- EU: Controlled Demolition?
EU: Controlled Demolition?
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth,
As I read through the multitude of daily news articles about Russia, Ukraine, NATO and EU, it’s getting ever harder to escape the idea that there is a controlled demolition of the continent happening. And that neither its “leaders”, and certainly not its people, have any say in this. All we get from those “leaders” are NATO or World Economic Forum talking points. The only independent voice is Victor Orban. Who is either silenced in western media or painted as fully insane.
But Orban’s Hungarians won’t freeze this coming winter. He just signed a new gas deal with Russia. The main reason that is provided for all the others not doing that is of course Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Which is as insane as Orban is, and “totally unprovoked”, say the western media. Noam Chomsky summarized that best:
“Of course it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”
And no, it wasn’t just Russia/Ukraine.Way before that Europe had already screwed up its economies beyond recognition -if you cared to look under the hood. But why make it worse? I get a very strong feeling that those EU “leaders” have alienated themselves far too much from the people they purport to serve, and they’ll regret it. For now it’s obvious among farmers, for instance, but when people start freezing, they will want to know why. And if no answer is forthcoming that is both honest and satisfactory, many “leaders” will have it coming for them.
The entire energy and food crisis is being sold as “inevitable”, but it is nothing of the kind. They are the result of choices being made in Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam etc., about which nobody has asked your opinion. Something I jotted down a few days ago:
Is the west using Ukraine as an excuse to commit mass economic suicide? And, you know, fulfill some WEF-related goals? Why else would they cut off all economic ties to Moscow, at a time when it’s obvious they have no alternative sources for much of what they import from Russia? Moreover, why does a country like Holland aim to close 10,000 of its farms when it’s crystal clear that that will exacerbate the coming global food crises?
If you don’t like Putin, that’s fine, but why should your own people suffer from what you like or not? And of course you can ask whether it’s a good idea that a country the size of a postage stamp is the world’s no. 2 food exporter. But it is. And if you try to change that by doing a 180º, also on a postage stamp, it is very obvious that is not going to go well. And all the so-called leaders know this. But they still do it.
Prices for heating, petrol, as well as food, are set to go much higher than they have already, mitigated only -perhaps- by the fact that ever fewer people will be able to afford the ever higher prices. But now it’s starting to look like this was all scripted. Because “we” could have kept communication channels with Russia open, “we” could have negotiated for peace for the past 6 months. Not doing that was a deliberate choice. A choice that you and me, another “we”- had no voice in whatsoever.
The Dutch could have negotiated with their farmers, and slowly addressed their perceived problems with nitrogen oxides, while keeping food production going. And we could have found a way to keep Russian and Ukrainian crops available on world markets too. But it doesn’t feel at all like “we” wanted that.
Someone made a list of what EU won’t get anymore with the Russia boycott.: “nat-gas, rare earths, inert gases, potash, sulfur, uranium, palladium, vanadium, cobalt, coke, titanium, nickel, lithium, plastics, glass, ceramics, pharmaceuticals, ships, inks, airplanes, polymers, medical and industrial gases, sealing rings & membranes, power transmission, transformer and lube oils, neon gas for microchip etching, etc., etc.”
And that’s not all. Fertilizer!! Why they do it, I don’t know. Do they WANT to kill their own economies? It makes no sense. And this will not be over soon.
Reuters of course seeks to blame Putin. But he’s not the one who introduced the sanctions. He’s offered to let the gas and oil exports continue.
Putin Bets Winter Gas Chokehold Will Yield Ukraine Peace – On His Terms
Cold winters helped Moscow defeat Napoleon and Hitler. President Vladimir Putin is now betting that sky-rocketing energy prices and possible shortages this winter will persuade Europe to strong arm Ukraine into a truce — on Russia’s terms. That, say two Russian sources familiar with Kremlin thinking, is the only path to peace that Moscow sees, given Kyiv says it will not negotiate until Russia leaves all of Ukraine
“We have time, we can wait,” said one source close to the Russian authorities, who declined to be named because they are not authorised to speak to the media. “It’s going to be a difficult winter for Europeans. We could see protests, unrest. Some European leaders might think twice about continuing to support Ukraine and think it’s time for a deal.”
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell wants Europeans to be obedient little critters, and take the punishment for the policies he and his ilk have carved out. Because “we” are destined to win. Mr. Borrell is planing to do just fine this winter, mind you. With the best steak your money can buy, real fine wine, to be consumed in comfortably heated homes, restaurants and offices. A picture of Marie Antoinette pops up in my brain.
EU high representative and foreign policy chief Josep Borrell gave a surprisingly blunt assessment of the Ukraine war and Europe’s precarious position in an AFP interview published Tuesday, admitting that Russian President Vladimir Putin is betting on fracturing a united EU response amid the current crisis situation of soaring prices and energy extreme uncertainty headed into a long winter. Borrell’s words seemed to come close to admitting that Putin’s tactic is working on some level, or at least will indeed chip away at European resolve in the short and long run, given he chose words like EU populations having to “endure” the deep economic pain and severe energy crunch. He cited the “weariness” of Europeans while calling on leadership as well as the common people to “bear the consequences” with continued resolve.
Borrell explained to AFP that Putin sees “the weariness of the Europeans and the reluctance of their citizens to bear the consequences of support for Ukraine.” But Borrell suggested that Europe will not back down no matter the leverage Moscow might have, particularly when it comes to ‘weaponization of energy’ – and called on citizens to continue to shoulder the cost. Who will blink first? …appears to be the subtext here. He urged: “We will have to endure, spread the costs within the EU,” Borrell told AFP, warning that keeping the 27 member states together was a task to be carried out “day by day.”
And yet, as some like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have consistently argued since near the start of the Feb.24 invasion, it is inevitable that some will be forced to bear the “costs” much more than others. Already this is being seen with initiatives out of Brussels like rationing gas consumption, which has further led to scenarios like German towns and even residences being mandated to switch off lights or resources for designated periods at night. “More cold showers” – many are also being told. As we round the corner of fall and enter the more frigid months, we are likely to only see more headlines like this: “German cities impose cold showers and turn off lights amid Russian gas crisis.”
Talking of Marie Antoinette. Emmanuel Macron is the little man of grand vision. He foresees the ‘End Of Abundance’, a veritable “tipping point” in history. And he’s just the man to lead you through it. I’ll give him this: he’s got good speech writers. But speech writers don’t keep the people warm and fed.
Macron Warns Of ‘End Of Abundance’
France is headed toward the “end of abundance” and “sacrifices” have to be made during what is a time of great upheaval, President Emmanuel Macron told his cabinet on Wednesday upon returning from summer break. The country has faced multiple challenges lately, ranging from the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine to the unprecedented drought that has battered the whole European continent this summer. Yet, Macron believes that the crisis is actually of a much bigger scale and that structural changes are imminent.“
Some could see our destiny as being to constantly manage crises or emergencies. I believe that we are living through a tipping point or great upheaval. Firstly, because we are living through… what could seem like the end of abundance,” he said. The country and its citizens must be ready to make “sacrifices” to meet and overcome the challenges they are facing, he continued. “Our system based on freedom in which we have become used to living, when we need to defend it sometimes that can entail making sacrifices,”Macron added.
“Faced with this, we have duties, the first of which is to speak frankly and very clearly without doom-mongering,” Macron stressed. The president called upon his cabinet to show unity, be “serious” and “credible” and urged ministers to avoid “demagogy.” “It’s easy to promise anything and everything, sometimes to say anything and everything. Do not give in to these temptations, it is demagoguery,” the president said, adding that such an approach “flourishes” today “in all democracies in a complex and frightening world.”
There is a pattern in the messages of today’s Marie Antoinettes. Borrell wants you to take it lying down, Macron wants you to do that for a long time (like the rest of your lives), and the Belgian PM makes it more concrete: you’ll be freezing for the next 10 years. After which, supposedly, renewables will have been built to keep your kids warm. Spoiler: they won’t be.
Belgian PM: “Next 5-10 Winters Will Be Difficult” As Energy Crisis Worsens
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo might have spilled the beans about the duration of Europe’s energy crisis. He told reporters Monday, “the next 5 to 10 winters will be difficult.” “The development of the situation is very difficult throughout Europe,” De Croo told Belgium broadcaster VRT. “In a number of sectors, it is really difficult to deal with those high energy prices. We are monitoring this closely, but we must be transparent: the coming months will be difficult, the coming winters will be difficult,” he said. The prime minister’s comments suggest replacing Russian natural gas imports could take years, exerting further economic doom on the region’s economy in the form of energy hyperinflation.
From Greece, even more concrete: energy subsidies. €1.9 billion in one month. To keep the hordes out of the streets. Wait, that Belgian guy said this will last 5-10 years. How is the country going to pay for that? One thing that comes to mind is Greeks will vote for anyone in the next election who vows to talk to Putin ASAP, restore the countries’ good relationships and sign a gas deal.
A significant rise in the price of electricity announced by state-controlled Public Power Corporation (PPC) for September forced the government to raise its electricity subsidy for September to 1.9 billion euros, from €1.1 billion in August. The subsidy level inevitably follows the PPC’s pricing policy, since it is the dominant player in the market, with 63% of consumers choosing it. While PPC had the lowest price of all electricity providers in August (€0.48 per kilowatt-hour) it raised its September price to €0.788 for those consuming up to 500kWh per month and €0.80 for heavier consumers. In order to stick to its commitment for an actual charge to consumers between €0.14-0.17 per kWh the government had to adjust its subsidy level accordingly, raising it by over 72%.
How long will this last, you said? Well, according to AP, “Washington expects Ukrainian forces “to fight for years to come.” “Included in the package are advanced weapons that are still in the development phase..”
‘Months Or Years’ Before US Arms Reach Ukraine – Media
Years could pass before some of the weapons in the upcoming “largest ever” package of US military assistance to Kiev actually reach Ukraine, according to Western media reports. On Tuesday, a number of mainstream media outlets cited anonymous US officials as describing the impending announcement of a $3 billion package of military aid to Ukraine. If confirmed, it would be the largest of its kind so far. Washington is by far the biggest supplier of military hardware to Ukraine as it fights against Russia. However, some of the promised equipment “will not be in the hands of Ukrainian fighters for months or years,” according to NBC News, one of the outlets that reported the upcoming package. Included in the package are advanced weapons that are still in the development phase, it explained.
The same caveat was cited by the Associated Press, which said that it may take “a year or two” for the arms to reach the battlefield, according to its sources. Washington expects Ukrainian forces “to fight for years to come,” US officials told the AP. The AeroVironment Switchblade 600 drone is an example of a weapon system that was promised to Ukraine months ago but has yet to be delivered. Defense News said this week that the Pentagon plans to sign the contract necessary for sending 10 of the so-called “kamikaze drones” within a month. Last month, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov called on foreign suppliers of arms to use his country as a testing ground for new weapons. He pledged to provide detailed reports about the experiences of Ukrainian soldiers with the prototypes provided to them.
This is not going to go well. Not for the European “leaders”, not for the EU, not for Ukraine, and not for Europeans. We could start a little bet as to how many leaders will still be in place by spring, and I bet you Zelensky won’t be one of them. Putin will. As for the rest, Rutte, Macron, we’ll see. But don’t underestimate the wrath of people with hungry and cold children. It feels like almost an alien image for 99% of Europeans, but it no longer will be.
And there is no logical reason for this, there is only the ideology of a few handfuls of little men with grand visions. Hate of everything Russia has kept the west going for 100 years or more. And these little men feed off of that. They can only do that by refusing to talk. Because that’s exactly what Russia does not refuse. Only, they want to talk as equals.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/25/2022 – 02:00 - Escobar: Geopolitical Tectonic Plates Shifting, Six Months On…
Escobar: Geopolitical Tectonic Plates Shifting, Six Months On…
Six months after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO) by Russia in Ukraine, the geopolitical tectonic plates of the 21st century have been dislocated at astonishing speed and depth – with immense historical repercussions already at hand. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is the way the (new) world begins, not with a whimper but a bang.
The vile assassination of Darya Dugina – de facto terrorism at the gates of Moscow – may have fatefully coincided with the six-month intersection point, but that won’t change the dynamics of the current, work-in-progress historical drive.
The FSB may have cracked the case in a little over 24 hours, designating the perpetrator as a neo-Nazi Azov operative instrumentalized by the SBU, itself a mere tool of the CIA/MI6 combo de facto ruling Kiev.
The Azov operative is just a patsy. The FSB will never reveal in public the intel it has amassed on those that issued the orders – and how they will be dealt with.
One Ilya Ponomaryov, an anti-Kremlin minor character granted Ukrainian citizenship, boasted he was in contact with the outfit that prepared the hit on the Dugin family. No one took him seriously.
What’s manifestly serious is how oligarchy-connected organized crime factions in Russia would have a motive to eliminate Dugin as a Christian Orthodox nationalist philosopher who, according to them, may have influenced the Kremlin’s pivot to Asia (he didn’t).
But most of all, these organized crime factions blamed Dugin for a concerted Kremlin offensive against the disproportional power of Jewish oligarchs in Russia. So these actors would have the motive and the local base/intel to mount such a coup.
If that’s the case that spells out a Mossad operation – in many aspects a more solid proposition than CIA/MI6. What’s certain is that the FSB will keep their cards very close to their chest – and retribution will be swift, precise and invisible.
The straw that broke the camel’s back
Instead of delivering a serious blow to Russia in relation to the dynamics of the SMO, the assassination of Darya Dugina only exposed the perpetrators as tawdry operatives of a Moronic Murder Inc.
An IED cannot kill a philosopher – or his daughter. In an essential essay Dugin himself explained how the real war – Russia against the collective West led by the United States – is a war of ideas. And an existential war.
Dugin – correctly – defines the US as a “thalassocracy”, heir to “Britannia rules the waves”; yet now the geopolitical tectonic plates are spelling out a new order: The Return of the Heartland.
Putin himself first spelled it out at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Xi Jinping started to make it happen when he launched the New Silk Roads in 2013. The Empire struck back with Maidan in 2014. Russia counter-attacked coming to the aid of Syria in 2015.
The Empire doubled down on Ukraine, with NATO weaponizing it non-stop for eight years. At the end of 2021, Moscow invited Washington for a serious dialogue on “indivisibility of security” in Europe. That was dismissed with a non-response response.
Moscow took no time to confirm a trifecta was in the works: an imminent Kiev blitzkrieg against Donbass; Ukraine flirting with acquiring nuclear weapons; and the work of US bioweapon labs. That was the straw that broke the New Silk Road camel’s back.
A consistent analysis of Putin’s public interventions these past few months reveals that the Kremlin – as well as Security Council Yoda Nikolai Patrushev – fully realize how the politico/media goons and shock troops of the collective West are dictated by the rulers of what Michael Hudson defines as the FIRE system (financialization, insurance, real estate), a de facto banking Mafia.
As a direct consequence, they also realize how collective West public opinion is absolutely clueless, Plato cave-style, of their total captivity by the FIRE rulers, who cannot possibly tolerate any alternative narrative.
So Putin, Patrushev, Medvedev will never presume that a senile teleprompter reader in the White House or a cokehead comedian in Kiev “rule” anything. The sinister Great Reset impersonator of a Bond villain, Klaus “Davos” Schwab, and his psychotic historian sidekick Yuval Harari at least spell out their “program”: global depopulation, with those that remain drugged to oblivion.
As the US rules global pop culture, it’s fitting to borrow from what Walter White/Heisenberg, an average American channeling his inner Scarface, states in Breaking Bad: “I’m in the Empire business”. And the Empire business is to exercise raw power – then maintained with ruthlessness by all means necessary.
Russia broke the spell. But Moscow’s strategy is way more sophisticated than leveling Kiev with hypersonic business cards, something that could have been done at any moment starting six months ago, in a flash.
What Moscow is doing is talking to virtually the whole Global South, bilaterally or to groups of actors, explaining how the world-system is changing right before our eyes, with the key actors of the future configured as BRI, SCO, EAEU, BRICS+, the Greater Eurasia Partnership.
And what we see is vast swathes of the Global South – or 85% of the world’s population – slowly but surely becoming ready to engage in expelling the FIRE Mafia from their national horizons, and ultimately taking them down: a long, tortuous battle that will imply multiple setbacks.
The facts on the ground
On the ground in soon-to-be rump Ukraine, Khinzal hypersonic business cards – launched from Tu-22M3 bombers or Mig-31 interceptors – will continue to be distributed.
Piles of HIMARS will continue to be captured. TOS 1A Heavy Flamethrowers will keep sending invitations to the Gates of Hell. Crimean Air Defense will continue to intercept all sorts of small drones with IEDs attached: terrorism by local SBU cells, which will be eventually smashed.
Using essentially a phenomenal artillery barrage – cheap and mass-produced – Russia will annex the full, very valuable Donbass, in terms of land, natural resources and industrial power. And then on to Nikolaev, Odessa, and Kharkov.
Geoeconomically, Russia can afford to sell its oil with fat discounts to any Global South customer, not to mention strategic partners China and India. Cost of extraction reaches a maximum of $15 per barrel, with a national budget based on $40-45 for a barrel of Urals.
A new Russian benchmark is imminent, as well as oil in rubles following the wildly successful gas for rubles.
The assassination of Darya Dugina provoked endless speculation on the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense finally breaking their discipline. That’s not going to happen. The advances along the enormous 1,800-mile front are relentless, highly systematic and inserted in a Greater Strategic Picture.
A key vector is whether Russia stands a chance of winning the information war with the collective West. That will never happen inside NATOstan – even as success after success is ramping up across the Global South.
As Glenn Diesen has masterfully demonstrated, in detail, in his latest book, Russophobia , the collective West is viscerally, almost genetically impervious to admitting any social, cultural, historical merits by Russia.
And that will extrapolate to the irrationality stratosphere, as the grinding down and de facto demilitarization of the imperial proxy army in Ukraine is driving the Empire’s handlers and its vassals literally nuts.
The Global South though should never lose sight of the “Empire business”. The Empire of Lies excels in producing chaos and plunder, always supported by extortion, bribery of comprador elites, assassinations, and all that supervised by the humongous FIRE financial might. Every trick in the Divide and Rule book – and especially outside of the book – should be expected, at any moment. Never underestimate a bitter, wounded, deeply humiliated Declining Empire.
So fasten your seat belts: that will be the tense dynamic all the way to the 2030s. But before that, all along the watchtower, get ready for the arrival of General Winter, as his riders are fast approaching, the wind will begin to howl, and Europe will be freezing in the dead of a dark night as the FIRE Mafia puff their cigars.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 23:40 - Visualizing 10 Years Of Tinder
Visualizing 10 Years Of Tinder
A decade of swiping and over half a billion downloads later, Tinder still leads the market share of online dating apps in the United States at 32%.
As Visual Capitalist’s Lydia Adeli and Nick Routley detail below, what started as a “hook-up” app 10 years ago for college students, is now a mainstream hit that is globally used in 190 countries and 45 languages.
The graphic above highlights key moments that have shaped the app’s success, using data from Match Group’s investor presentations and news reports.
From Hatch to Match: The Early Days of Tinder
The concept of the app emerged when the original founding partners, Sean Rad and Joe Munoz, won a hackathon in 2012. Their collaboration lead to the development of Tinder (originally named Matchbox).
Marketing the app to college students was a strategic decision that quickly gained the interest of millennials. This young demographic had been traditionally underserved in the online dating world, and with the global adoption of smartphones, a mobile-only dating app hit the right spot at the right time.
Monetization began in 2015 when premium features became exclusively available for paid users. Annual revenue that year was $47 million and by 2021 that grew to $1.7 billion.
Match Group acquired Tinder in 2017, with a $3 billion valuation. But at the time, very few could predict the stellar run Tinder would have, having risen to become the top dating app in the world and one of the most popular apps overall.
This surge in popularity is also reflected in the financials — Tinder is just one of the 30 dating apps that Match Group owns, but it represents over 50% of their overall revenues. In addition, Tinder is closing in on generating $2 billion per year.
Today, Match Group is worth roughly $17 billion, and by some estimates Tinder is worth around $9 billion, over triple the price of the original acquisition.
Note: Tinder’s value is based on the valuation multiples for online dating companies as well as Tinder’s revenues as a portion of Match Group’s total.
Tinder and Technology
The swipe feature was an integral part of Tinder’s design, and it revolutionized the dating world. Gamifying dating was a novel concept when the feature was introduced back in 2012.
From the 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail” to today’s dopamine-inducing hit of “It’s a Match!,” it’s easy to see the influence technology has on the way we date and mate.
Below is a snapshot of app features that have been driven by technology and culture:
The Tinder Algorithm
Rating people’s attractiveness can be a controversial subject. Websites like Hot or Not and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facemash are cringe-worthy reminders of the internet’s past.
During the app’s early development, the discovery of a new match relied partially on the “Elo” rating system to score desirability. Attractiveness was evaluated by how often people swiped. The more selective you were with swiping, the higher your attractiveness was rated within the algorithm.
But now according to Tinder’s pressroom:
“Elo is old news at Tinder.”
Instead, Tinder’s algorithmic criteria for profile discovery depends on the users:
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Recent activity – members who are sending likes and nopes
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Profile elements such as the user’s interests
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Location
Tinder now says that proximity is a key factor in how people match on the app.
The Future of Tinder: A Changing Demographic
Today, as the company attempts to target Gen Z, the company’s revenue growth expectations are more lukewarm thanks to shifting cultural preferences,
And keeping the app relevant to a young demographic requires thoughtful consideration that goes beyond just adding new technological features. According to research organization YouthSight, more than 90% of Gen Z’ers report having frustrations with dating apps.
Only time will tell if technological incentives such as features for the metaverse, or virtual coins that further gamify the dating app, are attractive enough for Tinder to compete against the allures of meeting people IRL.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 23:20 -
- Conrad Black: The Regime Has Its Man – All It Needs Now Is The Crime
Conrad Black: The Regime Has Its Man – All It Needs Now Is The Crime
Authored by Conrad Black via The American Mind (emphasis ours),
A week after the invasion and nine-hour occupation of former President Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, it is becoming clearer every day that there was no plausible legal reason for it.
It may have been, as has been widely alleged, a fishing expedition to try to find something useful for Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 kangaroo court inquiry into the “insurrection,” but if so, this was a desperation play, and since no such objective was specified in the warrant nor presumably mentioned in the affidavit supporting the warrant, such a fishing expedition is not legal, though on recent precedent, legal relevance is the last criterion this regime would take into account.
These are, if not the identical authors, certainly kindred spirits in the law enforcement bureaucracy of those who inflicted upon the much-wronged and disserved people of the United States the Trump-Russia collusion fraud, the whitewash of Hillary Clinton’s destruction of 33,000 subpoenaed emails and reckless and illegal use of a home server for confidential official information, the two spurious impeachments, and the scandalous mishandling of the Biden family’s financial shenanigans, and many other triumphs of malice and incompetence.
The burden of the deluge of semi-official leaks pipelined through the docile Trump-hating media last week gradually back-pedaled from the lofty insinuations of those elusive “high crimes and misdemeanors” equivalent to treason, to an archival dispute of the kind that all departing presidents have. The climb-down spiked briefly with the absurdity of misuse of nuclear military information in contravention of the Espionage Act, and wound up the week as a toothless, general-purpose, normal legal precaution. The normal Democrat practice in this kind of perversion of the prosecutorial apparatus is to rely upon the docile and rabidly partisan national political media to transmit a Niagara of dishonest official leaks. The New York Times, usually reliable as an administration source, has revealed that President Biden pressured the attorney general to prosecute Trump. The best he could do, apparently, was this burlesque of due process, with a feeble and belated acknowledgment that he had approved the invasion and that, of course, the fact of an investigation in progress prevented him from saying anything about it.
In this case, the spigots of leaks shut down after a few days, and in an agile act of improvisation, the anti-Trump media has taken to accusing the former president and his followers of inciting disrespect for the justice system and betraying a sense of unease at having Trump’s papers and conduct closely examined, thus inciting the inference that he must have been guilty of something. This is the familiar reasoning of people so possessed by hate that they wish to charge somebody with something, and in failing to find any useful evidence, they cite the absence of the evidence as illustrative of the fiendish cunning of the targeted person, in hiding or destroying the evidence.
This was the basis of the late Christopher Hitchens’ accusation against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger of being responsible for the death of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. And it was the essence of journeyman historian Michael Beschloss’ comments that while it was true that what was being done to President Trump was unprecedented, that was only because Trump was so obviously more criminally dishonest in his behavior than any previous American president, and so there was no need to elaborate upon it.
The fact that there is no evidence against Trump of having done anything illegal, despite years of obsessive and frequently illegal official persecution of him to unearth such evidence, merely confirms the satanic depths of his wickedness. Next we will have historian-for-hire John Meacham give us another chorus about Joe Biden’s resemblance to Franklin D. Roosevelt (who in four terms as he led the country out of the Great Depression and to the brink of victory in World War II never had one day of a negative public approval rating).
The Wall Street Journal, which has been quite professional and even-handed in its treatment of Donald Trump as a politician, warned on the weekend that it would damage his credibility if he objected to the publication of the warrant for the intrusion at his house. They need not have worried: Trump was happy to have it made public and the shoe was now on the other foot, as the Justice Department is reduced to lame excuses for not releasing the affidavit on the basis of which the judge-shopped, professedly Trump-hating, magistrate to whom the affidavit was submitted, authorized the intrusion.
Legally, it need now hardly be pointed out that the execution of the search warrant at Trump’s home was an outrage. Justice should have proceeded by subpoena, and cannot explain why it waited for 19 months since Trump left office, during which Trump claims he cooperated entirely with it, to take this step. Even if there was some dispute on the matter of the subpoena, one hardly needs to launch a major raid to handle the disposition of such a non-urgent matter. Since a president can declassify anything he wants, the regime’s media apologists are reduced to claiming he must have declassified some things incorrectly.
This is all of a piece with six years of perversion of the highest legal and intelligence offices to persecute a political opponent. The seizure of the former president’s three passports is the crowning imbecility: that the most famous person in the world is a flight-risk is a hard sell-even to the most pathological Trump-haters, and the passports are being returned, (with extensive executive and lawyer-client privileged material it is implicitly acknowledged was also seized improperly).
The only conceivable explanation for this action is not to be found in the farrago of nonsense in the deluge of official leaks; it is that the Democratic strategists believe that their only hope for retaining control of the U.S. Senate at the midterms is to shift the conversation from the fiasco of the Biden administration and focus it on the chaos that regularly erupts around Trump, even though that chaos is usually generated by his enemies and not by him. The former president seems to have recognized the intention behind this impotent pseudo-legal nonsense and has been relatively restrained in his response and has called for the de-escalation of overheated spirits.
The Democrats, who until recently subscribed to the wishful fantasy that Trump’s support was melting away, have effectively confirmed him as commander of the Republicans. They may also have finally generated some independent voter empathy for him, and enabled him to appear in a more generous light than he has had at any time in the last six years. The legal farce is de-escalating, and it will be a real challenge even for the totalitarian legions of media Trump-haters to maintain a straight face and unwavering inflection as they try to provide a legal justification for this preposterous flim-flam job.
Conrad Black is a Canadian-born British peer, and former publisher of The London Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post, and Canada’s National Post, of which he was founder. An acclaimed author and biographer, his latest book is Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other (2018).
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 23:00 - Working From Home Now Means Letting Corporate Surveillance Into Your Daily Life
Working From Home Now Means Letting Corporate Surveillance Into Your Daily Life
The covid pandemic event has inspired a generation of workers with false notions about labor, production and work ethics, to the point that it may be a decade or more before people finally return to reality and stop living in fantasy.
One prominent issue, of course, is the anti-work movement, which essentially believes that no-skill work should be paid a living wage or that such workers should be supplemented by government welfare. This is the beginning of Universal Basic Income (UBI), which means millions of people dependent on government fiat and maintaining this relationship would become a matter of survival. You can’t rebel against a corrupt government when you depend on them to feed you and your family.
The covid stimulus checks acclimated the public to the taste of UBI (not to mention the rent moratoriums) and many of them now have an addiction to living for free. Large numbers of Americans and Europeans think that this is the way it should be forever, but nothing is for free, kids. There’s always a cost and a consequence.
Another issue is the rise of the “work from home movement.” Certainly, there are many technology jobs, media jobs and data analysis jobs that can be accomplished from home and are perhaps better done outside of an office than inside of one. The advantages are substantial, with reduced traffic in major population centers, psychological relief from the often stifling office environment and potentially improved work output. Businesses pay for less office space and less supplies also. It seems like a win-win.
However, there is an agenda afoot which seeks to exploit the work-from-home dynamic and pervert it into something ugly. And, it is rooted in a growing trend of corporate surveillance of employees in their own houses.
Eight out of ten the largest employers in the US already track productivity metrics at the workplace. This means monitoring software on work computers, surveillance cameras, facial recognition, mood recognition, keystroke records, and even cell phone tracking apps with GPS records. The argument in favor of this kind of Orwellian all-seeing eye is: “You don’t have to work here if you don’t want to – you can always quit.”
This is a cop-out response that is designed to circumvent any discussion on the unethical nature of employee monitoring to such an extreme level. People are being paid, but at the same time they are being treated like property – they are being treated like slaves with no privacy. And what if every single employer uses employee surveillance? What if there are no options? You can quit, but will you be able to find a work environment that doesn’t treat you like this?
This kind of pervasive intrusion is exactly what the work-from-home movement is inviting into their daily lives, as more and more companies are now demanding that employees allow technological surveillance onto the home computers, cell phones and even allow corporations to insert video surveillance into worker houses.
A research paper recently published by the SAGE Journal of Management suggests that employee monitoring does not lead to more productivity; rather, it leads to the opposite. Participants in worker experiments were found to be less productive and more likely to break the rules if they knew they were being watched. The paper asserts that surveillance takes away the sense of personal responsibility that workers require to be involved in their jobs.
One could argue that the drop in productivity in the experiments is because the threat of real consequences was not present. There is some legitimacy to this.
In a world where anyone can now be fired from their job and lose their livelihood for an offhand remark on social media, what would happen if the same kind of consequences extended to discussions in our homes? What if work surveillance wasn’t just about “productivity,” but also about controlling behavior and ideals of employees? This is exactly where we are heading; a future where what you say in the comfort of your own living room is dissected and examined for “wrong thinking.” And what is “wrong thinking?” It’s whatever the people in power say it is. A person criticizing the very nature of corporate surveillance could one day be fired for “wrong think.”
There are choices, the more obvious being self-employment and starting your own business. But as the economy continues to decline starting your own business will be increasingly difficult. One could simply go off-grid completely and try to produce necessities for themselves, and this is really what we need rather than a work-from-home movement, but it will take large communities of people all going off grid to make much of a difference.
Ultimately, the entire basis for worker surveillance is built on a fallacy. Most jobs that can be accomplished at home are not paid by the hour. Busywork is not the same as productivity. If an employee is doing their work the boss will know it because that employee will turn in finished work. Companies don’t need to monitor employees, they only need to monitor RESULTS. If a worker is solid, they’ll have great results and an extensive catalog of finished projects. If a worker is lazy, then they’ll have no results to show. It’s really that simple.
So why the massive invasion of privacy? Maybe it’s not about productivity at all. Maybe it’s about acclimating the public through their jobs to being watched 24/7, and accepting that this is the new normal.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 22:40 - 4.9 Million Illegal Aliens Crossed US Border In 18 Months Since Biden Took Office: Report
4.9 Million Illegal Aliens Crossed US Border In 18 Months Since Biden Took Office: Report
Authored by Rita Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Nearly 5 million illegal immigrants have crossed U.S. borders in the 18 months since President Joe Biden took office, according to a new report.
Illegal immigrants walk from Mexico into the United States on their way to await processing by the U.S. Border Patrol in Yuma, Ariz., on May 23, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) A total of 4.9 million illegal aliens, including some 900,000 “gotaways” who evaded apprehension and have since disappeared into American communities, have entered the country by the end of July, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said in a statement on Aug. 16.
“Roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Ireland has illegally entered the United States in the 18 months President Biden has been in office, with many being released into American communities,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in the press release.
He blamed Biden for putting the unprecedented surge down to external factors, not the administration’s own “sabotage” of immigration laws. After rolling back key Trump-era policies, Biden presided over the largest number of apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the U.S.–Mexico border in a calendar year in history, recording almost 1.9 million arrests last year.
“The endless flow of illegal aliens and the incursion of lethal narcotics pouring across our border will not end until this administration demonstrates a willingness to enforce our laws,” Stein said.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
New Surge
Two million illegal aliens have entered the country in the first 10 months of this financial year, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In June, more than 207,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border, making this the highest number of June apprehensions in history.
Although July saw a slim decline in CBP encounters at the southwest border of nearly 200,000, it turned out to be the 17th straight month with more than 150,000 encounters, representing a 325 percent increase over the average number of July apprehensions under the Trump administration, the statement reads.
Among the more than 213,000 illegal aliens deported from the border in July, only 37 percent of the arrests led to expulsions under Title 42—a 7 percent drop from last month. Border agents processed the majority of the rest under Title 8, which oftentimes lets illegal aliens be released into the U.S. interior while their cases sit in backlogged immigration courts.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 22:20 - Australia Fast-Tracks 'Killer' Robo-Subs To Plug Capability Gap
Australia Fast-Tracks ‘Killer’ Robo-Subs To Plug Capability Gap
As the submarine “gap” between China’s military and Australia’s widens, a company named “Anduril” will build the first 30-meter-long underwater ‘killer’ drone next year as a deterrent against Chinese aggression, according to The Guardian.
Australia’s defenses are in a precarious situation as a replacement submarine project’s disastrous failure will leave waters around the US-friendly country in the Indo-Pacific region vulnerable. But that’s where Anduril plugs the sub-gap by building the country’s “iPhone” of artificial-intelligence-controlled killer robots until the replacement nuclear sub fleet is operational by the late 2030s.
The extra large autonomous undersea vehicles (XLAUVs) can dive 6,000 meters while conducting intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, and surveillance operations. XLAUVs can carry various payloads, including sensors, scanners, and weapons.
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, a tech entrepreneur who sold Oculus Rift to Facebook in 2014, has a $100 million deal with the Australian Navy to deliver three prototype XLAUVs in three years.
A big step forward for Navy’s undersea capability. #AusNavy and @DefenceScience have entered into a contract with Anduril Australia, to design and manufacture Extra Large Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in Australia. #DefenceIndustry pic.twitter.com/S3GJX0P3QM
— Royal Australian Navy (@Australian_Navy) May 7, 2022
The new killer robot subs will accelerate Australia’s looming submarine capability gap as the aging Collins-class fleet is phased out amid threats of Chinese aggression.
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“Undersea vehicles will be a really important part of deterring aggression,” he told The Guardian.
Questioned about robo-subs plugging the capability gap, Luckey said:
“That’s one of the reasons we’re pulling the timing in. When you’re talking about a gap, we can help mitigate the problem but we’re not going to fix the problem.”
He noted that crewed subs will always be needed, though robo-subs will revolutionize the modern battlefield.
“Having a human in the loop is critical so you’ll have manned submarines working hand in hand with unmanned submarines,” he said.
Given Australia’s geography and the security risks of Chinese aggressions, along with replacement subs for its aging fleet, which are two decades behind schedule, Canberra has put its faith in a tech entrepreneur to plug the subgap with killer robotic drones.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 22:00 - The FBI's Gestapo Tactics: Hallmarks Of An Authoritarian Regime
The FBI’s Gestapo Tactics: Hallmarks Of An Authoritarian Regime
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.”
– Harry Truman
With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.
These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.
That authoritarian danger is now posed by the FBI, whose love affair with totalitarianism began long ago. Indeed, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government so admired the Nazi regime that following the second World War, it secretly and aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen as part of Operation Paperclip. American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since.
If the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II weren’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—adopted many of the Third Reich’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them against American citizens.
Indeed, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
Compare the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves—powers that have grown since 9/11, transforming the FBI into a mammoth federal policing and surveillance agency that largely operates as a power unto itself, beyond the reach of established laws, court rulings and legislative mandates—to its Nazi counterparts, the Gestapo—and then try to convince yourself that the United States is not a totalitarian police state.
Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.
Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI has also built a vast repository of “profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.” The FBI’s burgeoning databases on Americans are not only being added to and used by local police agencies, but are also being made available to employers for real-time background checks.
All of this is made possible by the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (President Biden’s budget projections allocate $10.8 billion for the FBI), the government’s vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.
Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.
Working through the U.S. Post Office, the FBI has access to every piece of mail that passes through the postal system: more than 160 billion pieces are scanned and recorded annually. Moreover, the agency’s National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose those demands to the customer. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread constitutional violations.
Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).
In addition to technology (which is shared with police agencies) that allows them to listen in on phone calls, read emails and text messages, and monitor web activities, the FBI’s surveillance boasts an invasive collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.” Law enforcement agencies are also using social media tracking software to monitor Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts. Moreover, secret FBI rules also allow agents to spy on journalists without significant judicial oversight.
Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race and religion, and its assumption of guilt by association, the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile Americans based on a broad range of characteristics including race and religion.
The agency’s biometric database has grown to massive proportions, the largest in the world, encompassing everything from fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to DNA, and is being increasingly shared between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in an effort to target potential criminals long before they ever commit a crime. This is what’s known as pre-crime. Yet it’s not just your actions that will get you in trouble. In many cases, it’s also who you know—even minimally—and where your sympathies lie that could land you on a government watch list. Moreover, as the Intercept reports, despite anti-profiling prohibitions, the bureau “claims considerable latitude to use race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in deciding which people and communities to investigate.”
Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.
As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force has begun using the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. Moreover, the government continues to add to its growing list of characteristics that can be used to identify an individual (especially anyone who disagrees with the government) as a potential domestic terrorist. For instance, you might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you:
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express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
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exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership)
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read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books
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show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
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fear an economic collapse
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buy gold and barter items
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subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation
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voice fears about Big Brother or big government
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expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties
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believe in a New World Order conspiracy
Much like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates political and religious groups, as well as businesses.
As Cora Currier writes for the Intercept: “Using loopholes it has kept secret for years, the FBI can in certain circumstances bypass its own rules in order to send undercover agents or informants into political and religious organizations, as well as schools, clubs, and businesses…” The FBI has even been paying Geek Squad technicians at Best Buy to spy on customers’ computers without a warrant.
Just as the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police forces into a national police force, America’s police forces have largely been federalized and turned into a national police force.
In addition to government programs that provide the nation’s police forces with military equipment and training, the FBI also operates a National Academy that trains thousands of police chiefs every year and indoctrinates them into an agency mindset that advocates the use of surveillance technology and information sharing between local, state, federal, and international agencies.
Just as the Gestapo’s secret files on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce, the FBI’s files on anyone suspected of “anti-government” sentiment have been similarly abused.
As countless documents make clear, the FBI has no qualms about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate and attempt to discredit dissidents of all stripes. For example, not only did the FBI follow Martin Luther King Jr. and bug his phones and hotel rooms, but agents also sent him anonymous letters urging him to commit suicide and pressured a Massachusetts college into dropping King as its commencement speaker.
Just as the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI has not only targeted vulnerable individuals but has also lured or blackmailed them into fake terror plots while actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing or deporting them for their so-called terrorist plotting.
This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.” In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that FBI agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day. Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
When and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America, in much the same way that the empowerment of Germany’s secret police tracked with the rise of the Nazi regime.
How did the Gestapo become the terror of the Third Reich?
It did so by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”
In other words, ordinary citizens working with government agents helped create the monster that became Nazi Germany. Writing for the New York Times, Barry Ewen paints a particularly chilling portrait of how an entire nation becomes complicit in its own downfall by looking the other way:
In what may be his most provocative statement, [author Eric A.] Johnson says that ‘‘most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.’’ This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, ‘‘a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.’’ The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference.
Much like the German people, “we the people” have become passive, polarized, gullible, easily manipulated, and lacking in critical thinking skills. Distracted by entertainment spectacles, politics and screen devices, we too are complicit, silent partners in creating a police state similar to the terror practiced by former regimes.
Had the government tried to ram such a state of affairs down our throats suddenly, it might have had a rebellion on its hands. Instead, the American people have been given the boiling frog treatment, immersed in water that slowly is heated up—degree by degree—so that they’ve fail to notice that they’re being trapped and cooked and killed.
“We the people” are in hot water now.
The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army of government henchmen protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.
From Presidents Clinton to Bush, then Obama to Trump and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.
Can the Fourth Reich happen here?
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s already happening right under our noses.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 21:40 -
- Comparing US Federal Spending With Revenue
Comparing US Federal Spending With Revenue
In 2021, the U.S. government spent $6.8 trillion on various expenditures and government-aided programs. Where was this money spent, and how much was covered by taxpayers’ dollars?
As Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang reports, this graphic by Truman Du shows a breakdown of U.S. federal spending in 2021, as well as a breakdown of where the money came from, using data from USAspending.gov.
Money Comes and Goes
In 2021, U.S. government revenue totaled more than $4 trillion. About half of it came from individual income taxes, while about 30% came from Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Here’s a full breakdown of revenue sources in 2021:
Despite the trillions in revenue generated, like most years, U.S. federal spending was higher in 2021, which put the federal government in a budget deficit of $2.7 trillion.
This was the second highest deficit on record, down from a peak of $3.1 trillion in 2020 during the height of the global pandemic.
After income and Social Security spending, health was the third-largest expenditure in 2021. Here’s a look at the full breakdown, and where spending was allocated last year:
Spending is expected to curb further in 2022. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office via AP News, the 2022 deficit is projected to drop to $1.15 trillion and will continue to decrease for the next three years.
U.S. National Debt
In March 2021, U.S. national debt reached an all-time high of $28 trillion. That includes intragovernmental holdings, which is about $6 trillion of debt owed within the government itself.
While overall debt is rising, the cost of servicing this debt has actually dropped in recent years thanks to record low interest rates.
However, with interest rates on the rise again this year, servicing the existing national debt is becoming more expensive.
And eventually, when it comes time for the U.S. government to refinance its loans, a greater portion of the federal budget will need to be allocated to servicing debt, which will put a squeeze on other areas of spending.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 21:20 - Tverberg: Why No Politician Is Willing To Tell Us The Real Energy Story
Tverberg: Why No Politician Is Willing To Tell Us The Real Energy Story
Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,
No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.
This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.
Figure 1. World fossil fuel energy consumption per capita, based on data of BP’s 2022 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Politicians cannot possibly admit that today’s world economy is headed for collapse, in a way similar to that of prior civilizations. Instead, they need to provide the illusion that they are in charge. The self-organizing system somehow leads politicians to put forward reasons why the changes ahead might be desirable (to avert climate change), or at least temporary (because of sanctions against Russia).
In this post, I will try to try to explain at least a few of the issues involved.
[1] Citizens around the world can sense that something is very wrong. It looks like the economy may be headed for a serious recession in the near term.
Figure 2. Index of consumer sentiment and news heard of company changes as reported by the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, based on preliminary indications for August 2022.
Consumer sentiment is at an extraordinarily low level, worse than during the 2008-2009 great recession according to a chart (Figure 2) shown on the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers website. According to the same website, nearly 48% of consumers blame inflation for eroding their standard of living. Food prices have risen significantly. Over the past year, the cost of car ownership has escalated, as has the cost of buying or renting a home.
The situation in Europe is at least as bad, or worse. Citizens are worried about possibly “freezing in the dark” this winter if electricity generation cannot be maintained at an adequate level. Natural gas supplies, mostly purchased from Russia by pipeline, are less available and high-priced. Coal is also high-priced. Because of the fall of the Euro relative to the US dollar, the price of oil in euros is as high as it was in 2008 and 2012.
Figure 3. Inflation-adjusted Brent crude oil price in US dollars and euros, in chart by the US Energy Information Administration, as published in EIA’s August 2022 Short Term Energy Outlook.
Many other countries, besides those in the Eurozone, are experiencing low currencies relative to the dollar. Some examples include Argentina, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea.
China has problems with developers of condominium homes for its citizen. Many of these homes cannot be delivered to purchasers as promised. As a protest, buyers are withholding payments on their unfinished homes. To make matters worse, the prices of condominium homes have started to fall, leading to a loss of value of these would-be investments. All of this could lead to serious problems for the Chinese banking industry.
Even with these major problems, central banks in the US, the UK and the Eurozone are raising target interest rates. The US is also implementing Quantitative Tightening, which also tends to raise interest rates. Thus, central banks are intentionally raising the cost of borrowing. It doesn’t take much insight to see that the combination of price inflation and higher borrowing costs is likely to force consumers to cut back on spending, leading to recession.
[2] Politicians will avoid talking about possible future economic problems related to inadequate energy supply.
Politicians want to get re-elected. They want citizens to think that everything is OK. If there are energy supply problems, they need to be framed as being temporary, perhaps related to the war in Ukraine. Alternatively, any issue that arises will be discussed as if it can easily be fixed with new legislation and perhaps a little more debt.
Businesses also want to minimize problems. They want citizens to place orders for their goods and services, without the fear of being laid off. They would like the news media to publish stories saying that any economic dip is likely to be very mild and temporary.
Universities don’t mind problems, but they want the problems to be framed as solvable ones that will offer their students opportunities for jobs that will pay well. A near-term, unsolvable predicament is not helpful at all.
[3] What is wrong is a physics problem. The operation of our economy requires energy of the correct type and the right quantity.
The economy is something that grows through the “dissipation” of energy. Examples of dissipation of energy include the digestion of food to give energy to humans, the burning of fossil fuels, and the use of electricity to power a light bulb. A rise in world energy consumption is highly correlated with growth in the world economy. Falling energy consumption is associated with economic contraction.
Figure 4. Correlation between world GDP measured in “Purchasing Power Parity” (PPP) 2017 International $ and world energy consumption, including both fossil fuels and renewables. GDP is as reported by the World Bank for 1990 through 2021 as of July 26, 2022; total energy consumption is as reported by BP in its 2022 Statistical Review of World Energy.
In physics terms, the world economy is a dissipative structure, just as all plants, animals and ecosystems are. All dissipative structures have finite lifespans, including the world economy.
This finding is not well known because academic researchers seem to operate in ivory towers. Researchers in economic departments aren’t expected to understand physics and how it applies to the economy. In fairness to academia, the discovery that the economy is a dissipative structure did not occur until 1996. It takes a long time for findings to filter through from one department to another. Even now, I am one of a very small number of people in the world writing about this issue.
Also, economic researchers are not expected to study the history of the many smaller, more-localized civilizations that have collapsed in the past. Typically, the population of these smaller civilizations increased at the same time as the resources used by the population started to degrade. The use of technology, such as dams to redirect water flows, may have helped for a while, but eventually this was not enough. The combination of declining availability of high quality resources and increasing population tended to leave these civilizations with little margin for dealing with the bad times that can be expected to occur by chance. In many cases, such civilizations collapsed after disease epidemics, a military invasion, or a climate fluctuation that led to a series of crop failures.
[4] Many people have been confused by common misunderstandings regarding how an economy really works.
[a] Standard economics models foster the belief that the economy can continue to grow without a corresponding increase in energy supply.
When economic models are designed with labor and capital being the important inputs, energy supply doesn’t seem to be needed, at all.
[b] People seem to understand that legislation capping apartment rents will stop the building of new apartments, but they do not make the same connection with steps taken to hold down fossil fuel prices.
If efforts are made to bring down the prices of fossil fuels (such as raising interest rates and adding oil from the US petroleum reserves to increase total oil supply), we need to expect that extraction will be adversely affected. One article reports that Saudi Arabia does not seem to be using recent record profits to quickly raise reinvestment to the level that seemed to be required a few years ago. This suggests that Saudi Arabia needs prices that are quite a bit higher than $100 per barrel in order to take significant steps toward extracting the country’s remaining resources. This would seem to contradict published reserves that, in theory, take current prices into consideration.
Reuters reports that Venezuela has reneged on its promise to send more oil to Europe, under an oil for debt deal. It wants oil product swaps instead, since it is lacking in its ability to make finished products from its oil itself. It would take a long run of prices much higher than today’s level for Venezuela to be able to sufficiently invest in infrastructure to do such refining. Venezuela reports the highest oil reserves in the world (303.8 thousand million barrels), even higher than Saudi Arabia’s reported 297.5 thousand million barrels, but neither country can be counted on to take major steps to raise supply.
Similarly, there have been reports that US shale drillers are not investing to keep production growing, despite what seem to be sufficiently high prices. There are simply too many issues. The cost of new investment is very high, outside of the already drilled sweet spots. Also, there is no guarantee the price will stay high. There are also supply line issues, such as whether appropriate steel drilling pipes and fracking sand will be available, when needed.
[c] Published information suggests that there is a huge amount of fossil fuels remaining to be extracted, given today’s level of technology. If we assume that technology will get better and better, it is easy to believe that any fossil fuel limit is hundreds of years in the future.
The way the economy works, the extraction limit is really an affordability issue. If the cost of extraction rises too high, relative to what people around the world have for spendable income, production will stop because demand (in terms of what people can afford) will drop too low. People will tend to cut back on discretionary spending, such as vacation travel and meals in restaurants, cutting back on demand for fossil fuels.
[d] How “demand” works is poorly understood. Very often, researchers and the general public assume that demand for energy products will automatically remain high.
A surprisingly large share of demand is tied to the need for food, water, and basic services such as schools, roads, and bus service. Poor people require these basics just as much as rich people do. There are literally billions of poor people in the world. If the wages of poor people fall too low relative to the wages of rich people, the system cannot work. Poor people find that they must spend nearly all their income on food, water and housing. As a result, they have little left to pay taxes to support basic governmental services. Without adequate demand from poor people, the prices of commodities tend to fall too low to encourage reinvestment.
The majority of fossil fuel use is by commercial and industrial users. For example, natural gas is often used in making nitrogen fertilizer. If the price of natural gas is high, the price of fertilizer will rise higher than farmers are willing to pay for the fertilizer. Farmers will cut back on fertilizer use, reducing yields for their crops. The farmers’ own costs will be lower, but there will be less of the desired crops grown, perhaps indirectly raising overall food prices. This is not a connection that economic modelers build into their models.
The lockdowns of 2020 show that governments can indeed ramp up demand (and thus prices) for energy products by sending out checks to citizens. We are now seeing that the approach seems to produce inflation rather than more energy production. Also, countries without energy resources of their own may see their currencies fall with respect to the US dollar.
[e] It is not true that energy types can easily be substituted for one another.
In energy modeling, such as in calculating “Energy Return on Energy Invested,” a popular assumption is that all energy is substitutable for other energy. This isn’t true, unless a person accounts for all of the details of the transition, and the energy needed to make such a transition possible.
For example, intermittent electricity, such as that generated by wind turbines or solar panels, is not substitutable for load-following electricity. Such intermittent electricity is not always available when people need it. Some of this intermittency is very long-term. For example, wind-generated electricity may be low for more than a month at a time. In the case of solar energy, the problem tends to be storing up enough electricity during summer months for use in winter. A naive person might assume that adding a few hours of battery backup would fix intermittency problems, but such a fix turns out to be very inadequate.
If people are not to freeze in the dark in winter, longer-term solutions are needed. One standard approach is to use a fossil fuel system to fill in the gaps when wind and solar are not available. The catch, then, is that the fossil fuel system really needs to be a year-around system, with trained staffing, pipelines and adequate fuel storage. A modeler needs to consider the need to build a whole double system instead of a single system.
Because of intermittency issues, electricity from wind and solar only substitute for fuels (coal, natural gas, uranium) that operate our current system. Publications often talk about the cost of intermittent electricity being at “grid parity” when its temporary cost seems to match the cost of grid electricity, but this is matching “apples and oranges.” The cost comparison needs to be in comparison to the average cost of fuel for plants producing electricity, rather than to electricity prices.
Another popular assumption is that electricity can be substituted for liquid fuels. For example, in theory, every piece of farm equipment could be redesigned and rebuilt to be based on electricity, rather than diesel, which is typically used today. The catch is that there would need to be an enormous number of batteries built and eventually disposed of for this transition to work. There would need also need to be factories to build all this new equipment. We would need an international trade system operating extraordinarily well, to find all the raw materials. Likely, there would still not be enough raw materials to make the system work.
[f] There is a great deal of confusion about expected oil and other energy prices, as an economy reaches energy limits.
This issue is closely related to [4][d], with respect to the confusion about how energy demand works. A common assumption among analysts is that “of course” oil prices will rise, as limits are approached. This assumption is based on the standard supply and demand curve used by economists.
Figure 5. Standard economic supply and demand curve from Wikipedia. Description of how this curve works: The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.
The issue is that the availability of inexpensive energy products very much affects demand as well as supply. Jobs that pay well are only available if inexpensive energy products can leverage human labor. For example, surgeons today perform robotic surgery, requiring, at a minimum, a stable source of electricity for each operation. Furthermore, the equipment used in the surgery is created using fossil fuels. Surgeons also use anesthetic products that require fossil fuels. Without today’s fancy equipment, surgeons would not be able to charge nearly as much they do for their services.
Thus, it is not immediately obvious whether demand or supply would tend to fall faster, if energy supply should hit limits. We know that Revelation 18:11-13 in the Bible provides a list of a number of commodities, including humans sold as slaves, for which prices dropped very low at the time of the collapse of ancient Babylon. This suggests that at least sometimes during prior collapses, the problem was too low demand (and too low prices), rather than too low supply of energy products.
[5] The International Energy Agency and politicians around the world have recommended a transition to the use of wind and solar to try to prevent climate change for quite a few years. This approach seemed to have the approval of both those concerned about too much burning of fossil fuels causing climate change and those concerned about too little fossil fuel energy causing economic collapse.
A rough estimate of what the decline in energy supply might look like under the rapid shift to renewables proposed by politicians is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Estimate by Gail Tverberg of World Energy Consumption from 1820 to 2050. Amounts for earliest years based on estimates in Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospectsand BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy for the years 1965 to 2019. Energy consumption for 2020 is estimated to be 5% below that for 2019. Energy for years after 2020 is assumed to fall by 6.6% per year, so that the amount reaches a level similar to renewables only by 2050. Amounts shown include more use of local energy products (wood and animal dung) than BP includes.
If a person understands the connection between energy consumption and the economy, such a rapid drop in energy supply looks like something that would likely be associated with economic collapse. The goal of politicians seems to be to keep citizens from understanding how awful the situation really is by reframing the story of the decline in energy supply as something politicians and economists have chosen to do, to try to prevent climate change for the sake of future generations.
The rich and powerful can see this change as a good thing if they themselves can profit from it. When there is not enough energy, the physics of the situation tends to lead to increasing wage and wealth disparities. Wealthy individuals see this outcome as a good thing: They can perhaps personally profit. For example, Bill Gates has amassed about 270,000 acres of farmland in the United States, including newly purchased farmland in North Dakota.
Furthermore, politicians see that they can have more control over populations if they can direct citizens in a way that will use less energy. For example, bank accounts can be linked to some type of social credit score. Politicians will explain that this is for people’s own good–to prevent the spread of disease or to prevent undesirables from using too much of the available resources.
One way of dramatically reducing energy consumption is by mandating shutdowns in an area, purportedly to prevent the spread of Covid-19, as China has been doing recently. Such shutdowns can be explained as being needed to stop the spread of disease. These shutdowns can also help hide other problems, such as not having enough fuels to prevent rolling blackouts of electricity.
[6] We are living in a truly unusual time, with a major energy problem being hidden from view.
Politicians cannot tell the world how bad the energy situation really is. The problem with near-term energy limits has been known since at least 1956 (M. King Hubbert) and 1957 (Hyman Rickover). The problem was confirmed in the modeling performed for the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others.
Most high-level politicians are aware of the energy supply issue, but they cannot possibly talk about it. Instead, they choose to talk about what would happen if the economy were allowed to speed ahead without limits, and how bad the consequences of that might be.
Militaries around the world are no doubt well aware of the fact that there will not be enough energy supplies to go around. This means that the world will be in a contest for who gets how much. In a war-like setting, we should not be surprised if communications are carefully controlled. The views we can expect to hear loudly and repeatedly are the ones governments and influential individuals want ordinary citizens to hear.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 21:00 - Kardashians & Kevin Hart Exposed Among LA County's Biggest Water-Wasters
Kardashians & Kevin Hart Exposed Among LA County’s Biggest Water-Wasters
Hollywood celebrities like to lecture average Americans about how they need to change their lifestyles to fight climate change. But many of these A-list celebs who preach Greta Thunberg’s gospel of saving the planet often fail to live the eco-friendly lifestyles they advocate.
Last month, we revealed that Taylor Swift, Steven Spielberg, Kim Kardashian, and Oprah Winfrey, some of whom are so-called ‘climate activists,’ were top on the list of private jet polluters.
Another list of elite Hollywood celebs has emerged this week as the water police in Los Angeles County have served them with repeated violations as serial water wasters.
Axios spoke with Virgenes Municipal Water District spokesperson Mike McNutt who said Kim and Kourtney Kardashian (serial climate offenders), Kevin Hart, and Sylvester Stallone are among the 1,600 people who have exceeded their monthly water budgets by 150% at least four times more than ordinary people in Southern California, who are forced to take shorter showers, banned from watering their yards, and unable to wash their cars.
Hollywood A-listers appear to live in a two-tier society where they don’t have to play by the rules and are hypocrites in helping the environment.
At least readers have an understanding of the hypocrisy of Hollywood elites. It’s okay if the Kardashians fly around the world in their private jets and have lavish pool parties, but frowned upon when average Southern Californians want to water their parched front yard.
This reminds us of a quote from the late George Carlin at the Beacon Theater in 2005, who famously said:
“They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.“
Yet more examples of reality where elites don’t have to play by the rules.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 20:40 - Why The Dollar Rally Is Blowing Itself Out
Why The Dollar Rally Is Blowing Itself Out
By Simon White, Bloomberg markets live commentator and reporter
The dollar has been on a tear again recently, but a rising dollar soon causes global trade and therefore demand for dollar-denominated assets to drop, leading to a weaker USD.
As highlighted on Monday, headwinds are growing for the dollar as the real yield curve flattens. Paradoxically, this means a more hawkish Powell at this week’s Jackson Hole would add to headwinds for the US currency, after any initial kneejerk reaction.
While yields and yield curves indicate flow-driven demand for the dollar and USD assets, the level of the dollar has implications for the stock of dollar assets. A higher dollar makes it more expensive for foreign borrowers of USDs to service their debt, generating deleveraging pressure. It also makes the cost of buying new dollar assets more expensive in foreign-currency terms.
But the big driver of global capital flows is trade. Capital flows are the flipside of trade flows, and trade imbalances create capital imbalances which drive capital flows. Global trade today is beginning to falter, which means capital flows are falling.
Virtually all major commodities are traded in USD (apart from a few notable exceptions such as wool, which is traded in AUD), therefore a rising dollar eventually depresses global trade as the price of everything rises in foreign-currency terms. The dollar’s current strength is causing a slowdown in global trade.
Deleveraging pressure driven by the dollar’s strength and a slowdown in primarily USD-denominated global trade are therefore leading to a fall in foreign transactions of US assets.
From last December to June, foreign holdings of long-term US assets (stocks and bonds) has fallen from $27.3 trillion late last year to $23.5 trillion, with the DXY rising almost 13% over the same period.
Jackson Hole may be the buy-the-rumour-sell-the-fact catalyst for the dollar to head lower, especially if Powell leans hawkishly and the real yield curve flattens more. But even if not, the dollar’s baked-in strength soon threatens to be the rally’s undoing.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 20:20 - White House Says Russia's "Sham Referendums" In Ukraine To Begin In Days
White House Says Russia’s “Sham Referendums” In Ukraine To Begin In Days
The White House said Wednesday that it has information that Russia is imminently planning “sham” referendums in occupied Ukrainian territories, which is expected to come in weeks or even days. The US has learned that Russian leadership has instructed officials to begin preparing to hold sham referenda, particularly in Kharkiv, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters in a briefing.
“We have information that Russia continues to prepare to hold these sham referendum in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and the so called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics,” Kirby introduced. “We’ve also learned that the Russia leadership has instructed officials to begin preparing to hold a sham referenda, particularly in Kharkiv as well.”
“And these referenda could begin in a matter of days or weeks. In fact, we can see a Russian announcement of the first one or ones before the end of this week.” Kharkiv Oblast broadly is currently scene of heavy fighting, while Kharkiv city itself – which is Ukraine’s second largest – has this week been coming under heavy aerial bombardment.
“We expect Russia to try to manipulate the results of these referenda under the false claim of the Ukrainian people wanting to join Russia. It will be critical to call out and counter this disinformation in real time,” Kirby continued.
“Russian officials themselves know that what they’re doing will lack legitimacy, and it will not reflect the will of the people. The Ukrainian people, in any free and fair referendum, would vote overwhelmingly against joining Russia,” he added.
Washington and Ukraine had previously accused Moscow of the same tactics when it came to the 2014 Crimean status referendum. During a July briefing, Kirby had referenced Crimea is alleging that Russia’s goal is to roll out an annexation playbook for captured territories. Russian forces are currently slowly struggling to secure all of the Donbas.
Some reporting, including in The New York Times days ago, have strongly suggested a “static” of “stale-mated situation along the front lines of late. But Moscow on Wednesday offered an explanation, claiming that it had deliberately slowed its “special operation” out of a desire to protect local civilians.
“Now there’s a stalemate along a frontline stretching some 1500 miles.”@jrug maps out how the war in Ukraine has unfolded over the past six months. pic.twitter.com/Rqvr34nT1H
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) August 24, 2022
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Everything is being done to avoid casualties among civilians,” Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday. “Of course, this slows down the pace of the offensive, but we are doing it deliberately.”
But countering this narrative, according to Reuters…
Ukraine’s top military intelligence official said on Wednesday that Russia’s military offensive was slowing because of moral and physical fatigue in their ranks and Moscow’s “exhausted” resource base.
Casualty counts on either side has also been a source of skepticism and controversy, with both Ukrainian and US intelligence consistently saying Russia has lost into the many tens of thousands of troops, while the Kremlin has given much lower official figures.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 20:00 - US State Department Issues Kidnapping Advisory For Americans In Mexico
US State Department Issues Kidnapping Advisory For Americans In Mexico
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The U.S. Department of State issued an advisory warning Americans about an increased risk of kidnapping when going to Mexico, amid heightened cartel violence in several areas.
“Violent crime—such as homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery—is widespread and common in Mexico,” the State Department said Wednesday in its notice.
Police officers and members of the National Guard as seen in Nahuatzen, Mexico, on June 5, 2021. (Alan Ortega/Reuters) The federal government and State Department have limited capacity to render emergency services to citizens in many places in Mexico. That’s because U.S. government employees are restricted or prohibited from going to certain areas, according to the State Department.
“U.S. citizens are advised to adhere to restrictions on U.S. government employee travel. State-specific restrictions are included in the individual state advisories below,” the notice said. “U.S. government employees may not travel between cities after dark, may not hail taxis on the street, and must rely on dispatched vehicles, including app-based services like Uber, and regulated taxi stands.”
For government workers, they should also avoid traveling alone and in remote areas, according to the bulletin. Federal government employees also cannot drive from the “U.S.-Mexico border to or from the interior parts of Mexico” other than daytime travel in Baja California, a Mexican state that lies south of California, and a select few other areas.
‘Do Not Travel’
Several Mexican states were marked under the “Do Not Travel” section in the State Department bulletin due to crime and the risk of kidnapping, including Sinaloa, Colima, Guerrero, Michoacan, Zacatecas, and Tamaulipas states. People were also urged to reconsider travel or exercise increased caution in most other Mexican states due to the risk of kidnapping or crime.
“Keep traveling companions and family back home informed of your travel plans. If separating from your travel group, send a friend your GPS location. If taking a taxi alone, take a photo of the taxi number and/or license plate and text it to a friend,” according to the State Department’s bulletin.
“Use toll roads when possible and avoid driving alone or at night,” it added. “In many states, police presence and emergency services are extremely limited outside the state capital or major cities.”
Last week, hundreds of Mexican soldiers were sent to the border city of Juarez after a prison face-off between members of two rival cartels caused a riot and shootouts that killed 11 people, most of them civilians, authorities said.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 19:40 - Bootleg Abortion Pill Sales On The Rise
Bootleg Abortion Pill Sales On The Rise
Ever since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, dozens of websites have popped up which are illegally shipping abortion drugs anywhere in the US without a prescription – which violates Food and Drug Administration rules.
The operator of one website says that the demand for abortion pills has skyrocketed since the June decision, according to the Wall Street Journal, which notes that some of the websites are registered overseas – and are different from US-based telehealth operators that prescribe and sometimes ship the pills to patients who live in states where the procedure is legal.
A screenshot obtained by The Wall Street Journal shows the home page of Abortionrx.com. The site is among dozens of websites that sell drugs typically used in a medication abortion without the need of a prescription. Sites are charging as much as $500 per pack of abortion pills, and hold themselves out as providing access to pills for those who can’t reach a clinic – or who live in states where abortion telehealth is illegal.
The unregulated market creates risks, according to abortion-rights advocates, including that the pills may arrive too late to be used effectively. What’s more, those buying abortion pills online without a prescription in states where it’s illegal could face criminal charges, legal experts advise.
Some health experts expressed concerns about websites potentially selling bogus drugs or not providing adequate information and medical support. “You don’t know what you’re getting,” said Al Carter, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which represents state pharmacy boards.
Two medications, mifepristone and misoprostol, are typically used in a medication-abortion regimen, which the FDA has approved for up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Websites selling abortion pills without a prescription are mainly selling pills that haven’t been reviewed by the FDA, according to descriptions on the sites and information from buyers. The FDA has sent complaints to some companies associated with websites selling abortion pills online. -WSJ
“Drugs that have circumvented regulatory safeguards may be contaminated, counterfeit, contain varying amounts of active ingredients, or contain different ingredients altogether,” and FDA spokesperson told the Journal.
Two medications, mifepristone and misoprostol, are typically used in a medication-abortion regimen.Photo: Natalie Behring for The Wall Street Journal One website based in Kazakhstan, Medside24.com, says its sales of abortion pills has doubled since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The site procures pills manufactured in China, Russia and Vietnam.
There are few-to-no requirements to buy from site abortionrx.com, another such website. According to one woman in Florida, a $249 PayPal purchase was all she needed to do – with the pills arriving four days later in a brown envelope from Las Vegas. While no instructions were included, she was able to fine them online.
Another website, abortionrx.com, is registered to Mumbai-based Rablon Healthcare Private Ltd.
At least six sites selling abortion pills without a prescription in July were registered under the name Richard Asamoah Agyemang of Denver, according to information on domain ownership. Mr. Agyemang said he is a college student and web developer. He said he doesn’t sell abortion pills. “I don’t know who made those websites,” Mr. Agyemang said. Two of the sites had been taken offline in August.
Some of the abortion-pill websites say that they sell pills from manufacturers in India. Three manufacturers mentioned on some sites, Zydus Lifesciences Ltd., Cipla Ltd. and Naman Pharma Drugs, said they weren’t aware of the sites. Cipla said it stopped making abortion medication about seven years ago. Naman manufactures abortion pills on a contract basis for companies in Africa and doesn’t export to the U.S., a spokesman said. -WSJ
When one woman, a teacher in Ohio, ordered from Sydney-based onlineabortionpillsrx.com, they warned her no to mention the medications she was purchasing on PayPal.
“In case PayPal comes to know about what you purchased, PayPal may take legal action against you,” read an email.
That said, PayPal typically does not pursue legal action against buyers, but the company could close one’s account(s) if they violate its acceptable use policy.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 19:20 - Cops Shut Down 8-Year-Old Girl's Lemonade Stand To Protect Society From Unlicensed Lemonade
Cops Shut Down 8-Year-Old Girl’s Lemonade Stand To Protect Society From Unlicensed Lemonade
Authored by Matt Agorist via TheFreeThoughtProject.com,
Police were dispatched to an Ohio city, not for a robbery or murder, but for an 8=year-old girl selling lemonade without a permit…
Asa Baker is an 8-year-old girl from Ohio with an overwhelming entrepreneurial spirit. Over the hot summer, rather than spend the days inside watching TV, Asa would set up a lemonade stand in her front yard to make some cash.
“It’s fun and you get lots of people,” Asa told FOX 8 news in an interview, adding that lots of truckers stop buy and pay more than the $1 per cup that she charges.
“Especially on a country road, I get a lot of people,” she said.
Unfortunately for Asa, however, her summer of entrepreneurial spirit would come to a grinding halt when police shut down her stand for the crime of selling lemonade without a permit.
Earlier this month, Asa had her first experience with the state’s iron fist when she set up her stand at her father’s business downtown. Everything was cleared with the property owner and she had permission to be there during the town’s annual Rib and Food Festival.
Asa was in an alleyway about a half block from the festival and business was good — until police showed up.
Asa says when she saw a police officer walking up to her stand she thought he was going to buy a cup of lemonade. But that was not his mission. Instead of encouraging the little girl’s business acumen in the lemonade realm, he was there to shut her down.
Asa had not paid the government for the privilege of selling lemonade from private property and it was this cop’s job to enforce this law.
Highlighting the sentiment behind the “just doing my job” mentality, this officer actually had a conscience and was upset that he had to shut down Asa’s stand. But he still shut it down.
“Well, they were really sad that they had to shut me down but they gave me $20 to try and pay for it,” said Asa.
“I could definitely tell he did not want to shut her down, but, I mean, you get a call, he has to do it. He definitely did the right thing, you know, in the situation he was put in,” said Katrina Moore, Asa’s mother.
“We looked it up and it was pretty much anywhere in Ohio. You have to have a license and I’ve never heard of that,” said Kyle Clark, Asa’s Dad.
FOX 8 reached out to the city who stated that the police department is obligated to enforce the city’s ordinances — apparently, even if it means quashing an 8-year-old girl’s spirit.
In the codified ordinances of the city of Alliance, it clearly states that any vendor must procure a license before opening.
There are no exceptions. Not even for a child’s lemonade stand.
The law is so vague, that the family has no idea what permit to buy — especially for an 8-year-old girl.
“In order to get a food vendors license, it only lasts for five days and its $40 for five days so that’s kind of out of the picture. If she wants to sell on the street, she has to get a street permit. If she sells in front of a business, we have to get a solicitors permit,” said Moore.
The good news is that Asa was unphased and a week later, she was back out on the street, selling lemonade. After the negative press on social media, this time, police said they were going to leave her alone — a win for civil disobedience.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 19:00 - Reports Of Heavy Drone Activity Over Afghanistan's Helmand Province
Reports Of Heavy Drone Activity Over Afghanistan’s Helmand Province
There have been reports this week of possible heavy drone activity over parts of Afghanistan, suggesting the Pentagon is continuing to carry out aerial targeting and strikes on Al-Qaeda and/or ISIS-K, one full year after the US military drawdown from Kabul in August 2021.
The reports follow closely on the heels of the July 31st CIA drone strike on longtime Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul neighborhood. It seems the US “over the horizon” mission in Afghanistan could be going into full gear, despite American troops officially withdrawing from the country.
File image, via NBC “A drone strike targeted camp bastion in Helmand around 5AM. AQIS and AQ members Abu Zubair, Abu Anas, Farooqi Qari Sulaiman and Abu Al Hassan have been present in various parts of Helmand province including inside camp bastion,” a well-known Afghan journalist and war observer Bilal Sarwary wrote Wednesday based on his sources.
“Residents in Helmand and Kandahar provinces report constant drone activity over both provinces for the last few days,” he emphasized.
Little in the way of details or even confirmation is known at this point, but given substantial rumors of ongoing clashes between rival Taliban factions in restive Helmand province, the drones could be US/UK coalition intelligence monitoring the conflict.
Other observers have also of late noticed apparently stepped up drone activity by the Western coalition…
More AlQaeda members targeted by drones in former US/U.K. base in Helmand. The base is used by the Taliban Dictatorship.
The Taliban are turning Afghanistan into a terrorist training camp. #Afghanistan #Taliban #FreeAfghanistan #SupportNRF #Panjshir https://t.co/yFVtKttLYY
— Herbert Elizabeth (@OzymandiusUK) August 24, 2022
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“Sources report that there were several al-Qaeda/AQIS members present at the site when drones struck Camp Bastion, a base that was formerly in use by foreign forces/ANDSF and now in control of the Taliban,” writes another prominent war monitor.
Given all of this, what does seem clear is that US intelligence isn’t hesitating to step up its drone activity over Afghanistan – likely a low risk venture at this point given the ruling Taliban’s lack of any sophisticated or advanced anti-air systems.
Via BBC Aside from the Zawahiri operation, the first known US drone strike to have happened since August 2021 occurred in April of this year, and targeted a Taliban ammunition depot.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 18:40 - 2nd Round Of US Airstrikes Over Syria As Militias Fire Rockets On Occupied Gas Fields
2nd Round Of US Airstrikes Over Syria As Militias Fire Rockets On Occupied Gas Fields
Update(1833ET): The Pentagon said Wednesday it is looking into reports of an exchange of fire between pro-Iranian groups in Syria and the US coalition forces. Meanwhile during the evening (local time), The Jerusalem Post reports that President Biden has authorized a second round of US airstrikes:
A second round of airstrikes by the US-led international coalition operating in Iraq and Syria targeted Iran-linked sites in the Deir al-Zor region of eastern Syria on Wednesday evening, according to local reports.
The airstrikes targeted Iran-backed militias in the city of Al-Mayadin and Saker Island, according to the reports.
Alongside the reported airstrikes, reports by both Syrian and foreign media indicated that a number of rockets had been fired towards the Green Village and Conoco gas fields, both sites where US forces are hosted.
Retaliation after yesterday’s U.S. strikes in #Syria. Even though #Iran denied association with the targets to avoid having to directly respond, its proxies did. https://t.co/t7XqVCHBC6
— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) August 24, 2022
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Local pro-Assad and Iran-backed forces appear to be retaliating, in a dangerous situation that suggests escalation after years of US forces occupying Syria’s oil and gas rich northeast region, ever since Trump’s “secure the oil” mission which has been kept in place by Biden.
This comes after the prior evening’s US strikes on militias in Deir ez-Zor, said to be retaliation for last week’s missile attacks on the US base at al-Tanf, along the Iraqi border. Follow-up reports say last night’s initial strike was conducted by multiple manned fighter jets.
* * *
The Pentagon has confirmed that President Biden ordered airstrikes on Iran-backed groups in Syria on Tuesday, following a series of reported attacks on a remote US base in eastern Syria and which appeared to also target ground allies being trained by American special forces.
“At President Biden’s direction, US military forces conducted precision airstrikes in Deir ez-Zor Syria today. These precision strikes are intended to defend and protect US forces from attacks like the ones on August 15 against US personnel by Iran-backed groups,” a CENTCOM statement said.
Illustrative, AP file image That prior incident from last Monday (8/15) occurred at what’s called the Green Village base near the Iraqi border. It involved a volley of rockets fired on the compound by an unknown entity, some of which failed to launch and were later recovered by US forces. A prior statement from Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) said the base has a “small number” of coalition troops, including Americans, and that the attack didn’t result in any casualties.
On that same day a week ago, two small drones attacked al-Tanf Garrison in southeast Syria, in what was suspected to be a possible coordinated attack. The US command never identified the group behind the missile attack, and the other similar recent episodes such as against Tanf base – which have also occurred sporadically over prior months.
But the Pentagon views pro-Iran militia attacks which have previously happened over the years also in Iraq as part of a larger overall pattern in an attempt to push US forces out of the region.
Concerning this fresh, and somewhat rare counter-strike, the Pentagon statement said that Biden “gave the direction for these strikes pursuant to his Article II authority to protect and defend US personnel by disrupting or deterring attacks by Iran-backed groups.”
Strike location The US military also called it a “proportionate, deliberate” action necessary to defend US forces on the ground. However it remains that of course from the perspective of Damascus (as well as Assad’s Iranian and Russian allies), the US military is occupying sovereign Syrian soil with hostile intentions.
CNN provides some of the details of the US strikes based on its sources as follows:
Buccino told CNN the US targeted a group of bunkers used for ammunition storage and logistics support by Iranian-backed groups in Syria. The US military monitored a total of 13 bunkers in the same complex extensively, Buccino said, totaling more than 400 hours of surveillance.
The strike was intended to target 11 of the bunkers, since the US could not be certain whether the other two bunkers were clear of people, Buccino said.
The statement further asserted that the strikes were then limited to just 9 of the bunkers because of a “small group of people nearby” that the operation did not intend to target.
Via BBC/SOHR: A monitoring group posted footage of a large explosion in the town of Ayyash. While Israel’s attacks on “Iranian militias” in recent years have been frequent, and have come under growing condemnation by Russia, such US aerial attacks inside Syria have remained much more uncommon.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 18:33 - California DA Admits 70% Of Suspects Released On $0 Bail Committed New Crimes
California DA Admits 70% Of Suspects Released On $0 Bail Committed New Crimes
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
A Northern California district attorney revealed more than 70 percent of suspects who were released on $0 bail between 2020 and 2021 in his county went on to commit new crimes.
“When over 70 percent of the people released under mandated $0 bail policies go on to commit additional crime(s), including violent offenses such as robbery and murder, there is simply no rational public safety-related basis to continue such a practice post-pandemic, especially in light of the increasing violent crime rates across California,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig said in a Monday statement.
In April 2020, the California Judicial Council implemented the Emergency Bail Schedule which mandated $0 bail for most people accused of crimes amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Yolo DA’s office tracked individuals who were released on $0 and who were rearrested.
The Judicial Council rescinded the order in June 2020, but several California countries kept the bail schedule in effect, including Yolo County. It wasn’t until June 1, 2021, that the county enacted a new bail schedule and ended the $0 bail protocol, according to Reisig’s office, which also released a report (pdf).
“Recent criminal histories of the 595 individuals released on $0 bail in Yolo County were reviewed for any new arrests in the state of California,” said the office on Monday.
“Of the 595 individuals released, 420 were rearrested (70.6 percent) and 123 (20 percent of the overall number or 29 percent of those rearrested) were arrested for a crime of violence.”
That includes crimes of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, domestic violence, robbery, and carjacking.
Resig’s office noted that one person who was released on $0 bail in Yolo County was charged with murder in Sacramento County in connection to a July 2021 shooting.
Cashless Bail
His findings come amid criticisms about the elimination of cash bail in some states and municipalities across the United States. Left-wing activists say that the no-bail policy makes it fairer for people who can’t afford to make bail.
But critics, including police groups and unions, say that people who are released and re-released often go on to commit other crimes.
An analysis released by the New York Post earlier this month revealed that 10 criminals netted nearly 500 arrests since the start of New York state’s controversial bail reform laws went into effect in 2020.
“Time and time again, our police officers make an arrest, and then the person who is arrested for assault, felonious assaults, robberies, and gun possessions, they’re finding themselves back on the street within days—if not hours—after the arrest,” said New York City Major Eric Adams, a Democrat, said earlier this month about the policy.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 18:20
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