Today’s News 29th December 2021

• Shellenberger: How 'Defund The Police' Backfired On Democrats
  Shellenberger: How ‘Defund The Police’ Backfired On Democrats

  Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Unherd.com,

  Over the last two decades, progressives have established a new consensus on crime. Nonviolent felonies like shoplifting and drug possession should be reclassified as misdemeanours. Cities should defund the police and spend the money on nurses, psychologists and social workers instead. Offenders should have minimal involvement with the justice system — and be kept out of jail wherever possible.

  

  But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus. Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020. At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland. Meanwhile property crimes in California’s four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November. Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.

  Of course, many crime rates are still below what they were in the Eighties. And progressives are right to say that we shouldn’t panic about rising crime, since past panics contributed to cruel and crude responses, including overly long prison sentences with little in the way of real rehabilitation programmes. That’s why, in the late Nineties, I worked for George Soros’s foundation, among others, advocating for drug decriminalisation, reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, and alternatives to incarceration.

  But today it’s clear that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In 2000, when I stopped working on criminal justice policy, progressives were advocating mandatory rehabilitation as an alternative to incarceration. Now, progressive prosecutors are simply releasing criminal suspects from custody without requiring rehab or extended probation. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for instance, a man who had run over the mother of his child with his SUV was released on $1,000 bail. Neither he nor his SUV were put under electronic surveillance. Soon after, he killed six people and injured another three dozen — by running them over with his SUV.

  Meanwhile incarceration rates in the United States are at a 30-year low. In 2019, there were 17% fewer prisoners in the US than in 2009. And while progressives are right to point out that nearly half of the people in federal prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences, it’s worth noting that there are eight times more people in state prisons than federal prisons. And just 14% of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences. Half are there for murder, rape, robbery and other violent offences.

  While homicides and other violent crimes merit special attention, crimes driven by drug addiction, such as shoplifting, public camping, and public defecation, undermine the fabric of city life. Progressives sold their criminal justice reforms on the idea that nonviolent offenders would be released into some kind of supervisory care, focused on treatment and rehabilitation. But often that did not happen.

  Consider San Francisco. Its jail population plummeted to 766 in 2021 from 2,850 in 2019. If progressives had done what they’d promised, there would be 2,000 extra people on probation being supported to stay sober and out of trouble. That hasn’t happened. And that’s troubling because many who are released re-offend. Half of all offenders — and three-quarters of the most violent ones ­— who were released from San Francisco jails before trial, between 2016 and 2019, went on to commit new crimes. Instead of benevolent paternalism, progressives delivered libertarian anarchism. And yet all that would have been required would have been weekly drug testing, check-ins with probation officers, and electronic monitoring.

  Still, if we are to reduce crime without returning to an era of mass incarceration, we need a new consensus around criminal justice — one that prioritises prevention and rehabilitation, rejects calls to defund the police, and views probation as critical to making alternatives to incarceration work. And all of that starts with understanding why people commit crimes in the first place.

  Progressives attribute crime to “root causes” like poverty, inequality, and structural racism. San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin, for example, recently claimed that, “Affordable housing, quality education, access to health care and addiction services can provide the stability that empirical evidence has shown actually deters criminal activity.” Of course these things are important, but there is no evidence that they prevent crime. Indeed, the study Boudin cited simply found that, in 12 cities where over 10% of population received welfare benefits, “more crime occurs when more time has passed since welfare payments occurred.” It did not look at the role of any of the factors he referenced.

  Indeed, there is little evidence for the claim that poverty and structural racism have any impact on crime. African American crime rates were lower during the Forties and Fifties, when segregation was legal, poverty more widespread, and discrimination more overt, than between 1965 and 1990. Indeed, homicides among African Americans shot up after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And though it’s true that homicides rose during the first few years of the Great Depression, they then declined in most major cities afterward. And rates of crime, including homicide, kept declining after the 2007 financial crash and resulting recession, the worst since the Depression.

  Homicide is irrational and emotional, experts agree, not a natural and predictable response to personal setbacks. Social conditions like poverty, oppression, and unemployment do not drive violent acts; people suffering from these conditions have varied rates of violence throughout history. Rather, one of the most important factors, when it comes to homicide, is the public’s belief in the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, as well as things like patriotism and “fellow feeling”. Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States closely follow the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing, and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late Sixties and early Seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the Fifties and mid-Nineties, homicides decreased.

  So anti-police protests take a toll. In 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, causing demonstrations across the US. Afterwards, the police chief in nearby St Louis noted that, “the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.” In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country’s leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had risen after the incident. At first, Rosenfeld was sceptical, noting that homicides in St. Louis had started to rise before then. But after looking at the evidence, he changed his mind. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities, between 2014 and 2015.

  Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.

  But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”

  Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.

  What liberals ignore is that there is good quantitative evidence that more policing can reduce crime. They argue that the police don’t actually prevent crime, they just punish people after the fact. But in 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package offered a billion dollars in grants to struggling American cities, to fund the police; cities qualifying for the grant increased policing by 3.2% and experienced a 3.5% decline in crime.

  And there’s another inconvenient truth that liberals ignore: the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Working a 13-hour, rather than 10-hour, shift means cops are far more likely to experience public complaints against them, while back-to-back shifts quadruple the likelihood.

  Still, progressives are busy gaslighting the public about their efforts to defund the police. A progressive columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote, “while there is continuing debate about what is driving the violent crime increases … we know for a fact that defund had nothing to do with it. Because defund never actually happened.” This is patently untrue. After the Black Lives Matter protests, more than 20 big cities reduced police budgets by at least $870 million. The LAPD’s budget was slashed by $150 million in July, for instance. It’s just that homicides rose so quickly that most cities reversed their defunding budgets. “From New York City to Los Angeles,” noted the Associated Press at the end of last month, “in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests … police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures.”

  San Francisco is a classic example. After Black Lives Matter protesters last year demanded that cities “Defund the Police,” Mayor London Breed held a press conference to announce that her city would be one of the first to do exactly that. Breed announced $120 million in cuts to the budgets of both San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments. Last week, Breed u-turned dramatically, announcing that she was making an emergency request to the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money to fund the police and support a crackdown on crime, including open-air drug-dealing, car break-ins, and retail theft.

  Progressives denounced her plan. They oppose enforcing laws, when addicts and mentally ill people break them, because they believe “the system” is fundamentally racist, wrong and the cause of social injustice. This explains why progressives are narrowly focused on black people killed by the police, even though 30 times more black people are killed by civilians. And it explains why Boudin and other progressive prosecutors are obsessed with emptying prisons. (“The challenge going forward,” said Boudin in 2019, “is how do we close a jail?”)

  Still, there’s reason to be hopeful. When Breed announced a sweeping crackdown on open air drug dealing and crime, she said, “I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances.”

  “Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law … Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference … I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”

  My time working in justice reform taught me that tough love works. The Netherlands and Portugal are often held up as progressive utopias, and while it’s true that both have reduced criminal penalties, both nations still ban drug dealing, arrest drug users, and sentence dealers and users to prison or rehabilitation. “If somebody in Portugal started injecting heroin in public,” I asked the head of drug policy in that country, “what would happen to them?” He said, without hesitation, “They would be arrested.”

  And being arrested is sometimes what addicts need. “I am a big fan of mandated stuff,” says former felon Victoria Westbrook. “I don’t recommend it as a way to get your life together, but getting indicted by the Feds worked for me.” Today Victoria is working for the San Francisco city government to integrate ex-convicts back into society.

  It’s hard work, but it pays off. Over the last 20 years, Miami has reduced its “homeless” population by 57%, despite skyrocketing rents, by closing open drug scenes and providing free psychiatric care, drug treatment and basic shelter. In High Point, North Carolina, police targeted three neighbourhoods with persistent crack cocaine dealing. There, police officers, accompanied by local community workers, met with dealers in person, asked them to stop, and offered them job training, tattoo removal and help restarting their lives. The officers gave the dealers unsigned arrest warrants, ring binders of the evidence against them, and video proof of their crimes. It proved to be good motivation for the dealers to clean up their acts.

  People in progressive cities are often shouted down for even suggesting a role for law enforcement. “Anytime a person says, ‘Maybe the police and the health care system could work together?’ or, ‘Maybe we could try some probation or low-level arrests,’ there’s an enormous outcry,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys. “‘No! That’s the war on drugs! The police have no role in this! Let’s open up some more services and people will come in and use them voluntarily!’”

  But there is strong quantitative evidence that probationary programs that are “swift, certain, and fair” reduce arrests, recidivism, and drug use. The most famous of these programmes is Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE). It incentivised offenders to follow probation rules by applying guaranteed, immediate, and short jail time for parole violations like failing a drug test. One study found that HOPE reduced drug use by 72%, future arrests by 55%, and incarceration by 48%.

  A researcher summarised the benefits of the program, saying, “HOPE actually gets people to change their behaviour by setting up a circumstance where their natural behaviour moves in the right direction. They don’t want to be arrested and go to jail, so they stop using. That’s a profoundly rehabilitative thing to do.” In other words, HOPE rewards addicts and criminals for behaving well, instead of simply expecting them to.

  It’s time for a new consensus on crime. Enforcing laws will reduce violence. Pushing offenders to take responsibility for themselves, when they leave prison, will lead them to independent lives, rather lives of crime. Progressives have done their best to undermine justice, as well as common sense, for two decades. As well as refunding the police, we should apologise to them.

  * * *

  Michael Shellenberger is author of the best-selling book Apocalypse Never (HarperCollins 2020) and San Fransicko (HarperCollins 2021).

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 23:40

• Asia's Going Nuclear
  Asia’s Going Nuclear

  After announcing its plans for a phase-out of nuclear power in 2000 and ramping up financial and infrastructural investments in renewable energy production since then, Germany is entering the home stretch: In the following weeks, the country will take offline three of its six remaining nuclear power plants, with the remaining three following at the end of 2022.

  And as Statista’s Florian Zandt notes, since there are no plans to build new reactors, this will make the European country only the second nation worldwide next to Italy to close down all preexisting nuclear reactors without constructing new ones so far.

  As Statista’s chart indicates, the rest of the world is not ready to ditch this power source quite yet…

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Asia in particular is still big on nuclear power, even with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima happening as recently as 2011 and some neighboring regions still being visibly affected by the fallout to this day. Japan still has 33 reactors in commission while proposals, planning or construction have started on an additional eleven according to data by the World Nuclear Association. India plans to triple its number of nuclear power plants to 72 in total, while China has proposed the construction of 168 new reactors in addition to 18 being built and 37 being planned, which would amount to an increase of 337 percent. Overall, 35 reactors around Asia are already in construction, with Europe coming in second with 15 plants.

  While the steady increase in energy consumption and the scarcity of fossil fuels like coal, crude oil and gas might make nuclear energy a viable, clean option on paper, the technology still poses a great many risks, especially when it comes to the correct disposal and storage of highly radioactive waste products and the condition of older plants. According to data by the International Atomic Energy Agency, two thirds of the 441 currently active nuclear power plants are older than 30 years, a fact that might make thinking about at least overhauling those plants instead of building new ones something to consider.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 23:20

• A Perfect Storm Of Incentives
  A Perfect Storm Of Incentives

  Authored by Antony Davies via The American Institute for Economic Research,

  It is not yet clear whether history will remember the 2020s more for an outbreak of a deadly virus, or for an outbreak of mass psychosis.

  No doubt, both were at play, the former because the virus was novel and deadly, the latter because we had no idea how much so. In March of 2020, the World Health Organization estimated Covid’s case fatality rate to be over 3 percent. Some outlets reported case fatality rates above 10 percent. By comparison, the case fatality rate for the common flu is a mere fraction of a percent. 

  But the early information ranged from sketchy to biased. In the early days, the number of Covid tests was limited, so physicians only tested those who were sick enough to show up at hospitals. This skewed the early data toward showing Covid as being deadlier than it actually was. With no randomized testing, the actual lethality was impossible to know. 

  This bias interacted with the media and politicians’ incentives to create a perfect storm of incentives.

  
  The media had an incentive to repeat the worst fatality projections and to play down the bias behind the projections because bad news attracts viewers, and viewers attract advertising dollars. Heavy media coverage of the worst Covid projections alarmed voters, and that forced politicians to respond. But the politicians’ incentives were skewed toward a heavy-handed response.

  There were two ways politicians could have been caught making mistakes. Politicians might not have imposed lockdowns when lockdowns were needed. If they erred in this way, the error would have become quickly and clearly evidenced in body counts. Angry voters would have looked for someone to blame, and the politicians would have been the clear choice. Conversely, politicians might have imposed lockdowns when lockdowns were not needed. If they erred in this way, the error would have remained mostly hidden. Unemployment and business closures would skyrocket, but politicians could point to the millions of hypothetical deaths that “would have occurred” were it not for the lockdowns.

  By late 2020, it became clear that early case fatality rates were overstated, but it was too late for politicians to change course. A feedback loop had ensued wherein the media sold advertising by spotlighting the Covid danger. This made people fearful, and the people pushed politicians to act. Politicians acted and then hid the potential error of unnecessary lockdowns by emphasizing the danger of Covid. This gave the media more material to spotlight and more advertising to sell. Social media then jumped into the fray by anointing itself the arbiter of what was and wasn’t “misinformation.” But social media was as motivated as the mainstream media to attract eyeballs and sell advertising, and so anything that contradicted the official line on Covid was deemed “misinformation.”

  The result was mass psychosis in which people’s behaviors toward the real threat of Covid became inconsistent with their behaviors toward other real threats. And what was the real threat of Covid?

  While most countries imposed lockdowns, Sweden resisted. The Swedish government recommended social distancing and banned gatherings of more than 50 people, but it did not require businesses to close. Because of differences in population mobility, density, size, and the environment, a comparison of Sweden to the United States isn’t possible. What is possible is a comparison of Sweden to Sweden. The Imperial College of London (ICL) produced the early forecasts of Covid deaths. These were the forecasts on which politicians based their policy decisions. Applying the ICL forecast model to Sweden, Swedish epidemiologists predicted that, by July 1 2020, Sweden would have suffered 96,000 deaths if it had done nothing, and 81,600 deaths with the few policies that it did employ. In fact, by July 1, Sweden had suffered only 5,500 deaths.

  The ICL model overestimated Sweden’s Covid deaths by a factor of nearly fifteen.

  Early ICL forecasts indicated that, unchecked, Covid would kill 40 million worldwide in 2020, and that the number could be cut in half by social distancing and isolating the elderly. According to the World Health Organization, worldwide Covid deaths for 2020 totaled 1.8 million.

  The ICL model overestimated world Covid deaths by a factor of ten.

  For 2020, the same ICL forecasting model also predicted that, if the countries did nothing in response to Covid, up to 2.2 million people in the US and another 550,000 in the UK would directly die from Covid.

  Suppose that ICL predictions of US and UK Covid deaths were overstated only by a factor of three. Then, in the absence of lockdowns and mandatory masks, the United States could have expected around 730,000 Covid deaths and the UK 180,000 in 2020. How many people actually died? In 2020, the number of direct deaths due to Covid were approximately 360,000 in the US and 77,000 in the UK. Thus, even assuming that the ICL model had a significantly smaller bias than it demonstrated elsewhere, the lockdowns appear to have only saved around 370,000 lives in the US and 103,000 in the UK.

  To further skew these estimates, the ICL model assumes nonpharmaceutical interventions only. The widespread availability in the US of a vaccine, beginning in mid-2020, further reduces the number of lives the lockdowns saved. In short, however many lives the lockdowns did save, they were far fewer than what the ICL models predicted they would save.

  As with all things, lockdowns do not come without tradeoffs. Some people died of cancer, kidney disease, and other non-Covid causes because they were afraid to go to hospitals out of fear of contracting Covid. In Canada, cancer screening was suspended so that hospital resources could be devoted to Covid care. Early estimates show up to a 10 percent increase in cancer deaths as a consequence. In the US in the early days of Covid, there was a 30 percent decline in the number of people seeking initial treatment for kidney disease.

  At the start of the pandemic, calls to suicide hotlines spiked across the country, as did instances of domestic violence. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that the total number of deaths in the US was 450,000 larger than it should have been in 2020. That 360,000 of those were directly due to Covid means that the remaining 90,000 were due to Covid only indirectly or due to the lockdowns themselves.

  In addition to the lockdowns costing lives, we expended unprecedented resources maintaining them. These came initially in the form of unemployment and business closures, and later in the form of supply chain problems and inflation and higher taxes to pay for massive stimulus spending. In late 2020, economists estimated that, provided it ended by the fall of 2021, the pandemic will cost the United States around $16 trillion over the next decade. That’s around $40 million for every life saved. 

  But how many more lives might we have saved had we done something different with those resources? Around 660,000 people die each year of heart disease in the US. The National Institutes of Health spends around $5 billion each year researching cures for cardiovascular diseases. Americans spend another $330 billion each year for hospitalization, home health care, medication, and lost productivity associated with cardiovascular diseases.

  Suppose that, over the next decade, it turns out that the 2020-21 lockdown saved a total of 1.1 million US lives (including people who may have contracted Covid in 2020-21 but died over the subsequent decade from lingering complications). This is three times the 370,000 the lockdown appears to have saved in 2020 alone. We will have spent $16 trillion in direct costs and lost productivity to save those 1.1 million people. But, over the same decade, 6.6 million people will have died of cardiovascular diseases. To save them, we will have spent $3.3 trillion. We are dedicating one-fifth the resources to fighting a disease that kills six times the number of people. That makes no sense.

  Of course, Covid and cardiovascular diseases are very different in that heart disease isn’t contagious. And yet, that criticism cuts both ways: because heart disease isn’t contagious, we can’t develop a herd immunity, and so heart disease will remain with us for generations whereas Covid will not.

  None of this is to say that we shouldn’t have taken measures to halt Covid’s spread. It is to say that there is something markedly broken about a public policy response that spends five times the resources on a threat that is one-sixth as deadly as the single most deadly thing that kills Americans.

  We got here because politicians’ survival incentive is to do whatever it takes to secure our votes, and the media’s profit incentive is to say whatever it takes to bring us back looking for more. As Omicron looms, and as surely as Pi, Rho, and Sigma will follow, voters should meet their fears with reason, view the media with a skeptical eye, and demand that politicians discuss tradeoffs openly and honestly.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 23:00

• TikTok Tricks Teens Into 'Self-Diagnosing' Rare Mental Disorders
  TikTok Tricks Teens Into ‘Self-Diagnosing’ Rare Mental Disorders

  On top of inundating teenagers with content produced by wannabe hookers-in-training glorifying BDSM, kinky sex and other prurient subjects, much to the chagrin of responsible parents everywhere, TikTok is also facing criticism for convincing teenagers that they have (sometimes rare) mental disorders, everything from ADHD to Borderline Personality Disorder, and beyond.

  The news initially appeared in WSJ, which spoke to several teenage high school students about their experiences with the app. One, a young woman named Samantha Fridley, who claims she was diagnosed with depression at age 10, told WSJ she had stayed up until 0300 in the morning while watching an endless stream of videos about BDP and other rare disorders like bipolar disorder and multiple-personality disorder.

  Many of these videos are being made by teenagers or twentysomethings who try to portray themselves as “experts”, but who in fact have no formal experience treating mental illness. Some encouraged viewers to perform their own self-diagnoses at home, convincing young impressionable adults that they have serious disorders.

  It’s becoming a problem since young people who manage to convince themselves that they have these disorders might be more tempted to indulge in borderline behavior in an effort to convince themselves, and others, that the diagnosis is legitimate.

  TikTok videos containing the hashtag #borderlinepersonalitydisorder have been viewed almost 600MM times. However, only 1.4% of the US adult population is believed to experience the disorder, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

  

  Multiple-personality (otherwise known as dissociative-identity) disorder is even rarer, afflicting 1% of the population, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Videos containing the hashtag #dissociativeidentitydisorder have been viewed well over 700M times on TikTok. Many of the videos feature teens and young adults as they appear to switch from one personality to another.

  One mental health expert said TikTok videos that help to de-stigmatize mental illness can be helpful. But self-diagnosing teens have been inundating mental health providers, potentially creating problems for the whole system. That same provider said they were surprised when they saw the sheer volume of videos about MPD, considering how extremely rare it is.

  Some even worry that bombarding teens with this type of negative content might potentially alter their brain chemistry.

  “We have to convince these kids to release their self-diagnoses but when they leave us they go right back into that TikTok community which reinforces their beliefs,” said Don Grant, executive director of outpatient services for Newport Healthcare’s teen treatment center in Santa Monica, Calif.

  Grant hasn’t kept a tally of the teens who use TikTok to self-diagnose, but he told WSJ the number was “significant.”

  This is just the latest report to raise questions about the TikTok algorithm, which is considered a trade secret by TikTok owner ByteDance and is closely guarded. The company says it’s working on tweaks to the algorithm that could protect teens and other users from being over-exposed to just one type of content.

  Any parents who are concerned about their child’s self-diagnosis are encouraged to sit back and listen to the teen before making judgments. But if they refuse to change their minds, it might be time to force them to delete the app entirely.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 22:40

• Buchanan: How We Forfeited The Fruits Of Cold War Victory
  Buchanan: How We Forfeited The Fruits Of Cold War Victory

  Authored by Pat Buchanan,

  As 1991 turned into 1992, America appeared to have arrived at the apogee of its national power and world prestige.

  President George H.W. Bush had just sent an army of half a million men to expel, in a 100-hour campaign, Saddam Hussein’s invading army from Kuwait. The world, including Russia, China and Iran, had supported U.S.-led military action to overturn Iraq’s aggression.

  Our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, had just collapsed and disintegrated into 15 nations. The Warsaw Pact had dissolved. All of Eastern Europe was free. We were the sole surviving superpower.

  In the reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue for the victory parade of the troops of Desert Storm, the thought occurred: This is what it must have been like when the generals returned in triumph to Rome to take the cheers of the crowds.

  

  But, instead of making America again “a normal country in a normal time,” as Jeane Kirkpatrick had urged, we set out on our path to empire.

  There was much hubristic talk in those days of a “unipolar moment” in which we would establish a “benevolent global hegemony” and create a New World Order under U.S. dominance and tutelage.

  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”

  Three decades after those heady days, how has it gone for us?

  Today, the world’s other great powers, Russia and China, are united against us in a “relationship” that, the autocrat Xi Jinping says, “in its closeness and effectiveness … even exceeds an alliance.”

  Russia is issuing virtual ultimata against any further advance of NATO into Ukraine or Georgia. Beijing, after digesting Hong Kong, is indicating that the time draws near for its annexation of Taiwan.

  How did we get here?

  At age 90, Mikhail Gorbachev, who gave up power in December 1991, identifies a primary cause: “The triumphal mood in the West, especially in the U.S. Arrogance and self-confidence went to their heads.”

  Indeed. Back in February of 1997, George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment of Joseph Stalin’s USSR, implored America not to seize its triumphal moment and move NATO into Eastern Europe:

  “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

  “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

  So said Kennan. And so it came to pass, as Russia has placed 100,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine and told us that any further expansion of NATO into its border states, or the installation of weapons there that can threaten Russia, would be intolerable — and resisted.

  Because we admitted into an alliance to contain Russia all of its former Warsaw Pact allies and three former Soviet republics, we are now close to sword’s point with a Russia that our own actions have driven into an entente with the greatest rival the U.S. has ever known: China.

  And who built up China, with four times our population, into the first world power with a capacity to challenge America across all fronts — strategic, military, diplomatic and economic?

  Capitalist America did.

  Clinton Democrats and Bush Republicans, reveling in the riches global trade would realize for our prosperity, threw open America’s markets to production from anywhere and everywhere on earth.

  U.S. corporations swiftly began to transfer production out of the United States to where it could be done cheapest — the People’s Republic of China. From 1991 on, China surged and eventually swept past the U.S. as the first manufacturing power on earth.

  A self-sufficient America that provided for all its needs in World Wars I and II is now dependent on foreign nations for the necessities of its national life.

  Meanwhile, a mighty China is rolling up islands, rocks and reefs in the South and East China seas and warning the United States against any effort to prevent the reunion of Taiwan and the motherland.

  These, then, are three of the historic blunders that have forfeited for us the unique position America held at the close of the Cold War.

  • First, alienating Russia by treating it as an incorrigible and permanent enemy by pushing our alliance onto its front porch.

  • Second, pursuing a globalist trade policy that China exploited to become an economic and military rival of the United States.

  • Third, America’s plunge into the Middle East, with our forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and then Syria, Libya and Yemen.

  They availed us nothing and led only to death and destruction.

  Of the passing of that preeminence we had in 1991, let it be said: We did it to ourselves.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 22:20

• Mexican Billionaire's Christmas Advice: Buy Bitcoin, "Stay Away From Fiat!"
  Mexican Billionaire’s Christmas Advice: Buy Bitcoin, “Stay Away From Fiat!”

  The unprecedented monetary stimulus unleashed by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks to help combat the economy-destroying COVID crisis has unleashed hyperinflation, which has resulted in the spiraling death of fiat. 

  On Christmas day, Ricardo Salinas Pliego – Mexico’s third-richest man – tweeted to his million followers why they needed to ditch fiat currencies and purchase Bitcoin. 

  “A hug and all the success of the universe for all of you, may God give you health, desire to live and get ahead, the world belongs to dreamers!

  “Stay away from FIAT money .. it’s fake money made of paper and lies. The Central Banks are printing more money than ever before. Invest in Bitcoin,” Pliego said. 

  Pliego quoted market commentator Holger Zschaepitz’s ever-expanding Federal Reserve balance sheet chart. He called fiat a “mega fraud.” 

  Para los que no entendieron mi segundo regalo navideño de ayer…
  Pónganse almejas! El Fiat es un mega fraude. https://t.co/RosuvTCHLC

  — Ricardo Salinas Pliego (@RicardoBSalinas) December 26, 2021

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

  The billionaire sounded frustrated and also said, “politics leaves NOTHING GOOD for an entrepreneur, I better dedicate myself to continue generating prosperity and job opportunities for our collaborators … When you enter politics, you realize that enemies are real and friends are lies.” 

  Pliego has been investing in Bitcoin for years and has called out the central banking scam. He said in November 2020 that he invested a substantial portion of his liquid assets in the world’s biggest cryptocurrency. 

  “Many people ask me if I have bitcoins,” Salinas said at the time, who has a $13.4b fortune through his stakes in retail, banking and broadcast businesses, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. “YES. I have 10% of my liquid portfolio invested it,” he tweeted last year. 

  The billionaire is right – the purchasing power of currencies has lost tremendous value as central banks print trillions of dollars to prevent the global economy from imploding. 

  For example, one U.S. dollar could buy ten beer bottles in 1933. Today, as Visual Capitalist Govind Bhutanda notes, it’s the cost of a small McDonald’s coffee.

  

  In other words, the dollar’s purchasing power – its value in terms of what it can buy – has decreased over time as price levels have risen. Bitcoin fairs better than fiat because it’s limited in numbers and serves as an inflation hedge. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 22:00

• Biden's Troubled Relationship With The Truth… And Consequences
  Biden’s Troubled Relationship With The Truth… And Consequences

  Authored by Andy Puzder via RealClearPolitics.com,

  President Biden’s approval rating has plummeted, and Democrats wonder why. The United States is facing hardships, but hardships alone don’t make a president unpopular. Leaders who are honest about the problems we face and forthright about the solutions they offer tend to do well (think, say, of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan). Unfortunately, that is not the leadership Americans are getting from this president.

  

  Instead, the Biden administration has tried to convince the public of things that are not just untrue but implausible. To note a few, Biden did not (and does not) have a “national strategy” to defeat COVID; our southern border is not “secure;” the Afghan withdrawal was not an “extraordinary success”; the current bout of inflation is neither “temporary” nor “a good thing”; and government spending never takes “the pressure off of inflation.”

  Of course, politicians often overstate things and sometimes outright lie. Nothing new there. It’s the in-your-face nature of the administration’s falsehoods that is stunning.

  For a recent example, take Biden’s efforts to promote his Build Back Better bill. The administration often claims that the legislation really “costs zero dollars” because it is “paid for.” Most Americans realize that paying for something doesn’t make it free. Otherwise, literally everything would be free. Seriously, people get this.

  In fairness, Biden was attempting to state that BBB wouldn’t add to the deficit because taxing the rich would pay for it. But even that claim didn’t pass the smell test. Just about everybody outside of Washington, D.C., knows that government programs are never actually “paid for.” We are already borrowing from our great-grandkids just to cover our current profligate spending.

  So, the Democrats resorted to various accounting tricks and budgetary chicanery to make it appear as though taxing “the rich” would pay the BBB bills. Few were fooled. Analyzing the bill using realistic assumptions, the Congressional Budget Office found that it would result in around $3 trillion in new deficit spending.

  In yet another implausible claim, Biden said that BBB’s massive government spending would take “the pressure off of inflation.” No less an authority than former Clinton and Obama economist Larry Summers warned in February that profligate government spending would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” The Democrats ignored him and passed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief boondoggle. In hindsight, Summers was prescient. In November, he recommended that the administration “not compound errors” it had already made “with far too much fiscal stimulus and overly easy monetary policy” and reject Build Back Better.

  To counter these concerns, Biden claimed that BBB’s massive government spending would bring down inflation because government would pick up the tab for certain household expenses, such as child care. Of course, this ignores the impact that the bill would have on the supply of – and demand for – child care.

  Child care providers are already in short supply. According to Sen. Richard Burr, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the bill would shrink the supply further “by killing off faith-based providers, small family child care homes, [and] kinship care,” while increasing the demand for child care with massive government subsidies. Not surprisingly, a study by the Progressive Peoples Policy Project, a think tank as left-leaning as its name implies, found that the bill would actually increase the cost of child care for middle-class families by about $13,000 per child annually.

  The supply-and-demand dynamic and its impact on inflation seem to be mysteries to the administration – but not to most Americans. According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the average American family will incur an additional $3,500 in expenses this year solely because of already-surging inflation. It’s the kind of thing people notice.

  Of course, the administration made this implausible claim only because the bill needed West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s support to pass. Manchin, however, made it clear that, with inflation already at a 40-year high, he wouldn’t support legislation that added to the deficit or further swelled prices.

  Like most Americans (including Larry Summers), Manchin refused to be fooled. He announced that he won’t support the bill – effectively killing it in its present shape. Rarely deterred by reality, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then announced that the Senate would move forward with a vote on the bill nonetheless.

  Progressives have long lived in a bubble that cuts them off from the concerns of the “deplorables” in “fly-over America.” During the pandemic, the left hermetically sealed that bubble, shielding its leaders from the discontent that runs across political, geographic, racial, and ethnic lines. Otherwise, they would have foreseen the declining popularity of a president who repeatedly makes patently implausible claims and attempts to advance policies at odds with basic common sense.

  The lesson here is not a new one. As someone said long ago: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

  * * *

  Andy Puzder is the former CEO of CKE Restaurants, chairman of the board of 2ndVote Advisers and a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 21:40

• Strategist Explains How A Declining Working-Age Population Can Be An 'Inflationary Force'
  Strategist Explains How A Declining Working-Age Population Can Be An ‘Inflationary Force’

  During an otherwise quiet Holiday weekend, the team at MacroVoices has come through with a new episode of its markets podcast featuring returning guest Jesse Felder, founder of the Felder Report, which offers proprietary research to paying customers. During the interview, Felder offers his perspective on the inflation/disinflation debate that has been raging on MV, while popular inflation indicators take out highs from three or four decades ago.

  But before readers get too bogged down in this all-too-fresh indicators, Felder asserts that – preferring to approach his inflationary outlook from a structural perspective – over the long term, demographic changes in the US could create more headwinds and tailwinds alike.

  For example, the US got a taste of one inflationary dynamic last year when the virus hit, and baby boomers old enough to retire left the workforce en masse, choosing to walk away from the table with as much of their gains from the prior decade as they could. According to Felder, declines in the working population relative to the nonworking population is an “inflationary force”.

  We’ll let Felder explain in his own words:

  “If you just start with demographics, I think the IMF put out a thing, a report, you know, three, four years ago pointing out that demographics in the United States actually globally, everywhere but Japan, you know, we’re seeing these increasing age dependency ratios of you know, more retirees than working population, and that is an inflationary dynamic. I think something, one of the things that people don’t really appreciate, is that in the wake of the financial crisis, I think we had a lot of baby boomers who were forced to stay in the workforce. They weren’t able to retire because their retirement accounts took a hit and so they had to stay in the workforce longer than they otherwise would have kind of artificially increasing the supply of labor for a period of time acting as a disinflationary force. But what we saw with the pandemic was a total reversal of that, where all those folks said, hey, look, my retirement accounts now 300%, whatever front, you know, in the last decade, and I can now afford to retire, and I don’t want to stay at work and get sick. So all those folks retired, and then you had, you know, even further to that degree, a bunch of people who maybe were going to retire 5-10 years from now, who thought you know, what, I’ve just done so well, with my retirement accounts. Why don’t I retire early.”

  “And so we’re seeing this dramatic decline, I think in the working population relative to the non-working and that is an inflationary force, putting pressure on wages. And I think that’s one of the factors we’re seeing right now that’s a secular push. That’s, you know, in place, but it’s been exacerbated by the pandemic.”

  He also warned about the impact of debt as a disinflationary force…

  You know, when you talk about debt as another disinflationary force. I think that’s true for folks like me, and you Erik, who, you know, if we get too indebted, we have to cut back on our spending and hurts demand. But that’s true for everybody but the federal government who can, you know, print money to monetize the debt. I think that’s another thing we’ve seen as part of the pandemic is this, you know, when debt-to-GDP, you know, gets to where it is, it’s typically problematic for countries that can’t, you know, get away with money printing. The United States government has been getting away with it for the past, you know, a couple years now. And obviously, that’s not disinflationary at all to be issuing $4 or $5 trillion dollars of new debt and having the Fed you know, buy it all up is has not been disinflationary, it’s been absolutely inflationary.

  …and the potentially inflationary aspects of economic rule by a handful of massive tech giants – Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta etc – that dominate markets today have seen such profound growth and durability to competition (thanks to their ability to simply buy every company that threatens their market share in any way) that some are beginning to wonder whether they will ever become victim to disruptors, like the first few waves of dotcom-focused tech giants did (who doesn’t remember Netscape?)

  And I think the final thing that Rosie brought up, and I’m a big fan of his work. He talks about disruptive technology. And I think that’s been true for a long time, too. But if you look at what’s happened in the economy, in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer companies. You know, who’s disrupting apple today, who’s disrupting Facebook today. Facebook and Google are maybe a good example of companies who have their finger on the pulse of who in social media is going to potentially disrupt Facebook? Well it’s Instagram then we will just by them. And you know, same thing with Google. And so they’ve been able to make 1000s and 1000s of acquisitions to essentially shore up their position, their monopoly or duopoly positions that have really prevented from disruptive tech from exerting a disinflationary impact in recent years. And I would say, Amazon is probably another example of this. Who’s disrupting Amazon? Nobody. In the pandemic, we saw that you know, sales already off of a huge base, go up 40% or something insane, you know, we’ve never really seen a company of that size, see that type of growth. And they just have such a strong position in the market that they can’t be disrupted. I think we’re seeing this in wages, too, with Amazon, there was a good article in the Wall Street Journal recently, that pointed out that, you know, with Amazon paying $18 starting wage in its warehouses. It’s putting pressure on every other employer across the country to raise wages.

  The interview also included a helpful chart pack that Felder delved into during the Q&A. One indicator he shared that caught our eye is the following chart comparing the S&P 500’s performance with changes in excess liquidity in the economy.

  

  Felder explains what can be a confusing dynamic succinctly and simply: in the wake of the great financial crisis, many baby boomers put off retirement because their portfolios took a hit,

  To help show how excess liquidity is being sucked out of the system, Felder turned to a simple indicator that has become increasingly familiar to us: a comparison in the rate of growth between the M2 money supply and GDP. The purpose of the indicator is it’s believed to be a reliable illustrator of excess liquidity by showing the growth in the money supply that’s due to central bank stimulus vs. real economic activity.

  As Felder’s chart shows, excess liquidity is already being sucked out of the system rapidly already, allowing them to be pushed into yet another policy blunder with potentially severe consequences for the market. Notice the correlation between the indicator and stocks over the past few years. How much longer can this continue without impacting the market?

  Felder also shared this interesting chart of a Nasdaq “Hindenburg” indicator that triggers whenever market breadth collapses, signaling that only a few richly valued stocks are carrying the market on their back, and it’s only a matter of time before they, too, give in.

  The last time we saw this indicator was in the late summer of 2018, just that Q42018 selloff that sent stocks deep into the red just before the holidays, leaving the S&P500 with its most recent annual decline.

  From the highs, that move was a 20% decline. 

  It was seen again in the early months of 2016  and  the summer of 2015 before the flash crash that August. Prior to that, it was also seen in 2007, and before that, it triggered just as the dotcom mania was collapsing.

  

  Felder’s interview and accompanying chart pack, both available on MacroVoices, features more food for thought about Felder’s outlook for the dollar, commodities, precious metals and crypto.

  Listen below:

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 21:20

• RIP, 'Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated'
  RIP, ‘Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated’

  Authored by Matt Welch via Reason.com,

  Farewell to a Biden White House messaging strategy that was terrible long before Omicron…

  

  If you spend too much time observing the way politicians speak, you’ll pick up an almost perceptibly mechanical gear-shift in their heads when the brain-groove reminds them to reproduce an anecdote or talking point they have formulated so many times before. Occasionally the subconscious rebels against the alienating monotony with apologetic prefix clauses like, “That’s why I like to say,” or “I always tell the story that,” but the pre-sets mostly override such human twitches to deliver the desired political result.

  So it was for President Joe Biden’s counterproductive “pandemic of the unvaccinated” slogan, which the White House COVID-19 Response Team introduced in mid-July, and which the president was still regurgitating inaccurately as late as December 14.

  In a local TV interview with News Center 7 in Dayton, Ohio, the president was asked about whether his administration would continue fighting his contested employer vaccine mandates in court. The politician-brain quickly whirred into gear.

  “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated,” Biden emphasized, on the same day that the omicron variant produced a one-day positive-case increase of 16 percent in highly vaccinated New York City. 

  “That’s the problem. And so everybody talks about ‘freedom,’ and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?”

  What about that indeed.

  New York City’s one-shot vaccination rate (of 92 percent for adults, 83 percent for kids between 13 and 17) “rivals any number in the free world,” Politico’s Jack Shafer observed last week, and yet somehow my vaccinated teen and boosted self spent Christmas under quarantine. The fact-checkers over at The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact generously rated Biden’s “vaccinated…do not spread the disease” claim as only “mostly” false, despite epidemiologist quotes like “[the] statement is not accurate,” and “vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people.”

  But the problems with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” message pre-date the variant that rendered it factually ludicrous. On September 16, one week after Biden reversed serial administration promises by announcing an employer vaccine mandate (while using language such as “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us”), science writer Yasmin Tayag penned an Atlantic piece headlined “Stop Calling It a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’“

  “Bullying the unvaccinated into getting their shots isn’t going to work in the long run,” Tayag predicted, in a piece surveying a field of study (behavioral science) to which the White House seems oblivious.

  “The way the mandates are being presented is driving a wedge between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. If the goal is to inoculate enough people to reach herd immunity, this approach may eventually backfire.”

  So how have mandates worked in practice? The New York Times on December 18 published a survey of all 50 states and the country’s largest 100 cities, and concluded that the government orders “have not provided the significant boost to state and local vaccination rates that some experts had hoped for.” To the contrary: “In most locations, the number of adults with at least one shot grew at a slower pace after states and cities announced mandates than it did nationwide in the same time periods.”

  “Mandates might help for people who are just finding it inconvenient, but have no really legitimate reason to not get the vaccine,” Lisa Cooper, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, told the Times.

  “But then you have people who have strong beliefs against it or who really have significant other struggles, and the mandates are not going to do anything for those people.”

  The Times notes that—at least until and unless Biden’s employer mandate passes legal muster—the vast majority of government vaccination orders take place in Democratic-voting, high-vaxxed polities: “In almost all of these states and in all of the counties surrounding the cities with mandates, a majority of the residents voted for President Biden. Statewide mandates tend to be most popular along the West Coast and in the Northeast, whereas states banning some mandates tend to be clustered in the South.”

  So if vaccine mandates aren’t moving the needle on vaccination, what, precisely, are they for? One particularly ungenerous hypothesis is hard to avoid. Rebranding COVID-19 as the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” then targeting that population with punishments for noncompliance, has been a way to scapegoat political opponents and technology companies, while bolstering the sense of virtuousness among the vaxxed.

  Those dynamics were present at the creation of the re-brand. The same week that the White House COVID-19 Response Team began telling vaccinated people that the pandemic was now for those other people, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a “whole-of-society” effort to combat “health misinformation,” then Biden just flat-out accused Facebook and other social media companies of “killing people.”

  Then in the same week that Biden announced his vaccine mandate, he also charged prominent GOP officials with being “cavalier” about whether children lived or died. “Republican governors in states like Texas and Florida are doing everything they can to undermine the public health requirements that keep people safe,” the president tweeted. “They’re playing politics with the lives of their citizens, especially children. I refuse to give in to it.”

  Biden’s entire speech unveiling his vaccine mandate was dripping with irritation for Americans who had yet to get a shot, and for politicians who were not sufficiently on board with his COVID policies. A selection:

  Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated […]

  This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And it’s caused by the fact that despite America having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot.

  And to make matters worse, there are elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19. Instead of encouraging people to get vaccinated and mask up, they’re ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from COVID in their communities. This is totally unacceptable. […]

  That 25 percent [of unvaccinated people] can cause a lot of damage—and they are. The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or [pancreatitis], or cancer. […]

  [W]hat makes it incredibly more frustrating is that we have the tools to combat COVID-19, and a distinct minority of Americans—supported by a distinct minority of elected officials—are keeping us from turning the corner. These pandemic politics, as I refer to, are making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die.

  We cannot allow these actions to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal. […]

  The bottom line: We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.

  The message given here to the vaccinated is mixed bordering on schizophrenic. This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated does not jibe with vaccinated workers need protection from unvaccinated workers. In a speech touting the urgent need for vaccination, Biden is saying that getting vaccinated cannot be a ticket back to normal life until we deal with those foolish anti-vaxxers. Rather than encourage the kind of social cohesion that correlates best with high inoculation rates, the president is telling one bloc of voters it’s OK to be pissed off at the other.

  Writing in The Lancet last month under the headline “Stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified,” epidemiologist Günter Kampf laid out the practical drawbacks to Biden’s approach.

  “People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic,” Kampf wrote.

  “It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatising parts of the population for their skin colour or religion. I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatisation of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.”

  The pandemic of the unvaccinated framing actively encouraged one of the uglier and least productive societal reactions to COVID-19: Making the mere fact of contracting the virus a morality play falling largely along partisan lines. The whole notion that by “doing everything right,” and “following all the rules,” you will be righteously spared, unlike those anti-science people this summer down south.

  That self-flattering narrative is collapsing, now that (as predicted) a stubbornly seasonal/regional virus has hit media/Democratic centers for a third consecutive winter. “Thousands who ‘followed the rules’ are about to get covid,” ran the headline on a Washington Post “Wellness” column last week. “They shouldn’t be ashamed.” Lovely sentiment, that.

  If the public health goal is to prevent unnecessary deaths by persuading fence-sitters to take the life-saving vaccine, there are many strategies that strike me as more potentially effective than scapegoating, marginalizing, and punishing a population that’s already disproportionately suffering from the disease. Starting with maybe studying, you know, behavioral science.

  Outgoing National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins did an interview with NPR this month that included this startling admission: “I do think we need to understand better how—in the current climate—people make decisions….To have now 60 million people still holding off of taking advantage of lifesaving vaccines is pretty unexpected. It does make me, at least, realize, ‘Boy, there are things about human behavior that I don’t think we had invested enough into understanding.'” Boy!

  Next, politicians and public health officials might consider telling the whole relevant truth as they know it, rather than the partial bowdlerized truth as they mold it to shape public behavior.

  It’s not just Biden busting the fact-check-o-meters; it’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky, as Jacob Sullum pointed out just today: “Time and again during the COVID-19 pandemic…Walensky has proven herself untrustworthy. The latest example is Walensky’s slippery response to criticism of a study that she has repeatedly cited to justify the CDC’s controversial recommendation that K–12 schools require students to wear face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19.”

  Public health officials have been unreliable narrators about the science of masks, the science of social distancing, the science of outdoor transmission, the science of outdoor dining, and the science of reopening, almost always in the direction of favoring their preferred restrictions. Responding specifically and factually to expressed reasons for vaccine hesitancy is not only more moral than compulsion and demonization, it might well be more effective at the stated goal.

  This doesn’t mean sugarcoating the vastly different outcomes among the Covid-positive vaxxed and unvaxxed—far from it. This graph is far more compelling to me than sitting through yet another rambly Joe Biden speech:

  

  But the above should also serve a message to us vaccinated Americans: It looks like, on balance, we’re going to come out of this omicron infection all right. Maybe instead of directing rage at a subset of our fellow countrymen who are getting seriously ill in disproportionate numbers, we should personally live as though we are in an endemic, and otherwise try to persuade our recalcitrant loved ones that this mild cough and week-plus indoors is a damn sight better than the alternative. Politicians might not be able to shut off their internal machinery of rhetorical division, but weren’t you supposed to be better than all that?

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 21:00

• Hollywood Elites Panic-Buy Armored-Cars And Safe-Rooms Amid Rising Violent Crime
  Hollywood Elites Panic-Buy Armored-Cars And Safe-Rooms Amid Rising Violent Crime

  After years of rising crime in Los Angeles, elites in wealthy neighborhoods are finally panicking about the recent string of high-profile retail robberies and home burglaries. Experts say wealthy individuals are purchasing bulletproof cars, safe rooms, employing armed guards, and even constructing walls with barbed wire around their properties.

  The issue of violent crime is nothing new to Los Angeles, but a spillover to upscale neighborhoods has put elites on edge. The Hollywood Reporter reports agencies who provide private security are seeing increasing demand for private patrols. 

  Since August, Rising S Company, a company that builds underground bunkers, has installed 13 safe rooms, nine safe doors, two underground bunker shelters, and two window fortifications across Brentwood Park, Beverly Park, and Paradise Cove. This compares with seven safe rooms in California in the last 2.5 years. 

  

  Estate manager Bryan Peele, president and founder of the L.A.-based Estate Managers Coalition, said his clients have “fully equipped safe rooms that they can live in for a few days, if necessary, that are completely hard-wired with phone cables, Internet, everything.”

  One of Peele’s clients has three bulletproof cars and wears fake Rolexes. “This guy will take a $200,000 Rolex and copy it, using stainless steel and other metals, so it looks like the original but costs maybe $2,000-$3,000 per watch. So, in the event that it’s stolen, the client is out a lot less money,” he said. 

  Many upscale homes are installing more cameras, constructing fences with barbed wire, and employing 24-7 security details that will protect them from once their private jet touches down to their mansions. 

  Some people are even taking firearm and self-defense classes so they will know how to defend their family and or themselves in an emergency. 

  Violent crime rises from an alarming cocktail of criminal justice reforms. For instance, thieves can steal up to $950 in goods and receive a slap on the wrist, the equivalent of a traffic ticket. Criminal gangs have taken advantage of relaxed laws and have recently gone on a wave of retailer smash and grab robberies. There have also been high-profile robberies of elites. 

  When philanthropist Jacqueline Avant was murdered in her Beverly Hills mansion earlier this month, it was a wake-up call for the community.

  “Almost immediately after the Avant shooting, it’s been crazy busy. We have increased operations in that area tremendously,” said Aaron Jones, CEO of International Protective Security. “I have a lot of regular VIPs; when people call, I get on the phone with them. We understand the urgency of what’s going on. It’s nonstop.”

  Criminal justice reforms caused all this madness. Law and order needs to be restored or people will start moving out of the area. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 20:40

• Woman Charged With Assault After Punching, Spitting-On Unmasked Passenger During Delta Flight
  Woman Charged With Assault After Punching, Spitting-On Unmasked Passenger During Delta Flight

  By Allen Zhong of the Epoch Times

  A woman who was recorded in a viral video punching and spitting an unmasked male passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight was charged in Georgia.

  The woman who was identified as Patricia Yannet Cornwall was charged with assaulting by striking, beating, or wounding; a crime which is punishable by a fine and/or up to one year in jail if found guilty. Records from the Walton County Sheriff’s Office show Cornwall is a California resident.

  According to the complaint and sworn affidavit from FBI Task Force Officer Rudyard Jarrard, the incident happened during the flight from Tampa, Florida, to Atlanta, Georgia. The disputes were started over a beverage cart blocking the aisle.

  “Who am I, Rosa Parks?” Cornwall responded when the flight attendant asked her to find an open seat until beverage service was completed. The male passenger—who is identified as R.S.M. in the complaint—seemed to think that Cornwall’s response was inappropriate, and told her that she “isn’t black … this isn’t Alabama and this isn’t a bus.”

  Cornwall then turned on the male passenger and ended up striking his head with a closed fist and causing visible injury. She also spat in the passenger’s face and head area. She was taken by the flight security and restrained for the remainder of the flight, reads the complaint.

  Cornwall was released on Monday after a $20,000 bond was posted, court records show. A federal public defender, Mildred Geckler Dunn, was assigned as her attorney.

  

  The complaint doesn’t mention any disputes over masking during the altercation. However, a video clip that captured the event shows an argument about masks being part of the feud.

  Delta flight from Tampa to Atlanta got crazy‼️ pic.twitter.com/I9BZUKv3LB

  — ATL Uncensored | Atlanta News (@ATLUncensored) December 25, 2021

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

  Cornwall can be seen in the video—with her mask under her chin—telling the male passenger “Wear your [sic] mask?”

  “I’m eating,” the passenger can be heard responding.

  “Sit down, Karen!” the passenger can be heard shouting at Cornwall once during the video.

  R.S.M. and at least another passenger reminded Cornwall to wear her mask during the event. He can be heard swearing while telling Cornwall to wear her mask.

  Cornwall punched him right after.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 20:20

• Omicron Has Lower Hospitalization Rate, Epidemiologists Confirm
  Omicron Has Lower Hospitalization Rate, Epidemiologists Confirm

  Epidemiologists were anxious as they awaited the next batch of data about the omicron variant, but already it’s pretty clear that the number of hospitalizations from the so-called “omicron wave” is far below the level from earlier waves, including last year’s winter wave.

  As Bloomberg reports, the seven-day average of new cases in the US hit 206,577 on Sunday, roughly 18% lower than the all-time high recorded on Jan. 11… Meanwhile, hospitalizations rose to a seven-day average of 8,964, only half their earlier peak.

  “We are seeing exponential increases in cases, and a much lower increase in hospitalizations and deaths,” said Albert Ko, chair of the department of epidemiology and microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health.

  And it’s not just in the US: London has also seen lower hospitalization numbers during its latest wave, as data shared by Dr. Scott Gottlieb show.

  London and New York City: New Covid cases and New Covid Hospitalizations – #Omicron versus prior waves. On a relative basis, Hospitalizations are well below what was seen in prior Covid waves. pic.twitter.com/FaUyySGuLO

  — Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) December 28, 2021

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  This isn’t exactly a shocker: three studies published last week show that hospitalization rates for omicron have been far lower than with previous strains.

  Scientists even attempted to determine exactly how much of the decline in hospitalization rates has been due to growing levels of natural immunity; and even when patients do end up in the hospital with omicron, they appear to spend less time there.

  On a relative basis, Hospitalizations are well below what was seen in prior Covid waves.

  “It appears there is less risk of hospitalized disease across the board, but we have to be a little bit careful about interpreting that,”  said Jeffrey Morris, professor and director of the biostatistics division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

  And that’s not the only new piece of data that might help put the public’s mind at ease:

  The most recent spike was purely “technical” in nature.

  1/7

  On Monday the number of COVID cases in the U.S. spiked as labs reopened after the holiday. While this is more a technical spike due to labs catching up from previous days, the seven-day moving average is on the verge of making a new high. pic.twitter.com/KrD9gM4lqM

  — Jim Bianco biancoresearch.eth (@biancoresearch) December 28, 2021

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  Still, 2MM Americans have been confirmed infected in recent weeks, sending the effective unemployment rate surging.

  3/7

  This chart shows 2.04M tested positive in the past 10-days. If we assume 75% are in the workforce (few under 18 test positive), then 1.04% of the workforce is currently “out” with a positive test.

  So, the effective unemployment rate just spiked 1.04% in the last 10-days. pic.twitter.com/67ZvkPHoDk

  — Jim Bianco biancoresearch.eth (@biancoresearch) December 28, 2021

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  But it wouldn’t be Xmas without the Grinch, and unfortunately for those who believe the peak of this latest wave might be right around the corner, Bianco’s research suggests otherwise:

  7/7

  Europe has been struggling with tens of millions of lost workdays as their positives surge and surge and it has still have not peaked.

  Many think US positives will peak in the next 2- to 3-weeks … this has not been the case in Europe, and the US is ~6-WEEKS behind them. pic.twitter.com/KdmZ82xuNd

  — Jim Bianco biancoresearch.eth (@biancoresearch) December 28, 2021

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  If Europe’s path is followed by US, we still have six more weeks before this exponential wave peaks.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 20:00

• The Net Impact Of Child Tax Credit Expansion Is More Inflation
  The Net Impact Of Child Tax Credit Expansion Is More Inflation

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

  Biden claims Build Back Better won’t add to inflation. We strongly disagree…

  

  The Anti-Poverty, Targeting, and Labor Supply Effects of the Proposed Child Tax Credit Expansion

  The University of Chicago investigates the The Anti-Poverty, Targeting, and Labor Supply Effects of the Proposed Child Tax Credit Expansion emphasis mine.

  We estimate the anti-poverty, targeting, and labor supply effects of the expansion by linking survey data with administrative tax and government program data which form part of the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID). Initially ignoring any behavioral responses, we estimate that the expansion of the CTC would reduce child poverty by 34% and deep child poverty by 39%. 

  The paragraph look good if you stop reading there and miss the key phrase “initially ignoring any behavioral responses”. 

  Reality then surfaces.

  We then simulate anti-poverty effects accounting for labor supply responses. By replacing the TCJA CTC (which contained substantial work incentives akin to the EITC) with a universal basic income-type benefit, the CTC expansion reduces the return to working at all by at least $2,000 per child for most workers with children.

  Relying on elasticity estimates consistent with mainstream simulation models and the academic literature, we estimate that this change in policy would lead 1.5 million workers (constituting 2.6% of all working parents) to exit the labor force.

  The decline in employment and the consequent earnings loss would mean that child poverty would only fall by 22% and deep child poverty would not fall at all with the CTC expansion.

  In short, people would drop out of the labor force content with $3,000 or $3,600 per child (up from $2,000 per child).

  Moreover, there was no means test on this.

  As BBB is currently written, the money would be handed out willy-nilly.

  Beware of Expansions!

  Press Secretary Jen  Psaki moaned “Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone.” 

  Manchin is not ending the program. He is willing to let the emergency tax credit expire and return the amount to where it was.

  One of Manchin’s fears is precisely that programs never end. The second is they are not paid for. And the third is the program will add to inflation.

  If Manchin OK’d BBB he would be under the same pressure a year from now, something he wants to avoid.  

  Meanwhile, at a time when labor shortages abound, there would be increased incentive for people to drop out of the labor force.

  Add it all up and it’s impossible to not get inflation out of this mess. 

  Incentivizing people to not work is the last thing we need right now.

  *  *  *

  Like these reports? If so, please Subscribe to MishTalk Email Alerts.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 19:40

• NFL Legend John Madden Unexpectedly Died Tuesday Morning
  NFL Legend John Madden Unexpectedly Died Tuesday Morning

  According to a press statement by the NFL, Hall of Fame coaching and broadcasting legend John Madden died unexpectedly Tuesday morning. He was 85 years old. 

  Madden is one of the most iconic figures in NFL history with a 103-32-7 record. 

  

  The NFL announced the passing of Madden on Tuesday evening:

  Earlier today we received the sad news that the great John Madden died unexpectedly this morning. He was 85.

  “On behalf of the entire NFL family, we extend our condolences to Virginia, Mike, Joe and their families,” said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

  “We all know him as the Hall of Fame coach of the Oakland Raiders and broadcaster who worked for every major network, but more than anything, he was a devoted husband, father and grandfather. 

  “Nobody loved football more than Coach. He was football. He was an incredible sounding board to me and so many others. There will never be another John Madden, and we will forever be indebted to him for all he did to make football and the NFL what it is today.”

  Memorial service information will be announced when available.

  Madden was the youngest head coach in pro football when Al Davis hired him to coach the Oakland Raiders, and he led them to a Super Bowl title while having so much success that he still has the all-time highest winning percentage among all coaches who won at least 100 games.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 19:30

• Goldman's Head Of Hedge Fund Coverage: The Inconvenient Truth Is That The Era Of "Irresponsible Bullishness" Is Over
  Goldman’s Head Of Hedge Fund Coverage: The Inconvenient Truth Is That The Era Of “Irresponsible Bullishness” Is Over

  As excerpted from from the weekly markets/macro comment by Tony Pasquariello, Global Head of Hedge Fund Coverage at Goldman Sachs

  I went back and read a batch of emails that I sent over the course of this year. it’s a humbling exercise, but I think valuable — it illustrates the broad direction of things, as well as how much noise, clutter and emotion we absorb along the way. in the doing, you also realize what gets traction (references to coffee, baseball trivia and my grandparents 1) and what doesn’t land quite as well (you’re tired of New England sports references, I know). In the end, we should give thanks, as 2021 will go down as one of those extraordinary years, certainly in the US: record M&A … record new issue … record retail activity … all-time highs in the equity market, the housing market and the digital space … long may it run.

  some parting thoughts on 2021:

  1. the year began with a marriage of fiscal and monetary policies the likes of which the world had never seen; the year ends with a potentially failed BBB bill and a central bank that’s quickly getting out of the bond buying business. I’ll get into the implications of this shift in the 2022 section.

  2. looking back, despite so much intoxication at the time, it’s notable how many things topped out in Q1 — not only in the reflation foot race (the high close on 10-year note yields was 1.74% on March 31st), but also in highly valued tech names (see GSXUNPTC), the renewables space (GSXURNEW) and SPACs (GSCBSPC1). in a way, it’s remarkable that Q1 marked peak exuberance, yet the broader market continued to make higher highs for many months thereafter; again, this is largely to the credit of the US mega cap tech names, who yet again beat the pants off most every other item on the global menu.

  3. what to say of COVID? it faded, at times, from the market narrative, but kept coming back in problematic ways. I’ll go back to a comment from July on Delta, which hopefully proves to be a cut-and-paste for Omicron: “to this point in the local move I’d argue the role of the variants has one been of concern around economic impingement — relative to very high growth expectations — rather than a game change; as we look ahead, the UK reopening experience could be the perfect stress test for whether stocks should discount something more than that.”

  4. the year featured a painful disjunction between “the stock market” and “the market of stocks.” you don’t need me to say it, but I can’t recall a year where headline market returns so hugely belied the difficulty of managing professional, levered funds along the path. even before you consider that S&P has added nearly 1,000 index points this year on a Sharpe Ratio that approaches 2.0, here’s an overly simple way to frame it: if you take the YTD total return of the GS Hedge Fund VIP basket … and you triple it … you still fall short of S&P 500.

  5. if there was ever a doubt about who wields power in the stock market, the US retail investor stole the show in 2021. following a year that saw more inflows than the prior 25 years combined, to what extent this cohort remains in the fight is a major open question for early 2022. in general, for financial actors of all stripes — households, corporations, sovereigns, your alma mater — I tend to think one of the big unknowns for next year is simply: where does all the capital go?

  6. on many days, the options market overpowered the underlying cash equity market. whether it was short-dated upside gamma grabbed by retail investors on their favorite single stocks, or record demand for index protection by professional investors, at various turns we saw the clear footprints of plain old calls and puts on the broader market. to recall a line from the great Emanuel Derman: “the central dogma of derivatives is that causality flows from underliers to derivatives, but that hasn’t been true for a long time.”

  7. in January of this year, headline CPI registered +1.4% y/y … the last print was +6.8% … and, it’s not crazy to think that number will be upwards of 7% come January. if you had told me at the start of the year how the inflation narrative would pan out, I certainly wouldn’t have predicted 10-year note yields of just 1.48% … nor that gold would be — gasp — down 6% … and, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I would have predicted that S&P would make a high over 4700. I’ll again reference a quote from Morgan Housel: “we think about and are taught about money in ways that are too much like physics (with rules and laws) and not enough like psychology (with emotions and nuance). physics isn’t controversial. it’s guided by laws. finance is different. it’s guided by people’s behaviors.”

  Thinking ahead to 2022:

  1. the big ball: the setup for risk taking is changing. I can no longer stand up and say that the outlook for growth is totally spectacular … nor can I say that both fiscal and monetary policy is utterly unbounded. so, the inconvenient truth is we’ve passed the near-perfect points of peak activity and peak liquidity. and, when you go from that remarkable brew to something, well, “less great” or “different,” I think it has to matter to asset markets — particularly when the base line is the COVID era produced a Sharpe ratio on 60/40 portfolios which is 3x the long-term average. at the very least, it’s harder to see the upside tail as clearly from here, therefore the era of “irresponsible bullishness” is probably over for now.

  2. following an era where the total return of S&P has been positive in 12 of the past 13 years, does that mean it’s game over for the bull market? with appreciation for the prior point and a lowering of expectations, I’m not inclined to ditch Old Turkey just yet and I think there are still good macro fundamentals to anchor to. from here, the bull case is now predicated on the 1st derivative:

  1. financial conditions are still ridiculously, if inappropriately, easy — note that US 10yr real rates are 15bps lower today than they were before the PFE news last year;
  2. the underlying economy retains significant strength into next year, and a +3.5% GDP forecast is still well above-trend;
  3. if S&P earnings growth 8% next year, the index has significant underlying ballast.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 19:20

• Just 3% Of CEOs Say COVID-19 Is Their Top Worry: Report
  Just 3% Of CEOs Say COVID-19 Is Their Top Worry: Report

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

  While the fear of getting fired has risen sharply among C-suite executives due to various disruptive forces buffeting their businesses, a mere 3 percent identified COVID-19 as their top worry, according to the CEO of management consultancy AlixPartners.

  

  In a Dec. 27 interview with Yahoo Finance, AlixPartners CEO Simon Freakley previewed some of the topline findings of the forthcoming 2022 AlixPartners Disruption Index, which surveyed over 3,000 senior executives globally across multiple industries to find out what keeps them awake at night.

  Freakley told the outlet that AlixPartners’ third annual disruption survey, due for release in January, will show that nearly three-quarters of CEOs feel their jobs are at risk.

  “The 72 percent—almost three-quarters—of CEOs feel that their jobs are in jeopardy, a massive 20 point jump since last year, is really significant,” Freakley said.

  Last year’s disruption index showed that 51 percent C-suite executives worried about losing their jobs due to the disruption facing their industries, while 25 percent identified COVID-19 as their top concern. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2.

  “When we asked people what was keeping them awake at night, COVID didn’t even make the top 10,” Freakley said of this year’s findings, adding that pandemic anxiety came in at number 13.

  “In the top 10 were issues like the impact of artificial intelligence in their sectors, governance issues coming from new regulation, environmental issues, how they were responsible but still profitable, all of these concerns are in the top 10,” he added.

  The prior 2021 disruption index showed that new or evolving competition or business models was the main worry (34 percent), followed by technological advances as well as data privacy and security issues (33 percent each), and automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics (32 percent).

  Freakley said that, while it remains a concern, COVID-19 has been relegated to a more routine disruptive force.

  “I think the learning from this has been that COVID, whilst an enormous disruption in our times, is just another disruption,” Freakley told Yahoo Finance. “There are many, many disruptions hitting businesses being managed by executive teams. This is just another one.”

  At the same time, a whopping 94 percent of CEOs told AlixPartners for the 2022 survey that they feel their business models must fundamentally change over the next three years for them to stay relevant in their respective markets.

  While there has been no shortage of concern expressed by policymakers and public health officials about the pandemic generally, and the spread of the highly-contagious Omicron variant specifically, Freakley’s remarks suggest executives have become more adept at managing the disruptive impact of the outbreak.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 19:00

• TikTok Promoting "Proud Groomer Teacher" Videos
  TikTok Promoting “Proud Groomer Teacher” Videos

  Rod Dreher at The American Conservative details the disturbing trend of school teachers openly bragging on popular social media platforms about indoctrinating young children in their classes with transgender and “sexual rights” instruction. “Call it confidence, or call it arrogance, but there are some young schoolteachers who brag on TikTok about telling the little kids in their class all about transgenderism and gender theory,” Dreher writes.

  It comes also as a number of media reports in the US and UK have correlated the amount of time children spend online consuming content on apps like TikTok and their willingness to “come out” as a different gender, at increasingly young ages. One recent Daily Mail article observes that “Campaigners have accused TikTok of helping children to be ‘brainwashed’ by hosting viral social-media videos that promote changing sex as ‘cool’.”

  “TikTok signed a partnership earlier this year with Stonewall, the controversial [LGBT] rights charity, to promote this material” ⁦@StephenNolan⁩

  Children are being ‘brainwashed’ by TikTok videos on ‘cool’ trans surgery | Daily Mail Online https://t.co/EvOo4xiAWA

  — Hackney Terven (@NoShirleyNo) December 27, 2021

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  “Material posted by transgender influencers on the social networking service – in which they provide advice on transitioning and accessing hormone therapies – has been seen by millions of young viewers,” the report continues. 

  The phenomenon is fueling a ‘social contagion’ of pressure to persuade young people that they were not ‘born in the right body’, the report continues:

  “Some parents are concerned the involvement of TikTok, which became the UK’s most downloaded app last year, is fueling a ‘social contagion’ of pressure on impressionable youngsters and the rise in teenagers who are identifying as trans.”

  And now in many instances public school teachers are very openly boasting on their private channels that they are going after the young in their classrooms and online. Or as Rod Dreher sarcastically describes, these are “proud groomer teachers”…

  Preschool teacher 😳 pic.twitter.com/Rp3uSLOnfP

  — Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 27, 2021

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  My politics are very simple

  People like this should be fired, rendered unemployable, and everyone like them should be terrified of having conversations about “gender and sexuality” with your kids behind your back because they would be next https://t.co/p2CAbYEoCK

  — Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) December 27, 2021

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  And more…

  This is who you entrust your kids with. She gets her validation from 10 year olds saying the right pronoun pic.twitter.com/EQsaQeD415

  — Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 24, 2021

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  In Douglas Murray’s landmark book The Madness of Crowds, he wrote about “the increasing number of concessions to any and all trans demands by figures in authority.”

  

  Murray observed that already in 2019… “In online culture it is not at all unusual for the taking of hormones to be turned into an absurdly easy and consequence-free exercise. On YouTube, Instagram and other sites there are countless people who say that they are trans and who push the idea that you might be too.” 

  He noted in the book: “In such videos testosterone injections become known as ‘T’ or ‘man juice’. Some of these people who are transitioning in real time become celebrities in their own right.”

  Kristin Pitzen, a teacher for @nmusd in Orange County, Calif., recorded herself on TikTok talking about how she took down the US flag & has her students pledge allegiance to the LGBTQ BLM trans flag. https://t.co/uE0DSERpCq

  — Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) August 29, 2021

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  And back to Rod Dreher’s commentary, he highlights the woefully underreported fact that…

  TikTok signed a partnership earlier this year with Stonewall, the controversial lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights charity, to promote this material.

  Dreher then underscores, “TikTok is owned indirectly by the Chinese government, which this year began restricting LGBT social media material for its own people. Make of this what you will.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 18:40

• Oil Market Year In Review: The Big Storage Unwind Of 2021 And Looking Forward
  Oil Market Year In Review: The Big Storage Unwind Of 2021 And Looking Forward

  By Ryan Fitzmaurice of Rabobank

  Summary

  • Oil is set to end the year at the top of the pack with respect to commodity sector returns

  • A group of traders categorized as “Other Reportables” were the big buyers of Brent this year

  • Unwind trades related to storage plays were a key driver of WTI positioning and price in 2021

  Top of the pack

  As we approach the final trading days of 2021, we felt now was a good time to review the oil price formation this past year as well as the key drivers behind the historic annual gains.

  Ironically, the impressive gains come on the heels of a terrible 2020 which saw oil prices trade into the low teens and even briefly negative in the case of WTI. As it stands though, the petroleum sector is up 55% for 2021 and is set to end the year at the top of the pack with respect to commodity sector returns. Further to that end, this year will mark the largest annual gain for the Brent crude index since the late 1990s. Interestingly, the aggressive buyers behind this year’s rally are not the usual suspects as money managers were net sellers of oil futures over the course of the year. That’s not to say money managers were bearish crude oil, as that was not necessarily the case either. In fact, the commonly used quantitative signals were heavily weighted toward the bullish end of the spectrum for much of the year, such as oil trend, momentum, and carry.

  On the flip side, the US Dollar strongly appreciated, and oil market volatility was elevated at different points in time, causing asset managers to reduce oil futures holdings to compensate for the currency and volatility shifts. As it turns out, a lesser-known group of speculators categorized as “Other Reportables” were the big buyers of ICE Brent futures this year. For reference, this category of trader has emerged as a powerful market force in recent years and has distinctly different trading behavior from the heavily momentum-driven managed money category. Nonetheless, “Other Reportables” bought an impressive 250k contracts over the past 52 weeks, taking the other side of the managed money liquidation selling, in addition to all the selling from swap dealers and commercial interests. As for the Nymex WTI contract, it was a slightly different scenario with commercial storage trade unwinds dominating the buying interest throughout most of the year while both money managers and “Other Reportables” were net sellers of the US benchmark.

  

  The big storage unwind of 2021

  As we just noted, commercial storage traders were the big buyers of the Nymex WTI contract in 2021. This was not just a 2021 story though and to fully understand one needs to goes further back in time to the dark days of the early pandemic when oil prices were crashing on the threat of breaching physical storage limits amid widespread lockdowns and even a brief OPEC market share war. At the time, oil calendar spreads were in “contango” and blowing out to historic proportions, creating an enormous opportunity for those market participants with the right storage and logistical assets. In essence, an extremely attractive and virtually risk-free return could be made by storing physical crude oil, given the ability to sell futures forward, effectively locking in a huge spread above the cost of financing and leasing fees. Naturally, storage filled up fast in that environment, nearly reaching maximum capacity at the peak. Importantly, a great deal of futures were sold forward to hedge this enormous build up in inventory. In fact, this hedging pressure undoubtedly contributed to the selloff witnessed during that period. As we now know though, conditions changed rapidly in 2021, and a huge drawdown in crude stocks occurred as global economies reopened and as crude supplies tightened as a result of OPEC+ discipline.

  Furthermore, the forward curves for both crude oil benchmarks shifted from a historic “contango” in 2020, to a strong “backwardation” in 2021, as can be seen in Figure 3. This abrupt shift in fundamentals and curve structure reversed the favorable conditions for storing oil and, as such, commercial traders sold down inventory and unwound “short” hedges in the futures market for much of the year. In fact, this dynamic can be seen in Figure 4 with the CFTC Commercial “Short” positioning for Nymex WTI being reduced in conjunction with the inventory draws. Furthermore, the shift from a deep “contango” to a rather steep “backwardation” dramatically improved the backdrop for oil and commodity index investors as a result of the attractive roll-yield on offer for much of 2021. Further to that end, the WTI index is up 55% on the year, with the increase in spot prices accounting for roughly 46% of the gains and with roll-yield adding a meaningful 9% or so depending on the exact timing of rolls. As is clear from this year, roll-yield is a significant contributor to commodity futures market returns and its long-term impacts cannot be overstated.

  

  Looking Forward

  Looking forward, oil markets are heading into 2022 with strong momentum, trend, and carry signals as it currently stands. Further to that end, money managers have plenty of dry power at hand to buy oil futures following a year of net liquidation, as a result of a stronger US Dollar and elevated market volatility.

  As such, we expect these two factors to play an outsized role for oil markets in the coming year and a reversal in either or both should lead to increased oil buying from money managers. In addition, inflation concerns were a key driver of a resurgence in commodity index flows in 2021, and we suspect this trend to continue well into 2022 and beyond.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 18:20

• Russia Mocks Woke American Snowflakes With Christmas Diversity Guide
  Russia Mocks Woke American Snowflakes With Christmas Diversity Guide

  As America’s institutions continue to slide deeper and deeper into wokeism, and attempts to resist the #resitance are met with cancel campaigns and authoritarianism, all that’s left at this point is parody.

  

  To that end, the Russian state-sponsored RT has put together a two-minute clip mocking everything that the American left has become with a “Christmas Tolerance-Diversity Guide 2022,” which trolls the US with everything from feminized cuckold husbands to transgender snowmen, to culturally appropriating a reindeer.

  Watch:

  Russia knows how to troll 😂 👌🏻 pic.twitter.com/bhnyI5ut6d

  — Matt Davio (@MissTrade) December 27, 2021

  Perhaps US state-sponsored Radio Free Liberty can throw something together mocking Russians for functional alcoholism or how their hotties turn into babushkas seemingly overnight… but unfortunately the left can’t meme. And, of course, it might offend someone.

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  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 12/28/2021 – 18:00

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