- These Are The Most 'Over-Touristed' Cities In Europe
These Are The Most ‘Over-Touristed’ Cities In Europe
With the travel industry having bounced back in full force after the peak Covid-19 pandemic years, residents of favorite city-break locations are feeling the impacts of overtourism.
As Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, the picturesque town of Hallstatt in Austria is one such place, having captured headlines in recent weeks after the local government put up barriers to stop tourists from taking selfies and introduced daily limits on the number of buses and cars.
The following chart gives an idea of just how busy some of Europe’s most popular cities can be, using annual tourism figures from 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year) to calculate an estimation of the number of vacationers to local residents.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Dubrovnik, Croatia comes first on the list with 36 tourists for every local resident. According to Holidu, the vacation home rental agency that created the ranking, the city is particularly popular in July and August. Dubrovnik, like many of the cities ranking high on the list, has a small population. That is in comparison to cities such as London, which ranks 29th out of the 35 cities analyzed, which has a population of nearly 9 million people.
Tied in second place comes the Italian city of Venice, the Belgian city of Bruges and the Greek city of Rhodes, all with 21 tourists per inhabitant. In Venice, overtourism has been largely attributed to cruise ships in recent years, leading to the authorities eventually banning the liners from coming into the city center as of August 2021. The final two cities to round off the top 10 are Dublin, Ireland with 11 tourists per inhabitant and Tallinn, Estonia with 10 toursis per inhabitant.
Holidu drew a shortlist of 35 cities based on The Savvy Backpacker and Air Mundo’s most visited cities lists.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/02/2023 – 02:45 - "Migrants Will Soon Be The Powerful" – German Broadsheet Causes Uproar With Immigration Article
“Migrants Will Soon Be The Powerful” – German Broadsheet Causes Uproar With Immigration Article
Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,
Die Zeit deleted the social media post linking to the article after a number of users expressed their outrage at the rhetoric, although many others praised the publication…
The German broadsheet Die Zeit has caused a storm on social media after publishing an article in which it claims Germany will soon be “a country in which migrants will no longer be a minority.”
Die Zeit, the Hamburg-based newspaper widely considered to be a more highbrow read than the tabloids, posted the article highlighting Germany’s irreparable demographic change to its socials on Tuesday with the caption:
Integration was yesterday: Germany is the second-largest immigration country in the world, and the original Germans are likely to become a numerical minority among many in the foreseeable future. And now?
The accompanying photo showed a group of four young immigrants in a top-down flash convertible smiling at the camera with the headline: “They will be the powerful.”
The article recounted a time when there used to be a “familiar homeland” before “the others” came, explaining that Germany used to have just 500,000 foreign nationals residing in the Federal Republic and the country “belonged to the Germans.”
You knew the neighbors. One understood what they said, what they believed, what they served up in the evening. There was peace. The economy grew miraculously.
Despite the article portraying a more peaceful era before mass immigration, the article itself is not anti-immigrant. It later attempts to persuade the reader to consider that Germany has almost always been a country of immigration, citing the Prussians who imported foreign workers — despite nearly all of these workers being European and Christian.
The article also claimed that Germany is “now safer than ever.” Despite statistics showing crime falling overall over the last decade, murders and gang rapes are increasing, and a disproportionate share of them are committed by Germany’s foreign population. In fact, gang rapes reached a record high in 2022, with half of the suspects being foreigners.
However, the article’s posting on social media caused a stir across the German political landscape as campaigners on both sides of the immigration debate commented on the story.
“Please what?” Green MEP Erik Marquardt wrote on Twitter in response to the Die Zeit post.
The social media post was later deleted and replaced with a new photo, depicting two white females and the caption, “In recent years, Germany has become the world’s second-largest immigration country without really wanting to admit it.”
Integration war gestern: Deutschland ist das zweitgrößte Einwanderungsland der Welt und die Deutschen dürften auf absehbare Zeit zu einer numerischen Minderheit unter vielen werden. Und nun? Ein Essay von @_vanessavu https://t.co/wL2MxBeab9 pic.twitter.com/zz4XM3gHjY
— DIE ZEIT (@DIEZEIT) May 30, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“This teaser is almost even worse than the old one,” commented Marius Mestermann, a journalist with Der Spiegel, a sentiment shared by a number of other self-proclaimed liberals.
Others, however, praised the publication for drawing attention to the demographic changes in the country, an indisputable fact materialized through record levels of mass immigration under years of liberal governance.
This trend shows no signs of slowing down, with the German government prepared to spend €36 billion on its open borders policies this year, despite growing resentment among the electorate. This public resistance is evidenced by a rise in support for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Germany continues to experience record population growth, with nearly 1.5 million migrants arriving in 2022, and 163,000 new arrivals in the first three months of 2023.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/02/2023 – 02:00 - Senate Rubber Stamps Debt Ceiling Band-Aid; Biden To Sign Into Law 'As Soon As Possible'
Senate Rubber Stamps Debt Ceiling Band-Aid; Biden To Sign Into Law ‘As Soon As Possible’
As expected, Chuck Schumer’s Senate was a lock for approving the deal to raise the debt ceiling, which will be suspended until January 1, 2025 while spending will remain ‘roughly flat’ for the same period of time “when factoring in agreed upon appropriations adjustments” (oh?), and virtually none of what actual conservatives wanted came to pass.
The 63-36 bipartisan vote means that the legislation will now go to President Joe Biden’s desk – who ‘looks forward to signing the bill into law as soon as possible,’ according to a White House statement.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act suspends the debt ceiling until just after the 2024 elections, in exchange for a 3% cap on increases in military spending, and cuts to undetermined domestic programs. It will leave Medicare and Social Security intact.
The deal largely protects Biden’s legislative achievements of last year, with Republicans having little success in using the debt ceiling to dismantle his climate, tax and health law, the Inflation Reduction Act. But it also allows Republicans to point to spending cuts, given that spending caps are enforceable for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and the party succeeded in clawing back some funding for the Internal Revenue Service and unspent Covid-19 money. WSJ
Passage of the bill averts a technical default, which was slated to happen as soon as June 5, when the Treasury department warned that the government would run out of money to pay its bills.
“America can breathe a sigh of relief, because in this process, we are avoiding default,” said Schumer (D-NY) in announcing the planned vote. “The consequences of default would be catastrophic. It would almost certainly cause another recession. It would be a nightmare for our economy and millions of American families.”
As the Wall Street Journal reports;
The bill’s passage closed out a relatively smooth final chapter in Congress’s efforts to tackle the debt ceiling after months of finger-pointing. Democrats accused Republicans of irresponsibly using the prospect of default to extort concessions, while Republicans countered that the nation’s growing debt called for decisive action, while also ruling out new taxes proposed by Biden.
The Treasury Department said in January that the nation had bumped up against the debt limit and started using extraordinary measures to keep the government solvent. Biden initially vowed that he wouldn’t negotiate on the debt ceiling, insisting that it be raised with no conditions attached. But talks between McCarthy, a California Republican, and the Democratic president kicked off in earnest last month, after House Republicans surprised many Democrats by staying largely united to pass a bill proposing deep spending cuts and rolling back parts of Biden’s climate and tax agenda. -WSJ
Passage by the Senate came less than 24 hours after the House finally approved the measure after weeks of negotiations which left conservatives livid over the fact that they got completely schooled out of meaningful spending cuts and other demands.
Under an agreement which allowed the Senate to fast-track the vote, the Senate agreed to entertain 11 amendments – all of which were rejected, as any of them would have required the legislation to be sent back to the House – which has already left town, for a re-vote.
More via Reuters;
Getting it through the Senate Thursday night took hours of negotiations between the two parties, with independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema shuttling in designer sneakers between Republicans lunching on the second floor of the Capitol and Democrats on and off the Senate floor.
Ultimately, they settled on allowing uncharacteristically speedy votes on 11 amendments — all of which failed — and a pair of statements from Schumer aimed at soothing concerns about defense spending levels and other potential cuts.
Schumer made it clear that the Senate could bypass the spending caps in the bill for Ukraine, defense and domestic priorities using emergency funding, though the Rpublican-controlled House would have to concur.
“I am pleased that, under President Biden’s leadership, Congress has passed bipartisan legislation to suspend the debt limit and prevent a first-ever default by the United States,” reads a Thursday night statement from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. “This legislation protects the full faith and credit of the United States and preserves our financial leadership, which is critical to our economic growth and stability.”
“A default would have caused severe hardship for American families, potentially leading to the loss of millions of jobs and trillions in household wealth, and higher financing costs for American taxpayers for years to come. The bipartisan agreement also protects against efforts to roll back the President’s core economic agenda – one that has contributed to a historically strong and resilient economic recovery. Congress has a duty to ensure that the United States can pay its bills on time, and I continue to strongly believe that the full faith and credit of the United States must never be used as a bargaining chip.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 23:48 - Escobar: The Sultan 2.0 Will Heavily Tilt East
Escobar: The Sultan 2.0 Will Heavily Tilt East
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,
It’s not that Erdogan has a scheme to head east at the west’s expense. It’s just that the world’s grandest infrastructure, development, and geopolitical projects are all in the east today…
The collective west was dying to bury him – yet another strategic mistake that did not take into account the mood of Turkish voters in deep Anatolia.
In the end, Recep Tayyip Erdogan did it – again. Against all his shortcomings, like an aging neo-Ottoman Sinatra, he did it “my way,” comfortably retaining Turkiye’s presidency after naysayers had all but buried him.
The first order of geopolitical priority is who will be named Minister of Foreign Affairs. The prime candidate is Ibrahim Kalin – the current all-powerful Erdogan press secretary cum top adviser.
Compared to incumbent Cavusoglu, Kalin, in theory, may be qualified as more pro-west. Yet it’s the Sultan who calls the shots. It will be fascinating to watch how Turkiye under Erdogan 2.0 will navigate the strengthening of ties with West Asia and the accelerating process of Eurasia integration.
The first immediate priority, from Erdogan’s point of view, is to get rid of the “terrorist corridor” in Syria. This means, in practice, reigning in the US-backed Kurdish YPG/PYD, who are effectively Syrian affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – which is also the issue at the heart of a possible normalization of relations with Damascus.
Now that Syria has been enthusiastically welcomed back to the Arab League after a 12-year freeze, a Moscow-brokered entente between the Turkish and Syrian presidents, already in progress, may represent the ultimate win-win for Erdogan: allowing control of Kurds in north Syria while facilitating the repatriation of roughly 4 million refugees (tens of thousands will stay, as a source of cheap labor).
The Sultan is at his prime when it comes to hedging his bets between east and west. He knows well how to profit from Turkiye’s status as a key NATO member – complete with one of its largest armies, veto power, and control of the entry to the uber-strategic Black Sea.
And all that while exercising real foreign policy independence, from West Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean.
So expect Erdogan 2.0 to remain an inextinguishable source of irritation for the neocons and neoliberals in charge of US foreign policy, along with their EU vassals, who will never refrain from trying to subdue Ankara to fight the Russia-China-Iran Eurasia integration entente. The Sultan, though, knows how to play this game beautifully.
How to manage Russia and China
Whatever happens next, Erdogan will not hop on board the sanctions-against-Russia sinking ship. The Kremlin bought Turkish bonds tied to the development of the Russian-built Akkuyu nuclear power plant, Turkiye’s first nuclear reactor. Moscow allowed Ankara to postpone nearly $4 billion in energy payments until 2024. Best of all, Ankara pays for Russian gas in rubles.
So an array of deals related to the supply of Russian energy trump possible secondary sanctions that might target the steady rise in Turkiye’s exports. Still, it’s a given the US will revert to its one and only “diplomatic” policy – sanctions. The 2018 sanctions did push Turkiye into recession after all.
But Erdogan can easily count on popular support across the Turkish realm. Early this year, a Gezici poll revealed that 72.8 percent of Turkish citizens privilege good relations with Russia while nearly 90 percent rate the US as a “hostile” nation. That’s what allows Interior Minister Soylu to remark, bluntly, “we will wipe out whoever is causing trouble, including American troops.”
China-Turkiye strategic cooperation falls under what Erdogan defines as “turning to the East” – and is mostly about China’s multi-continent infrastructure behemoth, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Turk Silk Road branch of the BRI focuses on what Beijing defines as the “Middle Corridor,” a prime cost-effective/secure trade route that connects Asia to Europe.
The driver is the China Railway Express, which turned the Middle Corridor arguably into BRI’s backbone. For instance, electronics parts and an array of household items routinely arriving via cargo planes from Osaka, Japan are loaded onto freight trains going to Duisburg and Hamburg in Germany, via the China Railway Express departing from Shenzhen, Wuhan, and Changsha – and crossing from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan and beyond via the Alataw Pass. Shipments from Chongqing to Germany take a maximum of 13 days.
It’s no wonder that nearly 10 years ago, when he first unveiled his ambitious, multi-trillion dollar BRI in Astana, Kazakhstan, Chinese President Xi Jinping placed the China Railway Express as a core BRI component.
Direct freight trains from Xian to Istanbul are plying the route since December 2020, using the Baku-Tblisi-Kars (BTK) railway with less than two weeks travel time – and plans afoot to increase their frequency. Beijing is well aware of Turkiye’s asset as a transportation hub and crossroads for markets in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, West Asia, and North Africa, not to mention a customs union with the EU that allows direct access to European markets.
Moreover, Baku’s victory in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war came with a ceasefire deal bonus: the Zangezur corridor, which will eventually facilitate Turkiye’s direct access to neighbors from the Caucasus to Central Asia.
A pan-Turkic offensive?
And here we enter a fascinating territory: the possible incoming interpolations between the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS+ – and all that also linked to a boost in Saudi and Emirati investments in the Turkish economy.
Sultan 2.0 wants to become a full member of both the Chinese-led SCO and multipolar BRICS+.
This means a much closer entente with the Russia-China strategic partnership as well as with the Arab powerhouses, which are also hopping on the BRICS+ high-speed train.
Erdogan 2.0 is already focusing on two key players in Central Asia and South Asia: Uzbekistan and Pakistan. Both happen to be SCO members.
Ankara and Islamabad are very much in sync. They express the same judgment on the extremely delicate Kashmir question, and both backed Azerbaijan against Armenia.
But the key developments may lie in Central Asia. Ankara and Tashkent have a strategic defense agreement – including intel sharing and logistics cooperation.
The Organization of Turkic States (OTS), with a HQ in Istanbul, is the prime energizer of pan-Turkism or pan-Turanism. Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan are full members, with Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Hungary, and Ukraine cultivated as observers. The Turk-Azeri relationship is billed as “one nation, two states” in pan-Turkic terms.
The basic idea is a still hazy “cooperation platform” between Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. Yet some serious proposals have already been floated. The OTS summit in Samarkand late last year advanced the idea of a TURANCEZ free trade bloc, comprising Turkiye, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and as observers, Hungary (representing the EU) and Northern Cyprus.
Meanwhile, hard business prevails. To fully profit from the status of the energy transit hub, Turkiye needs not only Russian gas but also gas from Turkmenistan feeding the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) as well as Kazakh oil coming via the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.
The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) is heavy on economic cooperation, active in a series of projects in transportation, construction, mining, and oil and gas. Ankara has already invested a whopping $85 billion across Central Asia, with nearly 4,000 companies scattered across all the “stans.”
Of course, when compared to Russia and China, Turkiye is not a major player in Central Asia. Moreover, the bridge to Central Asia goes via Iran. So far, rivalry between Ankara and Tehran seems to be the norm, but everything may change, lightning fast, with the simultaneous development of the Russia-Iran-India-led International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), which will profit both – and the fact that the Iranians and Turks may soon become full BRICS+ members.
Sultan 2.0 is bound to boost investment in Central Asia as a new geoeconomic frontier. That in itself encapsulates the possibility of Turkiye soon joining the SCO.
We will then have a “turning to the East” in full effect, in parallel to closer ties with the Russia-China strategic partnership. Take note that Turkiye’s ties with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan are also strategic partnerships.
Not bad for a neo-Ottoman who, until a few days ago, was dismissed as a has-been.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 23:40 - How The FBI Lost, Found, And Rewarded The Alleged Russian Spy Pivotal To Surveilling Trump
How The FBI Lost, Found, And Rewarded The Alleged Russian Spy Pivotal To Surveilling Trump
Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Wire,
Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with Brian Auten told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow.
But Danchenko had not left the U.S., court documents show. He was living in the Washington area. In fact, he had been arrested in Maryland in 2013 by federal Park Police for being drunk and disorderly, something the FBI analyst could have easily discovered by searching federal law enforcement databases. Clueless, the FBI closed its espionage case on Danchenko.
Auten would quickly rise to become the FBI’s top Russian analyst. In 2016 and 2017, he failed to properly vet the Steele dossier, a collection of salacious allegations created for Hillary Clinton’s campaign which sought to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, before clearing it as the central piece of evidence used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.Working out of headquarters as a supervisor, Auten knew Danchenko helped Christopher Steele compile the dossier while living in the area. But instead of contacting the Baltimore agents, Auten secretly groomed him as an informant, arranging payments of $220,000 to target Donald Trump and his former aide Page.
One result: Danchenko, the suspected Russian spy, falsely accused Page, a former U.S. Navy office who had previously helped the FBI, of being a Russian spy in the dossier.
Igor Danchenko Auten also never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the FBI’s longstanding concerns about Danchenko.
Like the Baltimore agents, investigators at FBI headquarters relied on Auten to build their counterintelligence cases on Page and three other Trump advisers. Auten provided the reports and memos they used to establish probable cause in each case. Auten also supported investigators working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Auten’s conduct was first singled out for rebuke by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who in 2019 issued a report detailing how Auten cut corners in the dossier verification process. Horowitz referred Auten to the FBI for discipline, which does not appear to have been administered.His earlier and deeper connections to Danchenko have only been more recently revealed in the report issued by Special Counsel John Durham. His findings suggest that if Auten had done his job over a decade ago, chances are the now-discredited dossier never would have been created and used by the FBI to eavesdrop on Page and help launch the Russiagate probe. It’s likely that Danchenko, the main source of the dossier’s allegations, would have been deported years earlier and flagged in the system, according to the recently released Durham Report.
The embattled analyst was recommended for suspension from the bureau last year, and his case has been under disciplinary review for several months. Contacted by RealClearInvestigations, an FBI spokeswoman declined to say if Auten has been suspended. “In keeping with our usual practice,” she said, “we have no comment on personnel matters.”
According to the Durham Report, Danchenko came onto the radar of agents working out of the Baltimore field office in 2010 after two former Brookings colleagues entering the government told the FBI that he had solicited classified information.
The agents subsequently opened an espionage case after discovering Danchenko had previous contacts with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.
“In particular, the FBI learned that in September 2006, Danchenko informed one Russian intelligence officer that he had an interest in entering the Russian diplomatic service,” the report stated. “Four days later, the intelligence officer contacted Danchenko and informed him that they could meet that day to work ‘on the documents and then think about future plans.’”
The next month, Danchenko contacted the intelligence officer “so the documents can be placed in [the following day’s] diplomatic mail pouch,” according to the report.
In addition, Danchenko had been identified as an associate of two other espionage suspects, Durham learned from a review of his case file.In July 2010, the FBI initiated a request to obtain a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Danchenko. Auten helped research Danchenko and provided information for wiretap applications. However, the investigation was soon closed after the FBI incorrectly concluded Danchenko had left the country in September 2010. Danchenko and his wife continued to reside openly in the Washington area.
But the probe wasn’t completely dead. In 2012, Auten exchanged emails with one of the Baltimore agents in which they speculated whether Danchenko had actually left the country. Then in 2013, the U.S. Park Police arrested Danchenko in Greenbelt, Md., on drunk-and-disorderly charges, court records first obtained by RCI show.
Danchenko’s case was visible in the federal law enforcement database and prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who years later, as acting attorney general, would sign one of the 2017 applications to renew a wiretap targeting Page and authorize an expansion of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.
The Russian-born Danchenko, who was living in the U.S. on a work visa, was released from jail on the condition he undergo drug testing and “participate in a program of substance abuse therapy and counseling,” as well as “mental health counseling,” the records show. His lawyer asked the court to postpone his trial and let him travel to Moscow “as a condition of his employment.” The Russian trips were granted without objection from Rosenstein. Danchenko ended up several months later entering into a plea agreement and paying fines.
Despite the flurry of legal records generated on Danchenko in the federal system, it is not clear why the FBI failed to take note of his presence in the country. What the record does show is that the bureau did not reopen the espionage case against him.
Danchenko reappeared on Auten’s radar in late 2016 as he and the FBI were using the Steele dossier he helped create on Trump to seek warrants to spy on Page.Auten identified his old espionage target in December 2016 as the “primary subsource” of the document. Instead of wiretapping Danchenko, the FBI recruited him as an informant and paid him $220,000 to help the bureau continue wiretapping the former Trump aide. FBI headquarters proposed paying Danchenko an additional $300,000 even as Durham was actively investigating him as the “linchpin to the uncorroborated allegations contained in the Steele Reports.” After asking officials at FBI headquarters about the bureau’s relationship with Danchenko, Durham determined that they were unable to justify keeping him open as a confidential source, “much less making hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to him.”
After examining FBI documents, Durham discovered that Auten interviewed Danchenko over three days in January 2017 as part of a plan to recruit him as a paid informant, despite the unresolved counterespionage investigation. Working with then-DOJ official David Laufman, the FBI offered immunity from prosecution to the longtime spy suspect and invited his lawyer to sit with him during the interviews.“If this recruitment was successful, the FBI planned to mine Danchenko for information that was corroborative of the damaging allegations about President-elect Trump in the Steele Reports,” Durham said in his report.
Auten confessed to Durham that Danchenko “was not able to provide any corroborative evidence related to any substantive allegation contained in the Steele Reports and critically was unable to corroborate any of the FBI’s assertions contained in the Carter Page FISA applications,” according to the Durham report (emphasis in the original).
Danchenko was kept on the FBI payroll for more than three years.
In internal FBI documents, Danchenko’s handling agent Kevin Helson incorrectly stated that there was no “derogatory” information associated with Danchenko and that he had not been a prior subject of an FBI investigation.
“This was clearly not true as there had previously been the unresolved Baltimore FBI counterespionage investigation of Danchenko that was only closed because it was believed he had left the country and returned to Russia,” Durham pointed out.
Agent Helson later learned that the informant he was assigned to handle had been investigated as a suspected spy. However, Auten advised Helson that the espionage case against Danchenko was “interesting, but was not a significant” matter, according to the Durham report.
“Notably,” the report added, “Auten did not inform Helson that he had previously assisted in the Baltimore investigation.”A Suspected Kremlin Agent ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’
The Baltimore agents were shocked to learn from Durham’s office that Danchenko had been signed up as a confidential FBI source. One of them interviewed by Durham’s investigators believed Danchenko was a Kremlin agent “hiding in plain sight” in the U.S., while frequently traveling overseas to be debriefed by Russian intelligence. The other Baltimore agent said the counterintelligence case on Danchenko remained unresolved and, in her opinion, “certainly a lot more investigation” should have been conducted on Danchenko.
“It is extremely concerning that the FBI failed to deal with the prior unresolved counterespionage case on Danchenko,” Durham concluded in his report.
“Given Danchenko’s known contacts with Russian intelligence officers and his documented prior pitch [to colleagues at Democratic think tank Brookings] for classified information, the Crossfire Hurricane team’s failure to properly consider and address the espionage case prior to opening Danchenko as a CHS [confidential human source] is difficult to explain, particularly given their awareness that Danchenko was the linchpin to the uncorroborated allegations contained in the Steele Reports,” the special prosecutor added. Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the FBI’s Russia investigation.
In an RCI interview, Danchenko’s lawyer denied his client ever spied for the Russian government. He said Danchenko feared Russian President Vladimir Putin and was concerned for his personal safety. However, Durham examined immigration records which revealed that Danchenko lived in the U.S. but traveled frequently to Russia, casting doubts about his security concerns.
Yet in sworn affidavits to obtain the FISA warrants targeting Page, FBI agents led judges on the secret surveillance court to believe Danchenko was “Russian-based” – and therefore presumably more credible as a source of the allegations that Page was a Russian agent. By 2017, Auten knew the “Russian-based” claim was untrue. Even so, he let case agents slip it into two FISA renewal requests targeting Page. And so the “Russian-based” fraud lived on through 2017.
Auten assured the court that Danchenko was “truthful and cooperative,” never telling the judges about unresolved questions that made him a suspected Russian agent.And Auten’s imprimatur carried great weight. In Durham’s telling, Auten was known internally as one of the “Triumvirate of Control” in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, along with senior counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and intelligence section chief Jonathan Moffa. Some case agents working under them believed the surveillance of Page was a “dry hole,” but the “triumvirate” insisted they continue secretly intercepting his emails, text messages, and other communications, according to Durham.
On Sept. 19, 2016, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team formally received a dossier report alleging that Page had held secret meetings with sanctioned Kremlin officials in Moscow earlier that summer in which they allegedly discussed lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. That same day, an anxious Auten urged department lawyers to consider including the dossier report as part of the initial FISA application targeting Page.
In an email to attorneys, Auten forwarded an excerpt from the dossier report and asked, “Does this put us at least *that* much closer to a full FISA on [Page]?”
The attorneys thought it was a “close call” when they first discussed a FISA targeting Page in early August, but the dossier report in September “pushed it over” the line in terms of establishing probable cause.
Except that the dossier allegation about secret Kremlin meetings was bunk. Auten knew there were serious doubts about it yet withheld those concerns from FISA judges.
On Oct. 17, 2016, Auten received an email alerting him to a conversation an informant covertly recorded with Page that day in which Page “outright denied” meeting with the Russian officials or even knowing them.
“Nevertheless,” Durham noted, “Page’s exculpatory statements were not included in the initial FISA application signed just four days later.”
Before the application was submitted, Auten also was aware that the dossier was being funded and promoted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.On Sept. 2, 2016, CIA personnel briefed Auten at FBI headquarters about credible foreign intelligence they received about the Clinton campaign’s machinations. Yet Auten took no steps to analyze the intelligence and how it might impact the Trump campaign investigation and surveillance requests. Nor did he inform the FISA court about it. Asked why he failed to disclose the “Clinton plan” intelligence, Auten told Durham’s office that it was “just one data point.”
As the FBI made requests to renew its spy warrants throughout 2017, Auten continued to gloss over major holes in the dossier. He even pressured agents and analysts to back off looking into a questionable source of key allegations, according to the Durham report. It turns out that source, Charles Dolan, was also tied to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.
Agent Helson told Durham that Auten told him to “hold off” on interviewing Dolan, who was never interviewed.Auten also told a female FBI analyst working for Mueller “to cease all research and analysis related to Dolan,” according to the Durham report. She wrote a memo in September 2017 documenting Dolan’s ties to the dossier, but said that “Auten had made edits to her memorandum, some of which removed information regarding Dolan.” She said she was frustrated by the censorship and wondered if there was “a political motive” behind it. The analyst told Durham she prepared a contemporaneous timeline in case she was ever questioned about her role in the Mueller investigation.
Perhaps most concerning was Auten’s reluctance to corroborate even the existence of a ghost-like source Danchenko claimed had provided him a stream of bombshell allegations that were essential to the FBI’s case for probable cause against Page. The alleged source, Belarus-born businessman and Trump booster named Sergei Millian, actually had no connection of any kind to Danchenko. There is no evidence the two men ever met or spoke. Yet Danchenko attributed to Millian the dossier’s core allegation: that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.” This claim, which Durham found to be completely conjured up by Danchenko, formed the backbone of all four of the FBI’s applications to the FISA court to spy on Trump.
Auten knew there were serious problems with the attribution. While debriefing Danchenko in January 2017, Danchenko was dodgy about his supposed conversations with Millian. Still, Auten made no effort to validate Millian as a source. He never examined either Danchenko’s or Millian’s phone records, for starters.
Durham did pull the call records, however, and easily determined that Danchenko never actually spoke with Millian. He also learned from Danchenko’s email records that he fabricated his conversations with Millian, which means he also made up the dossier allegation that Carter Page masterminded the Democratic National Committee email leak, a claim the FBI also vouchsafed to the FISA court to attain the Page wiretaps.
“Nevertheless, the information allegedly provided by Millian remained in the Page FISA applications,” Durham stated in his report.
Auten told Durham that he did, however, check with the FBI’s partners at the CIA to see if they had anything on file to corroborate Danchenko’s reporting in the dossier.“They received no corroborating information back,” Durham said.
Durham interviewed a career counterintelligence analyst at Langley who said the dossier was transparent fiction. “Indeed, after the dossier was leaked and became public,” Durham relayed in his report, “that [CIA] expert’s reaction was to ask the FBI, ‘You didn’t use that, right?’”For several years, Auten moonlighted teaching law enforcement, intelligence, and surveillance courses at Patrick Henry College in North Virginia. He was removed from the Patrick Henry website soon after RealClearInvestigations published a July 2020 story first identifying him as the anonymous “Supervisory Intelligence Analyst” singled out in 2019 by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz for cutting corners verifying the dossier.
Auten also is no longer listed as a member of the college’s Strategic Intelligence Board of Advisors. Patrick Henry’s communications director did not reply to requests for an explanation for Auten’s removal from the website. But a faculty spokesman confirmed over the phone that he is no longer teaching there.He is, however, apparently, still employed by the FBI. Auten’s most recent activities that have come to light? Possibly using false information to undermine allegations of criminal activity on the part of Hunter Biden. According to a July 25, 2022, letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Auten’s “scheme” entailed using deceptive and derogatory information to derail the FBI’s investigation.
“First, it’s been alleged that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” Grassley wrote. “It is further alleged that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by an FBI Headquarters (“FBI HQ”) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 23:00 - Jaguar Recalls Thousands Of I-Pace EVs Over Fire Risk, Tells Owners To Park Outside
Jaguar Recalls Thousands Of I-Pace EVs Over Fire Risk, Tells Owners To Park Outside
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is recalling 6,400 I-Pace electric SUVs delivered to the US because the high-voltage electric battery may overheat and catch fire.
The documents posted Wednesday by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the recall covers I-Pace vehicles delivered between 2019 and 2024.
The problem is centered around the EV batteries produced by LG Energy Solutions. The NHTSA is investigating LG because its batteries have forced five other automakers to issue similar recalls due to fire risk. Most notable has been the fire risk around Ford F-150 Lightnings.
According to an NHTSA filing, JLR said eight I-Pace vehicles had caught fire, but no accidents or injuries were reported.
Fortune said JLR sent an email to US I-Pace owners to park vehicles away from building structures until repairs have been completed.
South Korea-based LG said Jaguar is updating the battery-managing software on the vehicles while NHTSA investigates the fires.
“LG Energy Solution continues to closely work with our client Jaguar Land Rover to ensure that the investigation is concluded,” it said in a statement Thursday.
One of the consequences the automotive industry is facing as it rushes toward EVs to meet decarbonization targets is defective tech. Ford and BMW also have recalled batteries in recent years over fires.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 22:40 - Michigan Economics Professor: Boycotting Target Is "Literal Terrorism"
Michigan Economics Professor: Boycotting Target Is “Literal Terrorism”
In New York, a pro-life display was declared by a professor to be an act of “violence.”
In Colorado, a university site warned that misgendering is violence.
It is part of a national pattern on universities where opposing views are declared “harmful” or “violent” as a justification for censorship or even violence.
Now, University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers has declared boycotting the store Target over its line of LGBTQ+ “Pride” clothing is “literal terrorism.”
Target is the latest example of a corporation that is being “Bud Lighted” over its linked with LGBTQ+ efforts. While experts on MSNBC and CNN assured viewers that these boycotts fade quickly, these companies have now lost billions. Target has reportedly lost over $10 billion. Miller Lite is also being hammered over its “Bad $#!T to Good $#!T,” ad slamming male-oriented beer campaigns.
With these boycotts picking up steam, the coverage has turned from dismissive to alarmist.
Wolfers told MSNBC:
“[If] Target caves into this, then it says that the moment you threaten the employees of even a very large corporation, you get to control its policies. This is economic terrorism, literally terrorism, creating fear among the workers and forcing the corporations to sell the things you want, not sell the things you don’t.”
Wolfers did not object to past boycotts of companies like Twitter after Elon Musk sought to dismantle its censorship bureaucracy. He did not object to boycotts of Republican states over their laws concerning abortion, election integrity, or gender transitioning.
Most notably, Wolfers was one of the figures leading the mob against UChicago economist Harald Uhlig, who was discussed earlier. I quoted Wolfers as one of those seeking the removal of Uhlig from a leading economics journals because he criticized Black Lives Matters and the movement to Defund The Police.
Yet, Wolfers now claims that boycotts are “literal terrorism” because they are “forcing the corporations to sell the things you want, not sell the things you don’t.”
Boycotts have long been an important form of political speech extending back to the colonial protests against the British stamp and tea taxes. Indeed, the left has used targeted advertisers and boycotted companies to pressure corporate officials to change their policies. Twitter was targeted when Elon Musk sought to dismantle the company’s massive censorship operation. Now, however, boycotts are acts of terrorism when used against some of those policies.
The problem is that the media and these commentators cannot force customers to buy beer or other products. Consumers have found a way to express their views through the invisible hand of the markets. These advertising and public campaigns were designed to closely associate the brands with particular causes. That association has triggered a market response, including consumers who object to campaigns that seem more political than commercial.
Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, pledged to drop Bud Light’s “fratty reputation and embrace inclusivity.” She certainly succeeded in changing the entire view of the brand in less than a year on the job. Heinerscheid knew that the brand image sells the beer. That image is now unpalatable for some consumers. The social value of these campaigns is lost if consumers reject beer with the branding message.
Even Adam Schiff creating his own public endorsement of Bud Lite appeared to backfire. It is not clear that Anheser Busch was eager to have one of its labels pegged as the beer of choice by Adam Schiff as more than Dylan Mulvaney. Indeed, the company now appears to be in a death spiral. After it tried to distance itself form the Mulvaney association, it then Dylan Mulvaney for not staying the course with its earlier campaign. Those boycotts, however, are not being denounced as terrorism by Wolfers.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 22:20 - Here's How OpenAI Plans To Cleanse ChatGPT Of False Information
Here’s How OpenAI Plans To Cleanse ChatGPT Of False Information
Authored by Amaka Nwaokocha via CoinTelegraph.com,
OpenAI aims to reduce AI hallucinations in ChatGPT by enhancing math skills, as process supervision shows promise in improving accuracy…
On May 31, OpenAI announced its efforts to enhance ChatGPT’s mathematical problem-solving capabilities, aiming to reduce instances of artificial intelligence (AI) hallucinations. OpenAI emphasized mitigating hallucinations as a crucial step toward developing aligned AI.
In March, the introduction of the latest version of ChatGPT – ChatGPT-4 – further propelled AI into the mainstream. However, generative AI chatbots have long grappled with factual accuracy, occasionally generating false information, commonly referred to as “hallucinations.“ The efforts to reduce these AI hallucinations were announced through a post on OpenAI’s website.
AI hallucinations refer to instances where artificial intelligence systems generate factually incorrect outputs, misleading or unsupported by real-world data. These hallucinations can manifest in various forms, such as generating false information, making up nonexistent events or people, or providing inaccurate details about certain topics.
OpenAI conducted research to examine the effectiveness of two types of feedback: “outcome supervision” and “process supervision.“ Outcome supervision involves feedback based on the final result, while process supervision provides input for each step in a chain of thought. OpenAI evaluated these models using math problems, generating multiple solutions and selecting the highest-ranked solution according to each feedback model.
After thorough analysis, the research team found that process supervision yielded a superior performance as it encouraged the model to adhere to a human-approved process. In contrast, outcome supervision proved more challenging to scrutinize consistently.
OpenAI recognized that the implications of process supervision extend beyond mathematics, with further investigation necessary to understand its effects in different domains. It expressed the possibility that if the observed outcomes hold in broader contexts, process supervision could offer a favorable combination of performance and alignment compared with outcome supervision. To facilitate research, the company publicly released the complete data set of process supervision, inviting exploration and study in this area.
Although OpenAI did not provide explicit instances that prompted its investigation into hallucinations, two recent occurrences exemplified the problem in real-life scenarios.
In a recent incident, lawyer Steven Schwartz in the Mata vs. Avianca Airlines case acknowledged relying on the chatbot as a research resource. However, the information provided by ChatGPT turned out to be entirely fabricated, highlighting the issue at hand.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not the only example of artificial intelligence systems encountering hallucinations. During a demonstration of its chatbot technology in March, Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot examined earnings reports and generated inaccurate figures for companies like Gap and Lululemon.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 22:00 - Virginia, West Virginia Governors Sending National Guard Troops To Texas Border
Virginia, West Virginia Governors Sending National Guard Troops To Texas Border
Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Texas Army National Guard look on as illegal immigrants board a bus after surrendering to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Border Patrol agents for immigration and asylum claim processing following the end of Title 42 on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, on May 12, 2023. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images) The governors of Virginia and West Virginia are the latest Republican state leaders to announce deployments of National Guard troops to assist Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security efforts.
On Wednesday morning, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced he would deploy 100 of his state’s National Guard troops to Texas.
“The ongoing border crisis facing our nation has turned every state into a border state,” Youngkin said. “As leadership solutions at the federal level fall short, states are answering the call to secure our southern border, reduce the flow of fentanyl, combat human trafficking and address the humanitarian crisis. Following a briefing from Governor Abbott last week, Virginia is joining other states to deliver on his request for additional assistance.”
In a Wednesday morning press conference, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice also announced he would deploy 50 of his state’s National Guard troops to Texas.
“I know our National Guard will do incredible work, and we’ll wish them Godspeed to get home safe and sound,” Justice said. “I thank them all for their incredible bravery and for stepping up yet again to answer the call.”
Abbott has been using Texas state resources in recent months in a mission to stem the flow of illegal border crossings into the country. In recent weeks, Texas National Guard troops and Department of Public Safety officers have been seen setting up razor fences and turning back people attempting to cross from Mexico into Texas illegally.
Abbott has stepped up this border security effort after President Joe Biden’s administration ended the federal Title 42 immigration policy on May 11. Following the outbreak of COVID-19, U.S. officials had used Title 42 authorities to rapidly turn away and expel illegal immigrants under public health justifications.
On May 16, 24 Republican governors signed a letter pledging to support Abbott’s border security effort, including Youngkin and Justice. Since then, several Republican governors have deployed their state National Guard troops and state police resources to assist border control efforts.
Other States Sending Troops
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was among the first Republican governors to pledge specific resources to Abbott’s border security mission. On May 16, DeSantis announced his state would send 800 Florida National Guard soldiers, 200 Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers, 20 Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers, and 20 Emergency Management personnel to Texas. DeSantis also pledged five fixed-wing aircraft, two mobile command vehicles, 17 unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), and 10 watercraft.
On May 17, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced an unspecified number of troops from the Mississippi National Guard’s 112th Military Police Battalion would deploy to assist U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and agents along the southwest border.
On May 24, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced he had authorized the deployment of 100 Tennessee National Guard troops to the border. Lee said these troops would patrol and provide an added security presence at the border, help staff outposts, and assist in road and route clearance, barrier placement, and debris removal.
“America continues to face an unprecedented border crisis that threatens our nation’s security and the safety of Tennesseans,” Lee said of the deployment.
“The federal government owes Americans a plan to secure our country, and in the meantime, states continue to answer this important call to service,” Lee added. “I am again authorizing the Tennessee National Guard to help secure the Southern border, and I commend these troops for providing critical support.”
On May 24, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen also announced he would send 10 Nebraska state troopers to Texas to assist Abbott’s border security mission.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 21:40 - All New US Jobs Since The Covid Crash Have Gone To Foreign-Born Workers
All New US Jobs Since The Covid Crash Have Gone To Foreign-Born Workers
We live in a strange time, one where the formerly unthinkable – skepticism among the “very serious people” about government data veracity – has become mundane. And yet even though numerous bank analysts and strategists, and this site of course, have repeatedly raised questions and concerns about the credibility of the most important US economic data – the monthly jobs report – nothing ever changes and if it does, it comes in the form of periodic “seasonal adjustment” resets where we “learn” that all the data that guided markets and central banks, had been
fake, manipulatedwrong for years.But even if one ignores the blatant manipulation of economic data by self-serving administrations, who hope to generate political brownie points by casting the economy in a far stronger light than is merited in reality, there are still various bizarre offshoots within the data which few notice yet which are instrumental to maintaining the fake narrative.
Such as this: readers are probably aware that according to the BLS, there are now roughly 3.3 million more jobs (155.7 million) than there were at the peak just before the covid crash (152.4 million).
On the surface, this is an impressive accomplishment, as a deficit of some 22 million jobs has been erased in under three years.
But then, if one starts digging, some peculiarities emerge, like for example that much of jobs created in recent years have gone to “multiple jobholders“, meaning that not every “payroll” has been assigned to a unique individual, but instead there are now people who hold two, three or more jobs to make ends meet.
Or that much of the recent job creation has gone to low-paying part-time workers while full time jobs have stagnated.
Or that according to the household survey there was virtually no new jobs created for much of 2022 even as the establishment survey indicated that over 2 million new jobs had been added over the same period.
To be sure, it didn’t take long after we pointed out these glaring narrative “glitches” and discrepancies for the BLS to notice and to make the appropriate adjustments and historical revisions to the data to make it coherent. After all, bureaucrats are not very diligent and attention oriented, and manipulating bureaucrats are even worse.
Yet one place where the BLS has allowed a glaring data deficiency to persist, is in what will soon be a very politically charged and sensitive data series: where have all the new workers come from.
As noted above, if one believes the BLS, US payrolls are now a record high 155.7 million, or 161 million employed workers according to the Household survey. But if one digs a little deeper, one finds something rather peculiar: all of the jobs created since the covid crash have gone to foreign-born workers!
That’s right: as shown in the chart below, there are currently 131.1 million native-born US workers, which is down more than half a million from the pre-covid peak of 131.7 million reached in October 2019 (data source: Federal Reserve). Meanwhile, if only looks at the number of foreign-born workers, here the data paints a very different picture: having peaked at 27.8 million in Feb 2019, the number of foreign-born workers has not only recovered its covid crash losses, but has increased by an additional 2.2 million to a record 30.0 million as of April 2023!
Source: Federal Reserve FRED (native-born and foreign-born workers) This means that all the new job creation since the covid crash has gone to foreign workers, with native-born workers stagnating and still unable to break above pre-covid highs, even though if one merely extends the pre-covid trendline, native-born workers should have long ago surpassed their 2019 highs. Said otherwise, millions of native jobs have quietly gone to (lower paid) foreigners.
But what if the data shown above is merely a product of uneven distribution of hiring while the labor force growth has been similar. Good question, and to answer that we have looked not at the change in absolute jobs/workers but the change in labor forces, native-born and foreign-born, indexed at 100 as of Oct 2019. The result, shown below, speaks for itself.
Source: Federal Reserve FRED (native-born and foreign-born labor force) And there you have it: both the number of native-born workers and the actual native-born labor force have stagnated, while foreign-born workers have flourished and captured market share or rather employment and wage share from native Americans.
To be sure, there is much to analyze: unfortunately the BLS does not break down the “foreign-born” data set into legally and illegally-immigrated foreign-born workers, although considering that it was virtually impossible for legal foreigners to enter the US – let along work in it – for nearly two years after the covid pandemic broke out, it is rather safe to assume that much of the foreign-born work has gone to illegal immigrants.
Which then begs the question: how does this impact inflation? We already know that wage inflation is supposedly off the charts, but if the bulk of new hiring has gone to foreign-born workers who, for the most part, represent a cheaper labor option for employers, does that mean that wage inflation would be that much higher if most new workers had been native-born? What will happen to inflation if, say, Trump or DeSantis makes it a campaign pledge to focus on hiring native-born workers?
And another question: what does this track record mean for the coming presidential mudslinging campaigns – what impact will it have on the reputation of, say, Joe Biden, when he is asked why all new jobs under his administration have gone to foreign-born workers while native-born Americans have been left to stagnate?
We hope to have the answers soon enough; for now, however, we have another jobs report to focus on in just a few hours. And if the recent track record of the BLS “accuracy and integrity” is any indication of what to expect, tomorrow’s numbers should push what are already ridiculous job numbers well into the realm of peak absurdity.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 21:16 - Here’s What Trump Has Promised If He Wins In 2024
Here’s What Trump Has Promised If He Wins In 2024
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Former president Donald Trump said Wednesday that he’s eying a “most spectacular” 250th birthday celebration of the United States if he is elected, coming days after he promised to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. But the former president, a leading GOP candidate, has made a range of other new policy proposals.
Former president Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in New York City, on Aug. 9, 2022. (David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Reuters) US Celebration
“Three years from now, the United States will celebrate the biggest and most important milestone in our country’s history—250 years of American independence,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “That’s why as a nation we should be preparing for the most spectacular birthday party. We want to make it the best of all time.”
And Trump’s campaign said in a news release that the former commander-in-chief will hold a White House task force known as the “Salute to America 250” to hold anniversary celebrations across the United States between Memorial Day 2025 and July 4, 2026.
“I will work with all 50 governors, Republican and Democrat alike, to create the Great American State Fair, a unique one-year exhibition featuring pavilions from all 50 states,” he said in a video, proposing a “legendary,” special “one-time festival” in Iowa.
“And finally, and most importantly, I will ask America’s great religious communities to pray for our nation and our people as we prepare for this momentous occasion,” Trump also remarked. “America has been a country sustained and strengthened by prayer and by our communities of faith as we chart a course toward the next 250 years. Let us come together and rededicate ourselves as one nation under God.”
Other initiatives include the Patriot Games, an Olympic-style event for high school athletes, and the re-issuance of an executive order to restore the Trump-era National Garden of American Heroes that was ultimately blocked by President Joe Biden. That park would have honored great Americans and historical figures, Trump has said.
The timing of Trump’s statement is no coincidence. The former president is traveling to Iowa for a tour of the state, which is important launching point during the 2024 Republican Party primary.
“Together we will build it, and they will come,” Trump said of the proposed Iowa Fairgrounds event, using a quote from the movie Field of Dreams, which was filmed in Iowa.
100 New US Attorneys
Wednesday’s proposal from Trump builds on the patriotic themes that he used during his 2016 campaign and administration. Trump in 2020 established the 1776 Commission dedicated to patriotic education and history lessons, countering the New York Times’s “1619 Project” that attempts to reframe the founding of America around slavery.
Months before that, Trump also vowed in a campaign video to fight against who he described as “Marxist” left-wing district attorneys and “overhaul” the Department of Justice in the wake of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump for allegedly falsifying business records. If elected, his administration would also appoint 100 U.S. attorneys who are the “polar opposite” of district attorneys who received campaign cash from controversial left-wing billionaire George Soros.
“As we completely overhaul the federal Department of Justice and FBI, we will also launch sweeping civil rights investigations into Marxist local district attorneys,” Trump said in a video posted to his YouTube page, which was restored earlier this year after a two-year suspension. “And that’s what we have—they are Marxist in many cases.”
The end of the Obama-era border wall gives way to the taller, 30-foot Trump-era wall on the U.S.–Mexico border near Naco, Ariz., on Dec. 6, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) End Birthright Citizenship
This week, Trump also again vowed to issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrant parents. Several years ago, Trump signaled that he would issue the executive order, but some legal analysts have said that it would likely face significant legal challenges as birthright citizenship is essentially protected under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Trump’s website says that he “will again end catch-and-release, restore Remain in Mexico, and eliminate asylum fraud,” while “in cooperative states, President Trump will deputize the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing illegal alien gang members and criminals. He will also deliver a merit-based immigration system that protects American labor and promotes American values.”
Death Penalty for Drug Offenders
During his post-midterm announcement for president, Trump also proposed handing down the death penalty for some drug dealers and traffickers, arguing that such individuals are causing death and destruction
“We’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said at the time. “Because it’s the only way.”
Critical Race Theory
Trump in January also pledged to cut federal funding to schools that teach the controversial critical race theory along with curriculum around gender identity. While speaking in Davenport, Iowa, Trump promised to keep male transgender athletes out of girls’ sports and “bring back parental rights into our schools.”
A policy plan also calls for opening new “civil rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination.”
“As the saying goes, personnel is policy, and at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem,” Trump said earlier this year. “We’re at the end of the list on education, and yet we spend the most, but we’re going to be tops in education no matter where you go anywhere in the world.”
Jan. 6 Pardons
More than two years after the Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump said last month that he would pardon a range of individuals who were convicted and sentenced in connection to the incident. Those pardons, he said, will “be very early on” in his presidency.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 21:00 - Biden Speech Hailing NATO Strength Overshadowed By Serious Fall On Stage
Biden Speech Hailing NATO Strength Overshadowed By Serious Fall On Stage
President Joe Biden on Thursday ratcheted up the pressure on holdout nations Turkey and Hungary by saying that Sweden will join NATO “as soon as possible”. The former two countries have blocked Sweden’s entry, but recently approved Finland.
Biden hailed NATO unity in a speech before the US Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in Colorado Springs. “NATO is more energized and more united than it’s been in decades. It’s now even stronger with the accession of our newest ally, Finland – and soon Sweden – to the alliance, as soon as possible. It will happen. I promise you,” President Biden said.
Image: AP Biden’s strong words came immediately on the heels of Blinken’s trip to Sweden wherein he said that “the perspective of the United States” is that “the time is now to finalize Sweden’s accession.”
Especially since Finland’s formal membership acceptance in April, European and US officials have been pushing for Sweden’s entry as well – but again, Turkey has been adamant in maintaining its rejection, based on accusations that Swedish authorities allow ‘terrorist’ and Kurdish ‘dissident’ groups and individuals in its country.
“Welcome to NATO, Finland! I hope we will welcome our Swedish friends very soon, too,” French President Emmanuel Macron said soon after Finland’s accession.
As for Biden’s Air Force graduation speech, his important remarks on NATO or really any of the speech content for that matter were immediately overshadowed by what happened the moment he began to walk off stage…
BREAKING: Biden takes a big fall on stage just now at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation pic.twitter.com/GxkMbpyoNo
— Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) June 1, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The fall looked like a hard one, in a dangerous moment for the 80-year old Commander-in-Chief.
Below is another angle:
Another angle of Joe Biden’s fall on stage today. Watch the reactions. pic.twitter.com/74ChFqPafI
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 1, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Below is how The New York Times described the significant fall:
President Biden tripped and fell after delivering a speech and handing out diplomas to graduates of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on Thursday. Mr. Biden, who is 80 years old, was helped up and appeared to recover quickly.
Mr. Biden’s fall was captured on video and spread on social media. He appears to trip, fall to his knees and catch himself with his hands on the floor of the stage. He was helped up by several Air Force officials and Secret Service agents, and he walked back to his seat.
Mr. Biden had just delivered an energetic speech to the Air Force graduates before helping to hand out the diplomas. He fell after he distributed the final diploma and was headed back to his seat.
The White House issued an official statement via its communications director Ben LaBolt, who said in a tweet quickly after the incident, “He’s fine, there was a sandbag on stage while he was shaking hands.”
Biden declined to talk with reporters on the tarmac before boarding AF1 to fly back from Colorado after he fell on stage. https://t.co/S47Nv2Hr06
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) June 1, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Just as Biden declined to speak about the matter, mainstream media also shied away from commenting. Things were a little different a few years ago when President Trump walked slowly down a ramp (without falling)…
And here’s Joe Biden mocking Trump for walking carefully on the ramp, to avoid a fall
**Notice the covid pandemic death ticker on the side** pic.twitter.com/Dg9yRRVRJi
— The Real Brandon (@BluecollarBran) June 1, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
At a moment there’s a war in Ukraine and dangerous showdown between nuclear armed superpowers the United States and Russia, certainly Moscow is going to see Biden’s serious fall on stage as a sign of weakness and frailness from an ageing president.
* * *
Meanwhile, this is likely to have significant impact on the domestic front as well, as the Democrats decide whether to go all in on Biden in 2024…
Open the Democrat primaries and debates. This isn’t fair to anyone. https://t.co/KcW67BaR7z
— jack (@jack) June 1, 2023
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 20:54 - The Atlantic Hurricane Season Starts Today
The Atlantic Hurricane Season Starts Today
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts near-normal conditions for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season which starts today.
NOAA is forecasting five to nine hurricanes to occur in 2023, out of which one to four could turn into major hurricanes.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, one of the factors that could suppress the 2023 hurricane season is the likely start of an El Niño phase after three years with the La Niña phenomenon, which shifts colder temperatures and stronger trade winds to the Pacific, therefore exposing the Atlantic to warmer and less linear wind pattern more favorable for hurricane formation. If an El Niño phase were to start this year, it would shift cooler and windier conditions over to the Atlantic. However, above-normal ocean temperatures in the Central Atlantic band and the Caribbean have the power to strengthen hurricanes this season. NOAA concludes the two factors could offset each other, but if El Niño failed to form despite favorable conditions, the high ocean temperatures could make for an intense 2023 season.
While the 2022 season and its eight hurricanes – including Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Julia – was somewhat above average compared with recent years, 2020 was an extremely busy year for hurricanes. A total of 14 formed over the Atlantic basin – the most since 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina. Six of those were major hurricanes, including Hurricane Laura, Hurricane Eta and Hurricane Iota. In 2022, only two out of eight hurricanes in the Atlantic basin were of category 3 or above on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which is in contrast with the recent trend of 40-50 percent of all Atlantic hurricanes being classified as major ones.
You will find more infographics at Statista
While in the 1970s and 1980s, the share of major hurricanes stood at an average of around 30-33 percent of all Atlantic hurricanes, this had increased to an average of 40-50 percent per year in the 2000s and 2010s. The change translates to an average of 1.6 major hurricanes occurring per year in the 1970s and 1980s and 3-4 occurring annually today. Climate change has been identified as a reason why stronger hurricanes occur.
More evidence that hurricane seasons are changing can be deferred from the timing of named storms. 2021’s first storm – Ana – was named on May 22 after forming near the Bahamas. This made 2021 the seventh consecutive year a named storm formed before the start of the official season on June 1. The first named storm of 2022 occurred on June 5 and none was named as of June 1 in 2023.
2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, was the worst hurricane seasons since 1851, records from the National Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory at NOAA show. Hurricane Katrina was just one of seven major hurricanes observed in the Atlantic basin that year. 2005 was the year with most hurricanes in the Atlantic (15), followed by 2020 (14), 2010 (12, including Hurricane Sandy) and 1969 (also 12).
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 20:40 - A Debt Jubilee Of Biblical Proportions Is Coming Soon… What You Need To Know
A Debt Jubilee Of Biblical Proportions Is Coming Soon… What You Need To Know
Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,
Four thousand years ago, the rulers of ancient Babylon discovered a technique to stave off violent revolts.
In ancient times, there was a tendency for people to become hopelessly in debt to their creditors. Eventually, they would rise up and cause instability that could threaten the entire ruling system.
The rulers of the ancient world recognized this dynamic.
Their solution was to enact widespread debt cancellation—a debt jubilee.
Debt jubilees acted as a societal pressure release valve when there were no other options.
The practice spread in the ancient world and became codified in different civilizations.
For example, the Book of Leviticus recognizes debt jubilees as the end of a 49-year biblical cycle—seven cycles of seven years.
I think this ancient practice will make a big comeback soon as government, corporate, and personal debt have all reached unbearable levels today.
In fact, the debt jubilees have already started… and the investment consequences will be profound.
The Biggest Wealth Transfer in History
It’s important to note that debt jubilees do not magically create new wealth.
They simply redistribute it.
Debt jubilees are government decrees that amount to a massive wealth transfer with big winners and losers.
The PPP loan forgiveness during the Covid hysteria was the prelude.
President Biden’s student loan forgiveness took it to the next level.
The student loan forgiveness was unprecedented. Unilateral executive action of this size has never occurred during a time of peace. Moreover, Congress, not the president, is supposed to make spending decisions of this magnitude.
It is estimated that the immediate and deferred costs of the student loan forgiveness to be at least $590 billion.
Biden’s student loan debt jubilee went too far for even Obama’s former chief economic advisor, Jason Furman, who described it as:
“Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.”
Aside from the inflationary effects—which I’ll get to in a moment—the student loan jubilee also set a precedent that I think will be impossible to reverse.
Consider how the people who behaved prudently feel.
These people took different career paths to avoid student loans, cut back on their spending so they could afford college without borrowing, or paid off their student debt.
These people are probably feeling like suckers now.
Not only do they not get any debt relief, but they will have to foot the bill in one way or another to pay for those who had their student loans forgiven.
I imagine these people will be angry and probably have considerable car, mortgage, and credit card debt, as many Americans do. So they will want debt relief too… and I bet they will get it.
Amid rising prices, consumer debt is skyrocketing. It is at an all-time high of over $16 trillion, as seen in the chart below.
With interest rates rising, the cost of servicing this record debt is becoming unbearable for many. As a result, many Americans have reached their maximum debt saturation and are hitting a financial breaking point.
As Biden demonstrated, all it takes is a President’s pen stroke to wipe out hundreds of billions in debt.
I think the political pressure to do this again will be irresistible—especially before elections—as a way to court voters.
The student loan jubilee set a precedent.
I don’t think it will be long before we see a credit card jubilee, a car loan jubilee, or a mortgage jubilee.
How will the government pay for all these jubilees?
It’s improbable they could raise taxes enough to pay for them.
It also wouldn’t make sense to issue more debt to cancel other debts.
That leaves money printing as the only way they can finance these jubilees. So my guess is that’s what they’ll do.
That’s why the coming debt jubilees will pour “gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning.”
But it’s not just consumer debt that has become unbearable. The big enchilada is the US government’s federal debt.
The Coming Federal Debt Jubilee
The US federal government has the biggest debt in the history of the world. And it’s continuing to grow at a rapid, unstoppable pace.
In short, the US government is fast approaching the financial endgame.
Here’s why…
Today, the US federal debt has gone parabolic and is scores of trillions.
To put it in perspective, if you earned $1 a second 24/7/365—about $31 million per year—it would take you over 1,008,378 YEARS to pay off the US federal debt.
And that’s with the unrealistic assumption that it would stop growing.
The truth is, the debt will keep piling up unless Congress makes some politically impossible decisions to cut spending. But don’t count on that happening. In fact, they’re racing in the opposite direction now that they’ve normalized multitrillion-dollar deficits.
The amount of debt is so extreme that even a return of interest rates to their historical average would mean paying the interest expense on the debt would consume more than half of current tax revenues. Interest expense would eclipse Social Security and defense spending and become the largest item in the federal budget.
Second, a return to the historical average interest rate will not be enough to reign in inflation—not even close. A drastic rise in interest rates is needed. If that happened, it could mean that the US government is paying more for the interest expense than it takes in from taxes.
In short, the Federal Reserve is trapped.
Raising interest rates high enough to dent inflation would bankrupt the US government.
In other words, it’s game over. They have no choice but to “reset” the system—that’s what governments do when they are trapped.
How are they going to reset the system?
Nobody knows for sure. But I’d bet a debt jubilee of biblical proportions will be a big part of it.
So then, how will the US government repudiate its impossible federal debt burden?
My guess is that they won’t be explicit. That would look too much like a default. It would destroy the role of the US as the center of the world’s financial system.
Given a choice, I don’t think the US government would choose immediate self-destruction. Since power does not relinquish itself voluntarily, we should presume they’ll decide to stealthily implement their federal debt jubilee through inflation.
Inflation is a big bonus to debtors. It allows you to borrow in dollars and repay in dimes.
And since the US government is the biggest debtor in the history of the world, it is the single largest beneficiary of inflation.
That’s why I think the federal debt jubilee will come in the form of a massive wave of inflation.
Here’s the bottom line.
The coming debt jubilees could have the effect of wiping out many trillions worth of liabilities and creating previously unfathomable inflation.
That could trigger the largest wealth transfer in history.
Remember, debt doesn’t exist within a vacuum. It is a liability to the borrower and an asset to lender.
Those storing their wealth in government currencies, bondholders, and creditors will be the big losers.
Debtors and those who own unencumbered scarce assets will be the big winners.
It’s certainly not a just outcome.
Prudent savers shouldn’t be made to pay for the excesses of the debtors.
But notions of what is just or not did not impede Biden’s student loan jubilee—and they certainly won’t for the coming jubilees.
Although that will be unfortunate for many people, there is simply nothing anyone can do now.
The debt levels have already reached a point of saturation, and the government could soon see jubilees as a politically attractive option.
That’s why it is best to recognize the reality of this Big Picture and get positioned accordingly.
That means owning scarce and valuable assets that are not simultaneously someone else’s liability.
Crucially, this excludes fiat currency in bank accounts.
Remember, fiat currency is the unbacked liability of a bankrupt government.
Further, once you deposit currency into a bank, it is no longer yours. Technically and legally, it is the bank’s property, and what you own instead is an unsecured liability of the bank.
In an era of jubilees in which debts are wiped clean, you won’t want to be on the other end of unsecured liabilities or IOUs of any kind.
I suspect it could all go down soon… and it will not be pretty for many.
Most people have no idea how bad things can get… let alone how to prepare.
That’s why I’ve recently published a how-to guide detailing the best ways to protect your savings. It’s called The Most Dangerous Economic Crisis in 100 Years… the Top 3 Strategies You Need Right Now.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 20:20 - Investor Home Purchases Collapse Most On Record
Investor Home Purchases Collapse Most On Record
Residential real estate brokerage firm Redfin released new data that revealed a record-breaking drop in homes purchased by investors in the first quarter. This sharp decline is due to a combination of elevated interest rates and sliding home prices, which impacts potential future returns. With investors retreating to the sidelines, buyers in the market have dramatically shrunk, and price wars have eased.
Redfin data shows investors purchased 48.6% fewer homes in the first quarter compared with the same period last year. This was the most significant plunge on record.
To illustrate just how the Federal Reserve’s 14 months of aggressive interest hikes have chilled a major buyer of the residential real estate market, Redfin shows the record-breaking pullback in the chart below:
The brokerage said the investors still in the market have shifted to buying or flipping more affordable properties due to tightening credit conditions. Getting financing for lower-priced homes is easier, and there’s more demand. Low-priced home purchases surged to a two-year high, and a record 41.1% of investor purchases in the quarter were starter homes.
Redfin Senior Economist Sheharyar Bokhari said overall, investors have “pumped the brakes on home purchases.” However, he said, “They’re still scooping up a bigger share of homes than they were before the pandemic, which can create challenges for individual buyers at a time when there are so few homes for sale.”
Investors made up 17.6% of the market in the first quarter, down from 20.4% a year earlier. Still, the investor share of purchased homes is near record levels.
The rapid increase in the 30-year fixed mortgage rate to over 7%, not seen since the Dot Com bust, has been the main driver in cooling demand.
In a separate report, Lotfi Karoui, chief credit strategist at Goldman Sachs, offered some good news to clients that mortgage rates are expected to top around these levels and fall to under 6% in 2024.
Karoui pointed out that housing affordability has slightly improved but remains at decade lows.
And the inventory of existing homes remains extraordinarily tight.
“Beyond 2023, we expect a rebound in home prices as the impact of policy tightening subsides. While our economists think another policy rate hike this year is a possibility, their baseline expectation is that the Fed has ceased policy tightening. History indicates that home prices tend to grow after the conclusion of a hiking cycle, using 1995, 2000, and 2018 as a guide,” the Goldman analyst noted.
The silver lining is that investors are no longer saturating the market and sparking price wars as they did before and during the Covid era. Financing deals is becoming more challenging due to the increased cost of money, which is expected to continue to weigh on home purchases.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 20:00 - US Lacks 'Effective Tool' To Stop China’s Tech Theft: Treasury Official
US Lacks ‘Effective Tool’ To Stop China’s Tech Theft: Treasury Official
Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The United States lacks an effective tool to adequately combat widespread espionage and intellectual property theft being perpetrated by China’s communist regime, according to a U.S. Treasury Department official.
Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping (center) and Chinese and foreign naval officials applaud after a group photo during an event to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in Qingdao, in eastern China’s Shandong province, on April 23, 2019. (Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images) Despite years of competition and ongoing IP theft, the United States has not developed the tools required to target and prevent the continued transfer of sensitive U.S. technologies to China, according to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Rosen.
“We currently assess we don’t have an effective tool to target the money and sophistication with know-how that goes into these sensitive and most critical technologies into countries of concern,” Rosen said during a May 31 hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
“We risk leaving a gap in terms of some of our national security concerns,” he said.
Rosen added that the Biden administration was committed to “zealously” defending U.S. security interests, and would prioritize those interests over economic development if necessary, but required more tools to do so.
“The United States will secure our interests and those of our allies and partners,” Rosen said.
“We will not compromise on national security concerns, even when they force trade-offs with economic interests.”
Rosen’s remarks confirm expert testimony delivered to Congress last year, which stated that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in anti-competitive and anti-free market practices on a global scale, and that the United States lacks adequate non-security tools to defend its interests.
Policies That Benefited Corporate Profits
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the committee chair, said that the United States had fostered a system of policies over the course of several decades that had strengthened China at the expense of the American people. The nation’s current struggles to counter China, he said, are owed to policies that benefited corporate profits instead of American well-being.
“For far too long, our policy around China catered to multinational corporations and failed working families. It destroyed local communities, it eroded our manufacturing base and international competitiveness,” Brown said.
Brown added that U.S. policymakers “knew” corporations would terminate millions of U.S. jobs in favor of dirt cheap labor in China, but still granted the regime permanent most-favored trade status in the 1990s. Since then, he said, consecutive administrations had failed to correct the imbalance in China’s favor.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 19:40 - Pentagon Chiefs Cancel "Family Friendly" Drag Show At Air Force Base After Rep. Gaetz Pressure
Pentagon Chiefs Cancel “Family Friendly” Drag Show At Air Force Base After Rep. Gaetz Pressure
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on March 29, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., pointedly demanded Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley why drag queen story hours were still taking place on US bases around the world, including in Montana, Nevada, Virginia and Germany.
“Drag queen story hours is not something that the department funds,” Austin told the committee.
Milley chimed in, asking to see the flyers for the events Gaetz was referring to:
“I’d like to take a look at those, because I don’t agree with those,” Milley said.
Gaetz Asks Austin and Milley Why Drag Queen Shows are Still Happening on Military Baseshttps://t.co/nG99e4tp3n pic.twitter.com/RYVx96DWzb
— AɯƙɯαɾԃMαɱα™® (@Aspiemama_107) May 24, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
And as NBC News reports, when Milley was informed about the event this week, he was visibly angry about the decision to host the event on base, a U.S. official and a defense official said.
Sure enough, just days later, the DoD canceled a planned drag show at Nellis Air Force base in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to a statement provided to the Daily Caller on Thursday.
The Nellis LGBTQ+ Pride Council was set to offer a free “family friendly” drag show Thursday, June 1, to kick off pride month
“Per DoD Joint Ethics Regulation (JER), certain criteria must be met for persons or organizations acting in non-Federal capacity to use DoD facilities and equipment,” Sabrina Singh, deputy press secretary for the Department of Defense, told the Caller.
“As Secretary Austin has said, the DOD will not host drag events at U.S. military installations or facilities. Hosting these types of events in federally funded facilities is not a suitable use of DOD resources. Our Service members are diverse and are allowed to have personal outlets. We are proud to serve alongside any and every young American who takes the oath that puts their life on the line in defense of our country.”
Nellis AFB hosted a Pride Month drag show in June 2021, named “Drag-u-Nellis.”
A spokesperson for the base said in a statement that it was intended to promote inclusivity and diversity.
Rightly so, Rep. Matt Gaetz took a victory lap on the news…“HUGE VICTORY: The Department of Defense has CANCELED a scheduled ‘child-friendly’ drag show after I demanded answers from @SecDef Austin and General Milley!”
HUGE VICTORY: The Department of Defense has CANCELED a scheduled “child-friendly” drag show after I demanded answers from @SecDef Austin and General Milley!
Drag shows should not be taking place on military installations with taxpayer dollars PERIOD!
READ:… https://t.co/YDByQihQod pic.twitter.com/vnJiuFlh2z
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) May 31, 2023
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The question is – how many of these shows are being funded by the DoD that Rep. Gaetz is not aware of (and why?).
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 19:20 - The Suffering Is Off The Charts
The Suffering Is Off The Charts
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Things have taken a turn for the worse. In recent months, economic activity has been dropping all over the nation, and that decline appears to be accelerating. We just learned that gross domestic income has now fallen for two quarters in a row, and the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now been plummeting for 13 consecutive months. Unfortunately, when economic conditions deteriorate it is the people at the low end of the economic pyramid that get hit the hardest.
Thanks to our rapidly rising cost of living, we are seeing a dramatic explosion in the number of “working homeless” that are living out of their vehicles on a daily basis even though they are currently employed.
In particular, the RV “communities” that are springing up from coast to coast are starting to get quite a bit of attention…
The owner of a party bus company, Rikers Island prison guards and an Amazon worker are just some of the eclectic bunch who have formed a community of ‘working homeless’ people living out of RVs in the Astoria section of Queens, New York.
Similar communities have formed across the US from New England to California where people have chosen a nomadic lifestyle amid a national cost of living crisis.
Most of these people get up and go to work in the morning.
In fact, the Daily Mail spoke to one man that actually “works for a New York City hospital”…
Resident Paul Reevers described himself as ‘working homeless.’ He said that he has a job but the rent went up too high and he could not longer to afford a an apartment.
Reevers, who works for a New York City hospital, said that he took out a loan and bought his RV.
If you work at a hospital, you should be able to afford a place to live.
But this is our country now.
We are absolutely destroying the middle class, and as a result we now have a massive homelessness crisis on our hands…
Insider Monkey, a finance website, revealed a list of the top 30 cities worldwide with the highest homeless population. Notably, a handful of the US cities on the list are governed by progressive leadership, which may not surprise readers. While it is evident that some unfortunate individuals are facing homelessness, a trend exacerbated by recent inflationary pressures and a drug addiction crisis, some liberal policies have enabled others to sustain their nomadic lifestyles with taxpayer funds.
Insider Monkey found New York City is number 5 on the list, with a homeless population of about 69,000. Next is Chicago, at number 7 with 65,611. Washington, DC, is number 8 with 57,416, Los Angeles number 13 with 41,980, and San Fransisco number 14 with 38,000.
No matter what you or I are facing right now, at least we aren’t sleeping in the streets.
So we should count our blessings.
Hunger is also rapidly growing all over America. Right now, record numbers of people are coming for help at one food bank in the Seattle area…
Since March, the food bank has broken its record three times for the highest number of people served in a day since 2019, when the organization started allowing three visits a month. More and more, people like Jones who haven’t been to the food bank in years, are showing up, Christian said.
“That’s hard on them; they felt they had moved above the poverty line, got some stability but, ‘Here it is 2023 and here I am back in the food line asking strangers for help,’” Christian said.
And in Boston, the line for food on one recent weekend morning “stretched the length of two football fields”…
The line outside Boston’s American Red Cross Food Pantry on a recent Saturday morning stretched the length of two football fields.
The number of people filing into the red-brick industrial-zone warehouse on some days now exceeds the worst periods of the pandemic economic crisis and in April it had the second highest monthly traffic since it opened in 1982, according to David Andre, the director.
We are witnessing so much suffering all over the country right now.
And there are so many more people that are living right on the edge of disaster.
According to one recent survey, approximately 38.5 percent of U.S. adults experienced “some form of difficulty in covering expenses between April 26 and May 8”…
A large swath of American consumers are facing financial hardship as they grapple with elevated living costs, record-high credit card use, and two years of negative real wage growth. This perfect storm could decimate financially fragile households in the next downturn.
As many as 89.1 million American adults (or about 38.5%) were found to experience some form of difficulty in covering expenses between April 26 and May 8, according to Bloomberg, citing new data from the Household Pulse Survey. This is up from 34.4% in 2022 and 26.7% during the same period in 2021.
Of course this is just the beginning.
As I keep warning my readers, things will eventually get much worse.
And finally, whatever happens in Washington is not going to fundamentally alter our long-term trajectory, and that means that much more suffering is coming in the days ahead.
* * *
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 19:00 - Shellenberger: Why The Media Is Attacking Free Speech
Shellenberger: Why The Media Is Attacking Free Speech
Authored by Michael Shellenberger via ‘Public’ substack,
Governments around the world are cracking down on free speech. What they are demanding includes the ability to read private encrypted text messages and invade homes in search of wrongspeech. Their demands thus go far beyond what the Censorship Industrial Complex was able to get away with over the last six years.
And things are getting worse. Last week, the European Union announced it would punish Twitter for withdrawing from its supposedly “voluntary” censorship laws. “Twitter leaves EU voluntary code of practice against disinformation,” said the EU’s top censor, Thierry Breton, “You can run, but you can’t hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation under [the Digital Services Act] DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement.”
Politico begs to differ. The Censorship Industrial Complex, it wrote last week, is an “unproven conspiracy theory that a group of left-leaning academics, think tanks, tech workers and government employees coordinated to silence right-wing voters ahead of nationwide votes. To be clear (looking at you, Twitter Files), none of this has been proved, and there’s evidence that right-leaning voices have a larger, not smaller, presence online compared with those on the left.”
But it’s not unproven. In fact, the existence, funding, and actions of the Censorship Industrial Complex are extremely well-documented at this point. Across thousands of pages of Attorneys’ General lawsuits, thousands of pages of Congressional reports and testimony, and hundreds of pages of Twitter and Facebook files themselves, it’s clear that here was a highly coordinated campaign by top White House officials, government agencies, and government-funded contractors to demand Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies censor, in their own words, “often-true” content, including about drug side effects, both to prevent the public from seeing it but also to spread misinformation on behalf of a political agenda.
Politico did not, notably, provide any source or link to support its claim that “there’s evidence that right-leaning voices have a larger, not smaller, presence online compared with those on the left.” The reason might be that such “evidence” is a single highly selective study attempting to generalize about the whole of the social media experience through the lens of an outdated and simplistic Left-Right framework.
Emails from pro-censorship journalists to Twitter demanding the de-plaforming of another reporter, Alex Berenson.
The picture many of us have of journalists is Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All The President’s Men,” or the journalists in “Spotlight,” “She Said,” and “The Post.” They are dogged seekers of the truth, determined to overcome any obstacle in their way of discovering it and reporting it to the world. They advocate giving voice to the voiceless and uncovering secretive and dangerous abuses of power by everyone from senior government officials to powerful corporate executives to religious leaders.
But the real-world behavior of many journalists today at top news media companies is the exact opposite. They plot secretly with the Aspen Institute, each other, and social media executives about how to kill stories damaging to the president. And they help former CIA Directors and “Fellows” spread ridiculous conspiracy theories, including that Russians stole the 2016 election, controlled Donald Trump through a video of prostitutes urinating on him, and had somehow stolen Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Rather than quote from different sides, these journalists denounce their enemies. They dismissed as “racist” and as a “debunked conspiracy theory” that COVID-19 might have escaped from a Chinese lab while insisting that it was somehow less racist and far-fetched to believe the virus traveled 1,000 miles from the countryside before sickening someone at a “live wet market.” And they demanded that Twitter de-platform disfavored voices like Twitter Files reporter Alex Berenson.
Why do so many journalists participate in the war on free speech, including the freest social media platform, Twitter? Last summer, Berenson released documents showing reporters from CNN and Axios, urging Twitter to suspend Berenson for criticizing vaccines. “It’s like librarians burning books,” he told Public yesterday. “Why are journalists attacking journalists?”
…
The picture we had of mainstream news reporters speaking truth to power is no longer accurate. More frequently than not, reporters from those same institutions speak power against the truth. The evidence for the Censorship Industrial Complex is abundant, and they know it because they are part of it. The media’s problem is not that the censorship conspiracy is unproven. It’s that we proved it.
As such, Public is happy to announce a gathering of free speech leaders, journalists, and attorneys from around the world in London on July 22 – 23. At 7 pm on July 22, Matt Taibbi, Russell Brand, and I will speak on stage at Central Hall Westminster in London.
The next day, a small group of free speech leaders from around the world will gather to form an anti-censorship alliance aimed at defunding and dismantling the Censorship Industrial Complex, fighting new government censorship efforts, and pushing for First Amendment-level free speech protections worldwide. Email us to find out more information and get involved.
It’s time for freedom lovers to go on the offense. The problem isn’t that America is too free with its First Amendment free speech protections. It’s that other countries are too censorious. People around the world would love to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted in America, which is a big reason so many people want to live here. We are confident that when the peoples of the world, or their representatives, are forced to vote on free speech, they will tend toward the First Amendment, away from the totalitarian speech restrictions being pushed globally.
Governments are cracking down, but we are fighting back. The regime media won’t cover the news, so we will. After all the Congressional histrionics and media denials have passed, a worldwide grassroots citizen’s free speech and anti-censorship resistance movement will be left in their wake. It is notable that the main U.S. censorship groups, which are now being sued, are trying to deny that they were, in fact, censoring anyone.
But such lies are belied by their allies in the EU and elsewhere in the world trying to expand their censorship powers. In cracking down on speech, governments display their own lack of trust in the people, an attitude that will be increasingly reciprocated.
…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/01/2023 – 18:20
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