- 'Woke Warfighters': GOP Report Says Leftist Ideology, Gender "Insanity" Weakening America's Military
‘Woke Warfighters’: GOP Report Says Leftist Ideology, Gender “Insanity” Weakening America’s Military
Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,
Republican lawmakers have decried the Biden administration for policies that they say are weakening America’s military through leftist indoctrination and “woke” ideological posturing to appease “Ivy League faculty lounges or progressive pundits.”
“Unfortunately, President Joe Biden and his administration are weakening America’s warfighters through a sustained assault fueled by woke virtue signaling,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) in a report titled “Woke Warfighters,” according to Fox News.
“Our military’s singular purpose is to ‘provide for the common defense’ of our nation. It cannot be turned into a left-wing social experiment. It cannot be used as a cudgel against America itself.”
The report cites several examples of the administration’s stance. One example was Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s first action after being confirmed by the Senate, which included signing a “racism” memorandum. The message directed all service members and Department of Defense civilian employees to conduct a “one-day stand-down” to discuss extremism within their ranks.
This was despite the fact that in a force of more than 2.1 million active and reserve members, there were only 100 such cases of alleged “extremism,” according to data collected by the Biden administration.
“The world is a dangerous place, and the Biden Administration’s insanity is eroding our greatest source of security in it,” said the report, citing the military’s promotion of Marxist critical race theory, sex reassignment procedures, and transgender ideology, as well as the punishment of those who oppose such things.
Another example was that of Bishop Garrison, who currently serves as Austin’s senior adviser on human capital and diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. The report said that Garrison promoted the “1619 Project,” which is based on a falsified history of the United States and part of a revisionist education being taught in some schools across the country.
Another case cited in the report was that of Kelisa Wing, the chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at the Department of Defense Education Agency.
“Wing also wrote a book to teach white children that they have white privilege and that ‘white privilege hurts a lot of people.’ The book comes with an exercise to help kids understand ‘what parts of my identity have provided me with privilege.’”
Sex Reassignment Procedures
Rubio and Roy pointed out that the U.S. military has historically not accepted candidates who do not meet certain physical and mental criteria, and some of the disqualifying conditions include allergies to peanuts or gluten, learning disorders, acute depression or anxiety, and skin diseases like eczema and psoriasis.
“People cannot even enlist with Invisalign or braces until they are removed,” the report states. However, recent developments have the military forces “proudly promoting and celebrating sex reassignment procedures, which can have months-long recovery periods, with complete recovery taking ‘up to one year’ for some procedures.”
Former President Barack Obama’s Defense Department in 2016 allowed unrestricted access to military service by transgender people. The GOP report argues that people with gender dysphoria suffer from mental health issues and are more likely to experience severe anxiety and poor mental health encounters, and “are eight times more likely to commit suicide.”
The report cites Thomas Spoehr of The Heritage Foundation, who said that because people with gender dysphoria are more prone to mental health issues, other service personnel “will be reluctant to rely on them” because of these issues, which would result in a section of “non-deployable service members.” This could also lead to resentment within the ranks as some members will never be “called upon to deploy,” the report states.
The Biden administration allows members to “transition” while on active duty, and allows individuals to use shower and bathroom facilities of their choosing. Military members are now being trained in the use of appropriate pronouns and “when to recommend their subordinates consider gender reassignment surgery,” said the report.
Punishing Dissenters of Woke Ideology
The report concluded with the Afghanistan withdrawal, which resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members. The United States also left behind billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, including 2,000 armored vehicles and up to 40 aircraft, which the Taliban seized and paraded.
“No one faced consequences. Rather, the Biden Administration continued undermining the military with woke ideology and ignored its failure. The only service member who received a reprimand from the Afghanistan debacle was a lieutenant colonel who criticized the way the withdrawal was executed,” the report stated.
The GOP report accused the administration of hypocrisy for the lieutenant colonel’s treatment when compared to a junior medic in uniform who used the Chinese messaging app TikTok to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The medic asks in the video, “How am I supposed to swear to support and defend the Constitution and a country that treats its women like second-class citizens,” adding “I will not rest, and I will not be silent, because this is an attack on women in this country.”
The report states that the medic has not received any disciplinary action for her remarks.
Chiefs Push Back on Criticism
In 2021, the service chiefs for the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard rejected the assertion that the armed services are getting progressively “woke.”
“I think it’s an assertion that isn’t really grounded on facts,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said at a naval conference in 2021.
“We know that there’s strength in diversity; that is a scientifically proven fact.’’
The Epoch Times has reached out to the Department of Defense and its education agency.
U.S. Army officials confirmed on Sept. 30 that the Army failed to meet its recruitment goal of 60,000 personnel as the service branch only recruited about 45,000 soldiers during the 2022 fiscal year.
“In the Army’s most challenging recruiting year since the start of the all-volunteer force, we will only achieve 75 percent of our fiscal year 22 recruiting goal,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in a statement.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 23:30 - EV Charging Stations By 2035 Will Need More Power Than A Small Town
EV Charging Stations By 2035 Will Need More Power Than A Small Town
A new report from the electricity and gas utility National Grid (which serves parts of New York and Massachusetts) found a rapid increase in electric vehicles on the city streets and highways will require upgraded power grids to handle all the new demand. By 2035, a charging station could demand as much power as a sports arena or small town.
National Grid expects by 2035, large charging stations serving EVs, from SUVs and pickup trucks to delivery vans and semi-trucks, would require 19 megawatts of peak power — that’s approximately what a small town uses. In 2045, those large charging stations could demand upwards of 30 megawatts of capacity, with peak usage of a large manufacturing plant.
National Grid said current charging stations couldn’t serve the EV demand of the future, indicating significant power-grid improvements would be needed. It said expanding the charging infrastructure would take time:
“Building these high-voltage interconnections and upgrades can take years, which is why it’s important to take action right now.
“By making ‘no-regrets’ upgrades at ‘no-regrets’ sites, we can make sure fast-charging is there when drivers need it—and not a moment too late,” the report said.
Today, the impact of EV charging on the grid is small, and there is enough excess capacity to handle the current fleet of cars, SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks.
As EV adoption expands, so will the electricity demand, and as we’ve noted, nuclear power generation will be the best form of on-demand clean energy. The White House understands nuclear is the future for a sustainable clean grid, as they rush to secure a “large amount” of funding for a domestic uranium strategy.
Unreliable solar and wind won’t be enough to power the Biden administration’s ambitious plan for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be electric. Meanwhile, California set a target of 2035 to phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered light-duty vehicles.
Momentum is certainly building to electrifying vehicle fleets. In doing so, increasing investments in zero-emission nuclear power production and sourcing uranium domestically will be the key to sustainably powering future EV demand.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 23:00 - The Left's Cynical "Speech Is Violence" Ploy
The Left’s Cynical “Speech Is Violence” Ploy
Authored by Ben Shapiro via The Epoch Times,
This week, another evil mass shooter unleashed horror at a gay club in Colorado Springs, killing 5 and wounding another 25. The shooter – whose name I refuse to mention in order to disincentivize future shooters, who seek notoriety – was clearly mentally ill: Just last year, the shooter reportedly threatened his mother with a bomb, resulting in his arrest. Yet Colorado’s red flag law, which could have deprived him of legal access to weaponry, was not invoked by either police or relatives. The Colorado Springs massacre, then, is yet another example of a perpetrator with more red flags than a bullfighting convention, and no one in authority willing to take action to do anything about him.
Yet the national conversation, as it so often does, has now been directed away from the question at hand – how to prevent mass shootings – and toward broader politics. Instead of seeking methodologies that might be effective in finding and stopping deranged individuals seeking murder without curbing rights and liberties for hundreds of millions of people, our political and media leaders have decided to blame Americans who oppose same-sex marriage, drag queen story hour, and “family-friendly” drag shows.
Disagreement with the radical Leftist social agenda amounts to incitement to violence, they argue.
Thus, NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny said, “there is a pipeline. It starts from some smaller accounts online like Libs of TikTok, it moves to the right wing blogosphere, and then it ends up on Tucker Carlson or ends up out of a right-wing politician’s mouth, and it is a really dangerous cycle that does have real-world consequences.”
Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times wrote, “it seems hard to separate (these murders) from a nationwide campaign of anti-LGBTQ incitement …. They’ve been screaming that drag events … are part of a monstrous plot to prey on children. They don’t get to duck responsibility if a sick man with a gun took them seriously.”
Brian Broome wrote in The Washington Post that the shooting could not be “blamed on mental illness”; no, he stated, “It’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares …. The bottomless list of homophobes and transphobes on the right don’t need to throw the rock and then hide their hands. Instead, they use someone else’s hands entirely.”
The Left’s attempt to lay responsibility for violence at the feet of anyone who opposes the transgressive social agenda doesn’t stop with blame—it extends to calls for full-scale censorship.
“We’re living in an environment that’s driven by two things,” averred Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
“Politicians who are using us to bolster their careers by creating division and hate, and number two is social media platforms that are monetizing hate, and especially against marginalized communities. They’re—they’re choosing profits over hate, and it’s killing, literally killing our community.”
Social media, the logic goes, ought to shut down or demonetize any video disagreeing with the GLAAD agenda.
This is cynical politics at its worst. It’s also nothing new. The Left routinely cites violent incidents as reason to crack down on free speech with which they disagree. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Instagram) tweeted, “After Trump elevated anti-immigrant & anti-Latino rhetoric, we had the deadliest anti-Latino shooting in modern history. After anti-Asian hate w/ COVID, Atlanta. Tree of Life. Emanuel AME. Buffalo. And now after an anti-LGBT+ campaign, Colorado Springs. Connect the dots, @GOP.”
Yes, according to AOC, virtually every major mass shooting of the last seven years is the result of her political opponents—none of whom has called for violence. But in the world of the Left, disagreement is violence merely waiting to be unleashed. Which is why censorship, they believe, is the only way to achieve a more peaceful world.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 22:30 - US Nuclear Reactors Among The Oldest In The World
US Nuclear Reactors Among The Oldest In The World
The United States’ 92 nuclear reactors currently in operation have a mean age of 41.6 years, the third oldest in the world.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the only nuclear fleets that are older are those of Switzerland (46.3 years) and Belgium (42.3 years). Also older are the singular reactors in use in Armenia and the Netherlands.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The U.S. was among the first commercial adopters of nuclear energy in the 1950s, explaining the number of aging reactors today. A building boom between the 1960s and 1970s created today’s nuclear power plants in the United States. The five reactors completed in the 1990s and the one finished in 2016 were all holdovers of delayed construction projects from the 1970s experiencing roadblocks due to regulatory problems and mounting opposition to nuclear energy. The most recent construction start date of a completed U.S. reactor today is 1978 – one year before the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, which further cemented the public’s rejection of nuclear energy and the challenges of updating nuclear reactor infrastructure today. However, two reactors started at Vogtle power plant in Georgia in 2013 will join the grid soon as the newest additions to the U.S. fleet. They too experienced many regulatory and other delays, culminating in the bankruptcy of the reactor construction company. The U.S. government stepped in with a loan so that the project can now be finished almost 17 years after its initial proposal.
The U.S. today is one of only 15 countries which the World Nuclear Industry Status Report lists as actively pursuing nuclear energy. This includes new nuclear programs in the United Arab Emirates, Belarus and Iran that were started in the past decade only, as well as a younger program in China that started producing power in 1991 and today has a mean reactor fleet age of just nine years. India, running a nuclear energy program since 1969, nevertheless saw much more recent construction than the U.S., achieving a current mean reactor age of 24.2 years. Many European countries which were early adopters of the technology are meanwhile phasing out their programs, at times before the end of reactors’ expected lifespans.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis, interest in nuclear energy has been renewed in many countries, but challenges for nuclear reactors construction persist today. One solution could be a pivot to small reactors like the ones company NuScale is expected to build in Idaho by 2030 using a new modular technology.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 22:00 - Biden Admin Quietly Greenlights Plan To Build Huge Gulf Oil Terminal
Biden Admin Quietly Greenlights Plan To Build Huge Gulf Oil Terminal
Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The Biden administration has quietly approved plans to build a new crude oil terminal in the Gulf of Mexico off Texas, seemingly in contradiction to the president’s climate agenda.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to reporters in Bali, Indonesia on Nov. 16, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images) The Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration approved the application (pdf) for Enterprise’s Sea Port Oil Terminal, one of four proposed offshore oil export terminals, on Monday.
According to the application, the port will be located offshore of Freeport, Texas. It will have 4.8 million barrels of storage capacity and add 2 million barrels per day to the U.S. oil export capacity.
In its 94-page decision (pdf), the Maritime Administration said that it had approved the application because the construction and operation of the port is “in the national interest and consistent with other policy goals and objectives.”
“The construction and operation of the Port is in the national interest because the Project will benefit employment, economic growth, and U.S. energy infrastructure resilience and security,” the administration wrote. “The Port will provide a reliable source of crude oil to U.S. allies in the event of market disruption and have a minimal impact on the availability and cost of crude oil in the U.S. domestic market.”
The sun behind a crude oil pump jack in the Permian Basin in Loving County, Texas, on Nov. 22, 2019. (Angus Mordant/Reuters) Protests Over Planned Oil Terminal
The decision states that the project will expand on an existing Enterprise Crude Houston operated terminal located in Houston and will generate 62 permanent jobs over 30 years. Additionally, 1,400 temporary construction jobs will be created, with the majority of the workforce being hired from existing labor pools in Texas and Louisiana, according to the application.
The Environmental Protection Agency quietly issued its approval (pdf) of the project in October but stressed that “more emphasis is needed to ensure that environmental justice and climate change considerations are included in the project for the protection of overburdened communities.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 21:30 - Rocking Around The Plastic Tree
Rocking Around The Plastic Tree
For some families, the search for the right Christmas tree is an annual event.
For large shares of Americans and Brits though, this search may have ended a long time ago – the perfect tree already sitting safely in the attic or garage, ready for its glorious but fleeting return to the living room.
As new survey data from Statista’s Global Consumer Survey shows, it’s a different story in Germany.
You will find more infographics at Statista
There, the home of the Christmas tree tradition, the practice is still very much alive – 43 percent of adults said they would be putting up a real tree this year, compared to 24 percent in the U.S. and just 17 percent in the United Kingdom.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 21:00 - Thoughts On A Crypto Crisis
Thoughts On A Crypto Crisis
If you’ve never seen the movie “There Will Be Blood” starring Daniel Day Lewis, then now might be a good time. Based loosely on an Upton Sinclair novel that satirizes the early days of the oil industry, it portrays the life of an independent oil man who rises to great wealth and power at the expense of his humanity. While that character’s arc is predictable, what makes the movie is his back and forth interaction with a young pastor whose own lust for power turns out to be just as great, and just as corrupting. Lewis’ character, while evil, is at least self-aware about his greed and selfishness. The pastor is not, and in some ways turns out the more pathetic character.
Welcome to the state of crypto in its thirteenth year, except that in our story the greedy entrepreneur and the morally bankrupt spiritual leader have turned out to be the same person. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, but also Do Kwon (of Terra), Su Zhu (of Three Arrows Capital), Alex Mashinsky (of Celsius) and a few others. All claimed to be working towards the greater good. All ended up obscenely wealthy in the process. All turned out to be frauds.
Tempting as it might be to focus all of our energy into anger towards these men, this is a time for self reflection. As an industry, but also a community. Crypto has attracted millions of people from all over the world and the vast majority are good people who believe in this new way of building trust. But we are terrible at picking leaders (with a few exceptions) and have only ourselves to blame when they let us down.
The great irony of the collapses we’ve experienced lately is that nobody has to use these firms. Unlike Wall Street, where consumer choices are always limited (by design) the censorship resistance of crypto often means nobody has to use any service. Most of FTX’s clients could have custodied their own coins and used DeFi, in the same way that people who wanted a more decentralized stablecoin could have used Dai.
And yet, countless users who came to crypto to get away from traditional authorities ended up running into the arms of services offered by inexperienced leaders who act like they are running a cult. But why?
The simplest answer is greed. The KwonZhuMashFried’s of the world all promised their followers a faster road to riches. Greed has an exponential function. The more money people make, the more they (paradoxically) want, despite the marginal utility of the next dollar declining quickly. Crypto has made a lot of people rich, but for every user who cashes out there seems to be two who double down. This compulsion for always making more drives some people to suspend disbelief and to seek out the quacks who make the most grandiose promises.
But blaming everything on greed is too simple. There has to be more to this story, and true self reflection requires going deeper.
Another explanation is the messy birthing process of a new industry. Director Paul Thomas Anderson chose the early days of the oil industry as the setting for his tale of human corruption for a good reason. There is something about transformative technologies and their early boom-bust cycles that pulls in certain kinds of people, and those people often end up hurting many others. There is a good amount of historical precedence to what is happening in crypto today in other industries. The early days of the railroad industry had the Crédit Mobilier scandal, the early days of the web had Worldcom, and the early days of securitization had Lehman.
Ironically, even the early days of central banking included a spectacular bubble that led to a major collapse, as orchestrated by a cult-like figure who turned out to be a fraud.
In each example, early adopters who believed that the world could be a better place — a place where central banking could work, railroads could crisscross the land, or electronic communication could be ubiquitous — had to suspend some level of disbelief. They also had to have faith in the face of great skepticism, for each new idea had its naysayers. But their open-mindedness also paved the way for grifters with a messiah complex to come in, take over, and almost ruin everything.
Almost, because good ideas transcend the bad people who hijack them. This is a point that the crypto skeptics now basking in their schadenfreude tend to miss. Crypto didn’t become important because some mountebank mouthed off about it on twitter or because some charlatan testified about it to congress. It became important because it can solve important problems, and that importance enabled the rise of people like SBF. The collapse of FTX does not change that promise, in the same way that the collapse of countless railroad companies in the 1870s did not change the utility of trains.
Blockchain is a technology invented to transform trust. In that sense, it is even more fundamental than oil, railroads or telecommunication, for trust is the alpha and omega of civilization. This transformation was always going to be messy and have many ups and downs, great moments of triumph followed by equally hard periods of despair.
The fact that history is repeating itself doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. We can and should do better. For me, I at least owe that much to my students and readers. For you, it might be something that you owe to your investors or customers. Governments owe it to their citizens and we all owe it to future generations.
Here’s a short (but by no means definitive) list of how:
First, we need to stop with the cults of personality. Even after everything that has happened we still have too many charlatans. The Michael Saylors and Max Keisers of the world only hurt the cause. Part of me is ashamed to work in an industry where people behave like this. (Side note: Bitcoin has lost half of its value since the time Keiser declared “we are not selling.” Not only are these people scummy grifters, they are also terrible investors).
Second, success in this domain was, is and will always be about the tech, not the money, and certainly not the hype. Capital deployment, economic incentives and money legos are intricately involved with that tech, but doing well should only come to those who do good, and doing good means building something sustainable. The biggest tell of the impending doom of the KwonZhuMashFrieds of our world was their tendency to focus on flowery bullshit like super cycles and altruism, as opposed to the technology.
How sad that the lineup for the next major Bitcoin conference consists almost entirely of hype people, even after everything that’s happened. For contrast, this is what real leaders like to talk about.
Third, we need to stop the endless tribalism. Competition is healthy, believing your preferred project can only succeed if others fail is not. Tellingly, some of the industry insiders who just read my preceding paragraph have already jumped to false conclusions about my feelings towards Bitcoin and Ethereum, and will now filter the rest of my comments through that lens. This is not how serious people behave.
Our tribalism is a direct result of our insecurity. If you are actually certain that your project is the best then you should welcome the competition.
Fourth, we need a better approach to VC. I’ve worked in venture and have many friends who work in crypto VC, but something has gone wrong here, because the most sophisticated investors have somehow fallen for the biggest scams. I’m not sure what the solution is, but it probably starts with more diverse views within the venture community and more patience. Just because your fund can raise a billion dollars to deploy doesn’t mean that you should.
As a corollary, we also need to do something about the entrance of so much “biased capital” into our domain. Why do otherwise conservative institutions (such as pension funds) who would never invest a dollar into Bitcoin plow hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that promise to do stuff with Bitcoin like Celsius and FTX? Anyone who wants to get capital exposure to crypto should invest directly in crypto, as opposed to startups run by inexperienced boys with bad hygiene.
Fifth, we need better infrastructure. One reason major institutions prefer indirect equity exposure over directly owning the coins is custody. So we need better custody of all kinds, from safer self-custody to regulated centralized custodians. I find it telling that so many funds and protocols who obviously knew better still kept all their coins at FTX. They did that because it was easier.
The crypto-originalist vision of a world where every participant practices strict self-custody was never going to scale. Human beings have always wanted the help of a trusted institution to protect their valuables. This was true in ancient times when people used bearer assets like gold and will be true in future times when people use digital bearer assets like Bitcoin.
Sixth, we need better regulators. Naked ambition masquerading as “doing good” by people with a messiah complex doesn’t just infect the industry. It also infects some of the people who regulate it. Gary Gensler is a good example. He talks a big game, but his track record of actually preventing bad stuff from happening is abysmal. His agency directly looked at Terra & BlockFi, and dealt directly with Sam, but did nothing to protect their victims. This obsession with classifying tokens as securities is counterproductive.
The SEC’s refusal to allow a basic Bitcoin ETF, while simultaneously approving garbage like the BITI short Bitcoin fund, is the ultimate proof that this is more about Gary than investor protection. (BITI isn’t bad because it is shorting Bitcoin, it’s bad because it is bad at being short Bitcoin. BTC is down over 20% since it launched but the ETF is up less than half that amount.)
Gensler belongs to a family of regulators and government officials who seem to think industries exist to serve their needs, as opposed to the other way around. If they were in charge when YouTube came out they’d be fining kids who uploaded cartoon clips while demanding every YouTube channel get a federal broadcast license. Bad regulators are almost as harmful to a new industry as bad entrepreneurs.
That said, the crypto industry needs to get over its childish views on regulations. The parts of crypto that are fully centralized should be regulated like any other intermediary. The parts that sit in the middle (as FTX did) should be regulated by a mix of traditional rules and new ones that take advantage of the underlying tech, like proof of reserves. Only after we concede these points can we make a credible case for why things like DeFi should only be regulated by code and economic incentives.
Seventh, we need to start differentiating between good innovations and the inevitable get-rich-quick schemes that result. Ethereum (which only ever raised $16m) was a good innovation. The fifth smart contract platform based on the Move programming language (which has already raised a billion dollars) is not. Digital scarcity as applied to art and collectibles was a good innovation. Almost every BYAC clone is not.
As a corollary, we need to refocus tokenomics on building sustainable economic security and adoption. Bitcoin did this, but countless projects that have launched since have not. If your project gives more tokens to insiders and early investors than users will ever get then you have the wrong priorities. If your project needs a hundred million dollars to launch then you are in the wrong industry. There’s a high correlation in crypto between projects that have raised a lot of money and those that have failed spectacularly.
Eighth, decentralization is not binary and exists on a spectrum. So much time and energy is wasted on arguing the extremes in the abstract, but the real world is always gray. This is one of those areas where a bit of nuance goes a long way. Yes, Bitcoin is decentralized but no, mining and exchange are not. And that’s OK, because the underlying protocol is censorship-resistant so there will always be competition.
As a corollary, we need to be better at engaging with our skeptics, and that can only come from taking a balanced approach. For example, we need to concede the fact that hacks are a drawback of DeFi. Only then can we point out that one reason why DeFi gets hacked is because everything is transparent, so vulnerabilities are easy to spot. (Our legal system works much the same way, but we don’t try to end due process every time a criminal gets off on a technicality.)
Ninth, we need to stop rushing to embrace the next hot thing. I love DeFi, but I would never put all my money into a brand new protocol with an unproven economic model, even if I believe in the model.
Ours is an industry that likes to experiment in production, which is great. But we need to recognize that experiments can (and do) end badly.
Tenth, we need to stop relearning the hard lessons of history. Direct democracy doesn’t work, too much leverage is deadly, systems tend towards hierarchies, and financial institutions need to manage risk. Disrupting the old ways can only come from a place of awareness, not ignorance. If you haven’t studied the reasons why fiat currencies came to be, then you can’t have an informed opinion on Bitcoin. And if you aren’t an expert on banking, then you shouldn’t be building in DeFi.
Eleventh, we are all going to make it. Well, most of us anyway. Next year will be my tenth in crypto and this is my fourth bear market. Each one has its low points, but none have shaken my belief that crypto will eventually re-architect the global economy because my thesis is based on history and a deep understanding of the technology, as opposed to prices and prophets.
While it’s true that debacles like FTX now happen on a bigger scale, that’s only because the industry has grown. It will continue to do so, even if at an uneven pace.
[UPDATE] A friend just pointed out something that was missing from my 10 bullet points, which is a need to diversify the talent pool. This is a very important point so I’m adding it here. Part of the problem with the crypto industry is the way it attracts a certain kind of person — young, male, risk-seeking and likely to buckle convention. This might have been beneficial in the early days but we need older people to take leadership roles, along with more women and more people with experience from other industries.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 20:30 - Jeff Bezos Announces $123 Million In Donations To Combat Homelessness
Jeff Bezos Announces $123 Million In Donations To Combat Homelessness
It looks as though Jeff Bezos is following through on his promise to give away most of his fortune in his lifetime…
The Amazon founder and billionaire announced last week on Instagram that he recently awarded 40 grants as part of his Bezos Day 1 Families Fund initiative, which will go to fight homelessness.
They make up a portion of a $2 billion commitment Bezos has made to fight homelessness, according to CNN. In an exclusive interview with the network, Bezos had previously said he “plans to donate the majority of his $124 billion net worth during his lifetime”.
“With these funds, the organizations will continue their compassionate, needle-moving work to help families move from unsheltered homelessness and shelters to permanent housing with the services they require to achieve stability,” a statement from Bezos said.
The causes Bezos will be donating to in the future, according to the report, include “fighting climate change and supporting people who can unify humanity in the face of deep social and political divisions”.
Bezos says that giving away his wealth is a question of how to do it in a “levered way”. He told CNN: “It’s not easy. Building Amazon was not easy. It took a lot of hard work, a bunch of very smart teammates, hard-working teammates, and I’m finding — and I think Lauren is finding the same thing — that charity, philanthropy, is very similar.”
He continued: “There are a bunch of ways that I think you could do ineffective things, too. So you have to think about it carefully and you have to have brilliant people on the team.”
Several weeks ago Bezos also made a $100 million grant to Dolly Parton’s charity to use towards her philanthropic efforts. Bezos’ ex-wife Mackenzie Scott also announced that she would be donating another $2 billion to charity after Bezos’ interview with CNN. She has given away almost $4 billion to 465 organizations, CNN wrote.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 20:00 - Former Employee Sues United Furniture Industries Over Mass Firing
Former Employee Sues United Furniture Industries Over Mass Firing
By Clarissa Hawes of FreightWaves
A former United Furniture Industries employee claims the furniture manufacturer, headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, violated federal law by failing to give 60 days’ notice of its abrupt shutdown to nearly 2,700 employees and truck drivers, who found themselves without jobs two days before Thanksgiving.
Former UFI employees, operating under the Lane Furniture brand name, were blindsided early Tuesday morning after receiving either an email or text message instructing them not to report to work that day because their jobs were being immediately terminated “due to unforeseen business circumstances.”
As of publication Wednesday, Todd Evans, CEO of UFI, failed to respond to FreightWaves’ requests seeking comment about what precipitated the mass firing.
Toria Neal, a resident of Lee County, Mississippi, who worked for UFI for more than eight years, alleges in her proposed class-action complaint that the company violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act and did not provide at least 60 days’ written notice of a pending closure.
In the suit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Neal claims she and potentially thousands of other United employees received an email and/or text message “that it was terminating all of its employees effective immediately” just minutes before midnight on Monday.
The message from UFI stated that the “terminations were expected to be permanent and that all benefits would be terminated without provision of COBRA.”
Langston & Lott, based in Booneville, Mississippi, filed the first class action against United Furniture Industries, Inc., alleging it violated the WARN Act when terminating all 2,700 of its employees.
“Under the WARN Act, the employees of United Furniture were entitled to either a 60-day notice or 60 days of severance pay — neither of those were provided,” Jack Simpson, attorney for Langston & Lott, told FreightWaves. “If appointed class counsel, we look forward to vigorously investigating the actions of United Furniture and seeking as much compensation the terminated employees are legally entitled to.”
Thousands fired by email, text
“At the instruction of the board of directors of United Furniture Industries Inc. and all subsidiaries, we regret to inform you that due to unforeseen business circumstances, the company has been forced to make the difficult decision to terminate the employment of all its employees, effective immediately, on Nov. 21, 2022,” according to the statement to employees obtained by FreightWaves.
One former employee said generations of her family had worked for Lane Furniture before United Furniture Industries bought the furniture manufacturer from Heritage Home Group in 2017.
She said nothing prepared her and other family members who worked for the company that they would be fired via email or would no longer have health insurance.
“We would go over to our friends’ houses and say, ‘Hey, that chair or that piece of furniture was made at our plant,’” the former employee, who didn’t want to be named for fear of retaliation, told FreightWaves. “We really took pride in our work — and this is how we are treated.”
Some employees questioned the timing of UFI’s mass firing just before Thanksgiving.
However, over-the-road truck drivers for furniture delivery division UFI Transportation who are currently making deliveries “will be paid for the balance of the week,” the company stated in the letter to workers.
According to the UFI statement, it directs truckers with loads to “immediately return equipment, inventory and delivery documents for those deliveries that have been completed to one of the following locations: Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Verona, Mississippi; or Victorville, California.”
According to the Federal Motor Safety Administration’s SAFER website, UFI has 40 power units and 42 drivers.
In July, Pitchbook listed that the company had nearly 3,000 employees working in its 18 plants and distribution centers in North Carolina, Mississippi and California, as well as in Vietnam.
Another former employee said she was aware the company was experiencing some difficulties but had no clue UFI would fire its entire workforce.
In late July, the furniture manufacturer closed its plants in Winston-Salem and High Point, North Carolina, resulting in more than 270 workers losing their jobs, according to WARN Act notices filed at the time with the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
Another 220 jobs were eliminated in late July at the company’s plant in Amory, Mississippi. “The new leadership had been working extremely hard to put new processes in place,” the former employee told FreightWaves. “There was too much effort being put in for anyone to really know they would close overnight.”
While there was no communication from UFI executives as to what led to its abrupt closure, former employees did receive an update message late Tuesday about retrieving their belongings.
“As soon as the property manager can provide a safe and orderly process for former employees to come and gather their belongings, they will do so,” UFI/Lane Corporate Communications said in an email, which was obtained by FreightWaves. “We are not certain of the timeframe for this but will communicate proactively.”
Retrieving their belongings is the last thing on former workers’ minds, one former employee said.
“It is not fair to the laborers who seriously worked so hard to be blindsided like this,” the employee told FreightWaves. “It is not fair to the mom who just had a baby to wonder if she even has health insurance to cover it. It is not fair to the cancer patient in the midst of chemo about how to pay for her treatments.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 19:30 - Biden's 'Buy American' Rules Undermining Infrastructure Spending
Biden’s ‘Buy American’ Rules Undermining Infrastructure Spending
The $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that Congress passed in November 2021 is touted as one of the signature accomplishments of the Biden administration. However, a fatal flaw in the law is gumming up the works and making it hard to turn all that money into new bridges and roads.
That flaw is a far more expansive “Buy American” provision than what’s been typically used previously. As state and local government “trade” publication Route Fifty explains:
“The law added more materials that must be produced in the United States on projects getting federal money. Before, for example, the Buy America provisions applied to iron and steel. Now, they’ll apply to construction materials such as copper wiring, glass, fiber optic cable, and plastics.”
That’s causing a rising backlash from state transportation departments — in red and blue states alike.
This month, Roger Millar, Washington state’s secretary of transportation, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation on behalf of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials begging for relief from the red tape:
“The quick implementation of Buy America requirements for such a broad range of materials will cause delays in project delivery while states, contractors, manufacturers, and suppliers continue working to determine how best to track and verify these materials.“
Thus, in trying to give favors to U.S. manufacturers, the Buy American rule in the Democrats’ infrastructure package undercuts construction firms that face project delays and disruptions for lack of compliant materials.
To the typical person, Buy American rules sound great. However, when the rubber hits the road, they’re garbage.
Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, this year we will begin fixing more than 65,000 miles of highway. And when we use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America — we are going to Buy American. pic.twitter.com/uv7inLMCNE
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 2, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In addition to all the extra bureaucracy needed to scrutinize and track the materials being used, Buy American rules force government project managers to spend more for materials since their choice of vendors is drastically reduced.
“Given the current supply chain constraints, moving to all U.S.-sourced construction materials will inevitably lead to project sponsors paying a premium to meet the Act’s requirements,” wrote American Public Transportation Association President Paul Skoutelas in June. “The question then becomes whether the market/industry can absorb a doubling, tripling or even a quadrupling of costs for construction materials.”
That means that $1.2 trillion won’t go nearly as far as it could if project managers had unfettered access to the global market for materials.
Washington, D.C.’s transit system is a case study in these effects. Over a ten-year period, Buy American rules made the city’s revamp of its train fleet cost an extra $400 million, according to Reason. That’s the equivalent of an extra 150 train cars.
Buy American bureaucratic idiocy isn’t limited to infrastructure projects. It’s also showcased in food aid to other countries.
“Americans dole out $2.5 billion annually in food assistance,” writes Katrin Park at Foreign Policy. “About 75 percent of that money is used to cover the cost for processing and shipping U.S.-grown food overseas…A 2013 study found that buying grains locally in recipient countries resulted in 50 percent savings and shortened the delivery time from about six months to three.”
Then there’s the Jones Act, which blocks foreign vessels from transporting freight or people from one U.S. port to another, shaving tens of billions of dollars out of the American economy every year — with the costs ultimately borne by consumers, and the benefits reaped by politically influential shipbuilders, shippers and unions.
Bottom line: Like all Buy American rules, the ones in the Democrats’ infrastructure package force the government to spend more and get less. They do accomplish a principal purpose however: giving politicians something to boast about to ill-informed citizens who can’t see the unintended consequences.
The future is #AmericanMade, and it’s because Democrats passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the #CHIPSandScience Act. These bills are job creators, and they will make easier to Buy American!
— Congressman Donald Norcross 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@DonaldNorcross) November 1, 2022
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 19:00 - Gingrich: New Trump Special Counsel Is A 'Left Wing Hatchet Man'
Gingrich: New Trump Special Counsel Is A ‘Left Wing Hatchet Man’
Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The newly appointed special counsel to oversee probes related to former President Donald Trump is a “left wing hatchet man” in pursuit of a “witch hunt,” according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) talks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Sept. 22, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) Attorney General Merrick Garland’s pick for the role is Jack Smith, a registered independent and a veteran federal prosecutor who most recently served as the chief prosecutor of the special court in The Hague.
Coming days after Trump officially declared his 2024 presidential candidacy, the appointment put Smith in charge of two investigations: one involving Trump’s handling of classified materials in Mar-a-Lago, and another on the alleged interference of the transition of power following the 2020 presidential election and the certification of electoral votes.
American Prosecutor Jack Smith presides during the presentation of the Kosovar former president Hashim Thaci for the first time before a war crimes court in The Hague on Nov. 9, 2020, to face charges relating to the 1990s conflict with Serbia. (Jerry Lampen/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) While proponents of the move have applauded Smith’s appointment, pointing to his long career fighting corruption, Gingrich, an Epoch Times contributor, does not agree.
“This guy is not an independent counsel. He’s a left wing hatchet man,” he said in an interview, describing Garland’s choice as “outrageous.”
“I think the Justice Department figured out that when Trump announced for president that they couldn’t just continue the normal process, because they have always avoided prosecuting candidates,” he said.
(Left) Former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Jan. 31, 2022. (The Epoch Times); (Right) Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice in Washington on July 6, 2022. (Bonnie Cash/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) “But what they’re doing is it absurd,” he added.
“Most Americans will rapidly figure out this is one more example of the kind of witch hunt that has been dealing with the whole process of the Trump candidacy, starting in 2015.”
Following Garland’s announcement, the White House denied foreknowledge, saying that the Department of Justice “makes decisions about its criminal investigation independently.”
While Smith, in a statement, pledged to carry out the investigations “independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice,” Gingrich remains skeptical, citing Smith’s record working under the Obama administration.
During the five years serving as the Justice Department’s public integrity chief from 2010, Smith oversaw the conviction of former Virginia Governor, Republican Bob McDonnell, on bribery and extortion charges. The Supreme Court later unanimously reversed the conviction, ruling that the government’s “boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute” was unconstitutional.
The former speaker called Smith’s impartiality into question, citing his involvement in what Gingrich called the IRS scandal. The House Oversight Committee in 2014 found Smith to be responsible for arranging a meeting with an official in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to scrutinize nonprofits’ political activities. This meeting would set in motion the IRS’s campaign targeting Tea Party groups, which later resulted in a public apology from the agency and a $3.5 million Justice Department settlement for two lawsuits.
Selective Prosecution
Gingrich also pointed to the absence of similar treatment to Democrat politicians, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who used a private email server for government business, and the president’s son Hunter Biden, whose foreign business dealings are set to be a top focus of a new Republican House from January.
“I think that it is strange that they can find one more excuse to go after Donald Trump even though he keeps getting found innocent, but neither Hillary Clinton nor Hunter Biden have gotten independent counsel, and it tells you how corrupted the system is,” Gingrich said.
Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, attends an event at the White House in Washington on April 18, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who is in line to chair the House Oversight Committee, said the committee Republicans have found business deals by the Biden family in more than 50 countries, including Russia and China which were often led by Hunter. They also allege that the elder Biden had knowledge of and was involved in some deals.
Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s former business partner, has welcomed Republicans’ plan to probe the Biden family’s business operations in the hopes that it will prove the senior Biden played a part.
Trump’s Reaction
Gingrich was at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when the news of the special counsel appointment came out. Trump, he said, seemed “very balanced,” “positive, and cheerful.”
“He knew what they were doing. He’s been through this now for six years,” he said.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 18:30 - License Plates Could Be Printed On McDonald's Bags To Stop Littering
License Plates Could Be Printed On McDonald’s Bags To Stop Littering
There’s been talk about McDonald’s in southwest Great Britain could print car license plates on drive-thru bags to prevent customers from littering.
“It’s not clear exactly how the number plate would be printed on packaging, but it could be scanned onto the brown bags that contain the food,” Daily Mail noted.
Chris Howell, Swansea Council’s head of waste, parks and cleansing, told a climate change corporate delivery committee meeting:
“The Welsh Government has explored with McDonald’s, or their franchises, whether or not they could print number plates of cars collecting takeaways from their drive-throughs with a view that that would discourage people from discarding their materials (litter).”
Howell said one of the biggest hurdles with fast-food companies is that if one chain adopts the climate initiative, customers will go to competitors that don’t print license plates on bags.
“If McDonald’s do it, then people will just go to Burger King instead of McDonald’s, because nobody wants to have their private details printed on that packaging.” He added: “I think it’s a really good idea but at the minute it’s fraught with some difficulties.”
The nationalist political party in Wales, Plaid Cymru, first proposed the idea more than two years ago during the pandemic lockdown when party leaders noticed a spike in fast-food trash along city streets and highways.
Welsh Government spokesperson told MailOnline:
“There are no current plans to introduce a requirement for drive-through restaurants to add vehicle registration details to fast food drive-through packaging.
“We are continuing to support Keep Wales Tidy with other initiatives to tackle roadside litter including their No Regrets campaign and their Adopt a Highway initiative.”
Now ‘the cat is out of the bag’. It’s only a matter of time before governments start forcing fast-food companies to print license plate numbers on drive-thru bags. The dangers of this could be more surveillance, and who knows what corporations would do with license plate data if such a system were implemented.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 18:00 - The Great Gold Robbery Of 1933
The Great Gold Robbery Of 1933
Authored by Thomas Woods via The Mises Institute,
It’s been [89] years since the federal government, on the spurious grounds of fighting the Great Depression, ordered the confiscation of all monetary gold from Americans, permitting trivial amounts for ornamental or industrial use. This happens to be one of the episodes Kevin Gutzman and I describe in detail in our new book, Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. From the point of view of the typical American classroom, on the other hand, the incident may as well not have occurred.
A key piece of legislation in this story is the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, which Congress passed on March 9 without having read it and after only the most trivial debate. House Minority Leader Bertrand H. Snell (R-NY) generously conceded that it was “entirely out of the ordinary” to pass legislation that “is not even in print at the time it is offered.” He urged his colleagues to pass it all the same:
“The house is burning down, and the President of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire. [Applause.] And to me at this time there is only one answer to this question, and that is to give the President what he demands and says is necessary to meet the situation.”
Among other things, the act retroactively approved the president’s closing of private banks throughout the country for several days the previous week, an act for which he had not bothered to provide a legal justification. It gave the secretary of the Treasury the power to require all individuals and corporations to hand over all their gold coin, gold bullion, or gold certificates if in his judgment “such action is necessary to protect the currency system of the United States.”
The Emergency Banking Act reached back in time to amend the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had originally been intended to criminalize economic intercourse between American citizens and declared enemies of the United States. One provision of the act granted the president the power to regulate and even prohibit “under such rules and regulations as he may prescribe … any transactions in foreign exchange, export or earmarkings of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency … by any person within the United States.” In 1918, the act was amended to extend its provisions two years beyond the conclusion of hostilities, and to allow the president to “investigate, regulate, or prohibit” even the “hoarding” of gold by an American.
After those two years elapsed, people generally assumed that the Trading with the Enemy Act had passed into desuetude. But the Supreme Court later explained that the act’s provisions were not limited merely to World War I and the two years that followed — it “stood ready to meet additional wars and additional enemies” and could be called into service once again under those circumstances. (Little did anyone suspect in 1917 that these “additional enemies” would turn out to be the American people themselves.) As amended by the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the Trading with the Enemy Act no longer said that simply “during time of war” could the president prohibit the export of gold or take action against “hoarding” (i.e., holding on to one’s money). Now these actions could be taken during time of war or “during any other period of national emergency declared by the President.”
A month later, claiming authority from the Emergency Banking Act and its amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act, the president ordered all individuals and corporations in America to hand over their gold holdings to the federal government in exchange for an equivalent amount of paper currency. The paper currency they were receiving in exchange for the gold had always been redeemable in gold in the past, so few saw anything amiss in this coerced transaction, and most trusted the government’s assurances that this was somehow necessary in order to combat the Depression. Only later would they discover that they weren’t getting that gold back, and that the paper dollars they were being given in exchange would be devalued. Soon only foreign governments and central banks would be able to convert dollars into gold — and even that link to gold would be severed in 1971.
On June 5, 1933, at the behest of the president, Congress took the next step, passing a joint resolution making it illegal to “require payment in gold or a particular kind of coin or currency, or in an amount in money of the United States measured thereby.” Any provision in a private or public contract promising payment in gold was thereby nullified. Payment could be made in whatever the government declared to be legal tender, and gold could not be used even as a yardstick for determining how much paper money would be owed.
For the next six months President Roosevelt pursued an erratic monetary course. Every day a new gold price was declared, on a basis no one could figure out. Private lending in effect came to a halt, with the value of the dollar in constant flux amid the prospect of ongoing devaluation. As Senator Carter Glass (D-VA) put it, “No man outside of a lunatic asylum will loan his money today on a farm mortgage.” And thus the government could triumphantly announce that since the private sector was cruelly depriving Americans of credit, it would have to step in and provide relief.
Meanwhile, Senator William Borah was assuring his countrymen that when it came to the nation’s monetary system, “there is no limitation upon the power of Congress. It is not circumscribed in any respect whatever. It is given full and plenary power to deal with that subject; and therefore it is the same as if there were no Constitution whatever.” Borah also tried to argue that “when an individual takes an obligation payable in gold” he does so “with the full understanding that the Government may change its monetary policy at any time and that he must accept whatever the Congress says at a particular time shall constitute money.”
The general rule (to which there are occasional exceptions) that no senator should ever be listened to on anything holds here: the power of Congress over money is in fact very limited. It has the power to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”
Coining money simply refers to the process of taking a precious metal, converting it into coins, and stamping those coins with an indication of their metal content. The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering. Regulation of the value of money is a power of declaration and comparison, whereby some monetary standard is compared to other coins in circulation and an exchange rate for these various kinds of currency established according to the amounts of precious metals (with due allowance for the distinct values of different precious metals) in each. In other words, if Congress were to declare by statute what the prevailing market exchange rate between gold and silver was, and thus to “regulate” gold and silver coins vis-à-vis one another — or, more precisely, vis-à-vis the Spanish silver dollar that constituted the American monetary standard — then it would be properly exercising its constitutional power, which consists of nothing more than this.
That is why this power appears in the same clause with the power to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures,” which involves the measurement of fixed standards in order to assure uniformity throughout the nation. That power does not give Congress the power to declare that one-tenth of a pound shall now be declared a pound, but to take an already-existing standard and codify it. Every single monetary statute enacted from the ratification of the Constitution until the 1930s understood the congressional power to regulate the “value” of money not in the sense of declaring money to possess some arbitrary value that suits the whims of politicians or central bankers, but in the sense of establishing the relative values of gold and silver coins in terms of the ever-shifting relative values of those metals on the free market. (Needless to say, the market is perfectly capable of doing this on its own.)
Moreover, the “dollar” was not an arbitrary term at the time the Constitution was drafted. In the late 18th century, everyone knew what the “dollar” referred to: the silver Spanish milled dollar, which was in widespread use in the United States. The Constitution twice refers to the dollar — in Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 (a clause that everyone understood to involve a tax on the import of slaves), and in the Seventh Amendment (which protected the right to a jury trial in civil cases involving at least twenty dollars). If the dollar had been something that Congress could manipulate at will, or if “dollar” had been merely a generic term to refer to whatever Congress should arbitrarily choose to recognize as currency, the South would never have accepted that clause — or the Constitution itself. Congress might have manipulated the dollar so as to make the tax on slave imports prohibitively expensive. It could also have effectively abolished trial by jury in civil cases by making twenty “dollars” an astronomically high amount of money.
The Court never pronounced upon the constitutionality of the gold seizure (for reasons we speculate on in our book), the legality of which it simply took for granted. The cases it chose to hear involved the cancellation of gold clauses in public and private contracts. Known as the Gold Clause Cases, Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co., Nortz v. United States, and Perry v. United States were argued in January 1935 and decided the following month. In each case Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote the opinion for the Court; Justice McReynolds composed a single dissent that he applied to all three.
The Court declared in the first two cases that the federal government had been entitled to cancel all private contracts in gold. The perpetuation of gold clauses would have amounted to the “attempted frustration” of “the constitutional power of the Congress over the monetary system of the country…. [T]hese clauses interfere with the exertion of the power granted to the Congress.” Not a stitch of evidence existed for any aspect of this argument.
Perry, the third case, involved a man who had purchased in gold a US bond that was payable in gold, and was seeking payment either in gold or in the equivalent in paper currency. Since the government intended to pay in depreciated dollars, he believed he was receiving far less than he was entitled to under the terms of the bond. The bond’s face value was $10,000 in gold. In the inflated dollars of post-gold-standard America, it would have taken nearly $17,000 in paper currency in order to satisfy what the government had contracted to pay him.
The Court declared that the plaintiff was indeed entitled to his gold, since the government had an obligation to live up to its promises. But in not paying him his gold, the government wasn’t really wronging him, since gold was now illegal to hold. In other words, if the government paid him in gold, it would then have to confiscate that gold from him anyway since holding gold was against the law.
Speaking for the minority, Justice McReynolds declared:
Just men regard repudiation and spoliation of citizens by their sovereign with abhorrence; but we are asked to affirm that the Constitution has granted power to accomplish both. No definite delegation of such a power exists; and we cannot believe that the farseeing framers, who labored with hope of establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty, intended that the expected government should have authority to annihilate its own obligations and destroy the very rights which they were endeavoring to protect. Not only is there no permission for such actions; they are inhibited. And no plenitude of words can conform them to our charter.
To the argument that the bondholder had suffered no damage in being denied payment in gold since it was now illegal for people to own gold, the dissent replied: “Obligations cannot be legally avoided by prohibiting the creditor from receiving the thing promised…. There would be no serious difficulty in estimating the value of 25.8 grains of gold in the currency now in circulation.” The contract to pay in gold having been broken, the holder was at least morally entitled to receive in currency not just the nominal amount of the bond but an amount in paper dollars equivalent to what he would have earned if the payment could have been made in gold. “For the government to say, we have violated our contract but have escaped the consequences through our own statute, would be monstrous. In matters of contractual obligation the government cannot legislate so as to excuse itself.” Suppose a private individual tried to do the same thing, “secreting or manipulating his assets with the intent to place them beyond the reach of creditors.” Any such attempt “would be denounced as fraudulent, wholly ineffective.”
“Loss of reputation for honorable dealing,” the dissent concluded, “will bring us unending humiliation; the impending legal and moral chaos is appalling.”
By the 1970s the federal government had once again permitted Americans to hold gold coins. But when it came time to actually mint them again, it made sure that gold coins could never circulate and displace the constantly depreciating paper currency printed by the US government: the law required that such coins could circulate with a face value only a tiny fraction of their market value.
The full story of the gold confiscation is actually much worse than this, and we tell it in Who Killed the Constitution? What this episode teaches us is not so much that we need to “return to the Constitution,” though that would be an improvement over what we have now, but rather that pieces of paper that governments themselves interpret cannot be expected to prevent governments from doing what they think they can get away with.
Lysander Spooner once said that he believed “that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize.” At the same time, he could not exonerate the Constitution, for it “has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.” It is hard to argue with that.
[Originally published August 13, 2008]
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 17:30 - Crypto Facing A "Crisis Of Confidence" But Bitcoin "Is Not Going Away": Mike Novogratz
Crypto Facing A “Crisis Of Confidence” But Bitcoin “Is Not Going Away”: Mike Novogratz
Last week crypto investor Mike Novogratz took to CNBC in an attempt to help analyze the fallout from the FTX scandal. Speaking to Aaron Ross Sorkin, Novogratz – who suffered major losses (and humiliation himself) when Terra/Luna collapsed – laid out how trust has been lost in the asset class for the time being.
“This is about transparency and disclosure in a lot of ways. Our industry has failed to self-regulate. I think the money side of crypto, companies like ours, are going to get regulated and should be,” he says to start the interview.
“The tech side of crypto, the on-chain stuff, that has its own series of regulatory challenges. But that should be kept separately. Right now we’re in a deficit of trust – people think there’s a black swan around every corner,” he continues.
“Isn’t this an indictment of crypto? The entire premise of crypto was to create trust,” Aaron Ross Sorkin asks.
“That still is the long-term goal. Why did companies like mine get set up? We are a bridge company to bridge people into this new economy. It accelerates the capital going in, it helps people understand it. All the capital that has moved into crypto has come from centralized companies. But just like a centralized company, they need to build trust…” Novogratz says.
“This is not really an indictment of crypto, its an indictment of FTX and other companies that were poorly run or fraudulently run,” he continues.
“Do you feel like investors are going to take advantage of any crisis of confidence. Do we have a crisis of confidence in this market?”
“We certainly do have a crisis of confidence in the industry and we’re not out of the woods yet. FTX was a major player so it’s going to take a few weeks for people to even get their balance back. Bitcoin’s not going away,” he concludes.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a ‘v’ recovery, it’s going to be a grind out of gaining trust.”
You can watch Novogratz’s full interview on CNBC here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 17:00 - 'Redo The Arizona Election' Says Trump, Pointing To Voting Issues In Maricopa County
‘Redo The Arizona Election’ Says Trump, Pointing To Voting Issues In Maricopa County
Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Former President Donald Trump suggests that Arizona redo its 2022 elections after a memo revealed widespread problems at voting sites in Maricopa County on Election Day.
“This Election was a disgrace,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Nov. 22. “They should at minimum redo the Arizona Election,” Trump added, pointing to the memo written by attorney Mark Sonnenklar, who was one of 11 roving attorneys working with the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) Election Integrity program in Maricopa County.
According to the memo, 72 of the 115 voting centers the attorneys visited, or 62.61 percent, witnessed “material problems.”
The long lines negatively affected GOP candidates on election day, according to the memo.
“Because Republican voters significantly outnumbered Democrat voters in the county on election day, such voter suppression would necessarily impact the vote tallies for Republican candidates much more than the vote tallies for Democrat candidates,” Sonnenklar added.
Additionally, Sonnenklar disputed claims by county officials that printer/tabulator problems were resolved as of 3 p.m. local time and their impact was “insignificant.”
“Collectively, I and the other 10 roving attorneys also reported that voters had to wait in significant lines at 59 of the 115 vote centers we visited (51.3 percent). In many cases, voters had to wait 1-2 hours before they received a ballot for voting,” Sonnenklar wrote.
He added, “It is certainly safe to assume that many voters refused to wait in such lines, left the vote center, and did not return to vote later.”
In response to Trump’s comments, Arizona Republican governor’s candidate Kari Lake took to Twitter to thank the former president.
“It was nothing short of mass disenfranchisement for the entire Arizona First slate and the people of Arizona,” Lake added.
(Left) Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Katie Hobbs speaks to supporters at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel in Phoenix on Nov. 8, 2022. (John Moore/Getty Images). (Right) Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake greets supporters at a campaign rally at the Dream City Church in Phoenix Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake greets supporters at a campaign rally at the Dream City Church in Phoenix on Nov. 7, 2022. (John Moore/Getty Images) Arizona
Lake currently trails Democrat Katie Hobbs by about 17,100 votes, 49.7 percent to 50.3 percent, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s office.
Last week, Hobbs declared victory in the race, but Lake has not conceded yet.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Elections Integrity Unit has sent a letter (pdf) to Maricopa County officials demanding answers to “myriad problems” that voters in the county had to deal with on Election Day.
“The Elections Integrity Unit of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office has received hundreds of complaints since Election Day pertaining to issues related to the administration of the 2022 General Election in Maricopa County,” Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright wrote in the letter. “These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law.”
Wright is demanding a response from the county by Nov. 28.
After the letter was sent, Lake told the Daily Mail that she “will become governor.”
“The way they run elections in Maricopa County is worse than in banana republics around this world,” Lake told the outlet.
On Nov. 21, Lake posted a video on Twitter, saying that “whistleblowers are coming forward” about voting issues on election day in Maricopa County and her attorneys are “working diligently to gather information.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 16:30 - Iranian Protesters & Government Supporters Clash At World Cup
Iranian Protesters & Government Supporters Clash At World Cup
Rival sets of Iranian protesters have been confronting each other at the World Cup in Qatar, and a moment anti-government demonstrations and unrest has been raging inside Iran for over the past two months.
Tensions spilled over in and outside the stadium for Iran’s 2-0 win over Wales on Friday. As the AP and ESPN reported, “fans supporting the Iranian government harassed those protesting against it and stadium security seized flags, T-shirts and other items expressing support for the protest movement that has gripped the Islamic Republic.”
Getty Images Stadium security reportedly cracked down on any flags or symbols seen as undermining the officially recognized Iranian state, including preventing fans from carrying Persian pre-revolutionary flags into the venue, Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium.
In some cases pro-government supporters were seen trying to rip signs or imagery with protest slogans from the fans holding them. Some groups were heard chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom” during the match.
Controversy was unleashed when during a previous game the Iranian team appeared not to participate in the singing of Iran’s national anthem, while during Friday’s game that changed as the players sang.
The Associated Press observed further of Friday’s scenes in the stadium:
Small mobs of men surrounded three different women giving interviews about the protests to foreign media outside the stadium, disrupting broadcasts as they angrily chanted, “The Islamic Republic of Iran!”
Many women fans appeared shaken as Iranian government supporters shouted at them in Farsi and filmed them close-up on their phones.
A security official (pictured right in the read and black) attempts to intervene an anti-government protester at Friday’s World Cup match. Getty Images And according to more from the report:
Inside the stadium, a woman with dark red tears painted from her eyes held aloft a football jersey with “Mahsa Amini – 22” printed on the back — a reference to the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman whose death in police custody two months ago ignited the nationwide protests in Iran, a Reuters photo showed.
A CNN report from earlier this month cited a human rights monitor to say that at least 326 people have been killed since the start of what’s been dubbed the “anti-hijab” protests.
Tehran says dozens of police and security services personnel have also been killed, and has accused “rioters” of being part of a foreign-backed plot to topple the government.
Meanwhile, there have also been tensions more broadly between local Arabs and the presence of Israelis at the World Cup:
A Saudi football fan confronting an Israeli journalist. The look on the journalist’s face should tell you everything about the situation. No amount of “Peace Deals” will normalize Israel in the region. It was, is and will forever be Palestine. pic.twitter.com/CgwDamLubL
— Hadi Nasrallah (@HadiNasrallah) November 26, 2022
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 16:00 - Oil Market Metrics Signal Sufficient Supply And Weakening Demand
Oil Market Metrics Signal Sufficient Supply And Weakening Demand
By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com
Oil futures and swaps globally are increasingly showing signs of easing supply concerns and resurfaced concerns about further weakness in crude oil demand.
The prompt spreads in the U.S. benchmark, WTI Crude, are already in contango, signaling enough near-term supply. Brent Crude front-month to second-month futures prices also dipped into contango earlier this week.
Contango is the state of the market in which prices for delivery at later dates are higher than prompt prices—a market situation signaling oversupply and one which traders use to store oil for delivery at a later date. The opposite market situation—backwardation—typically occurs at times of market deficit and in it, prices for front-month contracts are higher than the ones further out in time.
Another oil market metric closely followed for signs of demand in the key oil-importing region, Asia, is the premium of Oman futures over Dubai swaps. That premium dropped on Thursday to below $1 per barrel – compared to a premium of over $15 a barrel in March this year – signaling much softer demand. The premium has fallen by around 80% in November alone, according to Bloomberg’s estimates.
So far this month, oil prices have dropped amid growing fears of economic slowdown and spiking Covid infections in China, where some forms of restriction on mobility have returned in nearly 50 large cities.
China is registering near-record numbers of new Covid infections daily—close to the April 2022 peak when the financial center Shanghai was under lockdown for weeks—likely depressing fuel demand as 48 Chinese cities currently have some form of restrictions on movements.
According to analysts at Nomura, as of Monday, areas accounting for almost 20% of China’s GDP were suffering from the latest Covid restrictions. China’s rising Covid cases and the return of restrictions have weighed on oil prices this month as the market fears another slowdown in Chinese economic growth and fuel demand, on top of global recession fears.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 15:30 - The Santa Pause Rally
The Santa Pause Rally
Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
People who have been reading my blog and listening to my podcast for years know that I hold a special disdain for the idea that markets can, and should, only go up.
On more than one podcast, and in more than one article, I’ve noted that this fallacy is just one of many nefarious concepts that I believe do a major disservice to the average investor.
When these otherwise illogical concepts are dumbed down to be made digestible to the average investor, it casts a signal that the financial industry, and the media that peddles it, are simply too embarrassed or incapable of leveling with the American public about the innerworkings of monetary policy and markets.
Rather than take concepts like the market only going up – which, when observed casually, sound ridiculous to even the most uninitiated market participants – and deliver them with a straight face, they are instead broadcast with a zany, sensational, insulting ethos that the industry thinks resonates better with the American public.
This is how we wound up with Jim Cramer – and why Cramer’s deadpan admission of market manipulation, caught on video, has gone mostly unnoticed and without consequences – but his show where he routinely rings bells and whistles while screaming, panting loudly and sweating profusely, WWF-style, is celebrated.
In addition to giving us the poor man’s stock market infotainment, financial media has also given us an unlimited number of “easily digestible”, yet equally as inane and useless acronyms, which conveniently help do away with critical thinking about investing when employed.
For example, Jim Cramer coined the term “FANG” year ago, which was an acronym for “Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google”.
While Cramer was trying to just be cute for beginner investors, the acronym – eventually adopted by mainstream media – sent another message: stock market investing is so easy, we don’t even need to decouple these names from one another anymore.
After all, Cramer talked about these companies so much that it was just easier to refer to them by one name, saving him time whenever he wanted to recommend or talk about these securities, but not necessarily the entire NASDAQ (despite the fact that these are completely different companies with completely different valuations).
But when referred to by their acronym, which is easy to remember by retail investors, where they went one, they went all.
The market for retail investors has been so similarly dumbed down and gamified with acronyms like ESG, FOMO and BTFD and stock ticker symbols like YOLO, HERO, BOOM and FUN, it has never been easier for retail investors to dump their money into an overpriced flaming bag of dog shit with a clever name than it is now.
But one of the most odious examples of dumbing down already idiotic Wall Street Keynesian thinking to retail investors has been the annual tradition of rooting for a “Santa Claus Rally”. Once used to describe the rally at the end of December heading into the new year, this term is now used by the financial media to describe any stock market rally that happens, for any reason, at the end of the year, on any given year.
Rather than being used to describe a rally that is taking place for legitimate means, the term has now taken on a life of its own over the last decade and has gone from a label to a reason that markets rally. The tail, in other words, is wagging the dog, despite the fact that everybody knows there’s no really good reason to buy stocks just because it’s the end of the year.
Everybody knows that companies are cyclical and everybody knows that holidays result in more sales for many companies. It’s safe to say that this century-old tradition has already been priced into stock markets.
So what, exactly, is a “Santa Claus Rally”?
In reality, it’s nothing – it’s a gimmick, like “FANG” – or to quote Chasing Amy – “a figment of your f*cking imagination!”
The “Santa Claus Rally” is nothing more than an easily understood analogic vessel that Keynesians in the financial media use to continue to implant the idea that the market should always go up into the minds of novice investors. It’s the anti-fundamental analysis, and it’s all wrapped up with images of everybody’s favorite holiday – a time of joy, cheer, prosperity, family and friends: Christmas.
That’s right: it’s a gimmick so nefarious, it invokes the time of year when people feel most complete. I mean, what do people look for from an investment? They look for financial security so as to live comfortably. And when do most people feel the most comfortable and secure? Around the holidays.
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But this year I’m calling it the “Santa Pause Rally” – not just because of how toxic the saying is to begin with, but because, as we have been figuring out the hard way for the last 9 months, there really is no reason for random celebration in markets right now.
Markets, and our economy, are in absolutely unprecedented waters right now, with our central bank stuck in a minefield of catch-22s that they can’t get out of without collapsing the economy or letting inflation run rampant. Thus, new paradigms in how investing and markets work are being written daily – and none of them include random stock rallies just because the financial media says so. That shit may have flown when volatility was at all time lows and the world financial and geopolitical order wasn’t in disarray – but that’s hardly the case today.
If 2018 wasn’t a stark enough reminder that the “Santa Claus Rally” is complete and total bullshit (recall, markets collapsed after slow and steady 25 bps rate hikes totaling barely 3%), this year should be.
Above: 2018’s “Santa Claus Rally”
I’m not saying that the market won’t rally at the end of the year, but what I am saying is that any rally we undergo will more than likely be a bear market rally and be short lived. I am sticking by my analysis that, as we speak, there is a 400 basis point pipe bomb making its way through the economic plumbing of the nation, just waiting to blow up and tank markets on any given day.
At the very least, hopefully this reminder of the idiocy not only of monetary policy, but of Wall Street naming conventions used to feed the hogs, serves to arrest any remaining mindless optimism mainstream media-watchers have heading into the end of the year.
There’s no way to say it without playing into the criticisms that I’m nothing but a fear mongering permabear, but I honestly believe there isn’t really anything to look forward to heading into the end of 2022 with markets or the economy.
All this market wants for Christmas is a soft landing, but instead, it’s almost certainly going to be getting a lump of coal over the next six months.
When that happens – or the next time some lobotomized television anchor uses the “Santa Claus Rally” notion – I beg of you to return to this piece and read the following paragraph, provided in bold font for your visual convenience.
Using cute names and anecdotal slogans does nothing to help educate mom and pop investors about monetary policy, which is the main driving force behind the nation’s current inflationary crisis. This dumbing down of markets and the economy will also be the reason behind any forthcoming panic in markets or economic depression for our country, as shock will be amplified due to investors believing things are better than they actually are. These terms are used as vessels in order to further an extremely misguided policy agenda that has gotten us into this mess to begin with – they put exceptional looking gift wrap on financial lumps of coal.
For more on how I’m positioned heading into 2023, you can read my latest update here.
Thank you for reading QTR’s Fringe Finance. This post is public so feel free to share it: Share
QTR’s Disclaimer: I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. These positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 14:30 - Foxconn Riot Could Cut China iPhone Production By More Than 30%
Foxconn Riot Could Cut China iPhone Production By More Than 30%
Apple’s top manufacturing partner, Foxconn Technology Group, is set to see November iPhone shipments from a massive factory in Zhengzhou, China, known as iPhone City, plunge after a week of unrest, Reuters said, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
They said iPhone production would be slashed by more than 30% at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant in November versus an earlier estimate of up to 30% when problems at the factory began in late October.
Most of the 200,000-person workforce has been living in isolation since last month. New hires were brought in recently as management wanted to keep churning premium iPhone models, including the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro.
But Foxconn failed to live up to its promises of higher pay for new hires, which sparked a riot across the world’s largest iPhone factory earlier this week. To squash the violence, Foxconn began distributing 10,000 yuan ($1,400) to newly recruited workers to leave by Thursday.
“The source said more than 20,000 workers, mostly new hires not yet working on production lines, took the money and left,” Reuters said.
The Zhengzhou plant accounts for 70% of global iPhone shipments, and a reduction in production will ripple through the supply chain. Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, is Apple’s top supplier, which means any manufacturing disruption in China could leave AT&T, Best Buy, and Verizon stores without iPhones.
Another source said it’s “impossible” for Apple to resume full iPhone production by the end of the month.
ODDO BHF, a Franco-German financial services group, said even if Apple shifts production to other plants, “the impact will probably be significant, as long as these protests are continuing in Zhengzhou, with significant delays to be expected for the iPhone 14.”
Foxconn acknowledged it made errors in managing new hires while blaming local officials for unpredictable health policies that impacted meal delivery and made maintenance nearly impossible, according to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the company.
“You see cases like Foxconn, and every company is now asking themselves, ‘Will that happen to me?’
“Any company that depends on manufacturing has to consider alternatives. It will be costly, but it will be less costly than only relying on China and then China doesn’t open up,” Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia Pacific economist at Natixis, said.
In early November, Foxconn revised its earning expectations down for Q4 on zero Covid disruptions at the assembly facility, while Apple warned iPhone capacity would be reduced. After chaos this week, more downward revisions could be ahead.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/26/2022 – 14:00
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