Today’s News 2nd January 2022

• CCP Extending "3 Warfares" Strategy Into Space: Expert
  CCP Extending “3 Warfares” Strategy Into Space: Expert

  Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times,

  A Chinese robot trundles about in the dust. It collects rock samples, measures chemical compounds, and observes craters never before seen by humankind. It’s beyond the reach of U.S. sensors. It’s beyond the rule of international laws and norms. It’s on a mission.

  

  It’s on the dark side of the moon.

  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been operating Yutu-2 on the far side of Luna since 2019. Ostensibly part of the CCP’s lunar exploration program, rovers such as Yutu-2 are preparing the way for the construction of a new robotic research base on the moon. That base, in turn, will prepare the way for a crewed moon landing and a new lunar base managed jointly by China and Russia.

  The exploration phase of this process, of which Yutu-2 is a part, is planned to extend through 2025 with six more missions conducted by China and Russia. Following that, construction on the base is expected to last until at least 2035, with full operational capacity being achieved by 2036.

  The ambition piques the interest of scientists, ever hungry for new knowledge about Earth’s only moon. The secrecy shrouding the project, however, unnerves strategists who don’t see this little rover as merely one small step for mankind, but as one giant leap for Chinese military capabilities.

  Indeed, some experts believe that Yutu-2’s lunar rock collection isn’t only a continuation of Sino–U.S. competition, but might actually provide the keys to victory in a future war.

  

  Space Is a Warfighting Domain

  Michael Listner is an attorney of a very peculiar sort. He specializes in space policy and has, for some years, led the publication of “The Précis,” a legal newsletter that examines the basis of space law and its ramifications for international policy in every field from business to national security.

  He says the CCP is extending its “Three Warfares” strategy into space. This vast new frontier will be central to the regime’s campaigns of media aggrandizement, the subject of psychological warfare, and, vitally, the centerpiece of new legal battles that will reshape the international order as China seeks to claim the United States’ global hegemon status for its own.

  The strategy, he said, is designed to undermine and perhaps defeat the enemy without firing a shot.

  “Space is a warfighting domain,” Listner said. “It’s going to be part of the struggle and it’s going to be part of a future conflict.”

  “They are fighting on all these fronts right now,” Listner added of the CCP’s three warfares strategy in space. “In fact, I really look at it as preparing the battlefield.”

  That effort to shape the battlefield, central to any military, is particularly meaningful to Chinese military strategists who, since at least the fifth century B.C., have studied the writings of the eminent philosopher of war Sun Tzu, who argued that preparing the battlefield was the means of mastering the enemy.

  As such, it’s feared that the Chinese regime will effectively ensure that should conflict break out, it has the strategic advantage by preparing a favorable legal landscape, positioning assets in orbit, and building alliances in its space operations.

  The reason for the continuation of this effort on the moon is simple enough: America can’t work without space.

  “The American dependence and reliance on space is almost absolute,” said Paul Crespo, president of the Center for American Defense Studies.

  “From communications to banking to air and ground travel and GPS, our economy, society, and military cannot survive without U.S. space dominance.”

  Crespo, a Marine veteran who served in the Defense Intelligence Agency, has spent years examining the CCP’s malign influence abroad and its efforts to degrade and undermine its adversaries through dual-use technologies and legal warfare.

  Both Crespo and Listner fear that the moon will be China’s next “nine-dash line,” and that it will be used to bend the rule of law to the CCP’s advantage, just as it has in the South China Sea.

  The Chinese regime claims about 85 percent of the disputed South China Sea demarcated by its nine-dash line, a claim that was rejected by a 2016 international tribunal. Several other countries also lay claim to parts of the waterway.

  Despite the ruling, Beijing has built military outposts on artificial islands and reefs in the region, and deployed coast guard ships and Chinese fishing boats to intimidate foreign vessels, block access to waterways, and seize shoals and reefs.

  Experts fear the CCP will use its moon and space infrastructure to similarly box out competition and control the happenings of the region, in violation of international laws and norms.

  “The CCP has proven it has no respect for international law or norms, and is willing to bully, threaten, coerce and push its way into any place it deems vital to its strategic goals,” Crespo said.

  “That’s crystal clear with its illegal expansion into, and claims on, most of the South China Sea.”

  “This certainly will be even more true for China in space where the norms are far less established and codified.”

  The United States’ response to CCP space adventurism has been mixed.

  During the administration of President Donald Trump, the nation took a hardline stance and sought to outrace the CCP to the moon. Indeed, the Artemis Accords were initially designed to guide those nations that were to partake in the Artemis Program, a U.S.-led effort to establish a base on the moon.

  Trump’s Space Policy Directive-1, likewise, sought to “lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.”

  To accommodate these ambitions, NASA attempted to step up its original goal of establishing a moon presence from 2028 to 2024. That date was quickly pushed back to 2025, however. Since then, NASA has changed course again, and slated 2025 as the earliest date for a U.S. flight around the moon, but which won’t land on the moon.

  

  A Long March 5B rocket lifts off from the Wenchang launch site on China’s Hainan island on May 5, 2020. Another variant of the Long March rocket was used to get China’s hypersonic missile into orbit in July. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

  Usurping the Advantage

  The moon race has the potential to revolutionize international relations more than any other facet of Sino–American competition. When it comes to dictating what the law is beyond the earth’s atmosphere, Crespo and Listner believe that who gets there first wins.

  “It’s all really about great power competition,” Listner said.

  “The general consensus about great power competition is who’s going to eventually make the rules in an international arena. In other words, who’s going to have the most influence in shaping what’s legal and what the worldview looks like in the next few decades.”

  Listner described the struggle between the United States and China for influence in shaping the world and its norms as one of competing visions, in which two radically different ways of understanding and operating in the world are being pitted against one another.

  That struggle, he said, is playing out in space.

  “Right now, there are two competing visions,” Listner said.

  “One is the Artemis Accords, which the Trump administration started.”

  “The Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China countered with their own competing vision, called the International Lunar Research station.”

  The Artemis Accords, Listner said, are a framework for international cooperation regarding the exploration and use of Luna, Mars, and other astronomical objects. The effort is based largely on the U.N. Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and seeks to affirm peaceful cooperation, promote interoperability, and register objects in space with uniform standards.

  The Outer Space Treaty currently has 111 signatories, including China and Russia. The Artemis Accords, first signed in 2020, has 14 signatories; China and Russia didn’t sign, viewing the effort as a commercial agreement needlessly favorable to the United States.

  The International Lunar Research Station, on the other hand, is the CCP and Russia’s effort to wrest international space leadership away from the United States’ NASA, and champion a new, Eurasian order.

  Indeed, little Yutu-2 is just the first of seven exploratory missions planned by China and Russia, which will prepare the way for the construction of the base. That matters when the future of space dominance is on the line.

  “It’s about the competing view of what the rule of law is going to be and who’s going to make the rules on the lunar surface and in exploiting space,” Listner said.

  “Whoever gets there first and starts building will be the one who makes the rules.”

  To that end, Crespo warned that the CCP is attempting to reforge space in its own image, undercutting the United States’ ability to sustain itself not only as a world superpower, but possibly as a civilization.

  “Neutralizing our space dominance will severely hamper our ability to win any major conflict, and ultimately even our ability to maintain a stable, modern, functioning society,” he said.

  “If the Chinese move beyond simply neutralizing our dominance and gain clear space dominance themselves, that will become almost a fait accompli in terms of America losing its ability to remain a world power, and even simply an independent sovereign nation.”

  Listner said that it’s gray-zone conflict at its finest, and that the United States and China are engaged in war by any other name.

  “From the perspective of the PRC, we’re at war,” Listner said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

  

  Chinese People’s Liberation Army HQ-9 surface-to-air missile launchers are seen during a military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Sept. 3, 2015. A modified version of this missile was used to shoot down a satellite in a test by China in 2007. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

  The Lunar Threat

  That gray-zone conflict, in which nations engage in hostilities stopping somewhere short of opening fire, is in full swing in outer space.

  “Any manned Chinese and/or Russian base on the moon would provide them a significant strategic advantage militarily, legally, and economically,” Crespo said.

  In early December, Gen. David Thompson, the U.S. Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations, said that the CCP is launching attacks on U.S. space infrastructure “every single day.” These reversible attacks, in which U.S. satellite architecture or cyber systems are compromised temporarily, are largely understood to be a testing of the waters.

  That is, preparation for a real war.

  Thompson said in separate remarks that the Chinese regime is developing space capabilities at double the rate of the United States. Moreover, its growing array of platforms designed for space warfare is growing.

  “[The Chinese] have robots in space that conduct attacks,” Thompson said.

  “They can conduct jamming attacks and laser dazzling attacks. They have a full suite of cyber capabilities.”

  “If we don’t start accelerating our development and delivery capabilities, they will exceed us. And 2030 is not an unreasonable estimate,” he said.

  Such advancements point to weaknesses in existing laws such as the Outer Space Treaty, which many people erroneously believe bans the development of space weapons.

  “Conventional weapons in space aren’t banned by the Outer Space Treaty, as can be seen by the Russian Federation’s ASAT [Anti-satellite weapon] demonstration a few weeks ago,” Listner said.

  “However, nuclear weapons in certain circumstances are prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty.”

  Listner’s remarks refer to the recent demonstration by Russia of an ASAT missile that it used to explode a satellite in orbit. Critics accused Russia of putting the lives of astronauts at risk, as the thousands of pieces of debris could destroy space vehicles. The event was similar to an incident carried out by China in 2007.

  Indeed, the CCP is rapidly expanding its military capabilities as part of an all-out push to usurp military and commercial dominance from the United States. That effort is designed to provide the CCP with an overwhelming new blitzkrieg of military technologies worthy of science fiction.

  The effort includes the development of hypersonic weapons, electromagnetic pulse devices, new naval vessels capable of launching rockets into space, and a nuclear reactor to power space travel, reportedly 100 times more powerful than those planned by the United States.

  In all, the CCP plans to launch 10,000 satellites by 2030 in its efforts to topple U.S. space dominance.

  There are several ways in which the CCP could use the moon, or space assets more generally, to exploit weaknesses in its adversaries or further its weaponization efforts. Increased presence would allow China greater communication and control of its space assets, most notably satellite architecture, which is key to U.S. and allied GPS systems that the military depends upon. Experts have long argued that a preemptive strike on U.S. GPS systems would be China’s first move in a war, including one over Taiwan.

  Other potentialities are more hypothetical, such as the long-theorized use of a kinetic bombardment system that could leverage Earth’s gravitational pull against it. Such a system could effectively turn objects as simple as tungsten rods into weapons of mass destruction due to the velocity with which they would hit the earth.

  This would effectively allow a satellite- or moon-based system to throw heavy objects at the Earth with the destructive power of a meteor, a feat for which the proposed weapon has long been termed “Rods from God.”

  Though costlier than other systems, the idea for such a system has existed since the Cold War, and the Pentagon reportedly considered developing it in 2006 before pursuing hypersonic glide vehicle research instead.

  Listner said the CCP’s continued conquest of space was partially owed to the failure of U.S. and allied leaders to recognize fundamental differences in Western and Eurasian ways of conceptualizing the world and politics.

  “Fundamentally, we have to understand that the PRC and the Russian Federation do not think like the U.S. and Western nations,” Listner said.

  His comments reflected a growing consensus, recognized by new U.S. congressional reports, that the CCP is advancing a global campaign to champion Marxism as an alternative to American capitalism, and to supplant the United States as a global hegemon.

  To this end, the international community may like to play at lawmaking, such as is the case with the Artemis Accords, but the CCP has demonstrated a repeated unwillingness to adhere to such norms.

  “NGOs, peace groups, and disarmament groups believe the PRC and the Russians think like us when they don’t,” Listner said.

  “It’s called ‘mirror thinking,’ and it’s a very, very dangerous trap to play into.”

  

  This picture released on Jan. 11, 2019, by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) via CNS shows the Yutu-2 moon rover, taken by the Chang’e-4 lunar probe on the far side of the moon. (China National Space Administrat/AFP via Getty Images)

  A Base for Whom?

  Perhaps nowhere is this trap more apparent than in the CCP’s so-called dual-use policy.

  The CCP publicly denies that its space systems and projects, including its moon plans and satellite, are used for military purposes. For instance, it characterized its grabber satellite as a means of cleaning space junk, and its hypersonic missile test as a reusable spacecraft.

  Critics of the CCP point out that the ambiguity about whether such technology is ultimately civilian or military in nature is a feature of dual use.

  Dual use is the practical realization of the CCP’s policy of “civil-military fusion,” aimed at erasing all barriers between private and public life to ensure that all civilian technologies also advance Chinese military dominance.

  The rockets used to launch Yutu-2 to Luna are one such example. The same type of rocket was used to launch the CCP’s new hypersonic weapons system, which U.S. leaders fear is a nuclear first-strike weapon.

  CCP leaders said that the test was for the benefit of its space program.

  “Virtually everything that enables a country to launch objects into space is indistinguishable from intercontinental ballistic missiles or hypersonic weapons,” Crespo said.

  “For China, that distinction is fairly moot.”

  Crespo said that that ambiguity is part of the program, designed to obscure whether the military or civilian function of any project was intended to be dominant.

  Such ambiguity makes a difference on the moon, where all Chinese taikonauts are in the employ of the Chinese military.

  “Any moon base serves scientific purposes while also clearly providing China a strategic lunar presence that will need to be defended, and can be used for surveillance, reconnaissance or military attacks of all types against satellites and other space assets,” Crespo said.

  “No lunar base will be purely civilian to the CCP.”

  A World to Gain

  Space has been described by researcher Paul Szymanski as “the most obscure battlefield.” Its obscurity doesn’t, however, diminish its centrality to the future of nations. To the contrary, the economic, military, and political ramifications of space, and of the control of Luna, in particular, are nigh impossible to overstate.

  “Space is America’s greatest asset and its greatest vulnerability,” Crespo said.

  “The Chinese and Russians see it as our Achilles heel.”

  To that end, one may consider the strategic value of space as the foremost point of CCP ambitions. It is the gateway through which one growing power might leapfrog a global hegemon to dictate the future of earthly affairs.

  Indeed, it isn’t an overstatement to say that the moon is to the CCP what the Alps were to Hannibal. Should it be taken, the rest may fall like dominoes.

  “The stakes are that high,” Crespo said. “Whoever controls space may control the world.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 23:10

• The World Is Ill-Prepared To Prevent Another Pandemic
  The World Is Ill-Prepared To Prevent Another Pandemic

  While the world’s overall preparedness score in the 2021 Global Health Security Index isn’t particularly good, Statista’s Felix Richter notes that it is markedly worse in the Prevention category.

  The global average score for the prevention of the emergence or release of pathogens is just 28.4 out of 100, as 113 countries are found to show “little to no attention” to zoonotic diseases, i.e. diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans, such as Covid-19 according to current knowledge.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  As the chart above shows, other categories also score far below the maximum of 100, with just one of the six pillars of health security reaching a global average score above 50.

  Worryingly, it’s the early stages of an epidemic, pandemic where the world seems particularly vulnerable.

  With a global average Prevention score of 28.4 out of 100 and an Early Detection & Reporting score of 32.3, the world seems dangerously underprepared to stop a future epidemic before it becomes a pandemic.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 22:35

• The Ungracious… And Their Demonization Of The Past
  The Ungracious… And Their Demonization Of The Past

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

  The last two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past. But there are lots of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history.

  

  Critics assume their own judgmental generation is morally superior to those of the past. So, they use their own standards to condemn the mute dead who supposedly do not measure up to them.

  Yet 21st-century critics rarely acknowledge their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history’s prior generations whose toil helped create their current comfort.

  And what may future scolds say of the modern generation that saw over 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, even as fetal viability outside the womb continued to progress to ever earlier ages?

  What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped on them over $30 trillion in national debt – much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?

  What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities? What is so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts, and car jackings?

  Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021? Was there less or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?

  Was it actually moral to discard the “content of our character” and “equal opportunity” principles of the prior Civil Rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement fixations on the “color of our skin” and “equality of result” superior?

  Would America have won World War II with the current labor participation rate of only six in 10 Americans working? Would our generation have brought all American troops home and quit World War I in fear of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic?

  Are we proud that most standardized tests of student knowledge and achievement continue to decline, despite record investments in education?

  Do we ever pause to consider that we enjoy our modern standard of living and security because we were once a meritocracy that quit judging our workforce by tribal affinities and ancient prejudices?

  Our generation talks of infrastructure nonstop. But when was the last time it built anything comparable to the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the California Water Project – much less sent a man back to the moon or beyond?

  If prior generations were so toxic, why do we continue to take for granted the moral and material world they bequeathed to us, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to our airports, freeways, and power plants? Did we ever defeat anything comparable to the Axis powers or Soviet communism?

  We know the symptoms of the current epidemic of hating the past.

  One is Orwellian renaming and statue-toppling. Historical revision often responds to puritanical mob frenzies rather than to democratic discussion and votes of relevant elected officials.

  Where is the pantheon of woke heroes who will replace the toppled or defaced Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt?

  Whose morality and achievement should instead be immortalized? Were the public and private lives of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Margaret Sanger, and Franklin D. Roosevelt without sin?

  Racial fixations tend predictably in one direction. In good Confederate fashion, we lump all individuals who look alike into inexact collectives of “white,” “black,” or “brown” – often to stereotype the supposed evils of so-called white supremacy.

  But if we go down that tribalist and simplistic road of caricatured oppressors and oppressed, will future generations tally up each group’s merits and demerits, to adjudicate the roles of millions of individuals in making America worse or better?

  What standard would they use to judge our ignorant world of racial stereotyping – proportional representation in Nobel Prizes, philanthropy, scientific breakthroughs, or lasting art, music, and literature versus statistics on homicides, assault, divorce, and illegitimacy?

  Immigration – when legal, diverse, measured, and often meritocratic – has been the great strength of America, as typified by industrious arrivals who chose to abandon their own homeland to risk new lives in a foreign United States.

  But if America is so flawed and so irredeemable, why in fiscal year 2021 are nearly 2 million foreigners now crashing its borders – illegally, en masse, and intent on reaching a supposedly racist nation that is purportedly inferior to those they abandon?

  According to the ancient brutal bargain, assimilation and integration grant the immigrant as much claim to America’s present and past as the native-born. But then shouldn’t the antithesis also be true?

  Shouldn’t immigrants at least respect those of the past who created the very country they now so eagerly desire, and died in awful places from Valley Forge to Bastogne to preserve?

  Never in history has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much, and yet expressed so little gratitude, to its now dead forebears.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 22:00

• "Imperialist Russia?" Four Western Provocations That Led To The Current US-Russia Crisis
  “Imperialist Russia?” Four Western Provocations That Led To The Current US-Russia Crisis

  A fresh report and analysis at the non-interventionist think tank, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, traces the roots of today’s US-Russia deteriorated relations and showdown over Ukraine back to the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990’s. 

  So much of current “debate” in public and media discourse is woefully lacking in even basic recent historical knowledge and context of the last thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even in daily conversations people might get into with friends, family or neighbors – it’s common to hear the charge of Russian “imperialism” and “aggression”… as if the Cold War never ended, or worse it’s as if some think Putin represents some kind of resurrected Czarist empire.

  

  But Ted Galen Carpenter of both the Cato Institute and Responsible Statecraft has detailed four specific major Western provocations which has led to the ongoing Ukraine crisis 2.0 – and at a moment the Kremlin is demanding that NATO agree to ‘no further eastward expansion’ in the form of “security guarantees” to be negotiated starting January 10 in Geneva. 

  “The one-sided, self-serving indictments of Russia’s behavior invariably ignore the numerous Western provocations that took place long before Moscow engaged in disruptive measures,” Carpenter writes.  “Indeed, the deterioration of the West’s relations with post-communist Russia began during Bill Clinton’s administration.”

  Below is a section of the Responsible Statecraft report listing and explaining the four Western provocations that led to U.S.-Russia crisis today…

  Western provocation number 1: NATO’s first eastward expansion. 

  In her memoir “Madame Secretary,” former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of state Madeleine Albright concedes that Clinton administration officials decided already in 1993 to endorse the wishes of Central and East European countries to join NATO. The Alliance proceeded to add Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1998. Albright admitted that Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his associates were extremely unhappy with that development. The Russian reaction was understandable, since the expansion violated informal promises that President George H. W. Bush’s administration had given Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed not only to accept a unified Germany but a united Germany in NATO.  The implicit quid pro quo was that NATO would not move beyond the eastern border of a united Germany.  

  Western provocation number 2: NATO’s military intervention in the Balkans. 

  NATO’s 1995 air war against Bosnian Serbs seeking to secede from the newly minted country of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the imposition of the Dayton Peace Accords greatly annoyed Yeltsin’s government and the Russian people. The Balkans had been a region of considerable religious and strategic interest to Moscow for generations, and it was humiliating for Russians to watch impotently as a U.S.-led alliance dictated outcomes there. The Western powers conducted an even greater provocation four years later when they intervened on behalf of a secessionist insurgency in Serbia’s restless Kosovo province. Detaching that province from Serbia and placing it under U.N. control not only set an unhealthy international precedent, but the move also displayed utter contempt for Russia’s interests and preferences in the Balkans.  

  The Clinton administration’s decisions to expand NATO and meddle in Bosnia and Kosovo were crucial steps toward creating a new cold war with Russia. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock Jr. cites the negative impact that NATO expansion and the U.S.-led military interventions in the Balkans had on Russian attitudes toward the United States and the West: “The effect on Russians’ trust in the United States was devastating. In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view.”

  Western provocation number 3: NATO’s subsequent waves of expansion.  

  Not content with how the Clinton administration antagonized Moscow by moving NATO into Central Europe, George W. Bush’s administration pushed the allies to give membership to the rest of the defunct Warsaw Pact and to the three Baltic republics. Admitting the latter in 2004 dramatically escalated the West’s military encroachment. Those three small countries had not only been part of the Soviet Union, they also had spent most of their recent history as part of Czarist Russia’s empire. Russia was still too weak to do more than present feeble diplomatic protests, but the level of anger at the West’s arrogant disregard of Russia’s security interests rose.

  Expanding NATO to Russia’s border was not the only provocation. Increasingly, the United States was engaging in “rotational” deployments of its military forces in the new alliance members. Even George Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, expressed worries that such actions were creating dangerous tensions. Putin’s February 2007 speech to the annual Munich Security Conference made it extremely clear that the Kremlin’s patience with U.S. and NATO arrogance was coming to an end. Bush, tone-deaf as ever, even tried to secure NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine — a policy that his successors have continued to push, despite resistance from France and Germany.

  Western Provocation number 4: treating Russia as an outright enemy in Ukraine and elsewhere.

  Western leaders did not take Putin’s warnings seriously enough, however. Instead, the provocations on multiple fronts continued and, in some cases, even accelerated. The United States and key NATO powers bypassed the U.N. Security Council (and a certain Russian veto) in early 2008 to grant Kosovo full independence. Three years later, Barack Obama’s administration misled Russian officials about the purpose of a “humanitarian” U.N. military mission in Libya, convincing Moscow to withhold its veto. The mission promptly turned into a U.S.-led regime-change war to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Shortly thereafter, the United States worked with like-minded Middle East powers in a campaign to oust Russia’s client, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria. The egregious U.S.-EU meddling in Ukraine’s domestic politics followed.

  It is unfair to judge Russia’s aggressive and destabilizing actions, including the annexation of Crimea, the ongoing military intervention in Syria, continuing support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, and attempted interference in the political affairs of other countries, without acknowledging the multitude of preceding Western abuses. The West, not Russia, is largely responsible for the onset of the new cold war.

  * * *

  It’s likely that some of the above arguments will be the focus of debate within the coming weeks as Russian and US-NATO officials engage each other in Geneva. While US officials might feign having a short memory over these things, it’s clear the Russian side is fully aware, and unwilling to let it go.

  And Russia is the one who is blamed of “expansion”, “imperialism” and “aggression” by @NATO #warmongers🤦 https://t.co/g3IfI7BuHS

  — Elena Plotnikova (@Cosmopolitka) December 30, 2021

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

  For example, in his latest comments Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov underscored precisely that Euro-Atlantic countries have repeatedly contradicted and broken prior commitments. “Our proposals are aimed at creating and legalizing a new system of agreements based on the principle of the indivisibility of security and abandonment of attempts to achieve military superiority, which was approved unanimously by the leaders of all Euro-Atlantic states in the 1990s. I would like to emphasize that what we need is legally binding guarantees since our Western colleagues systematically fail to fulfill political obligations, not to mention voiced assurances and promises given to Soviet and Russian leaders,” Lavrov said.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 21:25

• Texas Audit Finds Over 11,000 Potential Non-Citizens Registered To Vote, Other Problems
  Texas Audit Finds Over 11,000 Potential Non-Citizens Registered To Vote, Other Problems

  Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times,

  Voting irregularities – including potentially thousands of votes cast by non-citizens and the dead – were reported during the first phase of the Texas Secretary of State’s forensic audit of the 2020 general election, but critics deemed it more of a risk-limiting audit at this point.

  

  The Texas Secretary of State’s office released its findings on Dec. 31, but the issues found are not enough to significantly impact 2020 election results of the four counties involved in the audit—Collin, Dallas, Harris, and Tarrant counties—which account for about 10 million people, or a third of the Texas population.

  “Generally speaking, nothing was found on such a large scale that could have altered any election,” said Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, in an interview with The Epoch Times.

  Findings include:

  • Statewide, a total of 11,737 potential non-U.S. citizens were identified as being registered to vote. Of these, 327 records were identified in Collin County, 1,385 in Dallas County, 3,063 in Harris County, and 708 in Tarrant County. So far, Dallas County has canceled 1,193 of these records, with Tarrant County canceling one. Neither Collin nor Harris have canceled any potential non-voting records.

  • Since November 2020, 224,585 deceased voters have been removed from the voter rolls in Texas. Collin County removed 4,889 deceased voters, Dallas County removed 14,926 deceased voters, Harris County removed 23,914 deceased voters, and Tarrant County removed 13,955 deceased voters.

  • Statewide, a total of 67 potential votes cast in the name of deceased people are under investigation. Of those, three were cast in Collin County, nine in Dallas County, four in Harris County, and one in Tarrant County.

  • In a review of each county’s partial manual count report required under Texas law, three of the four counties reported discrepancies between ballots counted electronically versus those counted by hand. The reported reasons for these discrepancies will be investigated and verified during Phase 2 of the audit.

  Taylor said the state’s audit, currently moving into its second phase, was a first-of-its-kind for Texas.

  Secretary of State John Scott portrayed the audit as the country’s “most comprehensive forensic audit of the 2020 election,” according to a November press release. He added the audit will use “analytical tools to examine the literal nuts and bolts of election administration to determine if any illegal activity may have occurred.”

  

  Voters wait in line to cast their vote in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 3, 2020. (Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images)

  Of the four counties being audited, former President Donald Trump won Collin County, with President Joe Biden taking Dallas and Harris counties. Tarrant County, traditionally a red county, flipped to Biden with a slim 1,826 vote margin. Overall, Trump carried Texas with 52.1 percent of the vote to Biden’s 46.5 percent.

  The Texas audit was announced soon after Trump wrote a Sept. 23 open letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who Trump endorsed for re-election in 2022, pushing for a more thorough forensic audit of the 2020 election.

  Trump’s letter asked Abbott to include legislation in the third special session that would allow for more comprehensive forensic audits of the 2020 presidential election in Texas, specifically pointing to House Bill 16 and Senate Bill 97. Those pieces of legislation would have allowed party officials to demand county-level audits in future elections and allowed for a 2020 audit as well. Ultimately SB 97, which had similar language as HB 16, was introduced but did not pass both chambers before the clock ran out on the third and final session this fall.

  As it stands, the four-county audit is part of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping election bill passed by the Republican-led Legislature in the second special session of 2021, but vehemently opposed by Democrats.

  Legislators hoping to revive a fourth Legislative session to deal with voting fraud issues say the current audit is limited in scope.

   

  

  President Donald Trump takes the stage for a rally in support of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas, on Oct. 22, 2018. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

  State Rep. Steve Toth, (R) Woodlands, who sponsored HB 16, called the Secretary of State audit more of a risk-limiting audit that won’t adequately address all 2020 election problems.

  “We know that fraud has been taking place in Texas,” Toth said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

  “We need a forensic audit.”

  Sen. Paul Bettencourt, (R) Houston, who introduced SB 97, agreed that Toth had a point. Bettencourt’s bill would have allowed audits to be conducted at the county level across Texas. However, he said the Secretary of State’s audit has the potential to become a forensic audit during phase two if it begins to dig into voting irregularities.

  “My observation over time is that fraud is used against Democrats in their primaries and against the Republicans in the general election,” Bettencourt said in an interview.

  He pointed to some 3,000 non-residents potentially voting in Harris County cited by the audit. Bettencourt said as far back as 20 years ago when he was a district voting clerk, he would use jury service data indicating non-citizens to purge them from the rolls. But at this point, he said the county appears to have abandoned such efforts.

  Bettencourt noted other irregularities not covered by the state’s audit, such as a situation in Wichita Falls, where a single-family residence was home to more than 500 registered voters.

  

  Then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks at a community event while campaigning in San Antonio, Texas, on Dec. 13, 2019. (Daniel Carde/Getty Images)

  While the Texas Attorney General’s office lists only 386 active election fraud investigations, cases of voter fraud have increased in Texas. In a Texan article, Jonathan White, head of the election fraud division in the Texas Attorney General’s Special Prosecution Division said cases were “higher than our historical average by a long shot.” There were 510 offenses pending against 43 defendants at the time, according to the article, with most stemming from mail-in ballots.

  Taylor said that the Secretary of State’s audit was indeed a forensic audit. During the second phase of the audit, the secretary of state’s Forensic Audit Division will conduct on-site examinations in January and will compare machine tabulations with paper ballots when possible.

  

  A poll worker talks to a line of voters on election day in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 3, 2020. (Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images)

  Issues such as how drive-thru voting was conducted in Harris County in 2020, now prohibited by SB 1, will be reviewed, Taylor said, adding there were claims of a 1,800 vote discrepancy between the number of voters checked in and the number of votes cast at drive-thrus. About 127,000 votes were cast in the Houston area this way.

  But Leah Shah, communications director for Harris County Elections, said the county uses very strict protocol on how ballots are managed and couldn’t confirm a voting discrepancy.

  “We have heard that number, but we have no idea where that number came from,” she said in an interview.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 20:50

• China Releases Astonishing Images Of Mars Taken By Tianwen-1 Spacecraft
  China Releases Astonishing Images Of Mars Taken By Tianwen-1 Spacecraft

  To celebrate the new year, China National Space Administration (CNSA) published astonishing pictures of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter above the north pole of the red planet, according to Shanghai Morning Post.

  CNSA said the images were taken by a detachable sensor equipped with two high-definition cameras. The first picture shows the orbiter above the north pole ice cap of Mars. 

  

  The second picture is a close-up of the orbiter’s golden exterior skin where high-speed data communication antennas and a solar wing are seen. Beyond the orbiter are ice caps though not the ice we consider on Earth. Mar’s ice caps are dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) and water ice.

  

  The third picture shows the north pole ice cap, almost like a vanilla swirl ice cream cone. 

  

  The next image is the Zhu Rong rover on the surface of Mars. We can see the topography of the desolate planet that Elon Musk wants to rocket people to at the end of the decade. 

  

  We’ve been closely following the Tianwen-1 mission. In February of last year, the orbiter entered the orbit of the red planet. A couple of months later, a rover was released on the surface of the planet.  

  The mission so far means China is the only country besides the US to land a rover on Mars successfully. Its mission is to explore the surface and geology of the planet. 

  Space is becoming the next battleground domain for both US and China. Beijing has become super aggressive in space in the last year. The country has also landed a spacecraft on the moon and collected lunar rock samples. 

  The final frontier is space — the world’s superpowers are on a hunt for trillion-dollar deposits of rare metals that will power Earth’s green energy revolution in decades to come. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 20:15

• The Last Great Inflation
  The Last Great Inflation

  Authored by Milton Ezrati via The Epoch Times,

  With inflation in the headlines, a look back at the last experience might offer needed perspective. There is no claim here that history repeats exactly. Rather a look back offers ways to dispel nonsense and identify what is important.

  

  The Arab oil embargo of 1973 dominates most references to the last great inflation. No doubt oil played a role, but problems appeared long before the embargo.

  Inflation began to build in the second half of the 1960s. After years of barely any inflation, consumer prices by 1966 were rising at a 3.5 percent annual rate and then built on themselves so that by 1969 they were rising at a 6.0 percent rate.

  This initial price pressure had two clear roots.

  One was the strain President Lyndon Johnson had placed on the federal budget and the economy by simultaneously pursuing a war in Vietnam and a domestic war on poverty.

  Second was the willingness of the Federal Reserve (Fed) to accommodate the government’s credit needs by creating a powerful flow of new money. The broad M2 measure of the nation’s money supply rose a rapid 8.0 percent a year on average during this time.

  When in 1969 Richard Nixon took over from Johnson, he continued to spend freely, even though the war in Vietnam had begun to wind down. Nixon added a new inflationary factor to the mix when in August 1971 he ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold. This move destroyed the fixed exchange rate system that had prevailed for decades. The dollar fell on global exchange markets, adding directly to American living costs by raising the prices of imports. More fundamentally, the break with gold removed any restraint on the Fed’s ability to create new money.

  Growth in the country’s money supply soared at rates approaching 12 percent a year on average between 1971 and 1973. Along with federal spending, it boosted buying pressure and added to the inflationary trend, bringing the rate of price increases up quickly from a brief pause during the mild 1971 recession toward the old highs.

  Oil entered the picture in 1973. By then, the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had begun to chafe over how the American inflation was eroding the real value of their product. While other prices were rising, oil, set by American interests, had held at a relatively steady $25.00 a barrel. OPEC took control of pricing by imposing an embargo on oil sales and then quadrupled prices.

  The Fed responded by pouring still more money on the economy. The broad money supply jumped 14 percent in 1974. The Fed intended this to ease the economic strains of high oil prices, but the added money mostly extended and enlarged the immediate inflationary impact of the one-time jump in oil prices. By early 1975, inflation was running at over 11 percent a year.

  By 1979, consumer price inflation verged on a rate of 14 percent a year. The economic harm had become widespread. By skewing notions of value, inflation had destroyed wealth and distorted incentives, retarding the capital spending that would otherwise have fostered growth. With the Fed accommodating inflation, all expected it to continue. Workers made wage demands on the expectation of rapid increases in the cost of living, and managements granted them on the expectation that they could easily raise prices to more than offset the impact on the bottom line. This so-called wage-price spiral gave inflation a life of its own even as workers fell further and further behind. All suffered.

  The end came when a new Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, refused to validate the inflation as the Fed had previously done. He cut the pace of money growth. Without a ready source of Fed-provided liquidity, interest rates spiked upward. The 10-year treasury yield briefly hit 16 percent, and short-term rates touched 21 percent. Painful as these responses were, the Fed’s actions broke the inflationary spiral. By 1983, some 18 years after the process had started, consumer price inflation had fallen below 3.0 percent a year.

  Though much today is different, much also looks like this past. Washington is spending even more aggressively than it did 40-50 years ago. The Fed similarly has also pursued an expansive monetary policy. Policymakers recently promised a more restrictive monetary posture, but announced plans for only the most gradual of moves. The U.S. economy may get lucky, but the picture looks disturbingly like it did last time.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 19:40

• Iraqis Threaten To Burn Down "Embassy Of The Great Devil" To Mark Soleimani Anniversary
  Iraqis Threaten To Burn Down “Embassy Of The Great Devil” To Mark Soleimani Anniversary

  Just days ahead of the second anniversary of the killing of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, pro-Iran factions in Iraq held a mass demonstration just outside Baghdad’s Green Zone where the American and other international embassies are located.

  The protesters were filmed burning and destroying a large mock US embassy, in what appears a “threat” and possible warning of what’s to come. Iranian state media featured and spread the footage, describing the burning of the embassy model as part of events commemorating the “anniversary of the US assassination of Gen. Soleimani”…

  Iraqis rally ahead of anniv. of US assassination of Gen. Soleimani, burn model of US embassyhttps://t.co/U0GwljWUdZ pic.twitter.com/kNT6jizu6N

  — Press TV (@PressTV) January 1, 2022

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

  The January 3, 2020 US drone strike just outside Baghdad’s airport also took out Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) – which is seen in the West as supported by Tehran. Friday’s demonstration was reportedly organized by the PMF.

  It also comes at a time Washington’s expected withdrawal from Iraq date has come and gone. “Baghdad and Washington announced in July that the full withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq would be completed by the end of this year,” a recent report in The National indicated. “Training and advising missions, however, would continue.” So at this point the US deems its “combat mission” as over in the country, and yet hundreds or up to a few thousand troops remain in an ‘advisory role’.

  In essence the US presence in Iraq has not at all changed or been drawn down, which is sure to keep the Pentagon on a conflict footing with the pro-Iran paramilitary forces across Iraq.

  Iranian media quoted one protester at Friday’s events outside the Green Zone as saying:

  “Today we are remembering the day the evil embassy entered Iraq, the embassy of the great devil; the American embassy that never brings good things to any country, that brought harm to the Iraqi people. Today the Iraqis also mourn Qasem Soleimani and the heroic martyr Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”

  Saturday also witnessed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis take to the street to protest the US and the killing of Soleimani and Muhandis. 

  🔻Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have rallied ahead of the second anniversary of the US assassination of General Qassem Soleimani & Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.#مليونية_الشهادة_والسيادة pic.twitter.com/3Lt1c2SL6T

  — اياد المنصوري (@c0fWTvl6Ua60HBs) January 1, 2022

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

  The US is unlikely to leave Iraq anytime soon. Following the White House and Pentagon’s horribly bungled and botched evacuation mission from Kabul last August, the Biden administration has come under political pressure to “stay the course” in other conflict theaters. 

  However, regional leaders who wish to see a swift US departure from the Middle East (including Iraq and northeast Syria), argue that the ‘counter-ISIS’ mission is over, thus there’s no further ‘counter-terror’ justification for the Pentagon to remain there.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 19:05

• Omicron Offers An Off-Ramp From Our Failed Pandemic Policy
  Omicron Offers An Off-Ramp From Our Failed Pandemic Policy

  Authored by Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

  As the COVID-19 pandemic and the Western world’s unprecedented approach to it enters a new phase, with the Omicron variant becoming more prevalent, an opportunity presents itself to effect dramatic and much-needed changes to COVID policy.

  

  When the global pandemic was in its early stages in early 2020, very little was known, and our leaders feared the worst. Some understood, knowing the Chinese communist party’s response to SARS1, that the regime would avoid culpability at all costs, indeed at just about ANY cost, with possibly devastating consequences. Others, facing dubious models touting millions of deaths being brandished about by supposedly eminent scientists, and with the “extreme safety” being demanded by some elements of Western societies, were likewise in a panic. Fear gripped Western societies in a way unseen in generations.

  And, coupled with the Chinese regime’s extreme censorship of COVID-related data and workers, coupled with apocalyptic COVID propaganda spread by its mouthpieces and sycophants, it can be argued that the West largely threw out the tried-and-tested traditional pandemic playbook in favor of extreme top-down policies eerily similar to those the Chinese regime was celebrating. Most notably, we locked down our societies, in multiple ways, shuttering businesses and schools, with only “essential” work continuing—something we stuck with despite ample evidence pointing at the dubious nature of these policies. Basic principles of public health went out the window. Instead of fostering robust scientific debate, we censored and vilified contrarian scientists advocating for those principles, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). 

  In our frantic quest to find solutions, we seemingly miraculously developed vaccines to stop the virus, but enamoured by and in our rush to deploy our new miracles, we neglected key safeguards, such as collecting proper safety data. We vilified early clinicians and the therapeutic treatments they were finding success with, pushed vaccines as a panacea only to find that many didn’t want them. Then, we adopted all sorts of tyrannical policies to “encourage” adoption, even for healthy children who are at miniscule risk from the virus. We spent a year and a half breaking up society, chipping away at our most cherished basic rights, and hunkering down into tribal camps, creating a new “unclean” caste, the unvaccinated.

  As early as mid-2020, Stanford public health expert Dr. Scott Atlas unambiguously documented using available data that the human cost (in terms of lives) of the lockdown policies was already greater than the human cost of the virus, and this has not changed. Millions missed critical cancer screenings and suicidal ideation in teens skyrocketed—just a tiny part of the cost. A number of studies are showing that adverse events from the new vaccines, notably myocarditis, are more serious and common than has been generally understood. Corporate media, who have largely been cheerleaders in promoting the various questionable policies, are now asking questions about whether, for example, “too many shots might actually harm the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus.” Trillions have been spent for stimulus, and inflation is spiking—people are starting to feel the pain in their pocketbooks, especially the middle and working classes.

  The bottom line is, there will be hell to pay. And I can’t help but remember what Governor Ron DeSantis told me when I met him in Florida, trying to understand why he had adopted the unusual, though effective, policies that he had, which we documented in “Desantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns.” He told me: “They will never admit they were wrong.”

  Given the magnitude of our failure as a society in dealing with COVID, and the cardinal rule that human beings (but especially politicians) will go to gargantuan lengths to avoid responsibility, I posit that Omicron provides an off-ramp that doesn’t require admission of guilt. We need to halt the highly objectionable COVID policies being employed today, while giving up, for now, the assigning of blame.

  Omicron has changed the game. With the preliminary research in, the data appears to show several things:

  • Omicron is more contagious than Delta and other variants

  • COVID vaccines seem to do little to stop Omicron infection

  • Remarkably, there is some evidence that Omicron is breaking through natural immunity from previous variants

  • Omicron is much less severe than other variants, with many scientists comparing its symptoms to the common cold

  • Omicron is unexpected—its high level of mutation leaves scientists asking questions

  Whatever the past reality, the difference in risk from COVID infection between the vaccinated and unvaccinated now appears to be lower than it was with previous variants. Whatever the past reality, the unvaccinated are not more a danger to society than the vaccinated. As the infection goes endemic, many people will get the virus, irrespective of vaccination status or past inflection. 

  The obsession with asymptomatic testing for COVID can be left behind with heads held high, as can masks. Ignorance of the past power of natural immunity vs. the virus becomes a non-issue at present. And, unlike past variants, Omicron is indeed a bit of an enigma in terms of both its genetics and of how it functions. 

  In other words, a perfect opportunity to effect a dramatic shift in pandemic policy, for example to policies laid out in the Great Barrington Declaration and past pandemic public health standards. Vaccine mandates can be dropped in an instant, policy can indeed be “left to the states” as President Biden has suggested, and state leaders can also follow in kind.

  It’s an opportunity for leaders to use the novel Omicron variant to save face, as an “off ramp” off the current authoritarian and unpopular policy track, enacting policies that will have them celebrated and also work well, helping us start to heal our society. The sooner, the better.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 18:30

• Judge Delivers Major Setback To Prince Andrew In Lawsuit Filed By Epstein Victim
  Judge Delivers Major Setback To Prince Andrew In Lawsuit Filed By Epstein Victim

  Now that Ghislaine Maxwell has been found guilty of sex-trafficking charges tied to her work as Jeffrey Epstein’s de facto “madam”, many legal observers expect that she will eventually be sentenced to a lengthy prison stay that could see her die behind bars. But as the world waits for her sentencing, attention is turning once again the civil courts, where Prince Andrew is fighting a high-profile lawsuit filed by Virginia Roberts Guiffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who claims she was trafficked to Andrew when she was still underage.

  

  The lawsuit was filed in the US by a woman who lives in Australia, against a member of the British royal family. Andrew’s name came up during the Maxwell’s trial, when Jeffrey Epstein’s former pilot named names, though he wasn’t officially named by prosecutors.

  Now, an American judge has blocked two critical avenues for Prince Andrew to try and get around the lawsuit. Here’s more from the Guardian:

  Two of Prince Andrew’s avenues to prevent or stall the progression of Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s sex assault lawsuit against him were blocked on Saturday by a federal judge, increasing pressure to settle claims before a crucial court hearing this week.

  Judge Lewis A Kaplan, in a written order, told the prince’s lawyers they must turn over documents on the schedule that has been set in the lawsuit brought by Guiffre who claims she was abused – aged 17 – by the prince on multiple occasions in 2001 while she was being sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein.

  The judge’s decision comes ahead of a critical hearing in the case that’s set for Tuesday. Also, the details of a 2009 settlement agreement between the now-deceased Epstein and Giuffre that lawyers for Prince Andrew had hoped would protect him from Guiffre’s claims are expected to be released on Monday. Among other things, the judge will decide Tuesday whether Giuffre’s claims against the Prince are solid enough to merit a trial. All of this could greatly increase pressure on the Prince’s lawyers to settle.

  Giuffre’s lawyers have claimed that they have up to six witnesses linking the Duke to his accuser on the eve of the hearing into the civil lawsuit.

  In another document, Andrew’s lawyers acknowledged that they couldn’t provide documentary evidence that he has the “inability to sweat”, one of the defenses employed by Prince Andrew to try and discredit Guiffre (although the reaction to the claim in the press was one of abject dismissal).

  Meanwhile, on Saturday, it was revealed that David Boies, a lawyer for Giuffre, had said that Ghislaine Maxwell should have “cut a deal” – the latest indication that Maxwell had the opportunity to turn states’ witness against other high-profile individuals in Epstein’s circle, a group that includes former President Bill Clinton as well as Prince Andrew.

  “I have said publicly for five years that she was making a mistake in not going in and trying to cut a deal with prosecutors. She could have cut a very good deal early on but she passed up that opportunity. I think that’s proven to be a fatal mistake,” Boies reportedly said.

  See the judge’s official dismissal below:

  

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 17:55

• "Inappropriate Political Influence": Chief Justice John Roberts Responds To Threats Against The Court
  “Inappropriate Political Influence”: Chief Justice John Roberts Responds To Threats Against The Court

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  Chief Justice John Roberts used his year-end report on New Year’s Eve to denounce the threats being made against the Court and its members by Democratic politicians and groups, including threats to pack the Court to force an immediate liberal majority. Roberts referred to such threats as efforts to exercise “inappropriate political influence” on the Court in contravention of our constitutional values and traditions.

  

  We have been discussing the ramped up threats from Democratic leaders that the Court will either vote with the liberal justices on key issues or face “consequences,” including court packing.  Recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), a former law professor, became the latest to voice such reckless views.

  What Democratic members are demanding is raw court packing to add four members to the Court to give liberals an instant majority — a movement denounced by figures like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer.

  Last year, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass, and others stood in front of the Supreme Court to announce a court packing bill to give liberals a one-justice majority.  This follows threats from various Democratic members that conservative justices had better vote with liberal colleagues . . . or else.

  Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., recently issued a warning to the Supreme Court: reaffirm Roe v. Wade or face a “revolution.”  Sen. Richard Blumenthal previously warned the Supreme Court that, if it continued to issue conservative rulings or “chip away at Roe v Wade,” it would trigger “a seismic movement to reform the Supreme Court. It may not be expanding the Supreme Court, it may be making changes to its jurisdiction, or requiring a certain numbers of votes to strike down certain past precedents.”

  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also declared in front of the Supreme Court “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.”

  For her part, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. questioned the whole institution’s value if it is not going to vote consistently with her views and those of the Democratic Party: “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.” Warren seems to be channeling more AOC than FDR. Roosevelt at least tried to hide his reckless desire to pack the Court by pushing an age-based rule. It was uniquely stupid. The bill would have allowed Roosevelt to add up to six justices for every member who is over 70 years old. Warren, like AOC, wants the Democratic base to know that she is pushing a pure, outcome-changing court packing scheme without even the pretense of a neutral rule.

  Despite the fact that the Court has more often voted on non-ideological lines (and regularly issued unanimous decisions), Warren denounced the Court as an “extremist” body that has “threatened, or outright dismantled, fundamental rights in this country.” Those “fundamental” values do not apparently include judicial independence.

  Now Roberts has responded. His report is striking in its measured and deliberative tone in comparison to the often reckless rhetoric of these politicians. He waited to address the year in review for his court and the 107 district and appeals courts across the country. However, he included the following lines that are clearly directed toward Congress and extreme Democratic groups like Demand Justice:

  “Decisional independence is essential to due process, promoting impartial decision-making, free from political or other extraneous influence. The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.”

  The criticism comes after new polling shows that Roberts is the most popular government official in the country, a fact that led some on the left to express almost apocalyptic alarm.

  He is not the only justice who is speaking out to blunt the attacks on the Court.

  Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer chaffed at the claim that this is a “conservative” court and noted “The chief justice frequently speaks on this subject as well and says, no, no: we don’t look at our rulings from the point of view of our personal ideology.”

  Justice Thomas criticized those who seem intent on diminishing the authority or respect for the Court: “the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference…They think you become like a politician. That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”

  Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently told an audience that “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

  However, as discussed in my Hill column, the attacks are likely to increase in this key election year with so many major decisions ticking away on the Court docket. The type of demagoguery denounced by Chief Justice Roberts is now going mainstream with our leaders, the media, and various advocacy groups. Yet, Democratic strategists are finding that selling court packing and attacking justices is not resonating outside of the same 30 percent of voters on the left. Instead, many view what is “dire for democracy” is the effort to destroy one of the core institutions in our constitutional system.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 17:20

• Scientists Shed New Light On What Makes Omicron Spread
  Scientists Shed New Light On What Makes Omicron Spread

  At this point, members of the public have probably heard the following mantra a hundred times: while omicron is more infectious than delta, it also produces a less severe infection. This has been repeated over and over since the variant was first introduced to the public by a group of South African scientists.

  Well, just in case any doubters remain, the NYT reported the results of the latest round of studies on New Year’s Day. The studies mostly focused on animals: In studies on mice and hamsters, omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe.

  

  Most important: omicron appears to do less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and lead to serious difficulty breathing for many patients. But the animal studies show that omicron typically stays in the windpipe and upper respiratory tract: it doesn’t make its way down deep into the lungs like delta.

  “It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway.

  When omicron was first introduced back in November, the only thing scientists knew for certain was that it had more than 50 mutations, many involving the spike protein used by the virus to bind with human cells. But as scientists have discovered in the interim, there is more to a virus than its mutations.

  “You can’t predict the behavior of virus from just the mutations,” said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge.

  And after months of scientists’ infecting cells in Petri dishes and spraying the virus into the noses of animals, scientists have learned a little more about omicron. Interestingly, some scientists found the virus behaved in interesting ways, with reactions in certain species of animals drawing attention:

  Although the animals infected with Omicron on average experienced much milder symptoms, the scientists were particularly struck by the results in Syrian hamsters, a species known to get severely ill with all previous versions of the virus.

  “This was surprising, since every other variant has robustly infected these hamsters,” said Dr. Michael Diamond, a virologist at Washington University and a co-author of the study.

  For now, scientists suspect that omicron’s more mild demeanor might be a product of the human anatomy, moreso than the virus’s genetic makeup.

  The reason that Omicron is milder may be a matter of anatomy. Dr. Diamond and his colleagues found that the level of Omicron in the noses of the hamsters was the same as in animals infected with an earlier form of the coronavirus. But Omicron levels in the lungs were one-tenth or less of the level of other variants.

  A similar finding came from researchers at the University of Hong Kong who studied bits of tissue taken from human airways during surgery. In 12 lung samples, the researchers found that Omicron grew more slowly than Delta and other variants did.

  The researchers also infected tissue from the bronchi, the tubes in the upper chest that deliver air from the windpipe to the lungs. And inside of those bronchial cells, in the first two days after an infection, Omicron grew faster than Delta or the original coronavirus did.

  Although others have found characteristics in human lung tissue that help to prevent the new variant from spreading in the lungs. Specifically, a protein called TMPRSS2 on the surface of the inside of the lungs. This protein doesn’t take to omicron, impeding its spread in the critically important organ.

  Many cells in the lung carry a protein called TMPRSS2 on their surface that can inadvertently help passing viruses gain entry to the cell. But Dr. Gupta’s team found that this protein doesn’t grab on to Omicron very well. As a result, Omicron does a worse job of infecting cells in this manner than Delta does. A team at the University of Glasgow independently came to the same conclusion.

  Through an alternative route, coronaviruses can also slip into cells that don’t make TMPRSS2. Higher in the airway, cells tend not to carry the protein, which might explain the evidence that Omicron is found there more often than the lungs. Complicating matters, there are cells in the lungs that react to intruders by destroying all cells, not just infected ones.

  Of course, more studies will need to be conducted before the scientific community can say anything for certain.

  These findings will have to be followed up with further studies, such as experiments with monkeys or examination of the airways of people infected with Omicron.

  If the results hold up to scrutiny, they might explain why people infected with Omicron seem less likely to be hospitalized than those with Delta.

  Right now, this is all we can say for certain: COVID infections start in the nose, or possibly the mouth, before spreading down the throat. Mild infections don’t get much further than that…but when the virus takes hold in the lungs, it can then cause serious, lasting tissue damage.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 16:45

• How Bubbles, Price, & COVID-19 Changed Bitcoin For Me
  How Bubbles, Price, & COVID-19 Changed Bitcoin For Me

  Authored by Joakim Book via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  Bitcoin is not a bubble. It’s the monetary escape hatch we need now that the COVID-19 cat is out of the bag…

  

  I trained as a financial historian. My academic work focused on banks and financial markets in the past, and I was always fascinated by iconic bubbles of financial history — the tulip mania, the financial boom of the 1690s, the South Sea Company and Britain’s many financial panics in the 19th century.

  I wrote a thesis on the 1847 commercial crisis. I analyzed financial returns on London’s stock market in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and showed that returns then squared well with the first round of factor analyses developed a century later. I investigated the Bank of England’s role in the 1857 crisis, the 1866 Overend, Gurney & Company collapse and the 1890 bailout of Baring Brothers. (If you are under the impression that financial crises, government mismanagement and central bank bailouts only happened in the post-1971 era of modern monetary debasement, you are sorely mistaken).

  You could, Ray Dalio-style, say that nothing is new under our financial sun: many of these past crises map well onto more modern ones — perhaps, because there are only so many ways to make losses or catastrophically ruin monetary arrangements.

  While the concept of “bubbles” runs freely across the chronicles of financial history and those who study it, I was less convinced. The hand-waving arrogance with which well-established financial historians would denounce something as a bubble, delusion or financial madness would be familiar to most bitcoiners reading The New York Times or The Economist today. Mostly, these otherwise astute academics meant to launch derogatory remarks on the sorts of people who handled assets, and implied that real-world plebs in trading pits or exchanges couldn’t possibly possess knowledge of the superior kind with which their own university libraries embodied them. Worse, when pushed, the idea of bubbles never seemed to mean much else than “what goes up must come down.”

  What fascinates me about Bitcoin is the questions it poses for monetary economics — monetary rules, macroeconomic stability, regression theorem, Gresham’s law and the classification of fiat-commodity money. When I first heard rumblings of this technological solution to overthrow the state’s monetary monopoly, I mostly denounced it as hopeful technobabble. My orange-pilled friends couldn’t explain why it mattered monetarily, how it improved much on what we had (or with better central bankers, could have). The use value seemed altogether superfluous in a fintech world where moving value was easier than ever and central banks couldn’t even hit their inflation targets, let alone shove us over the brink of hyperinflation.

  Then, two things changed: price and COVID-19.

  To many laymen, reasoning from a change in asset price seems like an asinine and bubble-fueled reason to change one’s mind — the quintessential herd mentality. To convince you that it’s not, I return to the idea of bubbles before I argue that Bitcoin is the monetary escape hatch necessary in a less free world.

  PRICES KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON’T

  At the base of economics lies an information and calculation argument: real market prices, emerging in trade between willing participants, generate information about the world. It allows us to calculate profits and losses, to see if what we make is worth more than what we put in. It allows market participants (i.e., all of us) to grasp what’s going on — not, mind you, in the news agency way of broadcasting highly-curated pictures from afar, but by informing your economic decisions. Shortages and price declines tell us what’s scarcer and more plentiful, what’s in high demand and what is better used elsewhere.

  Financial markets and assets do the same thing for society’s current and future allocation of savings. The prices of securities vary more than market prices because the (far-off) future and how to assess it is less knowable than the immediate present or recent past. The “trouble with bubbles” is that nobody knows the future.

  Asset prices incorporate the knowledge that exists about the present and forecasts the future in the best way that we know how. If owners of securities are wrong about that future, they lose money or miss out on profitable investments. Scott Sumner of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University explains this well for the two most recent bubbles in U.S. financial history: the dot-com bubble in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and the housing bubbles a few years thereafter:

  “I think asset prices are usually relatively efficient based on fundamentals. I’m very dubious of people who claim that such and such a market is obviously overvalued. Most experts, I think, believe that the tech stocks in 2000 were obviously overvalued, or housing prices in 2006 were obviously overvalued… people [were] saying things like ‘those stock prices only make sense if you think American internet firms will eventually dominate the global economy.’

  “Well, they do now. Or the 2006 housing prices would only make sense if you think interest rates will get lower and lower and NIMBY [not in my backyard] regulations will stop new construction. Well, both of those things have happened and we’re now at a new normal of much higher housing prices in America. I think these markets we’re picking up some long-term trends that really did change the traditional fundamental price earnings ratio or rent price ratio in housing.”

  Knowing that something is “obviously overvalued” is the kind of extreme hubris that opponents of Bitcoin suffer from in outsized amounts. The fundamental value is zero, says economist Steve Hanke; as renowned and astute a writer as Nassim Taleb wrote some mathematical equations and proved (“proved”) that bitcoin’s fundamental value was nil. How could they possibly know that?

  Perhaps they ran a model, mentally or computationally, plugged in some values, and out popped a bubble verdict. Could be, but when you’re testing market (ir)rationality, you’re also implicitly testing the model: “Irrational bubbles in stock prices,” concluded the father of the efficient market hypothesis, Eugene Fama, in the 1990s, “are indistinguishable from rational time-varying expected returns.”

  Fundamentals, and our confidence in them, change, which is reflected in asset prices moving up or down. Against Taleb, Nic Carter had the pithiest rebuttal: No sir, it’s $34,500 — or whatever the market priced it at when he said it.

  When prices fall after a rally — say, internet stocks from 200 to 2001, home prices from 2007 to 2009 or bitcoin in April 2021 — laymen and professionals alike say that it’s a bubble. But what if the price increases captured something real, and were then validated by future events?

  U.S. median house prices recouped their losses four years later, and today stand about 60% higher (that’s nominally; deflated by CPI, house prices are about 16% higher in 2021 than at the peak of 2007). Internet stocks, including some of those ridiculed as hopelessly overvalued in 2001, dominate the U.S. stock market — their products and services have conquered the world.

  The chattering classes’ case against Netflix, just a few years ago, was similarly overwhelming: This hopeful tech company couldn’t possibly monetize its overextended services. It would have to conquer the world for the stock’s then-valuation to make sense… and then it did exactly that. Netflix expanded services, upped its margins and offered original content. Few are the analysts today yapping about Netflix as an obvious bubble.

  Bitcoin’s scope and promise is larger than any of them. What is its future value?

  For the next year, I predict that bubble charges against bitcoin, of which we saw plenty this year, will fade away. Both because angry nocoiners tire of making them when they’re received with ridicule, and because the longer something stays alive, expands and flourishes, the less sense the etiquette makes. Nobody calls Amazon a bubble anymore, nor Netflix. Even Tesla’s haters have largely surrendered, accepting that what propelled it to the fifth-largest U.S. company by market capitalization is something other than bubbling madness.

  No Bitcoiner takes the bubble attack seriously. Price matters, and only bubbles that fail (i.e., don’t recover) are relegated to history’s dustbin as “bubbles”; the successful ones are just promising ventures, deemed as such by a future that has hindsight as a guide.

  AN ESCAPE TO FREEDOM

  Every society that collapsed into turmoil — economic, monetary, military, social or other — has had individuals contemplating when to leave. It’s not an easy decision, forecasting doom and deterioration for one’s country of birth. Many are the migrants who can tell painful stories of uprooting their lives, made increasingly impossible by authorities, famine, war or hyperinflation, for an uncertain existence elsewhere.

  When staring down the “unending path to unfreedom that we’re experimenting with these days” as I argued earlier this year, what else is there but escape? When rule by the people is replaced by ruling the people, escape hatches are crucial. COVID-19 measures all over the world — and the agitated tenacity with which troves of people embodied them — showed me that lines of privacy and tyranny drawn in the sand could be approached, flirted with… and then crossed by about a mile.

  Seeing the writing on the wall, I, like many others, wanted an out. In an uncertain future, you never know which place becomes a beacon of freedom (two years ago, who would have bet on Sweden? And now that it, too, is conforming — whereto?) and who will confiscate your assets. The idea of a monetary escape hatch clicked with me.

  “When in doubt,” wrote Ray Dalio in his new book, “get out”:

  “If you don’t want to be in a civil war or a war, you should get out while the getting is good… History has shown that when things get bad, the doors typically close for people who want to leave. The same is true for investments and money as countries introduce capital controls and other measures.”

  If history is any guide, you won’t be able to peacefully and in organized fashion be able to take your assets with you: “When the flight of wealth gets bad enough,” concluded Dalio, “the country outlaws it.”

  Plenty of Americans have taken that advice, though so far, only in a regional sense — the exodus from California speaks volumes. Others living under oppressive regimes, in the West and elsewhere, have taken similar actions, departing their domiciles for freer pastures elsewhere.

  Bitcoin facilitates the monetary component of that shift, to move value from an unfree jurisdiction to a freer one. When fleeing a sinking ship, you need your body, your health and your loved ones. Ideally, you want your most treasured belongings too, which, thanks to bitcoin, you can now carry without anybody knowing. It comes with the more important shift of holding funds outside the purview (and control!) of your invasive government. Dan Held’s Thanksgiving wishes stated it clearest:

  “With governments restricting more of our rights, what would be our light at the end of the tunnel? And with COVID, this trend has accelerated, with our movement and access to goods and resources diminished all for the sake of public safety.”

  You never know what you rely on until it’s abruptly taken away. When your assets are confiscated, your money devalued, your transactions declined and your bank decides to freeze your account for whichever made-up reason it’s trumpeting next, it’s too late. Backups and escape hatches must be put in place before they’re needed.

  I never saw the need for a monetary or financial escape before: I had access to inflation-protection and developed financial markets. I could move my funds wherever I wanted, whenever, for a sliver of what it would have cost just decades ago. Except for the occasional technical glitch or misadventures in poor countries, my transactions were never declined. I had not, to put it bluntly, checked my financial privilege. The last decade or so, culminating with COVID-19, convinced me that the unproblematic and worriless existence I had taken for granted might not always be that way.

  Measures against this public emergency probably won’t be what ultimately does in freedom, collapses societies and ushers in the authoritarianism of dystopias. But the COVID-19 cat is out of the bag now, and the power play that rulers experimented with this year and the last is from now on available at every political negotiation table like it never was before. With only vague references to public safety and astonishingly low barriers, locking up people in their homes is now a feasible option.

  The ability to escape — to get out — hasn’t been this important in generations. This time isn’t different, but this time we have Bitcoin. Perhaps that’s enough.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 16:10

• Trudeau Implies Black Canadians "Racist, Misogynistic" – Questions Whether Unvaxx'd Should Be "Tolerated"
  Trudeau Implies Black Canadians “Racist, Misogynistic” – Questions Whether Unvaxx’d Should Be “Tolerated”

  Canadian Prime Minister had a good year, if only because he managed to cling to power during a surprisingly close national election. But having abandoned all concerns about convincing those who don’t already agree with him on issues from COVID vaccinations to feminist ideology, the Canadian PM decided to attack the unvaccinated during an appearance on local TV.

  

  The takeaway from his remarks: in contemporary Canada, anybody who dares question the wisdom of the mass vaccination policy should automatically be dismissed as a racist or a misogynist, even if they’re voicing well-considered criticisms, like Dr. Robert Malone is doing.

  Trudeau made the comments to a Quebecois television station, although he was careful to stipulate that the people of Quebec aren’t the problem. Rather, Trudeau questioned whether good vaccinated Canadians should be forced to “tolerate” their unvaccinated brethren.

  “We are going to end this pandemic by proceeding with the vaccination,” said Trudeau in French.

  “We all know people who are deciding whether or not they are willing to get vaccinated, and we will do our very best to try to convince them. However, there is still a part of the population (that) is fiercely against it.”

  “They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist. It’s a very small group of people, but that doesn’t shy away from the fact that they take up some space.”

  “This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people? Over 80% of the population of Quebec have done their duty by getting the shot. They are obviously not the issue in this situation.”

  While Trudeau would like Canadians to assume that all anti-vaxxers are racist, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth, because – just like in the US – black Canadians are generally more skeptical of vaccines.

  One study from Innovative Research Group showed black Canadians reported vaccination rates that were 20 percentage points below the Canadian average.

  Black Canadians also self-reported much lower rates of willingness and confidence pertaining to vaccines.

  

  President Biden has made a similar mistake in the past, and some have credited this dichotomy with influencing the White House to finally dial back its hostile rhetoric toward the unvaccinated.

  So, in reality, many of the “anti-vaxxers” Trudeau has condemned as racists are actually black themselves.

  Then again, racial sensitivity has never been one of the boyish PM’s strong suits.

  

  In a sense, Trudeau is conjuring up boogeymen, since vaccination rates across Canada are already extremely high (well beyond the levels once considered the threshold for “herd immunity”, before scientists decided to quietly scrap that concept when they realized the vaccines weren’t as effective as they had hoped).

  In Quebec, 84.5% of residents have received at least one shot, and a total of 14,900,242 jabs have been doled out since the start of the pandemic. Across Canada, 90% of people aged 12 and over have received at least one dose, while a total of 87% have received two jabs. In Alberta, it’s 90% of the people with one jab and 85% of people with two.

  Trudeau’s comments prompted People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier to lambast the PM, calling him a “fascist psychopath.”

  After all, if these people aren’t to be tolerated, what should be done? Should they be arrested and held in “re-education camps” until they acquiesce and agree to accept the shot?

  Watch the clip (in French) below:

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 15:35

• Omicron Is Creating An Unnecessary Media Hysteria Over Positive Case Numbers…Again
  Omicron Is Creating An Unnecessary Media Hysteria Over Positive Case Numbers…Again

  Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

  Back about a year ago – before the Delta variant, but long after we had a firm grasp on exactly how dangerous Covid was (or wasn’t, depending on your perspective) – I made the point that we had to stop blindly relying on, touting and hyping up individual positive Covid cases and blanket positive test numbers.

  In short, I made the argument that we needed to loosen our grip from hanging on individual positive tests being reported one at a time by the news. The brain damage and hysteria being drummed up from reporting one positive case at a time far outweighed the actual damage Covid was doing, in my opinion.

  If you remember correctly, back in 2020 and even in early 2021, any time a person of prominence, like an athlete, politician or celebrity tested positive, it was immediately an enormous headline that would cause the nation to collectively gasp.

  This wasn’t rational during the first variant of Covid, it remained irrational during the Delta variant, and is on the verge of just crazy-making now that the Omicron variant is here.

  The truth of the matter is that individual cases as news headlines only serve to create headlines and whip people up into a hysteria.

  For example – and I’m not trying to be mean here – but who even is this person, and why is this a lede on People.com?

  

  While the media loves singling famous people out or touting the absolute number of positive tests in a given location, it often fails to report any context.

  For example, reports about positive tests often do not include how many of the positive tests resulted in hospitalizations, how many of the positive tests even had symptoms and nuances like how many of the positive tests could be attributable to false positives.

  Why is this context extremely important when reporting about the Omicron variant?

  1. Studies are showing that Omicron is far less likely to land people in the hospital, with a trio of studies out of Scotland showing that Omicron was associated with a 2/3rd’s lower risk of hospitalization than the Delta variant. Loosely speaking, the Delta variant has been found to increase chances of hospitalization by up to 2x from the original disease. Using this loose math, this would mean that Omicron is about 30% less likely than the original variant to land you in the hospital.

  2. A new meta analysis of asymptomatic cases published in JAMA this month continues to show that about 45% of all combined cases between the U.S. and Europe are asymptomatic. This number drops to 40.5% when you include the entire geographical pool of Covid tests. This suggests that almost half of all “positive” cases may not be negatively affecting someone’s quality of life.

  3. PCR testing is notoriously sensitive. Someone close to me who follows CDC protocol, is vaxxed, boosted and routinely double masks said to me this week: “All these positive tests out of nowhere. It’s almost like it isn’t real.”

     While I’m not saying it “isn’t real”, what I am suggesting is that scratching below the surface about how PCR testing works might be a good idea before becoming hysterical about numbers the media presents.

     For example, CDC Director Rachel Walensky said this month that PCR tests may come back positive up to 12 weeks after someone has Covid.

     Back in 2020, health experts were saying PCR testing would pick up on “barely any traces” of the virus and that up to 90% of people who tested positive may not be carrying enough of the virus to infect someone else.

     “PCR’s greater accuracy detects viral load far below this level, and thus incorrectly identifies many individuals as infectious when they are not,” an Arizona State University writeup on testing accuracy from October 2020 added.

  4. False positives are still a thing. As demonstrated on national television this year when Ana Navarro had to be ushered off the set of The View, prevalence of false positives can range from 0% to 16%, or even higher, depending on which sources and studies you cite for your information. These estimates are statistically significant enough to warrant redundancy in all testing. When a second test isn’t issued for a “positive” result, the confidence in the reliability of the test diminishes ever so slightly. Combined with the above three points, it’s worth noting for context when reading Omicron positive testing headlines.

  Here’s a great example of the media at work from this summer, wherein CNN reports about an Olympic athlete who tested positive for Covid-19. CNN’s original source, a Tweet from an official Olympic body, offers slightly more context than CNN’s lede. No further information, such as whether or not the athlete even had symptoms or whether or not they were retested again that day to account for potential false positives, was given.

  

  And hey – I’m not suggesting that you should ignore case number trends in your specific jurisdiction and that you don’t take precautions. All I’m suggesting is there is a lot more behind the positive Covid test case numbers than people take the time to see.

  That, I believe, is because the media is satisfied using these numbers in the most sensational way possible and the public is largely uninformed and scared. The media I can place blame on for knowing better; the public, which largely consists of good hearted people just trying to do the right thing, I have more sympathy for.

  So let’s look at what’s happening this New Year’s Eve. People are being told to stay home and not enjoy themselves because a new variant of Covid is “sweeping the globe”. Case numbers are being reported in record sums, with terms like “unprecedented”, “unlike anything we’ve ever seen” and “shattered records” being thrown around:

  

  Holy fuck! Surely this is caused for severe alarm, right? Forget your vaccines that we once promised in a smug tone of voice would protect you from ever getting the virus again, Covid is back with a vengeance, motherfuckers!

  But seriously, let’s just calm down. We already know Omicron is more transmissible than other variants by an order of magnitude, so let’s stop acting surprised. We also know that millions upon millions of Americans have already prompted their immune systems with vaccines and booster shots, so let’s stop acting worried that the virus is once again “surprising” us.

  All month I’ve been watching athletes and coaches from various sports testing “positive” – resulting in sports games being canceled and hundreds of millions of dollars in associated revenue being put at risk.

  In addition to the economic loss “positive” tests immediately create, many of players and coaches who have been reporting to practice and feeling fine are claiming that testing protocols are taking a mental toll on them.

  Take, for example, French tennis player Benoit Paire:

  French tennis player Benoit Paire has tested positive for COVID-19 just weeks before the Australian Open gets underway on Jan. 17, 2022.

  “Hey my name is Benoit Paire, and for the 250th time I tested positive for Covid!!” he said on Twitter. “Honestly I can’t deal with this Covid s*** anymore.”

  “How am I doing? Because of Covid, I got a runny nose but because of all these quarantines spent in a hotel room halfway across the world, I don’t feel good mentally,” he continued.

  …

  Paire, who is vaccinated, added that he is “100 percent for the vaccine,” but urged people to “just live as before Covid, otherwise, I don’t see the point.”

  Do you know the old expression: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

  Maybe we should be asking: “If 350 million people report ‘positive’ tests but no one cares anymore, do we really need such stringent Covid protocols?”

  I know that sounds crass, but how many of the players and coaches do you think would be simply going about their business but for some super-sensitive PCR test turning up trace amounts of the virus? How many players don’t care at this point? How many of the tens of thousands of fans that wind up in the stadium cheering along these teams care at this point?

  The counter intuitive nature of our Covid testing is on full display in the world of sports. If we are to test in this fashion going forward, no team in any sport may ever field a starting lineup again.

  I mean, honestly – imagine testing everybody for trace amounts of the cold virus before every sporting event in every major sporting league. Nothing would ever get done and the leagues would fold due to inefficiency and loss of interest from fans.

  If you take the same fallacy and apply it to everyday life and everywhere that requires Covid testing, including places of business who mandate it, one really starts to get a look at the giant wrench that can be thrown back (George Gammon voice) into the gears of both the economy and people’s everyday lives.

  Omicron cases are surging. We know. It’s a cause for concern. People will take precautions that they deem necessary for themselves and for others. However,  inciting hysteria based on total number of cases at this point, given the new variant’s properties and what we know about testing, might be the most counterintuitive and irrational decision in responding to the virus yet.

  And that’s saying something, because there’s been a lot of them.

  

  —

  Enjoy this free preview of paid content? Zerohedge readers always get a discount to subscribe to my blog. Readerscan get 22.20% off FOR LIFE as subscribers by using this New Year’s link to help usher in 2022: Get 22% off forever

  More QTR:

  1. When The Global Monetary Reset Happens, Don’t You Dare Forget Why

  2. 22 Stocks I’m Watching For 2022

  3. Can “Bond Vigilantes” Ever Return To Set The Fed Straight?

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 15:00

• Ben Shapiro Eviscerates COVID Cult And 'Authoritarian Lockdown Nonsense' That's Destroyed 'Millions Of Lives'
  Ben Shapiro Eviscerates COVID Cult And ‘Authoritarian Lockdown Nonsense’ That’s Destroyed ‘Millions Of Lives’

  Now that the tide has officially turned thanks to Omicron – the hyper-transmissible, vaccine-mocking Covid strain that features flu-like symptoms and virtually no death, public health officials and their legacy media lapdogs have some explaining to do.

  In a Friday Twitter thread, Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro shines an industrial grade spotlight in the faces of the hypocritical left over their seemingly-overnight pivot on Covid truths – which until now were verboten and could get one banned, demonetized, or canceled by woke mobs.

  

  Without further ado:

  So once it became clear that covid was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following:

  — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 31, 2021

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

  Continued via Threadreaderapp (emphasis ours): 

  1. Cloth masks are ineffective against omicron (Leanna Wen, CNN);

  2. The vaccinated can spread and get covid;

  3. The death rate is comparable to the flu (Chris Hayes);

  4. Many people are entering hospitals with covid, not from covid (Fauci);

  5. Natural immunity is a reason omicron hasn’t been as virulent (Fauci);

  6. We have to take into account societal needs, not just spread prevention (CDC);

  7. The asymptomatic should not be tested (NFL);

  8. We should focus on hospitalizations and deaths, not case rate (Biden);

  9. Children are not at risk and schools should remain open;

  10. Covid is predominantly an illness affecting the immunocompromised and elderly and we should not shut down society.

  Those of us in reality have been saying all this for months and most of it since May 2020. But your political priors were more important than the data. You had to have your demonization narrative.

  So welcome to reality. And f*** all y’all for pretending you didn’t know this so you could have fun crapping on Trump and DeSantis and all your red state relatives.

  And btw, AOC and all you Leftist covid fanatics — those whose virtue signaling authoritarian lockdown nonsense that has resulted in millions of lives destroyed — stay in your states and leave mine alone.

  We chose data and freedom. You chose alarmism and unearned moral superiority. Stay in NY, NJ, CA, and the rest — and enjoy the actual paranoid nanny state you created among your friends who reward you for telling them they will kill their kids and grandma if they don’t panic.

  Oh yes, and Happy New Year to all.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 14:25

• 2022: The Year Of Breakdown
  2022: The Year Of Breakdown

  Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

  In other words, our economy and society have been optimized for failure.

  If we look at the fragility and instability of essential systems, it’s clear that 2022 will be the year of breakdown. Let’s start by reviewing how systems break down, a process I’ve simplified into the graphic below.

  

  1. Regardless of whether it was planned or not, all systems are optimized to process specific inputs to generate specific outputs. Each system is pared down to maximize efficiency as the means to maximize profits. This efficiency in service of maximizing profits requires trade-offs that only become visible when some key part of the system fails.

  The system that ships containers around the world offers a useful example. Shipping containers revolutionized shipping and reduced costs by commoditizing containers (all standard sizes), container ships (specifically designed to carry thousands of containers and container ports with specifically designed cranes, docks and truck lanes / queueing.

  It’s possible to load a container on some other craft with a jury-rigged crane, but the efficiency of that is essentially a fraction of the optimized system: the jury-rigged crane will only be able to load a handful of containers, the ship will only be able to carry a few containers, and the likelihood of the containers shifting increases.

  The infrastructure and labor are both highly specialized. Calling out the National Guard to speed up container offloading is a useless gesture unless the Guard can deliver more cranes and experienced operators.

  The greater the optimization, the greater the fragility as the breaking of any one link brings the entire system to a halt. Throwing in equipment and labor that the system isn’t designed to use will fail.

  Virtually every essential system has been stripped of redundancy, resilience, reserves and adaptability as the means to fully optimize inputs, processes and outputs. The system works well if every link in the dependency chain is working perfectly. Should one link go down, the entire system goes down.

  2. Cost-cutting has stripped systems of back-up staffing and expertise. Full-time workers have been replaced by gig workjers, contract workers, part-time staff on call, etc. Experienced staff cost too much so they’ve been let go as well, so there is no depth in numbers or knowledge.

  3. Management is top-heavy with MBAs and bean-counters with little pragmatic experience or knowledge of the systems they’re managing. Management is optimized to advance those who can generate big profits, not those with experiential skills needed to meet crises in real-world dependency chains, production, breakdowns, etc. So when the system comes apart, managers simply don’t have the knowledge or skills to solve real-world problems.

  The skills that are most desirable when everything is running smoothly are useless in crisis. Who do you want to go into combat with, the continuously promoted officer who won high marks for filing reports on time or the officer with actual combat experience who got passed over for promotion because he/she didn’t devote the proper attention to paperwork, meetings, virtue-signaling and derriere-kissing?

  Unfortunately the vast majority of our systems are managed by people who lack the long experience and hands-on skills needed to meet cascading crises.

  4. Systems are now so complex and opaque that they are in effect optimized to fail in ways that are impervious to quick fixes. Bureaucratic mission drift, virtue-signaling, the erosion of accountability, multiplying platforms and software and the endless expansion of compliance and regulatory burdens have loaded every system with numerous points of failure and procedural friction that contributes little or nothing to the organization’s core mission. As resources are devoted to make-work procedural black holes, the mission decays and collapses at the first crisis.

  Stop me if you’ve heard this before: contacting essential services (tax payments, etc.) rarely generates a timely reply, much less a solution; a new bridge or subway line takes decades to build and is billions over budget; software projects intended to streamline complex regulatory processes (building permits, etc.) never work right and end up slowing the whole system down, fraud is rampant, software security is laughably poor….the list is almost endless.

  5. Once the system has been stripped of resources, experienced staff, back-up equipment and supplies and loaded with unproductive friction, even a small crisis will bring down the entire system. In the graphic below, all of these resources are the buffer that enables systems to respond to the pressing demands of crises. Once these are gone, the only possible result is systemic collapse.

  6. We’ve collectively lost the ability and willingness to deal with crises for which there is no happy-story ending. We only want to hear the optimistic story, the glimmers of hope, the miracle cures, the painless tech fix, etc., and if we get a dose of reality instead, we’re quick to dismiss the bearer of inconvenient news as an alarmist, a doom-and-gloomer, etc.

  In other words, our economy and society have been optimized for failure. Drifting along in a daze of disconnected-from-reality complacency we are completely unprepared to deal with realities that don’t respond to magical thinking, optimism, hope and tech fantasies.

  *  *  *

  My new book is now available at a 20% discount this month: Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $8.95, print $20) If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 13:50

• "His Skin Was Burning": Melbourne Man Sets Himself On Fire Screaming About Vaccine Mandates
  “His Skin Was Burning”: Melbourne Man Sets Himself On Fire Screaming About Vaccine Mandates

  In what may be a repeat of events that sparked 2011’s Arab Spring when a Tunisian fruit vendor self-immolated, protesting soaring food prices and sparking a revolutionary wave across Northern African and Middle Eastern nations, a Melbourne man set himself and his car on fire in front of horrified diners on the first day of the new year while screaming about Covid-19 vaccine mandates in Australia’s Victoria state.

  

  The man emerged from a silver MG3 hatchback engulfed in flames near Church St in Richmond about 8pm on Saturday, where police officers and firefighters doused the man with water to extinguish the blaze with the help of about five witnesses according to the Daily Mail.

  

  The bystanders helped restrain the man before police officers pinned him to the ground. He was then taken into an ambulance and rushed to hospital. Police said he had suffered life-threatening injuries. One witness who helped restrain the man said his flesh was burning before the flames were put out with water.

  Victoria Police said it was called to the intersection after reports of a man self-harming. The man was taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries.

  Police cordoned off the area near the intersection of Church and Swan Street while customers at surrounding businesses were told to stay indoors. Bystanders said they initially saw black smoke coming from the vehicle, which was left with a charred driver’s side door.

  ⚠️ WARNING DISTRESSING FOOTAGE: Witnesses have told of a man setting himself on fire in Melbourne while crying out about Victoria’s vaccine mandates.

  Full story: https://t.co/h4jzuYH9N5 pic.twitter.com/dJnPjoJQC2

  — Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) January 1, 2022

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

  Lydia O’Connor was having dinner at a nearby restaurant when she heard the man screaming.

  “His skin was burning. He was on fire. His skin is stuck to [my] shirt,” she told The Herald Sun. “He was off his face screaming about the mandates.”

  “He poured gas on himself and on his car. It was on purpose,’ O’Connor told the publication. He was screaming about mandates. He was screaming “no vax ID” and throwing books.”

  Forensic police were then seen examining the area.  

  The incident caused disruptions to trams which run along Route 70 and Route 78 while the investigation continues.

   

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 13:15

• 2022 New Year's Resolution: Stand-Up In Defense Of Dissent!
  2022 New Year’s Resolution: Stand-Up In Defense Of Dissent!

  Authored by Guy Shepherd via PlannedMan.com,

  Big Tech came to market with the promise to level hierarchies and inequalities in communications. Fifteen years later, it’s hard to recognize you guys by your pitch books. A common denominator is emerging: you bend the knee to powers that that contradicts your stated missions.

  • The de facto reality is that the First Amendment is dying on our watch.

  • By doing nothing, the majority is aiding and abetting the tyranny of a minority.

  • This is how Orwellianism comes to scale.

  • Big Tech, we could use your help.

  We need to stop this shit now. It’s time to stand up in defense of dissent!

  

  This keep-our-heads-down, shut-up, eat-me-last approach will not end well. The forces of intolerance are growing.

  It’s getting scary out there and we need to chillax now. Let’s make it a “We the People” New Year’s resolution to knock the illiberal shit off.

  On what day did the First Amendment effectually die? I know it’s still written down on paper. But it no longer guides and ennobles our public discourse and mores. The ACLU is unrecognizable.

  When the banjo player from Mumford and Sons, Winston Marshall, is forced to bend the knee to Twitter mobs because he favorably retweets a New York Times bestseller critical of Antifa, something deeply disturbing and dangerous is afoot. More proof that “antifascists” can act in a fascistic, or more accurately, Maoist manner. Marshall’s apology was forced. He did it to insulate his fellow band members from the mob. I invite you to read his open letter in Medium. After reflection and prayer, this soft-spoken and deeply reflective man separated from his band both for their sake and for his own. He could no longer abide by and bend his knee to the Lie.

  We need to do the same.

  The de facto reality is that the First Amendment is dying on our watch. By doing nothing, the majority is aiding and abetting the tyranny of a minority. Empowered by sins of omission for not calling out the sins of commission. This is how Orwellianism comes to scale.

  I think it’s an easy out to blame Twitter. Twitter is the means. It’s a tool. Twitter is like a gun. It’s a powerful, inanimate means but it lacks a soul, a free will, which comes with capacity to choose. The problem is not Twitter. The problem is us—humans. We are are the problem. (If you think that I am agreeing with you right now, you are most likely wrong. What your brain just did is a problem that the first amendment exists to mitigate.)

  Twitter and an AR-15 are ontologically equal and constitutionally protected. Twitter by the First Amendment, the AR-15 by the Second. These are facts, not opinions.

  How would Democrats react if gun manufacturers started selling guns and ammo by political preference?

  The woke might respond: Who cares? We are going to confiscate all guns! At the moment, Antifa is happy with sticks and stones (and breaking bones), but guns will always be with us. Guns are a constitutionally guaranteed means of protecting one’s interests and rights. And some folks still use them to hunt.

  Now let’s back to Twitter and its behavior as a company.

  Twitter—like Facebook and Google—came to market with the promise to level hierarchies and inequalities in communications. The Good News—The Gospel of Big Tech—was a shared promise to democratize speech. In the Us versus Them, Man versus the Machine world, Big Tech was on the side of “We the People”—a pluribus of Us. And like the goddess Justice, Big Tech purported to be blind to political, ethical, religious, and sexual persuasions. The Us of the world bought what you, Big Tech, were offering at scale.

  But along the way to creating a better—“Don’t Be Evil”—Promised Land, you all started favoring a certain “Them” over “Us.” Of course, you still use the language of Us, but now you’re clearly acting like a Them. Fifteen years later, it’s hard to recognize you by your pitch books.

  Sadly, you collectively have shown a tendency to bend the knee to government—contradicting the Us v. Them distinction that once justified your godlike status. Today, the old moralism smells creepy. A common denominator of your behavior is emerging: you bend the knee to power that contradicts your mission. In China, you do it for market access and profit. At home, you do it because you want to—and because you can.

  There are limitations that come with a Section 230 designation. Presently, you in Big Tech are operating in a “have your cake and eat it to” moment, but that will pass. You are either going be a media company like the New York Times or a free-speech, free-search, free-market utility. A business model divided against itself cannot stand. I’m betting that if forced to make a binary choice, you will go with getting your utility mojo back.

  Yes, Jack Dorsey and Co., you are the new straws that stir the drink. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Gordon Gecko are all dead; insert your name. It’s worth remembering the role that choosing a political side played in the demise of your monopolistic predecessors. What politics giveth, politics can taketh away. I’m enjoying this Twitter war between Senator Warren and Elon Musk. While I like Musk’s moxie, the progressive arc of history favors Karen.

  Have your directors of strategy really considered how this is likely to work out? I’m writing this because I don’t think things are trending in your interest.

  Jack, the next few lines are directed at you.

  Let me break it down to basics. All human beings are assholes with assholes. All need to be sold toilet paper. Without equal access to TP, we can’t avoid becoming a shithole nation of shitty people.

  It’s understood that papers and parties are partial—they favor one particular asshole at the expense of another.

  But a utility business legally can’t and morally shouldn’t favor one asshole over another. I would think that you are morally opposed to, say, redlining according to race or sexual orientation. What’s the difference when it comes to the right of association? Once upon a time, liberals argued passionately and persuasively that any human being who had the blessing to be an American or a visitor to our shores could not be denied access to a bus seat, a drink from a water fountain, a meal at a lunch counter.

  Jack and Co.: whether you know it or not, your kingdoms are built on the Interstate Commerce Clause, which is predicated on the idea that a free market and free people see only the color green.

  It would be easier to chilaxx if you and your fellow unicorns made it a New Year’s resolution and reality to get back on the side of the original pluribus of Us. Serving us all is where it is at.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/01/2022 – 12:40

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