, sending a clear signal to hire more Minnesotans without actually requiring it. Renewable goliath NextEra Energy and RES Americas protested.

  “They complained that local hiring is too hard and costs more and will mess everything up,” Commissioner Joe Sullivan says. “But developers came to realize that the commission wants to promote economic development, and they have complied and continue to build projects.”

  The number of Minnesotans hired, often from unions, has shot up in a state with 477 wind and solar farms. Locals made up less than a fifth of workers on a project in 2018, just after the reporting requirement began. Two years later, on another wind farm, the number had increased to three-quarters.

  In Colorado, unions have watched from the sidelines as traveling workers built most of 125 renewable plants. The Keep Jobs in Colorado Act of 2013 seemed like a win for organized labor in a state where it has a small footprint. It required the utilities commission to consider labor practices such as wages, training and local hiring in approving energy construction and acquisitions.

  But commission delays implementing the statute and a loophole for companies to avoid reporting their labor practices undermined it. “There’s a race to the bottom on labor costs, and that hurts the economy in Colorado and nationwide,” says former Commissioner Frances Koncilja, who found the PUC to be unsupportive of unions.
   

  State Democrats recently put teeth into the law to force developers to report labor practices. It gives unions leverage as Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utility, prepares to double renewable energy generation by 2030. But unions aren’t celebrating. That’s because the commission is still free to take the low-cost road, says Gary Arnold, business manager of a Denver Pipefitters local.
   

  “We always seek ways to use union labor on projects where it does not put us at a competitive disadvantage and allows us to deliver the lowest cost energy to our customers,” Xcel spokeswoman Julie Borgen says.

  Who Foots the Bigger-Paycheck Bill?

  Faced with a hodgepodge of state practices, LiUNA and other big unions are now lobbying for a federal prevailing wage law to set a floor on pay across the country. They want the pay requirement to apply to projects that receive federal tax credits and other incentives, arguing that if developers get a government handout, then workers should benefit too.

  Will energy consumers foot the bill for green workers’ bigger paychecks? For decades, academic researchers have examined whether prevailing wage laws, which exist in many states, boost labor costs. Their answer is sometimes.

  In most of the many peer-reviewed studies since 2000, costs didn’t go up because higher wages attracted more skilled and productive workers and prompted developers to shave other expenses, according to researchers at the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and Colorado State University.

  After losing a bid for a prevailing wage mandate in December, unions are banking on support from the labor-friendly Biden administration and Democratic heavyweights in Congress. Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, is an outspoken proponent. And Sen. Joe Manchin, a key swing vote, defended a prevailing wage law in his home state of West Virginia before it was repealed.

  The solar trade group, which has joined the discussions in Washington, has a more nuanced position. It might support a pay standard if it’s optional and tied to an additional subsidy for developers, says SEIA’s Duncan.

  “It’s a stark choice,” says Zabin at UC Berkeley. “Either we have low-wage, dead-end jobs or we use the tools of government to make companies better employers and create real careers.”

  Conclusion of a Cautionary Tale

  C2 Logistics, which was building the Kansas wind farm, shut down in December after failing to pay its crew. Owner Jim Clark didn’t have experience in the construction or energy industries before moving into the wind business, according to his LinkedIn page. He ran a trucking company.

  Wood, a global engineering and consulting firm that hired C2 to build Flat Ridge III, took over the messy project and hired the workers after Clark left. The crew’s morale and productivity tanked after the paychecks stopped coming, and the wind farm has since missed its deadline for completion, former employees say.

  Flat Ridge III is also ensnarled in lawsuits. The workers are suing both Wood and C2 Logistics for backpay and damages. U.K.-based Wood says it won’t pay the employees money that Clark allegedly owes them because that’s his responsibility. Wood is also suing Clark for defaulting on his agreements to the workers and the project. And C2 is suing Wood and a subsidiary, claiming they withheld funds from the small wind company, which is why it didn’t pay its workers.

  Wind farm owner American Electric Power — which earned $2.2 billion in net profits in 2020 — could easily pay the crew and make this controversy go away. But the utility doesn’t plan to make the workers whole. “We expect our suppliers to fulfill their commitments,” a spokesman says.

  Meanwhile, Clark has been plotting his return. He aims to start another wind business and tried to recruit some of his former C2 workers, says crewman Schermitzler, who served on the Kansas project. Over a meal in Texas, he says, Clark asked him not to join the lawsuit and instead come aboard his new venture. Clark denies he is trying to launch a new business. 

  Schermitzler, who is owed about $6,400, has learned his lesson. He joined the lawsuit.

  “I want to get the word out so what happened to me doesn’t happen to anyone else,” he says.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 20:05

• Toyota Moving Fuel Cell Manufacturing From Japan To China After Beijing Offers Support
  Toyota Moving Fuel Cell Manufacturing From Japan To China After Beijing Offers Support

  Toyota is going to be producing the components necessary for fuel cell vehicles in China beginning next year. It marks the first time Toyota will produce these components outside of Japan, according to Nikkei. 

  Currently, components are being manufactured in Japan, before being sent to China to be assembled. 

  Beijing reached out to Toyota and asked the company to produce the components in the country, offering up support in hopes of moving toward its goal of putting 1 million fuel cell vehicles on the road by 2035. Beijing continues to push FCV as the “next generation” EV, offering cities incentives for establishing production facilities. 

  

  “Toyota is working with a Tsinghua-affiliated company to build a manufacturing facility for the driving systems of fuel cell cars,” Minggao Ouyang, a Tsinghua University professor, told Nikkei. The company will manufacture fuel cell stacks and other components. 

  Components made in China will be used in commercial vehicles and busses. Toyota is still currently in the process of working out the details of its partnership with Tshighua. The automaker and Tsinghua University established a joint venture in 2020. 

  A new production facility is targeted for 2022 and 2023 and could cost “hundreds of millions of dollars”.

  Toyota has sold about 11,000 FCVs as of September 2020, cumulatively. 3,600 of the units were sold in Japan and 6,500 were sold in the U.S. 

   

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 19:45

• Taibbi: A Biden Appointee's Troubling Views On The First Amendment
  Taibbi: A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

  “Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

  

  Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. He outlined the same ideas in a 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival speech:

  Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

  If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

  — The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.

  — As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should “admit defeat” and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. “In some cases,” Wu writes, “this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” What might that look like? He writes, without irony: “I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”

  — More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) “boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.”

  That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.

  Wu’s appointment may not matter a lot to those concerned about constitutional freedoms because, as Stanford professor Nate Persily puts it, the current Supreme Court would be very hostile to any attempt to water down the First Amendment. “If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the Roberts court,” says Persily, “it’s very strong speech protections.”

  However, there’s a paradox embedded in this new Democratic mainstream thinking about speech in the Internet era. As one activist put it to me last week, the new breed of Democratic-leaning thinkers like Wu wants to be anti-corporate and authoritarian at the same time. Their problem, however, is that in order to effect change through authoritative action, they need to enlist the aid and cooperation of corporate power.

  This paradox casts even the “antitrust all-star team” narrative about people like Wu and Khan in a different light. What may begin as a sincere desire by the Biden administration (or, at least, by figures like Wu, who by all accounts is a real antitrust advocate) to break up tech monopolies, may end in negotiation and partnership.

  While the liberal tradition of the party tilts toward antitrust action, the new, more authoritarian form of progressivism currently gaining traction is tempted by the power these companies wield, and instead of breaking these firms up, may be more likely to seek to appropriate their influence.

  You can see this mentality in the repeated exchanges between Congress and Silicon Valley executives. An example is the celebrated October 23, 2019 questioning of Mark Zuckerberg by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a House Financial Services Committee hearing. The congresswoman, as staunch a believer in the new approach to speech as there is in modern Democratic Party politics, repeatedly asks Zuckerberg questions like, “So, you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies?” and “Why you label the Daily Caller, a publication well-documented with ties to white supremacists, as an official fact-checker for Facebook?”

  “So, you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies? I think that’s just a pretty simple yes or no.”

  Complete exchange between @RepAOC @AOC and Mark Zuckerberg at today’s House Financial Services Cmte hearing.

  Full video here: https://t.co/heT7Psnlp1 pic.twitter.com/0iiWtfU5gQ

  — CSPAN (@cspan) October 23, 2019

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

  Grasping that everyone who’s ever thought about speech issues throughout our history has been concerned with the publication of falsehoods, incitement to violence, libel, hate speech, and other problems, the issue here isn’t the what, but the who. The question isn’t whether or not you think the Daily Caller should be fact-checking, but whether you think it’s appropriate to leave Mark Zuckerberg in charge of naming anyone at all a fact-checker. AOC doesn’t seem to be upset that Zuckerberg has so much authority, but rather that he’s not using it to her liking.

  A minority of activists within Democratic Party circles believes that the fundamental reason platforms like Facebook end up being what journalist Matt Stoller describes as speech “dumpster fires” has to do with the financial model of these companies.

  “These are advertising monopolies who have centralized control over the discourse,” is how Stoller puts it. He published a piece for the American Economic Liberties Project recently that suggests, “A possible reform path would be to remove protections for firms that use algorithms to monetize data.” His point is that firms like Facebook are incentivized to push users of all political persuasions toward the most angering, conspiratorial, sensational content, while also discouraging exposure to alternative or debunking points of view — a primary driver of our fact-starved political dilemma.

  In another piece the AELP published after January 6th, “How To Prevent the Next Social Media-Driven Attack On Democracy—and Avoid a Big Tech Censorship Regime,” the Project noted that banning Donald Trump from Twitter is ineffective even as a draconian solution, because it doesn’t alter the platforms’ basic incentive structure. Targeting the clickbait ad sales model for regulatory reform isn’t a panacea, either, but from the standpoint of traditional liberalism, breaking up surveillance advertising monopolies has to be better than partnering with said monopolies to switch out one elitist concept of speech control for another.

  This is where the paradox comes in. Every time a Democratic Party-aligned politician or activist says he or she wants the tech companies to take action to prevent, say, the dissemination of fake news, one has to realize that it makes little sense for those same actors to then turn around and advocate for breakups of those same firms. Anyone genuinely interested in clamping down on “harmful” speech would consciously or unconsciously want the landscape as concentrated as possible, because an information bottleneck makes controlling unwanted speech easier.

  This idea of needing a more activist conception of speech control is clear in Wu’s writing. He speaks about the First Amendment operating as a “negative right against coercive government action,” while in the modern environment, the government not only needs to secure the freedom to speak, but freedom from abuses. He posits a First Amendment that acts as a “right that obliges the government to ensure a pristine speech environment.” Because that would be difficult to accomplish in the First Amendment’s current form, he suggests “expanding the category of ‘state action’ itself to encompass the conduct of major speech platforms like Facebook or Twitter.”

  This is the subtext of those constant congressional demands that tech platforms fix the “problems” of unfettered speech. We have another round of such hearings coming this week. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will be having Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in to discuss, “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation.”

  The Committee’s ranking members and subcommittee chairs, Frank Pallone, Jr. of New Jersey, Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania, and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, are adopting the now-familiar line of pushing to hold the tech firms “accountable” for their speech environments, saying congress “must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.”

  Do these members of congress, or thinkers like Wu, want to break up these monopolies, or harness them? To date, the answer has run decidedly in one direction. Previous congressional hearings involving tech CEOs — I’m thinking particularly of an October, 2017 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in which Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono demanded that the platforms come up with plans to keep bad actors who “sow discord” from manipulating social media — already resulted in an overt partnership between Washington and Silicon Valley over “content moderation” decisions. The only question is, will that partnership become more expansive, as politicians become increasingly tempted by the power of these companies?

  As Stoller puts it, the Democrats have turned the tech battle into something like a Lord of the Rings contest, where the fight ends up being over the “one ring” of speech control. Others point out that the situation for new government appointees in the Biden administraiton will be complicated by the input of the intelligence services, whose point of view on this issue is clear and absolute: they love the bottleneck power of the tech monopolies and would oppose any effort to dilute it.

  Still others wonder about the wisdom of creating powerful new partnerships with Silicon Valley, given that political realities may change and another set of actors may soon be driving the content moderation machine. “It’s not like all this ends with the Biden White House,” is how Persily puts it.

  Wu’s comment about “returning… to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s” is telling. This was a disastrous period in American media that not only resulted in a historically repressive atmosphere of conformity, but saw all sorts of glaring social problems covered up or de-emphasized with relative ease, from Jim Crow laws to fraudulent propaganda about communist infiltration to overthrows and assassinations in foreign countries.

  The wink-wink arrangement that big media companies had with the government persisted through the early sixties, and enabled horribly destructive lies about everything from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe to the Missile Gap to go mostly unchallenged, for a simple reason: if you give someone formal or informal power to choke off lies, they themselves may now lie with impunity. It’s Whac-a-Mole: in an effort to solve one problem, you create a much bigger one elsewhere, incentivizing official deceptions.

  That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything should be run by people with graduate degrees.

  Going back to a system of stewardship of the information landscape by such types isn’t a 21st-century idea. It’s a proven 20th-century failure, and signing up Silicon Valley for a journey backward in time won’t make it work any better.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 19:25

• The Great COVID Migration: 31% Of Young Adults Relocated During The Pandemic
  The Great COVID Migration: 31% Of Young Adults Relocated During The Pandemic

  The great Covid Migration of 2020 and 2021 for people between 18 and 21 continues.

  We have extensively documented the exodus from major cities not only by Gen Z and millennials, but also by corporations, over the last 12 to 18 months. This is why we weren’t surprised when it was reported that 31% of people aged 18 to 31 “relocated either permanently or for an extended period of time” during the pandemic, according to CNBC.

  

  This figure compares to 16% of adults overall who moved. Among the findings of a Bankrate.com survey, CNBC reported:

  • Gen Z — who range from ages 18 to 24 — were most likely to pick up stakes, with 32% relocating. That was followed by millennials — ages 25 to 40 — at 26%.
  • Members of Gen X — ages 41 to 56 — and baby boomers — ages 57 to 75 — were least likely to relocate, with 10% and 5% having made moves, respectively.

  In terms of motivation for moving, 31% of people said they moved to be closer to friends and family. 27% said it was due to affordability and 21% said they were relocating for a job. 18% said they wanted more space and 17% said it was due to a newfound ability to work from anywhere.

  

  And while technically they left the cities, they didn’t go too far. The survey reveals that three of the five most popular relocation destinations from New York City were under 15 miles away. 

  When respondents left cities like Austin, Texas, Dallas, Houston or Orlando, Florida, they chose new living locations that were “less than 30 miles away”, the report notes. 

  The survey included 5,158 adults and U.S. Postal Service address requests from January to December 2020. According to the survey, “Bankrate analyzed 12,681,085 USPS change of address requests, which covered Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2020. They were compiled by zip code and only registered moves within or between zip codes with at least 10 requests over that period. For example, if three people or families moved from Bethpage, NY 11714 to Myrtle Beach, SC 29577, that would not show up in the dataset, but if 11 people or families made that same move, it would.”

  

  Zach Wichter of Bankrate.com concluded: “It really seems like people are just leaving the densest neighborhoods to go to places where they may be able to get a bit more bang for their buck.”

  He continued: “Millions of the most popular moves last year were within the same zip code and the same county, illustrating the desire for more affordability while staying close to home. It will be interesting to see if people have relocated permanently, or if they will return to their previous locations once we return to some sense of normalcy following the pandemic.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 19:10

• Morgan Stanley Identifies The Source Of Massive Treasury Selling
  Morgan Stanley Identifies The Source Of Massive Treasury Selling

  In recent weeks we have been pointing out the stark divergence between markets in various geographic time zones, most notably the variance in equity “moods” between the Europe and US, where it often appears that there are two regimes: one ending when Europe closes and another starting, with both usually mirror images.

  But while we mostly focused on how geography impacts stock markets, a far more interesting observation was made this week by Morgan Stanley’s chief rates strategist Matthew Hornbach, who over the weekend identified the origin, if not quite the identity, of the persistent seller of Treasurys over the past few months, who has sparked such a violent rout across not just the US rates space but also stocks and other core assets.

  As the following remarkable chart from Hornbach makes very clear, the cumulative downward price movement in Treasury futures has been concentrated in the Tokyo session. Furthermore, after a brief respite in the first week of March, selling in the Tokyo session accelerated dramatically ahead of the FOMC meeting and it continued afterward.

  

  Of course, the initial burst of Treasury futures selling – which appears to have originated out of Japan every time – would then have a domino effect on the rest of the world, and as Morgan Stanley notes, “weak price action during the Tokyo session led to additional selling during the London session” although to a lesser extent. As the next chart shows, since the start of the year, 85% of the cumulative decline in TY futures prices occurred in the overnight session, i.e., Japan is almost single-handedly responsible for the dump surge in yields this year!

  

  Why does this matter?

  Because if Morgan Stanley is right, and if the seemingly daily Treasury selling indeed originates out of Tokyo, there is finally good news for bond bulls: Hornbach writes that “we have good reason to believe the selling from Japan won’t last… into April.” That’s because the fiscal year in Japan ends on March 31. “At that point, liquidation of non-yen bond holdings should stop, if not reverse at some point in the April-June quarter.“

  But why did Japan sell non-yen bonds in the first place?

  According to Morgan Stanley, Japanese commercial banks hold a large number of equity shares, and the Nikkei 225 equity index put in its best fiscal year performance in decades. In other words, for the commercial banks, the income from bond holdings wasn’t necessary to make the year a successful one. Consider it one massive pension rebalance ahead of the March 31 fiscal year end… only this one was among commercial banks.

  

  In addition, Hornbach adds that it was no longer necessary to take the risk that bond yields would keep rising, thereby subjecting their bond portfolios to capital losses in the last quarter of their fiscal year. At the same time, with a new fiscal year comes new revenue targets. And unless the banks have confidence in the Nikkei 225 index continuing to rise, the much more attractive carry and expected rolldown in the Treasury market will seem very appealing, according to the Morgan Stanley strategist.

  In addition, the ability to realize that expected rolldown has been greatly enhanced by the higher bar the Fed set for tapering asset purchases and hiking rates.

  Summary: Japan’s persistent year-end selling led to an adverse domino effect around the globe, which eventually sparked a global bond – and stock – market turmoil. However, that’s now over, and Japanese banks are about to start buying massive amounts of US TSYs again once the fiscal year is over. And while it remains to be seen where stocks will trade in the coming week (see “Month-End Set For Epic Clash Between Forced Pension Selling And Quant Buying“), it now appears that Q2 is set to start with a bang, as between sliding yields and stimmy checks, the S&P is set to finally rise above the mythical 4,000 level.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/23/2021 – 18:55

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