Feb 25

Today’s News 25th February 2022

  • How Ukraine Fits Into The Global Jigsaw
    How Ukraine Fits Into The Global Jigsaw

    Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

    • Ukraine is part of a far bigger geopolitical picture. Russia and China want US hegemonic influence in the Eurasian continent marginalised. Following defeats for US foreign policy in Syria and Afghanistan and following Brexit, Putin is driving a wedge between America and the non-Anglo-Saxon EU.

    • Due to global monetary expansion, rising energy prices are benefiting Russia, which can afford to squeeze Germany and other EU states dependent on Russian natural gas. The squeeze will only stop when America backs off.

    • Being keenly aware that its dominant role in NATO is under threat, America has been trying to escalate the Ukraine crisis to suck Russia into an untenable occupation. Putin won’t fall for it.

    • The danger for us all is not a boots-on-the-ground war — that’s likely to only involve the pre-emptive attacks on military installations Putin initiated last night — but a financial war for which Russia is fully prepared.

    • Both sides probably do not know how fragile the Eurozone banking system is, with both the ECB and its national central bank shareholders already having liabilities greater than their assets. In other words, rising interest rates have broken the euro system and an economic and financial catastrophe on its eastern flank will probably trigger its collapse.

    The bigger picture is Mackinder’s World Island

    The developing tension over Ukraine is part of a bigger picture — a struggle between America and the two Eurasian hegemons, Russia and China. The prize is ultimate control over Mackinder’s World Island.

    Halford Mackinder is acknowledged as the founder of geopolitics: the study of factors such as geography, geology, economics, demography, politics, and foreign policy and their interaction. His original paper was entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History”, presented at the Royal Geographical Society in 1905 in which he first formulated his Heartland Theory, which extended geopolitical analysis to encompass the entire globe.

    In this and a subsequent paper (Democratic Ideals and Reality: A study in the Politics of Reconstruction, 1919) he built on his Heartland Theory, and from which his famous quote has been passed down to us: “Who rules East Europe commands the World Island [Eurasia]; Who rules the World Island rules the World”. Stalin was said to have been interested in this theory, and while it is not generally admitted, the leaders and administrations of Russia, China and America are almost certainly aware of Mackinder’s theory and its implications.

    We cannot know if the Russian and Chinese leaders and administrations are avid Mackinder fans, but their partnership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is consistent with his World Island Theory. Since commencing as a post-Soviet, post-Mao security agreement between Russia and China founded in 2001 to suppress Islamic fundamentalism, the SCO has evolved into a political and economic intergovernmental organisation, which with its members, observer states, and dialog partners accounts for over 3.5 billion people, half the world’s population.

    The symbiotic relationship between resource rich Russia and the industrial Chinese ties the whole SCO together. China’s development of the Asian land mass holds the promise of dramatic improvements in everyone’s living conditions. And consistent with the World Island Theory, Chinese money now dominates the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asian nations, particularly those controlled and influenced by the Chinese diaspora. China’s influence also spreads to South America through organisations such as BRICS (B is for Brazil) and Chile for copper and other metals.

    While the Sino-Russian partnership dominates the World Island economically, America has only gradually been expelled from Asian affairs. Its post 9/11 campaigns in the Middle East destabilised that region, creating fuel for America’s enemies and appalling refugee calamities for her European allies to this day. Her withdrawal from resource-rich Afghanistan was merely the last domino to fall. She retains political influence in Western Europe and South-East Asia only, though her military and intelligence presence is still widespread.

    Today, America’s actions are those of a hegemon whose time is passing. By the UK opting for Brexit, American influence over the European Union through its security and political partnership with the UK has been diminished. Its grip on European affairs through NATO is being undermined by both Turkey’s determination to shift its interests into the Turkic regions of Central Asia, and the EU’s determination to establish its own defence arrangements. The irrelevance of NATO for the future defence of Western Europe is now becoming apparent to the Russians, and it must be hard for them to resist speeding its decline.

    The cold war in the Pacific is all about containing China. While Taiwan’s future and China’s attempts to establish naval bases in the South China Seas hog the headlines, China’s trade influence in the region continues to increase. After President Trump withdrew America from the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TTP was replaced by the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership which came into force in December 2018, whose eleven signatories have combined economies representing 13.4% of world GDP. This makes it one of the largest free trade areas by GDP and includes Australia and New Zealand. Even the UK has formally applied to join (it qualifies as a Pacific nation through its dependencies in the region), so that three of the US security “five eyes” members will be part of the CPTPP.

    China also applied to join the CPTPP last September. For now, China’s membership of the CPTPP is in doubt. US allies in the partnership, including Japan, are insisting on various obstructive provisions. But in that well-worn hackneyed metaphor, China is the elephant in the room, and it is hard to see the CPTPP holding out against her membership for ever. For now, China can chip away at it by separate free trade agreements with selected CPTPP members, with whom it is already in bilateral trade.

    Whatever America’s desire to retain political and military control over the Pacific may be, the economics of trade will eventually diminish that influence. And while sabres are being rattled over Taiwan and Pacific atolls, Russia is putting pressure on Europe to put an end to American dominated defence arrangements at the other end of the World Island.

    Observers of the greatest of the great games would be right to look at current developments over Ukraine in the context of Mackinder’s heartland theory. Understand that, and you have a grasp of Putin’s reasoning. Driving American influence out of the Eurasian continent has been his objective ever since America reneged on her agreement not to advance NATO any closer to Russia following the ending of the old USSR.

    Ukraine is caught in the middle

    Both Russia and the Anglo-Saxons are ramping up the rhetoric over Ukraine. Until recently, Ukraine itself had seen little evidence of any truth in Western propaganda, asking for it to be toned down because all this war talk is increasing its likelihood and ruining the economy. Meanwhile the EU mainstream just wants peace and natural gas.

    Concern is being expressed in some quarters that all this talk of war might become self-fulfilling — like the first World War. In this case, it is generally agreed by military strategists that Putin would be mad to take over Ukraine. He certainly has the fire power, and Ukraine is cast like a Belgium on the Steppes, with two ethnic groups and whose main purpose seems to be to allow foreign occupation and passage for foreign troops. But holding on to Ukraine against the peoples’ will, when there is an immensely long border over which dissidents can be provided with arms and anti-Russian propaganda is another matter.

    Russian occupation is likely to be limited to defending Donbas and Luhansk now that Russia has formally recognised their right to self-determination. Without firing a shot, the Russian military has moved the border a hundred miles into formally Ukrainian territory. But that is where an occupying invasion is likely to stop and is not to be confused with the pre-emptive strikes against military bases and airfields today.

    These moves are there to apply increasing pressure for a diplomatic settlement. So, what is it that Putin wants? Basically, he wants America to get out of Eastern Europe. And following Brexit, as America’s poodle he sees no reason why Britain should be there either. And having his thumb over various gas pipes into Europe, he is squeezing Germany and the other EU NATO members into his way of thinking.

    Ukraine comes in the wake of America’s disastrous evacuation of Afghanistan, which followed the failure of her attempt to remove Syria’s Assad. It is rumoured that US intelligence services organised the failed coup in Kazakhstan, which was quickly subdued by Russian troops. So, from Putin’s point of view, American policy with respect to the Eurasian land mass has failed, he has America on the run, and he will want to capitalise on its retreat.

    Meanwhile America, which has ruled western Europe through NATO following WW2, finds it hard to come to terms with its setbacks and needs to get back on the front foot. Presumably, by ramping up fears of a Russian invasion, the Biden administration hoped that either Putin would back down or be tricked into attacking Ukraine. If he had backed down, that would be a diplomatic victory and allow America to rebuild its presence in Kiev. If Putin invades and occupies Ukraine, America can help make life extremely difficult for an occupying force. Either way, it would mark the end of American policy failures on the Eurasian continent. Britain, as always, merely toes the American line.

    But Putin is no fool. He is destroying Ukraine’s economy. He has his thumb on Nord Stream 1 and 2. And Germany has too many commercial and financial interests in both Russia and Eastern Europe for this not to hurt. Germany also hosts the main railhead for China’s silk road. If Germany kowtows to America, will America then put pressure on her to cut ties with China?

    This is the geopolitical reality Germany and all mainland Europeans must now face. The new German Chancellor must decide: does he back America, sacrifice Germany’s economic potential and see energy costs soar, or does he recognise the economic realities of the Russia—China partnership and the enormous opportunities it provides for the long run?

    Russia, America, and Germany are the principal actors whose decisions will decide the outcome of the Ukrainian situation. An escalation into a non-nuclear conflict and Russian occupation of Ukraine will only suit the Americans, confirming that their presence is the guarantee of national security.

    Ukraine has become a virtual battleground.

    Ukraine’s geographical position, between the liberated central European states and Russia ensured that it would become central to the continuing rivalry between Russia and America. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been determined to forge its path independent of Russia as a sovereign nation. But its starting point was difficult, with its eastern provinces predominantly Russian, while the western regions were more central European.

    The Orange and Maidan Revolutions in 2004 and 2014 respectively were proxy struggles between America and Russia. While America allegedly chucked billions into its Ukrainian interests, in 2014 Russia responded by taking over Crimea and fomented rebellions in Luhansk and Donetsk. By capturing Crimea and fostering two breakaway provinces, Putin had won this territorial battle in an ongoing war.

    Other than these eastern provinces, most Ukrainians have desperately tried to avoid their country becoming a Russian colony. They wanted to apply for EU membership, which was rejected by Russian-backed President Yanukovych in 2013, leading to the Maidan Revolution and Yanukovych fleeing the country to Russia. Ukraine has also sought the protection of NATO, which has provoked Putin to put a stop to American influences marching eastwards.

    While Ukraine never left the headlines, the US moved its focus to Syria later in 2014.The eventual failure to oust Assad, who drew on Russian help, was followed by Afghanistan. Ukraine is now back in the headlines, this time at the behest of Russia. Putin is now proactively leading this conflict instead of quietly letting America make all the mistakes and rolling with the punches, representing a major change in Russian strategy. It implies that Putin perceives America to be off balance, and he sees it as the time for a winning move.

    Putin has prepared his defences carefully. US politicians called for Russia to be cut out of SWIFT after the Crimean invasion. Since then, Russia has developed Mir, a payment system for electronic fund transfers, and a SWIFT equivalent known as SPFS — System for transfer of Financial Messages, with agreements linking SPFS to other payment systems in China, India, Iran, and member nations of the Eurasian Economic Union. The Central Bank of Russia has strengthened the commercial banking network. And it has also reduced its dollar exposure as much as possible by investing in gold and euros instead, which means less reserves are held as deposits in the US banking system and invested in US bonds.

    From these actions, Putin has signalled that he is aware that the danger to Russia is more likely to be a financial war, rather than a physical one. As President Biden said, to have American troops on the ground fighting the Russians is a world war and will not happen. In that sense the Ukraine, over which Russia retains an energy stranglehold, is a virtual battleground for a proxy war.

    Financial considerations

    In examining the strengths and weakness of the principal parties, we must first confirm who they are: Russia, America, and the EU. And in the EU, principally it is Germany, but all member states will be affected.

    As argued above, Russia’s real objective is to get America out of Europe, and Putin’s strategy is to drive a wedge between America and the EU, and in particular its industrial powerhouse, Germany. Plans to split America from Europe go back to Putin’s earlier days, with the construction of Nord Stream to bypass Ukraine with which Russia’s Gazprom was in dispute. Delivering 55bn billion cubic meters of natural gas annually, the first Nord Stream was completed in 2012. A second pipeline. Nord Stream 2, which is ready to go online, doubles this capacity.

    American pressure on Germany to delay the operation of Nord Stream 2 follows the dollar’s debasement from March 2020 in particular, when the Fed reduced interest rates to zero and instituted QE of $120bn every month. The effect has been to undermine the dollar’s purchasing power for nearly all commodities, including energy. Consequently, a combination of dollar debasement, winter demand and the absence of extra supply from Russia has created an energy crisis not just for Germany, but all EU members.

    Germany is particularly hard hit, with its producer prices index up 25% year-on-year at the end of January. Germany cannot go along with an escalation of financial sanctions against Russia at a time when its industry is struggling with other rising production costs. Not only is her trade with Russia substantial, but she has banking and financial interests in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia, which could be destabilised by American-led attempts to restrict payments.

    Despite Chancellor Scholz’s initial support for EU sanctions Germany is likely to be indecisive, torn between competing demands from a collapsing economy and pressure from NATO. By withholding regulatory permission for Nord Stream 2 he has demonstrated that instead of regarding his electors’ interests as paramount, he has given in to NATO pressure. This weakness on Olaf Scholz’s part is consistent with the indecisive socialism of his Social Democratic Party and Germany’s continuing guilt trip following two world wars.

    Recognising the importance of Germany and its likely indecision, President Macron of France seized the political opportunity to mediate between Russia and the EU, which suits the Russian cause. Macron simply provided another channel for Putin’s message about NATO: get the US out of Europe and the EU should be responsible for its own defence. And given Macron’s ambitions for France in Europe he is likely to see it as an opportunity to enable France to take the lead in the EU’s future defence arrangements after the Ukraine situation has blown over. That will be down the road, but for now the EU is standing firm behind US and UK sanction proposals.

    Sanctions rarely work. They merely encourage the sanctioned to dig deeper into their own intellectual and entrepreneurial resources and work hard to find ways round them. Russia will merely sell its gas elsewhere: at these high prices harm is minimal, and they can afford to restrict supplies through Ukraine, the Yamal-Europe and Turk-stream pipeline supplies. It might be sensible for Russia to allow flows through Nord Stream 1 to continue for now, holding its restriction as a backup threat. European gas prices will likely rise even further, providing a price windfall for Russia. The tweet below, from Russian President Medvedev implies European gas prices will double from here.

    The apparent lack of understanding of economic and financial consequences for the EU by the EU leadership is a wild card danger. The economic and financial exposure of Germany to its eastern neighbours has already been mentioned, but other EU members are similarly exposed. Furthermore, the reckless inflationary policies of the ECB have undermined the financial health of the entire euro system to the point where even on the current rise in bond yields, the ECB and all the national central banks (with only three minor exceptions) have liabilities greater than their assets. The whole eurozone is a mountain of financial disasters balanced on an apex over which it is set to topple.

    We cannot say for sure that Ukraine will be the last straw for the euro system, but we can point to political ignorance of this instability. Any dissenting central banker (and there could be some, particularly at the Bundesbank) has no influence at the political level. We must assume that none of the major political players in this tragedy are aware of the financial and economic crisis in Europe waiting to be triggered. And if the Russians have made a mistake, it will be in their accumulation of euro reserves, which will turn out to be worthless when the euro system collapses.

    Financial sanctions against individual oligarchs have probably already been anticipated and avoiding action been taken by them: oligarchs are not dumb. Sanctions against Russian banks will have also been anticipated and will probably inflict less damage on them than on their counterparties in the EU banking system, particularly if SWIFT comes under pressure to suspend Russian banking access.

    Not only Ukraine, but the whole of the EU, for which Russia supplies over 40% of its natural gas, is being squeezed. We can be reasonably sure that the Russian government has war-gamed this situation in advance.

    Inflation, gold, and unintended consequences

    The situation today is very different from that of 2014 at the time of the Maidan revolution, with the world massively increasing government debt and currency in circulation since then. At the time of the Crimean take-over, commodity prices were declining from their peak in 2011, and following Crimea, they fell sharply with negative consequences for the Russian economy. The expansion of world currencies is now driving commodity and energy prices higher due to their purchasing power is declining.

    Figure 2 shows how a basket of commodities has increased in price since the Fed reduced its funds rate to the zero bound and instituted QE at $120bn per month. In those 22 months commodity prices have risen by 127% by this measure.

    When all commodity prices rise at the same time it is due to currency debasement, which is what has happened here. Within the broader commodity context, energy price increases have been particularly acute, with Russia being a major beneficiary, leading to a substantial surplus on its balance of trade.

    It has been a long-term ambition of the Sino-Russian partnership not just to expel America from the World Island but to reduce dependency on dollars as well. While trade between Russia and China is increasingly settled in their own currencies, so long as the dollar has credibility for settling international transactions it will still dominate trade for the other nations in the Eurasian landmass.

    The fiat alternative for Russia has been the euro, which partly explains why Russia has accumulated them in her foreign currency reserves. But since 2014, the stability of the euro system has deteriorated to the point where the currency is no longer a credible alternative to the US dollar. We cannot be sure if this is understood in the Kremlin. But there has always been a Plan B, which is the accumulation of physical gold.

    There is evidence that official reserves in China and Russia understate the true position. Following the enactment of regulations in 1983 whereby the Peoples Bank was appointed sole responsibility for the acquisition of China’s gold and silver reserves, I have estimated that the State accumulated as much as 20,000 tonnes of gold before permitting the public to own gold, for which purpose the Shanghai Gold Exchange was established in 2002. Since then, the SGE has delivered a further 20,000 tonnes from its vaults into public hands, though some of this will have been returned as scrap.

    The Chinese state has retained the exclusive right to mine and refine gold, even importing doré from abroad. China is now the largest gold mine producer in the world by far, continuing to add over tonnes annually to total above ground stocks (last year’s dip to 350 tonnes was due to covid), which are all ringfenced in China. These policies, as well as anecdotal evidence suggests that my earlier estimate of state-owned gold of 20,000 tonnes was realistic.

    Russia has been relatively late in adding to her gold reserves, having officially accumulated 2,298 tonnes. But being only second to China as a gold mine producer at 330 tonnes, it is likely that following earlier financial sanctions that Russia has accumulated undeclared gold reserves as well. Additionally, we can see that all the SCO members and their associates have increased their declared gold reserves by 75% since 2014. Plan B therefore appears to be to back fiat roubles and renminbi with gold in the event of a Western fiat currency meltdown.

    The West has no such plan. America’s fifty-one-year denial of and attempted demotion of gold as the ultimate money appears to have left it short: otherwise it could have returned Germany’s gold on demand instead of trying to spin it out over a number of years. Furthermore, Western central banks routinely lease and swap their gold, leading to double counting of reserves and lack of clarity over ownership. We can be sure that neither Russia nor China indulge in these practices.

    The consequence of these disparities is to weaponize gold’s monetary status, turning it into a nuclear weapon in a financial war. If, say, during NATO-led attempts to destabilise the rouble Russia was to declare another 6,000 tonnes to match America’s unaudited figure and for China to revise its reserves to stabilise the renminbi, it would probably result in a run against the dollar. It would be a sure-fire way for the Asian hegemons to destroy US economic and military power.

    Therefore, ultimately, the US and its five-eyes allies cannot win a financial war. When China and Russia planned their financial defences, this golden umbrella made sense, and the security services in America would have been aware of it, if not the full implications. But things have changed, particularly the debasement of all major currencies, including the renminbi. China has an old-fashioned cyclical property crisis on her hands and can only think to print her way out of trouble. Together with the Fed, the ECB, and the Bank of Japan, the Peoples Bank has expanded its balance sheet recklessly, and all together they have increased from $5 trillion equivalent in 2007 to over $31 trillion today, with their rate of expansion being particularly high from March 2020.

    The consequences for their currencies’ purchasing power are becoming obvious now, turbocharging Russia’s strategy with respect to European energy supply. What few politicians appear to be aware of, and we should include Putin in this, is the fragile state of the major central banks. Having loaded their balance sheets up with fixed-interest government debt, falling market values for these bonds are eliminating central banks’ margin of assets over liabilities. While the Fed, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England can turn to their governments for recapitalisation, embarrassing though that may be, the ECB has no such recourse.

    The ECB’s shareholders are the national central banks in the euro system. And they in turn, except for Ireland’s, Malta’s, and Slovenia’s central banks, all have liabilities easily exceeding their assets. The euro system is already insolvent, and Russian action on energy supplies could tip the whole currency system over the edge.

    Given the Russian Central Bank’s reserve holding of euros, we can call that an unintended consequence.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 02/25/2022 – 02:00

  • Perpetual Tyranny: Endless Wars Are The Enemy Of Freedom
    Perpetual Tyranny: Endless Wars Are The Enemy Of Freedom

    Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

    – James Madison

    War is the enemy of freedom.

    As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

    It’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

    This latest crisis—America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine—has conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises, manufactured or otherwise, which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

    And so it continues in its Orwellian fashion.

    Two years after COVID-19 shifted the world into a state of global authoritarianism, just as the people’s tolerance for heavy-handed mandates seems to have finally worn thin, we are being prepped for the next distraction and the next drain on our economy.

    Yet policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad isn’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, it’s certainly not making America great again, and it’s undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

    Indeed, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

    War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

    What most Americans—brainwashed into believing that patriotism means supporting the war machine—fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

    Consider: We are a military culture engaged in continuous warfare. We have been a nation at war for most of our existence. We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

    We are also being fed a steady diet of violence through our entertainment, news and politics.

    All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots.

    Back when I was a boy growing up in the 1950s, almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the heroic American military saving the day, whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

    What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America’s savior. By the time my own kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster film Top Gun—created with Pentagon assistance and equipment—that boosted civic pride in the military.

    Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda. Don’t even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers. Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig, with the Pentagon’s entertainment office helping to sell war to the American public.

    It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

    And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

    This is how you acclimate a population to war.

    This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

    This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the bomb.”

    As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon, “[C]ollusion between the military and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts—is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.”

    Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the government at large) so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?

    To those who profit from war, it is—as Sirota recognizes—“a ‘product’ to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers….At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction — and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal.”

    The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.

    This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to as the representation of a “clean war”: a war “without victims, without bodies, and without suffering”:

    “‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all human imagery from target areas … The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’ Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are ‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always ‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen … Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.”

    This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.

    “This obsession with weapons of war has a name: technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.”

    “Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin,” said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the machines of war.”

    In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment.

    Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon has also turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

    The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since, having co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.

    This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite for war.

    No wonder entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office. As professor Henry Giroux points out, “Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture.”

    No wonder the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games)—what Stahl refers to as “militainment“—that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire.

    No wonder Americans from a very young age are being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers—even virtual ones—in America’s Army (coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first person shooter video game produced by the military). Explorer Scouts, for example, are one of the most popular recruiting tools for the military and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement, Border Patrol, and the FBI).

    No wonder the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world. Seriously, America spends more money on war than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. Moreover, the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military—a standing army.

    We are dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

    Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhaul.

    Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.

    It happened in Rome: at the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise.

    It’s happening again.

    The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

    The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

    This is exactly the scenario President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

    Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

    We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

    The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.

    What we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government—i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers—and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

    The growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional principles which form the basis of the American experiment in freedom.

    As author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 23:40

  • US Vaccination Rates Collapse As Omicron Subsides
    US Vaccination Rates Collapse As Omicron Subsides

    As cases of the already-more-mild Omicron strain of Covid-19 subside, vaccination rates in the United States are collapsing, according to AP, which reports that the vaccination drive in the US is ‘grinding to a halt,’ and ‘demand has all but collapsed’ – particularly in rural areas.

    At present, the average number of Americans getting their first dose is down to around 90,000 per day – the lowest point since the first few days of the vaccination campaign in December 2020 – while the outlook for any sort of substantial increase has largely evaporated.

    AP of course acts like this is a national tragedy led by toothless rednecks in ‘deeply conservative’ parts of the country, suggesting a ‘losing battle to get people vaccinated’ in rural Alabama – but of course the reality goes unmentioned… that the vaccine largely evades Omicron – which is far less deadly than previous strains, and is only marginally effective in keeping medically at-risk people from dying.

    Even the Washington Post noted on Wednesday: “Coronavirus vaccine protection was much weaker against omicron, data shows.”

    While coronavirus shots still provided protection during the omicron wave, the shield of coverage they offered was weaker than during other surges, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The change resulted in much higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death for fully vaccinated adults and even for people who had received boosters. -WaPo

    Meanwhile, government vaccination incentive programs that gave away cash, beer, sports tickets and other prizes have also disappeared – while governnment and employer vaccine mandates have suffered blows in court.

    “People are just over it. They’re tired of it,” said Judy Smith, administrator for a 12-county public health district in northwestern Alabama.

    The bottoming-out of demand for the first round of vaccinations is especially evident in conservative areas around the country.

    On most days in Idaho, the number of people statewide getting their first shot rarely surpasses 500.

    In Wyoming, a total of about 280 people statewide got their first shot in the past week, and the waiting area at the Cheyenne-Laramie County Health Department stood empty Tuesday morning. The head of the department fondly recalled just a few months ago, when the lobby was bustling on Friday afternoons after school with children getting their doses. But they aren’t showing up anymore either. -AP

    “People heard more stories about, well, the omicron’s not that bad,” said Executive Director Kathy Emmons. “I think a lot of people just kind of rolled the dice and decided, ‘Well, if it’s not that bad, I’m just going to kind of wait it out and see what happens.’“

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 23:20

  • Amazon's Woke 'Lord Of The Rings' Is The Death Rattle Of Social Justice Content
    Amazon’s Woke ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Is The Death Rattle Of Social Justice Content

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    Modern social justice in all of its forms is communism. The political left doesn’t want to admit it openly, but there is no way around it and there is no debate. Some would call it “cultural Marxism,” but the bottom line is that there is no such thing as a legitimate social justice movement in the west because by law all people regardless of their ethnic circumstances are equally protected. You could say that SJWs are rebels without a cause, but I would point out that “social justice” is not their real cause. They aren’t really interested in equality, they are interested in control.

    There is a classic playbook for communist sabotage of a target society, and one of the first tactics is always the destruction of that society’s history and symbols. When Mao Zedong announced the birth of the “Cultural Revolution” in China in 1966, his goal was to disrupt growing discontent among the Chinese people with the broken promises of the communist regime. Only 8 years earlier in 1958 Mao had initiated the “Great Leap Forward,” which was a purge of his political opponents as well as a massive population reduction program that used food as a weapon. After the deaths of over 65 million Chinese citizens, Mao sought to redirect public anger by scapegoating a supposed conspiracy of “capitalists and imperialists.”

    The Cultural Revolution was essentially a nationwide witch hunt spearheaded by rabid and ignorant children; people easy for the government to manipulate and exploit. They scoured their own towns and cities as spies and enforcers for the CCP, looking for any signs that their neighbors were part of the conspiracy to disrupt the communist collective. They held tribunals and struggle sessions where anyone who said the wrong thing or who angered the wrong person was publicly humiliated or even murdered as “insurrectionists” by a mob of communist zealots.

    Most importantly, the Cultural Revolution was used as a means to utterly destroy any remnants of Chinese history before the commies arrived on the scene. Museums and universities were raided and ancient artworks, documents, books and historical parchments were burned in pyres. Historians and people with knowledge of the Chinese heritage were marched up and down the streets and chastised as enemies of the people. Statues were torn down and entire buildings razed to the ground. The communist system cannot gain dominance without two things – Rule at the barrel of a gun, and complete control over cultural products and information.

    The people cannot have a religion, they cannot have an unfiltered history, they cannot have a moral framework outside of communist law, and they cannot have any cultural expression that does not include communist propaganda. If they have these things, then the communists will always be battling for psychological supremacy over the masses. Competing ideas and interests are a danger to the collective. The existence of choice is like kryptonite to authoritarians.

    And this is one of the great crimes of communism in general: Yes, they are the biggest mass murderers in history surpassing the Nazis many times over, but killing people is one thing; deliberately killing their memories, histories and their mythologies is another. It is akin to murdering the soul of an entire nation and poisoning the future.

    It is important to remember this distinction when we talk about the current communist cultural revolution now happening in North America and parts of Europe under social justice. I often hear the argument that people are “overreacting” when social justice propaganda is implanted into a reboot or remake of a previous film or television work. It’s “just a movie,” they say. But some of these franchises represent the mythologies of our time. And, when SJW communists and their corporate partners implant their insane ideologies into these franchises their goal is not just to propagandize the public, it is also to destroy something the public loves, to erase our history and our heroes piece by piece and take a little bit of our national soul away each time.

    It’s also vital to point out that the mass movement to stop social justice in media, also known as the “Culture War,” is often accused of being anti-equality and anti-representation whenever we criticize a woke production. We’re called racists and bigots by leftists, but we don’t have a problem with race or “representation,” we have a problem with the politicization of race and representation. We’re fine with black and brown and even gay people in movies and television as long as their presence makes sense historically and canonically. What we don’t like in our entertainment is COMMUNIST AGITPROP. This is what the conflict is really about. We want their communism out of our culture, forever.

    The current social justice playbook in Hollywood has become so prevalent and mechanical since 2016 that it can be predicted down to specific plot points and character arcs. Almost everything these people make is the same.

    One might note that SJWs rarely produce any original stories, and there is a good reason for this – They have no creativity or imagination. Leftist activists and corporate elites in the industry have openly admitted in the past that they prefer to reboot classic properties because they can exploit existing public love for an older movie or character. When they make something original with new characters the project always fails horribly and no one shows up to watch. When they reboot classic movies, they can use nostalgia to trick people into watching without thinking and implant their leftist brainwashing into the production.

    Beyond trickery, though, I suspect that these activists are not even as interested in making money as they are interested in murdering our beloved characters and mythologies right in front of us. I think they take perverse joy in it. Why else would they continue spending billions of dollars on these productions and then lose billions more when their movies and TV shows inevitably tank? It makes no sense from a business standpoint, but it makes perfect sense from a militant communist standpoint. Again, the goal is to destroy the existing culture until there is nothing left.

    And this brings us to one of the last major story properties that the elitists have yet to touch: The Lord Of The Rings.

    I would not consider myself a “superfan” steeped in every aspect of the lore of Middle Earth. I have read all the primary books and The Hobbit, and I have of course watched the Peter Jackson films dozens of times. I do find Tolkien’s works, much like the fictional works of C.S. Lewis, to go far beyond the fantasy worlds they are established in and reveal some innate truths about human nature and our eternal and internal struggles with the inborn archetypes of good and evil. They clarify what the fight is really about, what evil really is, and what sacrifices good people must be willing to make in order to defeat evil when the times demand it.

    I often use the Lord Of The Rings as a metaphor to describe core problems we face in the real world. For example, I can’t think of a better metaphor for government power than the One Ring. Everyone thinks that they are pure hearted or righteous enough to wield the ring, but the vast majority of them are not and would only sink into corruption as they tried to exploit it. The only people that can hold the ring at all are the people who don’t want it, the people who have no desire for power and the people that only want to subdue or destroy it. Like the One Ring, so too must we have the same wariness of government control.

    Tolkien’s tale was also intended to act as a kind of early mythological history of ancient Britain. Because much of Britain’s ancient history was lost to wars and the destruction of documentation over centuries, Tolkien wanted to create an alternative mythology to represent the spirit of the region, borrowing elements of ancient stories while adding in his personal experiences. The Hobbits were based on the happy natured culture of rural English villages that he experienced in his youth. The horrors he witnessed during his service in WWI and the Battle of Somme are obvious to see in the conflict between Sauron and the heroes of Middle Earth.

    Interestingly, ever since Amazon purchased the partial rights to portions of the Lord Of The Rings in 2017, there has been an army of revisionist bloggers and media puppets trying to assert that Tolkien never intended his stories to be British or English in origin or relation. Clearly, the narrative is being adjusted so that Amazon can rationalize its diversity agenda within a story that was always meant to be set in a historically white country. Imagine if I went to Marvel and told them I want to reboot Black Panther but I think Wakanda needs less Africans and more whites and Asians? How well would that idea be received?

    The bottom line is it makes no sense when we take the setting and the lore into account. But hey, it’s okay to do it with Lord Of The Rings with Middle Earth as a proxy for ancient England because…well, no explanation for this hypocrisy is ever provided.

    The idea that a trillion dollar monstrosity like Amazon with aspirations of cultural domination could ever successfully reboot or revise Tolkien’s books is laughable at best. The team of writers involved have very little previous work worth noting but they do have a predictable roster of social justice virtue signals and hot takes. They are pampered bubble babies; people that don’t have the life experiences needed to grasp the deeper concepts that an older wiser man like Tolkien was trying to address. Of course, if you do enough shoe licking (or other things) in Hollywood and have the right politics you can be a dumb kid with a BA in social sciences and still get a job writing on a billion dollar project.

    It would appear that most of the LOTR fandom is in agreement as the trailer released this past week is being decimated by a flood of critical responses and the video has been ratioed into oblivion on YouTube. This was the exact reason why YouTube decided to remove the visibility of dislikes which can now only be seen with a special app; they want to protect the agenda by silencing dissent.

    It’s not working.

    As a long time enthusiast of film and popular media, I have to say that objectively and technically the trailer is terrible. It has to be one of the most boring trailers I have ever seen for an adventure based series, telling us absolutely nothing and building no emotional suspense. I have seen great trailers for very bad movies (the latest Matrix movie comes to mind), but Amazon’s only interest it seems was to showcase the diversity hires within their new show, and that was it.

    That said, one cannot overlook the communistic cancer wrapped around the arteries of this production. Every person involved and all the media coverage involved is steeped in social justice babble and made-up terminology. Usually leftists in Hollywood use a specific formula for marketing films that hides the propaganda until the content is released. They post a trailer which obscures their intentions, and perhaps even makes it seem as though the show will be close to the source material. Once they have you hooked and get your money, they stab your heroes through the heart and replace them with narcissistic facsimiles that any sane person would hate.

    This time Amazon has chosen to go full bore woke out of the gate and it’s not going well for them.

    All of us already know exactly what will happen in the new series, we don’t even need to watch it to predict the outcome. Timelines are being compacted down to nothing so this gives Amazon leeway to sabotage popular characters by retconning the lore. The plot points will be oddly close to those in the Jackson films, but with a completely different set of characters and messages. All the male heroes will be replaced with the now tiresome trope of ‘Stronk Wahmen’ and Mary Sues that are good at everything despite having no backstory to justify their awesome-ness.

    Expect Galadriel to be the new Aragorn. Expect the female hobbit in the trailer to be the next Frodo but better than Frodo. Expect to see 90 pound women tossing around 200 pound men in poorly choreographed fight scenes. Expect the female characters to act and talk like men while abandoning all femininity (feminists hate femininity more than they hate masculinity). Expect modern SJW language and millennial language to be insinuated into dialogue in the most awkward places. Expect sexual innuendo or sexual scenarios that are out of place in a fantasy story. Expect meaningless LGBT representation that adds nothing to the plot. Expect weak and ineffectual male characters that make stupid decisions. Expect modern race baiting to be prevalent when it comes to black characters. Expect a perfect pie chart of ethnicities in almost every crowd scene. And, as always, expect the villains to be painted as “misunderstood” and only destructive because “society” caused them to turn to the dark side. In other words, it’s all society’s fault that Sauron becomes a bad guy.

    It’s an old gameplan for deconstructing beloved properties and marginalizing the values and realities they represent. The thing is, we’ve seen this so many times now that it’s no longer catching us off guard.

    Race swapping elves and dwarves and ignoring the species lore and history of the books is really the least of the problems, it’s just a big flashing alarm that tells us what is to come in terms of political messaging. Anyone who needs to “see themselves” portrayed exactly in every film or show they watch in order to relate to the story is undoubtedly a narcissist. Relating to characters is about relating to the ideas and archetypes they symbolize; and if the lore of a story requires that those character be white, then this should not stop any normal black or brown person from embracing the ideals as long as those ideals are honest.

    Peter Jackson is noted as saying that he had no interest in implanting his own issues into Tolkien’s stories. He was not interested in using them for his benefit, only in honoring Tolkien’s legacy. The stories are universal, which is why they have appealed to billions of people around the world for the past several decades. SJWs cannot fathom this. They demand that every single new media product contain their political message and represent today’s world of “inclusivity.”

    One of the biggest mistakes conservative movements ever made was to ignore the culture war and dismiss entertainment media as not worthy of our attention. It’s just “nerd stuff,” right? This was idiocy on our part and it’s a failure we must now deal with. Today, the extreme left has invaded every facet of media and almost EVERYTHING we see and hear is designed to spread their cultism. Our entertainment is now a communist wasteland.

    Luckily, the massive and aggressive backlash against Amazon among the Tolkien fandom gives me hope. It would seem Amazon messed with the wrong nerds. Never before have I witnessed such a unified response to an attempt by a major corporation to pervert a loved property. What this tells me is that the majority of people are starting to become wise to the agenda in media and they are finally responding by letting these companies know they are not going to play the game. Neither politics nor culture are downstream from each other, they are parallel and equally vital. The fight for one must be taken as seriously as the fight for the other.

    Amazon’s hubris has led to an epic mistake which has set fire to the Beacons of Gondor. Everyone knows and everyone is watching them. This may very well mean the death rattle of social justice in popular entertainment as even the normies begin to abandon these shows and movies that represent nothing more than public sacrifices to the social justice gods.  Soon, no one will be watching.

    *  *  *

    If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 23:00

  • White House Says Russian Forces 20 Miles Outside Ukraine's Capital
    White House Says Russian Forces 20 Miles Outside Ukraine’s Capital

    Update(10:50pmET): Possible cruise or ballistic missiles have reportedly hit targets in or around the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. It’s unclear the degree to which the strikes are sustained at this point. 

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    The White House has informed lawmakers in Congress that it believes Russian forces are now a mere 20 miles from Kiev.

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    Large blasts are being reported by Western correspondents in the early morning hours local time. 

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    CNN is reporting: 

    The Ukrainian capital Kyiv was targeted with missile fire early Friday local time, according to an adviser to the country’s government.

    “Strikes on Kyiv with cruise or ballistic missiles continued,” Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine told reporters via text message.

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    President Zelensky in an earlier appeal to the world, said a new “iron curtain” is descending over Europe. 

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    * * *

    Update(6:42pmET): Shortly before 1am Kiev time Ukraine’s President Zelensky announced: “The enemy’s sabotage forces have entered the capital. Me and my family are remaining.” 

    “We need to talk about a ceasefire with Russia,” he added in the video message. Then what followed suggests the brutal reality is finally sinking in that despite years of ‘promises’ from Washington and the West of a “path to NATO membership” – none of his backers or Ukraine’s allies are coming to help: 

    “We are not afraid to talk to Russia. We are not afraid to talk about security guarantees for our state. We are not afraid to talk about neutral status. But what security guarantees will we have? But which countries will give them?” Zelensky says in response to a prior Russian offer to begin to negotiation “terms of surrender”. 

    “We are left alone in defense of our state. Who is ready to fight with us? I don’t see it. Who is ready to guarantee Ukraine’s accession to Nato? Everyone is afraid,” added Zelensky.

    “I asked the 27 leaders of Europe whether Ukraine should be in Nato. I asked directly. They are all afraid. And we are not afraid,” he said.

    The world is now witnessing in real time what prominent geopolitical analyst John Mearsheimer predicted over a half-decade ago against the backdrop of the initial West-backed Ukraine coup…

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    “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path & the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked,” Mearsheimer said in a clip that’s lately resurfaced and widely circulating. 

    Zelensky’s latest comments showing deep frustration and desperation came hours after President Biden in an address on the crisis confirmed that “US forces are not going to fight in Ukraine” while also rolling out fresh sanctions which stop far short of what Congressional hawks are demanding. On the energy front, he had said while crucially sparing key Russian energy exports from sanctions:

    “In our sanctions package, we specifically designed energy payments to continue. We are closely monitoring energy supplies for any disruption,” Biden said from the East Room of the White House. “We have been coordinating with major oil-producing and consuming countries…”

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    After the first full day of fighting, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine says that in total 30 Russian tanks, 130 armored fighting vehicles, 5 aircraft and 6 helicopters were taken out by Ukraine’s military. However, without doubt the Ukrainian losses are much, much more severe. 

    Meanwhile fresh reports say Russia is preparing to begin a “large-scale bombardment of Ukrainian capital Kiev around 03:00am Ukraine time,” based on a CNN correspondent citing US intelligence sources. 

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    Ukraine’s Defense Ministry is vowing to continue defending the country, also as Zelensky belatedly issued a ‘full mobilization order’ – which also bars all military eligible males from fleeing the country ranging in age from 16 to 60. 

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    Below: a round-up of confirmed footage via NY Times…

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    * * *

    Update(4:28pmET): The US and NATO are apparently doubling down: despite Ukraine seeing overwhelming Russian forced used to subdue the country (along with Belarussian troops), Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Minister has announced Kiev will receive “new defensive weapons” from Washington.

    Simultaneously, Ukraine’s defense minister says Russia is “preparing a new wave of attacks, including air strikes.”

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    However, it appears the debate inside the administration may be continuing on the extent it wants to go on provoking Russia further, after Biden earlier in the day made clear the US won’t send troops to Ukraine to engage Russia.

    This also as Ukraine’s government is touting that its arming a local resistance made up of civilians and military veterans…

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    Some evidence has emerged in the last half-day of fighting that in some places the Russians may not be encountering much resistance as they approach Ukrainian forces and bases. 

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    However, one major reported reversal happened in the last hours at the major Hostomel airfield near Kiev, which is reportedly back in Ukrainian military control after fierce fighting. Russia took it early in the day after a major aerial assault. 

    * * *

    Update(1:49pmET): Ukraine’s government has confirmed that the Chernobyl power plant site has been seized by Russian forces. “The Prime Minister made the announcement in a televised briefing, saying Russian troops had taken control of the zone and the nuclear power plant,” Bloomberg confirms. 

    “The facility is located about 80 miles (129km) north of Kyiv, several miles south of the Belarus border. Holding Chernobyl would provide Russian troops a staging point that couldn’t be shelled,” the report adds, in reference to the potential for dangerous radioactive fallout given the permanent presence of nuclear waste there. Speculation remains that should the site come under direct shelling, there could be nuclear contamination released into the air, potentially impacting other areas in Europe. 

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    Russian state media is in the evening Thursday (local time) citing Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to say that Moscow is offering Kiev “terms of surrender”. Meanwhile…

    WESTERN ALLIES SEE KYIV FALLING TO RUSSIAN FORCES WITHIN HOURS

    Peskov said: The president formulated his vision of what we would expect from Ukraine in order for the so-called ‘red-line’ problems to be resolved. This is neutral status, and this is a refusal to deploy weapons.

    And further: 

    The operation has its goals – they must be achieved. The president said that all decisions have been made, and the goals will be achieved,” Peskov continued, suggesting that, if Kiev were to agree to meet the demands, the current military attack on Ukraine could be called off.

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    * * *

    Update(10:11amET): The potential is rising for greater fallout from the war across Europe, as intense fighting is being reported centered in the Chernobyl area. Ukrainian authorities are sounding the alarm over potentially disastrous scenarios which could ensue in areas of the Chernobyl containment zone, which includes an expansive region surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant where radioactive contamination is highest, since the April 1986 disaster. Russian troops are reportedly entering the area from Belarus, according to Interfax:

    Advisor to Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko said that Russian troops from the territory of Belarus entered the zone of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant (NPP).

    Gerashchenko stressed that “if a nuclear waste storage facility is destroyed as a result of enemy artillery strikes, then radioactive dust can cover the territories of Ukraine, Belarus and the EU countries!”

    Ukraine’s President Zelensky has also reportedly sounded the alarm over combat in the containment area:

    UKRAINE PRESIDENT SAYS RUSSIAN OCCUPATION FORCES ARE TRYING TO CAPTURE THE CHERNOBYL PLANT

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    It goes without saying that given the ferocity of Russia’s ongoing air and ground campaign, any major incident there could spark broader panic for Europe, and a possible long term negative health impact in parts of Europe.

    Meanwhile Russia’s air war continues to intensify…

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    Now many hours into Russia’s attack that started around 5am Kiev time, it’s become clear that a full-scale ‘shock and awe’ type invasion is clearly on – which is not just limited to Donbas in the east. Stunning videos from on the ground show what can be described as an ongoing air war on Kiev and several other cities across the country. Tanks have also been seen speeding across Ukraine’s border from Belarus, with widespread reports that Belarusian soldiers are mounting the attack alongside Russian troops.

    Russia’s military had announced within just a couple hours into the offensive that all of Ukraine’s air defense systems have been taken out. A massive Russian aerial presence, including fighter jets and helicopters, has been confirmed over much of the country. 

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    Soon after the initial attack which also included cruise missile launches, which likely came from Russia’s Black Sea fleet, Kiev authorities cited “hundreds” of Ukrainians killed, including civilians. 

    It’s believed that much of Ukraine’s command and control military infrastructure was targeted and hit in the first wave, also as Ukraine border guards were attack, with some reports of soldiers fleeing the Russian advance. Moscow has declared safe passage for any Ukrainian soldier laying down their arms. 

    Ukraine’s state emergency service has also said a Ukrainian military plane was downed, which killed five people. This as surreal battlefield footage continues to evidence the ferocity of an air war in progress.

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    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday issued comment on the scope and goal of the military objections, citing Putin’s aim of the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine. 

    “Ideally, Ukraine should be liberated, cleansed of Nazis, of pro-Nazi people and ideology,” Peskov said, saying that operations would end only once these objectives have been reached. It remains unclear whether this will mean regime change in Kiev, though at this point that scenario is looking more than likely. There were early reports that President Zelensky has been offered safe passage if he leaves Ukraine.

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    Ukraine national police and emergency services have said there’s been fighting throughout the entire country, with Russia conducting over 200 attacks, with severe clashes ongoing in various parts of Ukraine.

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    President Biden has vowed severe and far-reaching new sanctions, which he said will be announced in an address on Thursday. German chancellor Olaf Scholz and other Western leaders condemned what Scholz called a “reckless act by President Putin,” and “terrible day for Ukraine and a dark day for Europe.”

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    “There is no justification for any of this — this is Putin’s war,” Scholz said at a news conference in Berlin. 

    The large in scope Russian campaign is now being widely described as Putin’s “shock and awe” war – to borrow from America’s Iraq War – in the heart of eastern Europe. Bloomberg and others are calling it Europe’s worst security crisis since World War II.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 22:50

  • Starlink "Reconnects Tonga To World" Following Devastating Tsunami  
    Starlink “Reconnects Tonga To World” Following Devastating Tsunami  

    A team of SpaceX engineers restored high-speed internet service to remote villages on the tiny Pacific island nation of Tonga that had undersea communication lines severed with nearby Fiji after the eruption of a massive volcano last month, according to Reuters. 

    “A SpaceX team is now in Fiji establishing a Starlink gateway station to reconnect Tonga to the world,” Fiji’s attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum tweeted Monday. 

    By Wednesday, Tonga’s prime minister, Siaosi Sovaleni, said 50 Starlink terminals would be distributed to the most remote parts of Tonga hit hard by the tsunami, which was triggered by the volcano. 

    “It is rather paradoxical for a devastating volcanic eruption and tsunami to bring to our shores the latest in satellite and communications technology,” Sovaleni said in a speech broadcast by Tonga Broadcasting Commission.

    “Elon Musk probably didn’t know much about Tonga until January 15, but gave generously.” 

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    Tonga lies about 500 miles east of Fiji, and reconnecting the undersea communication cables is costly and time-consuming. The fastest means of reconnecting the tiny island has been installing a Starlink gateway ground station in Fiji that beams internet to satellites and repeats it to the terminals. Here’s an example of how the technology works. 

    Elon Musk offered to restore Tonga’s internet services on an emergency basis. He noted the connection would be “hard” to establish because there weren’t enough geostationary satellites that would connect the island. It appears SpaceX engineers overcame some challenges will begin free service immediately until the undersea cable is reconnected. 

    Sayed-Khaiyum recently told Fijian Broadcasting Corporation that SpaceX engineers would operate the ground station in Fiji for six months. Musk’s space internet company has more than 1,800 Starlink satellites in orbit and 145,000 users globally (as of January). 

    Tonga Cable chief executive James Panuve said Musk’s internet service would greatly help “isolated villages in desperate need of connectivity. 

     

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 22:40

  • The War On Cash Entering Bold New Phase
    The War On Cash Entering Bold New Phase

    Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

    With so much news about Ukraine, inflation, massive government spending and exploding deficits, it’s easy to overlook the ongoing war on cash. That’s a mistake because it has serious implications not only for your money, but for your privacy and personal freedom, as you’ll see today.

    The war on cash is a global effort being waged on many fronts. My view is that the war on cash is dangerous in terms of lost privacy and the risk of government confiscation of wealth.

    Governments always use money laundering, drug dealing and terrorism as excuses to keep tabs on honest citizens and deprive them of the ability to use money alternatives such as physical cash, gold and, these days, cryptocurrencies.

    The real burden of the war on cash falls on honest citizens who are made vulnerable to wealth confiscation through negative interest rates, loss of privacy, account freezes and limits on cash withdrawals or transfers.

    The enemies of cash promote the ease and convenience of digital payments. Of course, there’s no denying that digital payments are certainly convenient. I use them myself in the forms of credit and debit cards, wire transfers, automatic deposits and bill payments. I’m sure you do too.

    But the surest way to lull someone into complacency is to offer a “convenience” that quickly becomes habit and impossible to do without. The convenience factor is becoming more prevalent, and consumers are moving from cash to digital payments just as they moved from gold and silver coins to paper money a hundred years ago.

    One survey revealed that more than a third of Americans and Europeans would have no problem at all giving up cash and going completely digital. Specifically, the study showed 34% of Europeans and 38% of Americans surveyed would prefer going cashless.

    But in reality, the so-called “cashless society” is just a Trojan horse for a system in which all financial wealth is electronic and represented digitally in the records of a small number of megabanks and asset managers.

    Once that is achieved, it will be easy for state power to seize and freeze the wealth, or subject it to constant surveillance, taxation and other forms of digital confiscation like negative interest rates.

    They can’t do that as long as you can go to your bank and withdraw your cash. That’s the key. In other words, it’s much easier for them to control your money if they first herd you into a digital cattle pen. That’s their true objective and all the other reasons are just a smoke screen.

    That’s what they won’t tell you.

    Elites know that they can’t ram their unpopular agendas through in normal times. The global elites and deep state actors always have a laundry list of programs and regulations they can’t wait to put into practice. They know that most of these are deeply unpopular and they could never get away with putting them into practice during ordinary times.

    Yet when a crisis hits, citizens are desperate for fast action and quick solutions. The elites bring forward their rescue packages but then use these as Trojan horses to sneak their wish lists inside. That’s what we’re seeing.

    The USA Patriot Act passed after 9/11 is a good example. Some counterterrorist measures were needed, of course. But the Treasury had a long-standing wish list involving reporting cash transactions and limiting citizens’ ability to get cash.

    They plugged that wish list into the Patriot Act and we’ve been living with the results ever since, even though 9/11 is long in the past.

    Cash prevents central banks from imposing negative interest rates because if they did, people would withdraw their cash from the banking system.

    If they stuff their cash in a mattress, they don’t earn anything on it; that’s true. But at least they’re not losing anything on it. Once all money is digital, you won’t have the option of withdrawing your cash and avoiding negative rates. You will be trapped in a digital pen with no way out.

    What about moving your money into cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin?

    Let’s first understand that governments enjoy a monopoly on money creation, and they’re not about to surrender that monopoly to digital currencies like Bitcoin. Libertarian supporters of cryptos celebrate their decentralized nature and lack of government control. Yet their belief in the sustainability of powerful systems outside government control is naïve.

    Blockchain does not exist in the ether (despite the name of one cryptocurrency), and it does not reside on Mars. Blockchain depends on critical infrastructure including servers, telecommunications networks, the banking system and the power grid, all of which are subject to government control.

    You need to understand that reality.

    The good news is that cash is still a dominant form of payment in many countries including the U.S. The problem is that as digital payments grow and the use of cash diminishes, a “tipping point” is reached where suddenly it makes no sense to continue using cash because of the expense and logistics involved.

    Once cash usage shrinks to a certain point, economies of scale are lost and usage can go to zero almost overnight. Remember how music CDs disappeared suddenly once MP3 and streaming formats became popular?

    That’s how fast cash can disappear.

    Once the war on cash gains that kind of momentum, it will be practically impossible to stop.

    Besides the loss of privacy, other dangers from the cashless society arise from the fact that digital money, transferred by credit or debit cards or other electronic payments systems, is completely dependent on the power grid. If the power grid goes out due to storms, accidents, sabotage or cyberattacks, our digital economy will grind to a complete halt.

    The time to protect yourself is now. The best way is to keep a portion of your wealth outside of the banking system.

    That’s why it’s a good idea to keep some of your liquidity in paper cash (while you can) and gold or silver coins. The gold and silver coins in particular will be money good in every state of the world.

    That’s why I’m always saying that savers and those with a long-term view should get physical gold now while prices are still attractive and while they still can.

    I strongly recommend that you own physical gold (and silver). I recommend you allocate 10% of your investable assets to gold. If you really want to be aggressive, maybe 20%. But no more.

    Just make sure you don’t store it in a bank, because it would be subject to confiscation. That defeats the whole purpose of having this sort of protection in the first place.

    I hold a significant portion of my wealth in nondigital form, including real estate, fine art and precious metals in safe, nonbank storage. That’s not because I’m paranoid or a fanatic prepper. I just think it’s prudent in these times.

    I strongly suggest you do the same. The cashless society could be here quicker than you think.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 22:20

  • Map Explainer: Key Facts About Ukraine
    Map Explainer: Key Facts About Ukraine

    The modern state of Ukraine was formed nearly 30 years ago after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then the country has often made headlines due to political instability.

    In the map graphic below, Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti and Nick Routley examine Ukraine from a structural point of view. What’s the country’s population composition? What drives the country’s economy? And most importantly, why is the country important within a global context?

    Where Do People Live in Ukraine?

    With a population of nearly 44 million people, Ukraine is the eighth-most populous country in Europe. For perspective, that is slightly smaller than Spain, and four times larger than Greece.

    As the cartogram below demonstrates, a large portion of the country’s population is located in and around the capital Kyiv, along with the Donetsk region—which is front and center in the current conflict with Russia.

    Not surprisingly, many of the country’s Russian speaking citizens live on the eastern side of the country, near the Russian border.

    Key Facts About Ukraine’s Demographics

    Ukrainians make up almost 78% of the total population, while Russians represent around 17% of the population, making it the single-largest Russian diaspora in the world.

    Other minorities include:

    • Belarusians: 0.6%

    • Bulgarians: 0.4%

    • Hungarians: 0.3%

    • Crimean Tatars: 0.5%

    • Romanians: 0.3%

    • Poles: 0.3%

    • Jews: 0.2%

    The country’s population has been declining since the 1990s because of a high emigration rate, and high death rates coupled with a low birth rate.

    Source: Population Pyramid

    The majority of the population is Christian (80%), with 60% declaring adherence to one or another strand of the Orthodox Church.

    Ukraine’s Economy: An Overview

    When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine turned over thousands of atomic weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and other countries. However, the defense industry continues to be a strategically important sector and a large employer in Ukraine. The country exports weapons to countries like India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

    Furthermore, Ukraine is rich in natural resources, particularly in mineral deposits. It possesses the world’s largest reserves of commercial-grade iron ore—30 billion tonnes of ore or around one-fifth of the global total. It’s also worth noting that Ukraine ranks second in terms of known natural gas reserves in Europe, which today remain largely untapped.

    Ukraine’s mostly flat geography and high-quality soil composition make the country a big regional agricultural player. The country is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of wheat and the world’s largest exporter of seed oils like sunflower and rapeseed.

    Coal mining, chemicals, mechanical products (aircraft, turbines, locomotives and tractors) and shipbuilding are also important sectors of the Ukrainian economy.

    The Bear in the Room

    Given the country’s location and history, it’s nearly impossible to talk about Ukraine without mentioning nearby Russia.

    The country shares borders with Russia both to the east and northeast. For context, a car trip from Moscow to one of the Ukrainian border cities, Shostka, takes around 8 hours. To the Northwest, Ukraine also shares borders with Belarus—a country that is closely aligned with the Kremlin.

    To the southeast is Crimea, a peninsula entirely surrounded by both the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov. In 2014, Russia annexed the peninsula and established two federal subjects, the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol. The annexation was widely condemned around the world, and the territories are recognized by most of the international community as being part of Ukraine.

    The region was of particular interest to Russia since Moscow depends on the Black Sea for access to the Mediterranean. The Port of Sevastopol, on the southwest edge of Crimea, is one of the few ice-free deepwater ports available to Russia in the region.

    Due to ongoing tensions between the two countries, Ukraine has been seeking to reduce Russia’s leverage over its economy. As a result, China and Poland have surpassed Russia as Ukraine’s largest country trading partners in recent years.

    However, Ukraine still remains an important route for Russian gas that heats millions of homes, generates electricity, and powers factories in Europe. The continent gets nearly 40% of its natural gas and 25% of its oil from Russia.

    Furthermore, Ukraine is connected to the same power grid as Russia, so it remains dependent on Moscow in the event of a shortfall. Even as conflict heats up, the two countries still share economic links, which will influence how the situation unfolds.

    Conflict in the Donbas Region

    Ukraine stands at the center of a geopolitical rivalry between western powers and Russia, and that rivalry is flaring up once again.

    Two regions along the Russian border—Donetsk and Luhansk—have been a conflict zone since 2014, when pro-Russian separatists began clashing with government forces. The map below shows the relative contact zone between the two opposing forces.

    ZomBear, Marktaff, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

    Currently Russia has troops and military equipment amassed at various points along the border between the two countries, as well as in neighboring Belarus.

    In recent days, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, recognizing them as independent states. This recognition serves as a definitive end point to the seven-year peace deal known as the Minsk agreement.

    As of February 23rd, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale military operation into Ukraine. The situation is still evolving rapidly.

    As this conflict heats up, it remains to be seen what will happen to the roughly 5 million people who live in the Donbas region.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 22:00

  • Is This The Next Big Gun Control Fight?
    Is This The Next Big Gun Control Fight?

    Submitted by The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).,

    The next battleground for gun rights will likely be fought at the local level, and it’s going to be a tough fight.

    Since the Gun Control lobby can’t seem to pass any gun control through Congress, they’ve taken two different but distinct pathways. The first is the Biden administration ruling by executive fiat and using the DOJ & ATF to push “regulations” that affect gun owners using existing laws on the books.

    The second is something we have mentioned before, but now we are starting to see a pattern from anti-gun groups. There’s a heightened push for gun control at the local level, specifically about State Preemption.

    Giffords, one of the largest anti-gun organizations, has been making a serious push for states to overturn their preemption statutes concerning gun laws. In 2021 they scored a significant victory when the Colorado General Assembly repealed the majority of its firearms preemption statute, making them the first state in the country to do so. According to Allison Alderman, senior counsel at Giffords, other states are looking to follow in Colorado’s footsteps.

    Let’s back up a second and get everyone caught up. If you’re unaware of what State Preemption is, it’s a law that says that no law at the local level can supersede state law. Forty-two states have preemption laws that specifically relate to firearms. Look no further than Montgomery County, Maryland, for an example of why state preemption laws are essential. 

    Montgomery County is constantly trying to make their own gun laws, with at one point making it illegal to have ammunition shipped to anywhere in the county. Because Maryland has State Preemption, Maryland Courts overturned this law. Even still, to this day, Montgomery County continues to attempt to pass its own gun control laws, with its most recent being a de facto ban on firearms throughout the entire county, which is currently being litigated.  

    Steph from TMGN Breaks Down State Preemption Laws and How They Affect You:

    State Preemption laws are a huge reason that many anti-gun jurisdictions in pro-gun states have consistent laws. Many may not remember, but in 1981, a suburb of Chicago, Morton Grove, passed a ban on handguns. They were able to do so because, at the time, there were no state preemption laws related to firearms. If you lived in Morton Grove, you could not possess a handgun. This ban on weapons was considered legal for 27 years until the Supreme Court decided District of Colombia v. Heller, affirming the 2nd Amendment as an individual right.

    Now we’re seeing a revisit of this 80s era Morton Grove mentality. In the aftermath of Colorado repealing its state preemption statute, Boulder, Colorado, is considering reviving its Assault Weapon Ban. The proposed ban would make possession of any rifle with a pistol grip or any pistol loaded outside the pistol grip illegal and punishable by a $1000 fine and 90 days in jail.

    This same ban (which officials from Boulder have previously admitted would be hard to enforce) was deemed invalid by Boulder District Court in 2021, 10 days before a mass shooting in Boulder, CO. This event led to the overturning of the state’s preemption statute.

    Gun owners know that firearms bans do not work. Many studies have been done by non-biased parties that show how gun bans are ineffective. In their own study, even the DOJ admitted that there’s no evidence to support that an “assault weapons ban” had any effect on gun violence whatsoever.

    Regardless of the evidence and data, the Boulder, CO city council seems determined to pass this ban into law, with Councilmember Mark Wallach saying, “This is not very controversial to me, let’s get this done.” About the proposed ban.

    This is precisely why Giffords will be pushing to overturn State Preemption laws across the country. The reality of the situation is that since gun control groups cannot get legislation passed at the federal level, they’ve resorted to where it’s relatively easy to get laws passed: Local government.

    The overturning of state preemption laws sets a dangerous precedent for gun owners. It’s impossible for individuals to know the laws of every county or city. If you were to have a concealed carry permit in your home county but then enter another county that has made carrying a firearm illegal, you’d be committing a crime unknowingly. State preemption goes a long way to ensuring that States don’t become a balkanized patchwork of conflicting gun laws.

    If gun owners don’t oppose the overturn of State Preemption laws, we may see a return to the time of Morton Grove. Remember that Morton Grove’s ban on handguns lasted from 1981 to 2008, 27 years. It was only overturned when the Supreme Court decided on Heller. Even though a few cases regarding so-called “assault weapon” bans are up for the Supreme Court’s consideration, this route of gun control seems to be compelling enough for Allison Anderman of Giffords to say, “It’s a really big deal.”

    The decentralized nature of this attack on our 2A rights will be a tough challenge, but this is exactly why it’s essential for gun owners to make their voices heard and participate in local politics.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 21:40

  • Housing Market Insanity Hits The Suburbs As Million-Dollar Listings Disappear
    Housing Market Insanity Hits The Suburbs As Million-Dollar Listings Disappear

    As investors like BlackRock help drive America’s ‘Housing Bubble 2.0’  to increasingly absurd proportions, Americans are growing surprisingly accustomed to the fact that homes costing $1 million or less are growing increasingly hard to find in a growing number of urban locales. As we reported earlier this month, the number of cities where the price of an average home has topped $1 million has more than doubled over the last five years.

    The dynamic is easy enough to understand: families seeking more space and cheaper prices flee from primary cities to secondary cities – or find a home in a comfortable nearby suburb.

    And because of it, more in-demand suburbs surrounding cities like Boston, New York City, Philadelpha or – on the West Coast – Seattle and Spokane, Washington, are seeing the sub-$1 million homes disappear at a disturbing pace.

    In a recent piece on the out-of-control American housing market, which of course will ultimately leave families holding the bag along with perhaps some investors, Bloomberg offered Wellesley, Mass., which once played host to Hillary Clinton during her college days. The McMansions and other sought-after million-dollar-plus offerings have almost disappeared from the market. Recently, in Wellesley, there were fewer than 10 even on offer.

    Wealthy young urbanites are in a race to the U.S. suburbs. But they’re already late: The starter mansions are almost gone.

    Take Wellesley, a leafy Massachusetts town of 30,000 people getting an influx of buyers from Boston who have outgrown apartments. Couples with dual incomes are coming out of the pandemic with more money, hungry for kids’ rooms and “his” and “her” home offices.

    In the first week of February, there were just eight homes available for sale, a fifth of the level two years earlier. The cheapest one: $1.1 million.

    “You have to act fast,” said Lara O’Rourke, an agent with Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty who helped a buyer beat out 15 others for a house listed for $1.4 million last month. “Inventory is not hanging around.”

    Leave it to Bloomberg to care so much about the interests of the most moneyed Americans. Clearly, they know their audience. We have also reported how the present state of the housing market leaves first time buyers and poorer buyers at a growing disadvantage.

    Of course, the disadvantages of the wealthy have a “spillover effect” that could also hurt the poor.

    Across the country, the upscale homes that were once a symbol of affluence and aspiration for well-to-do suburbanites are in short supply. Buyers are rushing to lock in purchases as mortgage rates rise, intensifying demand. That’s driving up prices from elite commuter towns such as Wellesley and Newton outside of Boston and Rye north of Manhattan, to booming Sun Belt areas like Austin, Texas.

    In a heated U.S. housing market that has locked out many entry-level buyers, people with million-dollar budgets are better positioned than most. But their difficulty finding homes has a spillover effect: They push into surrounding towns, and cheaper segments, squeezing affordability more with each bid.

    “The entry price for these towns has already gone sky high,” said Chris Herbert, managing director for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “It ends up pushing prices up across the board.”

    High-end inventory in areas outside Boston has fallen by more than 40% over the last year. And across the country, wealthy suburbs are increasingly seeing $1 million-plus homes as “the norm”.

    After years of seeing homebuyers shun its megamansions for high-rise apartments in Manhattan, even Greenwich, Conn., has seen inventory dry up.

    As we mentioned earlier, the biggest problem with such hot demand is that it feeds on itself, before eventually becoming a deterrent for families; rising loan costs are another factor as buyers are reluctant to give up a preferential rate.

    With demand so hot, the supply shortage is building upon itself. Older people who might have considered downsizing are staying put instead, avoiding fighting it out with younger buyers for smaller homes. As interest rates rise, homeowners also are less likely to want to move and give up their lower-cost loan. The average rate for a 30-year mortgage reached 3.92% last week, the highest since 2019, according to Freddie Mac.

    In Texas, sales of single-family homes of more than $1 million almost doubled last year, according to an analysis by the Texas Realtors trade group for the 12 months through October. More than a quarter of that activity was in Austin, where an influx of tech workers with Facebook, Google or Tesla Inc. salaries are hunting for space.

    And the result is that working people with budgets in between $1 million and $2 million can’t even get a showing.

    They’re beating out buyers like Jeremy Knight, who has lost four bidding wars. Knight, a local real estate agent who is looking to move to a different school district, says he’s seeking homes with asking prices below $1.8 million but expects to pay more. Houses at the lower end of luxury go well over asking, he said.

    “I was looking at a home for $1.75 million,” Knight said. “Just to get a showing, I had to wiggle in a 15-minute time frame at the end of the day. It was booked from beginning to end.”

    So, if you’re looking to buy a home in the immediate future, you better be ready to compromise: or if they’re willing to wait another six months or so, they might have better luck if the Fed truly does act on the course proposed by Zoltan Pozsar, the oracle of the repo market.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 21:20

  • Order Out Of Chaos: How The Ukraine Conflict Is Designed To Benefit Globalists
    Order Out Of Chaos: How The Ukraine Conflict Is Designed To Benefit Globalists

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    Within the next couple of months it is likely that there will be direct US military involvement in Ukraine, with Russia now openly supporting and recognizing separatist groups in the Donbass region on the eastern edge of the country and apparently moving to aid them militarily in separation. This is not the first time Russia has sent military units into Ukraine, but it is the first time since 2014 and the annexation of Crimea that the threat of military action has been overt rather than covert.

    When conflict erupts, you are going to see a swarm of media stories in western nations trying to outline the complexity of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union, while ignoring certain inconvenient truths. You will see many of these stories construct a narrative which then oversimplifies the situation and paints Russia as the monstrous aggressor. The goal will be to convince the public that our involvement in Ukraine is a moral and geopolitical necessity. There will be attempts to gain American favor and a call for US boots on the ground. Joe Biden will be at the forefront of this push.

    The surface trigger for the confrontation is obviously rooted in the 2009 decision by western powers and Ukrainian officials to consider the country for membership in NATO. Most of Russia’s actions when dealing with Ukraine can be owed to NATO involvement in the region, including the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. Strategically, it makes sense. Imagine if Mexico suddenly announced it was joining a military alliance with China and that Chinese military assets were going to be transferred near the US southern border? It probably would not end well.

    To be sure, Russia has a history of hypocritical behavior when it comes to its involvement in the affairs of its neighbors. For example, only a few months ago Kazakhstan was facing mass protests which the government claimed were caused by “foreign manipulation.” Zero proof was presented to justify this assertion. However, the claim was enough to rationalize the deployment of 2300 Russian troops over the border to shut down the protests.

    In reality, citizens of Kazakhstan were angry over a spike in inflation and high gas prices which continue to grind down the middle class and those in poverty (sound familiar?). In 2019, only 4% of the population lived under the official poverty line. In 2020, that number exploded to 14% of the population. Accurate numbers are difficult to find for 2021, but it is likely that poverty levels are now closer to 16%-20%. The reasons for civil unrest were obvious and justified, but the protesting Kazakhs were accused of being pawns of foreign enemies. As I have noted in many articles lately, this is a typical strategy of corrupt governments trying to retain power when the people rise up and rebel for legitimate reasons.

    Again, imagine if the Canadian government under Trudeau asked for US military assistance in scattering the trucker protests against his draconian vaccine mandates? We need to look at these decisions in context in order to grasp how insane they really are.

    Ironically, Russia is happy to support the unrest of separatists in Ukraine while also helping to silence unrest in Kazakhstan. Keep this pattern in mind because it will help in understanding how events surrounding Russia reflect a global trend that might effect Americans in the future.

    The diplomatic mess between Ukraine and Russia can be blamed in part on both sides, and it’s this kind of historical ambiguity where globalists tend to thrive. The fog of war helps to obscure establishment activities and often it is hard for people to see who is truly benefiting from the chaos until it’s too late. It is my belief that the Ukraine problem is at least partially engineered and that it is designed as a first domino in a chain of intended crises.

    I don’t think there is anything unique to the Ukraine conflict for the globalists; they could have just as easily tried to initiate a regional war in Taiwan, North Korea, Iran, etc. There are numerous powder keg countries that they have been cultivating for a couple of decades. We should not hyperfocus on who is to blame between Ukraine or Russia, we should focus on the effects that will result from any major regional disaster and how the globalists exploit such catastrophes to further the agenda of total centralization of power.

    The Ukraine scenario could be easily defused if both sides took some basic diplomatic measures, but this is not going to happen. NATO officials could take a step back from their pursuit of adding Ukraine to the ranks. The US could stop pouring cash and weaponry into Ukraine to the tune of $5.4 billion since 2014. Over 90 tons of military equipment has been sent to the country in 2022 alone. Russia could stop sending covert special operations units into the Donbass and be more willing to come to the table to discuss diplomatic solutions. The reason these things do not happen is because they are not allowed to happen by the power brokers behind the curtain.

    We are all aware of the globalist influences behind US and NATO leaders, we present the undeniable evidence of this on a regular basis. Biden’s penchant for globalist institutions is well known. But what about Russia?

    There are some in the alternative media and the liberty movement who falsely believe that Russia is anti-globalist – Nothing could be further from the truth. As with many political leaders Putin will sometimes use anti-globalists rhetoric, but his relationships tell another story. In Putin’s first autobiography, titled ‘First Person’, he discusses with fondness his first encounter with New World Order globalist Henry Kissinger as a member of the FSB (formerly the KGB). As Putin rose through the political ranks he maintained a steady friendship with Kissinger and to this day they have regular lunches and Kissinger has been an adviser to multiple branches of the Kremlin.

    It doesn’t stop there, though. Putin and the Kremlin have also kept a steady dialogue with the World Economic Forum, the project of the now notorious globalist Klaus Schwab. In fact, only last year Russia announced it was joining the WEF’s “Fourth Industrial Revolution Network” which focuses on economic socialization, Artificial Intelligence, the “internet of things” and a host of other globalist interests which will all lead to worldwide technocracy and tyranny.

    Again, the Russian government is NOT anti-globalist. This claim is nonsense and always has been. I would attribute the fantasy of Russian opposition to a steady stream of propaganda and what I call the False East/West Paradigm – The fraudulent notion that the globalist agenda is a purely Western or American agenda and that countries like China and Russia are opposed to it. If you look at the close interactions between the east and the globalists, this idea completely falls apart.

    It’s important to understand that most conflicts between the East and the West are engineered conflicts and the leaders of BOTH SIDES are not really at odds with each other. Rather, these wars are Kabuki Theater; they are wars of convenience to achieve covert ends while mesmerizing the masses with moments of terror and calamity. For anyone who has doubts about this, I highly recommend they read the thoroughly researched and evidenced works of professional historian and economist Antony Sutton, who quite accidentally stumbled onto the facts surrounding the globalist conspiracy and went on to expose their habit of playing both sides of nearly every war over the past century from the Bolshevik Revolution to WWII and onward.

    The strategy of order out of chaos is nothing new, it’s something the globalists have been doing for a very long time. The number of open revelations post-Covid about the ‘Great Reset’ that globalists have publicly admitted to is so staggering that their plans can no longer be denied. Any skeptics at this point should be suspected of having a single digit IQ.

    So, now that we have established the reality of globalist involvement in both the west and in Russia, we need to ask ourselves how they benefit from initiating a crisis between these powers over Ukraine? What do they get out of it?

    As I have noted in recent articles, it appears to me that Ukraine is a Plan B attempt to conjure more smoke and mirrors where the covid pandemic failed to satisfy the Great Reset plan. As Klaus Schwab and the WEF has constantly asserted, they saw the pandemic as the perfect “opportunity” to force the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the world. As globalist Rahm Emanual once opined in the wake of the 2008 economic crash:

    “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

    The WEF is an old hand at this tactic. Klaus Schwab also used the same exact language right after the credit crash of 2008 as he has used after the spread of covid, always trying to sell global governance as the solution to every disaster:

    “What we are experiencing is the birth of a new era, a wake-up call to overhaul our institutions, our systems and, above all, our thinking, and to adjust our attitudes and values to the needs of a world which rightly expects a much higher degree of responsibility and accountability,” he explained. “If we recognize this crisis as being really transformational, we can lay the fundaments for a more stable, more sustainable and even more prosperous world.”

    – Klaus Schwab on the Global Redesign Initiative, 2009

    Schwab jumped the gun back then just as he jumped the gun in 2020 when he declared the Great Reset an inevitability in the face of covid. The globalists must have expected a much higher death rate from the virus because they were practically dancing in the streets, elated over the amount of power they could steal in the name of “protecting the public from a global health threat.” If you look at the WEF and Gates Foundation simulation of a covid pandemic, Event 201 which was held only two months before the REAL THING happened, they clearly expected covid to do way more damage, predicting an initial death tally of 65 million. This never happened; it isn’t even close.

    It’s hard to say why an obvious bioweapon like covid failed to do the job. Viruses tend to mutate rapidly in the wild and behave differently than they do in a lab setting. I would even consider the possibility of divine intervention. Whatever the reason, the globalists did not get what they wanted and now they need yet another crisis to oil the gears of the Reset machine. With the already tiny death rate of covid now dropping even further with the Omicron variant and half the states of the US in full defiance of the vax mandates it is only a matter of time before the rest of the world asks why they are still under medical authoritarianism?

    War in Ukraine and the mere threat of that war expanding beyond the region could accomplish a number of things covid has not. It provides an ongoing cover for the stagflationary collapse which is now in full swing in the US, the supply chain problems that continue globally as well as the destabilization of the European economy. In particular, the EU is strongly reliant on Russian natural gas in order to heat homes and maintain its economy. Russia has strangled natural gas supplies to Europe in the past and they will do it again. Russian oil exports also fill demand gaps globally, and these exports will be strangled by sanctions or by the Kremlin deliberately cutting supplies to certain nations.

    War is always a distraction from economic sabotage. Even though the seeds of financial crashes are often planted and watered well in advance by central banks, the banks never get the blame because international conflicts conveniently take center stage. By extension, economic crisis causes mass poverty, mass desperation, and mass hysteria, and globalists will say that these dangers require an international solution that they will happily provide in the form of centralization.

    In the US and in many other western nations which have a large number of people still defending individual freedom, the globalists clearly want to use tensions with Russia as a means to silence public dissent over authoritarian policies. Already I am seeing numerous instances of establishment officials and leftists on social media suggesting that liberty activists are “pawns of the Russians” and that we are being used to “divide and conquer.” This is nonsense backed by nothing, but they are trying out the narrative anyway to see if it sticks.

    I have no doubt that any rebellion in the US against the globalists will be blamed on foreign interference. As mentioned earlier, the last thing the elites want is movements of free people obstructing the Reset in the name of liberty. We witnessed this in Canada where Trudeau announced unilateral emergency powers against the trucker protests, giving himself totalitarian levels of control. Even the Russian government has intervened in such public actions to prevent any kind of activist momentum. Biden will try to do the same thing, and war, even a smaller regional war, gives him a rationale to oppress dissent in the name of public security.

    Interestingly, martial law in the US is also much easier to legally and historically justify for the government as long as it is done in response to the invasion of a foreign enemy. The Russian influence narrative may very well be in preparation for martial law within America. Whether or not this actually succeeds is another matter.

    The consequences of a shooting event in Ukraine will be far reaching well beyond a distraction for the American public; my intent here is not to suggest only Americans will be affected. My point is that there are certain places in the world that are naturally resistant to the globalist scheme, and freedom minded Americans are a primary obstacle. If there is a large scale rebellion against the Great Reset, it’s going to start here. The globalists know this as well, which is why the US will undoubtedly be centrally involved in the Ukraine quagmire.

    While the event would be disastrous for Ukrainians and probably many Russians, there are deeper and more dangerous underlying threats intended for the US and a war in Ukraine acts as an effective scapegoat for many of them.

    *  *  *

    If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 21:00

  • Biden Admin Freezes New Oil And Gas Drilling Leases Despite Recent Court-Ordered Injunction
    Biden Admin Freezes New Oil And Gas Drilling Leases Despite Recent Court-Ordered Injunction

    As oil prices continue to rocket, now further helped along by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration is still fighting tooth and nail to freeze new oil and gas drilling leases – even after a court ruled against the administration for using a metric to estimate “the societal cost of carbon emissions” to justify their move. 

    Despite the court’s ruling, Biden’s administration has stopped new leases and permits for federal oil and gas drilling, MSN reported this week. 

    The administration was previously prevented from using the “social cost of carbon” metric in decisions regarding oil and gas thanks to an injunction issued by US District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana. 

    But government lawyers quickly appealed the injunction, arguing that it “necessitated a pause on all projects where the government was using a social-cost-of-carbon analysis in its decision-making”. This, in turn, allowed the Biden administration to freeze oil and gas projects. 

    The metric in question uses economic models to put a value on each ton of carbon dioxide emitted, MSN reported, with the intention of quantifying the economic harm of climate change. 

    Biden’s lawyers argued: “The consequences of the injunction are dramatic. Pending rulemakings in separate agencies throughout the government — none of which were actually challenged here — will now be delayed. Other agency actions may now be abandoned due to an inability to redo related environmental analyses in time to meet mandatory deadlines.”

    Interior Department spokesperson Melissa Schwartz added: “The Interior Department has assessed program components that incorporate the interim guidance on social cost of carbon analysis from the Interagency Working Group, and delays are expected in permitting and leasing for the oil and gas programs.”

    Schwartz says the Interior Department “continues to move forward with reforms to address the significant shortcomings in the nation’s onshore and offshore oil and gas programs,” the report noted. 

    The timing couldn’t be worse for the administration, as this week’s invasion of Ukraine by Russia has pushed brent well above $100/barrel. We noted earlier this week that JP Morgan has suggested oil could average at about $110/barrel for the remainder of the year – but this prediction was also before the current geopolitical conflict in Europe escalated.

    Great timing, Joe…

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 20:40

  • Free Bitcoin
    Free Bitcoin

    Authored by Marty Bent via The American Mind,

    It has been a bit over thirteen years since Satoshi Nakamoto emerged to introduce the world to an idea he had been working on: Bitcoin. A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Since that announcement, the protocol has attracted a great deal of attention, capital, and scrutiny. 

    As it stands today, the market cap of Bitcoin is $1.25 Trillion. It is beginning to be accepted by many across the world as something that will not be going away any time soon. As many in power begin to come to grips with the fact that Bitcoin isn’t going away, they are beginning to ask themselves, “How do we regulate this thing?”

    I am here to politely ask those who would like to “regulate Bitcoin” to resist the urge and instead turn inward and reflect on the damage that has been wrought by compounding decades’ worth of abysmal regulatory policy decisions, which have done little to stop crime and a whole lot to erode individual privacy, civil liberties, and safety.

    What is Bitcoin?

    To set the stage for a diatribe against US banking regulations in the context of Bitcoin, it is probably advantageous to describe Bitcoin in the context of American values as put forth by the Founding Fathers. Put simply, Bitcoin is the greatest extension and written preservation of Natural Rights since the Bill of Rights was passed by Congress in 1789. The peer-to-peer cash system that Satoshi launched allows any individual with access to the internet the ability to opt in to and audit a free-market monetary system, uncontrolled by any central bank. The world has been in desperate need of this for well over a century.

    By creating a private-public key pair specific to the Bitcoin network, an individual can receive, send, and secure the world’s first digital bearer instrument all by themselves. By creating a 12- or 24-word representation of their private key, anybody who so wishes can walk around naked with the access key to their wealth memorized in their head. There is no more need to trust a bank to grant you access to your wealth, nor to lug a heavy metal like gold across borders to transport your wealth if and when you decide to seek greener pastures. Bitcoin brings these functions into the 21st century and supercharges them in a way that is going to change our markets and culture for the better.

    Since money is the base-layer protocol of economic exchange between humans the world over, it is a very important tool. I would take it a bit further and argue that money is the most important tool that humans use. Either way, it would be in our best interest to ensure that we are using the best version of that tool possible. 

    Unfortunately we have been forced to use very poor monetary goods running through very centralized systems. Most do not realize this because most do not understand money or the concept that there can be free market monies. They simply accept that government-issued monetary goods are the only monetary goods.

    Satoshi understood the inherent problems with government-approved, central-bank-controlled monetary systems. He described them succinctly in an email to the P2P Foundation mailing list a little over a month after Bitcoin was officially launched:

    The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

    Humans are driven by incentives. Central banks create an inherently perverse incentive that drives those in control of the monetary spigots and plumbing to abuse that control to benefit a very small group of connected cronies at the expense of common citizens. This abuse comes in two dominant forms: unfettered seigniorage on a macro level, and subjective censorship on a micro level.

    Unfettered seigniorage is a stealth tax on individuals’ savings as an increase in the money supply inevitably leads to increased prices. No matter how much those in power manipulate the Consumer Price Index in an attempt to make you believe otherwise, money printing unduly affects those who find themselves on the lower rungs of the economic ladder as the purchasing power of their labor (measured in paychecks) decreases gradually, then suddenly over time. Those higher up on the ladder benefit greatly, as they are able to invest in the assets that newly printed money typically gets funneled into: stocks and real estate. 

    There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins. And so this endless, whimsical kind of seigniorage is impossible under a Bitcoin Standard. The common citizen will be able to invest his life force into a monetary good that has a capped supply.

    The payment rails that have been erected on top of the central bank monetary systems enable those in power to unilaterally decide who can and cannot receive and send money. This power is used to disempower those who exhibit wrongthink or conduct business that is deemed unacceptable by the regime.

    Making Things Worse

    Despite more than a decade of screeching from “experts” across academia, economics firms and think-tanks, and Washington, D.C., Bitcoin is still here enabling peer-to-peer digital cash transactions for anyone who can access the network. After almost 13 years of uninterrupted uptime, more and more people and governments are agreeing that Bitcoin is here to stay for the foreseeable future. This has led to a change in posturing from the expert class. They acknowledge that Bitcoin isn’t going away, so now they need to regulate it.

    They don’t even know enough to understand what they’re attempting. Bitcoin in itself cannot be regulated. Centralized companies who have built businesses that leverage the Bitcoin network can certainly be regulated, and the individuals using Bitcoin can be pressured to report their usage. However, at the end of the day it is impossible for these centralized authorities to regulate the rules of the Bitcoin protocol outside of convincing the network of globally distributed node operators to download software with their regulations included. And I can promise you that this is highly unlikely.

    Furthermore, we know that the focus of their efforts to regulate will revolve around importing existing Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering (KYC/AML) laws to the Bitcoin network. These laws find their roots in the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which thrust a dragnet surveillance apparatus on top of the banking system.

    Despite their best efforts, the Bank Secrecy Act and the KYC/AML regulations that have been created in its wake have done little to stop criminals from partaking in criminal activity, while objectively putting law-abiding citizens in harm’s way and creating compliance costs that make it extremely burdensome for competition to enter the banking sector. By forcing companies to collect and store the personal information of everyone they allow to access their services, these ineffective laws and regulations have created massive data honeypots that are constantly being hacked…by criminals who use that data to impersonate people so they can engage in fraud.

    In a world transitioning to a Bitcoin Standard, the continued collection of personal information like email addresses, home addresses, and phone numbers is foolish and dangerous. Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument in the middle of its monetization phase. Creating centrally controlled databases of bitcoiners, where they live, how to contact them, how much bitcoin they’ve bought over time, and whether or not they’ve moved their bitcoin to personal storage does little more than put tens of millions of individuals at risk of harm. And how much longer will we burden companies with expensive compliance practices that do nothing but put their customers at risk?

    Getting people to ask this simple question is a great first step when it comes to saving bitcoiners from regulation. Individuals need to realize that these regulations are causing far more negative outcomes than positive outcomes.

    Another avenue that will save bitcoiners from over-regulation is the well-calibrated incentive system embedded in the social layer of the protocol, particularly the incentives around mining bitcoin. There is a very strong narrative permeating regime-controlled and allied media that bitcoin is bad for the environment because of how much energy is dedicated to securing the network.

    While it is true that the Bitcoin network uses substantial energy, as befits a culture where investments of time and energy are at the root of property and property rights, what you’ll find when you zoom in is that miners are typically using energy resources that would typically be wasted or stranded. This is because miners are looking to drive their electricity costs as low as possible, and previously wasted and/or stranded energy sources provide those low costs. In that sense Bitcoin miners are driving humanity toward peak energy efficiency. No joules left behind!

    There are many states that have stranded and wasted energy assets within their borders. It is only a matter of time before a forward-thinking state (my satoshis are on Wyoming) invests in bitcoin mining infrastructure that leverages previously wasted energy and rolls the mining profits into a permanent fund. Bitcoin mining permanent funds will enable states to keep their in-state taxes extremely low while providing them significant leverage against the federal government. This leverage provides another safeguard against burdensome regulation of bitcoin businesses. The revenues realized by mining and the services made possible by well-funded permanent funds will incentivize state governments to make sure that bitcoin businesses aren’t over-regulated.

    Judging by current events in the US and abroad, it is highly likely that the federal government will react out of fear as Bitcoin rises to prominence, enacting regulations that make it extremely hard for bitcoin businesses to operate without collecting insane amounts of data and impossible for users to use Bitcoin in a peer-to-peer fashion. Bitcoin is anathema to the central bank digital currency system, a mechanism of total surveillance fused in unholy union with social and financial credit, that the regime would like to herd us all into. Such a scheme enables complete control over every aspect of our lives. The only sufficiently powerful digital alternative to this system is Bitcoin.

    My hope is that enough people wake up, realize the madness of technologically establishing anti-human and anti-freedom policies, and use Bitcoin to build fresh institutions that preserve both our freedom and our humanity. 

    *  *  *

    is the founder of TFTC.io, a media company focused on Bitcoin, beauty, and freedom in the digital age.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 20:20

  • Morgan Stanley Finally Acknowledges DoJ "Block Trading" Probe
    Morgan Stanley Finally Acknowledges DoJ “Block Trading” Probe

    Given the wealth of information that has already been leaked (likely by the DoJ & SEC) about the “block trading” investigation, Morgan Stanley’s official disclosure of the investigation in its Annual Report (released Thursday) seemed almost comically brief.

    For instance, the Street already knows the name of the top Morgan Stanley banker involved: Pawan Passi, once the head of the bank’s equity syndicate desk – he has supposedly been “on leave” from the bank since November. That was reported by Bloomberg, and both BBG and WSJ have reported a the names of some of the other bankers involved, as well as some of the key buy-side clients (including one Citadel-controlled fund).

    They include: Andrew Liebeskind at Citadel’s Surveyor Capital and Jon Dorfman at Element Capital Management. Felipe Portillo, a risk executive within Credit Suisse’s equity capital markets group, Michael Daum, a partner at Goldman and Michael Lewis, the head of US equities cash trading at Barclays (and a former Morgan Stanley banker until 2018). Those are some heavy-hitters, for sure. So far, the media organizations that have reported on their alleged involvement have refused to offer any details, saying only that they are somehow “involved”.

    It was only revealed about a week ago that the Archegos block trades (trades that Zero Hedge was among the first to report) which were among the most visible such trades in recent Wall Street memory, were indeed involved in the investigation (which supposedly  began years earlier). 

    In that incident, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs avoided the worst losses by breaking a backdoor agreement among half a dozen major global megabanks to try and parcel out the Archegos holdings slowly.

    Again, from what we know so far, the probe is examining whether hedge fund clients of Morgan Stanley and others were unfairly “tipped off” in advance of the trades. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine memorably explained once how bankers routinely pitch potentially interested parties about impending deals, and how a potential “gray area” like that described in the anonymously-sourced reports on the trades might come to exist.

    In its statement in its Annual Report, Morgan Stanley admitted it had been responding to “requests” from the SEC or DoJ about “block trading” since June 2019. A subheading entitled “Block Trading Matter” was included under the section “Legal Proceedings”:

    Beginning in June of 2019, the Firm has been responding to requests for information from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with an investigation of various aspects of the Firm’s block trading business.

    The bank then admitted that the requests started coming from federal prosecutors nearly two years later in August 2021.

    Beginning in August of 2021, the Firm has been responding to requests for information from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY in connection with its investigation of the same subject matter. The Firm is cooperating with these investigations.

    Block trades are a growing source of business for megabanks, with revenues from US block trades rising to $727.9 million in 2021 from $508 million in 2020, according to Dealogic data. Overall last year, there were $70.8 billion worth of block trades, up from $41.4 billion a year earlier. Of this, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs take home the lion’s share of the revenue – and the profits.

    Morgan Stanley’s annual report didn’t say anything about the SEC’s concurrent probe into spoofing and other manipulation by short sellers which has ensnared major short-selling hedge funds like Carson Block’s Muddy Waters.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 20:00

  • Is Tunnel Vision Hiding How Bad Things Are?
    Is Tunnel Vision Hiding How Bad Things Are?

    Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

    As eager as many of us are to put Covid-19 behind us we as a society simply have not turned the corner. Mainstream media has us in a stranglehold as it continues what is news and how to report it. Not seeing the bigger picture is something many people seem to suffer from. It occurred to me the other day that tunnel vision may be hiding just how bad things are.  

    I See Nothing – It Looks Alright To Me

    A lot of the problems I hear about come from those around me during conversations. These have to do with things the mainstream media is ignoring or not putting into proper perspective. Whether this is intentional or proof the media gets a big fail for keeping us informed is up for debate. The one thing that is clear is they seldom address the ramifications flowing from the events they report and how one problem also compounds another.  

    Another way to look at this is that it is becoming more difficult to reconcile all the lies and misconceptions floating around out there. Since most people are not deep thinkers, they seldom tie the consequences resulting from events together. It is necessary to do this to form a reasonable opinion as to whether something is good or bad. Simply taking the word of some babbling bias idiot from the news media has its drawbacks and adds to the dumbing down of society. 

    All this has clowns coming out of the woodwork with predictions. Call them wild, call them pure speculation, call them anything you like. The one thing I do know is that they can’t all be right and some will prove to be very very wrong. Some of these predictions are very specific, such as the one being thrown out there by Felix Zulauf. He claims we will see a 20% plus drop in the markets by summer, then a huge bull market lasting through 2024 caused by the Fed pivoting as we drop into recession.

    We even have some economy watchers putting forth the idea inflation is about to max out or will start to fall since the numbers are based on year-over-year figures. Still, it is difficult to discount other pressing issues that remain. One of these is what will happen to overall incomes with many people still not planning to return to work. Another has to do with the fact supply chains remain a mess and may get far worse if social unrest continues to spread. 

    An example of this, hidden from much of America by the media is highlighted by how the Canadian truckers, protest has brought freight shipments in Canada to a standstill. Also, we  are seeing a substantial slowing in many countries and segments of the economy. Another thing we must look at is “liquidity,” it is important to remember money is not distributed equally. If Fed tightening does occur, certain segments of the economy will suffer far more than others. 

    Headlines twisted to give a positive spin on things, such as, “U.S. industrial production jumps in January on demand for heating” tend to mask the fact this is not good for most people. This headline just came across my page, while it sounds upbeat, it is economically problematic. In short, it means consumers are paying more to heat their homes and that they will have less money to spend on other items. 

    It is somewhat amazing that in the last few days, the situation that has brewed so long in Ukraine is being used as the primary excuse for the market moving lower. More incredible is that people are accepting this, that narrative pushes away the bigger issue of the Fed tightening and raising interest rates at the same time the economy is slowing.

    The one thing I do know is that most Americans are poorly equipped to handle the  economic storm heading our way. When things are too ugly to look at, people ignore them and choose not to “handle” the truth. So many people have accepted as fact five major economic myths that allow them to brush aside reality. They are; 

    • Government is for and by the people

    • Financial planning means you only have to start saving a little money each year to guarantee an easy retirement

    • You have rights and we are not slaves

    • Your life will progress and move along pretty much as you have planned

    • Those in charge or above you care about you and will protect you 

    The ugly truth is pensions are bankrupt and so is our government, but we are not alone. In fact, in many ways America is still far better off  than many or should we say most other countries. The volatility we have seen in the market as of late has left many investors whipsawed out of their money and the worst is probably yet to come.  I see this as an indication we may be closer to the end of this euphoric bull market than many investors think.  Those that have been buying market dips should remember that markets climb a wall of worry but when they crash, it can come fast and furious.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 19:40

  • Uranium Stocks Surge After Swedish Utility Giant Suspends Deliveries Of Russian Uranium And Nuclear Fuel
    Uranium Stocks Surge After Swedish Utility Giant Suspends Deliveries Of Russian Uranium And Nuclear Fuel

    The uranium sector got an unexpected boost today when Swedish state-owned utility Vattenfall announced it will cease taking any deliveries of nuclear fuel from Russia for its nuclear power plants following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The company on Thursday said it has decided to stop planned deliveries and to not place any new orders from Russia until further notice. Vattenfall added the operation of its nuclear power stations will not be affected as its procurement strategy is to have multiple suppliers from different countries.

    From the press release:

    We are deeply concerned by the serious security situation in Europe and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    We have therefore decided that no planned deliveries from Russia to our nuclear power plants will take place until further notice.

    We will also not place any new orders from Russia to our nuclear power plants until further notice.

    Our procurement strategy is based on having multiple suppliers from different countries, in order to safeguard our independence and security of supply to our nuclear power plants. Based on this we also have plans to manage possible irregularities in the supply. The operation of our nuclear power plants will therefore not be affected by these decisions.

    The company, which generates electricity from a range of sources, including hydro, nuclear, fossil fuels and wind, aims to phase out fossil generation and increase the share of renewables. In 2021, nuclear accounted for 40.4 TWh of the company’s total generation of 111.3 TWh, while wind provided 11.1 TWh. According to the company’s website, in 2020, nuclear energy accounted for around 30% of Sweden’s electricity production.

    The news sent North American uranium miners soaring, with Cameco gaining as much as 12% in Toronto, on trading volume double the 20-day average so far. Energy Fuels was up nearly 11%, while other gainers include: NexGen Energy +9.8%, Uranium Energy +9.4%.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 19:20

  • Mitt Romney Blames Trump's "America First" Policy For Russian Attack On Ukraine
    Mitt Romney Blames Trump’s “America First” Policy For Russian Attack On Ukraine

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Senator Mitt Romney believes he’s identified where the real blame lies for Russia’s attack on Ukraine – former President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

    The former presidential candidate made the comments following Moscow’s bombardment of Ukraine’s military infrastructure.

    While Romney did criticize Joe Biden for his failed attempt at a Russian “reset,” he saved most of his invective for Trump’s “America first” foreign policy approach.

    “Putin’s impunity predictably follows our tepid response to his previous horrors in Georgia and Crimea, our naive efforts at a one-sided ‘reset’ and the shortsightedness of ‘America First,’” Romney wrote.

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

    Romney’s admonishment of “America First” is somewhat discredited by the fact that Putin made no significantly aggressive moves against neighboring countries during Trump’s term in office.

    During Barack Obama’s second term, when Biden was vice-president, Putin annexed Crimea.

    “The ’80s called’ and we didn’t answer,” said Romney, referring to when Obama dismissed the Senator’s concerns about the threat Russia posed to the world during the 2012 debates.

    As we highlighted earlier, Vladimir Putin attempted to justify the attack by saying he was fighting Nazis, a common trope now so overused it should be permanently retired.

    *  *  *

    Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

    In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behinds the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 19:00

  • Praise Of Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Battalion Given Green Light By Facebook: Intercept
    Praise Of Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Battalion Given Green Light By Facebook: Intercept

    Facebook is now allowing its billions of users to praise a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit called the Azov Battalion, after the social media giant previously banned the group from free discussion under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept‘s Sam Biddle reports.

    According to Biddle, the Azov regiment – which functions as an armed wing of the broader Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement – is classified as a “Tier 1” dangerous organization under FB policy, alongside the likes of ISIS and the KKK. It began as a volunteer anti-Russia militia before officially joining the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014, and is known for its hardcore ultranationalist views and neo-Nazi ideology.

    The group was formally banned by Facebook in 2019, and designated (along with several individuals) under the company’s prohibition against hate groups – subject to their harshest “Tier 1” restrictions that ban users from “praise, support, or representation” of blacklisted groups across all company-owned platforms.

    Members of the Ukrainian National Guard’s Azov Battalion train at their base in Urzuf, Ukraine. Brendan Hoffman for USA TODAY

    According to Biddle:

    Though it has in recent years downplayed its neo-Nazi sympathies, the group’s affinities are not subtle: Azov soldiers march and train wearing uniforms bearing icons of the Third Reich; its leadership has reportedly courted American alt-right and neo-Nazi elements; and in 2010, the battalion’s first commander and a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, Andriy Biletsky, stated that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].” With Russian forces reportedly moving rapidly against targets throughout Ukraine, Facebook’s blunt, list-based approach to moderation puts the company in a bind: What happens when a group you’ve deemed too dangerous to freely discuss is defending its country against a full-scale assault? -The Intercept

    According to Facebook’s new internal policy reviewed by The Intercept, the company will “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.”

    Examples of allowed speech include: “Azov movement volunteers are real heroes, they are a much needed support to our national guard,” and “We are under attack. Azov has been courageously defending our town for the last 6 hours,” and “I think Azov is playing a patriotic role during this crisis.”

    That said, the group still can’t use Facebook for recruiting purposes or publishing its own statements. The regiment’s uniforms and banners will continue to be banned as hate symbol imagery.

    Examples of speech regarding the group that’s not allowed, includes things like: “Goebbels, the Fuhrer and Azov, all are great models for national sacrifices and heroism,” and “Well done Azov for protecting Ukraine and it’s white nationalist heritage.”

    Facebook confirmed the decision, but refused to elaborate.

    Other “Tier 1” groups include the Islamic State and the Ku Klux Klan.

    Read the rest of the report here.

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 18:40

  • 'Follow The Data', They Said, And Then They Hid It
    ‘Follow The Data’, They Said, And Then They Hid It

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

    Never before has the public had access to so much data on a virus and its effects. For two years, data festooned the daily papers. Dozens of websites assembled it. We were all invited to follow the data, follow the science, and observe as scientists became our new overlords, instructing us how to feel, think, and behave in order to “flatten the curve,” “drive down cases,” “preserve capacity,” “stay safe,” and otherwise deploy all the powers of human will to respond to and manipulate disease outcomes.

    We could watch it all in real time. How beautiful were the waves, the curves, the bar charts, the sheer power of the technology. We can look at all the variations and the trajectories, assemble them by country, click here and click there to compare, see new cases, total cases, unvaccinated and vaccinations, infections and hospitalizations, deaths in total or death per capita, and we could even make a game out of it: which country is doing better at the great task, which group is better at complying, which region has the best outcomes.

    It was all quite dazzling, the power of the personal computer combined with data collection techniques, universal testing, instant transmission, and the democratization of science. We were all invited to participate from our laptops to bone up on statistics, download and look, assemble and draw, manipulate and observe, and be in awe of the masters of the numbers and their capacity for responding to every trend as it was captured and chronicled in real time.

    Then one day, writing at the New York Times, reporter Apoorva Mandavilli revealed the following:

    For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public …. Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.

    Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

    Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

    At the appearance of this story, my data science friends who have been digging through the databases for nearly two years all let a collective: argh! They knew something was very wrong and had been complaining about it for more than a year. These are sophisticated people at Rational Ground who keep their own charts and host data programs of their own. They have been curious all along about the exaggerations, the poor communication regarding the gradients of risk, the lags and holes in the demographic data on hospitalization and death, to say nothing of the strange way in which the CDC has been manipulating presentations on everything from masking to vaccination status and much more.

    It’s been a strange experience for them, especially since other countries in the world have been absolutely scrupulous about collecting and distributing data, even when the results do not comport with policy priorities. There can be little doubt, for example, that the missing data bears on the issue of vaccine effectiveness and very likely demonstrates that the claim that this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is completely unsustainable, even from the time when it was first made.

    In the New York Times story, many top epidemiologists were quoted expressing everything from frustration to outrage.

    “We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021. A detailed analysis, she said, “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”

    Well, if public trust is the goal, it’s not going so well. In addition to the failings revealed here, there are many other questions concerning cases and whether and to what extent the PCR testing can really tell us what we need to know, to what degree did the misclassification problem affect death attribution, and so much more. It seems that with each month that has gone by, what seemed to be these beautiful pictures of reality have faded into a murky data quagmire in which we don’t know what is real and what is not. And ever more, the CDC itself has urged us to ignore what we do see (VAERS data, for example).

    Dr. Robert Malone makes an interesting point. If a scientist at a university or a lab is found to have deliberately buried relevant data because they contradict a preset conclusion, the results are professional ruin. The CDC, however, has legal privileges that allows it to get away with actions that would otherwise be considered fraud in academia.

    There are many analogies between economics and epidemiology, as many have noticed over the last two years. The attempt to plan the economy in the past has suffered from many of the same failures as the attempt to plan a pandemic. There are collection problems, unintended consequences, knowledge problems, issues of mission creep, uncertainties over causal inference, a presumption that all agents obey the plan when in fact they do not, and a wild pretense that planners have the necessary knowledge, skill, and coordination required to presume to replace the decentralized and dispersed knowledge base that makes society work.

    Murray Rothbard called statistics the Achilles heel of economic planning. Without the data, economists and bureaucrats couldn’t even begin to believe they could achieve their far-flung dreams, much less put them into practice. For this reason, he favored leaving all economic data collection to the private sector so that it is actually useful for enterprise rather than abused by government. In addition, there is simply no way that data alone can provide a genuine full picture of reality. There will always be holes. It will always be late. There will always be mistakes. There will always be uncertainties over causality. Moreover, all data represents a snapshot in time and can prove extremely misleading with changes over time. And these can be fatal for decision making.

    We are seeing this play itself out in epidemiological planning too. The endless streams of data over two years have created what Sunetra Gupta calls “the illusion of control” when in fact the world of pathogens and its interaction with the human experience is infinitely complex. That illusion also creates dangerous habits on the part of planners, which we’ve seen.

    There was never a reason to close schools, lock people in their homes, block travel, shut businesses, mask kids, mandate vaccines, and so on. It’s almost as if they wanted human beings to behave in ways that better fit their own modeling techniques rather than allow their knowledge base to defer to the complexity of the human experience.

    And now we know that we’ve been denied information that the CDC has kept in hiding for the better part of a year, undoubtedly to serve the purpose of forcing the appearance of reality to more closely conform to a political narrative. We only have a fraction of what has been accumulated. What we thought we knew was only a glimpse of what was actually known on the inside.

    There is no shortage of scandals associated with pandemic policy over two years. For those who are interested in finding out precisely what caused the lights to be dimmed or even turned out on modern civilization, we can add another scandal to the list.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 02/24/2022 – 18:20

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