- WHO Suggests Europe Will Experience "Quiet" COVID-19 Period After Current Cases Subside
WHO Suggests Europe Will Experience “Quiet” COVID-19 Period After Current Cases Subside
Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,
The World Health Organization on Monday suggested that Europe will experience a “quiet” COVID-19 period before the virus returns toward the end of the year, albeit without a full pandemic.
WHO Regional Director of Europe, Hans Kluge, told Agence France-Presse that the highly infectious Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, could infect 60 percent of Europeans by March before tapering off for some time thanks to global immunity and increased vaccinations, among other things.
Omicron cases are sweeping throughout several European countries, and the EU health agency, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) says that the overall level of risk to public health is “very high.”
ECDC said earlier this month that it expects more cases to emerge in the coming weeks, driven by the Omicron variant, and warned of increased worker shortages among health care and other essential workers, and potential difficulties with testing and contact tracing capacities in many EU member states.
However, once the number of cases across Europe subsides, “there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity, either thanks to the vaccine or because people have immunity due to the infection, and also lowering seasonality,” Kluge said.
“So we anticipate that there will be a quiet period before COVID-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back,” he said.
Kluge’s comments come after White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday said that he’s “as confident as you can be” that most of the United States will reach a peak in Omicron infections in the middle of February.
“If you look at the patterns that we’ve seen in South Africa, in the UK, and in Israel and in the northeast and New England and upper Midwest states, they have peaked and [are] starting to come down rather sharply,” Fauci told ABC’s “This Week.”
While there are still some Southern and Western states that continue to see case numbers rise, if the pattern follows the downward trend seen in other places, such as the Northeast, the United States will start to see a similar “turnaround throughout the entire country,” Fauci said.
However, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases cautioned against being “overconfident” when it comes to the virus and its potential effects across the nation.
He also noted that those areas of the country that haven’t been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or received booster shots may still see “a bit more pain and suffering with hospitalizations.”
Kluge on Monday also cautioned that it was too early to forecast the virus becoming less severe and endemic, noting that new variants could still emerge.
“There is a lot of talk about endemic but endemic means … that it is possible to predict what’s going to happen. This virus has surprised [us] more than once so we have to be very careful,” Kluge said.
The WHO’s comments come as a growing number of European countries have rolled back their COVID-19 restrictions citing declining hospitalizations and data suggesting Omicron cases have peaked.
Beginning Jan. 27, people in the United Kingdom no longer have to wear masks in public or show proof that they’ve been vaccinated to enter some venues, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced.
Fully vaccinated people arriving into the UK will also no longer face testing requirements as of Feb. 11.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex said on Thursday the country will start to roll back restrictions within weeks, pointing to an improvement in the country’s COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalizations.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also told reporters on Jan. 10 that he wants the European Union to consider approaching COVID-19 in the same way it approaches flu.
“The situation is not what we faced a year ago,” Sánchez said in a radio interview with Spain’s Cadena SER.
“I think we have to evaluate the evolution of COVID to an endemic illness, from the pandemic we have faced up until now.”
However, Austria is moving closer to implementing a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for most adults after Parliament’s lower house on Thursday voted in favor of the proposal.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/26/2022 – 02:00 - Victor Davis Hanson: What Are Republicans "For" In 2022?
Victor Davis Hanson: What Are Republicans “For” In 2022?
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
Can Republicans move beyond just completing the original, necessary Trump agenda on closing the border, legal-only immigration, deterrence against China, energy production, immunity from optional military engagements in the Middle East, industrial and manufacturing resurgence in the Rust Belt and conservative judicial appointments?
What would such a new Contract with America entail, if it were indeed wise before the midterms to advertise such a confident Newt Gingrich-like strategy for regaining the House? And should a menu be more rather than less detailed? What about the follow-up for a later Republican presidency?
Here are the Ten Commandments worth running on, some new, some old. Not all are official policy positions. Some are recommendations for action even when the federal government is not directly involved.
1) A Safe and Law-Abiding America. Crime prevention and punishment is mostly a local and state affair. But the federal government promises to prosecute fully any criminal who crosses state lines or uses interstate communications to commit arson, public destruction, smash-and-grab looting or general attacks on any federal property within the states.
2) Affordable Energy for an Energy-Independent America. Restoration of gas and oil energy independence; reopening of federal lands for new energy leases; fast-tracking natural gas and oil pipelines; encouragement and incentives to mine rare and precious metals inside the United States needed for batteries and new sources of energy.
3) A Secure Border. Immediate completion of the border wall. Deportation of all those who crossed illegally between 2017 and 2024 and all criminals convicted of felonies or serious misdemeanors; employer sanctions; an end to catch-and-release; all refugee seekers apply outside the United States; a tax on remittances sent south of the border on those here illegally and on public assistance; the end of the primacy of family considerations in fast-tracking immigration requests, replaced by meritocratic considerations of English facility, skill sets and education. All immigration would be predicated on legality, diversity, meritocracy and measured and manageable numbers necessary for assimilation and integration.
4) A Sacrosanct Constitution and Preservation of Long-Held Traditions. On record for no changes to the Constitution; no dismantling of the Electoral College; no federalization of states’ voting laws; no increase in a nine-justice Supreme Court; no statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico; no end to the Senate filibuster.
5) The Restoration of Election Day. Encouragement to the states to limit mail-in balloting, return to the old notion of absentee balloting as an exception rather than the norm and cut back on extended/early balloting — with the goal that 60 to 70% of ballots cast are done so on Election Day.
6) A “Don’t Tread on Me” Foreign Policy. Strong support for the sanctity of allied nations. Deterrence against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and other belligerents. A realist foreign policy of “No better friend, no worse enemy.” An end to optional large, on-the-ground military engagements in the Middle East. A return of Pentagon emphasis on battle readiness rather than social justice and woke agendas, with budgets redirected to missile defense and naval and air deterrence.
7) Towards a Balanced Budget. Expenditures must match revenues. An update of the Simpson-Bowles National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform or enactment of its recommendations, with the aim of achieving a balanced budget in four years.
8) Anti-Trust, Anti-Monopoly Legislation. An end to Silicon Valley’s vast monopolies, cartels and immunity from public-utility regulations.
9) Strict Enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Prohibition of the use of racial bias/advantage/preference in the operations of public local, state and federal agencies. No federal funds allotted for critical-race-theory indoctrination.
10) No Federal Funds for Lawbreakers. An end to federal support of state agencies and private institutions that violate federal statutes and the Bill of Rights, whether sanctuary-city jurisdictions or campuses whose speech and trial codes violate the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments. Loss of tax-free status on income from university endowments of more than $10 billion.
Lots more might be included in any such agenda (e.g., moving agencies like the FBI out of Washington), but God limited his commandments to 10, and humble Republicans should keep that consideration in mind.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 23:55 - Is Ukraine A Distraction From Biden's Terrible Approval Rating?
Is Ukraine A Distraction From Biden’s Terrible Approval Rating?
As President Biden ‘celebrated’ the ‘most successful first year of a presidency ever’ last week, his approval rating hit a new low (worse than it was in November amid the Kabul crisis)…
Voters have signaled their unhappiness with Biden as his agenda has shifted far from the ‘moderate’ he projected during the campaign – but has still disappointed every ‘identity’ in his party due to the lack of legislation. Furthermore, Americans see inflation is at a forty-year high, the economy is faltering, the COVID-19 pandemic is never-ending (more deaths under Biden than Trump), among numerous other things.
All of which has sent the probabilities of Democrats losing the midterms later this year soaring.
New polls released this week show that a majority, 56%, of Americans disapprove of the president’s job, with only 26% of Americans believing things in the country are going well.
So, is it any wonder that the Biden administration is desperately seeking a distraction from the domestic chaos… and what better and more time-test strategy than to start a land-war in Eurasia.
For months, Russia has amassed forces near Ukraine. Now, all of a sudden, Western corporate media and the White House have been using the threat of war to crowd out news headlines of inflation, bare shelves at supermarkets, supply chain woes, and rising violent crime.
And while correlation is not causation, one can’t help but notice in the chart below how as the president becomes more unpopular, the headlines about Ukraine grow larger and larger.
The Federalist’s co-founder, Sean Davis, sums things up perfectly:
History is littered with empires that decided to start dumb wars to distract from social/economic problems in their own backyards. The worse Biden’s numbers get, the more likely it becomes that he’ll send your kids to the meat grinder in the hopes a war will juice his numbers. https://t.co/wEAYGxq0so
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 24, 2022
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Jordan Boyd at The Federalist notes that as early as the 1800s, those in power used their authority to start conflicts with foreign powers to manipulate public opinion.
French Emperor Louis Napoleon was suspected of pandering to French Catholics and trying to boost his country’s crumbling reputation when he entered the Crimean War in 1854.
Napoleon, experts say, wanted to lord France’s power over Russian Orthodox Christians to keep Frenchmen’s minds off of problems at home.
A more recent example of this distraction came in 1998 when President Bill Clinton suddenly decided, just days after he confessed to having sexual relations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, to bomb potential terrorists in Afghanistan and Sudan.
Let’s hope the maniacs in the White House aren’t serious about actually engaging in a kinetic war this time… to boost Biden’s dismal approval rating.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 23:35 - Insurance Companies Note Jump In Death Payouts Amid 40% Rise Among Prime-Age Americans
Insurance Companies Note Jump In Death Payouts Amid 40% Rise Among Prime-Age Americans
Authored by Conan Milner via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)
Insurance companies are reporting a jump in death payouts due to a dramatic rise in the number of deaths. The rise in the death rate is being corroborated by death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
More people are dying at younger ages and it’s not because of COVID-19. But it isn’t the government making a fuss about it, it’s life insurance companies.(IR Stone/Shutterstock) The death rate is up by 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels according to Scott Davison, chief executive of OneAmerica, a major insurance company based in Indianapolis. During an online news conference on Dec. 30, 2021, Davison said the change was unprecedented.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business,” he said.
OneAmerica sells life insurance to employers nationwide, and similar figures are found throughout the industry.
“The data is consistent across every player in that business,” Davison said. “And what we saw just in the third quarter—we’re seeing it continue into the fourth quarter—is that death rates are up 40 percent over what they were pre-pandemic. Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic. So 40 percent is just unheard of.”
This 40 percent figure doesn’t represent folks dying of old age, but is instead a reflection of deaths in working-age adults, aged 18 to 65. However, what’s responsible for the alarming spike in fatalities in this age group isn’t clear.
With all of the concern about COVID-19 lately, the contagion seems a likely choice. But according to Davison, something else is at play. He said the data coming from insurance companies—entities in the business of paying out when people die—show that the deaths being reported as COVID-19 fatalities “greatly understate” the actual deaths from working age people hit by the pandemic, as most of the claims being filed aren’t being classified as COVID-19 deaths.
“It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers,” he said.
Also taking part in the news conference was Brian Tabor, president of the Indiana Hospital Association. He also noted a dramatic rise in illness from a different perspective. Tabor said hospitals across Indiana were being flooded with patients “with many different conditions.”
In October 2021, The Times of India reported that health insurers saw a “huge surge in non-COVID claims,” with the head of interventional cardiology at a Mumbai, India, hospital noting a 40 percent increase in heart problems compared to the previous six to eight months.
Ever since COVID-19 hit, the world has been bracing itself for huge numbers. Most recently in a White House press briefing on Dec. 17, 2021, President Joe Biden warned that unvaccinated Americans can look forward to a “winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”
Still, such astronomical figures emerging all of a sudden are hard to fathom. The pandemic has worn on for nearly two years, and health officials have been keeping a close eye on the death count. What could account for such a dramatic jump at the end of 2021?
[ZH: Answering this question is Epoch’s Petr Svab with an in-depth analysis – buckle up]
Americans have been dying at a significantly higher rate over the past two years or so, but the COVID-19 disease tells only part of the story. Among seniors, the pandemic could explain the increase in mortality more easily than among younger people, where there’s a gap requiring further explanation.
Overall, there appear to be three distinct patterns in the data based on age:
Among those of age 0 to 17, mortality remained virtually unchanged since 2019.
Among those who were 65 or older, mortality increased in 2020, dropped in the first half of 2021, coinciding with the proliferation of the COVID-19 vaccines, and then increased in the third quarter of 2021, coinciding with the emergence of the Delta variant, which appeared more resistant to the vaccines.
Among those aged 18 to 49, mortality rose dramatically in the first half of 2020, then somewhat plateaued before increasing again in the third quarter of 2021.
The 50 to 64 age group appears to be a mix of the latter two patterns.
COVID-19 Impact
The differences between age groups become more apparent when deaths involving COVID-19 are highlighted.
Under the age of 18, COVID-related deaths barely register when visualized.
For those aged 75 and older, the novel disease more than explains any increases in mortality. For those aged 65 to 74, deaths were on the rise long before the pandemic. Excluding the COVID deaths leaves increases slightly above the previous trend.
Among those aged 18 to 65, however, there emerges the opposite phenomenon—after exclusion of COVID deaths, a significant hike in mortality remains. The non-COVID increase appears more pronounced in the younger age groups and less in the older ones.
There are several factors that would explain at least part of the excess deaths.
Drugs, Alcohol, Murder
Drug overdoses skyrocketed in 2020 with more than 20,000 more dying in the 18–64 age group than the year before. The Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) preliminary data for the first half of 2021 indicates the trend even somewhat intensified.
There are several factors that would explain at least part of the excess deaths. Drugs, Alcohol, Murder Drug overdoses skyrocketed in 2020 with more than 20,000 more dying in the 18–64 age group than the year before. The Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) preliminary data for the first half of 2021 indicates the trend even somewhat intensified.
Deaths involving alcohol—not just alcohol poisoning, but also those due to alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver and other alcohol-induced causes—have been on the rise in recent years, but the 2020 increase was particularly significant. Nearly 8,000 more died in 2020 than the year before in the 18–64 age group. The 2021 data is not yet available.
Homicide deaths increased nearly 30 percent from 2019 to 2020 in the 18–64 age group, accounting for nearly 4,000 excess deaths. Last year is shaping up to be similarly homicidal, based on CDC’s preliminary data for the first half of 2021.
With COVID-19 deaths excluded and assuming drug overdoses, alcohol, and homicide deaths continued in 2021 at a similar intensity as the year before, there was still about 50,000 excess deaths last year in the 18-64 age group.
Misclassified, Overwhelmed
The CDC and some experts argue that the excess deaths could be misclassified COVID-19 deaths as well as deaths due to lack of care because of hospitals overwhelmed with COVID patients. They point to the fact that about third of Americans die at home. Their death certificates would be probably written by attending physicians who may not test the patient for COVID-19.
The CDC issued guidance on June 15, 2020, that all people suspected of dying of COVID-19 should be tested post mortem, but it’s not clear to what degree medical practitioners are following through on it.
This explanation may be limited for several reasons.
Deaths at home indeed increased with the onset of the pandemic, from less than 32 percent in 2019 to more than 36 percent in June 2020. But then the rate dropped again, to less than 31 percent in December 2020. If people were forced to die at home because medical care wasn’t available to them, it doesn’t appear to have been widespread enough to explain the excess mortality gap.
The argument for misclassified COVID deaths usually assumes that the dying person was suffering from multiple ailments and the attending physician failed to note COVID-19 as at least a contributing factor. It’s not clear how often that applies to younger people who are generally healthier and among whom COVID-19 deaths are rarer and may stand out more.
Finally, the argument appears to use backward reasoning—assuming the excess deaths are caused by COVID-19 and then seeking supporting logic on how that could be.
Vaccines
There’s a growing group of doctors and researchers who point to the COVID-19 vaccines as a possible culprit in at least a part of the excess deaths last year. They usually point to several physiological mechanisms through which the vaccines could cause harm combined with known side effects as well as data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database of reports of health problems that have occurred after a vaccination and may or may not have been caused by it.
VAERS reports exploded with the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines. By Jan. 7, there were over a million reports, including more than 21,000 deaths. Previously, there would be about 40,000 reports and a few hundred deaths a year. They are largely filed by health care personnel, based on previous research.
The usual arguments against the VAERS data have been that it’s unverified and unreliable. Some researchers have pointed out, however, that the system isn’t meant to provide definitive answers, but rather early warnings. In their view, the reports have raised numerous red flags that haven’t been sufficiently investigated.
CDC Data Caveats
The latest detailed cause-of-death data available on the CDC website is for the year 2020. For 2021, CDC has been releasing some preliminary data bi-weekly, but cautions that it has a lag of 8 weeks or more as the death certificate data streams in from around the country. For this analysis, only data up until October has been used. For specific causes of death beyond COVID-19, pneumonia, and influenza, the CDC doesn’t break down the available 2021 data by age, limiting its usefulness for this analysis.
In addition, CDC’s COVID-19 mortality data that covers 2021 attributes to the virus all deaths where COVID-19 was marked on the death certificate, regardless whether it was listed as the underlying cause or as a contributing factor. Early in the pandemic, the CDC instructed medical practitioners to mark all deceased who had tested positive, and even those with COVID-like symptoms but who had not been tested, as deaths caused by COVID-19. Later in 2020, the guidance gradually changed. Untested cases were to be separated and COVID-19 was required to be at least a contributing factor to be listed on the death certificate.
In the second half of 2020, the last period with available death certificate data on this point, nearly 90 percent of deaths involving COVID-19 had the disease listed as the underlying cause of death rather than a contributing factor.
Some experts have also pointed to government policies as a possible culprit in some excess deaths. School closures and business lockdowns have led to both financial and psychological depression, some research and anecdotal reports indicate, which may have led to death in some cases. Suicide deaths, though, have been relatively stable between 2019 and June 2021, based on available data.
Death After COVID
There may be a more hidden health impact of COVID-19. A study published in December found that people hospitalized for COVID-19 had somewhere between two and three times the risk of dying in the following 12 months of something other than COVID-19 than those going to a doctor, but testing negative.
“This huge explosion of inflammation during a severe episode of COVID seems to be causing a lot of other problems,” said Arch Mainous, the lead author of the study and a vice chair for research in the Department of Community Health and Family Medicine at the University of Florida.
“It looks like there is an overall impact on your body from this biological insult,” he told The Epoch Times.
The study has several limitations. It included people only from one hospital system in Florida and as such may not fully apply to the entire U.S. population. Also, it controlled for comorbidities, but used the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI), which only includes 17 general factors that aren’t specific to COVID-19. It includes age as well as issues such as history of heart attack, stroke, cancer, AIDS, cirrhosis, kidney disease, and diabetes. Mainous acknowledged that the index may be less predictive in younger patients.
Finally, the studied population as a whole had on average a particularly high risk of dying. Of the more than 13,600 people included, over 2,600 died within a year—nearly 20 percent. For comparison, Americans of age 85 or higher have about 10 percent annual mortality.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 23:15 - Toyota Targets A Record 11 Million Vehicles Produced For Its Fiscal Year 2022
Toyota Targets A Record 11 Million Vehicles Produced For Its Fiscal Year 2022
Toyota has said it plans on making a record 11 million vehicles worldwide in its fiscal 2022, which starts in April of this coming year. The production number would shatter the record Toyota set in 2016 if it can be accomplished.
The target marks a major 20% hike from the company’s current fiscal year production and suggests a coming robust recovery in the auto market, which has suffered this year not only due to Covid, but also due to a global semiconductor shortage.
It’s a bright sunbeam of optimism not only for Toyota, but for the entire industry, which has struggled with supply chain hang-ups throughout 2021.
Toyota has already been sharing its plans with its suppliers, a new report from Nikkei said overnight. The company is planning on making 7.5 million vehicles overseas and 3.5 million in Japan, the report says. These mark increases of 25% and 15%, respectively.
Toyota is planning on output of more than 900,000 vehicles every month and has already told its suppliers that it has a target of 1 million vehicles for April 2022.
But heading into the new fiscal year, the automaker still has its challenges: output for February will be reduced by 20%, Nikkei reported.
In FY 2021, Toyota is expected to have produced about 9 million vehicles.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 22:55 - Bond Pain Set To Ease As Curve Gets Ahead Of The Fed
Bond Pain Set To Ease As Curve Gets Ahead Of The Fed
By Garfield Reynolds, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and analyst
This month’s bond rout is overdone. Wednesday’s Federal Reserve meeting may offer more carrots than sticks for debt investors.
While central banks are moving to exit quantitative easing as they look past the pandemic into a world of faster inflation, it’s worth remembering that Fed Chair Jerome Powell said this month that it would be “a long road to normal from where we are now.”This characterization jars with rates markets pricing in four hikes this year and yield curves that are threatening to flatten too far and too quickly.
Keep in mind that the Fed’s plan to rapidly shrink its balance sheet should help deliver a steeper yield curve, in contrast to the flattening implied by commentators including JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon, who see the risk of more than four rate hikes this year.
Dimon has been wrong-footed on rates before — including a 2018 warning that 10-year Treasury yields would hit 5% — yet traders are falling over each other to catch the bandwagon. It’s easy to momentum-chase rate shorts, and profitable for a time, whereas betting on balance-sheet reductions is a tougher game.
Also keep in mind that forecasts and the bond market itself show that inflation should cool, either because the impact of supply shocks fade as the coronavirus shifts from pandemic to endemic, or the first one or two hikes from the Fed’s zero bound hit the real world harder than traders envisage.
On top of this, there’s the dynamic whereby the more aggressive the market gets with pricing in steep hikes, the less aggressive the Fed needs to be to get financial conditions back to normal.
So even if the broad outlook for bonds remains bearish for the next few quarters, many traders could find themselves unhappily ahead of the Fed this week.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 22:35 - Watch: Mass Release Of 'Single Adult Migrants' Into Small Texas Town
Watch: Mass Release Of ‘Single Adult Migrants’ Into Small Texas Town
A massive group of single adult illegal immigrants – most of whom were men – were caught on video by Fox News being released into a Texas town via a small, unmarked office in a parking lot.
Fox News footage shows several federally contracted buses dropping off dozens of mostly male migrants at a parking garage in Brownsville, Texas. Black tarps were set up with a makeshift sign said “Border Patrol drop-off” above it. –Fox News
Watch:
There are black tarps set up around the parking garage to obstruct the public’s view. In a statement, the city of Brownsville confirmed to me that they use this spot to work with the federal government to facilitate travel for the migrants released from federal custody. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/c7kgs4rgyL
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 25, 2022
Fox employees witnessed men enter a small, unmarked office – only to emerge moments later and get into multiple taxi cabs, who were then taken to nearby Harlingen Airport. According to the report “there were no children or migrant families among the groups.”
Several of the migrants told Fox that they had crossed illegally that morning, paying approximately $2,000 per person to cartel smugglers. They also said they were flying to destinations including Miami, Houston and Atlanta.
Single adults are typically being expelled via Trump-era Title 42 public health protections. The Biden administration kept Title 42 in place but is not applying it to unaccompanied children or most migrant families. However, single adults have long been the easiest category of migrant to deport. -Fox News
The Brownsville Office of Emergency Management has been conducting the migrant transfers using FEMA funding in order to facilitate “the transfer of these migrants to their final destination by allowing them to use services to contact their families, NGOs, or a taxicab,” according to the city, which confirmed that the parking garage is serving as a staging area for migrants to obtain travel information to “facilitate their transfer to their final destinations.”
As soon as I finished typing this, another bus pulled up and is also releasing dozens more single adult men. Some of them are wearing ankle monitors. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/1xZhlCLYd1
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 25, 2022
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According to Fox, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says they aren’t involved in the releases, while an Immigration and Customs Enforcement source said they thought it was an ICE release.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 22:15 - In Catastrophic Month For "Smart Money", Goldman Saw Biggest Hedge Fund Buying Since 2020 On Monday
In Catastrophic Month For “Smart Money”, Goldman Saw Biggest Hedge Fund Buying Since 2020 On Monday
Amid record volumes and a sharp intra-day price reversal in the US equity markets yesterday, and with confused retail investors first panic selling then panic buying as they chased the unprecedented reversal in momentum on Monday…
… the Goldman Sachs Prime book saw the largest 1-day net buying since Nov ‘20 (a +3.9 standard deviation vs. the average daily net flow of the past year), driven by short covers and to a lesser extent long buys (1.6 to 1). North America was by far the most net bought region followed by EM Asia, while DM Asia was the most $ net sold.
Here is the breakdown from the latest Goldman Prime report. There are some staggering datapoints here.
- After 8 straight days of net selling, US equities on the GS Prime book saw the largest $ net buying since Dec 17th (+3.4 SDs), driven short covers and to a lesser extent long buys (2.3 to 1).
- Yesterday’s $ short covering in US equities – driven by Macro Products – was the 5th largest in the past five years (+3.0 SDs).
- US ETF shorts decreased 4% (ex. MTM) – the largest 1-day reduction since Oct ’20 – driven by covers in Broad-Based Equity and Technology ETFs.
- Single Stocks saw the 3rd largest $ net buying in the past five years (+4.1 SDs), driven by long buys and to a lesser extent short covers (4 to 1).
- With the sole exception of Energy, all sectors were net bought led in $ terms by Consumer Disc, Info Tech, Comm Svcs, Health Care, and Industrials.
- Following 7 straight days of net selling, Consumer Disc stocks saw the largest $ net buying since Jun ’21 (+3.8 SDs) driven by long buys and short covers (1.4 to 1).
- Info Tech stocks were net bought for a second straight day and saw the largest $ net buying since Dec 17th (+2.1 SDs), driven by long buys and short covers (2.5 to 1).
- Most $ Net Bought Industries – Software, Interactive Media & Svcs, Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure, Internet & Direct Marketing Retail, Entertainment, IT Svcs, Biotech, Multiline Retail
- Most $ Net Sold Industries – Tech Hardware, Capital Markets, Oil, Gas & Consumable Fuels, Media, Pharmaceuticals, Metals & Mining, Banks, Household Durables
What about performance?
Well, on Monday, hedge funds lucked out: according to GS Prime, fundamental LS managers were down as much as -2.2% intra-day before recovering amid the price reversal, and closing -0.2% (alpha +0.2%) vs MSCI Total Return -0.6%. We suppose a similar pattern was observed on Tuesday.
But while hedge funds may have been saved by that mystery put seller we profiled yesterday, they are still facing a world of pain (and unprecedented redemption requests): according to Goldman, so far in January, Fundamental L/S funds are down 7.2% (alpha -4.0%) after just 16 trading days in 2022.
And the devastating punchline: according to Goldman “since we starting compiling performance estimates using Prime positions in Jan ’16, Fundamental LS returns had only experienced worse drawdowns in March ’20, and Q4 ’18.“
And instead of having conviction one way or another and risking capital to justify their ridiculous performance fees, the so-called smart money is now absolutely clueless, and net leverage has collapsed to one year lows and sliding fast.
And in this environment where everyone is losing money and nobody knows what to do, it is not surprising that emini liquidity has cratered to levels not seen since March 2020… when the Fed had to inject $5 trillion and backstop the bond market with direct purchases of corporate bonds, to reboot the market.
Translation: good luck to Powell tomorrow and the Fed with those “six or seven hikes” and balance sheet runoff…
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 21:55 - Woman At Texas Walmart Offers Another Shopper $500,000 For Her Child
Woman At Texas Walmart Offers Another Shopper $500,000 For Her Child
It looks like supply chain shortages are showing up everywhere…
For example, a woman in a Walmart in Texas this month reportedly offered another shopper $500,000 for her infant child.
The “bizarre encounter” took place in Crockett, Texas, when two women were reportedly both at the self-checkout line. A mother on line said 49 year old Rebecca Taylor commented about her son’s blond hair and blue eyes before asking “how much he costs”.
49 year old Rebecca Taylor The mother originally laughed off the incident, before Taylor claimed to have $250,000 in her car. Then, the mother alerted the authorities.
She told police that Taylor was at the store with another woman and that she waited for them to leave the store before leaving herself. After she thought Taylor left, she made her way out to the parking lot where Taylor and the other woman “screamed at her that the offer was now $500,000.”
Taylor has since been charged with “sale or purchase of a child” and has been released from the Houston County Sheriff’s Office on a $50,000 bond, the NY Post, Fox News and Click 2 Houston reported.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 21:35 - Ukraine Crisis: How Deep State Created Biden-Putin Rift?
Ukraine Crisis: How Deep State Created Biden-Putin Rift?
Submitted by Nauman Sadiq,
Days before Biden’s inauguration as president on January 20 last year, instigating Russian dissident and Putin’s longtime foe Alexei Navalny to return to Russia on January 17 from his sojourn in Germany for no apparent political advantage, after being allegedly poisoned in August 2020, was clearly the job of the US deep state that wanted to sabotage newly inaugurated Biden administration’s relations with Russia and forestall the likelihood of rapprochement between the arch-rivals.
It’s pertinent to note that as a goodwill gesture before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva in June, Russia significantly drewdown its troop build-up along Ukraine’s border. Reciprocating the courtesy, however, the ambience and body language of the summit, clearly choreographed by the US national security establishment, were kept as austere as possible.
No joint press conferences were held, as is customary after such momentous meetings. The organizers of the farcical show strictly ordered “no breaking the bread” or refreshments during hours-long strenuous discussions. All blame games and tough talk. Even Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was held in a more cordial atmosphere than the bitter encounter between the leaders of the two global powers.
The civilian administrations of the United States, whether Trump or Biden, want to have friendly relations with other major powers, including Russia and China, and want to focus on national economy to provide much-needed financial relief to the American electorate. But the mindset and institutional logic of the US deep state has been frozen in the Cold War era, and it perceives any threat to its global military domination agenda with utmost suspicion and hostility.
The current brinkmanship on the Ukraine crisis is a manifestation of this global power belligerence where the hands of civilian presidents are tied behind their backs and the Pentagon’s top brass determines the national security agenda pursued by the United States.
It’s worth noting that it wasn’t the first time the deep state scuttled peace negotiations between the civilian administration of the United States and its global rivals. Following their first-ever rendezvous in Singapore in June 2018 and a “bromance” lasting over a period of several months, a much-anticipated two-day summit meeting between capricious North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump was held at the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam, on February 27–28, 2019.
On the last day of the Hanoi Summit, however, the White House abruptly announced that the summit was cut short and that no agreement was reached. Trump later clarified that it was due to North Korea’s insistence on ending all sanctions. The real reason of the foundering of the much-hyped North Korea nuclear negotiations, however, can be discovered in hardly noticed news headlines weeks after the summit.
In March 2019, Adam Taylor and Min Joo Kim reported for the Washington Post:
“In broad daylight in late February, just days before President Trump met with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, a group of masked men forced their way into the North Korean Embassy in Madrid. The intruders tied up staff and took computers and mobile phones before fleeing.
“The raid was initially a mystery, but the culprit was soon revealed: Free Joseon, an organization that calls for the overthrow of Kim’s dynasty. More details emerged this week as a Spanish judge lifted a secrecy order on the embassy raid case and claimed one of the perpetrators had later shared stolen material from the raid with the FBI.
“More startling still to North Korea watchers, however, was one of the names of the suspects Spain would reportedly seek to extradite from the United States: a Mexican citizen by the name of Adrian Hong Chang. To many, that name rang a bell.
“Adrian Hong had been a prominent figure in the tightknit world of defectors and activists in Washington and Seoul a decade earlier. Hong had spent some of his childhood in Mexico and later studied at Yale University, where he formed a now well-known NGO that campaigned for change in North Korea. He was a regular at government events and in newspaper op-eds.
“Some said the statements by Free Joseon fit in with the man they knew. For years, Hong has sought to establish a government-in-exile for North Korea. Lee Wolosky, a lawyer with Boies Schiller Flexner and a former State Department official, issued a statement on the group’s behalf Wednesday that said ‘the United States and its allies should support’ groups that oppose the North Korean government.
“Hong later formed Pegasus Strategies, an advisory firm, and was listed as president of a North Korea-focused group called the Joseon Institute. He appears to have broadened his interests to include the Middle East, traveling to Libya in 2011. ‘I consider the Arab Spring a dress rehearsal for North Korea,’ he said in an interview with the National that year.
“Park Sang Hak, a prominent North Korean defector, said he had last seen Hong in Washington in June 2018, when they both attended a meeting at the Director of National Intelligence. There has been widespread speculation in both the Spanish and South Korean media that the group has ties to the CIA. South Korea’s Munhwa Ilbo, the country’s main evening conservative newspaper, published an editorial Thursday that said the ‘US seems to be unofficially involved and providing support’ to Free Joseon.
“State Department spokesman Robert J. Palladino said Tuesday that the U.S. government ‘had nothing to do’ with the embassy incident. Kim Jung-bong, a former NIS official, said while he thought the Free Joseon movement was probably in contact with the CIA, he doubted the U.S. intelligence community would have supported the embassy raid. ‘Their moves were too sloppy,’ Kim Jung-bong said.
“It was not immediately clear how the group could have afforded to carry out raids in a foreign country or hire a prestigious law firm such as Boies Schiller Flexner.”
After reading the excerpts, it becomes abundantly clear that Adrian Hong was a CIA asset and the brazen tactics of raiding North Korea’s embassy in Madrid were deliberately made to look “sloppy” because the raid’s purpose was nothing more than sending a clear message to the North Korean leader before the Hanoi Summit.
Although Trump was eager to get a coveted feather in his diplomatic cap by making Kim Jong-un agree to discard North Korea’s nuclear program, the US national security establishment was staunchly against the negotiations since the beginning.
While Trump was holding a summit with the North Korean leader in Singapore in June 2018, the deep state shills in the mainstream media were publishing fabricated satellite images and speculating that Trump was being duped by Kim and that North Korea had shifted its nuclear arsenal at a secret location in the mountainous region bordering China.
Coming back to Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO and the alliance’s eastward expansion along Russia’s western borders, the ostensible cause of the current standoff, it’s pertinent to mention that the trans-Atlantic military alliance NATO and its auxiliary economic alliance European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset the influence of the former Soviet Union which was geographically adjacent to Europe.
Historically, the NATO military alliance, at least ostensibly, was conceived as a defensive alliance in 1949 during the Cold War in order to offset conventional warfare superiority of the former Soviet Union. The US forged collective defense pact with the Western European nations after the Soviet Union reached the threshold to build its first atomic bomb in 1949 and achieved nuclear parity with the US.
But the trans-Atlantic military alliance has outlived its purpose following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now being used as an aggressive and expansionist military alliance meant to browbeat and coerce the former Soviet allies, the Central and Eastern European states, to join NATO and its corollary economic alliance, the European Union, or risk international economic isolation.
It was not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the groundwork for the European Union was signed in February 1992.
The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to entice the former communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering financial incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of agreements to abolish internal border checks between the EU member states, thus allowing the free movement of workers from the impoverished Eastern Europe to the prosperous countries of the Western Europe.
Regarding the global footprint of the American forces, according to a January 2017 infographic by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were deployed across the world, including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.
In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed during the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been significantly brought down after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 47,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom. Thus, Europe is nothing more than a client of corporate America.
Not surprisingly, the Western political establishments, and particularly the deep states of the US and EU, were as freaked out over the outcome of Brexit as they were during the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and threatened to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars of loan package offered by Vladimir Putin.
In this regard, the founding of the EU has been similar to the precedent of Japan and South Korea in the Far East where 45,000 and 28,500 US troops have currently been deployed, respectively. After the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of geographically adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman administration authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and send a signal to the leaders of the former Soviet Union, which had not developed its nuclear program at the time, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in Europe.
Then, during the Cold War, American entrepreneurs invested heavily in the economies of Japan and South Korea and made them model industrialized nations to forestall the expansion of communism in the Far East.
Similarly, after the Second World War, Washington embarked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with an economic assistance of $13 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in the current dollar value. Since then, Washington has maintained military and economic dominance over Western Europe.
Thus, all the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and equality aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the Western military alliance against the former Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to isolate adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policies as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.
* * *
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 21:15 - 'Ethereum Killer' Rocked By Outages, Solana Co-Founder Blames "Growing Pains"
‘Ethereum Killer’ Rocked By Outages, Solana Co-Founder Blames “Growing Pains”
Once heralded as the “Ethereum Killer“, cryptocurrency Solana has crashed almost 70% from its November highs amid a series of outages and bot attacks that have left traders and users frustrated to the point where many are raising questions about its viability.
The network had become the natural alternative to ethereum after bursting into the limelight last year. Ethereum’s high fees and slow transaction times had been a pain in the behind for its users and with Solana coming in as a shiny new alternative, users flocked to it.
But, as Bloomberg reports, the protocol suffered its sixth serious outage of more than eight hours this month over the weekend, which a notice on its website attributed to excessive duplicate transactions causing a high level of network congestion.
During these periods of network instability, crypto traders are often left unable to sell off their positions as transactions fail to complete on Solana’s network, yet another sign of how unreliable this emerging technology can be during times of stress. When combined with a market-wide crash in crypto prices, investors scrambling to offload their tokens are left to figure out other routes while their portfolios rapidly decline.
For now, Solana is being dumped in favor of Ethereum over the weekend’s latest outages…
Yakovenko further stoked traders’ ire during the crypto crash by making light of Solana’s instability. The Solana Labs co-founder attached a screenshot showing a Solana node reporting 2.05 million duplicate data packets being submitted to the network, accompanied by the caption ‘lol’.
lol pic.twitter.com/2bwB6qZDzS
— anat◎ly 🦀🤿🏒 🤙 (@aeyakovenko) January 22, 2022
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There are some sematics involved here as Decrypt notes that technically the Solana network hasn’t experienced a full outage since September’s extended downtime, but it is hard to arguer that it has been smooth sailing the last few months for the rising layer-1 blockchain. Following recent network performance issues, Yakovenko has detailed the platform’s “growing pains” as it scales to meet demand.
Yakovenko disputes claims that the network went down and data from blockchain explorers support that view. But even if Solana was still functioning, it did so at a weakened level. Solana’s own status website shows a “partial outage” for nine days so far in January, citing either “degraded performance” or “network instability” as the reason for each.
“The network has not experienced any periods of downtime since September,” Yakovenko wrote today.
“Despite that, the user experience is not what it should be today.”
Late last week and into the weekend, Solana users took to social media and Discord to complain of frequent issues. Transactions on the network were getting stalled, often taking considerably longer than normal to complete or outright failing as the network struggled to maintain its typical throughput level measured in transactions per second (TPS).
In a statement shared with Decrypt this morning, Yakovenko wrote that the mark has reached a recent average of 800 TPS, down from the typical mean above 3,000 TPS. (For context, Ethereum, the leading smart-contract blockchain network, can handle roughly 15 transactions per second, on average.)
With about a quarter of the usual transaction throughput on Solana, users attempting to send and receive funds, interact with DeFi tools (peer-to-peer lending and trading applications), and buy and sell NFTs have had issues.
Unlike September’s downtime, which was blamed on an overload of transactions submitted by bots attempting to manipulate a token launch, Yakovenko wrote that the “overwhelming majority” of recent transactions are legitimate—“from normal market DeFi activity, not malicious users or coordinated attacks.”
“The outages are partly a function of Solana’s success, in that the usage and developer activity has grown significantly faster than the maturity of the protocol,” Alkesh Shah, global crypto and digital asset strategist at Bank of America Securities Inc., told Bloomberg.
“In some ways, it’s a high-class problem, having so many transactions meaning it’s an attractive platform for developers and users.”
“The real indicator will be if developer activity and transaction activity significantly slows,” said Shah.
“That would mean that people are not viewing the benefits of Solana versus the challenges of its growing pains. At this point, that’s not happening.”
With more and more of these complex transactions in the mix, Solana validators are struggling to keep on top of the constant flow of user demands.
“The network is experiencing growing pains as it onboards a new class of sophisticated builders and users,” Yakovenko wrote.
Finally, we do note that Solana isn’t the only one having issues.
Ethereum continues to be plagued by scaling difficulties and extremely high gas fees, while newcomers like Polygon PoS saw costs spike by more than seven times in a month in January as play-to-earn video games clogged up demand.
“The ecosystems that are being built on Ethereum and the alternative blockchains are still thriving. There is no ‘winter’ for that ecosystem growth, and that’s really where the value is going to be added,” concluded Shah.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 20:55 - Watch: Nugget Of Truth Emerges On CNN As Guest Rips Biden Apart
Watch: Nugget Of Truth Emerges On CNN As Guest Rips Biden Apart
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
In between rearranging its programming to account for sacked presenters and accused pedophile producers, CNN found itself in a bind when a guest uttered a few words of truth by completely slamming the Biden administration.
Host Anderson Cooper was lost for words as Scott Jennings, former Special Asst. to President George W. Bush, tore into the “disaster” that is the Biden regime.
“I think he has a lot of political problems,” Jennings noted, adding “and an AP poll came out this morning, only 28 percent of Americans want the sitting president to run for re-election. And fewer than half of Democrats.”
“This is a disaster,” Jennings continued, also noting:
“I never imagined how quickly this would all unfold.”
“The person they sold on the campaign,” Jennings went on “The nice old moderate Grandpa who just wanted to help everybody get along and compromise is not what we got over the past year.”
“He has no mandate, really, to do much of anything,” he added, urging “It’s amazing that he got a couple of things done when the mandate was pretty clear: 50/50 Senate and near 50/50 House, and a pretty close presidential election.”
“The mandate was simply ‘replace Donald Trump and don’t do anything drastic or stupid,” Jennings said, adding:
“And yet everything about this agenda is extremely drastic. And he’s been angrier than I think people expected, he’s been more divisive, he’s been more partisan.”
“You look at the issues. We built five years of coverage on Trump out of Russia, COVID, and democracy,” Jennings asserted, adding:
“The president, in his press conference, invites Russia to invade the Ukraine. We have more [COVID] deaths under Biden than Trump. And now we have the president and the vice president question the legitimacy of the 2022 election? Are we any better off on these issues that we crucified Trump over?”
Watch:
Of course, no one saw this because CNN has lost 90% of its viewers and is more concerned with sending the likes of Brian Stelter into schools to man spread and blather about ‘misinformation’ in front of masked kids.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 20:35 - Meta Reportedly Abandons Diem Stablecoin Project After Intense Government Opposition
Meta Reportedly Abandons Diem Stablecoin Project After Intense Government Opposition
After surviving a major re-branding and fierce opposition from regulators and central bankers, Facebook’s effort to create a global stablecoin usable on its platform has reportedly been scrapped, according to a Bloomberg report.
BBG reported late Tuesday that Facebook-owner Meta has been looking for a buyer for its Diem project after the Federal Reserve and several powerful American lawmakers (including notably Sens. Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren) produced enough resistance to the project to leave it finally dead in the water. At one point, a couple of Democratic senators sent threatening letters to people involved with the project.
The Diem Association, a cryptocurrency initiative once known as Libra backed by Meta Platforms Inc., is weighing a sale of its assets as a way to return capital to its investor members, according to people familiar with the matter. Diem is in discussions with investment bankers about how best to sell its intellectual property and find a new home for the engineers who developed the technology, cashing out whatever value remains in its once-ambitious Diem coin venture, said the people, asking not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public.
As a result, the cryptocurrency ambitions of Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg have unraveled.
Just in on @TheTerminal: *META-BACKED DIEM IS SAID TO SEEK BUYER AFTER COIN PLANS DASHED
Stay tuned…
— Beth Williams Liou (@BWilliLiou) January 25, 2022
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Former Twitter CEO and bitcoin evangelist Jack Dorsey could not resist taking a quick shot…
carpe diem https://t.co/QTN2JzehUZ
— jack⚡️ (@jack) January 26, 2022
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The news has also hammered shares of Silvergate, the obscure banking partner that was supposed to issue the stablecoin, before being bogged down in resistance from regulators.
In addition to the “rebranding” (the project was originally known as Libra), the project sent anti-trust hawks into a tizzy, while central bankers accused Facebook of trying to usurp their control over the money supply. In the years since its introduction, the SEC has won the “battle of the regulators” over who will be the primary regulator of stablecoins, while the Fed has sought to create a stablecoin of its own nicknamed “Fedcoin”.
Given the intense hostility to the Diem project (which is technically controlled by a nonprofit foundation that is itself controlled by Meta), some speculated that Diem might be co-opted and become Fedcoin by default.
After all, it was the Fed that dealt the killing blow to the project, per BBG.
Diem said in May that an affiliate of the firm, Silvergate Bank, was to be the issuer of the Diem USD stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar that’s typically used to buy and sell other crypto. After a lengthy back-and-forth between the Diem advocates and regulators, Fed officials finally told Silvergate last summer that the agency was uneasy with the plan and couldn’t assure the bank that it would allow that activity, the people said.
Without a green light from the bank’s regulator, Silvergate was left unable to issue the new asset with confidence the Fed wouldn’t crack down, and so the Diem effort had no coin.
Facebook had already abandoned the original Libra concept – one coin backed by a basket of global currencies – in favor of creating a more traditional dollar-linked stablecoin more in line with what the Fed might want.
So, now that Diem is up for grabs, the big question is: will the Fed step in, co-opt the technology, and use it to catch up with the PBOC, which has already produced its own “e-RMB” (even if the project appears to still be in the troubleshooting phase)?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 20:15 - Taibbi: Let's Not Have A War
Taibbi: Let’s Not Have A War
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,
Joe Biden last week said the American response in Ukraine would be proportional to Vladimir Putin’s actions. “It depends,” the president posited, thoughts drifting like blobs in a lava lamp. “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…”
Bad idea. Alarms sounded all over Washington. The rip in the national political illusion was so severe, Republicans and Democrats were forced to come out agreeing, leaping into each other’s arms in panic. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who increasingly looks like a man about to miss a historically important free throw, said of a potential Russian invasion, “We can make crystal clear the stark consequences of that choice.” Republican Senator Ted Cruz said Biden “shocked the world by giving Putin a green light to invade Ukraine.” The National Security Council issued a statement through Jen Psaki that any Russian move into Ukraine would be “met with a swift, severe, and united response.”
In a later press conference, Biden explained he had to cut things short because, “You guys will ask me all about Russia.” He appears days from pulling his pants down to show reporters the electrodes White House chief of staff Ron Klain has probably attached to his testicles by now.
This is a rerun of an old story, only with a weaker lead actor. Six years ago, Barack Obama gave an interview to The Atlantic quashing Beltway militarists’ dreams of war in Ukraine:
The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do… This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.
Then as now, both blue and red propaganda outlets howled. The “core interest” of the Washington consensus is war. It isn’t just big business, but our biggest business, one of the last things we still make and export on a grand scale. The bulk of the people elected to congress and a lion’s share of the lobbyists, lawyers, and journalists who snuggle in a giant fornicating mass in the capital are dedicated to the upkeep of the war bureaucracy.
Their main purpose is growing the defense budget and militarizing the missions of other government agencies (from State to the Department of Energy to the CIA). Washington think-tanks exist to factory-generate intellectual justifications for foreign interventions, while attacking with ferocity — as if they were emergencies like pandemics or deadly hurricanes — the appearance of ideas like the “peace dividend” that threaten to move any of their rice bowls to some other constituency.
Both Biden’s comments and the “Obama doctrine” were fundamental betrayals, presidents saying out loud that there existed such a thing as “our” interests separate from Washington’s war pig clique. The latter group somehow believes itself impervious to error, and takes extraordinary offense to challenges to its judgment, amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.
These people consistently lose popularity contests to cannibals and fingernail-pullers, and their playbook — one play they run over and over, never deviating despite decades of disaster — is designed to reduce every foreign policy situation to contests of force. Their wag-the-dog thinking always argues the right move is the one that allows them to empty their boxes of expensive toys, from weapons systems to Langley-generated schemes for overthrows, which a compliant press happily calls regime change.
Obama looked at the big, muddy stretch of land atop the Black Sea called Ukraine and asked if its strategic importance was worth war. Meaning, real war, with an enemy that can fight back, not third-world pushovers in Iraq or Libya who offer as much resistance as the British colonial enemies Blackadder’s officers once described as being “two feet tall and armed with dried grass.” His answer was an obvious no. Ukraine has less strategic importance to the United States than Iraq, Afghanistan, even Kuwait for that matter.
No one will say it out loud, but the greatest argument against U.S. support for military action of any kind in Ukraine is the inerrant incompetence of our missions and the consistent record of destabilizing areas of strategic interest through our involvement, including in these two specific countries. At the moment the Berlin Wall fell the United States had almost limitless political capital with these soon-to-be ex-Soviet territories. We blew it all within a few years. Now that we’re really in trouble in Ukraine, why would we keep to the same playbook that got us here?
Our plan with every foreign country that falls into our orbit is the same. We ride in as saviors, throwing loans in all directions to settle debts (often to us), then let it be known the country’s affairs will henceforth be run through our embassy. Since we’re ignorant of history and have long viewed diplomats too in sync with local customs as liabilities, we tend to fill our embassies with people who have limited sense of the individual character of host countries, their languages, or the attitudes of people outside the capital.
Instead of devising individual policies, we go through identical processes of receiving groups of local politicians seeking our backing. We throw our weight behind the courtiers we like best. The winning supplicants are usually Western educated, speak great English, know how to flatter drunk diplomats, and are fluent in neoliberal wonk-speak.
We back Our Men in Havana to the hilt, no matter how corrupt they may become in their rule, a process we call “democracy promotion.” The cycle is always ends the same way, whether we’re talking about Hamid Karzai or Ayad Allawi or Boris Yeltsin. The white hat ally turns out to be either overmatched or a snake, usually the latter, and siphons off Western aid to himself and his cronies in huge quantities while smashing opposition by any means necessary. That brutality and corruption, combined with efforts to implement our structural adjustment policies (read: austerity, and the de-nationalization of natural resources) inevitably results in loss of popular support and/or the rise of opposition movements on the right, the left, or both.
Rising discontent in turn inspires further requests from the puppet for security aid, which we happily provide, since that ultimately is the whole point: selling weapons to foreigners to fill those Washington rice bowls. You will soon hear it in the form of increased calls for defense spending amid the Ukraine mess, but we’ve been at it forever.
We started selling drones to “allies” under Obama and escalated the practice under Trump with billions in sales to peaceful democratic havens like the UAE, who had already used them to massacre civilian populations, children included, in Yemen. We continued escalating such sales under Biden, adding countries like Qatar to our list of excellent customers in part with the idea of using the country as a base for “over-the-horizon” strikes in an Afghanistan bereft of “boots on the ground.” Even after our disastrous wars finish, we find ways to continue them.
This is relevant to Russia and Ukraine because we’ve cycled through at least half of the usual failure process with both countries. Just a couple of decades ago we essentially controlled the Kremlin, but so completely mismanaged that situation with aggressive backing of a notoriously corrupt Yeltsin regime that Vladimir Putin was able to consolidate power with widespread backing of a public initially much disposed to us. Ukraine we treated as a pawn nation from the start, backing a series of leaders who shamelessly looted the country before forcing them into a miserable Sophie’s Choice, about which the American public still knows little.
In 2013, Ukraine was proceeding down a path of integration into the E.U. Paul Manafort client Viktor Yanukovich, always described in America as an outright puppet of Moscow, was actually a proponent of Euro-integration at this point. “Yanukovich cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia” is how Reuters correspondent Liz Piper described his attitude, quoting him as saying to those wanting to go back to Russia’s arms, “Forget about it.. forever!” But Putin’s ferocious tactics, including intense economic and military threats, pushed Yanukovich to back out of the EU deal, and take instead an economic trade package with Russia that included $15 billion and the lowering by a third the price the country paid for natural gas from Russia.
This, in turn, spurred a Western response via the “Maidan revolution,” really a U.S.-backed coup, in which Yanukovich was replaced with someone more suitable to our foreign policy geniuses. “Yats is our guy” is how our current undersecretary for political affairs Victoria Nuland put it, insisting that Arseniy Yatsenuk be Ukraine’s next leader, even though Ukrainians might have preferred former boxer Vitaly Klitschko. When apprised some of the E.U. countries were uncomfortable with a coup, Nuland famously said, “Fuck the E.U.” Forget gunboats, here was F-bomb diplomacy!
Putin responded by annexing Crimea, which in turn led to the moment when Barack Obama made his decision to drop the bluff and stop the escalation. His reasoning was simple: Ukraine was always going to matter more to Russia than to the United States, and when push came to shove, he, Obama, wasn’t going to war over it. Moreover, because the hawks in Washington would never come out and say they would, either – “If there’s somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it,” he challenged – the issue instead would keep being presented as an improper defiance of consensus:
There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow… And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses… You are judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons.
Obama was nearing the end of his term. In saying all this he was probably motivated in part by a desire to spite the Hillary Clinton loyalists in the national security establishment he imagined would soon be taking over. They had crossed him on several important issues, including the question of whether or not to cooperate with Russia on Syria, and he was taking his soon-to-be-freed petty side out for an early test drive. But he wasn’t wrong to identify that Washington bureaucrats were more wedded to the militarization playbook than the public interest.
Six years later, even the NatSec dingbat brigade knows the public won’t buy the idea of risking nuclear war over Ukraine, which is why they’re pulling out stops to Twitterize the situation by introducing piles of other arguments and hypotheticals, like that the mad dictator won’t stop in Kyiv. “He wants to evict the United States from Europe,” said former intelligence officer, Brookings fellow, and ubiquitous Russiagate character Fiona Hill just wrote in the New York Times. This is absurd, but we will surely go through the process now of being told this is Hitler all over again, that Biden must be more Churchill than Chamberlain, etc. Headlines about $200 million in arms sales to Ukraine will turn to $500 million, a billion, etc., and other regional allies will be hit up with fresh sales calls.
Normally it’d be clear how this story ends, but Biden’s “gaffe” raised real concern that the war party will overcompensate with a catastrophic macho gesture (news that Biden is now “weighing” the deployment of more troops and warships to the region should fill all with confidence, for instance). There are people in Washington who think a pipeline of Javelin missile sales is worth having to watch for Russian subs popping up in New York harbor, and they are the same people in charge of this very heavy decision on the horizon.
There are people who will read this and cry, “Where’s your outrage against Vladimir Putin? Why don’t you denounce him?” To which I say, fine, I denounce him. Then what? When you’re done wailing, you’re still faced with deciding whether or not to go to war with Russia, which is not a real choice, unless you’re an idiot or General Jack Ripper-insane. Unfortunately, the Nulands and Blinkens who’ll be making this call just may fit those descriptions.
The ostentatious incompetence of the foreign policy establishment, which America got to examine in technicolor during the War on Terror, was one of the first triggers for the revolt against “experts” that led to the election of Donald Trump. Once, these were drawling Republican golfers who got hot reading Francis Fukuyama, thought they could turn Baghdad into Geneva, and instead squandered trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives pushing Iraq back to the eighth century.
The more recent crew is made up of Extremely Online, Ivy-educated fantasists who rarely leave their embassies abroad and view life as an endless production of Sloane or The Good Fight, soap operas about exclusive clubs of fashionably brainy pragmatists with the guts to color outside the lines and “get things done.” Lines like “Yats is our guy” make them tingly. This is perhaps the only subset of people on earth arrogant and dumb enough to think there’s a workable plan for pulling off a shooting war with Russia.
The truth is there’s nothing to be done at this point. We had our chance. Both Russia and Ukraine should have been economic and strategic allies. Instead, we repeatedly blew opportunities in both places by trying to flex more and more muscle in the region (including, ironically, via election meddling). Now there’s no winning move left. Conceding this means abandoning conventional wisdom, and the people we’re now relying on to see the light have shown little ability to do that.
In a situation with only two choices, bad and horrifyingly worse, God help us if the playbook wins again.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 19:55 - Merrill Lynch MD Fired After Racist Smoothie Shop Tirade Lands Him In Jail
Merrill Lynch MD Fired After Racist Smoothie Shop Tirade Lands Him In Jail
Finmeme accounts have had a ball over the weekend sharing the latest salacious citizen video purporting to expose a respected member of the financial services community as a racial-epithet-slinging madman.
Over the weekend, a clip of a man later identified as James Iannazzo of Merrill Lynch went viral in the latest example of a clip of an aggravated store patron hurling insults, and objects, at baristas just trying to make it through a shift. At one point in the clip, the man calls the young woman, with whom he’s engaged in a screaming match, a “f**king immigrant loser” and an “ignorant high school kid”.
He also called one of the workers a “f**king bitch” before throwing the smoothie at her.
I’ve identified this man as James Iannazzo of @MerrillLynch being racist and assaulting a minor pic.twitter.com/O8Ic6jyh3p
— Danesh (@thatdaneshguy) January 23, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The incident took place at Robeks in Fairfield, Connecticut at around 1430ET on Saturday. The 48-year-old financial adviser was later arrested and charged with a hate crime (an extremely serious charge), according to the NY Post.
The tabloid reported that the heated argument exploded after Iannazzo stormed into the store and accused its workers of serving him a smoothie with peanuts, which caused his allergic son to have a reaction that required hospitalization.
Police later confirmed that while Iannazzo did order the drink without peanut butter, he apparently neglected to say that his son had the allergy (remember, when you’re dealing with young retail and restaurant workers, a correct order is often too much to expect, meaning that it’s up to you to make sure staffers understand the seriousness of a mistake in this department).
Viral footage showed Iannazzo standing behind the counter at the store, demanding to know which of the four employees working that afternoon had made the drink. The store workers shouted back, Iannazzo asked to speak with the manager, and pretty soon, it was a full-fledged shouting match.
Footage of the ordeal had been viewed more than 2.6 million times on Twitter by early Monday, and clips have also circulated to millions on TikTok. As a result, Bank of America released a statement confirming that Iannazzo is no longer with the wealth management unit.
“Our company does not tolerate behavior of this kind. We immediately investigated and have taken action. This individual is no longer employed at our firm,” a statement said.
According to a LinkedIn profile purportedly belonging to him, Iannazzo had been with Merrill since 1995; his profile presently lists him as a managing director.
A lawyer representing Iannazzo released the following statement in his client’s defense: “When faced with a dire situation, Mr. Iannazzo’s parental instinct kicked in and he acted out of anger and fear. He is not a racist and deeply regrets his statement and actions during a moment of extreme emotion.”
Iannazzo reportedly turned himself in to police after initially fleeing the store.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 19:35 - Pfizer Board Member Suggests End To Mask, Vaccine Mandates
Pfizer Board Member Suggests End To Mask, Vaccine Mandates
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and current board member at Pfizer, said that declining COVID-19 cases should signal to policymakers that it is time to lift more pandemic-related restrictions.
“I think certainly on the east coast where you see cases declining dramatically we need to be willing to lean in and do that very soon I think as conditions improve we have to be willing to relax some of these measures with the same speed that we put them in place,” he told “The Squawk Box” in a Monday interview when asked about whether mask mandates should be dropped.
Scott Gottlieb testifies during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 5, 2017. (Zach Gibson/Getty Images) Gottlieb said that “a lot of the acrimony” in the United States stems from a lack of “clear goalposts” about when some of the measures will end.
The former FDA commissioner also cited the Connecticut government’s recent decision to rescind vaccine mandates for state workers as a policy that other policymakers should adopt in the near future as COVID-19 cases decline nationwide.
“The only way to get compliance from people and get accommodation [is] if we demonstrate the ability to withdraw these [mandates] in the same manner in which we put them in,” Gottlieb added.
The call for COVID-19 restrictions to be dropped comes as the overall infection rate in the United States has sharply declined in recent days. Data from the Johns Hopkins-run Our World in Data shows that 4,110 out of every one million Americans recorded infections on Jan. 10, but that rate was 2,643 as late as Friday and dropped to 615 per one million as of Sunday.
Outside the United States, more and more European countries have moved to rescind certain COVID-19-related rules, including vaccine passports and mask mandates. For example, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that starting Jan. 27, people in England won’t have to wear masks in public or show proof that they’ve been vaccinated to enter some venues.
But on Monday, World Health Organization’s (WHO) director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that more COVID-19 variants may emerge and alleged that it’s dangerous to assume Omicron is the last one or that “we are in the endgame.”
“There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out and how the acute phase could end. But it’s dangerous to assume that omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame,” Tedros told a WHO board meeting. “On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.” He didn’t provide evidence or data to back up his claim.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 19:15 - Joe Biden's Gasoline Problem Is Back
Joe Biden’s Gasoline Problem Is Back
By Bloomberg Markets Live commentator Jake Lloyd-Smith
Costly crude oil means runaway gasoline. With Brent now threatening to hit $90/bbl, pressure on the vital motor fuel remains to the upside. In this environment, look for governments trying to protect hard-pressed consumers — aka voters — from pain at the pump.
The latest salvo came in Asia this morning. Japan said it will give oil refiners subsidies that are designed to help processors maintain margins without passing on the rising costs to customers. The strategy also applies to diesel and kerosene oil, and may be followed by other measures.
The same dynamic is at play in the U.S., where gasoline futures have surged more than 50% over the past 12 months. A worried Joe Biden has already orchestrated a crude release from strategic reserves, an initiative joined by Japan among others. That bought some time, but didn’t turn the tide. Average retail prices are a few cents below the seven-year high hit in November.
The next focus will be the Feb. 2 OPEC+ meeting, when producers will review the market and decide on supply policy. The Biden administration will likely step up diplomatic efforts to get members that still have spare capacity to deliver more crude.
Whether they’ll listen is quite another matter.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 19:11 - Ron Paul On Biden Administration's Ukraine Freak-Out: Pretense For War?
Ron Paul On Biden Administration’s Ukraine Freak-Out: Pretense For War?
The Biden Administration, followed by lapdog UK, appears determined to ratchet up tensions in Ukraine to the point where war is inevitable. From the publicity stunt of evacuating the US Embassy in Kiev to – laughably – accusing Moscow of planning a Ukraine coup, a Biden Administration sinking in public opinion quicksand appears to be grasping for the war option.
But…even Ukraine is putting on the brakes! Is war actually inevitable, or will the endless posturing and atmosphere of tit-for-tat threats, now including military deployments to Eastern Europe by NATO, result in last minute de-escalation and diplomatic breakthrough…
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 18:55 - FBI Searches Illinois 'Center For COVID Control' Headquarters Following Complaints: Officials
FBI Searches Illinois ‘Center For COVID Control’ Headquarters Following Complaints: Officials
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The FBI confirmed its agents searched the Illinois headquarters of the Center for COVID Control amid a federal investigation into the multimillion-dollar testing business.
“The FBI was conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity in Rolling Meadows [on Jan. 22],” FBI Chicago spokespeople told media in confirming the search of the business.
People stop outside a COVID-19 testing site in New York City on Jan. 10, 2022. (Scott Heins/Getty Images) Yvonne Gamble, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general, said HHS agents and the FBI had searched the Rolling Meadows, Illinois, facility.
Annie Thompson, a spokesperson for the Illinois attorney general, told USA Today that the office is “working with the FBI and other law enforcement partners and will not comment on ongoing investigations as we work to hold accountable individuals who engage in unlawful conduct.”
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services stated on Jan. 21 that it’s investigating “numerous complaints” associated with laboratories and testing sites run by the Center for COVID Control.
“We take seriously any allegations of fraud or misbehavior by COVID-19 testing sites. CMS’s Center for Clinical Standards and Quality investigates these kinds of complaints and is aware of several alleged instances of misconduct by this company’s labs,” Dr. Lee Fleisher, chief medical officer and director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality for CMS, told CNN in a statement.
The agency “identified non-compliance” on behalf of the Center for COVID Control “and is waiting on an allegation of compliance from the laboratory to address the deficiencies cited,” Fleisher said, without elaborating.
Earlier in January, the Center for COVID Control’s founder and CEO, Aleya Siyaj, announced that the company would suspend operations between Jan. 14 and Jan. 22 due to “unusually high patient demand” that has caused staffing shortfalls.
“Center for COVID Control is committed to serving our patients in the safest, most accurate and most compliant manner,” Siyaj said. “Regrettably, due to our rapid growth and the unprecedented recent demand for testing, we haven’t been able to meet all our commitments.”
Later, the company stated that “it is extending its pause on operations” and “remains committed to providing the highest level of customer service and diagnostic quality and will not resume collection of patient samples until staffing resources permit CCC to operate at full capacity.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison also filed a lawsuit against the firm earlier in January, claiming it had failed to deliver COVID-19 test results, had delivered them in an untimely manner, or had provided falsified results.
People reported receiving COVID-19 results that were “riddled with inaccurate and false information including listing the wrong test type and false dates and times for when samples were collected from consumers,” his lawsuit read. Others got negative results when they hadn’t submitted samples to be tested, according to the suit.
Meanwhile, the Oregon Department of Justice told local media it would investigate the company for possible violations of state law.
The Center for COVID Control didn’t respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment by press time.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/25/2022 – 18:35
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