Today’s News 25th June 2024

• Fossil Fuel, CO2 Emissions Hit Record High In 2023
  Fossil Fuel, CO2 Emissions Hit Record High In 2023

  Don’t tell Greta, or her much easier on the eyes replacement, Sophia.

  At a time when the peak of “green” virtue signaling has come and gone, we regret to inform you that all that jawboning and posturing has achieved… absolutely nothing because according to the Statistical Review of World Energy report released on Thursday, global fossil fuel consumption and energy emissions hit all-time highs in 2023 (even as fossil fuels’ share of the global energy mix decreased slightly on the year).

  Growing demand for fossil fuel despite the scaling up of renewables could be a sticking point for the transition to lower carbon energy as climate alarmist scream and rage that global temperature increases are set to reach 1.5C (2.7F), the threshold beyond which scientists say impacts such as temperature rise, drought and flooding will become more extreme; then again these are the same shrill activists who predicted in 2018 that the world would end unless we stop using fossil fuels by 2023. Not only has that not happened, but fossil fuel use is hitting annual records!

  “We hope that this report will help governments, world leaders and analysts move forward, clear-eyed about the challenge that lies ahead,” Romain Debarre of consultancy Kearney said, realizing with even clearer-eyes that absolutely nothing will change since the bulk of fossil fuel consumption now comes from China and India, both of which could give a rat’s ass what some woke liberal kitten-hoarding, purple-haired screaming freak thinks.

  

  Last year was the first full year of rerouted Russian energy flows away from the West following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and also the first full year without major movement restrictions linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, it confirms that attempts to throttle Russian sales of fossil fuels have been a total fiasco.

  It gets better (or worse if you are a green lunatic): overall global primary energy consumption hit an all-time high of 620 Exajoules (EJ), the report said…

  

  … as CO₂ emissions exceeded 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time.

  

  “In a year where we have seen the contribution of renewables reaching a new record high, ever increasing global energy demand means the share coming from fossil fuels has remained virtually unchanged,” Simon Virley of consultancy KPMG said.

  The report recorded shifting trends in fossil fuel use in different regions. In Europe, for example, the fossil fuel share of energy fell below 70% for the first time since the industrial revolution.

  “In advanced economies, we observe signs of demand for fossil fuels peaking, contrasting with economies in the Global South for whom economic development and improvements in quality of life continue to drive fossil growth,” Energy Institute Chief Executive Nick Wayth said.

  And since nobody dares to dictate conditions to the “global south” lest they stop producing the cheap crap demanded by the “global north” (to feed their ravenous consumerist habits) sparking epic inflation, nothing will change.

  Industry body the Energy Institute, together with consultancies KPMG and Kearney, has published the annual report since 2023. They took over from BP which had authored the report, a benchmark for energy professionals, since the 1950s.

  It will come as no surprise to anyone that fossil fuel accounted for almost all demand growth in India in 2023, the report said, while in China fossil fuel use rose 6% to a new high

  Here are some highlights from the report on 2023:

  CONSUMPTION

  • Global primary energy demand rose by 2% in 2023 from 2022, to 620 EJ.
  • Fossil fuel use rose 1.5% to 505 EJ, which accounted for 81.5% of the overall energy mix, down by 0.5% from 2022.
  • Fossil fuel use did not increase in a single European country in 2023.
  • Electricity generation rose by 2.5% in 2023, up slightly from 2.3% of growth the previous year.
  • Renewable fuel generation (excluding hydro) gained 13% to a new record high of 4,748 terawatt-hours (TWh).
  • Renewables’ share of the overall energy mix excluding hydro was 8%, up from 7.5% in the 2022 report.
  • Including hydro renewables accounted for 15% of the global mix.

  OIL

  • Oil consumption exceeded 100 million bpd in 2023 for the first time ever, following a 2% year-on-year rise.
  • Oil supply growth was met by non-OPEC+ producers, with U.S. output gaining 9% on the year.
  • China overtook the U.S. as the country with the largest refining capacity in the world last year at 18.5 million bpd, though refining volumes still lagged behind at 82% utilisation vs the U.S.’ 87%.
  • Global gasoline consumption hit 25 million bpd last year, just above its 2019 pre-pandemic level.
  • Biofuels production increased by 8% to 2.1 million bpd in 2023, driven by gains in the U.S. and Brazil.
  • The U.S., Brazil, and Europe accounted for 80% of global biofuels consumption.

  NATURAL GAS

  • Global gas production and consumption remained relatively flat on the year in 2023.
  • LNG supply rose by almost 2% to 549 billion cubic metres (bcm).
  • The U.S. overtook Qatar as the leading global supplier of LNG after a 10% rise in production.
  • Overall European gas demand was down 7% on the year in 2023.
  • Russia’s share of European gas supply was just 15% in 2023, from 45% in 2021.

  COAL

  • Coal consumption hit a new high of 164 EJ in 2023, up 1.6% on the year, driven by China and India.
  • India’s coal consumption exceeded that of Europe and North America combined.
  • U.S. coal consumption fell by 17% in 2023 and has halved in the last decade.

  RENEWABLES

  • The record high in renewable generation was driven by higher wind and solar capacity, with 67% more additions in those two categories in 2023 than 2022.
  • As much as 74% of net growth in overall power generation came from renewables.
  • China accounted for 55% of all renewable generation additions in 2023, and was responsible for 63% of new global wind and solar capacity.

  EMISSIONS

  • Emissions grew by 2% on the year to exceed 40 gigatonnes.
  • Emissions rose despite the slight drop in fossil fuels’ share of the energy mix, because emissions within the fossil fuels category became more intense as oil and coal use rose and gas held steady.
  • The report notes that since 2000, emissions from energy have increased by 50%.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 06/25/2024 – 02:45

• Diplomats Tour Beirut Airport After UK Media Alleges Presence Of Hezbollah Weapons
  Diplomats Tour Beirut Airport After UK Media Alleges Presence Of Hezbollah Weapons

  Via The Cradle

  Diplomatic and media delegations toured Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport on Monday, one day after UK newspaper The Telegraph released a report claiming that Hezbollah had hidden weapons inside the facility. 

  Lebanon’s Information Minister Ziad al-Makari, Foreign Minister Abdullah Bou Habib, Tourism Minister Walid Nassar, and other officials attended the airport tour. Several ambassadors and media correspondents, including one from The Cradle, were also present. 

  

  They were shown the main cargo centers, a site storing imported goods, and several locations in the vicinity of the airport. 

  “The British Department of Transport is an official body concerned with transport. It visited Beirut Airport six months ago and viewed all its corners. It would have been more effective for this newspaper to rely on the Authority as a source in its article and not to unknown people and unknown parties,” Lebanese Transport Minister Ali Hamieh said during a press conference after the tour. 

  He also reiterated what he said a day earlier, on Sunday, about consultations being held with Lebanon’s prime minister and legal teams to file a lawsuit against The Telegraph, adding: “What is happening is a psychological war against Lebanon… we have proven that the article is ridiculous.”

  The UK newspaper cited “whistleblowers” from the airport on June 23 as saying they were concerned about increasing weapons deliveries coming into the country on direct flights from Iran, claiming they had seen “unusually big boxes” and the “increased presence of high-level Hezbollah commanders.”

  The Telegraph quoted Lebanon’s International Air Transport Association (IATA) as saying that it has been aware of Hezbollah weapons at the airport “for years” but is unable to do anything about it. 

  After the IATA announced that the quote was completely false, the daily edited the article, attributing the same quote to an unnamed “major international aviation body.”

  Commenting on the allegations, a high-ranking Lebanese security official told The Cradle on Sunday: “They spread lies to later justify any Israeli attack against Beirut airport because they want to isolate Lebanon. The enemy spreads these rumors as a kind of psychological warfare.”

  Al Qassam Brigades using anti-tank guided missiles (Chinese Hongjian-8 ‘Red Arrow’) against Israeli vehicles.

  Just wow. pic.twitter.com/m0r1yjhDzD

  — MenchOsint (@MenchOsint) June 24, 2024

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

  A large group of foreign ambassadors toured several sites in the vicinity of Beirut airport in 2018 to refute Israeli claims about missile depots in the area. In 2020, after Benjamin Netanyahu claimed a residential area in the Lebanese capital was being used to store weapons, Hezbollah invited international and local media to visit the site, and no such weaponry was found.

  Israel bombed Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport at the start of the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 06/25/2024 – 02:00

• Putin's "War" To Re-Shape The American Zeitgeist
  Putin’s “War” To Re-Shape The American Zeitgeist

  Submitted by Alastair Crooke

  The G7 and the subsequent Swiss ‘Bürgenstock Conference’ can – in retrospect – be understood as preparation for a prolonged Ukraine war. The three centrepiece announcements emerging from the G7 – the 10 year Ukraine security pact; the $50 ‘billion Ukraine loan’; and the seizing of interest on Russian frozen funds – make the point. The war is about to escalate.

  

  These stances were intended as preparation of the western public ahead of events. And in case of any doubts, the blistering belligerency towards Russia emerging from the European election leaders was plain enough: They sought to convey a clear impression of Europe preparing for war.

  What then lies ahead? According to White House Spokesman John Kirby: “Washington’s position on Kiev is “absolutely clear”:

  “First, they’ve got to win this war”.

  “They gotta win the war first. So, number one: We’re doing everything we can to make sure they can do that. Then when the war’s over … Washington will assist in building up Ukraine’s military industrial base”.

  If that was not plain, the U.S. intent to prolong and take the war deep into Russia was underlined by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan: “Authorization for Ukrainian use of American weapons for cross-border attacks extends to anywhere [from which] Russian forces are coming across the border”. He affirmed, too, that Ukraine can use F-16s to attack Russia and use U.S. supplied air defence systems “to take down Russian planes – even if in Russian airspace – if they’re about to fire into Ukrainian airspace”.

  Ukrainian pilots have the latitude to judge ‘the intent’ of Russian fighter aircraft? Expect the parameters of this ‘authorisation’ to widen quickly – deeper to air bases from which Russian fighter bombers launch.

  Understanding that the war is about to transform radically – and extremely dangerously – President Putin (in his speech to the Foreign Ministry Board) detailed just how the world had arrived at this pivotal juncture – one which could extend to nuclear exchanges.

  The gravity of the situation itself demanded the making of one ‘last chance’ offer to the West, which Putin emphatically said was “no temporary ceasefire for Kiev to prepare a new offensive; nor was it about freezing the conflict”; but rather, his proposals were about the war’s final completion.

  “If, as before, Kiev and western capitals refuse it – then at the end, that’s their business”, Putin said.

  Just to be clear, Putin almost certainly never expected the proposals to be received in the West other than by the scorn and derision with which they, in fact, were met. Nor would Putin trust – for a moment – the West not to renege on an agreement, were some arrangement to be reached on these lines.

  If so, why then did President Putin make such a proposal last weekend, if the West cannot be trusted and its reaction was so predictable?

  Well, maybe we need to search for the nesting inner Matryoshka doll, rather than fix on the outer casing: Putin’s ‘final completion’ likely will not credibly be achieved through some itinerant peace broker. In his Foreign Ministry address, Putin dismisses devices such as ‘ceasefires’ or ‘freezes’. He is seeking something permanent: An arrangement that has ‘solid legs’; one that has durability.

  Such a solution – as Putin before has hinted – requires a new world security architecture to come into being; and were that to happen, then a complete solution for Ukraine would flow as an implicit part to a new world order. That is to say, with the microcosm of a Ukraine solution flowing implicitly from the macrocosm agreement between the U.S. and the ‘Heartland’ powers – settling the borders to their respective security interests.

  This clearly is impossible now, with the U.S. in its psychological mindset stuck in the Cold War era of the 1970s and 1980s. The end to that war – the seeming U.S. victory – set the foundation to the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine which underscored American supremacy at all costs in a post-Soviet world, together with “stamping out rivals, wherever they may emerge”.

  “In conjunction with this, the Wolfowitz Doctrine stipulated that the U.S. would … [inaugurate] a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic zone of peace”. Russia, on the other hand, was dealt with differently—the country fell off the radar. It became insignificant as a geopolitical competitor in the eyes of the West, as its gestures of peaceful offerings were rebuffed – and guarantees given to it regarding NATO’s expansion forfeited”.

  “Moscow could do nothing to prevent such an endeavour. The successor state of the mighty Soviet Union was not its equal, and thus not considered important enough to be involved in global decision-making. Yet, despite its reduced size and sphere of influence, Russia has persisted in being considered a key player in international affairs”.

  Russia today is a preeminent global actor in both the economic and political spheres. Yet for the Ruling Strata in the U.S., equal status between Moscow and Washington is out of the question. The Cold War mentality still infuses the Beltway with the unwarranted confidence that the Ukraine conflict might somehow result in Russian collapse and dismemberment.

  Putin in his address, by contrast, looked ahead to the collapse of the Euro-Atlantic security system – and of a new architecture emerging. “The world will never be the same again”, Putin said.

  Implicitly, he hints that such a radical shift would be the only way credibly to end the Ukraine war. An agreement emerging from the wider framework of consensus on the division of interests between the Rimland and the Heartland (in Mackinder-esque language) would reflect the security interests of each party – and not be achieved at the expense of others’ security.

  And to be clear: If this analysis is correct, Russia may not be in such a hurry to conclude matters in Ukraine. The prospect of such a ‘global’ negotiation between Russia-China and the U.S. is still far off.

  The point here is that the collective western psyche has not been transformed sufficiently. Treating Moscow with equal esteem remains out of the question for Washington.

  The new American narrative is no negotiations with Moscow now, but maybe it will become possible sometime early in the new year – after the U.S. elections.

  Well, Putin might surprise again – by not jumping at the prospect, but rebuffing it; assessing that the Americans still are not ready for negotiations for a ‘complete end’ to the war – especially as this latest narrative runs concurrently with talk of a new Ukraine offensive shaping up for 2025. Of course, much is likely to change over the coming year.

  The documents outlining a putative new security order however, were already drafted by Russia in 2021 – and duly ignored in the West. Russia perhaps can afford to wait out military events in Ukraine, in Israel, and in the financial sphere.

  They are all, in any event, trending Putin’s way. They are all inter-connected and have the potential for wide metamorphosis.

  Put plainly: Putin is waiting on the shaping of the American Zeitgeist. He seemed very confident both at St Petersburg and last week at the Foreign Ministry.

  The backdrop to the G7’s Ukraine preoccupation seemed to be more U.S. elections-related, than real: This implies that the priority in Italy was election optics, rather than a desire to start a full-blown hot war. But this may be wrong.

  Russian speakers during these recent gatherings – notably Sergei Lavrov – hinted broadly that the order already had come down for war with Russia. Europe seems, however improbably, to be gearing up for war – with much chatter about military conscription.

  Will it all blow away with the passing of a hot summer of elections? Maybe.

  The coming phase seems likely to entail western escalation, with provocations occurring inside Russia. The latter will react strongly to any crossing of (real) red lines by NATO, or any false flag provocation (now widely expected by Russiam military bloggers).

  And herein lies the greatest danger: In the context of escalation, American disdain for Russia poses the greatest danger. The West now says it treats notions of putative nuclear exchange as Putin’s ‘bluff’. The Financial Times tells us that Russia’s nuclear warnings are ‘wearing thin’ in the West.

  If this is true, western officials utterly misconceive the reality. It is only by understanding and taking the Russian nuclear warnings seriously that we may exclude the risk of nuclear weapons coming into play, as we move up the escalatory ladder with tit-for-tat measures.

  Even though they say they believe them to be bluff, U.S. figures nonetheless hype the risk of a nuclear exchange. If they think it to be a bluff, it appears to be based on the presumption that Russia has few other options.

  This would be wrong: There are several escalatory steps that Russia can take up the ladder, before reaching the tactical nuclear weapon stage: Trade and financial counter-attack; symmetrical provision of advanced weaponry to western adversaries (corresponding to U.S. supplies to Ukraine); cutting the electricity branch distribution coming from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania; strikes on border munition crossings; and taking a leaf from the Houthis who have knocked down several sophisticated and costly U.S. drones, disabling America’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) infrastructure.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 23:40

• Visualizing How Long Each Generation Can Survive Without Income?
  Visualizing How Long Each Generation Can Survive Without Income?

  With nearly half of people under 34 worldwide unable to cover their needs for a month or less without income, it is no surprise that financial resiliency is a hot topic.

  So, for this graphic, Visual Capitalist has partnered with Lloyd’s Register Foundation to explore economic resilience further and determine how long the average person can afford to cover their needs without income.

  

  World Risk Poll 2024 Report: Economic Resilience

  Lloyd’s Register Foundation produces the World Risk Poll every two years in partnership with Gallup, and the World Risk Poll 2024 report explores the everyday risks of 147,000 people from 142 nations.

  They asked respondents how long they could afford to cover basic needs, such as food, transport, and shelter, if they lost all income. 

  Here’s what they found:

  

  The results reveal a distinct trend across all age groups, with respondents typically falling into two categories: those with one month or less of financial runway, and those with more than four months. Relatively fewer respondents reported being able to survive two to three months.

  National Economic Resilience

  The nation where a person lives also significantly contributes to their ability to cover their basic needs.

  The divide is particularly sharp between the percentage of respondents who could only cover their needs for a week or less and those who could cover their needs for a month or more—a tiny minority in developed economies, but a significant share of respondents from some developing nations.

  

  Engineering a Safer World

  The World Risk Poll 2024 report has revealed a weakness in global economic resilience. Younger individuals and those in developing countries are at higher risk than older individuals or those in developed countries.

  The report shines a light on the risks ordinary people face, such as how long they can cover their needs without income. However, the World Risk Poll 2024 report also highlights many more risks, such as global plastic waste, people’s safety at work, and the threat of climate change.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 23:20

• Would Russia Aid China In An Invasion Of Taiwan?
  Would Russia Aid China In An Invasion Of Taiwan?

  Authored by Audrey Oien via RealClearDefense,

  If China were to invade Taiwan, it is likely that Russia would provide Beijing with military, economic, or political assistance. While some experts have argued Ukraine and Taiwan are not the same situation, there are nonetheless lessons that can be drawn from Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as insight from U.S. officials that can be drawn upon to come to this conclusion. 

  

  Over the last several years, Russia and China have grown closer in many ways, including through increased military cooperation. Of the numerous joint exercises that have been held, ones that stand out are joint naval drills and air force patrols over the East China Sea. The naval drills began in 2022 and are the closest that joint drills have been held to the Taiwan Strait. Joint exercises are not a smoking gun, but concern from American officials may be a reliable indicator that this is worth paying attention to. 

  In early May, two American intelligence officials testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that increased Sino-Russian military cooperation has prompted new planning in the Department of Defense. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated that China and Russia are exercising together in relation to Taiwan for the first time, and that “China definitely wants Russia to be working with them.” She then said, “we see no reason why they wouldn’t” work together. Answering a follow-up question from Senator Mike Rounds, Haines confirmed that in the event of a conflict with Russia or China, a second front opening with the other is possible, with the likelihood depending on the scenario. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse testified that Russian and Chinese military forces “would certainly be cooperative,” if not interoperable. 

  But on what grounds would Russia assist China? Why would it be willing to aid Beijing in an invasion that would likely be met with a response from the United States and its allies? The most simple answer is because China did it for Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin is now indebted to Chinese President Xi Jinping, whether he realizes it or not. And no, the debt is not payable by monetary means. Putin will be able to pay his debts to Xi for his assistance in a war that has turned Chinese public opinion toward Ukraine, led to sanctions, and affected Xi’s image by providing assistance if, or when, China invades Taiwan.

  To get a better idea of what this assistance could look like, one can take a look at how China has aided Russia’s war in Ukraine. According to U.S. officials, China has helped supply Russia with dual-use material like optics, microelectronics, and drone engines to boost Moscow’s arms production, as well as provided Moscow with cruise missiles and machine tools for ballistic missiles. U.S. intelligence claims that Russian and Chinese groups have worked together to jointly produce drones inside Russia. It was also reported that a Chinese government agency established to promote trade with Russia has been attempting to source drone detectors and jammers, likely to supply Moscow with. U.S. officials further claimed that China helped Russia improve satellite and other space-based capabilities, as well as provided satellite imagery. Additionally, it was reported that China supplied Russia with 90% of the chips it imported in 2023 which were used to make missiles, tanks, and aircraft. The British Defense Minister has also accused China of providing or preparing to provide Russia with lethal aid. 

  Beyond providing this military equipment, China has continued support for Russia in its wartime by working together to avoid taxes and evade Western sanctions on goods like copper. And, China has increased imports of Russian gas and oil since the war began, as imports from the US, UK, and EU have dropped due to sanctions. Politically, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused China of using its influence and diplomats to help Russia disrupt the 15-16 June peace summit on Ukraine in Switzerland by encouraging other countries not to attend.

  Russian support during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could follow in a similar vein. Or, Xi may be able to pressure Putin into providing something more than what Beijing has done for Moscow. Analysts have maintained that Beijing holds the upper hand in the Sino-Russian partnership. While the relationship has been described as having no limits, it is not a relationship between two equals. Russia’s economic dependence on China puts Putin in a vulnerable position, with little room to say “no.” 

  The capacity in which Russia may offer China assistance during an invasion of Taiwan can be debated. Several factors would come into play, including the length of the conflict and those involved, specifically the degree to which the US would respond. Would the invasion take less than an hour, as one expert claims? Or would the conflict become drawn out and turn into a hot war with the US? Regardless of the exact scenario that could play out, Russia would most likely aid China in some capacity. Whether its military support during the invasion, economic assistance and support following an invasion, or political and diplomatic support, China’s role in the Sino-Russian partnership and demonstrated support for Russia during the war in Ukraine places it in a position to solicit some form of assistance from Moscow during an invasion of Taiwan. While this reasoning could stand on its own, it is supported by U.S. officials’ testimony that the U.S. Department of Defense is reconsidering its planning and preparedness to account for cooperation between Russia and China during a conflict.

  Audrey Oien is a Research Analyst at RANE, primarily focusing on the Asia-Pacific. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 23:00

• Americans And Their Passwords: It's Complicated!
  Americans And Their Passwords: It’s Complicated!

  Aside from presenting its big push into AI, Apple also unveiled a new Passwords app as part of its upcoming software releases. Built on the foundation of Keychain, the new app will enable users to store and access passwords, passkeys and other login credentials across Apple devices and on Windows PCs, helping them manage the multitude of logins that our digital lives require.

  As Statista’s Felix Richter notes, with the new tool, Apple is addressing a problem that many people have these days, as they’re forced to perform a balancing act between picking passwords that are safe and still somehow easy enough to remember.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 69 percent of U.S. adults feel overwhelmed by the numbers of passwords they have to keep track of, and 41 percent always or often write down their passwords – a practice that is not recommended by security experts.

  Password managers such as Apple’s new app can help address this problem, but so far they’re not so far spread.

  According to Pew’s findings, just 32 percent of respondents used a password manager at the time of the survey in May 2023, up from 20 percent in 2019.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 22:40

• Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth Continues To Embarrass And Humiliate Herself
  Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth Continues To Embarrass And Humiliate Herself

  Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

  Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth remains one of the most ridiculous dunderheads in science writing, a journalism adjacent field of writing that many reporters refer to with derision as “scicomm.” Earlier this week, a reader sent me this post on Blue Sky, with Helmuth promoting an article falsely claiming there was evidence to support six-feet social distancing during COVID.

  

  There isn’t. Former NIH Director Francis Collins and Tony Fauci have both testified to Congress that this evidence doesn’t exist.

  Helmuth shoehorns this narrative into Scientific American by ignoring Tony Fauci’s congressional testimony that six feet social distancing was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data” and then insisting it’s actually just a political fight between Fauci and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican Congresswoman long known for making outlandish statements that often stretch the fabric of reality.

  Just like Laura Helmuth.

  

  Fauci’s admission to Congress that the six feet rule was not based on science and that “it sort of just appeared” was backed up his boss, former NIH Director Francis Collins.

  In a transcribed interview with Congress, Collins also added that he was not aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation and he has not seen any evidence supporting six feet social distancing since the rule was dismissed.

  

  But it’s not just Fauci and Collins.

  Former FDA Director Scott Gottlieb told reporters back in 2021 that the six feet rule was never based on science. “The six feet rule was arbitrary in and of itself,” Gottlieb said in a September 2021 “Face the Nation” appearance. “Nobody knows where it came from. The six feet is a perfect example of sort of the lack of rigor of how CDC made recommendations.”

  The Washington Post reported that persistent frustrations over social distancing and other measures might lead Americans to ignore public health advice during the next crisis.

  Four years later, visible reminders of the six-foot rule remain with us, particularly in cities that rushed to adopt the CDC’s guidelines hoping to protect residents and keep businesses open. D.C. is dotted with signs in stores and schools — even on sidewalks or in government buildings — urging people to stand six feet apart.

  

  This is just the latest example in a long history of Laura Helmuth screwups.

  A recent BMJ investigation documented over a dozen social media posts by Helmuth promoting transgender care for children, despite scientific evidence showing such treatment has had “devastating consequences” for minors. And after she posted last year on X that “sparrows have four different chromosomally distinct sexes” the Wall Street Journal reported that X’s community notes had to correct Helmuth’s error.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 22:20

• Waste Of The Day: Newsom Wants Stronghold Over California Taxes
  Waste Of The Day: Newsom Wants Stronghold Over California Taxes

  Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via RealClearInvestigations,

  Topline: California voters may soon have a more direct voice in approving their sky-high tax rates — unless Gov. Gavin Newsom and other top Democratic lawmakers have something to say about it.

  Newsom’s attorneys are asking the state Supreme Court to remove an upcoming ballot measure that would require new taxes to be approved by voters, not just lawmakers.

  

  Key facts: The proposed Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act would stop new state taxes from being enacted without support from two thirds of the Legislature and a majority of voters. New local taxes would need approval from two thirds of city voters.

  Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses of the California Legislature. Top politicians are backed by labor unions and big-city mayors in their effort to stop the ballot measure, according to Politico. Their attorneys say the proposal unconstitutionally removes elected officials’ ability to raise revenue.

  The campaign in support of the ballot measure is funded mostly by real estate moguls and the California Business Roundtable, which brings together executives from the largest employers in the state.

  The CA Supreme Court heard arguments in May, but Politico reports that justices seem willing to let the measure go to voters in November and then rule on its constitutionality if it passes.

  California collected $280.8 billion in taxes in 2022, more than double any other state. That’s $7,195 per person, also the most in the nation.

  Background: OpenTheBooks has spent years covering the questionable Newsom and his conflicts of interest or wasteful spending.

  It took OpenTheBooks.com ten years to force open the California state checkbook. Then, we found that Gov. Newsom solicited up to 1,000 state vendors, their key employees and executives, for $10.6 million in campaign donations. Those companies received $6.2 billion in state payments during FY2021.

  Newsom’s administration also sent $2.3 million to Gender Spectrum, a nonprofit that supports kindergarten students’ “gender journey” and encourages students to invent their own gender.

  Critical quote: Carolyn Coleman, CEO of the League of California Cities, told the Associated Press that the ballot measure puts 100 local taxes worth over $2 billion at risk.

  “We’re raising the resources to fill potholes, so that we can support affordable housing in our community, so we can work to address homelessness, so that when you dial 911 there’s somebody there to answer the phone — not in two minutes — but in 30 seconds,” Coleman said.

  Supporting quote: Lawyers supporting the ballot measure told justices, “Our constitution, since its inception, has stated that all political power is inherent in the people. It has stated that the people have the power to reform and alter their government whenever they decide it needs reform … The people have the last word.”

  Summary: America was founded on the with three important word, “We The People…” California must allow that to happen.

  The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 22:00

• Widely Used And Deemed Safe, These Food Additives Are More Harmful Than Thought
  Widely Used And Deemed Safe, These Food Additives Are More Harmful Than Thought

  Authored by Flora Zhao via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  On her first day after moving from Australia to the United States, Elizabeth Dunford walked into a supermarket to buy bread. As a researcher of food additives, she instinctively glanced at the ingredients label.

  “Why are there so many additives?” she exclaimed in surprise. Nearly every loaf she picked up contained ingredients that made her uneasy. After lingering by the shelves, she reluctantly chose a bag.

  “At that moment, I thought: It looks like I will have to choose the best from the worst when shopping in the future,” Ms. Dunford, project consultant for The George Institute for Global Health and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina, told The Epoch Times.

  

  Today, over 73 percent of the U.S. food supply is ultra-processed. While both natural and ultra-processed foods are referred to as “food,” there is a vast difference between them. For instance, ultra-processed foods are not grown in soil but manufactured in factories, using many ingredients that cannot be found in the average home pantry.

  Beyond conventional additives such as preservatives, colors, and flavorings, many new additives are emerging. Stabilizers, emulsifiers, firming agents, leavening agents, anti-caking agents, humectants, and more have been invented to modify and improve the taste and texture of food.

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lists at least 3,972 substances added to food.

  Perhaps driven by a growing desire for richer and more varied flavors or by the pressures of fast-paced living, people have become accustomed to these substances, even considering them a natural part of the modern diet.

  Then and Now

  In the old days, families used salt and vinegar to preserve food. But with the advent of the industrial age, people became increasingly reliant on ready-made foods available on supermarket shelves.

  “By the mid-20th century, more and more food additives were being used,” said Mona Calvo, who has a doctorate in nutritional sciences and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Only recently have people begun to pay closer attention to what goes into the foods they eat.

  

  In the 1950s to 1970s, the FDA began evaluating the safety of common food additives, Ms. Calvo told The Epoch Times.

  “A safety assessment involves the scientific review of all relevant data, including toxicology and dietary exposure information,” an FDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times. These include tests conducted on rodents and cells. The ingredients will be added to food after the FDA gives its approval.

  Consumers can identify what is in their packaged foods by the nutrition facts and ingredient labels, said Ms. Calvo.

  Among the most widely used FDA-approved substances added to food, many have a safety classification known as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) based on their extensive historical use before 1958 or their safety evaluation in the 1970s or more recently.

  However, many people may not realize that substances classified as GRAS often lack an upper limit on the amount that can be added to food. In many cases, the quantity added is based on Current Good Manufacturing Practice (CGMP) guidelines. Ms. Calvo explained that if a manufacturer adds an excessive amount of an additive during production, which makes it unpopular among consumers, it could affect product sales. In other words, the amount of substances added is left to the manufacturer’s discretion.

  Over time, GRAS classification may be withdrawn for certain substances if the FDA is presented with compelling evidence of safety concerns associated with its use. A notable example is the official removal of trans fats from the GRAS list in 2015.

  Ms. Calvo pointed out another unresolved issue: There is no oversight on how much of these additive-containing foods people actually consume.

  “Many of the commonly used food additives were granted GRAS approval between 1970 and 1975, when people could not foresee the situation today,” she said. During that era, fewer women worked outside the home, and people consumed more home-cooked meals made from natural ingredients. With the prevalence of ultra-processed foods in today’s diet, the consumption of certain additives has naturally exceeded initial expectations.

  

  After an additive is approved for a specific function, food manufacturers often quickly incorporate it into a wide range of products, including breads, cookies, instant soups, sausages, and frozen, prepackaged meals.

  Dr. Jaime Uribarri, a nephrology specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has long been concerned about specific food additives, told The Epoch Times that “once an additive-containing packaged food is in the marketplace, the FDA does not have a mechanism for regularly testing its safety, such as through periodic sampling checks.”

  The Useful and the Unnecessary

  Objectively speaking, some food additives may offer more benefits than drawbacks, said Ms. Dunford.

  Preservatives, for example, help extend the shelf life of food. Adding a moderate amount of nitrites to cured meats can prevent botulism, a serious condition.

  However, she pointed out that many additives that enhance color, flavor, and other sensory aspects are “essentially not necessary.”

  Scientists have demonstrated in various studies the health hazards of consuming ultra-processed foods, including their close association with early death, cardiovascular diseases, mental disorders, respiratory diseases, metabolic syndrome, and cancer.

  Specifically, a cohort study involving nearly 45,000 middle-aged and older individuals in France found that for every 10 percent increase in the intake of ultra-processed foods, the risk of all-cause mortality increased by 14 percent. According to a 2024 umbrella review published in the BMJ, convincing evidence has been found linking ultra-processed food to a 50 percent increase in cardiovascular disease mortality, a 53 percent increase in common mental disorder outcomes, and a dose-dependent 12 percent increase in diabetes risk.

  

  While part of the increased risks can be attributed to the use of high-sugar, high-salt, high-fat, and low-fiber ingredients, some additives previously thought to be safe also warrant attention.

  “Phosphate additives is one that I’m very wary of,” said Ms. Dunford.

  Phosphate Additives

  A 2023 study published in the Journal of Renal Nutrition found that of all the 3,466 U.S. packaged foods tested, over half contained phosphate additives.

  Phosphate additives encompass a range of substances with various functions, such as stabilizing, thickening, emulsifying, adjusting acidity and alkalinity, improving texture, enhancing flavor, providing antioxidant properties, preserving, and coloring. Some phosphates serve multiple functions simultaneously.

  Multiple studies have shown that the health hazards associated with consuming ultra-processed foods are linked to a high intake of inorganic phosphates.

  The body’s absorption rate and utilization efficiency for phosphorus vary depending on the source. When a person eats natural foods, the release of phosphorus is relatively slow, and not all of it is absorbed. In contrast, inorganic phosphate food additives are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, significantly increasing blood phosphate levels and releasing hormones that promote phosphate excretion. These hormones can have a range of adverse effects on the cardiovascular system, kidneys, and bones, resulting in reduced vitamin D levels, bone loss, vascular calcification, and impaired kidney filtration capacity.

  Using inorganic phosphate additives in animal or cell experiments results in immediate side effects. “That gives you enough rationale to suspect that these may happen also in humans,” said Dr. Uribarri.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:40

• "Julian Is Free!" Assange Released After 'Time Served' Plea Deal With DOJ, Departs For Home
  “Julian Is Free!” Assange Released After ‘Time Served’ Plea Deal With DOJ, Departs For Home

  Update(2124ET): WikiLeaks has released its first footage showing Julian Assange as a free man, emerging from Belmarsh prison looking triumphant and joyous, and soon after boarding a plane to his native Australia…

  Julian is free!!!!

  Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU- yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true. THANK YOU. tHANK YOU. THANK YOU.

  Follow @WikiLeaks for more info soon…pic.twitter.com/gW4UWCKP44

  — Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) June 25, 2024

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

  Below is the official statement from WikiLeaks:

  JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK. This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations.

  This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible. After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.

  WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know. As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom. Julian’s freedom is our freedom.

  Below is a video statement from his wife, Stella Assange:

  * * *

  In a shocking turn of events, Julian Assange will plead guilty to leaking US national security secrets and return to his native Australia, under a deal with Biden’s DoJ that ends a nearly 15-year battle nightmare for the WikiLeaks founder.

  

  After spending more than a decade holed up and imprisoned in London – mainly to avoid being sent to the US – Assange, 52, is expected to be sentenced to time served (62 months in a Belmarsh prison – a high security facility in South-East London) during a court appearance Wednesday in Saipan, in the US Northern Mariana Islands, avoiding a potentially lengthy sentence in an American prison.

  Prosecutors had been in talks with Assange to resolve the 2019 case, The Wall Street Journal reported in March, with one sticking point being Assange’s desire to never set foot in the United States.

  To enter a felony plea, defendants generally have to show up in person in court. 

  Assange’s team had floated the possibility of pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, the Journal reported, which would mean Assange could enter the plea remotely.

  The Justice Department and Assange’s legal team reached a compromise under which Assange wouldn’t have to travel to suburban Virginia, where the original case is filed, and prosecutors could still get a felony plea, the people said.  

  As The FT reports, the agreement aims to resolve what has been a remarkable stand-off between the DoJ and Assange, who has become one of the world’s most controversial advocates for government transparency and whose legal troubles have spanned multiple countries. 

  The plea deal also offers a neat solution to what was becoming an increasing political headache for the U.S. government. 

  Earlier this year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he hoped the U.S. could find a way to conclude the case against Assange, and lawmakers there passed a motion calling for Assange to be allowed to return to his native home. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also weighed in, saying that the British courts should not extradite Assange to the U.S. In February, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, said Assange shouldn’t be extradited to the U.S. to face trial, saying he suffered from “depressive disorder” and was at risk of being placed in solitary confinement.

  Finally, while this is excellent news for Assange and his family – and journalistic freedom everywhere – we can’t help but wonder if this outstanding result would have occurred were it not for Biden heading into the first debate with Trump with his poll numbers in the toilet…

  Who cares! They are; and Julian is free…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:24

• Domino's Still Dominates The US Pizza Market
  Domino’s Still Dominates The US Pizza Market

  About 3 billion pizzas are sold annually in the United States. In 2022, pizza restaurant sales in the U.S. reached an all-time high of $46.9 billion, an increase of roughly $10 billion compared to just a decade prior.

  This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu, lists the top 10 U.S. pizza chains based on 2022 sales figures.

  

  This data was accessed via Statista (published June 2023).

  Domino’s Domination

  Domino’s is the biggest pizza chain in the U.S. by sales, reaching $8.6 billion in revenue in 2022. The brand is also found in 90 other countries around the globe, including stores on every continent except Antarctica.

  According to Domino’s main website, there are over 20,500 locations worldwide, which collectively serve over 1 million customers per day.

  Domino’s is followed by Pizza Hut with $5.3 billion in revenue. Little Caesars, with $4.7 billion, completes the top three.

  

  The top end of this ranking contains household names, but regional pizza chains also make the cut. Jet’s Pizza is popular in the Great Lakes region, and most Hungry Howie’s locations can be found in Michigan and Florida.

  The overall number of pizza restaurants in the U.S. has been on the rise, reaching more than 80,000 units in 2022.

  If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out this graphic, which visualizes the change in market share of U.S. carbonated soft drinks between 1995 and 2023.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:20

• Playing Politics With Crime In California
  Playing Politics With Crime In California

  Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

  California’s fierce political battle over crime and retail theft faces a key test this week as divided Democrats in the legislature address efforts by Gov. Gavin Newsom and his allies to undermine a public-safety ballot initiative.

  

  The ballot initiative would overhaul Proposition 47, a law voters approved in 2014 that lowered certain theft and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors partly as a way of reducing prison overcrowding.

  Newsom was among the first elected officials to support Proposition 47, a ballot initiative written by reform-minded George Gascon, who was then the district attorney in San Francisco. (In an unusual move, Gascon is now the DA in Los Angeles.)

  But the pendulum has now swung in the other direction, with critics blaming Prop 47 for the steep rise in retail theft and smash-and-grab “mob” robberies of both high-end department stores and convenience stores that have plagued retailers across the state.

  Californians for Safer Communities, a bipartisan group made up of law enforcement officials, elected officials, and businesses, including Walmart and Target, collected more than 900,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative that would reform Prop 47 by increasing penalties for criminals. In early June, the initiative qualified for the November ballot, a move Newsom and liberal supporters in the state legislature opposed.

  Instead of letting voters decide its fate, Newsom and his allies, which includes Assembly and Senate leaders, pushed a raft of public safety bills aimed at addressing organized retail theft, car break-ins, and other crimes. They are also working hard to thwart a separate ballot initiative sponsored by the California District Attorneys Association, which has attracted widespread Republican and law enforcement support.

  Democrats in the state Assembly added “inoperability” clauses to the proposed public safety bills to prevent them from going into effect if voters approve the ballot initiative aimed at reforming Prop 47. They contend that such clauses are needed to ensure that the law is consistent.

  Critics of the move argue that the Democrats’ “poison pill” measure is designed solely to circumvent California’s storied referendum process. Instead of letting voters determine the ballot initiative’s fate, Newsom and his allies are trying to undermine it apparently because they fear it could attract strong support – with the added impact of helping Republicans in key Congressional races this fall.

  “Democrats need to stop playing politics with public safety and let voters decide on fixing Prop. 47,” Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher said in a statement. “These poison pills show that Democrats aren’t serious about ending the crime wave – they just want to look like they’re doing something because their years-long support for criminals has become a political liability.”

  The machinations to undermine a ballot initiative on crime came the same week the California Supreme Court unexpectedly rejected another referendum that had attained enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot but which Democrats opposed. The court stopped a sweeping proposal that would have made it far more difficult for lawmakers to raise taxes and fees across the state. The justices unanimously ordered that the measure be kept off the ballot, finding it unconstitutional – even though it was an effort to amend California’s Constitution.

  Republicans and conservative activists who backed and financed the initiative, which they say had collected more than 1.4 million signatures, are fuming over the move. Carl DeMaio, a candidate for state Assembly and chairman of the group that helped collect the anti-tax initiative signatures, said the state liberal justices sided with “corrupt politicians” to strip citizens of their rights to qualify propositions for the ballot.

  Several other ballot initiatives aimed at increasing taxes are slated for the November ballot, and now citizens won’t have a countermeasure to vote on, he said. “The bottom-line remains: Californians cannot afford our state’s high taxes and cost of living – and until we fix the cost crisis, Californians will continue to flee this state,” DeMaio tweeted.

  Regarding Democratic leaders’ efforts to thwart the Prop 47 reform measures, Republicans got a surprise assist from several normally skeptical journalists. George Skelton, the longtime Los Angeles Times columnist and dean of the California press corps, wrote a column last week headlined: “Stop playing politics on retail theft.”

  “…Democrats cynically intend to insert a ‘poison bill’ that would automatically kill their own legislation if a rival tough-on-crime ballot measure is approved by voters in November,” he wrote. “To normal people, that must seem bizarre.”

   “Democrats fear the ballot measure so much they’re offering its backers an offer they can’t refuse,” Skelton added. “At least that’s the Democrats’ hope. The message: Take what you can get immediately from the legislation – or risk losing it if the ballot measure passes.”

  Criticism only increased over the week after CBS New California broke a story revealing that Newsom’s chief of staff would not negotiate to strengthen the Democratic package of crime bills unless the coalition backing the Prop 47 reform ballot initiative agreed to postpone that effort.

  In leaked emails, Newsom Chief of Staff Dana Williamson told Greg Totten, the coalition’s lead negotiator, that Democrats would be willing to negotiate on its package of crime bills – but only if the matter was tabled until 2026. “As I noted previously, our focus is on amending Proposition 47 on the 2024 ballot,” Totten replied. “If the administration is prepared to consider an amendment of Proposition 47 on the 2024 ballot, then we are happy to meet.”

  Williamson then abruptly cut Totten off. “If that’s your position, then I agree, there’s nothing to talk about.” She added, “It’s really amazing how you are incapable of taking a win. And the consultants you’re working with haven’t won anything in a decade. Good luck.”

  Republicans and journalists aren’t the only ones who find the inoperability clauses disingenuous. At least three Democratic state lawmakers removed their names from retail theft bills included in the package after the clauses were added, and district attorneys and law enforcement associations in their districts pulled their support.

  Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, yanked his support from the retail theft bill package because of the added inoperability clauses.

  “Unfortunately, I can’t support the retail theft package, which contains my Retail Theft Accountability bill, AB 1794, with the poison pill non-operative amendments included,” McCarty noted. McCarty is running for mayor of Sacramento and has positioned himself more to the center while facing a progressive opponent.

  Democratic state Sen. Alvarado-Gil and Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria, who both represent the more conservative Central Valley, also withdrew their names as co-authors of retail theft bills included in the package.

  “I oppose the amendments to these two bills, and I was not consulted about them prior,” Alvarado-Gil said in her weekly newsletter to constituents. “Let me be clear – I do support the Prop 47 reform initiative and believe the voters have the right to vote on this. This is not about the policy; it’s about the politics.”

  Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership also faces opposition to both the retail theft legislative package and the ballot initiative from the progressive wing of the party, which opposes any criminal justice reforms that will result in increased incarceration.

  “The [Democratic] leadership here has gotten a little bit too far out front of their troops,” GOP Sen. Roger Niello told RealClearPolitics in an interview Friday. “I know a lot of members of their caucus didn’t even know about this amendment move and only heard about it over the [previous] weekend.”

  A spokeswoman for Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas did not respond to a request for comment about the level of Democratic support for the amended legislative package. This bill was also amended to include an urgency clause, which means it goes into effect immediately. Yet to do so would require a two-thirds majority of the Assembly and Senate. Sacramento insiders say the urgency is needed because of another deadline.

  Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta faces a Thursday deadline to provide a title and summary for the ballot initiative and is poised to characterize the proposition as one that would kill the legislature’s anti-crime reform bills. He can only do so, however, if the retail theft package with the inoperability clauses passes with a supermajority this week before the deadline.

  Some California political observers assume Newsom is trying to keep Prop 47 intact to protect his political legacy for any future White House run. But others believe Democratic leaders fear the more immediate political fallout – that the tough-on-crime ballot initiative could help turn out more Republican voters this fall, giving GOP candidates for the House of Representatives an edge in tight election contests that could determine which party holds the majority.

  “What the Democrats are doing has gotten the Sacramento Bee editorial board, which is to the left of Mao, to agree with Republicans in the legislature,” Rob Stutzman told RCP. “This is absolutely raw politics. This is all about Democrats doing everything in the world to keep this issue off the ballot in November because of how it could affect congressional races and, therefore, the balance of who controls the House of Representatives.”

  This past week, Dave Min, a state senator running in a tight battleground contest to replace Rep. Katie Porter this fall, joined his party’s push to undercut the ballot initiative by supporting the addition of the “poison-pill” amendments. Min, who authored a piece of the public safety package, has joined the Democratic leadership in a press conference in which they unveiled their strategy to add the inoperability clause to the legislation.

  Over the last week, Min also twice said he didn’t have a position on the Prop 47 reform ballot initiative because he had been too busy to read it.

  “I’m sorry, and I’ll be honest, I have not had time to review the initiative,” Min said during an Appropriations Committee meeting while the amendments were being added. “I’ve got a lot on my plate these days. At the point in time when the ballot is finalized, I’m going to take a look at all the initiatives on the ballot and take a look at them.”

  Min’s position is a hire-wire act in his Orange County district, where prominent law enforcement officials, including Sheriff Don Barnes, vigorously back the ballot initiative. It also risks highlighting Min’s DUI conviction last year.

  “Dangerous Dave Min puts criminals ahead of victims because he is a criminal,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Ben Petersen said in a statement. “Min earns a special spot in the hall of shame shilling for these poison pills while on probation himself.”

  If the Democratic retail theft package with the amendments manages to pass this week, Skelton says Bonta has a tough decision to make – whether or not to “doctor up” the bill title and summary to undermine its ability to pass and risk “tarnishing his image by looking like just another hack politician.”

  Niello is watching Bonta closely because he has long tried to transfer the responsibility of writing proposition titles and summary statements from the attorney general to an independent legislative analyst.

  “There’s been so many blatantly biased statements made, and this whole strategy that [Democratic leaders] are pursuing is dependent upon the attorney general rewriting it in a negative light,” Niello said.

  Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:00

• Study Finds Alarming Surge In Deaths From Neurological Disease Among Young Adults
  Study Finds Alarming Surge In Deaths From Neurological Disease Among Young Adults

  A recent preprint study which relies on extensive data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) paints a concerning picture of the neurological health landscape in the United States. The study, which focuses on those aged 15-44, reveals a disturbing increase in deaths from neurological diseases both as the primary cause and among multiple contributing factors.

  

  This uptick in mortality rates, which is particularly significant among younger adults, could have profound implications for the nation’s public health policies, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  Perhaps most concerning, the study found an increase in neurological complications following COVID-19 vaccinations, including conditions such as Guillain-Barré syndrome and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.

  According to Phinance principal Ed Dowd, “The results show a clear break from the prior historical trend in death rates from neurological diseases.”

  🚨🚨 US – Trends in Death Rates from Neurological Diseases, Ages 15-44

  Our results show that the excess UC (Underlying Cause) death rates from neurological diseases for individuals aged 15 to 44 age were 4.4% (Z-Score 4.9) in 2020, then rose to 10.0% (Z-Score 11.1) in 2021,… pic.twitter.com/HYA4wHtZ9S

  — Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) June 20, 2024

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

  The Study: Methodology and Key Findings

  Researchers Carlos Alegria and Yuri Nunes of Phinance Technologies conducted a deep dive looking at neurological disease-related mortality across various age groups from 2000 to 2023.

  Their study distinguishes between deaths where neurological conditions were the underlying cause (UC) and instances where these diseases were listed among multiple causes (MC) on death certificates, and compares death rates against a baseline to identify excess deaths.

  Key findings from the study include:

  • A notable rise in excess mortality from neurological diseases reported as the underlying cause of death among individuals aged 15 to 44, with increases of 4.4% in 2020, 10.0% in 2021, 9.9% in 2022, and 8.1% in 2023.
  • Excess deaths from neurological conditions as part of multiple causes tracked overall mortality rises and were significant even after removing deaths where COVID-19 was also reported.

  

  As Phinance notes, “The strength of the statistical significance of the excess deaths from neurological diseases was very high, being considered extreme events, indicating a clear change from the prior 2010-2019 trend.”

  The intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic with the rise in neurological disease deaths adds layers of complexity to the analysis – including the notion that various medical interventions and societal disruptions might have exacerbated underlying neurological vulnerabilities:

  • Notably, the study points to an increased risk of developing severe neurological conditions following COVID-19 vaccinations, with specific vaccines linked to higher risks of serious ailments such as the aforementioned Guillain-Barré syndrome.

  • Some cases of long covid have been associated with long-term neurological complications.

  Perhaps most alarming is the impact on younger individuals. Those aged 15-44, typically considered in the prime of life, exhibited a stark increase in neurological disease-related deaths. This raises serious questions about potential environmental, biological, or social factors that are disproportionately affecting younger populations.

  The authors conclude:

  How can we explain the excess UC deaths from neurological diseases in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023? In 2020, this could be explained by deaths from health effects related to the pandemic management measures such lockdowns and lack of medical care, or other related factors such as stress, less exercise, worse food habits, or from under-diagnosed COVID-19 itself, or related side effects. The acceleration in excess death rates from neurological diseases in 2021, 2022 and 2023 is more difficult to explain due to COVID-19 on its own. Given the case studies of neurological adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination cited in the literature, one possible factor could be adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. Furthermore, one must also account for the possibility of continuous COVID-19 infections or Long COVID…

  Implications for Public Health

  The implications of these findings extend far beyond the immediate health of the young adult population – and pose serious questions about the readiness of the U.S. healthcare system to handle a potential influx of neurological health needs and the potential need for sweeping changes in public health policy:

  • There is a clear call for focused research to unravel the factors driving this surge in neurological deaths.

  • Public health strategies may need to pivot towards enhancing neurological health services and preventive care, particularly for younger populations.

  • Understanding the full impact of COVID-19 on long-term health outcomes will be crucial in shaping future healthcare initiatives.

  The study raises concerning and considerations – between the social impact of waves of potential neurological disease and the woefully underprepared healthcare system, health priorities in the coming decades will need to be analyzed and addressed.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 20:40

• ESG And Stakeholder Capitalism: A Necessary Deconstruction
  ESG And Stakeholder Capitalism: A Necessary Deconstruction

  Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy,

  The Following is Book Reviews of:

  The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All, by R. David McLean (Cato Institute, 2023)

  The Race to Zero: How ESG Investing Will Crater the Global Financial System, by Paul H. Tice (Encounter Books, 2024)

  May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—and What We Can Do About It, by Alex Edmans (Penguin Random House, 2024)

  *  *  *

  “I’m not going to use the word ‘ESG’ because it’s been misused by the far left and the far right,” Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, declared a year ago. The far left, Fink complained, wanted BlackRock to use other people’s money to decarbonize the economy. As for what Fink presumably regards as the “far right,” BlackRock had lost $4 billion in mandates as a result of the political debate on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, which he called “90% misinformation.”

  

  The chief executive of the world’s largest fund manager was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival to fellow billionaire David Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. At one point, Fink confessed to being ashamed of being part of the public conversation on ESG brought on by the annual letters that he writes to CEOs of BlackRock’s investee companies. “When I write these letters, it was never meant to be a political statement,” Fink told Rubenstein. “They were written to identify long-term issues.”

  Moments later, Fink backtracked. “I write about stakeholder capitalism, and I’m a big believer that you have to focus on all of your stakeholders,” Fink said. “So there’s nothing to be ashamed about. I just don’t use the word ‘ESG’ anymore.” Confused? You’re meant to be. BlackRock has been put on the defensive by red-state blowback to the anti-fossil-fuel positions adopted by BlackRock in its embrace of stakeholder capitalism and ESG. The debate on stakeholder capitalism and ESG is too important to be left with BlackRock and its CEO’s less than candid, but nonetheless revealing, attempt to find a way out of BlackRock’s self-inflicted ESG difficulties.

  That’s why the three books reviewed here are so important. Taken together, they constitute a comprehensive refutation of ESG and stakeholder capitalism. In The Case for Shareholder Capitalism, R. David McLean takes the argument back to first principles—indeed, back some 320,000 years and archaeological evidence that some of our earliest African ancestors engaged in trade. Moving to Europe, Homo sapiens outcompeted physically stronger Neanderthals because we traded and they did not. “Why would trading help us survive? Trade enables specialization,” McLean writes. Trade also enabled the formation of towns and cities, i.e., civilization.

  People trade with other people only when both sides gain. This axiom of human behavior applies to shareholder capitalism: a corporation is a legal entity through which customers, suppliers, and employees trade with the business’s shareholders. “You cannot expect businesses to keep trading with you unless the trading also makes the businesses’ owners better off,” McLean writes. “Profits reflect the business owner’s gain from trading.”

  Profit—the economic value accruing to shareholders—also indicates whether a business makes an economic contribution to society. When a mature firm or product is chronically loss-making, “it likely signals that the resources it is using could be put to better use elsewhere.” It makes society, as well as shareholders, poorer because it consumes resources that could have gone to more valuable use elsewhere.

  McLean’s reasoning leads to two powerful insights. The first involves what he calls the “stakeholder fallacy,” which says that shareholders should be put on an equal footing with other stakeholders: “This overlooks the fact that they already are on an equal footing. If a customer or an employee in a capitalist economy doesn’t find it beneficial to transact with a firm, then she isn’t required to do so. By the same token, if a transaction doesn’t benefit the firm’s shareholders, then the firm shouldn’t engage in the transaction. That is all shareholder capitalism requires.”

  This links to the second insight. When a manager spends the corporation’s money on things that cannot reasonably be expected to create shareholder value, the manager is expropriating the corporation’s assets. Either corporate spending is undertaken with the intention of increasing shareholder value, or it expropriates the firm’s resources. “There is no third category.” Whether spending in the second category is labeled “socially responsible,” or to improve an ESG rating, is entirely subjective, McLean argues: “Labels reflect what the labelers like or dislike. That is all. They have no higher meaning. Labeling an expropriation ‘socially responsible’ does not change the fact that it is an expropriation.”

  McLean is a professor of finance at Georgetown University. His writing has the virtue of bringing crystalline brilliance to a subject distorted by willful obfuscation and misleading claims. Paul H. Tice, author of The Race to Zero, spent 40 years on Wall Street, including spells at J. P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers, and BlackRock. Tice’s practitioner experience and the granularity of the evidence that he presents make for a perfect complement to McLean’s more theoretical treatment.

  Like McLean, Tice is unsparing in his criticism. ESG, he writes, is the latest fraud being perpetrated on the financial markets, and sustainable investment is a scam that aims to determine the allocation of capital in the economy: “[I]t is socialism disguised as a new form of capitalism.” As a former Wall Streeter, Tice follows in the footsteps of Terrence Keeley and his pathbreaking 2022 book Sustainable: Moving Beyond ESG to Impact Investing, for which Keeley sacrificed his senior role at BlackRock. Like Keeley, Tice advocates segregating ESG funds, or impact funds, as Keeley calls them, and takes the case against ESG several stages further.

  Tice writes of how Wall Street bosses embraced ESG as a path back to social acceptability after the financial crisis. Despite empirical studies demonstrating a tenuous link, at best, between ESG factors and corporate performance, Wall Street’s analytical defenses were dulled by the Fed-induced trance of near-zero interest rates. Tice contrasts the objectivity and reproducibility of credit ratings with the subjectivity and non-comparability of ESG ratings, as different ESG raters have their own methodologies delivering vastly different results on the same company. According to Michael Jantzi, founder of ESG rater Sustainalytics (now owned by Morningstar), the diversity of ESG ratings is a sign of a healthy market. This is like saying that schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are “signs of a healthy mind,” Tice comments.

  ESG is fundamentally about getting capital providers (debt and equity) to use their financial leverage and institutional power to frog-march the corporate sector into the front line of the war against climate change. As Tice notes, apart from climate change, ESG is “just a ragtag collection of liberal policy wants” sponsored by the United Nations—diversity, union power, gender pay equality, executive compensation, and “fair” corporate taxes. The UN attempts to justify the prioritization of climate change over the other 16 of its sustainable development goals (the first of which is ending world poverty), on the spurious grounds that tackling climate change drives attainment of all the rest. In the world according to the UN, there are no costs or trade-offs when it comes to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

  When companies set net zero targets, they expropriate value from their shareholders. Where does this shareholder wealth go? The recent scandal at Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which companies use to validate corporate net zero targets, illustrates the truth of McLean’s proposition on shareholder expropriation. Under pressure from John Kerry and lubricated by a large donation from the Bezos Earth Fund, SBTi decided to support the use of carbon credits to finance the energy transition in the Global South. Thus, net zero targets are a non-legislated tax on shareholders to fund the goals of the Paris climate agreement. This was too much for many of SBTi’s staff and advisers, one of whom denounced carbon credits as “scientifically, socially and from a climate perspective a hoax.”

  The first step in getting companies to set decarbonization targets is forcing them to report their greenhouse gas emissions. Three years ago, Follow This, a Dutch nonprofit—more accurately, an anti-profit—tabled a shareholder resolution that would require Chevron to reduce its Scope 3 emissions, defined as those emitted across the company’s entire value chain. As McLean writes, “Chevron is an oil company. It can reduce its customers’ CO2 emissions only by getting its customers to use less oil. The purpose of this resolution, therefore, was to get Chevron to destroy itself.”

  A majority of Chevron’s shareholders voted for the resolution, including the Big Three index providers: BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. The Chevron resolution is a clear example of investment managers using other people’s money to destroy the value of their investments. On Larry Fink’s own definition, this puts BlackRock and the other two index providers on the far left of American politics.

  Shareholder capitalism depends on a chain of principal–agent relationships that runs from savers, investors, and pension plan beneficiaries through investment managers to corporate boards and CEOs. The first-round principal–agent relationship is generally governed by the legal duties that investment managers, as fiduciaries, owe their clients because, as Fink puts it, they’re managing other people’s money and shouldn’t pursue other objectives. ESG advocates try to square the circle by claiming that investing according to ESG precepts boosts—or, at minimum, does not sacrifice—investor returns (“doing well by doing good”). This won’t wash. McLean quotes Cliff Asness, cofounder and chief investment officer of AQR Capital Management, who points out that if one investor mandates an investment to maximize return for the risk taken, and a second says to do that, subject to the following constraints, “it is simply false and irresponsible for the asset manager to assert that the second investor should expect to do as well as the first, except in the case where those constraints are non-binding (and therefore not relevant).”

  Evidence that advocates of ESG investing don’t believe their own arguments for ESG boosting risk-adjusted returns is shown by their campaign to destroy fiduciary duty as a binding constraint on investment managers. Tice is superb on this, writing that rules on the duties of fiduciaries are being rewritten to “not just allow but require an ESG approach by fund managers.” Thus the UN-sponsored Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) states that fiduciary duty exists to ensure that those managing other people’s money act in the interests of beneficiaries—the omission of “sole” pointing to PRI’s sleight of hand, which comes next—requiring “investors to incorporate all value drivers, including environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, in investment decision making.”

  Tice charts how PRI, together with its sibling the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), has become increasingly prescriptive. In 2015, PRI and UNEP FI published Fiduciary Duty in the 21st Century (foreword by Al Gore and his investment partner David Blood), with the intent of eviscerating fiduciary duty as a constraint on investment managers by, as Tice puts it, requiring fiduciaries to “consider the long-term interests of their beneficiaries, both financial and nonfinancial, whether known to them or not.” With its detailed demands addressed to individual financial regulators around the world to write its proposals into law and regulation, PRI’s Fiduciary Duty in the 21st Century is a lobbying manual to end fiduciary duty in the 21st century.

  PRI’s 5,336 signatories include BlackRock, which signed on October 7, 2008, State Street (May 2012), and Vanguard (November 2014). BlackRock states that it is committed to supporting PRI’s principles “where consistent with our fiduciary duties.” This is thoroughly disingenuous, as PRI continues its campaign to weaken, and ultimately destroy, the fiduciary duties that BlackRock professes to maintain. Fink’s protestations that BlackRock does not seek to play politics with other people’s money have little credibility for as long as BlackRock remains a PRI signatory.

  PRI has conquered Europe and the UK, which together account for about 75% of the 868 pro-ESG regulations tracked by PRI. In Britain, shareholder capitalism perished under a nominally Conservative government. At the COP26 Glasgow climate conference in 2021, Rishi Sunak as Chancellor of the Exchequer spoke of a $130 trillion wall of capital—the amount of other people’s money managed by the members of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero—to be deployed to finance the net zero transition. Sunak went on to say that the entire global financial system needed to be rewired for net zero. “Investors need to have as much clarity and confidence in the climate impact of their investments as they do in the traditional financial metrics of profit and loss,” Sunak told the COP. As a result, the UK is the first country in the world to have incorporated the framework drawn up by Michael Bloomberg’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures into its disclosure requirements for listed companies and large asset managers.

  Britain formally left the EU in January 2020. In practical terms, it remains fully aligned with the EU on ESG and sustainability. Eight months after Brexit, the City minister, John Glen, told an ESG conference that Britain would, at the very least, match the EU’s Sustainable Finance Action Plan. “We are working hard to support the sustainability and responsible investing agenda,” Glen said. These were not empty words. That year, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the regulator overseeing corporate governance, reporting, and auditing, issued a revision of its investment managers’ stewardship code.

  Tice observes that the revised code has the PRI’s fingerprints all over it. All 12 of the FRC’s “stewardship” (a word that has been twisted to mean the opposite of what it should) principles embed a sustainable approach to investing, requiring investors to identify and respond to supposed systemic risks, including climate change, and to integrate ESG and climate change into their investment processes. UK-listed companies operating mainly in the UK are required to produce net zero transition plans that are to be vetted by a Transition Plan Taskforce, cochaired by the CEO of one of Britain’s largest insurers and a Treasury minister.

  While Britain killed off shareholder capitalism through regulatory fiat, minimal legislative change, and no public debate, at least the EU’s effort involved legislative change and due consideration by the European Parliament. Under the 2020 Taxonomy Regulation, large publicly listed companies and all financial-market participants must report the proportion of their activities that meet the standards of environmental sustainability set out in the regulation and further the goals of the European Green Deal and those that do not. The 2022 Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires, among other things, sustainability to be embedded into companies’ long-term strategic planning. The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation of the same year penetrates deep into how investment managers should consider and disclose sustainability risks and creates three classes of investment funds: Article 6 for non-ESG funds; Article 8—funds integrating ESG and sustainability; and Article 9 funds—those with sustainable investment as their core objective.

  The sustainability regimes adopted by Britain and the EU are more than a license for shareholder expropriation; they are instructions for systematic shareholder expropriation. It shows that the “S” in ESG really stands for socialization of people’s savings, to be deployed to meet governmental objectives denoted by “E,” principally decarbonization, thereby exposing “G,” notionally about protecting shareholders, as a sham designed to con institutional shareholders into wholesale adoption of ESG. However, neither Britain nor the EU took on board the adverse macroeconomic consequences of transitioning from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism. Asness’s logic shows why savings earn a lower return under ESG. Lower returns require a higher quantum of savings to generate the same future income stream. Having to save more means lower consumption and living standards today and in the future.

  Asness’s logic on the outperformance of the unconstrained versus the constrained investor also applies to economies. An economy constrained by a net zero mandate has fewer choices than an unconstrained one; in particular, it is precluded from using the most efficient sources of energy. Given the high transitional costs of net zero, it is condemned to perform worse than it would without the net zero constraint. (For this reason, the UN’s claim that net zero promotes achievement of other sustainable development goals, including poverty eradication, is not just illogical; it is immoral.) By directing capital into less productive assets, the economy produces less. Lower returns on productive assets imply lower stock-market valuations, and reduced returns on new investment cascade through the economy into weaker economic growth.

  Empirical data on Britain’s efforts to decarbonize power generation with heavy investment in wind and solar capacity bear this out. In my 2023 RealClearFoundation report “The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies,” I show that between 2009 and 2020, a 15.5% increase in nameplate electrical generating capacity produced 17.1% less electricity, caused by a 28.3% decline in output per unit of generating capacity over those 11 years.

  The negative microeconomic impacts of the transition from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism aggregating into anemic macroeconomic performance bring to mind Frédéric Bastiat’s warning in That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen: “It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences.” Conservative ministers appear perplexed that they adopt antigrowth policies like net zero and mandatory ESG and then find themselves presiding over an ex-growth economy and cruising towards a catastrophic defeat at the general election on July 4.

  Although shareholder capitalism has come under sustained attack from the Biden administration, so far, the US has escaped the fate of Britain and Europe. The Department of Labor’s 2022 ERISA “Prudence and Loyalty” rule attempts to force pension fiduciaries to incorporate ESG factors into investment decision-making. The SEC’s recently finalized climate disclosure rule aims to inculcate climate-consciousness into corporate decision-making and requires companies to make standardized emissions disclosures, so that climate activists can compare and then coerce them into adopting costly decarbonization targets, notwithstanding the fact that, regarding climate disclosures and materiality, the SEC had fulfilled its legislative mandate with its February 2010 guidance on climate disclosures.

  Litigation fears likely led the SEC to drop mandatory Scope 3 emissions disclosures and the withdrawal of some heavyweight financial institutions from net zero investment groups likely reflects fear of potential suits alleging infringement of antitrust law. However, the most effective opposition to ESG has been at the state level, where red states have pushed back against ESG by legislative and legal action as well as by simply taking their business elsewhere.

  This resistance has lead the executive branch, in league with its allies on Wall Street, to greater reliance on informal or soft power to bring about the transition from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism: create the impression of the inevitable triumph of net zero; harness market momentum from the Big Three index providers and massive blue-state pension funds to provoke investor herding; and, with the help of an ideologically aligned media, foster a pro–net zero climate of opinion, in which dissenting opinions and contrary narratives are not tolerated—in short, the weaponization of information.

  It is on this battlefield that the third in the trio of books reviewed here is so valuable. Rather than directly confronting ESG and stakeholder capitalism head-on, in May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—and What We Can Do About It, Alex Edmans provides the tools and, perhaps more importantly, the skeptical mind-set to unpick common ESG claims. Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School, recently wrote two important papers on ESG: “The End of ESG” (2022); and “Applying Economics—Not Gut Feel—to ESG” (2023), which overturn conventional thinking on ten key ESG issues.

  Edmans reviewed an early draft of McLean’s book. “What better person to get feedback from?” McLean asks. Yet they are on different sides when it comes to sustainability. All businesses in a capitalist economy are subject to Schumpeter’s perennial gale of creative destruction: “We can have sustainable economic growth, but if we do, then nothing is sustainable at the level of the individual business,” McLean writes. On the other hand, Edmans is a self-described sustainability advocate. Far from blinding him to problems arising out of concept of sustainability, Edmans says that he seeks out well-informed critiques and views disagreement as valuable.

  Twenty years of research have taught Edmans the lesson of rigorously testing claims. May Contain Lies is elegantly structured around an ascent up the ladder of “misinference,” an ideologically neutral term that does not give off the stench of censorship that often accompanies usage of misinformation and, especially, disinformation:

  • A statement is not fact.
  • A fact is not data.
  • Data are not evidence.
  • Evidence is not proof.

  When it comes to claims about ESG, Edmans provides examples that suggest that the book’s title is underdone. It’s a pretty safe bet that a pro-ESG statement will contain lies, a carve-out being made for best employee-rated companies, which Edmans’s research shows are associated with stronger stock-market performance. Edmans relates that a House of Commons committee asserted that an academic paper found that high wage disparities damage corporate performance, despite Edmans telling the clerk to the committee that the conclusion had been from a preprint that, post–peer review, came to the opposite conclusion.

  Then there is the case of the “world-famous” investor who invites Edmans to partner in a new fund focused on pro-gender-diversity companies—if he could come up with supportive research. Edmans and a colleague crunch 24 relevant measures; 22 are negatively associated with company performance; one has a statistically insignificant relationship, leaving only one (fewer media reports on diversity controversies are linked to stronger corporate performance). Six months later, the investor launches a diversity fund backed by other research claiming that female-friendly firms perform better. Data mining, Edmans says. Even by Wall Street standards, pushing ESG investment products demands unusual levels of cynicism.

  Edmans’s guiding star is falsifiability: “The only way to support your theory is to try to disprove it…. [F]inding out what’s wrong is the only way to find out what’s right.” Missing, though, is the bigger picture in which opinion diversity is suppressed, and attempts at falsification, or even modification, of dominant consensus narratives are dismissed as actions of bad actors.

  Edmans rightly stresses the necessity of having a scientific culture: “an environment where people put out bold and innovative ideas, actively seek dissenting opinions.” On climate change, such a culture does not exist in science or finance. In 2022, Stuart Kirk, head of sustainability at HSBC, gave a presentation arguing that investors did not need to worry about climate change. “The speech did an important service by providing a contrasting opinion,” Edmans writes, while acknowledging that performing this valuable service cost Kirk his job. It is left to Tice to draw the conclusion that Kirk’s termination shows that no one on Wall Street is free to speak out against sustainability “for fear of being personally attacked and likely fired or calling down the ESG gods on their firm.”

  Edmans uncritically cites the famous 97% scientific consensus on climate change, which, Tice shows, was originally derived from a sift of climate research papers, two-thirds of which expressed no opinion on anthropogenic climate change. Sir David Attenborough’s warning that climate change is our greatest threat—greater than pandemics and nuclear war—is “not clearly incorrect,” Edmans says. Neither is it obviously correct; yet Edmans offers no means of choosing between these two mutually exclusive speculations about the future. Fact-checking, which Edmans suggests elsewhere, won’t do. Facts exist only in the past. There is no such thing as a future “fact,” a word derived from the Latin factum, meaning “thing done,” the past participle of the verb facere, “to do.”

  One way of assessing the credibility of statements about the future is to examine the track record of past predictions against what actually happened. In 1953, Sir Richard Doll, one of the pioneering epidemiologists who uncovered the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, predicted that in 1973 there would be 25,000 lung cancer deaths in Britain. In fact, there were 26,000. The science of smoking and lung cancer had passed a sharp predictive test with flying colors.

  It is reasonable to put greater weight on the science behind a forecast that under-predicts a large rise and to put less reliance on the science that over-predicts. Such is the case with climate science. A year after the 1988 Toronto climate change conference, which declared the danger of climate change second only to a global nuclear war, a Commonwealth group of climate experts produced a 140-page report in which they made a supposedly conservative prediction of global temperature increase of 0.24°C–0.48°C per decade. This compares with an average rise of 0.21°C per decade derived from the Met Office’s global temperature data set from 1989 to 2023 (five-year trailing average) and a linear warming trend from January 1979 to March 2024 in the satellite temperature record of 0.15°C per decade, implying that the Commonwealth experts’ forecast ran 1.7–2.4 times hotter than observations.

  No reasonable person could claim that in the 36 years since the Toronto climate conference, humanity has experienced anything close to the death and destruction of a global nuclear war. As Tice points out, the number of disaster-related deaths globally has dropped by a factor of ten over the past 100 years. In terms of lives lost, no recent natural disaster has been as devastating as the central China flood of 1931, in which as many as 2 million people lost their lives and affected the lives of 52 million more. Nonetheless, 36 years after the Toronto conference, climate change is portrayed as a catastrophe of existential proportions, one still lurking over the horizon, despite a near-contemporaneous temperature forecast running far ahead of observed warming and even upgraded to being more destructive than nuclear war.

  It’s not only temperature forecasts that were overheated. Six years ago, Manhattan Contrarian Francis Menton posted a catalog of failed climate tipping-point predictions. In 1988, the year of his famous congressional testimony, NASA climate scientist James Hansen told a journalist that Manhattan’s West Side Highway would be under water in either 20 years or 40 years (the record is unclear). In 2018, ten years after or ten years before the expiry of Hansen’s prediction, Menton went down the highway. To no one’s surprise, except possibly Hansen’s, “the water didn’t appear any closer to swamping it than it was back in 1988.”

  Despite the impacts of climate change being far less severe than initially believed nearly four decades ago, climate change has to be catastrophic to justify the profound (and unachievable) economic and societal transformations demanded by net zero. Were people to start believing that its effects are mild or even benign, climate change’s potency to move policy mountains would evaporate. For this reason, querying the catastrophist narrative is not permitted. It’s here that Edmans’s belief in the importance of opinion diversity and actively seeking dissenting views runs into the over-heated reality of today’s world.

  As a newspaper reader, Edmans subscribes to both the conservative Daily Telegraph and the left-wing Guardian. Twinning opposing op-eds is the formula behind RealClearPolitics (RCP) that publisher David DesRosiers sees as an antidote to polarization and hyper-partisanship. This led to RCP’s blacklisting by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British NGO, which last year labeled RCP a high-risk news site for disinformation (the author is a senior fellow of a foundation that works with RCP).

  GDI describes its role as disrupting the business models of news and opinion sites that it deems disseminators of disinformation. Because climate catastrophe is a non-fact that belongs to the category of an unverifiable speculation about the future, fact-checking climate change quickly morphs into opinion censorship. Thus, GDI’s definition of disinformation encompasses what it calls “adversarial narratives,” i.e., opinions—whether or not supported by scientifically sound analysis—that it disagrees with.

  The weaponization of information was discussed by Dr. Scott Atlas, who served as President Trump’s scientific adviser on Covid for part of 2020, in a recent interview with PragerU’s Marissa Streit. What he has to say about censorship has a direct read-across to climate. Censorship worked, Atlas told Streit. Dissenters were demonized, and a cancel culture blocked people from speaking and blocked people from hearing. “The solution to misinformation is more information. There is no one who should be trusted with the power to determine truth versus not.”

  Atlas also spoke of the funding webs that distort academic research in a pattern similar to that in climate science. The federal government, in the form of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is the main funder of medical science. A cabal of powerful, politically connected people are chairs of departments in medical schools and also reviewers or editors-in-chief of medical publications. There’s an added twist: in response to FOIA requests, OpenTheBooks found that individual NIH employees received $325 million from the pharmaceutical industry over an 11-year period, which looks very much like legalized corruption.

  Atlas and Edmans offer similar advice on what Atlas calls a “crisis of trust,”Atlas telling Streit:

  “We now know the responsibility is on us as individuals in a free society to know what we’re talking about; to go investigate the source and the data because the era of trusting people solely on the basis of their credentials is over … They’re incompetent. But also, they’re not to be trusted. They manipulated the public instead of g[iving] us information and let[ting] us decide.”

  Unsurprisingly, GDI holds the opposite view. In a February 2022 interview, Daniel Rogers, GDI’s cofounder and executive director, speaks of the societal function of information that requires deference to politically approved science:

  “People have been convinced through the online disinformation ecosystem not to get vaccinated, becoming eventually sick and causing more harm. In that sense, while the number of websites acting as purveyors of disinformation isn’t that big, it’s an enormous problem in terms of impact, to the point that it poses a threat to democracy…. This is a true cultural malignancy.”

  Rogers’s is an authoritarian, top-down model of information dissemination and control. Yet, almost in the same breath, Rogers expresses alarm that “around the world, authoritarian regimes are increasingly coming into power, which I see as a direct result of the collective information environment poisoned by these toxic business models.” He might as well have been talking about GDI as a toxic business model. In a crisis of trust, it is organizations such as his that act as malignant nodes in the spread of distrust.

  Ultimately, the crisis of trust is a crisis of civilization. In May Contain Lies, Edmans recounts an experiment in which subjects are invited to drink apple juice from a bedpan that they know is perfectly clean; 72% of them flatly refuse. This is rational behavior. Heuristics, or rules of thumb, obviate thinking and enable us to live fuller lives. And, as McLean shows, trade is a supremely human activity. Trade enables specialization, and specialization enables the development of knowledge expertise. We all lose when expertise is discredited by being politicized and harnessed to a public policy agenda.

  A necessary condition for restoring trust in expertise is free expression by experts and nonexperts alike free of intimidation. This condition was absent during the pandemic and continues to this day. It has been absent for many years in discussions on climate change, as both Stuart Kirk and climate scientist Judith Curry, drummed out of her position at Georgia Tech, can testify.

  Despite the weight of the forces arrayed against them and the power of climate catastrophism to silence dissent, opponents of ESG and stakeholder capitalism have succeeded in checking its advance. True, the battle is lost in the EU and, for the time being, in Britain, but the fact that the CEO of the world’s largest investment manager refrains from using the word “ESG” says something, as does the withdrawal of a number of large financial institutions from climate action groups. The two Republican SEC commissioners remind its chair of the limits of the authority delegated to it by Congress (Hester Peirce: “We are Not the Securities and Environment Commission – At Least Not Yet”) – and Scope 3 emissions fall away from the SEC climate disclosure rule. ExxonMobil has filed a suit against Follow This, the climate activist that BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street had supported against Chevron management, and publicly states that it does not care about growing shareholder value.

  Financial markets speak in prices. Tice points out that in 2022, the S&P 500 Energy subindex rose by 59.05%, while the broader equity market sank by 19.44%. As McLean demonstrates, if there is any free lunch in investment, it is diversification by lowering risk but not returns. By restricting their universe of investment possibilities, ESG investors increase risk without improving their chances of return. Investors have noticed. The battle to save shareholder capitalism can be won. These three books help bring that victory closer.

  My advice? Read them.

  Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClearFoundation and author of  The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 20:20

• Deadly Blaze Rips Through US-Sanctioned Moscow Electronics Research Building
  Deadly Blaze Rips Through US-Sanctioned Moscow Electronics Research Building

  A huge and deadly fire is raging at a defense technology research center outside of Moscow, which has so far reportedly taken the lives of at least eight people (per BBC citing state media updates, though the casualty count is conflicting).

  A building of the Platan Research Institute has been engulfed in flames, widespread social media videos show. It is located in the town of Fryazino in the Moscow region. Importantly, Platan develops radio-electronic systems for Russia’s Defense Ministry, raising suspicion that this could be the result of sabotage or covert attack connected to the war in Ukraine.

  

  Governor Moscow oblast, Andrei Vorobyov, confirmed in a Monday statement that three floors of the building have been overwhelmed by flames. “The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth floors are on fire,” Mash said Monday.

  TASS has cited an eyewitness who saw two people tragically fall to their deaths after they jumped from a window trying to escape the flames and thick smoke. BBC writes:

  There are conflicting reports about the building’s purpose. It once homed the Platan Research Institute and defence industry, according to Tass.

  A statement to the agency from Ruselectronics, a Russia-owned electronics organisation, said the building has been privately owned since the 1990s. However, opposition media outlets recently reported that Platan was based in the building as late as 2023.

  It is not immediately clear what caused the fire, but one eyewitness told Tass that it broke out on the sixth floor before spreading.

  Russian media are awash with dramatic videos of a blaze inside a building associated with Platan Institute, a major producer of electronics for the Russian army. pic.twitter.com/ckBHPYmgtg

  — Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) June 24, 2024

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  Over 130 fire and emergency services personnel, two helicopters, and 50 vehicles are engaged in fighting the blaze, which has spread to a whopping 5,000 square meters.

  “The fire area has increased to 5,000 square meters. The extinguishing operation is complicated by the presence of gas-air mix canisters inside the building. The firefighters continue working to eliminate the fire,” a statement given to TASS indicated.

  Once again we are left with the question: accident or covert sabotage?

  Stuff go boom in Germany, other stuff go boom in Russia. For some reason the press has struggled to connect the dots. https://t.co/0O5dczl9Pr

  — Jack Murphy (@JackMurphyRGR) June 24, 2024

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  Local authorities have already announced a criminal case connected the deaths, possibly due to arson or else negligence. 

  Platan Research Institute is among many defense ministry-linked firms currently under US-led sanctions.

  In Moscow, the Platan research institute, which is affiliated with the Russian Armed Forces, was set on fire. 🔥

  Some of the things this facility is known to be producing are components for nuclear weapons, as well as electronic warfare and air defense systems. pic.twitter.com/2RuM03n4ou

  — Astraia Intel (@astraiaintel) June 24, 2024

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  We previously outlined recent mysterious industrial fires and possible sabotage incidents across Europe, the UK, and inside Russia… a trend which has left many observers speculating this could be part of an ongoing covert ‘dirty war’ in the shadows of the Ukraine conflict.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 20:00

• Visualizing Saudi Aramco's Massive Oil Reserves
  Visualizing Saudi Aramco’s Massive Oil Reserves

  Saudi Aramco controls 259 billion barrels worth of oil and gas reserves, which is unmatched by any other company globally. This is a key factor in the company’s massive $1.8 trillion valuation.

  To illustrate that, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu created this chart to compare the proved reserves of major oil companies as of 2022.

  

  Data was compiled by Statista from various company reports.

  Crown Jewel

  Saudi Aramco is the national oil company of Saudi Arabia. As of 2024, it is the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization.

  Its oil reserves are over four times bigger than the reserves of all the other six companies on our list combined.

  

  Behind Saudi Aramco, American company ExxonMobil comes in second with 17.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent, followed by another American company, Chevron, with 11.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

  Saudi Aramco produces 9 million barrels of oil a day, more than any other firm and nearly a tenth of the world’s total.

  In addition, the state-run oil giant is the world’s most profitable company, generating $722 billion in profits between 2016 and 2023.

  Saudi Aramco is also expected to play a big part in Saudi Arabia’s plans to diversify its economy and reduce oil dependence. Recently, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman confirmed that the kingdom is in talks to sell a 1% stake in the state oil giant, which could help fund the country’s projects in clean energy and technology.

  If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out this graphic, which ranks oil production by country.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 19:20

• Fasting Boosts Cancer-Fighting Ability Of 'Natural Killer' Cells: Study
  Fasting Boosts Cancer-Fighting Ability Of ‘Natural Killer’ Cells: Study

  Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Fasting can program certain immunity cells in the body to fight cancer better and improve the cell’s ability to survive in a tumor environment, according to a recent study.

  

  The study, published in the journal Immunity on June 14, looked at how fasting affected natural killer (NK) cells, a type of white blood cell capable of killing damaged or abnormal cells like cancer and those infected by a virus. The presence of a higher number of killer cells within a tumor is usually seen as beneficial for a cancer patient. Researchers found that fasting can reprogram the metabolism of natural killer cells, improving their ability to fight cancer and enabling the cells to survive in the harsh environment within and around the tumors.

  “Our findings identify a link between dietary restriction and optimized innate immune responses, with the potential to enhance immunotherapy strategies” of cancer patients, the paper said.

  In the study, researchers analyzed cancer-infected mice that were not given food for a period of 24 hours, twice a week. As the mice were allowed to eat freely in between fasts, they did not lose any weight.

  During the fasting period, glucose levels in the mice dropped, similar to humans, along with a jump in free fatty acids. Meanwhile, the natural killer cells were observed to have undergone a major change.

  “During each of these fasting cycles, NK cells learned to use these fatty acids as an alternative fuel source to glucose,” said Rebecca Delconte, a co-author of the study.

  “This really optimizes their anti-cancer response because the tumor microenvironment contains a high concentration of lipids, and now they’re able to enter the tumor and survive better because of this metabolic training.”

  Fasting was also observed to have redistributed NK cells in the body. Some of the cells traveled into the bone marrow, getting exposed to high levels of a signaling protein. This led to NK cells producing more Interferon-gamma, a type of protein that plays a key role in the body’s anti-tumor response.

  NK cells in the spleen experienced a separate programming that allowed them to better use lipids as a source of fuel.

  “With both of these mechanisms put together, we find that NK cells are pre-primed to produce more cytokines within the tumor,” Ms. Delconte said.

  “And with the metabolic reprogramming, they’re more able to survive in the tumor environment, and specialized to have improved anti-cancer properties.”

  The research comes as clinical trials to study the safety and effectiveness of fasting together with standard cancer treatments are underway.

  The study was funded through multiple sources, including the National Institutes of Health, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, and the American Cancer Society. Authors declared no competing interests in the study.

  Fasting Risks

  While the June 14 study found positive links between fasting and fighting cancer, clinical dietitian Juhina Farooki says the safety of the process should only be determined on a case-by-case basis.

  “Every patient is different, and what could be safe for one patient is not necessarily safe for the other patient,” she said, according to a Jan. 29 post at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

  Malnutrition is one of the risks of fasting while undergoing cancer treatment. A lack of proper nutrients can result in weight loss, slow down the healing process, and worsen fatigue, the post said. It can also add more stress during what is an already tense period for the individual.

  Ms. Farooki advises cancer patients who wish to fast to only do so after consulting with their physician. This ensures the patient gets sufficient nutrition.

  A February 2023 study that investigated the effect of skipping meals in mice found that there was a difference in the number of monocytes in the creatures. Monocytes are white blood cells made in the bone marrow that fight cancer.

  One group of mice were given breakfast while the other group was denied. After four hours of fasting, 90 percent of monocytes in the fasting mice were found to have disappeared from the bloodstream, which fell further at eight hours. In the non-fasting mice, monocyte levels remained unaffected.

  Meanwhile, a recent German study found intermittent fasting to have a protective effect against inflammation and cancer in the liver. The researchers conducted tests on mice already suffering from liver inflammation.

  After the mice were subjected to four months of intermittent fasting, their liver function tests improved. The mice were found to be less likely to develop liver cancer.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 19:00

• It Took Nvidia 23 Days To Add $1 Trillion In Market Cap; Berkshire Hathaway Hasn't Managed That In 60 Years
  It Took Nvidia 23 Days To Add $1 Trillion In Market Cap; Berkshire Hathaway Hasn’t Managed That In 60 Years

  This morning, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid published his latest chart book titled “Charts to make you go WOW” (available here to pro subs), which will prompt a few surprised exclamations even from the hardened cynics.

  And while there is an extensive selection to pick from – and we will go over the charts in more details shortly –  it’s hard to pick a more “wow” chart example than the recent developments involving Nvidia (there’s lots more beside in the pack from AI and industrial revolutions to debt, deficits, demographics, migration and housing).

  The chart below shows that it’s taken 60 years for the most famous and arguably successful investor in the world, Warren Buffet, to build Berkshire Hathaway up to just shy of a trillion-dollar company ($883bn at Friday’s close). Indeed the company’s origins began in the 19th century so the full journey has taken well over a century and it’s yet to hit a trillion dollars.

  Contrast that with Nvidia, which went from just below $2tn market cap for the last time on April 24th, to over $3tn just 30 trading days later. Even more impressively, at its record close last Tuesday, where it became the largest company in the world, the last trillion of market cap was added in only 23 trading days.

  

  Then again, the higher they rise… Nvidia opened on Thursday after the holiday another 3% higher, melting up on virtually no volume (and a brutal gamma squeeze). But since that intraday peak it has tumbled 13% in just three days, and slipped back to 3rd in the S&P 500 rankings. The move came as portfolio managers rebalanced portfolios at the end of the quarter, with JPM calculating some $50 billion in selling pressure from pension funds, to account for the surge in tech shares; the start of the buyback blackout period last week didn’t help either.

  So, as Jim Reid asks rhetorically, is this a pause for breath or signs the air is being let out of the balloon? He responds that while his chart book hints that he does believe in AI, there have been signs of over exuberance in the US market over the last month. Penny stock trading has soared and net call options on Mega Cap Growth and Tech has exploded in June.

  This, alongside positioning and the move into the buyback blackout period, has led DB strategist to suggest a “breather” is likely.

  More in the full DB Monthly Chartbook “Charts to make you go WOW” available to pro subs.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 18:40

• Biden's Latest DEI Hire Deletes Past Anti-White And Anti-Police Tweets
  Biden’s Latest DEI Hire Deletes Past Anti-White And Anti-Police Tweets

  Authored by Steve Watson via modernity.news,

  In the latest clownworld development, the Biden Administration hired a man in a dress to be its new Associate Communications Director and it quickly emerged that the guy had a history of spicy tweets hating on white people, comparing police officers to ‘slave patrols’ and ‘lynch mobs’, and calling for ICE to be abolished.

  

  Here is who they hired. Tyler Cherry (left).

  The new White House Associate Communications Director. pic.twitter.com/jUzFbGYeVU

  — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 23, 2024

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

  He looks like Mr Slave from South Park.

  The Biden Administration just hired Mr Slave from South Park as their Associate Communications Director. What could possibly go wrong?… OH, it already has. Full report here: https://t.co/nHkM2HPgUZ pic.twitter.com/EpXVwPltdH

  — m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) June 24, 2024

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

  Or Weird Al Yankovic if you prefer:

  One of these is a weird oddball parody, the other is Al Yankovic. Pretty soon neither of them will have a real job. Full report here: https://t.co/nHkM2HPgUZ pic.twitter.com/vWEDc2yu0l

  — m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) June 24, 2024

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

  He has a degree in gender studies. Of course he does.

  New White House Associate Communications Director got his degree in gender studies https://t.co/50qgFFZPvr

  — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 24, 2024

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

  He used to work for Media Matters. Of course he did.

  More of Tyler Cherry’s past tweets: https://t.co/RGPupkA045

  — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 24, 2024

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

  He also thinks there are too many white people.

  Tyler put out a tweet backpedaling on all his previous tweets before closing comments. He didn’t specify which tweets he changed his views on https://t.co/UZoWIAhoFa

  — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 24, 2024

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

  When people started to point all this out, Cherry apologised, and then started deleting all the old tweets.

  BREAKING: New White House Associate Communications Director deleted all his past tweets except his most recent one where he backpedals on all his past posts. https://t.co/bLECPrNXIv pic.twitter.com/l4cOgAyAHO

  — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 24, 2024

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

  That’s really awesome to hear Tyler— could you elaborate on what views are different and which one of these past posts do not reflect your current views? pic.twitter.com/pzdbBJg1dA

  — Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) June 23, 2024

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

  He deleted every tweet with the word ‘white’ in it:

  Since I posted this an hour ago, the Biden communications staffer has gone back and deleted every single one of his tweets with the word “white” in it. (When I checked an hour ago, he had hundreds). https://t.co/BJwpBRdQlk pic.twitter.com/ZPCOKW0Gni

  — Nate Hochman (@njhochman) June 23, 2024

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

  And restricted who can reply or comment:

  What did you change your views on? https://t.co/NPdEWKuFTx pic.twitter.com/mH3BAukQwZ

  — Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) June 23, 2024

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

  There is no word yet on whether this guy likes to steal luggage or not.

  Too late to backpedal Tyler Cherry.

  You’ve been exposed as a horrible human who has no respect for law enforcement or decency.

  Resign.pic.twitter.com/3wxlm3BRtd

  — Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) June 23, 2024

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

  Who is really running the country?

  Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 06/24/2024 – 18:20

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