Jun 28

Today’s News 28th June 2023

  • VW Curbs EV Production As EU Demand Falters Amid Gloomier Economic Picture
    VW Curbs EV Production As EU Demand Falters Amid Gloomier Economic Picture

    German newspaper Nordwest-Zeitung reports Volkswagen has temporarily reduced the production of electric vehicles at one of its plants.

    Volkswagen’s Emden plant in Lower Saxony has reduced production of the electric ID.4 compact SUV and ID.7 sedan for the next two weeks because of weakening sales. 

    Industry blog Autocar reported Manfred Wulff, head of the works council for the Emden plant, told German Press Agency in an earlier article published by the North West newspaper that while EV production was being reduced, production of combustion-engine models, including the Volkswagen Passat, are unaffected. 

    Wulff said 300 of the current 1,500 temporary workers employed at the plant would not have their contracts renewed in August. And he noted EV demand is 30% below planned production figures. 

    “We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” he told the North West.

    Wulff noted that the ID 7 saloon, planned to start production in July, would be delayed to “later this year.” 

    North West interviewed the minister of economic affairs for Lower Saxony, Olaf Lies, who said, “Registration numbers of electric vehicles continue to be high, but what concerns us is the current dip in demand – not only at Volkswagen but across all manufacturers.” 

    The timing of this news comes as the eurozone economy was in a technical recession in the first three months of 2023.

    The contraction was due to a downward revised second estimate from Germany’s statistics office showing that the eurozone’s largest economy was in recession in early 2023. 

    A downturn in the euro area economy is weighing on demand for large ticket items, like fancy EVs. Many on the continent have been dealing with the highest energy and food inflation in a generation as living standards plunge. 

    Stifel analyst Daniel Schwarz commented on the news. He said, “Reducing the number of temps and canceling a shift signals that VW is not expecting this to improve in the short term.” 

    Could we be witnessing the beginning innings of EV demand cracking?  

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/28/2023 – 02:45

  • AfD's Success Is A Warning Sign To Europe's Mainstream Parties
    AfD’s Success Is A Warning Sign To Europe’s Mainstream Parties

    Authored by László Szőcs via Remix News,

    AfD’s recent successes are a warning to politicians that Europe is not being led as people want it to be…

    All politics is local politics — this time, the lessons of this established axiom in America are being learned in Germany. On Sunday, the most right-wing party in the German parliament, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), achieved its first electoral breakthrough in 10 years: Its victory in the Sonneberg district of Thuringia marked the first time it has become part of a local executive.

    The significance of this should neither be overestimated nor underestimated. The AfD continues to be seen as a pariah in the German political system. It’s a party with which neither the center-right CDU/CSU alliance nor the parties to its left are willing to form a coalition, neither at the federal nor state level. At the same time, according to newspaper reports on Monday, the AfD’s breakthrough has caused serious unease and fear among Jewish and Turkish organizations in Germany. Some are claiming a general crisis of democracy.

    Although the AfD is often described simply as anti-immigration, it is much more than that. Thuringia has the fifth-lowest proportion of immigrants of the 16 federal states, just a few percent, which is in line with the overall picture in east Germany, even if the proportion has risen sharply in recent years. And Thuringia is not a backward, underdeveloped region either. Sonneberg on the Bavarian border, for example, is part of the European metropolitan region of Nuremberg. When my photographer colleague and I were there on a reporting trip ahead of the 2021 Bundestag elections, traveling from Gera to Erfurt and Mühlhausen, we encountered many signs of discontent with the Merkel era in a province where the greats of German culture — Bach, Schiller, Herder, Goethe — all made their mark.

    “Today, Germany is unfortunately far from being a democracy. In a democracy, other voices, including conservative ones, should be heard,” said Günter Oßwald, who, contrary to the stereotype, is not a marginalized, beer-swilling, unemployed man on a housing estate, but someone who employs 150 people in his car parts business in Mühlhausen.

    Angela Merkel was — at least on paper — a conservative head of government. However, the supposedly center-right CDU/CSU coalition, the leading opposition force in Germany, has not yet overcome Merkel’s turn to the left and is unable to capture a large enough share of the right-wing electorate. The AfD is polling at 19 percent of the vote nationwide, overtaking the leading government party, the Social Democrats, and is in second place behind the Christian Union parties.

    The forthcoming east German state elections could also confirm that dissatisfaction with the mainstream is making the AfD the most popular party in the eastern federal states — the former communist GDR. There is no communist nostalgia in this. As Timothy Garton Ash, who has been traveling in Germany, wrote 30 years ago, the Americanization of the GDR was more visibly successful than the Sovietization of GDR society. The far left in the east has an obvious upper limit, despite the fact that post-communists have manifested themselves in Bodo Ramelow, who is the prime minister of Thuringia.

    Although it is only one district in Thuringia, the AfD’s victory in Germany is the latest warning sign for the European mainstream — which despises ordinary citizens — ahead of next year’s EU elections.

    In Austria, the like-minded Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) is the most popular, while in France the National Rally is gaining strength. Sunday saw a conservative election victory in Greece, and in July, the ball is set to continue in Spain. Citizens in more and more places are openly fed up with the way Europe is being run today.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/28/2023 – 02:00

  • Escobar On Russia's Coup-Gate: Putin Wins… On All Counts
    Escobar On Russia’s Coup-Gate: Putin Wins… On All Counts

    Authored by Pepe Escobar,

    When the lightning of History strikes, better cut to the chase in our first draft…

    Here we go.

    After the extraordinary events in Russia during The Longest Day, President Putin wins on all counts.

    Among other feats, he has made an absolute, inter-galactic ass of the whole collective West MSM – all over again.

    He rallied virtually every Russian to end the Special Military Operation (SMO) – or “almost war” (according to some business circles) quicker.

    He – and the FSB – amassed a formidable list of traitors and 5th and 6th columnists, which will be properly dealt with.

    And he now enjoys unlimited freedom to deploy de facto Counter-Terrorist Operation (CTO) martial law powers.

    As much as Putin helped perennial Lukashenko in August 2020, preventing regime change in Belarus, good ol’ Luka prevented Russia from sliding into civil war in June 2023.

    A complex wide-ranging counter-terror op is now in effect in Moscow and beyond, while assorted Western sub-zoology specimens are stunned, dazed and confused: wasn’t that supposed to be Putin meeting his Czar Nicholas II moment?

    A first glance at the chessboard tells us that all the pieces seem to be falling in their right places.

    • Prighozin gets a golden parachute in Belarus.

    • Shoigu may be about to be sacked, perhaps even Gerasimov (yes, there are deeply dysfunctional layers inside the Ministry of Defense).

    • The Wagner musicians will be incorporated as a regular Army Corps.

    • They may keep doing business in Africa: demand is huge.

    So what really happened after The Longest Day?

    Hefty CIA funds may have changed hands. But in the end the “coup” could turn out to be the Greatest Russian Trolling of the West Ever.

    The Mother of All Maskirovkas

    Once again, facts on the ground prove Putin is the undisputed champion of Russia. After keeping a strategic silence for a few hours, his intervention gathered full support from the civilian population, the FSB, the Chechens, the Army, the Communists, everyone.

    The exact terms of the deal between Luka and Prighozin, with help from the governor of the Tula region, Alexey Dyumin, are still unclear.

    Prighozin said he was satisfied with the terms. Peskov confirmed on the record that a criminal case against Prigozhin would be dropped. A key Prighozin demand was the twin resignation of Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of Staff Gerasimov. That may – or may not – happen in the immediate future.

    And that brings us to the still fascinating possibility this was the Mother of All Maskirovkas. Prigozhin sets up all this circus just to get a meeting in Moscow with Shoigu and Gerasimov.

    Talk about an overkill just to go out on a date.

    The Mother of All Maskirovkas scenario also implies a move worthy of 5D chess.

    On Saturday, Wagner was 200 km away from Moscow.

    Yet on Sunday, Wagner was 100 km away from Kiev.

    Next level Sun Tzu Art of War, anyone?

    Between sovereignty and betrayal

    Alexander Dugin correctly points out how this was also an exercise in Sovereignty: “Only Sovereign Lukashenko, together with Sovereign Putin himself, confronted [Prighozin]…It turned out that many can frame the President and the people, acting in the shadows and apparently on his behalf, but saving the Fatherland in a critical situation is not their specialty.”

    The corollary is that Russia needs “a sovereign elite, otherwise everything will repeat itself.”

    As for the dazed and confused collective West, especially the NATO-Kiev junta, with everyone instantly rebranding Wagner from “terrorists” to “freedom fighters”, getting bogged down in their own swamp is the art they excel in.

    Mainstream media spun that the proverbial “Western officials” were “taken by surprise” by the mutiny. That depends on the amount of funds that changed hands, and in which direction, during the preparation.

    The SMO, now CTO keeps rolling along. The Russian Army continues to fight, undisturbed. The “counter-offensive” remains teetering over the edge of a cliff, ready to kiss the black void.

    Putin winning on all counts implies the whole civilian population – and the military – engaged into preserving him and the Russian institutions, as well as perfecting them. There’s absolutely no nation anywhere across the collective West where we find this level of citizen support.

    Russian politics is a special animal. It works at the highest level and also at grassroots level – unlike in the West, where the norm is deep hatred between the elites and the people.

    Of course it should always be stressed it’s the less patriotic Russian oligarchs who run away every time something approaching The Longest Day takes place.

    For a few hours, the West was betting heavily on the dismemberment of Russia. Not now. And not in the foreseeable future.

    The succession is already being prepared, by Team Putin and selected patriotic oligarchs. Among the contenders, there’s a secret name that will stun everyone when it pops up. He’s still invisible in terms of public opinion, and works in the shadows. His name should remain secret for the time being.

    As it stands, what matters is that Russia as whole emerged even stronger out of The Longest Day. The man and woman in the street showed himself and herself, once again, as a true patriot, ready to defend the Motherland whatever it takes.

    There was no confrontation between those who are pro-Russian institutions and those who are pro-Wagner. People actually support both. People regarded Wagner like the “polite green men” who helped to peacefully retake Crimea in 2014. Facing them, there was not a single policeman or military.

    So Putin is stronger than ever. But everyone should always keep this in mind: the one thing he can’t forgive is betrayal.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 23:45

  • Tucker Carlson Dares To Ask "Why Exactly Are We At War With Russia?"
    Tucker Carlson Dares To Ask “Why Exactly Are We At War With Russia?”

    “Why exactly are we at war with Russia?”

    Those are the verboten words that Tucker Carlson to utter at the start of Episode 7 Of his Tucker on Twitter series where he highlights the irony that the so-called ‘war for democracy’ is actually enabling dictatorship and tyranny.

    With nuclear extinction a possibility and 1000s of lives and billions of dollars already wasted, “what’s the point” he asks, “are we really doing this so that the Biden family can repay its debts to the oligarchs that financed their beachhouse.”

    “Thankfully” the former Fox News star explains, “we have an answer.”

    “The war against Putin and for Ukraine is in fact a war for democracy.”

    Sounds familiar?

    “Democracy must prevail” exclaims Nancy Pelosi as Carlson offers bipartisan examples of warmongers pushing for ‘democracy’ and all the military-industrial complex enrichment that comes with it.

    Carlson further mocks the rhetoric surrounding the war as a fight for democracy, highlighting the irony of supporting Ukrainian President Zelensky, who suspended democracy in his own country.

    “we are currently fighting a war for democracy on behalf of a leader who just casually announced he’s happy to end democracy and our democracy and supporting leaders have no problem with that“

    In fact, the Biden administration continual support for Ukraine despite Zelensky’s disregard for democracy, implies that their motives are questionable.

    He argues that during wartime, politicians become powerful and can justify any action, including silencing political opponents, leading to a potential erosion of democracy.

    Carlson suggests that those in Washington, including Republicans, support Biden’s stance on Ukraine because ending the war would threaten their power.

    He concludes by speculating on the future of Joe Biden, pointing out his age-related decline and potential implications for the Democratic Party, suggesting that Gavin Newsom may be a potential successor.

    Watch the full episode below:

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    Full transcript below:

    Hey it’s Tucker Carlson, you may have found yourself wondering recently as the world slides closer to nuclear Annihilation than any time in human history why exactly are we at war with Russia.

    It seems like there’s a pretty significant downside to this particular foreign policy decision, starting with economic collapse and ending potentially with Extinction so is there a good reason we’re doing it so many innocent young people have been killed so many hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted some of them from the U.S treasury so what’s the point are we really doing this so the Biden family can repay its debts to the oligarchs who finance their beach house in Rehoboth.

    We’re doing it so our government can continue to lie about its illicit bio labs in Eastern Europe so that flabby losers like Toria Newland and Tony Blinken can feel like they’re doing something important with their sad empty lives.

    Really honestly there’s got to be a better reason for waging this the most pointless war of all.

    What is it.

    Well thankfully we have an answer: the war against Russia ladies and gentlemen the war against Putin and for Ukraine is in fact a war for democracy.

    Watch and recall the motive the president has said many times “we’re focused on what we can do to support Ukraine’s effort to fight for their democracy”.

    “Democracy must prevail. The Ukrainian people are fighting the fight for their democracy and in doing so for ours as well.”

    “Assisting and helping Ukraine win this fight for democracy and freedom and of course Ukrainian president zielinski understand that what’s at stake in Ukraine is bigger than just his Nation it is literally a battle for freedom and democracy themselves.”

    “They are showing the world what an existential fight for democracy looks like.”

    “President Zelenky and the Ukrainians have changed the course of history for the better and we unequivocally are with the Ukrainian people in their fight to remain a sovereign democracy.“

    Unequivocally with the Ukrainian people to remain in democracy it’s a bipartisan view democracy must Prevail.

    You just heard noted democracy expert Nancy Pelosi say the daughter of the mobbed up mayor of Baltimore as Pelosi puts it the Ukrainian people are fighting the fight for their democracy and for ours as well that’s right for ours as well without Ukrainian democracy in other words we can have no democracy here if the ukrainians aren’t free.

    Neither are we we must make sure they can vote in Kiev so we can continue to vote in Kansas City.

    It’s really that simple and yet tonight we regret to tell you that we have a problem it looks like they’re not going to be able to vote in Kiev anymore and no for once it’s not Putin’s fault.

    Democracy in Ukraine seems to be suspended by the world’s foremost democracy Advocate himself Field Marshal zielinski.

    Watch:

    “If we win” he says “we’ll let people vote otherwise no you vote” and we feel like it because ultimately we’re completely in charge and make all the rules.

    Your job is to obey or be punished.

    That’s our version of self-government.

    Self means me – I’m the government now.

    That’s not just any autocrat that’s our chief Ally in the war for democracy.

    This is the guy who just announced he’s like did you cancel next year’s elections.

    So you’ve got to wonder what the Biden Administration thinks of this – we can’t possibly continue to support zielinski, that guy, after he said that can we because in a clip less than 30 seconds long he just blew up our entire rationale for supporting his side in the war.

    So we can’t support him.

    Oh of course we can and we will.

    Here’s Joe Biden from yesterday reaffirming America’s unequivocal support for Ukraine no matter what happened in Russia “we the United States should continue to support Ukraine’s defense and its sovereignty and its territorial integrity”.

    So to recap we are currently fighting a war for democracy on behalf of a leader who just casually announced he’s happy to end democracy and our democracy and supporting leaders have no problem with that in fact they’re strongly for it.

    Shocked?

    You shouldn’t be.

    Of course they’re for it. You should have seen this coming.

    Wars for democracy always cancel democracy in the process – that’s why our leaders love them and they all do it – even The Virtuous leaders Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the British government under Winston Churchill through an entire opposition party into prison and let them rot for the duration – in some cases with their families.

    So in a war for democracy you can do anything.

    Imagine what a man might do who has fewer principles.

    If that man say ran Ukraine he might seize churches arrest priests ban all criticism of himself disappear his political opponents and that’s happening.

    Just last month zelinski threw a man called Gonzalo Lira into prison indefinitely for the crime of daring to write about the Ukrainian government in unflattering ways.

    Now what’s interesting what separates this from other such cases is that lira is an American citizen, so Joe Biden who was quite a bit of SWAT as they say in Ukraine could have freed Gonzalo Lira within hours, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to – he didn’t say a word about it – he remains in prison tonight.

    So that makes you wonder what’s the real motive here when normal people see War they see death and destruction, sadness and suffering; but that’s not what demagogues see – they understand it differently they know that War means power mostly for them.

    During wartime everything they do can be justified – war is the gravest of all emergencies – imagine the coveted lockdowns times a thousand plus drones.

    Once War breaks out politicians become Gods with the power of life and death. So in a peaceful democracy you have to debate your political opponents in public and that’s tiresome but in a war for democracy you can just throw them in jail or have them executed. You can see that many in Washington are looking forward to that moment and that may be why they so fervently support Joe Biden – even many Republicans – against a potential opponent – the only opponent who opposes the war in Ukraine.

    If you were to end the war their power would evaporate.

    Last week a whistleblower produced WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden proving that at the very least his father knew about his influence peddling businesses abroad and probably participated in them “I’m sitting here with my father” Hunter Biden wrote to his Chinese Partners demanding money as much as anything reported about the bidens over the last several years this was The Smoking Gun.

    There it is right there in the message that would have been enough to a normal president it would have been more than enough to keep a normal president from running for office again but had virtually no effect on Joe Biden.

    Most media Outlets ignored it completely or tried to spin Biden’s relationship with his son as some kind of moral Victory “the real meaning of the hunter Biden Saga as I see it” wrote Nick Kristoff of the New York Times “isn’t about presidential corruption but is about how widespread addiction is and about how a determined parent with unconditional love can sometimes reel a child back.”

    He actually wrote that and if you doubt it you should know that view was common.Here’s the take from ABC “the hunter Biden story, the Scandal, the this, that, it’s also the story of a Father’s Love and Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son Hunter and will never treat him lesser than and so he is a father first take it or leave it.“

    So whistleblower produces a text message showing that Joe Biden was in the room with his son when his son was selling influence to an enemy power the Chinese government and ABC’s take on it Joe Biden is a father first take it or leave it.

    What accounts for a response like that?

    Well that’s the way you talk when you’ve got nothing to fear from an upcoming presidential election – you don’t even bother to think of an excuse for your candidate because you don’t need to. Your country has electronic voting machines – Joe Biden got 81 million votes in 2020 and you’re pretty sure he can do it again.

    In fact you know he can you’re not worried but actually they should be a little worried

    The people who control Joe Biden – Susan Rice and the rest – know they can continue to run our government, writing the press releases, formulating the policies, and they can do it effectively forever, as long as Joe Biden gets dressed in the morning, and of course that’s their strong preference.

    These are fervent opponents of change but the one thing these people cannot control is aging.

    Joe Biden is old he’s 80 now he will be 85 at the end of the next term.

    People imagine that old age is a long predictable progression from Acuity to permanent unconsciousness but often that’s not at all how it actually works.

    When old people start to slide they tend to Slide fast.

    Joe Biden has begun that descent.

    Here he was yesterday and here’s what she wrote to me and I quote you can imagine my joy she called them right away and the next day they sent someone out to survey her yard as Beth wrote this is the best thing that’s happened in Rural America since the rural electrification act for electricity to farms in the 30s and 40s end of quote.”

    End of quote you weren’t supposed to hear that – Joe Biden read the stage directions out loud –  that’s like eating the garnish that comes with your entree you’re supposed to know not to do that.

    Joe Biden no longer does in a year or two he will be gone completely and there will be no hiding it at that point the Democratic party will face a secession problem.

    If Joe Biden is re-elected next year and then forced to leave office during his term due to disability or death that means Kamala Harris will become president of the United States and nobody wants that not even her husband.

    In real life nobody likes Kamala Harris.

    That’s not an attack on her in fact it’s possible to feel pity for someone who’s so universally reviled. It is instead an observation of unchanging physical reality like gravity or photosynthesis nobody wants Kamala Harris to be president no one will benefit if she becomes president so logic suggests there’s going to be a change.

    It’s going to have to be somebody else and whoever that person is is going to have to enter the race soon before the election after Biden drops out.

    Who could that person be? We don’t know obviously this is all just guessing but we do know whoever that is we’ll have to have two essential criteria he’ll have to be as shallow ruthless and transactional as Joe Biden is and he’ll need to have flattery skills that are so polished and advanced they’d be considered Superior even in the Saudi Royal Court and there’s only one man in modern America who fits that description Gavin Newsom the governor of California and perhaps not coincidentally Joe Biden’s new closest friend.

    “I am here Mr President” Newsom told Biden at an event that they did together last week. “I am here as a proud American as a proud Californian mesmerized by not just your faith and your Devotion to this country and the world we’re trying to build but by your results by your action by your passion by Your Capacity to deliver.”

    I get mesmerized by you Joe Biden – imagine saying that as a compliment you couldn’t do it.

    Few human beings could do it but Gavin Newsom had no problem at all those words rolled right off his Fork tongue. He never stopped smiling so if you’re looking for the leader of the coup there he is right there she’s in Kennedy’s motorcade.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 23:38

  • Nvidia Slides As Biden Prepares New AI Chip Export Curbs To China
    Nvidia Slides As Biden Prepares New AI Chip Export Curbs To China

    One month ago, Wall Street lost its mind when Nvidia reported guidance that blew away consensus: in the aftermath of ChatGPT, it seemed as if the entire world suddenly wanted the company’s flagship A100 chip, helping send NVDA stock higher by almost 50% in days, pushing the company into the vaunted “cuatro comas” club.

    And maybe they did… but maybe not. Maybe instead of a scramble by everyone to become the Apple of AI, something which only a small handful of cash-rich companies can even hope of achieving due to the vast capex sums required, all that happened was a rush by Chinese companies to rush and front-load orders before the chip export ban hammer falls, something we discussed most recently two weeks ago.

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    To be sure, it wouldn’t be the first time that Chines firms were double and triple ordering precious chips (it happened all throughout the post-Covid supply chain crunch) and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Nvidia was caught in the middle of the US-China chip war. Recall, it was just last August that NVDA stock tumbled (amazing to think it was “only” $150 back then) to get ahead of US chip export crackdowns, after the US has implemented new license requirements for Nvidia’s A100 and forthcoming H100 integrated circuits – Nvidia’s highest-performance products for servers – in sales to China and Russia. Nvidia said last September the restrictions would cost it $400 million in that quarter.

    But while the market quickly forgot that one of Nvidia’s largest revenue streams could be shut off at any time, and resumed bidding up the stock following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 as the world lost its collective mind in the historic AI frenzy, the reality is that nothing had actually changed.

    And early Tuesday evening the world got a reminder of just how little things had changed, when the WSJ reported that Washington could soon close loopholes in the sale to China of powerful chips used to train AI models, potentially denting sales to the world’s largest semiconductor market.

    The Commerce Department could move as soon as early next month to stop the shipments of chips made by Nvidia and other chip makers to customers in China and other countries of concern without first obtaining a license, the people said.

    The action would be part of final rules codifying and expanding the export control measures announced in October, some of the people said.

    The move would further crimp China’s ability to build out AI capabilities after restrictions last year that cut off the most advanced AI chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. Nvidia responded to that move by making a version of its AI chips for the Chinese market called the A800 that fell below performance thresholds outlined by the Commerce Department. That chip replaced the A100, which is widely used in data centers to do AI computations.

    But the new restrictions being contemplated by the Commerce Department would ban the sale of even A800 chips without a license, according to the WSJ sources.

    The news sent Nvidia stock sliding more than 3% in after-hours trading in New York. Why? Because as we said last August, Nvidia gets about a fifth of its revenue from China, and any trade intervention by the US – which at this stage in the new cold war is just a matter of time – would cripple Nvidia’s value proposition.

    While Nvidia led declines in shares of US chipmakers after hours, rival AMD also fell about 3%. The two lead the market for chips vital to the development of generative AI models such as ChatGPT.

    In response to last summer’s regulations, Nvidia designed less-capable chips that fall under thresholds that require a license from the Commerce Department before export to China or other countries of concern. But Biden is now weighing action as soon as next month to expand the curbs to include those lower-powered semiconductors, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources.

    Such a move underscores the Biden administration’s determination to contain China’s technological rise and could stoke tensions between the two countries. The US is increasingly concerned about Beijing’s technological ambitions, including around the use of AI in military and scientific advances that could tilt the geopolitical balance.

    Nvidia, which with a market cap just over $1 trillion has become the world’s most valuable chipmaker with a more than 80% share of the market for data center accelerator chips, and has been operating under rules that required approval for shipments to China of its A100 and new H100 parts. It was able to partially alleviate the impact on its finances by selling a modified version of the A100 that’s slower at accessing data, and therefore didn’t trigger the restriction.

    But now Biden’s minions are going after those chips as well in hopes of delaying China in the global AI race, and the question is with the market having priced in virtually unlimited growth for the chip company, what will the threat of losing as much as 20% of its total revenue (and growth) mean to NVDA stock.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 23:05

  • CJ Hopkins 'Horrified' To Find "The Same Totalitarian Program Is Being Rolled Out" Everywhere Around The World
    CJ Hopkins ‘Horrified’ To Find “The Same Totalitarian Program Is Being Rolled Out” Everywhere Around The World

    Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

    Fear and Loathing in the City of Westminster

    Our descent into City Airport was like the drop-ship scene in the movie Aliens. The BA CityFlyer Embraer 190, a narrow-body twin-engine airliner, rolled over into a 40-degree bank and started bucking like a mechanical bull. Simulated “chimes” began chiming frantically. Flight attendants bolted for their seats. The German businessman in the seat beside me, obviously a nervous flyer, immediately adopted the “brace” position. I gripped his shoulder reassuringly and shouted into his ear like a drunken redneck, “WE’RE ON AN EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL! GOING DOWN!”

    And so began my latest trip to London. This time, I wasn’t there to talk to “the Left” or to hunt down endoparasitoid xenomorphs. I was there on Serious Conspiracy Theorist Business, which I explained to the chirpy MI6 operative posing as a “survey taker” that followed me out of Border Control asking questions about my “nation of residence” and my “experience with the passport scanners,” and so on. She was wearing one of those rubber “Mission Impossible” masks that made her look like a middle-aged British woman. I waited for an opportunity, head faked, juked right, and lost her in the crowd. As I entered the “Arrivals” lobby, I turned and shouted in her general direction, “NOT MY FIRST RODEO, MR. PHELPS!”

    I don’t know what was up with all the shouting. I’ve been experimenting with different types of medication for this sinus condition I’ve had for months. My Sinus Specialist diagnosed me with “long” or possibly “permanent Covid,” or some yet-to-be-named debilitating syndrome caused by some other bio-weapon that produces cold-and-flu-like symptoms and has a survival rate of 99.8 percent. So, maybe it was bad reaction to my meds. Whatever it was, I was feeling jumpy.

    And the climate-change apocalypse didn’t help. Emerging from the Tube in Westminster was like walking into an enormous open-air sauna. Bodies were lying all around on the sidewalks. AFP photographers in hazmat suits were taking pictures of the carnage. Herds of corpulent American tourists staggered through the streets in semi-fugue states sweating profusely and thumbing their phones like an invasion of alien albino hippos trying to call up to their UAPs and arrange for immediate emergency extraction. I pushed and shoved and elbowed my way down Tothill Street to my pod hotel, checked in, and proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the maze of identical Kubrickian hallways that eventually led me to my luxury pod, and cleaned myself up for the night’s festivities.

    What was I doing back in London in the middle of a heat wave? Well … OK, I’m allowed to tell you about it now. As you are probably aware, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand were doing this public event last Thursday …

    … but that’s not what I was really there for.

    Not that the Thursday event wasn’t fun. It was. Despite the rather pricey tickets, there was a good size house and spirits were high. Russell Brand was in top form, pouring out torrents of intellectual free-association like an English Neal Cassady and nailing the punchlines of all the jokes. Michael was also firing on all cylinders. He worked the house like a seasoned politician, whipping the crowd into a veritable frenzy of anti-totalitarian fervor. Stella Assange took the stage at one point and briefed us on the official crucifixion of her husband, which, sadly, now looks like a fait accompli. Matt, who had just made it to London that morning, and so was jet-lagged and delieriously sleep-deprived, dispensed with the speech he had rewritten on the plane, and just winged it, and somehow pulled it off … because that, as they say, is show biz.

    Here’s the money part of Matt’s speech, which he paraphrased in London (emphasis mine):

    “What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.“

    Early the next morning, Michael, Matt, and a secret cabal of international journalists, editors, organizers, political satirists, academics, and other Very Serious People whose names I am not at liberty to mention gathered in an undisclosed location and spent the better part of the day sharing harmful misinformation and strategizing about how to defeat (or marginally disrupt) the network of governments, Intelligence agencies, global corporations, NGOs, and so-called disinformation experts known as the Censorship Industrial Complex. There were delegates from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and other nominally sovereign countries.

    This heretofore clandestine meeting was conducted in what appeared to be a WWII-era air-raid shelter that had been converted into a private BDSM club under military-level OPSEC protocols (i.e., the meeting was conducted according to the protocols, not the architectural conversion). I’m not entirely sure why that was. We weren’t doing anything even remotely illegal. However, given that I’m under criminal investigation here in Germany for tweeting the cover art of my book, and the IRS’s sudden interest in Matt, and Kit Klarenberg’s recent experience in Luton, perhaps the abundance of caution was warranted. The last thing we needed was the UK Thoughtpolice goose-stepping in like Basil Fawlty and dragging everyone off to Room 101.

    Anyway, that’s what I was actually there for. I had never met most of the people in attendance, except online on the double-encrypted Russian-backed dark-web conspiracy-theorist channels where we hatch our right-wing-extremist plots to defend people’s rights to freedom-of-speech and engage in other harmful anti-Democracy behaviors. I’m still not sure who I actually met in London, as we were all wearing identical Mickey-Mouse masks and speaking through portable voice modifiers. (In any secret meeting like this, you have to assume you’ve been infiltrated!)

    After the obligatory arguing about the agenda, we settled in and shared our country reports, which, unsurprisingly, were all variations on a theme. I won’t go into all the details. Michael Shellenberger’s non-profit has been tracking those developments. Matt Taibbi and Racket News are reporting it. Other alternative media outlets are reporting it. Millions of people all around the world are talking about it, writing about it, and arguing with each other about it. Your Twitter feed is probably full of it. Alex Gutentag just published a huge article about it.

    So, what is it, exactly, that is going on?

    The thing that was horrifying about listening to my colleagues reporting on the state of things in their countries — or, rather, the thing that should be horrifying but is becoming a mundane fact of life — is that more or less the same totalitarian program is being rolled out in countries throughout the world.

    • The censorship.

    • The official propaganda.

    • The criminalization of dissent.

    • The pathologization of dissent.

    • The manipulation of our perception of reality.

    • The coordinated transformation of the world into a smiley-faced neo-Orwellian police state in which politics no longer matters because society has been divided into two basic classes, i.e., “the normals,” who are prepared to mindlessly follow orders and parrot whatever official propaganda they are fed, and “the deviants,” or “extremists,” who are not.

    Seriously, all satire aside, think about the implications of that.

    As you sit there in whichever nominally sovereign country you’re sitting there reading this in, ask yourself, “how and why is this happening?” Then ask yourself, “why is it happening now?”

    If you do not have answers to those questions, it might behoove you to attempt to come up with some. That is basically what I’ve been trying to do — in a satirical and sometimes not so satirical manner — in these Consent Factory essays for the last seven years. I’m not going to summarize it all again here. I’ve done that, repeatedly, in my essays and books. I did it the last time I visited London to give a talk at the Real Left Conference.

    I did it again at this gathering in London. It did not go over all that well.

    The thing is, most of us are so laser-focused on the trees that we cannot see the forest. But our adversaries see the forest. They see the forest like fucking eagles. They own the fucking forest and everything in it. While we hop like squirrels from tree to tree, distracted from distraction by distraction, from limited hangout by limited hangout, they are building a big fucking fence around it and deploying the Forest-Ranger Sturmabteilung.

    I’m reminded of that infamous Karl Rove quote. He was referring to the USA, of course, but it was GloboCap (i.e., the Corporatocracy) that he was really speaking for whether he knew it or not …

    “That’s not the way the world really works anymore … we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]

    If we do not want to end up “studying that reality,” the global, pathologized-totalitarian reality that is being subtly and not so subtly implemented simultaneously in countries throughout the world, at some point we had better come up with some actual answers to those questions above.

    The supranational, globally-hegemonic, post-ideological system of power that runs our world — whatever you need to call it — has answers to those questions. It has a story. It is a story about a beneficent global empire governed by authoritative scientific experts who are trying to save the world from Whatever and protect everyone from “disinformation” and “harmful” speech, ideas, and so on. Like every good story, it has an antagonist. Us. We are the official enemy. Right, Left, libertarian, anarchist, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist … it does not make one iota of difference. There is only the Empire, and those who oppose it. The Empire does not give a shit why. It is conducting a global “Clear-and-Hold” operation, wiping out internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity. It could not care less what you think you believe in. All it wants is mindless obedience and rote repetition of its propaganda. That’s how totalitarianism works.

    And there I go with my story again. If anyone has a different story that makes sense of the last seven years — and arguably the last 30 years — honestly, I would love to hear it. My story fills me with fear and loathing, but the only other coherent story I’m hearing at the moment is the Empire’s story, and I think we all know how that one ends.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 22:45

  • Midtown Gets Paywall: Feds Approve NYC Congestion Toll
    Midtown Gets Paywall: Feds Approve NYC Congestion Toll

    The US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration approved the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s congestion tax scheme to charge drivers entering New York City’s midtown Manhattan. The tax is the first of its kind in the nation, expected to fleece hardworking Americans between $9 and $23 per day to drive through the district, reported Bloomberg. 

    “Congestion pricing will reduce traffic in our crowded downtown, improve air quality and provide critical resources to the MTA,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul. 

    Hochul said, “I am proud of the thorough environmental assessment process we conducted, including responding to thousands of comments from community members from across the region.”

    She added: “With the green light from the federal government, we look forward to moving ahead with the implementation of this program.” 

    The MTA operates NYC’s subways, buses, and rail lines. It’ll be responsible for implementing the tax scheme as soon as April 2024. Bloomberg said motorists driving south of 60th Street would be able to use an E-ZPass. 

    The new tax aims to fleece motorists and raise $1 billion of new annual revenue for the MTA. NYC officials want to reduce the number of daily vehicles entering the district by up to 20%.

    Meanwhile, in a joint statement from Rep. Josh Gottheimer, Sen. Bob Menendez, and Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr.—all Democrats, they said, “This is nothing more than a cash grab to fund the MTA.” 

    The new tax will put a paywall around the elite financial district and bar lower-income motorists from entering because of the cost of entry. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 22:25

  • Actor Jim Caviezel Says Movie Exposing Child Sex Trafficking Is 'Huge Weapon Against Evil'
    Actor Jim Caviezel Says Movie Exposing Child Sex Trafficking Is ‘Huge Weapon Against Evil’

    Via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Jim Caviezel, a Christian actor of “The Passion of the Christ” fame, said he wants his upcoming thriller “Sound of Freedom” to shed light on the reality of child sex trafficking in the United States and warn parents of what he called a “pedophile agenda” that has been pushed for decades.

    Jim Caviezel (L), actor in the new human trafficking film “Sound of Freedom,” and Tim Ballard (R), a former Department of Homeland Security special agent and founder of Operation Underground Railroad, speak during an interview in Washington on June 21, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

    The film stars Caviezel as Tim Ballard, a Homeland Security agent who, after rescuing a young boy from traffickers, learns that the boy’s sister is still captive. He quits his job and puts his life at risk as he embarks on a mission deep into the jungle of Colombia to save the girl.

    In an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” Caviezel and the real Tim Ballard said what the film depicts, as dark and disturbing as it may be, is based on real events and people.

    Image from the “Sound of Freedom” movie, starring Jim Caviezel, to be released nationwide on July 4, 2023. (Courtesy Angel Studios)

    “I will say, it is a true story, absolutely,” Caviezel told host Jan Jekielek. “Every character is real. Every bad guy is real.”

    “At the end of the film … it showed all the good guys, the bad guys, the kids, and it said where they are today,” said Ballard. “We know where they are. Those are real kids, every one of them. Some of them work for us. Some of them have actually rescued people from human trafficking as young adults.”

    In 2013, Ballard left his government job to found Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a non-profit organization working with law enforcement around the world to rescue children from exploitation and help survivors recover. They have been operating in places where instability and conflict make women and children more vulnerable to trafficking, including countries like Ecuador, Mexico, and Ukraine.

    Tragically, according to OUR, the kidnapping and sexual exploitation of children in those countries is being fueled and propelled by a growing U.S. customer base.

    “The big numbers: $150 billion a year are made off the backs of men, women, and children as slaves,” Ballard said, noting that some 27 million people around the world live in slavery, with 6 million of those being children.

    “It’s estimated that 2 million of those [children] are specifically designated for the commercial sex trade,” the former federal agent continued. “The United States is number three for destination countries for human trafficking, number one the consumption of child rape videos, and we are now approaching number one in production of child exploitation material.”

    ‘A Huge Weapon Against the Evil’

    In 2019, Ballard testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, arguing that an expanded, strengthened U.S.–Mexico border barrier provides an “effective tool” in combating those trying to smuggle children into the country for the purposes of selling them for sex. He now believes that the countries’ poor border enforcement might be part of a broader agenda catering to this lucrative market.

    “Why are there over 85,000 unaccompanied minors showing up in the last two years at the southern border and are delivered to sponsors with no background check, no DNA testing?” he said. “Thousands of these kids … showing up alone with a name: ‘Call this number, please, and take me to my sponsor.’ They call the number and they show up.”

    “The fake news media outlets are also propelling this agenda that don’t call them pedophiles. They want to call it minor attracted persons, or MAP,” he added. “Sexualizing kids, giving kids right to consent, pushing God out of education—all the platforms the organized pedophile groups have been peddling, the woke left is now implementing them.”

    For parents and concerned Americans, Caviezel said his film will help them better understand the reality and what they need to do to protect their loved ones.

    “The film is very powerful because it shows you how routinely [child sex trafficking] occurs,” he told Jekielek. “But it also helps you. It weaponizes you to know what the warning signs are. A mother and a father have to guard their children and protect them. And by sticking your head in the sand is not protecting your children.”

    “When you walk out of there, you won’t get up just like you did on ‘The Passion of the Christ’ or on ‘Schindler’s List,’” the actor added. “And the difference between ‘Schindler’s List’ and this film, is that ‘Schindler’s List’ was 50 years too late. We’re doing this right now during the time. And this is a huge weapon against the evil.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 22:05

  • 16.5 Million Americans Risk Stroke From Too Much Exercise
    16.5 Million Americans Risk Stroke From Too Much Exercise

    While things such as daylight savings time, skipping breakfast, skyrocketing energy bills and making the bed ‘too vigorously’ have been floated as causes for heart attack and strokes (and totally nothing else), you can now add ‘exercising too hard’ to the list.

    According to a new study in the Physics of Fluid, researchers concluded that an elevated heart rate can cause strokes in people with blocked carotid arteries, which occurs through a process of stenosis – where the carotid arteries located on both sides of the neck become clogged with fat an cholesterol, forming a plaque that narrows the artery.

    The NY Post reports that stenosis can be difficult to catch early, and is dangerous because it limits blood flow to the brain, which can result in a stroke.

    And according to the Cleveland Clinic, some 16.5 million (5%) of Americans have carotid artery stenosis.

    Contributing factors to stenosis include smoking, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure or cholesterol, or diabetes.

    Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur used a computational model to simulate blood flow in carotid arteries at three stages of stenosis: without blockage, with a mild 30% blockage and with a moderate 50% blockage.

    They compared the effect of an exercise-induced heart rate at 140 beats per minute, which can be achieved by a brisk walk for some obese people, and resting heart rates of 67 and 100 bpm.

    Healthy patients and those with only slightly blocked arteries appeared to have exercise be beneficial for maintaining healthy blood flow.

    However, the results for those with moderate to severe blockage were concerning. –NY Post

    According to author Somnathj Roy, “Intense exercise shows adverse effects on patients with moderate or higher stenosis levels,” adding “It substantially increases the shear stress at the stenosis zone, which may cause the stenosis to rupture. This ruptured plaque may then flow to the brain and its blood supply, causing ischemic stroke.”

    Stroke, which is 80% preventable, is the #5 cause of death in the United States, according to the American Stroke Association.

    “While stressful exercises may be beneficial for improving the cardiac performance of healthy individuals, the same may bring in extremely adverse consequences at elevated heart rates on account of extensive physical activities for patients having extensive arterial blockages, if not performed in supervision of specialized experts,” according to the report.

    Travis
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 21:45

  • Shellenberger Exposes Secret Government Effort To Regulate Your Mind
    Shellenberger Exposes Secret Government Effort To Regulate Your Mind

    Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Public Substack,

    Congress must defund and dismantle the corrupt Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and fire its director, Jen Easterly

    One of the big questions that those of us involved in exposing the secret U.S. government censorship effort have been asking ourselves over the last few months is: did the people involved know that they were breaking the law?

    That question appears to have been answered with a resounding yes by the House Judiciary Committee. Yesterday it released its report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded with Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” on government censorship.

    “It’s only a matter of time,” wrote a former assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an email to a colleague, “before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”

    The “we” in that sentence refers to the network of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that we and others have dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex.

    That Complex includes the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

    Its leader, Kate Starbird, responded to the former CIA official, Susan Spaulding, by saying, “Yes. I agree. We have a couple of pretty obvious vulnerabilities.”

    But one day later, Starbird dismissed the notion that she and her colleagues were doing anything wrong.

    The real problem was, she explained, that “current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms” and that CISA may face “bad faith criticism” for its censorship.

    What is “malinformation”?

    It’s accurate information that might lead people to come to the wrong conclusions — or do things that Starbird, Spaulding, and their allies didn’t want them to do, like not getting vaccinated against Covid-19.

    In truth, America’s taxpayer-funded censors view themselves not only as the good guys but as superheroes.

    One of the leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Jen Easterly, the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security, has as her Twitter photo a cartoon image of herself as a superhero complete with a cape.

    The harsh reality is that Easterly, Starbird, and Spaulding have more in common with China’s censors than they do with America’s founders.

    …

    Those tactics appear to have been lifted whole cloth from George Orwell’s censors in “1984.” Totalitarianism begins, after all, with the corruption of language.

    …

    [Congress] should demand that Easterly be fired and CISA defunded and dismantled. If CISA is engaged in any worthwhile non-censorship activities, they should be moved to an agency staffed by people who don’t think it’s their business to regulate our “cognitive infrastructure” and imagine themselves to be superheroes.

    Subscribers can read Michael’s full note here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 21:25

  • Record Number Of Americans Forecasted To Travel July 4th Weekend
    Record Number Of Americans Forecasted To Travel July 4th Weekend

    A record number of Americans are expected to hit the roadways this July 4th weekend. Despite elevated inflation straining households, there’s still a lot of pent-up travel demand after the pandemic years. Even with surging travel demand, fuel consumption is unlikely to exceed pre-Covid levels due to more efficient vehicles and the proliferation of EVs. 

    “We’ve never projected travel numbers this high for Independence Day weekend,” Paula Twidale, Senior Vice President of AAA Travel, wrote in a new report released Monday. 

    Twidale said, “What this tells us is that despite inventory being limited and some prices 50% higher, consumers are not cutting back on travel this summer. Many of them heeded our advice and booked early, another sign of strong travel demand.”

    AAA projects more than 43 million motorists will drive at least 50 miles from their homes between June 30 and Tuesday, July 4. That’s a 2.4% increase versus 2022 and 4% compared to 2019. If travel by buses, trains, cruise ships, and planes is added, then a record 50.7 million Americans are expected to travel. 

    Bloomberg pointed out that while record travel is expected for the holiday weekend, “widespread adoption of more efficient vehicles means fuel demand nonetheless remains muted — and might never get back to pre-pandemic rates.” Data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows the average car is more fuel efficient, getting about 33.3 miles per gallon. Also, the increasing number of EVs decreases fuel product demand at retail pumps. 

    Americans are still traveling and spending money despite negative real wage growth for the past two years, along with soaring credit card balances and the highest interest rates in a generation. 

    The next test for the consumer will be if they still can splurge on travel on late summer Labor Day weekend. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 21:05

  • Software Engineer, Fiancee Sentenced To Prison For Developing Application To Break China’s Internet Censorship
    Software Engineer, Fiancee Sentenced To Prison For Developing Application To Break China’s Internet Censorship

    Authored by Freda Wu and Sophia Lam via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Two people, who were detained by Shanghai State Security Police in October 2021 for developing software that circumvents the Great Firewall, received six- and five-year prison sentences on June 12, 2023.

    Undated file photo of Zhang Yibo (L) and He Binggang (R). (Courtesy of Falun Dafa Infocenter)

    He Binggang and his fiancée Zhang Yibo, along with several others, were arrested on Oct. 9, 2021, for developing and maintaining software that helps people living in China access overseas internet platforms, according to the Falun Dafa Infocenter.

    The Chinese regime set up Great Firewall (GFW), or Golden Shield Project, in 1998, which is managed by the regime’s Ministry of Public Security to monitor and censor what can and cannot be seen in China through an online network.

    He and Zhang are Falun Gong adherents, a spiritual practice that has been persecuted inside China since 1999 and has been the subject of intense political propaganda.

    Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual improvement practice based on principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, with five slow-moving, gentle exercises that have significant physical benefits. The practice has been very popular in China, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners in the country before the Chinese communist regime began to persecute the belief and its followers in July 1999.

    He and Zhang had developed software called oGate that allows Chinese people to freely access websites and information available outside of China but which are blocked by the GFW and otherwise unavailable inside China.

    Persecuted for Belief: Reports

    He and Zhang have been subjected to long-term persecution by the Chinese regime for their belief in Falun Gong.

    According to Minghui.org, the police denied He’s lawyer from visiting him at Shanghai’s Changning District Detention Center. On March 10, 2022, his lawyer was allowed to talk to him on the phone at the detention center, but without seeing him in person.

    He’s physical condition is very poor because of repeated torture by the Chinese regime.

    “His neck issue and partial paralysis, which resulted from torture during [the] previous detention, worsened. He has now completely lost the ability to walk and has become bedridden. He has trouble falling asleep at night and suffers from constant dizziness, headache, and incontinence,” Minghui reported in June 2023.

    He, 46, has been imprisoned two times previously.

    He is a gifted software engineer, according to Minghui.org, a platform that tracks the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.

    When he was 15 years old he created “Computerized Audible Aids for the Blind.” The invention won the Silver Award of the Sixth National Invention Award and the “Sixth Shanghai Yilida Youth Invention Award.”

    He obtained a certificate in computer application software engineering as a senior programmer when he was only 16.

    In 1994, He was admitted into Fudan University, and four years later he entered the graduate program.

    In 2000, he was detained by police and later given a six-year sentence at Shanghai Tilanqiao Prison.

    Fudan University expelled him.

    In 2007, He was released and he began his own technological company. But in 2010, he was detained again for his spiritual practice.

    According to a June report on Minghui.org, He was tortured when he was imprisoned for the second time, and the beatings caused him to become paralyzed due to severe spinal injuries. He was sentenced to five years in prison in April 2011 despite having been paralyzed.

    Zhang was a business manager for a foreign company. The Xuhui Court sentenced her to one and a half years in prison in 2009 for her spiritual practice, according to Minghui.org.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 20:45

  • US Honeybees Suffer Second Deadliest Season On Record
    US Honeybees Suffer Second Deadliest Season On Record

    Figures published today reveal beekeepers in the U.S. lost an estimated 48% of their honey bee colonies in 2022-23.

    As Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, according to an annual survey that tracks the state of managed hives, this is the second highest death rate on record after 2020-21’s 51%.

    Infographic: U.S. Honeybees Suffer Second Deadliest Season on Record | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Honey bees are crucial to our food supply, pollinating over 100 different crop types.

    As reported by Bee Informed, a national collaboration of leading research labs and universities in agricultural science, the most prominent cause of colony death reported by commercial beekeepers over the year was “varroa destructor” – a parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on honey bees.

    In the summer, ‘Queen issues’ were the second most common reason cited, followed by ‘adverse weather’.

    According to the publication, “although the total number of honey bee colonies in the country has remained relatively stable over the last 20 years (~2.6 million colonies according to the USDA NASS Honey Reports), loss rates remain high”.

    This puts beekeepers under “substantial pressure” to create new colonies each year.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 20:25

  • The Real Casualties Of Russia's 'Civil War': The Beltway Expert Class
    The Real Casualties Of Russia’s ‘Civil War’: The Beltway Expert Class

    Authored by Max Blumenthal & Wyatt Reed Via The GrayZone,

    For just over 12 hours, everyone from former U.S. ambassador to Russia and noted Hitler apologist Michael McFaul to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to neocon pundit Anne Applebaum exploded with seemingly libidinal excitement about a supposed “civil war” that was certain to feature “Russians…killing Russians,” along with “lots of casualties” and Putin “probably hiding somewhere.”

    It was as though the Soviet Union was collapsing all over again, and Prigozhin, a character named on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list whom the U.S. government has sanctioned for leading what it described as a “transnational criminal organization,” was suddenly a white knight storming into Moscow to liberate Russia from “the Putin regime” on the back of a tank. Move over, Juan Guaido.

    Expecting a bloodbath and seismic political upheaval, corporate networks like CNN had budgeted wall-to-wall coverage of the coup that wasn’t, filling cable news green rooms with rent-a-generals, K Street think tankers, and war-hungry former diplomatic corps hacks.

    On Saturday afternoon, however, news broke across the U.S. that Prigozhin had struck a deal with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end his protest and go into exile. Thus ended a largely bloodless affair that ultimately saw fewer documented deaths than the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot.

    Though the supposed revolt in Russia burned out faster than a Leopard tank on the way to Zaporizhzhia, we now know that a number of serious casualties were incurred inside the D.C. Beltway. The Grayzone obtained an exclusive look at the massacre some of America’s top Russia experts carried out against their own credibility.

    McFaul McFails, Again

    Ever since he was unceremoniously ejected from Moscow for apparently attempting to organize a color revolution in 2012, Ambassador Michael McFaul has waged a personal jihad against the country’s government. His hatred of the Russian leadership grew so impassioned that he once declared that Putin was morally inferior to Adolf Hitler, embracing a fringe view associated with Holocaust deniers that asserts the Nazi dictator “didn’t kill German-speaking people.”

    When the events of Friday kicked off, McFaul could hardly contain himself. The disgraced diplomat immediately took to Twitter to insist without a shred of evidence to claim that Putin “has ordered his army and others to destroy Wagner & Prigozhin.”

    “So there’s going to be a big fight,” he promised.

    As for the Russian President, McFaul confidently declared: “I am sure that he is no longer in Moscow.” Just after noon on Saturday, he seemed to believe the Russian president’s demise was imminent. “Rats are jumping” from Putin’s ship, he effused, referring to oligarch Arkady Rotenberg taking a flight to Azerbaijan. “This is now a civil war,” the self-styled expert confidently declared.

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

    But around 1:30 PM on Saturday the unwelcome news had made its way to Washington: Putin and Prigozhin had reached an agreement. There was to be no civil war in Russia, after all.

    McFaul was suddenly forced to reckon with the reality that his predictions of a coup were premature, and that virtually everything he had said hours before was completely wrong. “Can anyone remember a mutiny or coup attempt that lasted 24 hours and no one really fought or was killed?,” pondered the retired diplomat, seemingly coming to grips with the obvious. 

    Then, like an alcoholic in denial after yet another blackout, McFaul whimpered, “I was wrong about this. Eager to learn why.”

    Anne Applebaum’s ‘Civil War’ 

    This May, anti-Russian pseudo-scholar and former Iraq war cheerleader Anne Applebaum predicted a decisive Ukrainian counter-offensive that would storm through Russian defenses and not only “liberate” Crimea, but encourage regime change from Moscow to Venezuela. 

    In an article co-authored by former Israeli prison guard and The Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, and illustrated by the Davos frontman, Bono, (with apparent help from an Etch-a-Sketch), Applebaum openly fantasized about a madman taking control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

    “Even the worst successor imaginable,” she wrote, “even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin, because he will be weaker than Putin. He will quickly become the focus of an intense power struggle.”

    By Friday, Applebaum seemed to believe her fever dreams were coming true. And it was then that she breathlessly announced, “Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war. ” 

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

    “If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be,” she lectured readers, just hours before the bloodless “coup” came to a conclusion. 

    Applebaum’s husband is the former foreign minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, who infamously tweeted his gratitude to the U.S. government for destroying the Nord Stream pipeline. While Sikorski deleted his tweet, Applebaum’s thoroughly discredited “civil war” article remains on the website of the Atlantic.

    On Sunday, Applebaum and McFaul were rewarded for their badly botched analysis with an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, which is hosted by the Biden White House’s former press secretary.

    Zelensky: Putin Is ‘Very Afraid’

    “The man from the Kremlin is obviously very afraid and probably hiding somewhere, not showing himself,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proclaimed on Saturday. According to fact checkers, Zelensky did not issue this bold statement from inside a bunker or in front of a green screen. 

    U.S. Intelligence Claims ‘Surprise’

    On Sunday, CNN reported that U.S. intelligence analysts were taken by surprise by “the swiftness of the deal that was struck on Saturday.”

    What’s more, they believed that Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow “would encounter much more resistance” than it did.

    “I do know that we assessed it was going to be a great deal more violent and bloody,” an unnamed U.S. official reportedly told the outlet.

    But D.C.’s disappointment with the lack of carnage on Moscow streets did not end there.

    Kurt Volker Declares ‘The End’ for Putin

    Kurt Volker is a former U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations who also operated as a de facto Raytheon lobbyist while serving as the executive director of the John McCain Institute. Volker also functioned as a liaison for U.S. and Ukrainian business interests while presiding over the founding of American University Kyiv.

    During a Saturday CNN appearance, Volker declared that the brief moment of disorder in Russia marked “the end for Putin” and “the beginning of the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine.” 

    Christo Grozev: Bellingcat’s Neocon-Stradumus

    Christo Grozev is the Russia director of the U.S. and U.K. government-funded website Bellingcat. This April, Grozev celebrated a terrorist attack that saw a Russian war blogger assassinated and a cafe full of civilians blown up in St. Petersburg, Russia. 

    With chaos seemingly intensifying inside the Russian Federation again, Grozev suddenly transformed from a glorified OSINT blogger into a geopolitical soothsayer with a unique ability to divine the fate of the Kremlin. 

    “Prigozhin says he’s got 25k strong army and he’s going to take power and deal with the ‘traitors’ at the top before returning to the front line,” the Bellingcat commentator claimed on Twitter. “Am old enough to remember how Russia ‘pundits’ said I was talking nonsense predicting a Prigozhin coup attempt this year.”

    Having not been born literally yesterday, we at The Grayzone are thankfully old enough to remember when Prigozhin’s “coup attempt” failed to materialize and ended quickly with negotiations.

    Our memory is so long, in fact, that we recall when the war prophet Grozev stated that Russia had expended 70 percent of its precision missile stocks back in April 2022. Since then, Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian targets have only increased.

    Ian Bremmer: Peter Hotez of International Relations

    As president of the Eurasia Group risk analysis firm, political scientist Ian Bremmer has leveraged his supposed expertise into a lucrative business.

    Bremmer recently weighed in in defense of the absurdly double-talking pediatrician and pundit Peter Hotez, defending his decision not to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Covid-related issues on the grounds that Hotez was a credentialed expert, and RFK Jr. was not.

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    “It would be like me debating elon [Musk] on electric vehicles. Or him debating me on international relations,” Bremmer argued, asserting his own superior credentials. “There’s no value added.”

    During the events of Friday, Bremmer joined the rest of the Beltway expert class in predicting imminent doom for Putin. “wagner territorial gains in russia dramatically faster than in ukraine,” Bremmer wrote in a viral post seen by more than 1 million Twitter users.

    Moments later, he joked that “ukraine has run out of popcorn,” implying that Kiev was eagerly preparing for Russia’s collapse. 

    Following the announcement of Wagner’s stand-down on Saturday, an apparently disappointed Bremmer insisted “there’s no environment where [Putin and Prigozhin] hug it out.”

    Top Biden Officials’ Travel Plans Interrupted

    Among the most overlooked victims of the brief march on Moscow were high-ranking U.S. officials’ weekend plans.

    On Saturday, a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that a planned visit to Jordan and Israel by Gen. Mark Milley, the top military officer in the U.S., had been canceled “due to the situation in Russia.”

    Biden administration National Security Council director and possible human scarecrow Jake Sullivan was forced to cancel a trip as well. Sullivan had reportedly been slated to attend a conference on Ukraine in Denmark until Prigozhin decided to make a trip of his own toward Rostov-on-Don.

    Stephen King: Lost in Fantasy

    Horror author-turned-liberal Russiagate conspiracist Stephen King, who once praised Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and Holocaust perpetrator Stepan Bandera in a phone call with a prankster he believed to be Volodymyr Zelensky, was clearly titillated by Friday’s events.

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    When Prigozhin’s forces briefly took over the city of Rostov-on-Don, King once again proved unable to contain his overactive imagination. “Putin sowed the wind. Now he must reap the whirlwind. Slava Ukraini!” he exclaimed.  

    Noted Online Stalker Idrees Ahmad Predicts ‘The Death of Aaron Mate’s Career’

    Idress Ahmad once existed on the margins of the U.K.’s antiwar movement, publishing a book attacking the Iraq war-era neocon cabal, suggesting Senators Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold voted for Iran sanctions because they are Jewish, and openly questioning the West’s narrative of a genocide in Darfur.

    After running into financial trouble and escaping deportation to his native Pakistan “against the odds” thanks to a Home Office decision that remains unexplained, Ahmad transformed into the very thing he once condemned. 

    Having re-emerged as a rabid supporter of the West’s dirty war on Syria, Ahmad busied himself by stalking The Grayzone, even phoning its editor, Max Blumenthal, to threaten him against publishing a factual investigation of the Syrian White Helmets in 2016. 

    While Ahmad’s recent work at the spook-infested Newlines think tank has failed to generate much interest, even among his fellow regime change cheerleaders, we noticed his prophecy on Saturday that Prigozhin’s “coup” would lead to the collapse of The Grayzone, the international committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, and “the death of Aaron Mate’s career.”

    At the time of publication, we are still triggering Ahmad’s rage-a-holic personality while his own media career has gone about as far as Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 20:05

  • Watch: The Evolution Of The Most Popular Desktop Operating Systems Since 2003
    Watch: The Evolution Of The Most Popular Desktop Operating Systems Since 2003

    Mobile phones might be the most common way of getting online today, but the digital and internet era started for most people with the humble desktop computer.

    And, as Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao details below, over the past 20 years, a long list of operating systems (OS) have been used to run the most popular desktop computers.

    Sjoerd Tilmans has created an animated chart showing the rise and fall in market share of popular desktop operating systems over the period of May 2003 to June 2022, using data from W3Schools and GS Stat Counter.

    Microsoft’s Monopoly on the Most Popular Desktop OS

    The story of the desktop OS market is a story of Microsoft’s explosive growth and market dominance.

    In the 1980s, the fledgling company signed a partnership with personal computer behemoth IBM. Microsoft would supply IBM with an operating system for its computers, MS-DOS, and receive a royalty for every computer sold.

    Those royalties boosted Microsoft’s coffers. And its release of Windows—a more visual interface than DOS—helped them grab hold of the PC market. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw different versions of Windows capture the market:

    • Windows 95:
      The now famous toolbar and Start menu made their debut here. The version also would launch Internet Explorer, once the world’s most popular browser.

    • Windows 98:
      An upgrade to ‘95 which supported more hardware like USBs and connecting more than one monitor.

    • Windows XP:
      XP quickly became a fan-favorite because of its stability, and a hit with both commercial and personal computer clients. Windows XP gained market share steadily upon release in 2001, quickly becoming the most popular desktop OS with a peak of 76% market share in 2007.

     

    Microsoft doubled down on their next releases from the end of the 2000s to 2020, with some misses (Windows Vista) and some hits (Windows 10). Here’s a look at the most popular ones:

     

    • Windows 7:
      Released as the successor to the poorly received Windows Vista, it kept the same visual style (“Aero”) but greatly improved performance and stability from Vista’s benchmarks. In 2011, Windows 7 passed XP to become the most popular desktop OS.

    • Windows 8 and 8.1:
      Created for tablet-desktop integration, just as Microsoft released the companion Surface tablet. The beloved Start menu was replaced (an unpopular decision) and tile-based visual style introduced. However the dramatic differences between the desktop and tablet versions made for a steep learning curve, with the 8.1 release reintroducing the Start button.

    • Windows 10:
      The follow-up to Windows 8 kept the the tile-based appearance but focused on a desktop-oriented interface with quality of life updates. By 2018, Windows 10 had become the most popular desktop OS, eventually peaking at 61% market share at the start of 2022.

     

    The most recent version of Windows released, Windows 11, had updated graphics styling, widget integration, and introduced Microsoft’s latest internet browser Microsoft Edge. But it received a mixed response and slow uptake compared to Windows 10, gaining a market share of 8.3% by June 2022.

     

    Microsoft Vs. Other Desktop OS Contenders

    As of February 2023, Microsoft had a comfortable lead in the desktop OS market, holding nearly 72% of the market.

    In a distant second is Apple’s macOS. The most profitable company in the world might make most of their money from smartphones, but Apple has still managed to carve out a small but sturdy segment of the desktop operating OS market. It reached its peak of 19% in April 2020.

    The other tech giant in the desktop OS game is Alphabet, whose ChromeOS is unique for using an internet browser (Google Chrome browser) as its primary interface. Generally packaged as a simpler and cheaper device option—it was primarily released with inexpensive laptops called “Chromebooks”. More recently, Alphabet announced a version that can be installed on existing computer hardware in 2022.

    Compared to the commercially released OS above, Linux is completely free to download and use, and is the largest open-source software project in the world. Although the OS is only used in about 3% of desktop computers, it was also the basis of Android and ChromeOS, and is the most-used OS on devices with embedded software—routers, smart home devices, cars, and even a few spacecraft (The SpaceX Falcon 9, for example).

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 19:45

  • Judge In Trump Documents Case Denies Special Counsel Jack Smith's Request To Seal Witness List
    Judge In Trump Documents Case Denies Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Request To Seal Witness List

    Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A federal judge on June 26 denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request to file a confidential list of 84 witnesses in the classified documents case involving former President Donald Trump and co-defendant Walt Nauta.

    Former President Donald Trump is introduced at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner at Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, Mich., on June 25, 2023. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

    Smith’s motion, filed on June 23, sought to keep the list of witnesses a secret from Trump and forbid him from communicating directly with them about the case.

    U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, said in her order that prosecutors failed to explain why it was necessary to keep the names under seal or why redacting or partially sealing the document would be inadequate.

    According to Cannon’s order, Trump’s attorneys took “no position” on Smith’s motion but reserved the right to object to aspects of it, such as implementation. Cannon also said that “numerous news organizations” opposed Smith’s motion in court filings citing the First Amendment and related legal principles.

    “Upon review of the foregoing materials, the Government’s Motion is denied without prejudice, and the Motion to Intervene and accompanying Motions to Appear Pro Hac Vice are denied as moot,” Cannon wrote in her ruling.

    “The Government’s Motion does not explain why filing the list with the Court is necessary; it does not offer a particularized basis to justify sealing the list from public view; it does not explain why partial sealing, redaction, or means other than sealing are unavailable or unsatisfactory; and it does not specify the duration of any proposed seal.”

    In Smith’s June 23 motion, he said the government provided Trump’s legal team with the list of witnesses they wished to remain under seal. The court had previously instructed Trump at his June 13 arraignment, at which he pleaded not guilty, not to engage in any communication with Nauta or the witnesses involved in the case.

    Security Clearances

    Trump was indicted on 37 counts related to sensitive and classified documents retained beyond his term in office. The documents were seized during an FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August 2022.

    Smith presented evidence during the June 13 proceeding indicating that Trump violated federal law by allegedly retaining the documents, sharing them with individuals who were not authorized to access such information, and obstructing the investigation by directing Nauta to relocate boxes at Mar-a-Lago instead of surrendering all the materials to the authorities.

    Trump has maintained his innocence. In various remarks to the media and to his supporters, Trump has labeled the prosecution and raid as the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice under his chief 2024 presidential rival, incumbent President Joe Biden.

    Last week, Cannon initially set the trial date for Aug. 14, which is about seven weeks away. Smith filed a separate motion requesting to delay the start date by four months, pushing it to December.

    He stressed that proceeding with the trial on the originally scheduled date would not allow enough time for adequate preparation, which would negatively affect both the defense and the government’s interests.

    The case involves classified information, so Trump’s lawyers need to seek and receive final security clearances to access a few classified documents, which can take up to 60 days. The process for his lawyers to receive interim security clearances was already underway.

    Smith filed a separate motion on June 23 requesting a classified information security officer under the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). The motion clarified that CIPA has implications for the trial proceedings, as it introduces additional time requirements specific to cases involving classified information.

    Under CIPA, parties can request a pretrial conference to discuss any possible issues related to the prosecution of the case concerning classified information. Cannon set a July 14 hearing to discuss how classified materials will be handled in the case in a separate order on June 26.

    The appointment of a classified information security officer also was granted.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 19:25

  • Coders, Learn To Build
    Coders, Learn To Build

    Back in late January, when prevailing consensus was that the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes would crush US residential housing, we showed readers a little known market indicator which signaled that the housing market was in far better shape than conventional wisdom suggested, and asked whether the housing market has bottomed.

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    Since then, despite mortgage rates rising to 7%, back to the highest level of the 21st century, housing stocks have continued to push higher, and the homebuilder ETF (XTB) is up 20%, and just shy of its all time high. In other words, at least as far as the market is concerned, the answer whether housing has bottomed has been a resounding yes.

    But how is that possible? Isn’t the US consumer crushed? Aren’t credit standards so tight that virtually nobody can get a mortgage? Haven’t 7% mortgages made housing the most unaffordable in history?

    While the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes, there is something else that matters much more, and is a far bigger driver of housing supply/demand equilibrium levels, i.e., prices.

    We are talking, of course, about housing inventory… or the lack thereof.

    Consider: according to the latest report RedFin, in May there were fewer homes for sale than any other month on record! Specifically, the number of homes for sale in the U.S. fell 7.1% year over year to 1.4 million on a seasonally adjusted basis in May. That’s the lowest level in Redfin’s records, which date back to 2012, and the first annual decline since April 2022.

    By comparison, there were 2.2 million homes for sale in May 2019, before the pandemic rocked the U.S. housing market, meaning housing supply was 38.6% below pre-pandemic levels this May.

    America’s housing stock is dwindling because there are very few people selling homes. A key reason cited for the lack of supply is that nobody who has a mortgage in the 3-4% ballpark, wants to cash out and take out a new mortgage that is up to 4% higher, wiping out any capital gains from the sale transaction. Some more math:

    Nearly every homeowner with a mortgage has an interest rate below 6%, meaning many are opting to stay put because selling and buying a new home would mean taking on a higher monthly mortgage payment. The average 30-year-fixed mortgage rate in May was 6.43%, up from 5.23% a year earlier and a record low of 2.65% in 2021.

    Whatever the reason for the lack of sales, new listings of homes for sale declined 25.2% year over year in May to the third lowest level on record on a seasonally adjusted basis, as homeowners were handcuffed by high mortgage rates.

    As the pool of homes for sale shrinks, homebuyers in many markets are grappling with competition, which is preventing home prices from plunging despite a freeze in buyer demand brought on by elevated mortgage rates. Effectively, there is a standoff where sellers don’t fell compelled to sell, and buyers can’t afford to pay prices demanded by sellers, which has resulted in a deep freeze of the housing market where bids and asks for the same house are sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars apart.

    Meanwhile, the median U.S. home sale price was $419,103 in May. That’s down just 3.1% from a year earlier, when prices hit a record high of $432,311. While home prices fell in May, they posted a smaller decline than they did in April, when prices dropped 4.2% from a year earlier—the largest decrease on record with the exception of January 2012.

    Another remarkable consequence of the plunge in inventory is that the typical home that sells is no longer selling at a discount. According to RedFin, the average sale-to-list-price ratio, which measures how close homes are selling to their final asking prices, was 100% in May, meaning the typical home that sold was purchased at its list price. That’s down from 103.1% a year earlier, but is the highest level of any May on record prior to the pandemic and follows nine straight months of sub-100% sale-to-list-price ratio

    Still, as Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather says, “it’s too early to say that price declines have bottomed out. Prices may have room to fall because mortgage rates could still rise. The Federal Reserve just signaled that it is likely to continue raising interest rates this year. That could further hamper homebuyer demand and cause home prices to fall in the near term, though the drops would be minimal. We’re unlikely to see double-digit price declines like we did during the 2008 housing crisis.”

    There is another reason why prices may drop: there has been a flood of new home construction. As the next chart shows, the number of houses under construction at this moment are just shy of their all time high, and well above both starts and completions.

    Which has a profound consequences for the US labor market: thanks to the frenzied in process construction of single family houses, employment in the construction sector is effectively the highest it has been since 2007, and rapidly approaching an all time high.

    Which brings us to the punchline.

    Remember when a few years ago the derogatory punchline lobbed at all those (reporters) who had been recently let go was to “learn to code.”  Fast forward a few years, and coder jobs have gone stone colder as a result of not only the surge in rates which has forced tech companies to become profitable (which most of them can’t so they have had to lay off hundreds of thousands of highly paid workers), but the coming AI/ChatGPT shock which will lead to even more layoffs. In any case, as the following chart from the Indeed hiring platform (which tracks job openings much more accurately than the politically-mandated mess that is JOLTs) shows, hiring for softwarre development jobs has plunged and is now near the March 2020 trough even as hiring of construction workers fires on all cylinders. Some more details:

    Indeed hiring tabs open jobs by US sector relative to pre-covid Feb 2020 baseline: purple is Software Development (-16.1% from pre-pandemic) and blue is Construction (+49.2% from pre-pandemic). As Goldman notes, this is “clearly a reflection of the continued shortage of blue collar labor while the job cuts in big tech have had an impact on software employment.”

    The bank concludes that this is “a good reminder that this labor market can not be painted with a broad brush while the secular forces of demographics, immigration and the wake of covid has left lasting labor shortages in pockets of the economy.”

    Which is true. What is also true, is that the worker class that until not too long ago was certain it was immune from the vagaries of the economic cycle, and acted accordingly refusing to show up to the office and instead of actually working, spent the day at home in various yoga positions or drinking some supposedly healthy green crap while getting their 10th covid booster shot, the “coders” are suddenly in zero demand, while the “hot” job sector is now construction. To all those programmers, who are about to get steamrolled by the double whammy of being made obsolete by a chatGPT algos, we have three words of advice: “learn to build.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 19:05

  • Corporatism Has Replaced Liberalism
    Corporatism Has Replaced Liberalism

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

    It’s not capitalism. It’s not socialism. The new word we are hearing these days is the right word: corporatism…

    That refers to the merger of industry and state into a unit with the purpose of achieving some grand visionary end, the liberty of individuals be damned. The word itself predates its successor, which is fascism.

    But the “F” word has become totally incomprehensible and useless through misuse so there is clarity to be gained by discussing the older term.

    Consider, as an obvious example, Big Pharma. It funds the regulators. It maintains a revolving door between corporate management and regulatory control. Government often funds drug development and rubber-stamps the results. Government further grants and enforces the patents.

    Vaccines are indemnified from liability for harms. When consumers balk at shots, government imposes mandates, as we have seen. Further, pharma pays up to 75% of the advertising on evening television, which obviously buys both favorable coverage and silence on the downsides.

    This is the very essence of corporatism. But it is not only this industry. It ever more affects tech, media, defense, labor, food, environment, public health and everything else. The big players have merged into a monolith, squeezing out the life of market dynamism.

    The topic of corporatism is rarely discussed in any detail. People would rather keep the discussion on abstract ideals that are not really operational in reality. It’s these ideal types that split right and left; meanwhile the really existing threats sail under the radar.

    And that is strange because corporatism is much more of a living reality. It variously swept through most societies in the world in the 20th century, and vexes us today as never before.

    But corporatism has a long ideological history that actually stretches back two centuries. It began as a fundamental attack on what was then known as liberalism.

    Liberalism began centuries earlier with the end of the religious wars in Europe and the realization that permitting religious freedom was overall good for everyone.

    It lessens violence in society and still retains the opportunity for the vigorous practice of faith. This insight gradually unfolded in ways that pertained to speech, travel and commerce generally.

    By the early 19th century, following the American Revolution, the idea of liberalism swept Europe. The idea was that the state could do no better for society than to let it develop organically and without a purpose-driven end state, a centralized authority that seeks to achieve a specific goal or purpose, often seen as a greater good or common end that justifies the restriction of individual liberties.

    In the liberal view, in contrast, liberty for all became the sole end state.

    Standing against traditional liberalism was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the German philosopher who explained the loss of territory at the end of the Napoleonic Wars as merely a temporary setback in the German nation’s historical destiny.

    In his vision of politics, the nation as a whole needs a destiny that is consistent with his postulated laws of history. This holistic view was inclusive of church, industry, family and individuals: Everyone must march in the same direction.

    The whole reaches its pinnacle in the institution of the state, he wrote in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which “is the actuality of the ethical idea, “the rationality of the ethical whole,” the “divine idea as it exists on Earth” and a “work of art in which the freedom of the individual is actualized and reconciled with the freedom of the whole.”

    If all of that sounds like mumbo jumbo to you, welcome to the mind of Hegel, who was trained in theology foremost and somehow came to dominate German political philosophy for a very long time.

    His followers split into left- and right-wing versions of his statism, culminating in Marx and arguably Hitler, who agree that the state is the center of life while only arguing about what it should do.

    Corporatism was a manifestation of the “right-wing” version of Hegelianism, which is to say that it did not go so far as to say that religion, property and family should be abolished, as Marxism later suggested. Rather each of these institutions should serve the state, which represents the whole.

    The economic element of corporatism gained steam with the work of Friedrich List (1789–1846) who worked as an administrative professor at the University of Tübingen but was expelled and went to America where he became involved in the establishment of railroads and championed an economic “National System” or industrial mercantilism.

    Believing that he was following up with the work of Alexander Hamilton, List advocated national self-sufficiency or autarky as the proper managerial trade for trade. In this, he stood against the entire liberal tradition that had long rallied around the work of Adam Smith and the doctrine of free trade.

    Such is a brief look at the intellectual roots and development of corporatist thinking, complete with its most noxious ideological elements. The focus on a purpose-driven nationalism in each case comes through dividing and conquering the nation, usually by a “great man,” and allowing the “experts” to run roughshod over the desires of the common people for peace and prosperity.

    The corporatist model was deployed in most countries during the Great War, which was the largest experiment in central planning in cooperation with munitions manufacturers and other large corporations.

    It was deployed in combination with conscription, censorship, monetary inflation and a large-scale killing machine. It inspired an entire generation of intellectuals and public managers.

    The U.S. New Deal, with its price controls and industrial cartels, was largely managed by people such as Rexford Tugwell (1891–1979) who was inspired to rally around corporatism by his experience in this war. The same pattern repeated in the Second World War.

    This brief history only takes us only to the middle of the 20th century. Today corporatism takes a different form. Rather than national, it is global in scope.

    In addition to government and large corporations, today’s corporatism includes powerful nongovernment organizations, nonprofits and huge foundations built by huge fortunes. It is as much private as it is public. But it is no less divisive, ruthless and hegemonic than it was in the past.

    It has also shaved off most of its egregious (and embarrassing) teachings, leaving in place only the ideals of world governments working directly with the largest corporations in media and tech to forge a single vision for humanity on the march, such as spelled out daily by the World Economic Forum. With that come censorship and restrictions on commercial and individual liberty.

    That is only the beginning of the problems.

    Corporatism abolishes the competitive dynamic of competitive capitalism and replaces it with cartels run by oligarchs.

    It reduces growth and prosperity. It is invariably corrupt. It promises efficiency but yields only graft.

    It expands the gaps between rich and poor and creates and entrenches deep fissures between the rulers and ruled. It dispenses with localism, religious particularism, rights of families and aesthetic traditionalism. It also ends in violence.

    Corporatism is anything but radical. The word is a perfect descriptive of the most successful form of statism of the 20th century.

    In the 21st century, it has been given new life and an ambition that is global in scope.

    But as regards the highest American ideals and enlightenment values of freedom for all, it really does represent the opposite.

    It is also the single most vexing problem we face today, far more of a going concern than old archetypes of socialism and capitalism. Also in the American context, corporatism can come in forms that masquerade as both left and right.

    But make no mistake: The real target is always liberty traditionally understood.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 18:45

  • US Treasury Sanctions Wagner's 'Gold & Weapons Dealing' Operations In Africa
    US Treasury Sanctions Wagner’s ‘Gold & Weapons Dealing’ Operations In Africa

    The US Treasury Department on Tuesday has announced new anti-Wagner sanctions in a belated attempt to cut off the group’s weapons funding, at a moment the Russian government has essentially pardoned the mercenary outfit for treasonous actions. It remains unclear what role Wagner will play inside Russia, if any, as its founder Yevegny Prigozhin sets up shop in neighboring Belarus after President Lukashenko mediated a deal on his behalf.

    The fresh sanctions, announced Tuesday, target four companies accused of “gold dealing” on Wagner’s behalf as well as an individual Washington says made “weapons deals” tied to Wagner.

    Companies in Russia, the UAE, and Central African Republic “have engaged in illicit gold dealings to fund the Wagner Group to sustain and expand its armed forces, including in Ukraine and Africa,” according to the Treasury statement. Wagner in Africa is essentially a foreign policy arm of the Kremlin, which might explain why Moscow sees the group as somewhat indispensable.

    Africa has lately been known as a place with the largest Wagner mercenary presence outside of the Ukraine conflict, which has deeply alarmed Washington and West. The US and its allies have long hoped to thwart and dismantle Wagner’s presence there, and deal-making with multiple African governments. 

    Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson said in a statement, “The Wagner Group funds its brutal operations in part by exploiting natural resources in countries like the Central African Republic and Mali.”

    “The United States will continue to target the Wagner Group’s revenue streams to degrade its expansion and violence in Africa, Ukraine, and anywhere else.”

    And the individual listed, identified as Andrey Nikolayevich Ivanov (Ivanov), is a Russian executive of Wagner Group who “worked closely with Prigozhin’s entity Africa Politology and senior Malian government officials on weapons deals, mining concerns, and other Wagner Group activities in Mali,” the Treasury statement alleged.

    The Treasury announcement further says action is being taken against a gold mine directly owned by Prigozhin:

    Diamville SAU (Diamville) is a gold and diamond purchasing company based in the CAR and controlled by Prigozhin. Diamville is one of several Prigozhin-connected entities that is intimately involved in the CAR mining sector. In 2022, Diamville participated in a gold selling scheme that entailed converting CAR-origin gold into U.S. dollars. Following the imposition of U.S. sanctions on several Russian financial institutions, participants in the scheme planned to move the proceeds by transferring cash by hand. Additionally, Diamville shipped diamonds mined in the CAR to buyers in the UAE and in Europe.

    The Treasury statement identifies Mali as a major base of Wagner’s illicit activities in Africa.

    Going back years, the Malian government has contracted with Wagner to assist its national armed forces in rooting out al-Qaeda affiliated groups which are active there. Wagner has recently come under allegations of massacring civilians in the context of its large firefights with Islamist insurgents.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/27/2023 – 18:25

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