Apr 28

Today’s News 28th April 2022

  • Germany Supports 'Gradual' EU Ban On Russian Oil As Moscow Rejects Gas Payment From Seized Trading Unit
    Germany Supports ‘Gradual’ EU Ban On Russian Oil As Moscow Rejects Gas Payment From Seized Trading Unit

    Update(1130ET): As the EU attempts to impose unity amid the still fast escalating gas for rubles standoff and potential full-blown energy crisis, Germany has said for the first time it is ready to back a ‘gradual ban’ on Russian oil.

    As detailed in a breaking Bloomberg report, “Berlin would support a phased approach to targeting oil rather than some of the other options that have been discussed, such as a price cap or payment mechanisms to withhold parts of Moscow’s revenue, according to people familiar with talks among EU ambassadors.”

    “The ban would also need to come with a transition period, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private,” the report adds, which is akin to the EU strategy when in banned coal earlier in April.

    Meanwhile, after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen upon the start of Wednesday charged the Kremlin with trying to fracture Europe’s response with “blackmail” – Moscow has rolled out a few more tricks of its own amid Germany’s signaling a change of posture regarding Russian energy it’s population is so heavily dependent on…

    “Russia’s major gas bank rejected a payment from a trading firm that Germany seized from Moscow’s control, the first sign of friction following the take-over amid a broader regional energy dispute,” according to Bloomberg.

    Gazprombank is indicating it rejected some April and May gas deliveries payment – even though it was made in rubles per Russia’s firm request – on the basis that the German government previously took over Gazprom PJSC’s German subsidiary as part of sanctions enforcement.

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    Update(0918ET): Is Europe starting to panic amid cracks in a ‘unified European front’? It appears so, based on a press briefing in Brussels by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who said:

    “Its’ very clear and the request from the Russian side to pay in rubles is a unilateral decision and not according to the contracts,” and further “Companies with such contracts should not accede to the Russian demands. This would be a breach of the sanctions so a high risk for the companies.”

    She also denounced this “as an instrument of blackmail” after the Gazprom suspension of gas to Poland and Bulgaria. “This is unjustified and unacceptable,” she said earlier in the day. “And it shows once again the unreliability of Russia as a gas supplier.”

    * * *

    It appears that Putin’s gambit is working.

    One day after Russia halted natgas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria due to “nonpayment in rubles”, confirming that the country is willing to go ahead with its bluff and shut down supplies to “unfriendly” nations and sending European nat gas prices soaring, Bloomberg reports citing a person close to Russian gas giant Gazprom, that already Europe’s fake united front is cracking as four European gas buyers have already paid for supplies in rubles as Russia demanded even as further cutoffs if others refuse the Kremlin’s requirement aren’t likely until the second half of May, when the next payments are due.

    While it was unclear which are the four companies violating EU directives and paying directly in rubles, according to Reuters Germany’ Uniper and Austrian OMV are among the companies that have folded to Kremlin’ demands:

    • GERMAN UNIPER CO SAYS PAYMENT SCHEME FOR RUSSIAN GAS IN RUBLES DOES NOT CONTRADICT THE SANCTIONS AND IT IS POSSIBLE TO PAY IN RUBLES – OFFICIAL

    • AUSTRIA AND THE AUSTRIAN OMV HAS ACCEPTED THE TERMS OF PAYMENT FOR RUSSIAN GAS IN RUBLES – AUSTRIAN CHANCELLOR

    Pro-Russian EU member Hungary, meanwhile, has struck a deal to pay into a euro-denominated account with Gazprombank, which in turn will deposit the amount in roubles to Gazprom Export, foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said in a video posted to Facebook. Its next payment is due on May 22, he said. Slovakia has reached the same agreement, he added as more of Europe realizes that it is impossible to live without Russian energy sources.

    Separately, to facilitate their compliance with Russian demands (and ostensibly in breach of European sanctions), ten European companies have already opened the accounts at Gazprombank needed to meet President Vladimir Putin’s payment demands, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

    As we reported yesterday, Russia halted gat supplies to Poland and Bulgaria on Wednesday after they refused Gazprom’s proposed mechanism for ruble payments, which the gas giant says does not violate European Union sanctions. Russia supplies gas via pipelines to 23 European countries. Moscow demanded that it be paid in rubles for nat gas shipments after the EU imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. However, the EU told member states that the mechanism the Kremlin proposed, which required opening euro and ruble accounts with state-controlled Gazprombank, would violate the sanctions. It appears that to at least 10 energy companies, complying with Russian demands to keep the gas flowing is more important than potentially pissing off some Eurocrats.

    According to the FT, Gazprom Export notified Bulgargaz and PGNiG of the suspension of gas supplies from April 27 until payment is made in accordance with the decreed procedure, the company said. It warned that the unauthorised withdrawal of gas volumes transiting through Poland and Bulgaria to other European countries such as Germany would result in a reduction of transit supplies.

    “Bulgaria and Poland are transit states,” Gazprom said. “In the event of unauthorized withdrawal of Russian gas from transit volumes to third countries, supplies for transit will be reduced by this volume.”

    In response to the “unexpected” supply halts, which infuriated EU president Ursula von der Leyen, who today tweeted that “Gazprom’s announcement is another attempt by Russia to blackmail us with gas” adding that Europe is “prepared for this scenario” although judging by the scramble by several energy companies to pay in rubles that is not really true…

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    … European gas prices rose by 20% on Wednesday. Futures contracts tracking Europe’s wholesale gas price advanced almost by a fifth at €117 per megawatt hour in early trading. Prices are almost seven times higher than a year ago.

    “Gazprom has completely suspended gas supplies to Bulgargaz (Bulgaria) and PGNiG (Poland) due to non-payment in roubles,” Gazprom said in a statement on Wednesday.

    While we already know that at least a handful of European energy buyers folded to Russian demands, multiple European buyers have refused to pay in roubles (for now), saying it contradicted contract terms and would be a way to bypass EU sanctions on the Russian central bank.

    “Politically, this raises the stakes for the EU Commission’s decision on whether the new payment system would violate sanctions and, hence, will probably keep market volatility elevated,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Samantha Dart in a note to clients. She also added that it is Goldman’s “view that it is in the interest of both the EU and Russia to work out a solution that brings gas payments in compliance with the EU’s legal requirements, consistent with recent comments from Brussels.”

    Today’s events can work as an added incentive for the EU, and especially Germany, to find a way to work out a RUB payment mechanism given the significant economic toll a halt in gas flows would have in the region, which would be much greater than that of Poland or Bulgaria.

    Well, it appears that in lieu of a political resolution, at least some companies are taking matters into their own hands, a development which will either escalate tensions further and lead to even more draconian measures, as the following Reuters quotes suggests:

    • WESTERN OFFICIALS SAY RUSSIA DECISION TO HALT GAS TO POLAND, BULGARIA IS LIKELY TO BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE AS IT DEMONSTRATES WHY DEPENDENCE ON RUSSIA MAKES COUNTRIES VULNERABLE TO COERCION

    … or force Europe to realize that full sanctions of Russian energy are impossible and force politicians to find loopholes, as this next Reuters headline signals:

    • EU WILL TEMPORARILY INCREASE GAS PURCHASES FROM THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION THROUGH COUNTRIES READY TO PAY IN RUBLES TO COMPENSATE FOR THE CESSATION OF SUPPLIES TO POLAND AND BULGARIA – TASS SOURCE

    To be sure, in a worst case scenario, Goldman warns that “a full interruption of Russian flows to Germany would potentially lift European gas prices to over 200 EUR/MWh this summer.”

    Given all of this, it appears the Ruble is no longer “rubble” after all, trading at 6-month highs versus the dollar…

    And near two-year highs against the euro…

    Just remember, Janet Yellen said this was all manipulation and told you that “you should not infer anything” from the value of the ruble.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 04/28/2022 – 22:31

  • Where People Spend The Most (And Least) Time On Social Media
    Where People Spend The Most (And Least) Time On Social Media

    On average, global internet users spend 2 hours and 27 minutes on social media per day, though, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, trends differ widely by country. In many of the markets that Global Web Index surveyed, social media use had shrunk or plateaued in Q1 2020 when compared with 2019 and 2018 figures, but the coronavirus pandemic reversed this trend in many countries.

    Infographic: Where People Spend the Most & Least Time on Social Media | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Emerging markets continue to spend the most time on social networks during a typical day.

    This could be driven by these markets generally having younger populations, with the 16 to 24-year-old segment driving growth globally.

    Nigeria spent the most time connected to social networks, devoting more than four hours a day to the digital social sphere.

    Filipinos typically spent almost as much time per day on social media sites, while Indians and Chinese clocked in around 2.5 hours and 2 hours, respectively, per day.

    Countries with aging populations exhibited shorter social media use. During a typical day in Japan, people spend only three quarters of an hour staying connected on social networks. Germany posts only slightly higher numbers, with users going on social media for one hour and twenty minutes every day, while the UK and the U.S. both spent closer to two hours per day engaging with social media.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 04/28/2022 – 02:45

  • On Ukraine, Turkey Walks Fine Line Between NATO, Russia
    On Ukraine, Turkey Walks Fine Line Between NATO, Russia

    Authored by Adam Murrow via The Epoch Times,.

    Turkey has proven adept at maintaining neutrality in regards to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. While Ankara has condemned Russia’s “special military operation,” it has also declined to follow the lead of its NATO allies in supporting US-led sanctions on Moscow. According to local experts, its reasons for doing so are both economic and political, and reflect Turkey’s varied approach to its relations with Russia.

    “Turkey is a neighbor to both countries, with whom it has intense economic relations,” Halil Akinci, who served as Turkey’s ambassador to Russia from 2008 to 2010, told The Epoch Times.

    “So it’s in Ankara’s interest to stay on good terms with them both.”

    Neutrality, he added, also left Turkey in the perfect position to mediate—thus raising its international profile—“since we’re the only ones acceptable to both sides.”

    Condemnation Without Sanctions

    When the Russian operation first began on Feb. 24, Turkish officials condemned it as “unacceptable” and a “violation of international law.” They were also quick to stress, however, that Ankara—unlike its NATO allies—had no intention of enforcing US-led sanctions on Russia.

    Prof. Dr. Mehmet Seyfettin Erol, a political analyst and head of the Ankara Center for Crisis and Policy, an independent think-tank, said Turkey had “reasonable grounds” for declining to support sanctions.

    “Turkey is positioning itself as a mediator by keeping communication channels open with Russia,” Erol told The Epoch Times. He went on to assert that Ankara and Moscow were closely engaged on a broad range of issues based on principles of “cooperation and competition.”

    Akinci, when asked if Turkey was subject to pressure by NATO to adopt a harder line against Russia, said no one could reasonably expect Ankara to enforce sanctions —especially given current economic realities.

    “Because of its massive trade dependence on Russia, Turkey isn’t in a position to do this [i.e., enforce sanctions],” he said. “Like the rest of the world, Turkey simply cannot ignore Russia’s vast natural resources.”

    Indeed, an estimated 45 percent of Turkey’s natural gas imports currently derive from Russia, along with more than 75 percent of its imported wheat. This represents a dire situation for a country that has seen its currency lose more than 80 percent of its value year-on-year, causing the prices of many staple commodities—including bread—to skyrocket.

    At the same time, Turkey has significant trade relations with Ukraine, which supplies it with another 10 to 15 percent of its total wheat imports. Ankara and Kyiv also cooperate in the defense-industries field, including the joint manufacture of aerial drones.

    ‘Constructive’ Mediation Efforts

    Turkish neutrality may be economically expedient, but it has also served to raise the country’s profile by positing it as the ideal mediator—a role it has assumed with gusto. On March 10, the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers met in Turkey’s resort city of Antalya; and on March 29, delegations from both countries held talks in Istanbul. Although hailed by all sides as “constructive,” the talks failed to produce any tangible breakthroughs.

    Russia, for its part, which appears to have the upper hand militarily, demands guarantees that Ukraine will never join NATO. It also demands Kyiv’s recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea (annexed by Russia in 2014), and recognition of two Russian-speaking territories in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhasnk) as independent republics.

    Based on recent signals from both camps, Erol believes it is likely that Ukraine will “give up on NATO membership first, and Moscow will accept Ukraine’s European Union membership in return.” The main sticking point, he believes, is the Donbas region. “Russia demands recognition of the so-called republics, but the Kyiv administration and the international community do not seem to accept this,” he said.

    Because it involves major power players like Russia and NATO, the conflict could become a long-simmering “proxy war” lasting “months or even years,” Erol warned, citing past Russian entanglements in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

    Akinci agreed that reaching a negotiated settlement “could take a long time.” He added, however, that if the military equation were to change significantly on the ground, “[diplomatic] positions could change as well.”

    In the meantime, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has extended an open invitation to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet in Istanbul for further talks. “I wholeheartedly believe that a peaceful solution can be found through dialogue,” he said on April 18. Three days later, Russian forces reportedly captured the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

    Ties With Russia: ‘Not Black and White’

    Historical rivals, the Ottoman (i.e., Turkish) and Russian empires fought at least a dozen major conflicts over four centuries, ending with the First World War. But today, Turkey, despite its 70-year-old membership in NATO, is keen to remain on good terms with Russia, with which it shares a substantial maritime border in the Black Sea.

    That being said, the two have implacable foreign-policy differences, especially in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. In Syria, for example, Turkey supports anti-Assad armed groups, while Russia backs the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The two countries also support diametrically-opposing forces in war-ravaged Libya.

    Turkey-Russia relations bottomed out in late 2015, when a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Sukhoi fighter near Turkey’s tense border with Syria. But relations quickly recovered the following year, especially after a failed coup attempt against Erdogan’s government, for which Ankara blamed Fetullah Gulen, a US-based Turkish-Muslim preacher who claims to have an international following.

    Washington’s refusal to extradite Gulen to Turkey then led to a rupture in US-Turkey ties and a concurrent improvement in Ankara’s relations with Moscow.

    “Because Gulen resides in the US, Turkey implicitly accused Washington of supporting the coup attempt,” Dr. Ilhan Uzgel, a prominent Turkish political analyst, told The Epoch Times.

    “This, in turn, led [Erdogan’s] ruling Justice and Development Party to ally itself with nationalist and Eurasianist elements who favor closer ties with Russia, China and Iran,” Uzgel, a former professor of international relations, added.

    “This combination of external and domestic factors prompted Ankara’s subsequent ‘tilt’ towards Moscow.”

    In 2017, Turkey went so far as to announce the purchase of an advanced S-400 missile-defense system from Russia. The move infuriated Turkey’s NATO allies and eventually resulted in limited US sanctions being imposed on Turkey itself.

    In explaining Ankara’s eclectic approach to Moscow, Akinci stressed that, at least with respect to the Middle East, Turkey’s differences with the US “are actually deeper” than those with Russia.

    “For example, our American allies have nurtured, and continue to support, an organization opposed to Turkey’s territorial integrity,” he said.

    Here he was referring to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Syrian branch of which the US has backed in its war against Assad, but which Ankara views as a terrorist group. “In this case, US policy actually poses a greater danger to Turkey than anything the Russians are doing,” Akinci asserted.

    He added: “Every state has its differences with Russia and every state has interests in common with Russia. In some areas, the US and Russia get along quite well; in others, they do not. Geopolitics is never black and white.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 04/28/2022 – 02:00

  • The Illusion Of Freedom: We're Only As Free As The Government Allows
    The Illusion Of Freedom: We’re Only As Free As The Government Allows

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

    “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”

    – George Carlin

    We’re in a national state of denial.

    For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

    Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

    Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.

    For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.

    On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.

    The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

    Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.

    The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.

    In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.

    We’re in trouble, folks.

    Freedom no longer means what it once did.

    This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

    My friends, we’re being played for fools.

    On paper, we may be technically free.

    In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

    We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

    Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

    As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

    Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

    In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

    Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

    Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

    This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

    That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

    We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

    The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

    This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

    Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 23:25

  • Stinger Missile Production Hit With Delays, Raytheon CEO Warns
    Stinger Missile Production Hit With Delays, Raytheon CEO Warns

    Stinger shoulder-fired missiles are in short supply, and increased production might not come online for a few years, Raytheon Technologies Corporation revealed in a conference call with investors on Tuesday. 

    Robert Spingarn from Melius Research asked Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes: “Will the Army replace the current 1,400 stingers that were sent to Ukraine?”

    Hayes replied Raytheon is “currently producing stingers for an international customer, but we have a very limited stock of material for stinger production.” 

    The CEO added, “DoD hasn’t bought a stinger in about 18 years. And some of the components are no longer commercially available, and so we’re going to have to go out and redesign some of the electronics in the missile of the seeker head.”

    Hayes said it’s “going to take us a little bit of time” to ramp up production and doesn’t expect DoD to place large replenishment orders for stingers until 2023 or 2024. 

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    In the past two months, the US has sent more than1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine. With stingers in limited production, this could be problematic for the West if the conflict in Ukraine broadens. 

    The Army recently sent out a request for a next-generation infrared homing surface-to-air missile with plans to award a contract in the 2Q23, though the new missiles won’t be fielded until 2028.  

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 23:05

  • Former NATO Commander Disguises War Propaganda As Novel
    Former NATO Commander Disguises War Propaganda As Novel

    Authored by by Patrick Macfarlane via The Libertarian Institute, 

    On March 9, 2021, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, co-authored a fiction novel with Elliott Ackerman, another former U.S. military officer. The book, entitled 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, imagines a kinetic war between the United States and China.

    Given the pedigree of its authorship, the novel provides a compelling window into the psychology of NATO’s military leadership and, correspondingly, the foreign policy establishment behind it. To those familiar with said psychology, the events of the novel will not be surprising.

    It begins with a Chinese ambush of a U.S. vessel in the South China Sea; an Iranian capture of a U.S. pilot; a full scale naval battle between the U.S. and China (resulting in a total U.S. defeat); and a Russian invasion of Poland. The novel concludes with a limited nuclear exchange between the U.S. and China.

    Given the last few decades’ hawkish hand wringing about Chinese and Russian cyber capabilities, the tactics employed in the novel are similarly unsurprising. A Chinese cyberattack disables U.S. hardware, allowing the naval rout. The Iranians, as allies of Russia and China, similarly disable U.S. aircraft. For their part, the Russians slice underwater communications cables leading to a complete internet blackout in the West.

    To an uncritical reader, the novel appears to be a “cautionary tale” and a “warning” against global conflict. The novel’s dust jacket states:

    Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors’ years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

    Mainstream outlets were as successful in their attempts to paint 2034 as a “warning” as their reviews were cringeworthy.

    Wired, which ran a series of exclusive pre-print excerpts, had this to say:

    Wired has always been a publication about the future—about the forces shaping it, and the shape we’d like it to take. Sometimes, for us, that means being wild-eyed optimists, envisioning the scenarios that excite us most. And sometimes that means taking pains to envision futures that we really, really want to avoid.

    By giving clarity and definition to those nightmare trajectories, the hope is that we can give people the ability to recognize and divert from them. Almost, say, the way a vaccine teaches an immune system what to ward off. And that’s what this issue of WIRED is trying to do…

    Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever—and it happens to be a rippingly good read. Turns out that even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.

    The Washington Post’s review was almost worse.

    This crisply written and well-paced book reads like an all-caps warning to a world shackled to the machines we carry in our pockets and place in our laps, while only vaguely understanding how the information stored in and shared by those devices can be exploited. We have grown numb to the latest data breach—was it a pollical campaign (Hillary Clinton’s), or one of the country’s biggest credit-rating firms (Equifax), or a hotel behemoth (Marriott), or a casual-sex hookup site (Adult Friend Finder), or government departments updating their networks with the SolarWinds system (U.S. Treasury and Commerce)?

    In “2034,” it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention! George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, “Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel” was published 35 years before 1984. Ackerman’s and Stavridis’s book takes place in the not-so-distant future when today’s high school military recruits will just be turning 30.

    Between Wired’s ham-handed COVID-19 vaccine analogy and the CIA Washington Post’s ironic Orwell reference, the mainstream marketing campaign clearly attempts to portray the novel as a cautionary tale.

    Image: US Navy

    It is impossible to gaze into the hearts of men, but we do have some clues. Those clues suggest that the co-authors really do seek to warn against war with China. However, in doing so, they advocate for it. Indeed, their warning is not against the folly of empire, but against a rising China.

    Ultimately the co-authors’ MacBethian premonition of conflict necessitates escalatory U.S. policy. On March 18, 2021, the pair were interviewed by NPR. Stavridis had this to say:

    …a subtext in all of this [the novel] is to strike a warning bell about the rise of China and the propensity in human history going back 2,500 years almost any time a [sic] established power is challenged by a rising power, it leads to war. It’s a dangerous moment. And 15 years from now, I think, will be a moment of maximum danger because China will have advanced in its military capability and technology. Therefore, our military deterrent will somewhat decline. We’re standing in the danger, as we say in the Navy.

    Ackerman embraces this view:

    …and we’re not only sounding the alarm bell, but the book is also trying to situate where America is in this moment of 2034.

    Further, the pair assert they do not believe in the American decline.

    Interviewer (to both): “…do you believe this, that America will be the author of its own destruction?”

    Stavridis: “I believe there are many in the world who do believe that. I personally do not…there are many in the world who believe our best days are somehow behind us. They would be miscalculating, in my view, to believe that.”

    Ackerman: “I would add I am by no way a believer in the decline of America. And I am very much committed to the idea of the American ideal. That being said, looking back throughout our entire history, the greatest threat is us turning inward and destroying that ideal. Lincoln himself said – I’m paraphrasing, but basically said that if America is going to destroy itself, we will be the author and the finisher. And I think he says, a nation of free men will live forever or die by suicide. And I don’t think that’s Lincoln being a declinist about the United States. But I think it’s him recognizing that our divisiveness can oftentimes be the greatest threat and what leaves us the most unable to respond to challenges from outside the country.”

    Indeed, a reader would be hard pressed to find any point where the co-authors suggest any strategy short of increasing military confrontation with China. Instead, they warn that America must be more united against an outside threat. It must, by implication, build up its military force, and, oddly enough, confront Chinese technological advances with less reliance on our own technology.

    Stavridis expanded on his China policy prescriptions in a June 2021 interview:

    The South China Sea is a vital entry point for the United States today. It’s a massive body of water full of oil and gas as well as fisheries, and about 40 percent of global trade passes through it.

    So, there are strong strategic reasons, as the United States values its alliances in Asia, to push back against Chinese claims.

    It is not just the South China Sea but also the East China Sea, where the Senkaku Islands lie, that are vital to American interests as long as our allies operate there and trade flows through there.

    And above all we simply as an international community cannot acquiesce to China’s preposterous claims, which have been rejected by international law.

    Indeed, a number one red line would be an attack against our allies.

    For example, if China attacked and tried to forcibly take the Senkaku Islands, that would be a red line for the United States. Or an attack against the Philippines, another treaty ally of the United States. An attack against any treaty allies would be the number one red line.

    A second red line would be trying to attack U.S. military personnel operating in the South China Sea.

    We conduct what we call “freedom of navigation patrols.” These are our warships sailing through international waters such as the South China Sea.

    If China were to attack a U.S. ship to attempt to demonstrate their view that they own the South China Sea, that would be a red line. In fact, the book “2034” opens with an attack involving U.S. military personnel being killed in the South China Sea.

    Stavridis believes that the U.S. must continue to devote itself to entangling alliances, against which the founding fathers warned. The U.S. must also continue to press its presence in the South China Sea.

    Despite resolutely warning against a war against China, Stavridis commits the U.S. to myriad tripwires that would ignite it. These China policy positions parallel Stavridis’ positions on Ukraine. It’s always more, more, more.

    More funding, arming, and training Ukrainians, more U.S. commitment to NATO, more U.S. weaponization of Big Tech, more money to the U.S. State Department, more interagency cooperation, and more silencing dissent. These positions are escalatory. At the very least, they flirt with making Washington a direct party to the War in Ukraine. They may give Russia reason to attack U.S. and NATO forces.

    Given Russia’s nuclear footing, these policies pose an existential threat to humanity itself.

    Indeed, it will always be a mystery how the hawks convinced the American public that the path to peace leads through war. Perhaps those of us who survive the inevitable result of this mantra can ponder the answer while painting on the cave walls.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 22:45

  • Map Shows Wildfire Outbreak Sweeping Across US Amid Megadrought
    Map Shows Wildfire Outbreak Sweeping Across US Amid Megadrought

    New data from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) shows an outbreak of wildfires sweeping across the country. 

    FIRMS’ interactive map shows wildfire activity is expanding in the country’s Southeast, Midwest, and Southwest regions amid one of the worst megadroughts in 1,200 years. 

    National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) released an update Wednesday that said more than 3,700 wildland firefighters and personnel are assigned to eleven major fires. 

    “The Southwest area continues to have the most large fire activity, where five incident management teams are assigned. One complex incident management team is assigned to a large fire in Nebraska,” NIFC said. 

    The agency said more than 21,181 wildfires had burned 1,080,836 acres in the US since the beginning of the year. That’s above a 10-year average of 14,958 wildfires that burned 727,141 acres. Some of the most devastating wildfires have been in Texas due to “extreme drought” and high winds. 

    Much of the US West is experiencing severe to extreme drought conditions. The outbreak of fires comes as no surprise. 

    Recent forecasts by federal government meteorologists may suggest drought conditions could worsen as there’s a 59% chance of La Niña for the Northern Hemisphere through summer. What this would mean is drier conditions that could spark even more wildfires. 

    However, it’s the opposite in the Northern Plains, where historic flooding has wiped out farmlands and delayed plantings that could trigger additional global food supply chain problems. 

    Megadroughts, wildfires, and historic floods are some of the natural disasters plaguing the US. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 22:25

  • States Join Forces To Tackle Border Crisis And Cartel-Related Crime
    States Join Forces To Tackle Border Crisis And Cartel-Related Crime

    Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Ohio has been beleaguered by the opioid crisis for years. It has one of the highest overdose rates in the country, next to West Virginia, Kentucky, and Delaware.

    Montgomery County Sheriff’s deputies and emergency personnel respond to a suspected drug overdose in a gas station carpark in the Harrison Township of Dayton, Ohio, on Nov. 1, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    As with all states, nearly every grain of fentanyl that Arkansas law enforcement seizes has traveled across the U.S.–Mexico border.

    In 2021, Arkansas State Police confiscated 10 pounds of fentanyl, enough to kill more than 2 million people, according to Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Two milligrams of fentanyl can be fatal.

    In Georgia, fentanyl-involved deaths increased by more than 106 percent during fiscal year 2021, according to Gov. Brian Kemp.

    On April 19, the Republican governors of 26 states announced the creation of a new Border Strike Force, which aims to “disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal organizations.”

    “The porousness of the Southern Border is an open door to transnational criminal organizations that use it to traffic drugs that feed the addiction epidemic throughout the United States,” the memorandum of understanding states.

    The group includes two southern border states—Arizona and Texas—as well as 24 others: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

    “In the absence of federal leadership, states are partnering together to create the American Governors’ Border Strike Force to disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal organizations by increasing collaboration, improving intelligence, investing in analysis, combating human smuggling, and stopping drug flow in our states,” the agreement states.

    A group of Hondurans cross the Rio Grande toward Eagle Pass, Texas, from Piedras Negras, Mexico, on April 21, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    The amount of drugs being seized at the border has plummeted as illegal alien apprehensions have reached record highs, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics.

    “If we seize even 5 percent of what’s coming across the border, we’re lucky,” said Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, referring to a question about fentanyl pills.

    “And if there’s nobody there to detect you and apprehend you, the cartels are going to push it through between the ports of entry when they know that there is absolutely no chance that we’re going to apprehend that narcotic.”

    In mid-December 2021, law enforcement authorities seized a record 1.7 million fentanyl pills in Scottsdale, Arizona.

    More than 100,000 Americans, a record amount, died of drug overdoses in the 12-month period ending in April 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fentanyl was involved in almost two-thirds of those deaths.

    L-R: Scottsdale Police Chief Jeff Walther in front of a display of illicit fentanyl-laced pills and other narcotics; Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and Cheri Oz, special agent in charge of the DEA’s Phoenix field division at a press conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Dec. 16, 2021. (Scottsdale PD)

    Sharing Personnel and Intel

    The group of governors, in their memorandum of understanding, pledged to work together to “serve as a force multiplier to target cartels and criminal networks financially and operationally.”

    “Together, governors will improve public safety, protect victims from horrific crimes, reduce the amount of drugs in our communities, and alleviate the humanitarian crisis at the Southern Border,” the agreement states.

    States can request help from other participating states and state-specific certifications and licenses will be honored among states. Each state is responsible for its own costs.

    Currently, 160 National Guardsmen from Georgia are stationed at the southern border.

    “As new and even larger waves of migrants approach the border, I grow increasingly concerned for their safety,” Kemp wrote in a March 31 letter to President Joe Biden. The body of Texas National Guard Specialist Bishop E. Evans was recovered from the Rio Grande on April 25 after he drowned while attempting to rescue illegal immigrants—who were later identified as allegedly being involved in marijuana trafficking.

    Last summer, state troopers from Nebraska, Iowa, and Florida augmented troopers in Texas to apprehend human smugglers and illegal aliens who evaded Border Patrol. Florida also sent Fish & Wildlife officers to help patrol areas of the Rio Grande in its boats.

    A Border Patrol agent checks an illegal immigrant wearing two wristbands that Mexican cartels have been using to control human smuggling into the United States, near Penitas, Texas, on March 15, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    Hutchinson said one of the most important elements of the Border Strike Force is the sharing of intelligence on the operation of criminal organizations.

    “Increased coordination with other states will be a benefit to our state and nation, but increased action from the federal government is still needed to help manage this,” he said.

    Ohio is prepared to offer other states intelligence analyst support, if asked, the governor’s office said.

    Since 2019, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has set up four narcotics intelligence centers in his state that help trace drug trafficking organizations back to their ringleaders and suppliers.

    “Many times, those investigations reveal that Mexican cartels are behind the drugs being trafficked in Ohio,” DeWine’s office told The Epoch Times via email.

    State Laws

    The 26 states also plan to review their state laws regarding human trafficking, drug trafficking, and transnational criminal organizations “to ensure that such crimes are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

    “We’re currently in the process of determining what laws may need strengthening and where we can step up enforcement efforts in drug interdiction, human trafficking, and other crimes stemming from a porous southern border,” Hutchinson told The Epoch Times via email.

    Texas just strengthened its anti-smuggling laws last September, while Arizona doesn’t have a state law against human smuggling, and border counties are suffering the impact.

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been implementing state border security initiatives since June last year under Operation Lone Star, but has stopped short of testing state Constitutional powers to deport illegal immigrants.

    The state has appropriated $3 billion for Operation Lone Star, which includes the arrest and prosecution of illegal alien trespassers, beefed-up law enforcement and National Guard presence along the border, and busing illegal immigrants to Washington.

    Abbott recently caused significant delays for commercial trucks at several major Texas–Mexico trade bridges, which forced neighboring Mexican states to sign deals pledging to curb illegal border crossings. To date, there’s no indication that the four Mexican states are reining in illegal immigration.

    A cartel scout’s campsite can be seen below a tree on the Mexican side of the border wall near Naco in Cochise County, Arizona on Dec. 6, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    Title 42

    Governors, Border Patrol agents, and border sheriffs have expressed concern over the revocation of Title 42—a public health provision that allowed for the quick expulsion of illegal immigrants.

    The Biden administration announced that Title 42 would end on May 23; however, a federal judge is preparing to block the move. Title 42 was never designed to be central border security or immigration policy, but as the Biden administration removed other border security measures, it became more significant.

    The Department of Homeland Security has estimated that the end of Title 42 could mean up to 18,000 illegal alien apprehensions per day. Border agents are currently apprehending more than 6,000 per day.

    A Border Patrol agent drops a group of illegal immigrants being expelled under Title 42 at the halfway point of the international bridge between the United States and Mexico, in Eagle Pass, Texas, on April 19, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    Title 42 has slowly been whittled down by the Biden administration since February 2021—first to allow in all unaccompanied children, then families with children under the age of 7, then, most families in general, most single females, and then, single adults from non-Spanish-speaking countries.

    “We are now processing illegal aliens from Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala) under Expedited Removal rather than T[itle] 42,” Judd wrote on Twitter on April 19.

    In February 2021, 73 percent of illegal immigrants were expelled under Title 42. By March 2022, it had been reduced to 49 percent.

    “Illegal border crossings lead to more drugs entering the country, more dangerous individuals evading arrest, and more victims of human trafficking,” the 26 governors stated.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 22:05

  • 75% Of Young Adults Believe The U.S. Is Suffering From A "Mental Health Crisis"
    75% Of Young Adults Believe The U.S. Is Suffering From A “Mental Health Crisis”

    A new survey released this week has concluded that nearly 75% of young adults across the country agree that “the United States has a mental health crisis.”

    The results, released by The Hill this week, were compiled by the Institute for Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. The survey found that only 6% of people who responded to the survey disagreed with “the idea that the U.S. is undergoing a mental health crisis.”

    The survey queried “more than 2,000 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 29 from March 15-20”. 

    52% of young adults who responded reported “experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness”, while about 25% of respondents admitted to thinking about self-harm.

    In what may be an allusion to the pandemic and lockdowns starting to wind down (unless you live in China), the latter number is down 4% from a year prior, when 28% of respondents said they thought about self-harm. 

    More than 25% of respondents said they knew someone who had committed suicide. 

    Similar studies have shown that almost half of all young adults experienced mental health symptoms in the second year of the pandemic, The Hill wrote. These findings came as the result of a second study, when researchers at UCSF “”used a sample of 2,809 adults ages 18-25 years from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey data to evaluate the scope of anxiety and depression symptoms from June through early July 2021”. 

    48% of those young adults reported mental health symptoms and 39% said they used prescription medications. 

     

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 21:45

  • MSNBC, ABC Claim Elon Musk Wants To See Abuse Of Women & Jews, And A Return To Apartheid
    MSNBC, ABC Claim Elon Musk Wants To See Abuse Of Women & Jews, And A Return To Apartheid

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    Amid the meltdown of leftists canceling themselves following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the most extreme reactions came from the likes of MSNBC’s Joy Reid and ABC’s The View, where it was declared that Musk is a white supremacist who wants to see the return of segregation, as well as abuse of Jewish people and rampant misogyny against women.

    Perpetual race grifter Reid proclaimed that Musk “misses the old South Africa in the 80s. He wants that back,”  adding “Elon Musk’s companies have a history of open racism.”

    She also charged that Musk’s “idea of freedom means freedom to be a jerk and to be cruel and to have no one be able to stop you.”

    Reid’s guest Jason Johnson then declared that Musk could make public everyone’s private Twitter messages, before she declared that free speech advocates only want to “come in and be able to punch people in the face and walk around and laugh about it and then not have anyone be able to stop them.”

    Reid then stated that “there was a time when people had the double hashtags around their names because they were Jewish and right-wingers were saying get in the oven any time you made any benign comment on Twitter.”

    She added “They attacked women. You know, the misogyny was crazy on Twitter for a while,” insinuating that Musk is all for that kind of activity.

    “The thing is the enjoyment they get out of being in this town square is being able to harass people, being able to attack people,” she further stated.

    Watch:

    Reid stirred up the Apartheid accusation on Twitter (ironically), and also suggested that Musk is keen on allowing “nazis” free reign on Twitter:

    Others amplified the idiotic claim:

    Elon Musk is from South Africa, so that means he loves white nationalism. Yeah, OK. Just like every German is a Nazi.

    It’s completely deranged, but what else would you expect from Reid? She says this about everyone who disagrees with her on any topic.

    Over at ABC, The View co-host Sunny Hostin declared that Musk only cares about free speech for “straight white men” and is preparing to “take away the guardrails” and “unleash the trolls”.

    She then blurted out that “there have been some surveys done” and claimed that 85% of women have seen abuse on Twitter, insinuating that’s what Musk wants to see.

    Hostin then whined about Musk being rich and cited Mark Zuckerberg’s “takeover” of Facebook as an example of how billionaires shouldn’t have control over “modes of communication.”

    Watch:

    Again, completely factually incorrect blathering and deranged accusations, all triggered by Elon Musk saying he supports free speech, and illustrative of exactly why Musk bought Twitter, as Joe Rogan points out below.

    *  *  *

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

    In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 21:25

  • Oklahoma GOP Governor Sign Nation's First Law Banning Non-Binary Birth Certificates
    Oklahoma GOP Governor Sign Nation’s First Law Banning Non-Binary Birth Certificates

    Oklahoma is the first state to write a nonbinary prohibition into law that will ensure “clarity and truth” on official birth documents, according to AP News. 

    Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed the bill into law on Tuesday that explicitly says birth certificates will have only male or female gender assignments. The new law comes after an executive order from the governor restricted the Oklahoma State Health Department from adding a nonbinary option. 

    “People are free to believe whatever they want about their identity, but science has determined people are either biologically male or female at birth,” said Oklahoma Rep. Sheila Dills, the bill’s House sponsor, in a statement after the bill passed the House last week.

     “We want clarity and truth on official state documents. Information should be based on established medical fact and not an ever-changing social dialogue,” she added.  

    Meanwhile, Oklahoma elected the first nonbinary state legislator in the country, Democrat Mauree Turner, in 2020. Turner tweeted this as the bill was being debated last week: 

    “I find it a very extreme and grotesque use of power in this body to write this law and try to pass it — when literally none of them live like us.” 

    The news comes one month after Gov. Stitt signed a bill prohibiting biological males from competing in girls’ sports. 

    It’s worth noting the Biden administration recently announced making an “X” gender on US passports. 

    According to the think tank Movement Advancement Project, sixteen states and the District of Columbia have already allowed gender marker designation besides male or female. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 21:05

  • Mask Mandates Make Comeback To US College Campuses
    Mask Mandates Make Comeback To US College Campuses

    Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Two months after the federal government eased mask recommendations for most Americans, some colleges and universities have reinstated mask mandates, along with other measures, citing surges in COVID-19 cases on their campuses.

    Columbia University in New York City on May 10, 2021. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

    Several prominent institutions—including American University and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.; Columbia University in New York; Johns Hopkins University in Maryland; and Rice University in Texas, to name a few—have brought back indoor mask requirements that were phased out not too long ago.

    Many of these schools already have vaccine and booster mandates. For example, Columbia required all students and employees to submit proof of their booster vaccination before March, boasting an overall 99.9 percent compliance rate for the campus community. Yet it now demands that students wear surgical masks in classrooms because of an uptick of COVID-19 cases on campus and elsewhere in New York City.

    “Based on the current situation and in an abundance of caution, we will require wearing of non-cloth masks in classrooms,” the Ivy League school announced on April 10. In a more recent update, the university said the requirement wouldn’t go away any time soon, despite an overwhelmingly high level of vaccination among the campus population.

    “We anticipate making no changes in our current campus COVID-19 guidance, unless New York City puts in place measures that we would be required to follow,” Columbia officials said on April 22, noting a “gradual increase in COVID-19 cases” in the city.

    Rice also requires all eligible students and employees to get booster shots. In mid-March, the Houston-based university lifted its mask mandate for vaccinated individuals, only to reverse the policy after less than a month because of a sudden rise in COVID-19 cases.

    “There’s been a significant rise in the number of positive cases reported in our community—about 145,” the university said in an April 10 statement. Specifically, Rice demanded that everyone in a classroom wear a mask regardless of their vaccination status, except for instructors while lecturing, since 90 percent of those new cases have occurred among undergraduate students. Large events also have been canceled. Students can continue to eat in dining halls, but at half of the designated capacity.

    According to a COVID-19 tracker on Rice’s website, the university has recorded 31 positive tests for the week following Easter. There’s also been a noticeable downward trajectory since April 10, but the restrictions remain in place.

    Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, health officials and the mayor raised the city’s COVID-19 alert level on April 18, requiring citizens to wear face coverings when out in public. That has prompted a number of schools, including the University of Pennsylvania, Temple, St. Joseph’s, La Salle, Drexel, and Thomas Jefferson universities, to require students and staff to mask up while in school buildings.

    All of these Philadelphia schools went mask-optional again just three days later, when the city announced that it not only has reversed the decision to reimpose the mask mandate, but also ditched the COVID-19 alert system that triggered it.

    “The infection rate is going down, hospitalizations are going down, and, frankly, the ruling in Florida confused a lot of stuff. SEPTA is doing what they did and confused a lot of stuff,” said Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney.

    Kenney was referring to a U.S. district judge in Florida who struck down a federal rule requiring face coverings for planes and other forms of public transportation, as well as the decision by SEPTA, Pennsylvania’s regional transit authority, to lift the requirement that travelers must wear masks on its buses and trains.

    Florida’s universities were among the earliest in the nation to drop their mask mandates. South Florida University has been mask-optional since August 2021, while the University of Florida said it simply doesn’t have the authority to force people to mask up on campus.

    “The university does not currently have the authority to take the actions you recommend,” University of Florida President Kent Fuchs wrote in response to the Alachua County Commission, which had asked the school to adhere to a public health emergency declaration that mandated masks indoors.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 20:45

  • Whistleblower Son Of Deutsche Banker Who Committed Suicide, Found Dead In LA
    Whistleblower Son Of Deutsche Banker Who Committed Suicide, Found Dead In LA

    The body of Valentin Broeksmit was found early on Monday morning on the 4500 block of Multnomah Street on Monday, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

    45-year-old Broeksmit was reported missing last year, with the LAPD saying he was last seen on April 6, 2021 around 4 p.m., at Griffith Park on Riverside Drive driving a 2020 red Mini Cooper.

    But he continued tweeting under the handle @BikiniRobotArmy during this period).

    His last tweet:

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

    If that names rings a vague bell, it should.

    Self-described as a “comically terrible spy”, Broeksmit was best known for his brief moment in the spotlight as he reportedly worked with federal authorities investigating the activities of Deutsche Bank and its ties with former President Donald Trump.

    Journalist Scott Stedman, who writes at the Forensic News website, also confirmed Broeksmit’s death in a tweet.

    “He supplied me and other journalists with Deutsche Bank documents that highlighted the bank’s deep Russia connections,” Stedman wrote.

    “It is very sad. I don’t suspect foul play. Val struggled with drugs on and off.

    “In truth, I hadn’t talked to Val since January and before that many more months. I wish I had.”

    Broeksmit was reportedly “pretty troubled” for many years…

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

    Given the circumstances, perhaps most sadly is the fact that, as we detailed in 2016, Valentin was the son of high-ranking Deutsche Bank banker William Broeksmit who committed suicide at age 58 – found hanging in his London flat from a dog leash tied to the top of a door.

    As we reported at the time, financial papers had been strewn about the scene of his suicide, and on a dog bed near the body were a number of notes to family and friends. One was addressed to Deutsche Bank CEO Anshu Jain, with an apology. That note offered no clue as to the reason he was sorry.

    It was reportedly the papers left behind by his father than Valentine Broeksmit had offered to federal investigators (and he was subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee during its probe of Trump’s ties to the bank).

    New York Times reporter David Enrich wrote in 2019 that Broeksmit helped the FBI in its probe of Deutsche Bank, noting that Broeksmit had drug-use issues and would often bend the truth to come up with “far-fetched theories.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 20:25

  • Plastic Grocery Bag Bans Actually Boost Sale Of Small Plastic Garbage Bags: Study
    Plastic Grocery Bag Bans Actually Boost Sale Of Small Plastic Garbage Bags: Study

    Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Researchers have discovered that bans and fees on plastic carryout grocery bags (CGB) could have serious unintended consequences.

    A woman leaves a grocery store using plastic bags in Mississauga, Ontario, on Aug.15, 2019. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)

    The investigators found that both bag fees and outright prohibitions boosted the sale of 4-gallon and 8-gallon plastic bags—in line with the view that many consumers reuse their supposedly single-use bags as garbage bags around the house.

    “The effect of a 5¢ fee for either paper or plastic CGBs is essentially the same as that of a ban on plastic bag and a fee of 10 or 15¢ on paper bags. While policy makers may choose fees over bans in order to soften the blow, our results suggest that the overall effect on consumers is little different,” wrote the authors, professor Richard Woodward of Texas A&M University (TAMU) and Yu-Kai Huang of both TAMU and the University of Georgia.

    Woodward and Huang used Nielsen retail scanner data from Washington; Santa Clara County, California; San Luis Obispo County, California; and Montgomery County, Maryland between 2006 and 2014. All four had passed restrictions on carryout grocery bags before 2014.

    They used nearby counties that had not implemented such measures as controls.

    Huang and Woodward found that plastic bag laws did not impact the sale of larger bags, lending additional support to the view that small plastic garbage bags end up substituting for the regulated grocery bags.

    The study comes at a time when laws regulating the sale of plastic grocery bags are spreading rapidly throughout the United States and the wider world.

    Chicago, for example, charges a tax of 7 cents per plastic bag.

    Uniform plastic bag fees are a regressive tax because people pay the same amount no matter their wealth or income.

    Carryout plastic bag bans have been passed in California, New York, Maine, Vermont, Oregon, Hawaii, Delaware, and Connecticut.

    Such bags have also been banned in China, New Zealand, and many other countries, including several African countries.

    In Kenya, for instance, people caught producing, importing, or using banned plastic bags can suffer major fines or even imprisonment.

    Woodward and Huang estimated that plastic bag regulations led stores to purchase an average of 127 more pounds of plastic each month because of the substitution of small plastic garbage bags for carryout bags.

    “While we are unable to tell the net effect on plastic consumption, because of the heavier weight of purchased trash bags, it is possible that a bag ban could even lead to an increase in total plastic waste, and this is without taking into account any plastic content in purchased CGBs that consumers buy, and eventually discard, as a result of the ban,” the authors noted in the study.

    The Epoch Times has reached out to Plastics Industry Association for comment.

    The Epoch Times has also contacted an anti-single use plastic group, the Footprint Foundation. The Footprint Foundation is associated with Footprint, a materials science firm that aims to replace single-use plastics with plant-based alternatives.

    In addition, The Epoch Times has reached out to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group known for its opposition to single-use plastics.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 20:05

  • Iran & China Declare Deepened Military Cooperation To Confront 'US Unilateralism'
    Iran & China Declare Deepened Military Cooperation To Confront ‘US Unilateralism’

    The anti-West axis appears to be growing on the peripheries of the Ukraine conflict as Washington is perceived as giving an unbending ‘with us or against us’ ultimatum. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi hailed deepening strategic and military cooperation between the Islamic Republic and China on Wednesday.

    According state media cited in The Associated Press, “Raisi told China’s Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe that Tehran sees its ties with Beijing as strategic. Closer cooperation would serve to confront what the Iranian president described as U.S. unilateralism as talks to revive Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers have stalled.”

    Wednesday’s meeting in Terhan, Iranian Presidency Office via AP

    Raisi appeared to indirectly reference the US and perhaps NATO, which included urging the two countries to cooperate in “Confronting unilateralism and creating stability and order is possible through cooperation of independent and like-minded powers.”

    Wei too seemed to remotely reference the Ukraine crisis and the West’s economic war against Russia when he said China and Iran could deepen security ties “particularly in the current critical and tense situation.” And more, per the AP:

    Wei said his visit was aimed at “improving the strategic defense cooperation” between Iran and China — cooperation that he said would have a “remarkable” impact in defusing unilateralism and fighting terrorism.

    The harshest and most direct criticism aimed at Washington came from Iran’s defense chief, Gen. Mohammad Reza Ashtinai, who blasted US militarism and aggression abroad.

    Ashtinai said, “wherever the U.S. has had military presence, it has created waves of insecurity, instability, rifts, pessimism, war, destruction and displacement.”

    Iran’s Gen. Ashtinai is expected to visit China next as head of a military delegation from the Islamic Republic at the invitation of Beijing, in furtherance of the declared deepened defense and strategic ties. Recently, in 2021, the two countries signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement focusing on industrial development, infrastructure and transportation.

    Multiple of the world’s largest economies have recently seen their leaders either sit on the fence regarding US pressure to jump on the Russia sanctions bandwagon, or outright blame NATO for stoking the conflict, as was the case with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa…

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    Officials in Tehran have this week voiced their view that Washington will be forced back to the negotiating table in Vienna amid the stalled nuclear deal due to events in Ukraine and the resulting European energy crisis. Earlier this month Iran said that it considers all that’s needed for a renewed JCPOA agreement as essentially a ‘done deal’ – but that it’s the US that’s stalling.

    “Failure to reach a deal [so far] is a result of domestic troubles in the US but the ever-increasing problems caused by the Ukraine war will put pressure on [President Joe] Biden to accept the necessity of a deal [with Tehran],” a spokesman for Iranian delegation to the Vienna nuclear talks said to official news agency IRNA on Sunday.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 19:45

  • More Secret Gender Transition Closets Discovered In Public Schools
    More Secret Gender Transition Closets Discovered In Public Schools

    Authored by Alice Giordano via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    They started in colleges, but trans closets—rooms stocked with transgender clothes and accessories for students to change into after arriving to school and back out of before going home—are being discovered in public schools with some indication they are being kept a secret from parents.

    Students walk to their classrooms at a public middle school in Los Angeles, on Sept. 10, 2021. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

    In a recent TikTok video, a California teacher implies that the trans closet he started at the high school where he works is meant to be kept from parents.

    “The goal of the transition closet is for our students to wear the clothes that their parents approve of, come to school and then swap out into the clothes that fit who they truly are,” the teacher said.

    The California Family Council and others eventually confirmed the identity of the teacher as Oakland Unified School District Spanish teacher Thomas Martin-Edwards, who is also the founder of “Queer Teacher Fellowship.”

    Martin-Edwards, the teacher who runs the trans closet, is also transgender. He has posted videos of himself in the classroom showing off the stilettos he wears to school.

    Neither Martin-Edwards, a former assistant principal in another school district, nor the school responded to inquiries by The Epoch Times about the trans closet.

    “This is [an] example of the deceit schools are deliberately using to carry out a growing transgender movement in public schools behind the backs of parents,” the Christian conservative group California Family Council wrote on its website.

    “In addition to gender ideology madness, this school is teaching children that it is acceptable to defy their parents.”

    California Family Council first discovered the trans closet through a Facebook posting by a nonprofit group that calls itself “The Transition Closet.”

    On its Facebook page, The Transition Closet states it is working with one of the district’s high schools to create a trans closet—posting “we are extremely excited to begin our journey in working with Fremont High School of Oakland, California, along with our favorite teacher of TikTok/@justaqueerteacher.”

    Amare Roush, founder of The Transition Closet, told The Epoch Times that her organization does support keeping the existence of trans closets at schools secret from parents, because of the abuse she says children often face at home if they disclose to their parents they are transgender.

    “We do provide a safe space for kids whose parents are not accepting, because it’s known to help lower the suicide rate,” said Roush who is also a certified advocate for domestic violence victims.

    “These kids are going to do it anyway, we just want a way to provide them with a way to do it safely to where they’re not wearing clothes that are too small for them, or doing so in a way that’s going to get them hurt by their parents.”

    Roush emphasized that school was the best venue to provide trans kids with trans clothing.

    “Kids are at schools 40 hours a week, that’s where they spend most of the time, that’s where they form most of their relationships,” she said, “clothing is a big part of how we express ourselves and those kids that are able to express themselves correctly, are able to feel supported correctly.”

    Another trans closet being operated out of the Denver Conservatory Green Middle School in Colorado was also recently posted about on social media.

    The Twitter post ignited a flurry of messages slamming the school for encouraging transgenderism among students as young as 12 years old.

    “This is grooming,” tweeted one Colorado man, “Police should come to the classroom and arrest whoever the teacher is in this classroom.”

    The school also did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times.

    The original post about the Denver trans closet was made by “Buy Nothing Central Park” and refers to the closet for transgender students as being started at “our school.” It also asks for clothing for the trans closet being dropped off at the school.

    Megan Fox, a freelance columnist for PJ Media and co-host of the weekly YouTube show “Exposing Family Court Corruption,” recently raised $1,650 through gofundme.com to pay for documents relating to the trans closet at a Colorado school.

    Fox recently wrote in her column that the school told her she had to pay $1,650 to obtain the documents, which she requested via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). According to Fox, the school said the bill was based on 55 hours of staff time at $30 an hour to fulfill her request.

    On its website, The Transition Closet states that “the near future holds transition closet[s] and services throughout the school district for students of the Trans/Nonbinary/Intersex and additional LGBTQIA+ community members.”

    Roush said her organization is working with other schools in the United States to start trans closets and her organization currently runs them at several churches including Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Methodist churches.

    For the California school trans closet, the Arkansas-based group also includes contact information linked to the website validbybrodie.com, which includes a “start your own closet” section for students, teachers, and school administrators.

    It has also adopted the slogan “when your [sic] ready to come out of the closet, step into ours” and has an online shop that includes a variety of transgender accessories.

    It also sells transgender workbooks for teens and runs online name change clinics.

    Roush emphasized that transgender accessories are never supplied to minors without a parent’s permission.

    She said that transgender kids ended up physically hurting themselves by using duct tape instead of transgender accessories to hide their genitals.

    “Nobody would ask for this; we are just trying to ease the transition of kids that are dealing with this,”‘ she said.

    Her group also works with colleges to establish transition closets.

    Marshall University, the University of Arkansas, Penn State, and the University of California are among colleges that have been operating trans closets for years.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 19:25

  • "Bigger Mess Than Last Year" – Global Supply Chain Crisis Could Emerge By Summer 
    “Bigger Mess Than Last Year” – Global Supply Chain Crisis Could Emerge By Summer 

    The next round of supply chain bottlenecks could be even greater than last year’s massive congestion at ports as China’s “zero COVID” policy has shuttered factories and locked down major cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai. A backlog of orders is building, and commercial vessels off China’s top ports are increasing. Once China reopens, a tsunami of container ships will flood global shipping lanes.  

    Bloomberg provides a good summary of how the global supply chain is going to get slammed (again):

    “We expect a bigger mess than last year,” said Jacques Vandermeiren, the chief executive officer of the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-busiest for container volume, in an interview. “It will have a negative impact, and a big negative impact, for the whole of 2022.”

    Beijing’s zero-tolerance policy will unleash what we’ve been warning for months (read: here & here): a logistical disaster as top ports in the Asian country have slowed to a trickle, leaving empty containers piling and massive amounts of commercial vessels sitting offshore. 

    Once China reopens, and those vessels begin shipping products worldwide, FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller warns this will “wreck your summer.” 

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    “Once product export activities resume and a large volume of vessels make their way to the U.S. West Coast ports, we expect waiting times to increase significantly,” said Julie Gerdeman, CEO of supply-chain risk analytics firm Everstream Analytics.

    This may suggest that Goldman Sachs’ high-frequency weekly supply chain congestion index could reverse after falling for much of the year. If congestion worsens after China reopens, Goldman’s analysts might have to reevaluate their ‘peak supply chain’ call. 

    So how bad are the backups of container ships at the Shanghai port, a major hub for international trade, and one of the largest and busiest container ports in the world? 

    Well, satellite imagery from April 14, 2022, versus April 2019 shows the extent of the congestion. 

    Quite a difference from 3 years ago…

    Vessel congestion has been increasing at the Shanghai terminal. As of April 19, 2022, over 470 ships are still waiting to deliver goods to China. Here’s a broader view of the massive congestion.

    Goldman recently told clients supply-chain setbacks “have been somewhat worse than we anticipated, and we have adjusted our growth and inflation forecasts slightly in response in recent weeks.” When bottlenecks in China clear, vessels will flood major shipping lines as a seasonal import pickup gets underway. 

    At America’s dual hub of Los Angeles and Long Beach, 57 vessels were reported, the highest since late. U.S. container dwell times are also creeping higher again. 

    Congestion in Europe is already severe, and top ports such as Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Antwerp are working above capacity. 

    The global impacts of this current bottleneck are expected for summer and will greatly increase once China lockdowns are eased. According to an article in Freight Waves, this could turn into the most significant supply chain issue since the pandemic’s start if China’s shipping congestion isn’t cleared up soon.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 19:05

  • Luongo On Disney's Demise: "This Is Not The Way"
    Luongo On Disney’s Demise: “This Is Not The Way”

    Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

    We live in an age of maximum arrogance. When you watch companies with some of the most marketable brands in the world torch them on an altar of political correctness, it’s easy to just think them stupid or going with the flow of history.

    But they aren’t.

    Because not only do we live in an age of maximal arrogance, we also live in the biggest self-created false realities in human history.

    It is the height of irony that the biggest brand in storytelling, Disney, has succumbed to its own arrogance and self-delusion, becoming trapped in a false reality that Disney should dictate the direction humanity should accept.

    That’s what lies at the heart of Disney’s troubles today. It arrogantly believed it has an obligation to decide what is and is not culturally acceptable to a majority of its customers. It completely misread the room in thinking a large percentage of its business comes from the insufferably woke suburban moms who are just as fucked up as the kids they’ve raised.

    The good news is Disney got the message loud and clear that they are not the arbiters of when it’s appropriate to groom children for adulthood. The bad news is they may not have heard it.

    Social media, political pressure and simply the massive extended echo chamber that is California politics suffused Disney’s board and its corporate culture with the mind virus of egalitarianism, eschewing any basic faith in humanity itself.

    Since they’ve rejected all forms of god, or submission to a higher authority that wasn’t man-made, Disney decided it was time to undermine all of its properties by coming out of the closet, as it were.

    Disney chose poorly.

    The Phildickian Nightmare Made Real

    I’m a huge Philip K. Dick fan.

    Dick wrote dozens of short stories and at least half a dozen important novels focusing on this very problem of false realities leading to a crisis in faith. In Dick’s work those false realities were tangible: You could visit them through drugs or meditation, meet your analogue from an alternate Universe or by nearly dying get trapped in a hellish landscape of someone else’s design.

    But in reading these tales, we recognize that they exist as metaphor, like all stories do, to teach us lessons about how to navigate our conflicts and emerge transformed into something better. For all of his wacky situations and conceits, Phil Dick’s stories are all about the most important issues we all face: empathy overcoming shame, pride justifying violence, selfishness justifying nihilism.

    Dick’s protagonists are all suffering basic crises of faith. The modern world has let them down, led them on a false path experiencing deep mid-life bouts of ennui as their carefully constructed coping strategies to numb their pain are shattered.

    And like all great storytellers Dick chose the fantastical and the weird not just to hide real human stories as enticements, but also, I’d argue, to make them far more memorable than they would have been otherwise.

    UBIK, for example, has been hailed as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and whose ideas populate hundreds of derivative works of Hollywood. It’s what we will remember him for. By contrast all of his ‘real world’ literature which covered the same topics, couldn’t get published during his lifetime.

    The Storyteller’s Apprentice

    The alchemy of the fantastic with the mundane is what makes for great storytelling. It’s what made Disney into Disney. It’s what gave Dick’s science-fiction work its heft and power. It’s what makes stories something worth retelling.

    Taken to its extreme stories and legends become something larger than individual chapters. In an oral tradition the stories handed down would morph to suit the challenges of the day, their sequels can and would contradict what came before. Continuity wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t important, what was important was the underlying lessons, the underlying truth.

    Read any anthology of ancient stories and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

    Dick created novels like UBIK and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to be purposefully insolvable puzzles of nested realities. They can be seen as examples of modern storytellers submitting to the higher power of stories themselves, knowing that the puzzles they present bring people back to them over and over.

    And guess what? You get exposed, again and again, to the deeper message, the deeper meaning. It’s what happened to me. I used to re-read UBIK every June 5th, the day the novel opens, because the book is that important to me.

    It’s why we watch beloved movies multiple times. You may have come for the superheroes or the lightsabers but you come back for the story.

    The point being is that stories which last have resonance and speak truth. Some become so big they grow beyond their origins into something that cannot be untangled. They become myth, legend. When the stories in the Bible or the Norse myths were being passed down through the ages, there wasn’t any care about continuity, only imparting lessons to the next generation who heard them.

    Jordan Peterson has made the point that it is actually the lack of continuity, the lack of logic, that makes Creation Myths capable of sustaining a culture and a society from falling into chaos and civil war. He frequently uses the example of the Egyptian stories of Osiris, Set and Horus as the big example, which sustained ancient Egypt, apparently, for thousands of years.

    Even Christianity can’t claim that…yet.

    This is the responsibility Disney took on when it acquired first Pixar Studios, then Marvel Studios and then, most importantly, Lucasfilm. It already owned ESPN and ABC. It was now a story generating conglomerate so large that it owned all the modern mythmaking franchises sans DC Comics.

    And with its overtly dipping its wick into the obvious political fray over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law it betrayed that responsibility as a repository and generator of new stories capable of becoming myth to its core.

    Disney, who used to stand apart from Hollywood’s descent into depravity and violence, became the ultimate symbol of it overnight.

    The War Over the Stars

    Star Wars I would argue, is one example of a modern story which is looked on by many today with that same kind of reverence. Star Wars’ inherent weirdness is what makes it so very accessible. The comic mythologies of Marvel and, in particular, DC have these same echoes.

    Both have been subverted to serve the ‘Woke’ agenda of the World Economic Forum and their Great Reset of all things human into all things Transhuman, which I’ve discussed at length in the past.

    It’s also why I think Zack Snyder’s Justice League {ZSJL} was a major turning point in the culture war, because the fans overrode the studio, exposing their betrayal of good storytelling for personal political gain. They butchered ZSJL and its predecessor on purpose to kill the franchise and create something both incomprehensible (Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice) and hollow (2017’s Justice League)

    That’s how much Warner Bros. executives hate Zack Synder and the basic message of his DCEU films:

    Chaos is bad, men need to be strong, and unite against madmen who are irredeemable.

    Management are furious by the runaway success {of ZSJL}, across the globe…This movie touched a deep nerve with a lot of people, especially in China (330 million views in the first 7 days), and whose release, in and of itself, feels like an inflection point.

    Snyder’s DC films aren’t woke, they are archetypal. The more this story about how Warner Bros’ execs screwing Snyder over gets out, the worse it looks for them and the more momentum the fans have to get stories they want, not the stories the powers want to give them.

    … or the stories the powers think we need, which is the fine line between propaganda and art.

    With Warner Brothers Discovery now a reality, everything DC in the pipeline is being retooled and all attempts to leave poison pills behind with billions of dollars tied up in bad projects blocked by new CEO David Zaslav, it’s looking like my call about ZSJL being an inflection point in the culture war was prophetic.

    Disney hasn’t yet cleaned house and possibly never will.

    I stopped referring to Star Wars as a fairy tale years ago, recognizing that it has risen for some to the level of Creation Myth. The bitter divide over the Original Trilogy vs. the Sequel Trilogy is a kind of incel version of the Old Testament/New Testament divide.

    It’s not that Star Wars is a good replacement for these far older, richer stories. It is that Star Wars has become that replacement for too many in our world today. As such, we have to recognize the angst surrounding it is real, even if the reality in which that angst was generated is a false one.

    They are in need of something more.

    This is why The Mandalorian was such a hit with all Star Wars fans. It restored some faith.

    Again from last year’s article on this subject:

    With two good guys who have deep storytelling chops now effectively running Lucasfilm, Dave Filoni and John Favreau, Star Wars will regain ‘the high ground’ in the culture war over the next decade.

    Now, today I’m not as sure of this statement as I was then, because Disney’s leadership has shown itself to be so thoroughly compromised.

    But if Star Wars comes back in full it will be despite the internal war within Disney and Lucasfilm. They will have to respond in part because of the competition on the horizon from Warner Discovery and also because burning Disney to the ground will leave it vulnerable to the same forces which led Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

    The Way Forward

    Embedded to the core of Star Wars is this idea of the power of stories to sustain culture. The mythology of the Jedi’s impartiality helped sustain the Old Republic for “a thousand generations,” even as they became hidebound and dogmatic.

    George Lucas built Star Wars on this idea, a mythology for a culture losing touch with its old traditions. Early returns are that he was successful. Star Wars will have to last a hundred years as a playground for storytellers to acquire even a smidgen of that power.

    Canonically, the collapse of the Jedi and the cynicism of Luke Skywalker as expressed in The Last Jedi is what spurred Favreau and Filoni to create The Mandalorian and heal the divide in the fanbase.

    Mando’s story is the opposite of Luke’s: A bad man driven by faith in an ancient creed to protect the innocent Grogu (Baby Yoda). That faith leads him to self-sacrifice but also challenging the creed’s self-negation to plant the seeds of spiritual rebirth in the post-Empire chaos through which hope springs in all of us.

    The creed he follows is even older than The Republic, a story of the historical conflicts between Mandalorians and Jedi going back 10,000 years. Those stories have sustained the most faithful even through racial purges, deadly civil wars, and the Empire’s turning Mandalore to a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

    It is truly powerful stuff, of the type new myths are born from. Mando’s story will be finding a new relationship with his creed that restores Mandalore, just like Luke did with the Jedi creed.

    “This is the way,” has joined “May the Force be with you,” as the rallying cry of a generation of people inspired by a story. To bear the burden of rebuilding a fallen world takes both fortitude and faith, hope and strength.

    And it shows you just how far Disney has fallen as a company that it succumbed to madness about race, sex and parental rights in service of false realities rather than seek the truth inherent in its own stories.

    The way out of the crisis is through it.

    *  *  *

    Join my Patreon if you want to get real.

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 18:45

  • DHS Creating 'Disinformation Governance Board' Ahead Of Midterms
    DHS Creating ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ Ahead Of Midterms

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to control narratives combat whatever they deem ‘misinformation’ before the 2022 midterms and beyond.

    According to Politico, the new entity will focus on ‘misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”

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    It will be headed by Nina Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, and advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. She also oversaw the Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute.

    She also sings erotic Harry Potter songs.

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    “The goal is to bring the resources of (DHS) together to address this threat,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during Wednesday testimony.

    News of the DHS entity comes just days after Elon Musk secured a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, which he’s vowed to change into a free speech platform within the bounds of the law.

    As PJ Media notes:

    Jankowicz has written two books, How to Lose the Information War and How to Be A Woman Online. In a pinned tweet pimping her newly released second book, Jankowiz lets her inner misandry loose and writes, “Men ‘burst violently into your mentions and your life like the Kool-aid man, demanding your attention, hawking opinions that they believe are unarguably, manifestly correct and indispensable.’”

    As a thought experiment – what do you think the “Disinformation Governance Board” would have done with the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 US election – which Democratic politicians and dozens of former intelligence officials swore had ‘all the hallmarks’ of a Russian disinformation campaign – a claim which turned out to be misinformation itself?

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/27/2022 – 18:25

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