May 02

Today’s News 2nd May 2021

  • China Has A Grand Carbon Neutrality Target… But Where Is The Plan?
    China Has A Grand Carbon Neutrality Target… But Where Is The Plan?

    Authored by Alicia García-Herrero and Simone Tagliapietra, both Senior Fellows at Bruegel,

    China’s new long-term targets, to reach peak emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, are yet to be matched with a consistent short-term action plan…

    As the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, China will make or break the global quest for climate neutrality by the middle of the century – the only way to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5°C. Consequently, President Xi’s announcement in September 2020 of China’s new objective to peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 was broadly welcomed. But President Xi offered no detail on how China could turn this vision into reality, and an examination of China’s current plans shows clearly the goal will not be achieved without major changes.

    Following Xi’s announcement of the goals at the United Nations General Assembly, some details of how China might approach its targets were provided at the December 2020 Climate Ambition Summit. Here, Xi outlined preliminary elements of the new Nationally Determined Contribution that China is due to submit – like all other Paris Agreement signatories – ahead of COP26 in late 2021. Xi stated that China would aim by 2030 to cut carbon intensity per unit of GDP by more than 65% from 2005 levels (compared to the existing target of 60%-65% by 2030), and would increase the share of non-fossil fuels in energy consumption to 25% by 2030 (compared to the existing target of 20%).

    As a continuation of the progress already being made by China, rather than an acceleration, these preliminary targets raised doubts about the feasibility of China peaking its emissions before 2030 and securing carbon neutrality by 2060. China’s continued investments in coal, the primary component of the county’s energy mix, have reinforced those doubts (Figure 2).

    Instead of cutting its reliance on coal, China put 38 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, equal to the entire coal-fired power generation capacity currently installed in Germany. While one could argue that the pandemic made 2020 a difficult year for China to focus on climate, it remains to be seen when and how China will reveal how it intends to peak emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

    The most obvious place to look for such information is China’s 14th Five Year Plan (FYP), which was announced at the National People’s Congress in March 2021. Five Year Plans are the main guiding force behind policy in China at all levels of government. Unfortunately, on climate measures, the 14th FYP falls short. It essentially outlines a continuation of existing trends, rather than an acceleration of climate action. Strongly focused on the development of the manufacturing sector (notably through strict targets on state-led innovation), the plan mentions neither a coal cap, nor an emissions cap (Table 1).

    The 14th FYP simply commits to reducing the carbon and energy intensity of China’s GDP growth. Current estimates are that China’s emissions will continue to rise every year, at a rate of 1% to 1.7% until 2025. It should also be noted that the 14th FYP makes several references to the development of coal, emphasising its “clean and efficient utilisation”. This is consistent with the broader structure of the plan, which is strongly oriented towards ensuring China’s self-sufficiency in the context of an increasingly hostile external environment and, in particular, US-China strategic competition. In other words, the 14th FYP does not include a coal-consumption reduction target, nor a clear target for emissions to peak by 2025. Interestingly, the plan also makes no reference to the target of 1,200 GW of solar and wind installed power capacity by 2030, mentioned by President Xi in December 2020.

    The lack of specific targets for the 2020-2025 period in the 14th FYP is worrisome, but does not mean President’s XI‘s commitment made at the UN is unachievable. It could still be achieved with much more stringent measures to cut emissions between 2025 and 2030, or with more stringent measures within the 14th FYP at central and local level, even if not imposed in the FYP. However, China’s recent economic history shows local government pushing for higher rather than lower growth, hampering progress in cutting carbon emissions.

    More detailed measures on energy, renewable energy, coal and electricity from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment are expected in late 2021/early 2022. It might be within these measures that we finally see a ‘coal cap’ for 2021-2025. As if this were not enough, both Chinese and international climate modelling studies state that China’s emissions should peak by 2025 at the latest for China to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 (see for example a December 2020 study coordinated by the Energy Foundation China and the University of Maryland, which highlighted the dangers of locking-in high-emission assets and the need for rapid action). If China’s emissions do not peak quickly, achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 will be challenging.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 23:25

  • Guess Who's Testifying In Congress US Troops Must Stay In Afghanistan Forever?
    Guess Who’s Testifying In Congress US Troops Must Stay In Afghanistan Forever?

    When interventionists and national security deep state hawks need to prolong what’s already the longest war in in US history, who’re they gonna call?…

    “Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee they’re worried about President Biden’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, with Rice suggesting the US may need to go back,” Axios reports.

    The pair’s “expert” testimony was given over Zoom and appears to have been kept relatively quiet, given it was a ‘closed door’ members only call, until Axios learned of it.

    Rice of course infamously served as George Bush’s National Security Advisor during the initial invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, and crucially helped make the case for war to the American public, later serving as Bush’s Secretary of State through 2009.

    Having helped start two failed wars, both of which have long remained deeply unpopular among the American public, naturally Condi Rice as a pre-eminent neocon voice would be consulted as a “stay the course” point of view. It’s also deeply revealing that there’s no foreign policy space in terms of viewpoint whatsoever between Rice and Clinton – latter who pushed for the US-NATO invasion of Libya and planned covert regime change in Syria against Assad.

    Little is known about precisely what Hillary testified, but it’s not difficult to imagine. Here are a few key insights via Axios:

    • “Condi Rice is like, ‘You know, we’re probably gonna have to go back,’” amid a potential surge in terrorism, the member said.

    • Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), the top Republican on the committee, told Axios: “With the potential for an Islamic State, coupled with what they’re going to do to our contractors in Yemen and Afghanistan is, sadly, it’s going to be tragic there and we all see it coming.”

    • Another member of the committee confirmed both Clinton and Rice raised concerns about the potential fallout from a quick removal of all U.S. troops.

    • Both also expressed concerns about protecting U.S. diplomats on the ground following the withdrawal and what the move will mean for the global war on terrorism.

    One unnamed committee member told Axios further that “they both agreed we’re going to need to sustain a counterterrorism mission somehow outside of that country.”

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    Well of course!…there always needs to be a war going on somehow and somewhere – otherwise how would these warmongering ladies sleep at night?  

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 23:00

  • Niall Ferguson: How Ike's 1950s America Beat The 'Asian Flu' With Science & Common Sense
    Niall Ferguson: How Ike’s 1950s America Beat The ‘Asian Flu’ With Science & Common Sense

    This essay is adapted from Mr. Ferguson’s new book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” which will be published by Penguin Press on May 4. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

    In 1957, the U.S. rose to the challenge of the ‘Asian flu’ with stoicism and a high tolerance for risk, offering a stark contrast with today’s approach to Covid-19…

    “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!” Wordsworth was talking about France in 1789, but the line applies better to the America of 1957. That summer, Elvis Presley topped the charts with “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” But we tend to forget that 1957 also saw the outbreak of one of the biggest pandemics of the modern era. Not coincidentally, another hit of that year was “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” by Huey “Piano” Smith & the Clowns.

    When seeking historical analogies for Covid-19, commentators have referred more often to the catastrophic 1918-19 “Spanish influenza” than to the flu pandemic of 1957-58. Yet the later episode deserves to be much better known, not just because the public health threat was a closer match to our own but because American society at the time was better prepared—culturally, institutionally and politically—to deal with it.

    The “Asian flu”—as it was then uncontroversial to call a contagious disease that originated in Asia—was a novel strain (H2N2) of influenza A. It was first reported in Hong Kong in April 1957, having originated in mainland China two months before, and—like Covid-19—it swiftly went global.

    Like Covid-19, the Asian flu led to significant excess mortality. The most recent research concludes that between 700,000 and 1.5 million people worldwide died in the pandemic. A pre-Covid study of the 1957-58 pandemic concluded that if “a virus of similar severity” were to strike in our time, around 2.7 million deaths might be anticipated worldwide. The current Covid-19 death toll is 3 million, about the same percentage of world population as were killed in 1957–58 (0.04%, compared with 1.7% in 1918-19).

    True, excess mortality in the U.S.—now around 550,000—has been significantly higher in relative terms in 2020-21 than in 1957-58 (at most 116,000). Unlike Covid-19, however, the Asian flu killed appreciable numbers of young people. In terms of excess mortality relative to baseline expected mortality rates, the age groups that suffered the heaviest losses globally were 15- to 24-year-olds (34% above average mortality rates) followed by 5- to 14-year-olds (27% above average). In total years of life lost in the U.S., adjusted for population, Covid has been roughly 40% worse than the Asian flu.

    The Asian flu and Covid-19 are very different diseases, in other words. The Asian flu’s basic reproduction number—the average number of people that one person was likely to infect in a population without any immunity—was around 1.65. For Covid-19, it is likely higher, perhaps 2.5 or 3.0. Superspreader events probably played a bigger role in 2020 than in 1957: Covid has a lower dispersion factor—that is, a minority of carriers do most of the transmission. On the other hand, people had more reason to be afraid of a new strain of influenza in 1957 than of a novel coronavirus in 2020. The disastrous pandemic of 1918 was still within living memory, whereas neither SARS nor MERS had produced pandemics.

    High school students in Washington, D.C., September 1957. PHOTO: EVERETT COLLECTION

    The first cases of Asian flu in the U.S. occurred early in June 1957, among the crews of ships berthed at Newport, R.I. Cases also appeared among the 53,000 boys attending the Boy Scout Jamboree at Valley Forge, Penn. As Scout troops traveled around the country in July and August, they spread the flu. In July there was a massive outbreak in Tangipahoa Parish, La. By the end of the summer, cases had also appeared in California, Ohio, Kentucky and Utah.

    It was the start of the school year that made the Asian flu an epidemic. The Communicable Disease Center, as the CDC was then called, estimated that approximately 45 million people—about 25% of the population—became infected with the new virus in October and November 1957. Younger people experienced the highest infection rates, from school-age children up to adults age 35-40. Adults over 65 accounted for 60% of influenza deaths, an abnormally low share.

    Why were young Americans disproportionately vulnerable to the Asian flu? Part of the explanation is that they had not been as exposed as older Americans to earlier strains of influenza. But the scale and incidence of any contagion are functions of both the properties of the pathogen itself and the structure of the social network that it attacks. The year 1957 was in many ways the dawn of the American teenager. The first baby boomers born after the end of World War II turned 13 the following year. Summer camps, school buses and unprecedented social mingling after school ensured that between September 1957 and March 1958 the proportion of teenagers infected with the virus rose from 5% to 75%.

    The policy response of President Dwight Eisenhower could hardly have been more different from the response of 2020.

    Eisenhower did not declare a state of emergency. There were no state lockdowns and, despite the first wave of teenage illness, no school closures. Sick students simply stayed at home, as they usually did. Work continued more or less uninterrupted.

    With workplaces open, the Eisenhower administration saw no need to borrow to the hilt to fund transfers and loans to citizens and businesses. The president asked Congress for a mere $2.5 million ($23 million in today’s inflation-adjusted terms) to provide additional support to the Public Health Service. There was a recession that year, but it had little if anything to do with the pandemic. The Congressional Budget Office has described the Asian flu as an event that “might not be distinguishable from the normal variation in economic activity.”

    President Eisenhower’s decision to keep the country open in 1957-58 was based on expert advice. When the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) concluded in August 1957 that “there is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease,” Eisenhower listened. As a CDC official later recalled:

    “Measures were generally not taken to close schools, restrict travel, close borders or recommend wearing masks….ASTHO encouraged home care for uncomplicated influenza cases to reduce the hospital burden and recommended limitations on hospital admissions to the sickest patients….Most were advised simply to stay home, rest and drink plenty of water and fruit juices.”

    Dr. Maurice Hilleman, seen here in the lab in 1963, played a key role in the development of a vaccine for the Asian flu in 1957. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

    This decision meant that the onus shifted entirely to pharmaceutical interventions. As in 2020, there was a race to find a vaccine. Unlike in 2020, however, the U.S. had no real competition, thanks to the acumen of one exceptionally talented and prescient scientist. From 1948 to 1957, Maurice Hilleman—born in Miles City, Mont., in 1919—was chief of the Department of Respiratory Diseases at the Army Medical Center (now the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research).

    Early in his career, Hilleman had discovered the genetic changes that occur when the influenza virus mutates, known as “shift and drift.” It was this work that enabled him to recognize, when reading reports in the press of “glassy-eyed children” in Hong Kong, that the outbreak had the potential to become a disastrous pandemic. He and a colleague worked nine 14-hour days to confirm that this was a new and potentially deadly strain of flu.

    Speed was of the essence, as in 2020. Hilleman was able to work directly with vaccine manufacturers, bypassing “the bureaucratic red tape,” as he put it. The Public Health Service released the first cultures of the Asian influenza virus to manufacturers even before Hilleman had finished his analysis. By the late summer, six companies were producing his vaccine.

    It has become commonplace to describe the speed with which vaccines were devised for Covid-19 as unprecedented. But it was not. The first New York Times report of the outbreak in Hong Kong—three paragraphs on page 3—was on April 17, 1957. By July 26, little more than three months later, doctors at Fort Ord, Calif., began to inoculate recruits to the military.

    Surgeon General Leroy Burney announced on August 15 that the vaccine was to be allocated to states according to population size but distributed by the manufacturers through their customary commercial networks. Approximately 4 million one-milliliter doses were released in August, 9 million in September and 17 million in October.

    This amounted to enough vaccine for just 17% of the population, and vaccine efficacy was found to range from 53% to 60%. But the net result of Hilleman’s rapid response to the Asian flu was to limit the excess mortality suffered in the U.S.

    A striking contrast between 1957 and the present is that Americans today appear to have a much lower tolerance for risk than their grandparents and great-grandparents. As one contemporary recalled,

    “For those who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four….We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.”

    D.A. Henderson, who as a young doctor was responsible for establishing the CDC Influenza Surveillance Unit, recalled a similar sangfroid in the medical profession:

    “From one watching the pandemic from very close range…it was a transiently disturbing event for the population, albeit stressful for schools and health clinics and disruptive to school football schedules.”

    Compare these stoical attitudes with the strange political bifurcation of reactions we saw last year, with Democrats embracing drastic restrictions on social and economic activity, while many Republicans acted as if the virus was a hoax. Perhaps a society with a stronger fabric of family life, community life and church life was better equipped to withstand the anguish of untimely deaths than a society that has, in so many ways, come apart.

    A further contrast between 1957 and 2020 is that the competence of government would appear to have diminished even as its size has expanded. The number of government employees in the U.S., including those in federal, state and local governments, numbered 7.8 million in November 1957 and reached around 22 million in 2020—a nearly threefold increase, compared with a doubling of the population. Federal net outlays were 16.2% of GDP in 1957 versus 20.8% in 2019.

    The Department of Health, Education and Welfare was just four years old in 1957. The CDC had been established in 1946, with the eradication of malaria as its principal objective. These relatively young institutions appear to have done what little was required of them in 1957, namely to reassure the public that the disastrous pandemic of 1918-19 was not about to be repeated, while helping the private sector to test, manufacture and distribute the vaccine. The contrast with the events of 2020 is once again striking.

    It was widely accepted last year that economic lockdowns—including shelter-in-place orders confining people to their homes—were warranted by the magnitude of the threat posed to healthcare systems. But the U.S. hospital system was not overwhelmed in 1957-58 for the simple reason that it had vastly more capacity than today. Hospital beds per thousand people were approaching their all-time high of 9.18 per 1,000 people in 1960, compared with 2.77 in 2016.

    In addition, the U.S. working population simply did not have the option to work from home in 1957. In the absence of a telecommunications infrastructure more sophisticated than the telephone (and a quarter of U.S. households still did not have a landline in 1957), the choice was between working at one’s workplace or not working at all.

    Last year, the combination of insufficient hospital capacity and abundant communications capacity made something both necessary and possible that would have been unthinkable two generations ago: a temporary shutdown of a substantial proportion of economic activity, offset by massive debt-financed government transfers to compensate for the loss of household income. That this approach will have a great many unintended adverse consequences already seems clear. We are fortunate indeed that the spirit of the vaccine king Maurice Hilleman has lived on at Moderna and Pfizer, because much else of the spirit of 1957 would appear to have vanished.

    Despite the pandemic, people thronged the beach and boardwalk at Coney Island in July 1957. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

    “To be young was very heaven” in 1957—even with a serious risk of infectious disease (and not just flu; there was also polio and much else). By contrast, to be young in 2020 was—for most American teenagers—rather hellish. Stuck indoors, struggling to concentrate on “distance learning” with irritable parents working from home in the next room, young people experienced at best frustration and at worst mental illness.

    We have done a great deal over the past year (not all of it effective) to protect the groups most vulnerable to Covid-19, which has overwhelmingly meant the elderly: 80.4% of U.S. Covid deaths, according to the CDC, have been among people 65 and older, compared with 0.2% among those under 25.

    But the economic and social costs, in terms of lost education and employment, have been disproportionately shouldered by the young.

    The novel that captured the ebullience of the Beat Generation was Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” another hit of 1957. It begins, “I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about.” Stand by for “Off the Road,” the novel that will sum up the despondency of the Beaten Generation. As we dare to hope that we have gotten over our own pandemic, someone out there must be writing it.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 22:35

  • Biden Unveils New Strategy For North Korea & Wants You To Know It's "Not Trump's"
    Biden Unveils New Strategy For North Korea & Wants You To Know It’s “Not Trump’s”

    On Friday the Biden administration announced the completion of its major review of US policy toward North Korea, which revealed deep White House pessimism toward prior Trump efforts to strike a “grand bargain” with Pyongyang to persuade it to abandon its nuke program.

    Commenting on how “limited” the Biden admin sees its path forward with Kim Jong Un on this front, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday, “Our goal remains the complete de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula with a clear understanding that the efforts of the past four administrations have not achieved this objective.”

    Psaki further said to reporters while traveling aboard Air Force One that “Our policy will not focus on achieving a grand bargain, nor will it rely on strategic patience,” and further emphasized Biden will take a “practical approach” looking for diplomatic openings with the North based on “practical progress”.

    The Washington Post summarized the Biden strategy based on the policy review as seeking to strike “a balance between President Donald Trump’s grand-bargain, leader-to-leader diplomacy and President Barack Obama’s arm’s-length approach to the crisis,” according to an admin official.

    Ironically enough, to gain insight into the only team that ever made diplomatic “progress” on a “practical” level with the Kim regime, the Biden administration has been consulting Trump officials, as The Associated Press notes:

    Biden administration officials have been consulting with Trump administration officials who took part in the Singapore talks between Kim and Trump in June 2018 as well as a second meeting in February 2019.

    The last face-to-face talks between senior officials from the two countries were held in Sweden in October 2019, and efforts by the Biden administration to resume a dialogue have been rebuffed.

    All of this appears to essentially translate to something like… we don’t actually have a path forward but we don’t want Trump’s path.

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    Meanwhile, officials in Seoul see things differently after the multiple historic breakthrough face-to-face summits under Trump…

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    Perhaps we’re simply about to witness a few years of Kamala Harris getting on the phone with Korean officials, as has been the case with other world leaders in the opening months of Harris Biden foreign policy messaging.

    And in the meantime the North will no doubt keep up its pressure and leverage in the form of ever bigger ballistic missile tests and accompanying bellicose threats.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 22:10

  • Safe Spaces Are Creating A Generation Of "Snowflake Tyrants": Dr. Everett Piper
    Safe Spaces Are Creating A Generation Of “Snowflake Tyrants”: Dr. Everett Piper

    Authored by Tom Ozimek and Joshua Philipp via The Epoch Times,

    Dr. Everett Piper, author of “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe But It’s Good,” told Epoch TV’s “Crossroads” Program that cancel culture’s relentless demand for safe spaces is making America’s youth emotionally fragile, less able to cope with hardship, and more prone to advocating for an ever bigger government role in allaying insecurity and providing safety at the expense of liberty.

    Piper, who served as president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University for 17 years, said that his earlier warnings, that coddling America’s youth by acquiescing to demands for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” would lead to a sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit, are increasingly coming to pass.

    “The ‘snowflakes’ have graduated,” Piper said.

    “And they now have jobs at Google and Amazon and Apple and Twitter and even Major League Baseball, where they’re carrying their cancel culture, their demands for safety, into our country at large, and they’re silencing everyone who disagrees with them. This is ideological fascism, it is not intellectual freedom.”

    Piper’s complaint about “snowflakes” having a growing impact on the political tenor of major American corporations is part of what Republicans—and conservatives more broadly—have started to more vocally criticize as “woke capitalism,” or big business’s embrace of progressive positions on issues like LGBTQ and voting rights.

    Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), fumed in a Sunday op-ed in The New York Post that “corporate America eagerly dumps woke, toxic nonsense into our culture, and it’s only gotten more destructive with time,” adding, “today, corporate America routinely flexes its power to humiliate politicians if they dare support traditional values at all.”

    Ranking member Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) questions witnesses during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 23, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

    “Multinational firms threaten boycotts over pro-life legislation. Cowardly sports leagues pull events out of states that dare pass legislation they don’t like. Firms like Delta parrot woke talking points, even as they cut deals with China, lending Beijing legitimacy and funding as it commits genocide in Xinjiang,” Rubio wrote, referring to the atrocities committed against the Uyghur community by the Chinese Communist Party, and to Major League Baseball pulling an event out of Georgia in protest against the state’s new election integrity law.

    A lobbying and communications outfit with deep ties to GOP leadership argued in a memo in mid-March that the rise of “woke CEOs embracing avant-garde social agendas” is fueling a populist surge in the Republican Party that threatens to upend its longstanding pact with big business.

    “These campaigns will be met with the same strength that any other polluter should expect,” Rubio wrote, suggesting that “woke” corporations would face Republican backlash for their activism.

    Much in the same tone, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on April 20 called for the Republican Party to reduce its financial dependence on big companies, while urging the breakup of some mega-corporations that exert too much power on American politics and seek “to run our democracy.” Already, Hawley has introduced the Bust Up Big Tech Act and the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act, which would strengthen antitrust enforcement to pursue the breakup of dominant, anticompetitive firms.

    “A small group of woke mega-corporations control the products Americans can buy, the information Americans can receive, and the speech Americans can engage in. These monopoly powers control our speech, our economy, our country, and their control has only grown because Washington has aided and abetted their quest for endless power,” Hawley said in a statement.

    Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) looks on during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on voting rights on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 20, 2021. (Evelyn Kockstein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

    Piper said that, at its core, corporate “woke-ism” was a phenomenon closely related to and fueled by the “demand to be comfortable rather than have your character built.”

    “This trigger warning ideology, this demand for safety in the academy rather than being challenged, this demand to be comfortable rather than have your character built. This is not a recipe for maturity. It’s a recipe for childishness and perpetual adolescence,” he said.

    “We’ve set aside the higher values, the higher ideas, the higher ideals of freedom and liberty,” Piper said. “We’ve allowed our freedom to be stolen from us because as children, we want to cower in the corner and demand that we be safe. And we’ve been willing to do that at the expense of essentially everything that the western civilization has stood for, and that is individual liberty.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 21:45

  • Massive Chinese Rocket Will Make Uncontrolled Reentry Within Days 
    Massive Chinese Rocket Will Make Uncontrolled Reentry Within Days 

    China successfully launched a key module of a new space station Thursday using the latest version of the Long March 5B heavy-lift booster. After completing its mission, the core stage of the rocket is still in orbit and could make an uncontrolled re-entry in the near term, according to SpaceNews. 

    The Long March 5B uses a core stage and four side boosters to launch heavy payloads into low Earth orbit. The rocket carries the payload up to orbit instead of separating at a lower altitude. This means that the Long March 5B booster is now uncontrollably tumbling back to Earth. 

    US military radars have detected the object and classified the rocket body as “2021-035B.” It’s a massive rocket body measuring more than 30 meters long and 5 meters wide, weighing 21 metric tons. The speed of the object is traveling at more than seven kilometers per second.

    Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, suggested the rocket is not under control as it makes its way back to Earth. 

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    This is the second launch for the Long March 5B, and the first occurred on May 5, 2020. Back then, the booster orbited for six days then shortly after made an uncontrolled re-entry. 

    “Where and when the new Long March 5B stage will land is impossible to predict. The decay of its orbit will increase as atmospheric drag brings it down into more denser,” said SpaceNews. 

    So, for now, look out above as an uncontrolled re-entry of a massive rocket plummets back to Earth could occur in the coming days. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 21:20

  • Biden Admin Interfering In Mexico's Efforts To Block Genetically Modified Corn
    Biden Admin Interfering In Mexico’s Efforts To Block Genetically Modified Corn

    Authored by Jessica Corbett via Common Dreams,

    A coalition of 80 US agricultural, consumer, environmental, public health, and worker groups sent a letter Thursday to key figures in the Biden administration calling for them to “respect Mexico’s sovereignty and refrain from interfering with its right to enact health-protective policies”—specifically, the phaseout of the herbicide glyphosate and the cultivation of genetically modified corn.

    “Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador quietly rocked the agribusiness world with his New Year’s Eve decree,” Timothy A. Wise of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (ITAP) noted earlier this year. “His administration sent an even stronger aftershock two weeks later, clarifying that the government would also phase out GM corn imports in three years and the ban would include not just corn for human consumption but yellow corn destined primarily for livestock.”

    AFP via Getty Images

    “Mexico imports about 30% of its corn each year, overwhelmingly from the United States,” Wise added. “Almost all of that is yellow corn for animal feed and industrial uses. López Obrador’s commitment to reducing and, by 2024, eliminating such imports reflects his administration’s plan to ramp up Mexican production as part of the campaign to increase self-sufficiency in corn and other key food crops.”

    The groups’ letter on the Mexican policies and U.S. interference—published in English (pdf) and Spanish (pdf)—is addressed to recently confirmed U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. Its lead author is Kristin Schafer, executive director of Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA).

    “We call on Secretary Vilsack and Trade Representative Tai, as key leaders in the new administration, to respect Mexico’s decision to protect both public health and the integrity of Mexican farming,” Schafer said in a statement. “It is completely unacceptable for U.S. public agencies to be doing the bidding of pesticide corporations like Bayer, who are solely concerned with maintaining their bottom-line profits.”

    Fernando Bejarano, director of Pesticide Action Network in Mexico, explained that “we are part of the No Maize No Country Campaign, a broad coalition of peasant organizations, nonprofit NGOs, academics, and consumers which support the presidential decree and fight for food sovereignty with the agroecological transformation of agricultural systems that guarantee the right to produce and consume healthy, nutritious food, free of pesticides and transgenics.”

    “We reject the pressure from corporations such as Bayer-Monsanto—and their CropLife trade association—which are working in both the United States and Mexico to undermine the presidential decree that phases out the use of glyphosate and transgenic corn,” Bejarano said.

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    The letter highlights Guardian reporting on US government documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents revealed that CropLife America and Bayer AG—which acquired glyphosate-based herbicide developer Monsanto in 2018—worked with U.S. officials to lobby against Mexico’s plans.

    According to journalist Carey Gillam’s mid-February report:

    The emails reviewed by the Guardian come from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and other US agencies. They detail worry and frustration with Mexico’s position. One email makes a reference to staff within López Obrador’s administration as “vocal anti-biotechnology activists,” and another email states that Mexico’s health agency (Cofepris) is “becoming a big time problem.”

    Internal USTR communications lay out how the agrochemical industry is “pushing” for the U.S. to “fold this issue” into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade deal that went into effect July 1. The records then show the USTR does exactly that, telling Mexico its actions on glyphosate and genetically engineered crops raise concerns “regarding compliance” with USMCA.

    Citing discussions with CropLife, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) joined in the effort, discussing in an inter-agency email “how we could use USMCA to work through these issues.”

    The Guardian also noted correspondence involving the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

    As the letter to Vilsack and Tai points out: “This interference and pressure from the agrochemical industry is continuing. On March 22nd, industry representatives sent a letter directed to your attention as leaders of USTR and USDA, identifying Mexico’s planned phaseout of glyphosate and genetically modified corn as a ‘leading concern’ for agribusiness interests and the pesticide industry (represented by the pesticide industry’s trade group, CropLife America).”

    “We strongly object to any interference by U.S. government officials or agribusiness interests in a sovereign state’s right to enact policy measures to protect the health and well-being of its people,” the letter states. “We urge your agencies to resist and reject these ongoing efforts.”

    “We welcome the administration’s stated commitment to listening to the science, improving public health, protecting the environment, and limiting exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides, while holding polluters accountable and prioritizing environmental justice, particularly for communities of color and low-income communities,” it adds. “We trust that these stated commitments, as well as your dedication to ‘fairness for farmers,’ extend equally to other countries and include respect for other nations’ and peoples’ rights to self-determination.”

    Other signatories to the letter include the American Sustainable Business Council, Beyond Pesticides, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace USA, Indigenous Environmental Network, ITAP, and Organic Consumers Association.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 20:55

  • Senate Intelligence Leaders Say Mystery 'Sonic Weapon' Attacks On US Officials Increasing
    Senate Intelligence Leaders Say Mystery ‘Sonic Weapon’ Attacks On US Officials Increasing

    After it was revealed Thursday that US intelligence is investigating at least two potential “directed energy” sonic attacks on White House personnel – one of which is alleged to have happened just off White House grounds – the US Senate Intelligence Committee weighed in on Friday, saying such mysterious incidents appear to be happening with greater frequency worldwide.

    Senators Mark Warner (D) and Marco Rubio (R) agreed that such microwave energy attacks have gone on for “nearly five years” and have targeted “US government personnel in Havana, Cuba and elsewhere around the world.” In a joint statement the two ranking members said, “This pattern of attacking our fellow citizens serving our government appears to be increasing. The Senate Intelligence Committee intends to get to the bottom of this,” according to Reuters. 

    As with the late 2016 into 2017 ‘Havana Syndrome’ attacks in which some 50 diplomatic personnel reported experiencing strange symptoms from vomiting to concussions to extreme nausea to chronic headaches, which was believed the result of some kind of undetected ‘directed energy’ weapon, the most recent incidents saw media reports speculate that Russia or China might be behind them. 

    It was starting last week that the mysterious incidents returned to national media spotlight after defense officials said they believe Russia is likely behind microwave energy weapon attacks on US troops in northeast Syria. Apparently some US troops occupying the country began reporting “flu-like symptoms” which caused the DoD to investigate possible linkage to microwave or directed energy weapons on the battlefield of Syria. Politico reported that “officials identified Russia as a likely culprit, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.”

    Despite instances of strange symptoms and even head injuries experienced by diplomatic personnel or troops abroad, no “energy weapon” has ever been found or uncovered that’s believed to have caused any of these alleged attacks. Most often US personnel report the symptoms enough time after the alleged attack took place for the “plot” and culprit to remain undetected. Naturally this has resulted in immense skepticism and pushback.

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    One deeply critical response to all the reporting late this week quipped: “Another day, another mostly anonymously sourced story about unidentified assailants supposedly assaulting U.S. government employees around the globe. This time, according to CNN, federal agencies are looking into something closer to home: symptoms suffered by a White House employee in Virginia and National Security Council staffer near the south lawn of the White House.”

    “Although a government report later concluded the most likely cause was instead some sort of ‘directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy’ (i.e. a microwave weapon), that conclusion was primarily based on a lack of evidence for other causes and received strong pushback from many others in the scientific community.”

    The commentary in Gizmodo pointed out further that “No hard evidence of any kind for the technology has ever been publicly presented by the US government. Reports citing government officials who suspect Russian intelligence to be involved have largely been anonymous and buoyed primarily by rumors the Russian government may have resumed Soviet-era research into experimental weapons.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 20:30

  • McConnell Urges Biden Administration To Drop "Divisive, Radical" 1619 Project From Grant Programs
    McConnell Urges Biden Administration To Drop “Divisive, Radical” 1619 Project From Grant Programs

    Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

    Thirty-seven Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday penned a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging him to remove the “1619 Project” from federal grant programs, arguing it skews American history for divisive political ends.

    “Our nation’s youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps. Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart,” McConnell and his GOP colleagues wrote in the letter (pdf).

    The Republicans expressed concern that the Biden administration is seeking to prioritize funding educational programs that incorporate the ideas of the 1619 Project and critical race theory into their teaching of U.S. history and civics, reorienting bipartisan programs “away from their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda.”

    In a proposed new rule released April 19, the Education Department outlined new priority criteria for a $5.3 million American History and Civics Education grant, as well as exemplary materials for K-12 educators to use. Specifically, the Education Department cited the “1619 Project,” and critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism” as leading examples for the kind of content it wants to use taxpayer dollars to promote in history and civics classrooms across the country.

    The “1619 Project,” inaugurated with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, attempts to cast the Atlantic slave trade as the dominant factor in the founding of America instead of ideals such as individual liberty and natural rights. The initiative has been widely panned by historians and political scientists, with some critics calling it a bid to rewrite U.S. history through a left-wing lens. Some historians have criticized the project over inaccuracies such as the American Revolution having been fought to preserve the institution of slavery rather than for seeking independence from Britain.

    “Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” McConnell and his colleagues wrote.

    The Pulitzer Center, an advocate of the “1619 Project,” provides a series of lesson plans for use in classrooms and says the project “challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date,” referring to the date of 1619.

    That’s in contrast to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the traditional date when the foundational principles of the United States were framed.

    Some of the activities for children include directing them to read an essay by New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, which contains the central assertion that “the year 1619 is as foundational to the American story as 1776 … black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers.’”

    The curriculum urges students to read the essay and consider such issues as, “What evidence can you see for how ‘some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy?’”

    Thomas Mackaman, a history professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, told The Wall Street Journal that, in his view, the American Revolution didn’t establish a “slavocracy,” as Hannah-Jones suggests, but it instead “brought slavery in for questioning in a way that had never been done before” by “raising universal human equality as a fundamental principle.”

    In their letter, the Republicans characterized the “1619 Project” as “putting ill-informed advocacy ahead of historical accuracy,” arguing that it serves to “double down on divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda.”

    “Actual, trained, credentialed historians with diverse political views have debunked the project’s many factual and historical errors, such as the bizarre and inaccurate notion that preserving slavery was a primary driver of the American Revolution,” the letter states.

    The Republicans concluded their letter with a call for the Education Department to “withdraw these Proposed Priorities and refocus on civic education and American history programs that will empower future generations of citizens to continue making our nation the greatest force for good in human history.”

    According to the Education Department, the reasoning behind its choices of examples is President Joe Biden’s executive order that aimed to advance “racial equity” and better support “underserved communities.”

    “The Department recognizes that COVID-19—with its disproportionate impact on communities of color—and the ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism have highlighted the urgency of improving racial equity throughout our society, including in our education system,” reads the Education Department document, which is undergoing a 30-day public review period in the Federal Register.

    The proposed rule marks the Biden administration’s latest move to teach American students that historical racism remains deeply embedded in today’s America. On his first day in the White House, Biden dissolved the Trump administration’s advisory 1776 Commission and tossed its first and last report, which called for a return to “patriotic education” focusing on how generations of Americans overcame racism to live up to the nation’s founding ideals.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 20:05

  • "Bernie Sanders Has Won": Munger Says Millennials Will Have "A Hell Of A Time Getting Rich Compared To Our Generation"
    “Bernie Sanders Has Won”: Munger Says Millennials Will Have “A Hell Of A Time Getting Rich Compared To Our Generation”

    The Berkshire Hathaway Annual shareholder meeting which, saw a return of both Warren Buffett and his perpetual sidekick, Charlie Munger, to the podium after a one year covid hiatus, is over after almost six grueling hours of back and forth between the two billionaires, Becky Quick, and a cast of supporting characters, most of whom are probably also billionaires. We will do a full post-mortem shortly of all the highlights, but there were a handful of funny episodes (usually involving the traditionally outspoken Charlie Munger) as well as a selection of cringeworthy moments (also involving Munger).

    One of these involved a lengthy discussion of how investing has changed in the past year, specifically with the flood of new, young retail traders pursuing some extremely crappy stocks whose outperformance has blown away Berkshire A shares with their modest 19% return.

    However, instead of offering some support to these newly-hatched capitalists who dream of achieving Buffett’s success, however on a far more truncated timeframe, Charlie Munger had some stark words of discouragement when it comes to the next generation seeking to master the stock market.

    “Bernie Sanders has basically won,” the 97-year old said. “He did it by accident, but he won.”

    Munger then followed up with a sad truth which the largest US generation will hate to hear: “the millennial generation is going to have a hell of a time getting rich compared to our generation” the billionaire said, referring to its engagement with the stock market, where for now at least, millennials appear to be winning but Munger is confident that it will all end in tears.

    Munger then slammed the retail investing euphoria and froth seen across multiple assets, saying we have a lot to be ashamed of for current conditions. “It’s not just stupid, it’s shameful,” he says describing what’s going on.

    Buffett also piped up and countered that it’s not that shameful for the people who are doing it — gambling’s a human instinct, to which Munger then clarifies that he doesn’t mind the poor that gamble but he doesn’t like the professionals that push them into it.

    Buffett then quoted Keynes about speculators and bubbles, saying we’ve had a lot of people in the casino in the past year, where people are day trading and basically gambling (adding there’s nothing wrong with gamblers). The gambling impulse is very strong worldwide and sometimes it gets an enormous shove. But Buffett also warns that gambling “creates its own reality for a while and no one’s going to tell you when the clock strikes 12 and it all turns to pumpkin and mice.”

    Asked how Berkshire’s performance compares to some of the supernova stocks in the past year, the billionaire said that when the competition is playing foolishly with other peoples’ money or their own, they’re going to beat Berkshire… the implication of course being that when everything crashes, Buffett will eventually come out on top again.

    Watch a replay of the full shareholder meeting here. Considering the ages of the two hosts, it may well be the final one for either (or both) of them.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 19:40

  • When Politicians Panicked
    When Politicians Panicked

    Authored by John Tamny via TheMarket.ch,

    Let’s travel back in time to March of 2020. It was then that predictions of mass death related to the new coronavirus started to gain currency. One study, conducted by Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, indicated that U.S. deaths alone would exceed 2 million.

    The above number is often used as justification for the initial lockdowns. «We knew so little» is the excuse, and with so many deaths expected, can anyone blame local, state and national politicians for panicking? The answer is a resounding yes.

    To see why, imagine if Ferguson had predicted 30 million American deaths, and hundreds of millions more around the world. Imagine the global fear, which is precisely the point. The more threatening a virus is presumed to be, the more superfluous government force is. Really, who needs to be told to be careful if a failure to be could reasonably result in death?

    Death predictions aside, the other justification bruited in March of 2020 was that brief lockdowns would flatten the hospitalization curve. In this case, the taking of freedom allegedly made sense as a way of protecting hospitals from a massive inflow of sick patients that they wouldn’t have been able to handle, and that would have resulted in a public health catastrophe. Such a view similarly vandalizes reason. Think about it.

    Really, who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization? Better yet, who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization at a time when doctors and hospitals would be so short staffed as to not be able to take care of admitted patients?

    Translated for those who need it, the dire predictions made over a year ago about the corona-horrors that awaited us don’t justify the lockdowns; rather they should remind the mildly sentient among us of how cruel and pointless they were. The common sense that we’re to varying degrees born with, along with our genetic predisposition to survive, dictates that a fear of hospitalization or death would have caused us to take virus-avoidance precautions that would have well exceeded any rules foisted on us by politicians. Goodness, masks and hand sanitizers were selling out in Germany at a time when politicians were still downplaying the virus.

    Vital Signals Get Lost

    To which some will reply with something along the lines of «Not everyone has common sense. In truth, there are lots of dumb, low-information types out there who would have disregarded all the warnings. Lockdowns weren’t necessary for the wise among us; rather they were essential precisely because there are so many who aren’t wise.» Actually, such a response is the best argument of all against lockdowns.

    Indeed, it cannot be stressed enough that «low information» types are the most crucial people of all during periods of uncertainty. Precisely because they’ll be unaware of, misunderstand, or reject the warnings of the experts, their actions will produce essential information that the rule-followers never could. In not doing what the allegedly wise among us will, low information citizens will, by their contrarian actions, teach us what behavior is most associated with avoidance of sickness and death, and more important, what behavior is associated with it.

    One-size-fits-all decrees from politicians don’t enhance health outcomes as much as they blind us to the actions (or lack thereof) that would protect us the most, or not. Freedom on its own is a virtue, plus it produces crucial information.

    But wait, some will say, «how elitist to let some people act as Guinea Pigs for the rest of us.» Such a statement is naïve. Heroin and cocaine are illegal, but people still use both. Thank goodness they do. How could we know what threatens us, and what doesn’t, without the rebellious?

    Economic Growth Is the Best Medicine

    Still, there’s the question of «elitism,» or comment about it. The view here is that the lockdowns were the cruelest form of elitism, by far. The implied statement about the lockdowns was that those who had the temerity to have jobs that were destinations would have to lose them. The lockdowns destroyed tens of millions of destination jobs, destroyed or severely impaired millions of businesses, not to mention the hundreds of millions around the world who were rushed into starvation, poverty or both as a consequence of nail-biting politicians in rich countries that chose to take a break from reality. Talk about elitist actions, plus the very idea of wrecking the economy as a virus-mitigation strategy will go down in history as one of the most abjectly stupid policy responses the world has ever endured.

    That’s the case because economic growth is easily the biggest enemy death and disease have ever known, while poverty is easily the biggest killer. Economic growth produces the resources necessary so that doctors and scientists can come up with answers to what needlessly sickens us or shortens our lives altogether.

    If anyone doubts the above truth, it’s useful to travel back in time to the 19th century. A broken femur then brought with it a 1 out of 3 chance of death, while those lucky enough to survive the break had only one option: amputation. A child born in the 19th century had as good a chance of dying as living. A broken hip was a death sentence, cancer most certainly was, but most didn’t die of cancer because tuberculosis and pneumonia got them first.

    So what happened? Why don’t we get sick or die as easily as we used to? The answer is economic growth. Business titans like Johns Hopkins and John D. Rockefeller created enormous wealth, only to direct a lot of it toward medical science. What used to kill us became yesterday’s news.

    Even though freedom is its own wondrous virtue, even though freedom produces essential information that protects us, and even though free people produce the resources without which diseases kill with sickening rapidity, panicky politicians erased it in 2020 on the supposition that personal and economic desperation were the best solution for a spreading coronavirus. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the political class in 2020.

    *  *  *

    John Tamny is Vice President at FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and author of the new book «When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason.»

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 19:15

  • "Extremely Successful" – World's Largest Aircraft Hits Skies For Second Time 
    “Extremely Successful” – World’s Largest Aircraft Hits Skies For Second Time 

    Stratolaunch Systems Corporation, founded by the late billionaire Paul G. Allen, flew the world’s largest aircraft named ‘Roc’ on Thursday for a second time. 

    “Today’s flight, at first review, has appeared extremely successful,” Stratolaunch’s chief operating officer Zachary Krevor told reporters. “We accomplished all test points as desired, we have not seen anything anomalous, and we are very pleased with the condition of the aircraft upon landing.”

    The Roc is a dual fuselage design and has a 385 feet wingspan. The purpose of the aircraft is to air-launch rockets into low Earth orbit. 

    The second flight was initially scheduled for April 19 but was terminated due to unfavorable weather. The last time Roc flew was two years ago, in April 2019. Back then, the airplane flew for 2.5 hours, achieved a maximum speed of 189 mph, and soared to an altitude of 17,000 feet. The first flight allowed pilots to evaluate the airworthiness of the aircraft. 

    On Thursday’s test, Roc reached an altitude of 14,000 feet at a maximum speed of 199 mph before landing successfully back at the Mojave Air & Space Port in California. 

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    “We’re very pleased with how the Stratolaunch aircraft performed today, and we are equally excited about how much closer the aircraft is to launching its first hypersonic vehicle,” Krevor said. 

    If all goes well, the first air-launch test of a hypersonic vehicle named “Talon-A” could occur as early as next year. 

    Sratolaunch’s activities may soon be of interest to the US military. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 18:50

  • Huge California Fire Last Year Was Arson Meant To Conceal Woman's Murder, Officials Say
    Huge California Fire Last Year Was Arson Meant To Conceal Woman’s Murder, Officials Say

    Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,

    A deadly 2020 wildfire in Northern California that killed two people and was one of the largest fires in state history was actually the work of a man who committed arson to conceal his murder of a woman, according to authorities.

    Victor Serriteno, 29, was arrested on Wednesday following an eight-month-long investigation by the Solano County Sheriff’s Office into the fire.

    Douglas Mai, 82, and Leon Bone, 64, were killed in the Markley Fire which began on August 18 near Lake Berryessa.

    Serriteno was arrested a month later and was held in jail without bail for the death of Priscilla Castro, 32, whose burned body was found on Sept. 2 near the same lake.

    Serriteno pleaded not guilty to her murder.

    Castro disappeared on Aug. 16 after she failed to return home following a date with Serriteno in Vacaville, according to authorities.

    The two met through an online dating app.

    An investigation by the Sheriff’s Office and CalFire officials has concluded that the fire was an arson and the deaths are now officially considered homicides.

    [ZH: So not ‘global warming’ then?]

    Within days, the Markley Fire merged with the Hennessey Fire and became a part of the LNU Lightning Complex Fire, the fifth-largest fire in state history.

    “Based on an extensive 8-month long investigation, we believe Serriteno deliberately set the Markley Fire in an attempt to conceal this crime,” said Solano County Sheriff Tom Ferrara at a news conference Wednesday.

    Serriteno will now face two additional counts of murder with special circumstances and arson charges, including committing arson during an official state of emergency.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 18:25

  • "There Is No Shortage?" Train Loads Of Lumber Stacked As Far As The Eye Can See 
    “There Is No Shortage?” Train Loads Of Lumber Stacked As Far As The Eye Can See 

    One of the most important things we’ve learned over the past year is the vulnerability of global supply chains. Most notably, supply disruptions of lumber have catapulted prices to the moon. 

    The narrative touted in the public domain is that COVID-19 sparked a dramatic underestimate in capacity by sawmills early in the pandemic as the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to zero, sparking a housing boom. The influx of demand outpaced supply and has caused lumber prices to jump 340% from a year ago, according to Random Lengths. 

    In terms of output, the lumber industry is controlled by just a handful of firms, including Weyerhaeuser Co., Georgia-Pacific LLC, West Fraser Timber Co., Ltd., among others, which makes it easier for capacity to be controlled. 

    Maybe there’s more to the lumber story that we’re not being told and should be investigated more in-depth by journalists. 

    YouTube account “Ken’s Karpentry” recently published a video of “huge quantities” of lumber sitting and not in lumberyards. The exact location of the video is not mentioned but could be near Lyndonville, Vermont. 

    The narrator in the video, perhaps it’s Ken, but we’re not sure, explains that a train depot has been transformed into a makeshift lumber yard. He said train loads of lumber coming out of Canada are offloaded here and then transported by tractor-trailer to lumberyards across the country.  

    He said, “I am astounded by how much lumber is here, and I am wondering why there is such a problem at lumber yards.” He added the facility stretches 3/8 of a mile. 

    The video has more than 300,000 views and over 1,300 comments in just a few weeks. 

    One person said, “Gee, could it be to keep the price gouging and profits up?? This whole excuse that “it’s due to covid” b*llsh!t has got to stop!” 

    “It’s too bad there are no investigative reporters left in the world. This lumber story needs to be investigated and exposed,” some else said. 

    Another person said:

    “This is what happens when a few companies own the entire market.” 

    And this person makes an interesting point:

    “There is no lumber shortage. It’s just Weyerhouse and GP wanting to drive up profits.” 

    So could the lumber industry, controlled just by a few players, be pulling the playbook straight out of the diamond industry to limit supply to drive up prices?

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 18:00

  • Escaping Serfdom
    Escaping Serfdom

    Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

    The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.

    When I was a schoolboy, I was taught that the feudal system of the Middle Ages consisted of serfs tilling small plots of land that belonged to a king or lord.

    The serfs lived a meagre life of bare subsistence and were subject to the tyranny of the king or lord whose men would ride into their village periodically and take most of the few coins the serfs had earned by their toil.

    The lesson I was meant to learn from this was that I should be grateful that, in the modern world, I live in a state of freedom from tyranny, and as an adult, I would pay only that level of tax that could be described as “fair”.

    Later in life, I was to learn that, in the actual feudal system, some land was owned by noblemen, some by common men. The commoners typically farmed their own land, whilst the noblemen parcelled out their land to farmers, in trade for a portion of the product of their labours.

    As a part of that bargain, the nobleman would pay for an army of professional soldiers to protect both the farms and the farmers. Significantly, unlike today, no farmer was required to defend the land himself, as it was not his.

    There was no exact standard as to what the noblemen would charge a farmer under this agreement, but the general standard was “one day’s labour in ten”.

    This was not an amount imposed or regulated by any government. The nobleman could charge as much as he wished; however, if he raised his rate significantly, he would find that the farmers would leave and move to another nobleman’s farm. The 10% was, in essence, a rate that evolved over time through a free market.

    Modern Serfdom

    Today, of course, if most countries levied an income tax of a mere 10%, there would be dancing in the streets. And the days of one simple straightforward tax are long gone.

    Today, the average person may expect to pay property tax (even if he is a renter), sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on. The laundry list of taxes is so long and complex that it is no longer possible to compute what the total tax level actually is for anyone.

    And to this, we add the hidden tax of inflation. In the US, for example, the Federal Reserve has, over the last hundred years, devalued the dollar by 98%, a hefty tax indeed. And the US is not alone in this.

    Only 50 years ago, the average man might work a 40-hour week to support a wife who remained at home raising the children. He often had a mortgage on his home but might have it paid off in ten years. He paid cash for nearly everything else that he and his family owned or consumed.

    Today, both husband and wife generally must be employed full time. In spite of this, they can’t afford as many children as their parents could, and they generally remain in debt their entire lives, even after retirement. This is significant inflation by any measure.

    In contrast, in the Middle Ages, the cost of goods might remain the same throughout the entire lifetime of an individual.

    In light of the above, the 10% that was paid by the serfs is beginning to look very good indeed.

    However, the great majority of people in the First World are likely to say, “What can you do; it’s the same all over the world. You might as well get used to it.”

    Well, no, actually, it’s not.

    There are many governmental and economic systems out there and many are quite a bit more “serf friendly” than those in the major countries.

    Countries such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas have no income tax. Further, some have no property tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on.

    So how is this possible?

    The OECD countries state that it is largely accomplished through money laundering, but this is not the case. In fact, low-tax jurisdictions are known to have some of the most stringent banking laws in the world.

    The success of these jurisdictions is actually quite simple. Most of them are small. They have small populations and therefore need only a small government. Yet each jurisdiction can accommodate large numbers of investors from overseas. This results in a very high level of income per capita.

    But unlike large countries, the money that is deposited or invested there is overseas money, so it is not captive. Investors can transfer it out overnight if need be.

    So, even if the politicians are no better than those in larger countries (generally, they are of the same ilk), they’re aware that, like the noblemen of old, if they attempt to impose taxation, the business will dry up quickly.

    In fact, such a free market dictates that the jurisdictions keep on their toes and keep trying to outdo their competitors by being more investment friendly.

    Therefore, the politicians in these countries, who might be only too happy to promise entitlements to their constituents, then tax them to the hilt in order to pay for the entitlements, are kept restrained by their own system.

    Are there downsides to living in a low-tax jurisdiction? Yes.

    As most of them are small but require a very high standard of living in order to attract investors, they must import virtually all goods needed by residents. This means a higher cost of all goods, as compared to the cost in a country that produces such goods. However, the wage level is also higher, which tends to balance out the equation.

    But there are also upsides.

    Those who move to such a jurisdiction find that after the first year there (when the basics such as cars, televisions, etc., have been paid for), all further income that has been saved from taxation is beginning to get deposited in the bank.

    At some point, the deposit level becomes great enough that investment becomes advisable. And as low-tax jurisdictions tend to be naturally prosperous, there is generally no limit to the opportunities for investment within the jurisdiction.

    There is a further benefit to living in a low-tax jurisdiction that tends to become apparent over time. Any government that depends on major investments from overseas parties must, of necessity, be non-intrusive and non-invasive. Such a government stays out of people’s business, eschews electronic monitoring and most certainly is not given to SWAT teams crashing down doors for imagined wrongdoing.

    Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

    He was correct, but the level of tax can vary greatly from one country to the next. And just as important, the level of government intervention into the affairs of its citizenry varies considerably. In a country where the level of tax is low, the quality of life is generally correspondingly high.

    A thousand years ago, noblemen, from time to time, became overly confident in their ability to keep the serfs on the farmland and demanded taxes beyond the customary “one day’s labour in ten”. When they did, the serfs of old often voted with their feet and simply moved. Today, this is still possible.

    If the reader presently contributes more than one day’s labour in ten to his government, he may wish to consider voting with his feet.

    *  *  *

    The political and economic climate is constantly changing… and not always for the better. Obtaining the political diversification benefits of a second passport is crucial to ensuring you won’t fall victim to a desperate government. That’s why Doug Casey and his team just released a new complementary report, “The Easiest Way to a Second Passport.” It contains all the details about one of the easiest countries to obtain a second passport from. Click here to download it now.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 17:35

  • How Costco Is Masking A 14% Price Jump With Shrinkflation
    How Costco Is Masking A 14% Price Jump With Shrinkflation

    The oldest trick in the retailer book is back.

    We have previously written about shrinkflation – the “creative” masking of higher prices whereby retailers sell a materially lower amount of products for the ‘same’ price, covering up what is often a significant price increase on a “per unit” basis (see “”Shrinkflation” – How Food Companies Implement Massive Price Hikes Without You Ever Noticing“, “Shrinkflation Hits The UK: Toblerone Shrinks By 10%, Price Stays The Same“, Shrinkflation Intensifies – Stealth Inflation As Thousands of Food Products Shrink In Size, Not Price), and we have a feeling that in light of the recent surge in commodity costs and food prices, we will be writing about it a whole lot more in the coming weeks.

    Take Costco, which as The Bear Traps report notes, is now charging the same price for paper towels but the roll has 20 fewer sheets. TBT refers to a recent post in a Red Flag Deals message board, where a member makes the following observation:

    Costco paper towels. Same price as the previous several times buying them. Now with 20 fewer sheets.

    140/160= .875

    The stealthy decline of 20 sheets per roll of towels from 160 to 140 for the “same price” is the functional equivalent of 14.3% inflation, and as TBT notes, “In our experience, only potato chip companies can get away with selling a half empty package.”

    Of course, once companies realize they can get away with such shrinkflation – and they will because as a RFD member responds…

    I tried telling the clerk at Costco about this, and they said “who cares, it’s just 20 sheets.”

    Will be the typical response.

    … the obvious next step will be to no longer bother with such attempts at masking double digit inflation, and to hike prices outright until there is an actual decline in supply, or as TBT predicts, “this is the precursor to real inflation next.” And sure enough, names from consumer giants from Kimberly-Clark to Clorox, Procter & Gamble, as well as food makers such as Hormel, JM Smucker, General Mills, Skippy and Hershey are already doing just that.

    But don’t worry, according to the Chairman, “it’s transitory.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 17:10

  • Blighted San Francisco Diagnoses Its "Perilous Trifecta" …And Bungles The Cure
    Blighted San Francisco Diagnoses Its “Perilous Trifecta” …And Bungles The Cure

    Authored by Christopher Rufo via RealClearInvestigations.com,

    San Francisco is coming undone. In recent years, the city has manifested a series of visible and persistent inequalities, with a spoils-to-the-victor world for its technological elite, and a chaotic, brutalized world for its dispossessed. In the city’s Tenderloin district, men openly hawk drugs on the street corners, desperate addicts are crumpled across the sidewalks, and first responders dart through the chaos to revive overdose victims.

    The city has become a web of contradictions. There are thousands of new millionaires, and, by the latest estimates, 18,000 people in and out of homelessness. The headquarters of Uber, Twitter, and Square are blocks away from the open-air drug markets of the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, and SoMa. Wealthy families attending an art opening at the Civic Center have to cross through the tent encampments that line the sidewalks.

    Residents, property owners, and small businesses—who pay an enormous premium to live and work in San Francisco—have begun to erupt in frustration. Citizens tell pollsters that homelessness is the city’s most pressing issue and business owners tell pollsters that “conditions on [the] streets have progressively deteriorated.”

    Mayor London Breed of San Francisco: Trying to address the city’s problems by expanding institutions the chronically homeless keep cycling through.

    City Hall has begun coming to terms with the crisis. Mayor London Breed recently hired a director of mental health reform, Dr. Anton Nigusse Bland, who compiled a statistical summary of the problem. People have long known that San Francisco has a homelessness problem, but Nigusse Bland discovered a population-within-a-population—the so-called “perilous trifecta”: 

    4,000 men and women who are simultaneously homeless, psychotic, and addicted to alcohol, meth, or heroin.

    About 70 % of them have been on the streets for more than five years; 40% have been on the streets for more than 13 years.

    This is the city’s fundamental predicament.

    How do you help people in the grips of the perilous trifecta? What interventions could make progress? Where do social workers even start?

    It’s almost impossible to understate the depths of this challenge.

    Dr. Anton Nigusse Bland, city mental health director: Identified 4,000 suffering from the “perilous trifecta” of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction

    San Francisco’s current policy toward the perilous trifecta can be best described as compassionate neglect. Every year, the chronically homeless cycle through the institutions of the socialized state, from hospitals, jails, and shelters, to sobering centers, case management appointments, and 72-hour psychiatric holds. Local government provides enough to meet an outward standard of compassion, but not enough to alter the trajectories of the homeless. The result is a disaster, which has drawn criticism across the political spectrum. Progressives are demanding more funding for existing programs, while moderates are bewildered by the eternal recurrence of tents, needles, and feces in their neighborhoods.

    The current policy regime can be divided into three domains — the hospital, the jail, and the subsidized apartment.

    Together, these institutions represent the new orthodoxy of the modern urban approach: Homelessness is reduced to a set of social-scientific variables, to be manipulated through the intensive application of the medical and social sciences.

    As part of its medical system, San Francisco currently spends more than $255 million per year on mental health and substance abuse programs, many of which cater to the city’s homeless. In a recent audit of the behavioral health system, the city’s budget and legislative analyst found that 70% of all psychiatric emergency visits involved a homeless individual and that 66% of all visitors had co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders. In total, the top 5% of “super-users,” totaling 2,239 adults, the majority of whom fall into the perilous trifecta, accounted for 52% of total systemwide service use. Doctors at San Francisco General see the same set of patients so frequently that they have developed an entire vocabulary to describe the population that circles in and out of their doors.

    The jail system is next. According to the San Francisco County Jail, the homeless account for 40% of all inmates — despite being less than 1% of the city’s overall population, and even after San Francisco decriminalized many quality-of-life crimes associated with homelessness. Again, the perilous trifecta looms large. Inmates with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders are more likely to be homeless and more likely to be charged with a violent crime compared to the general jail population. The pithy observation about deinstitutionalization is largely true: The people who might have once lived in the state mental hospital have simply been transferred to the county jail.

    Neither hospitals, jails, nor public housing have solved San Francisco’s homelessness epidemic.

    Finally, the public-housing complex is the new great hope, and fastest-growing public expenditure, for the homeless. Like many major West Coast cities, San Francisco has gone all in on “Housing First,” the theory that the municipal government must provide free housing for the homeless in perpetuity, with no expectations of sobriety, work, or participation in rehabilitation programs. For a city with a recurring homeless population of 18,000, this is an enormous expense. In 2019, San Francisco spent $285 million on shelters and “permanent supportive housing,” plus $65 million on traditional public housing, vouchers, and SRO units. At the same time, voters passed an additional $600 million bond to build “affordable housing.” But still, 67% of the Bay Area’s homeless are unsheltered.

    Even as they tout “evidence-based interventions,” “data-driven solutions,” and “best practices,” leaders in San Francisco have recognized the failure of the current system and proposed an ambitious reform agenda. However, in broad terms, this agenda only deepens its dependency on the social-scientific model and doubles-down on its worst assumptions. It can be summarized this way: deinstitutionalization, destigmatization, and decriminalization.

    In 2019, Mayor Breed and Supervisors Matt Haney and Hillary Ronen championed legislation for sweeping “mental health reform.” The plan would increase total spending on mental health and substance abuse to $500 million per year, and prioritize the homeless, create a central service center, and pressure private insurers to cover more costs. When it passed unanimously through the Board of Supervisors, Ronen celebrated it as a progressive milestone: “We just created the first universal mental health and substance use system in the country.”

    San Francisco’s homeless problem can be traced back to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill after Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel and this subsequent film.

    But this universality is only a theoretical formulation. The legislation does not include a funding source and, more important, simply expands the existing behavioral health system rather than reforming it. For the perilous trifecta, the problem is often not access to services, but participation in services. According to the latest one-night count, only 17% of the homeless reported using mental health services and only 11% reported using substance abuse services. For the unsheltered population, these figures are almost certainly lower.

    The problem is that members of the perilous trifecta are the least likely to seek services. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, approximately half the patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder suffer from anosognosia, which is the inability to understand their own disorder, often leading to a refusal to enter treatment and take medication. Adding a serious addiction to methamphetamine, which can cause paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, and violent behavior, only compounds the problem.

    In the past, the solution to this paradox was compulsion. The state took custody of the “gravely disabled” and treated them in long-term residential institutions. However, with the exposure of civil rights abuses and the release of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the United States gradually dismantled its mental health system, reducing the number of mental health beds per capita by an astonishing 95% between 1955 and 2016. Today, California has fewer beds per capita than the national average, with San Francisco having only 219 adult psychiatric beds available at a given time — drastically insufficient for the number of people in need.

    Although Mayor Breed has tentatively moved towards a return to short-term “conservatorships,” a form of involuntary commitment for individuals who present a grave danger to themselves or others, the plan has neither the scope nor the force to significantly reduce the numbers of the perilous trifecta. Because of pressure from disability activists and the ACLU, which have called conservatorships “the greatest deprivation of civil liberties aside from the death penalty,” the plan is limited to individuals who have had eight or more involuntary psychiatric holds in the past year, which, in practice, would mean less than 100 people citywide.

    Mayor Breed did not return a request for comment.

    San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney faces recall efforts in response to rising crime.

    Many progressive socialists argue that there is too much force in the system, not too little. San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, took office in January 2020 pledging to substantially reduce the county jail population, end cash bail, and decriminalize quality-of-life crimes associated with homelessness, including public camping, drug consumption, prostitution, and public urination. Boudin contends that the criminal justice system in San Francisco is a domain of persistent inequalities – locking up a disproportionate number of poor and minority residents – and has become the dumping ground for the addicted and mentally ill. Rather than continue this system, Boudin argues, the city must “implement a comprehensive transformation of the criminal justice system to decriminalize and treat mental illness, housing instability, and substance use as public health issues rather than criminal justice issues.”

    Boudin’s formulation does align with a single-day snapshot of the San Francisco County Jail population from 2016, which found that 48% of inmates were African American, 70% self-reported substance abuse, and 10% were deemed to have a serious mental illness. However, the narrative that the city is somehow targeting non-violent drug offenders and “criminalizing homeless” is specious. The snapshot also shows that 68% of inmates were arrested for violence, weapons possession, and serious felonies. Contrary to progressive rhetoric, only 4% were arrested for drug crimes — a vanishingly small number of people for a city in the midst of a heroin and methamphetamine epidemic.

    Authorities have enabled massive open-air drug markets in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin.

    The hard reality is that the perilous trifecta has fueled a boom in property crime and public disorder. In 2019, at least 1,120 individuals in the trifecta spent time in the county jail. Although the homicide rate remained static during Boudin’s first year office, burglaries have soared in a city that already had one of the highest property crime rates in the nation, while authorities enabled massive open-air drug markets in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, which is a central hub for the homeless population.

    The nexus between homelessness, addiction, and crime is clear: According to city and federal data, virtually all of the unsheltered homeless are unemployed, while at the same time, those with serious addictions spend an average of $1,256 to $1,834 a month on methamphetamine and heroin. With no legitimate source of income, many addicts support their habit through a “hustle,” which can include fraud, prostitution, car break-ins, burglaries of residences and business, and other forms of theft.

    Boudin’s plan to decriminalize such property offenses – the mirror opposite of the low-tolerance “broken windows” approach adopted in the late 1980s as crime rates began historic declines – has contributed to the sense that he is not holding criminals accountable. In 2019, the city had an incredible 25,667 “smash-and-grabs,” as thieves sought valuables and other property from cars to sell on the black market. The following year, rather than attempt to prevent or even disincentivize this crime, Boudin has proposed a $1.5 million fund to pay for auto glass repair, arguing that it “will help put money into San Francisco jobs and San Francisco businesses.” In literal terms, Boudin is subsidizing broken windows, under the notion that it can be transformed into a job-creation program.

    Boudin did not return a request for comment.

    Some San Franciscans are pushing back. Earlier this year, a group of residents and business owners launched a recall effort targeting Boudin, arguing that his policies have enabled crime and not done enough to protect victims.           

    The final plank of San Francisco’s policy platform is “destigmatization.” Public health experts in the city have gradually abandoned recovery and sobriety as the ideal outcome, preferring the limited goal of “harm reduction.” In a recent task force report on methamphetamine, the San Francisco Public Health Department noted that meth users “are likely to experience high levels of stigma and rejection in their personal and social lives,” which are “often reinforced by language and media portrayals depicting individuals who use alongside images of immorality, having chaotic lives, and perpetual use.”

    On the surface, this is a strange contention. If San Francisco’s perilous trifecta is any guide, methamphetamine use is heavily correlated with chaotic lives, perpetual drug abuse, crimes against others, and various transgressions against traditional morality. The harm reductionists’ argument, however, rests on the belief that addiction is an involuntary brain disease, akin to Alzheimer’s or dementia. In this view, addiction is better seen as a disability, and any stigma associated with it is therefore an act of ignorance and cruelty. According to the Department of Public Health, the goal of harm reduction policy is to reduce this unjustified stigma and focus public policy on “non-abstinence-based residential treatment programs,” “supervised injection services,” “trauma-informed sobering site[s],” and “training for staff on how to engage marginalized or vulnerable communities in ways that do not perpetuate trauma or stigma.”

    In practice, the task force recommendations would create an entire infrastructure to service addiction, rather than to reduce it. Although proponents of harm reduction claim the mantle of compassion, it’s a fatalistic theory. It assumes that most people cannot recover from serious addiction and, therefore, the social obligation is to provide the space and resources for addicts to pursue their own ends, which, for 40% of the perilous trifecta population, means 13 or more years in and out of homelessness. Activists have suggested that addicts can “reduce harms” by “[using] indoors instead of on the street,” “reducing how much [they are] using,” “transitioning from injecting to smoking,” and “continuing to use one type of drug but quitting another drug.” But in the face of the pathological overload of the perilous trifecta, these recommendations are negligently naïve, relegating a large portion of the homeless to a lifetime of chaos, sickness, and despair.

    In the long term, the real danger of destigmatization is that it would lead to the normalization of serious addiction and its consequences. In San Francisco, progressives have attempted to normalize the worst aspects of street homelessness, minimizing the drug use, toxic waste, psychotic episodes, and related crimes; they have blurred the lines between sickness and health, madness and sanity. Moreover, without a trace of irony, they have weaponized destigmatization itself, stigmatizing anyone who opposes the breakdown of public order as “fascists” and “homeless haters.” 

    An entire social media community has arisen documenting the descent of San Francisco’s streets. Twitter/homelessphilosopher/@PoopScoopSF/@sfstreets1/ @PowelMason415/@CleanUpWestSoma/@EsmeAlaki/@missmrm/@markdfabela

    The implicit wager of San Francisco’s policy is that the social-scientific apparatus can rescue people faster than the perilous trifecta expands its ranks. But the evidence suggests the opposite: that San Francisco has become a magnet for the troubled homeless. Methamphetamine deaths are up nearly 400% over the past five years; fentanyl overdoses doubled between 2019 and 2020. Meanwhile, the socialized state has reached a point of near exhaustion. First responders, police officers, and emergency room nurses are burning out. Psychiatrists at San Francisco General Hospital despair about the mass migration of out-of-state residents in search of the “San Francisco Special”: “housing, a psychiatrist, case manager, primary care provider, and transfer of Medicaid or general assistance.”

    The political class has insisted on greater control over the corporations, developers, and landlords, while deregulating life at the bottom. The result has been a deepening inequality, and an even more anarchic world for the poor. There is an entire social media community of mostly anonymous accounts who document the squalor of the encampments and psychotic episodes in the streets; they are the last resistance to the normalization of the perilous trifecta, and maintain their anonymity, it seems, out of fear of retribution. It’s a dark reality, but perhaps a warning of what’s to come.

    In the end, San Francisco finds itself fighting a monster. “Homelessness isn’t just a problem; it’s a symptom,” says its mayor. “The symptom of unaffordable housing, of income inequality, of institutional racism, of addiction, untreated illness, and decades of disinvestment. These are the problems. And if we’re going to fight homelessness, we’ve got to fight them all.” But this is part of the reason homelessness has become so intractable — —the political class has haunted its own world with abstractions; it has projected its own ideological premises onto the brutal reality of the streets.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 17:01

  • "This Is A Game-Changer For Uranium Stocks"
    “This Is A Game-Changer For Uranium Stocks”

    Submitted by Larry McDonald of The Bear Traps Report

    The Uranium Bull Thesis

    Uranium names are moving higher, breaking the recent downtrend just like energy names.

    Our copper thesis has played out nicely. But from a Washington policy perspective Uranium is the next trade.

    Last week we learned that Uranium Participation will be bought by Sprott. This is a large deal, game changer. A lot of hedge funds in our chat are discussing. I think Uranium prices double over the next 12 months. High conviction. It’s the pure, centrist green energy play, Nuclear power.

    Plays – Nexgen, Denison, CCJ, URA ETF

    This is BIG news. 

    U Participation Corp, was a company that was buying U and sitting on it, the original yellow cake. The market will now have daily price discovery and a retail / family office / small asset manager speculation vehicle. Game changer.

    Denison CEO was reluctant, didn’t think he could increase the pounds per share, now we have a new team taking over (Sprott). Very bullish for uranium. 

    1. We are getting a US listed vehicle with a physical redemption. Like a GLD for uranium. Look at PSLV and PHYS, equivalent.
    2. A new mechanism for retail, institutional. An at the market facility. Technically a closed end fund, NOT a GLD.
    3. Pounds come in, don’t go out. They could do a buyback if the market provides that opportunity.
    4. U Participation is tough to buy, pink sheet. RobinHood crowd cannot buy!!! Now there will be a new liquidity vehicle. 
    5. Mgmt transition from Dennison to Sprott. Think Industry player to real asset mgr. 
    6. When there is large premium, new buyers are vulnerable. This has suppressed upside momentum. NOW there is a liquid vehicle, large buyers can come in with a liquidity work out. 
    7. Next, Sprott does a big offering, to bring in new pounds into the fund. There was too much inventory of uranium in the system, this vehicle will eliminate this problem. Substantially reduce the problem. New size buyers of the fund will quickly translate into spot buying!
    8. Think CME and oil, this could be a new real franchise / a liquidity central facility. 
    9. Management take over might take 2/3 months. Then the premium U Part will come in, was 16% today. In a month or so, Dan Loeb can come in and buy $100m without the premium risk. Pounds will permanently be removed from the mkt. NOT at ETF, its a closed end fund. A discount may develop in the shares, but new buyers are in a much better spot. 
    10. When a large hedge fund sells, they come back, stay in fund.
    11. Closed end fund, pounds come in, don’t go out. Pounds will stay in the vehicle. It’s not a create and redeem situation like an ETF. Big seller will just create a discount. 

    Uranium bulls in our chat are calling the bottom with conviction.

    Transformational deal. 

    CCJ Cameco Breaking Out

    CCJ Cameco Corp is a) breaking downtrend consolidation b) almost back in the BULL uptrend. We remain long a 2/3 position in CCJ and a 1/3 position in the URA Uranium ETF.

    Uranium Participation Corp In Agreement with Sprott Asset Management to Modernize Business Structure and Pursue U.S. Listing

    Entered into an arrangement agreement with Sprott Asset Management LP, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sprott Inc. (NYSE/TSX: SII), pursuant to which UPC shareholders will become unitholders of the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust a newly formed entity to be managed by Sprott Asset Management.

    * * *
    Uranium News of the day 

    Sprott Asset Management taking over management of Uranium Participation Corp will light this market on fire and ultimately help drive the price of uranium much higher and faster than most realize. Our friend Kevin Bambrough actually conceived of uranium participation corp back in the mid 2000’s (over a sushi lunch) in the year leading up to that lunch he had aggressively pitched Eric Sprott on going big in uranium stocks and predicted a move from $11/lb to $140/lb. think of $140/lb simply as the inflation-adjusted price from the 70’s uranium bull market and over that year players bought 20% of most uranium juniors and a decent chunk of Cameco. We also invested in a few privates and helped some shell companies acquire uranium assets. The uranium price had run up from the teens to the low 20’s around that time and the spot market was very thin much like today. Over the course of that lunch Kevin was ranting about how certain he was that the uranium price would be moving up soon. Our pal was certain that the thin market was ripe to be squeezed higher and that our stocks would all rip as the price moved up.  A few hedge funds had recently bought a little physical uranium and were storing it with Cameco or Denison as req by law/regs. The lunch ended with the declaration that Kevin was going to pitch Eric Sprott to let him launch an uranium hold co ETF and Kevin did that very afternoon and it was an easy sell.  One thing people loved most about working with Eric is that there was no fucking around.  He made quick decisions.  Only thing was he didn’t want was ‘wasting time’ on the ETF. They were running billions in hedge fund and equity funds and we think that year heading towards $100mm plus in incentive fees. Some years they hit $200mm of incentives. The fees from a uranium ETF would be small. They called Chris Roy at Cormark (Sprott securities then) and said let’s work on this idea together. Being a brokerage you can do the raises and get 5 percent. Or $5mm in fees on the first $100mm and Eric had blessed a $20mm lead order. Anyhow, long story short, they launched it and just the news of it coming sent the uranium price up several dollars. As orders for the ipo grew and uranium was purchased the price when up a few more.  Moved near $22 to 28.50/lb in a few months as the prospectus got filed. The vehicle came out and kept trading at a premium and issue after issue swallowed up millions of lbs of uranium. Utilities felt incredible pressure knowing the vehicle was gonna keep gobbling up supply and this forced them to scramble and start entering into long term contracts. The spot price moving up over $100/lb and with little to no spot available forced them to sign contracts to try to get a discount and deals with $75/lb floors became the rage for miners. Those that signed long term fixed deals sub $50 took a look of flack from investors. So one thing to understand is utilities or fuel buyers will always avoid buying spot prices and pushing them higher. They have zero interest in doing that.  All they want to do is secure long term contracts for supply. They prefer to sign deals with ceiling prices. They also try when possible to sign deals centered around a price like $45/lb (like they have with Cameco) but if the spot price goes up they only pay a portion of the increase.

    URPTF Uranium Participation Corp

    Uranium Participation Corp’s US ADR is broke out to the upside out of the recent wedge on Wednesday. The company is now pursuing a US listing, which in our view, will prompt front-running inflows.

    Uranium Market

    Oversupplied market like we’ve had meant they could point to a weak spot price and contract as such. Back then UPC (Uranium Participation Corp) wasn’t able to issue shares at the market and needed to trade at a decent premium in order to be able to justify paying issuance fees and accretively purchase more uranium. So here we are today. About a year off the bottom of the uranium market. Yellow cake did an issuance and some miners bought some lbs. Well the big dog in the space is upc by a country mile and it’s been notably quiet for months cause they were obviously working on this deal. In order to change to the trust format and be dual listed in Canada and the USA they needed a licensed money manager. Enter Sprott 2021 and the physical ETF powerhouse it’s become. UPC will become much like the Silver and Gold etfs and be able do ATM issuance. This is a complete game changer. It means both retail and institutional investors will be able to cause physical uranium to be purchased like never before.

    UPC shares will be issued with just a slight premium and uranium will be purchased as close to real time as possible. Many of us uranium investors have a very positive view on physical uranium but often shy away from buying upc or yellowcake at a premium knowing well that any day a deal could be announced and the premium gets crushed and you can lose a quick 5 or 10 percent. Totally kills it. Demand has in my mind been incredibly pent up as a result of the lack of a clean structure.   Also, many institutions will only allocate on a deal if that. Liquidity and lack of ability to get in or out near NAV is a big concern (as it should be). Well very soon that’s solved. Not only that but consider the various uranium etfs that also hold a piece of Uranium participation corp or Yellowcake. Those etfs continually issue shares and basket buy their holdings. We imagine often pushing the premium up on upc and likely cause other shareholders to sell. So once the transition is complete when uranium stock etfs get inflows and buy upc it will directly cause uranium lbs to be purchased. This improved liquidity may end up causing some etfs to increase there weighting in upc as a result. (Btw say good bye to yellowcakes premium. We doubt yellow cake will raise much more money unless they can issue ATM as well and we don’t know AIM rules.

    So, carrying on with upc. Having it NYSE listed will give it much better exposure and make it eligible for many USA based funds that either cant or don’t invest in Canada. The total size of USA market is around $50 trillion vs Canada $3.5 trillion. 13x bigger.

    UPC has not done an issuance yet in this uranium bull market.  It was trading at a discount last year and actually sold uranium and bought back stock because it was accretive to do so. So the North American markets have been ‘underserved’ for a year.

    Bulls will be buying UPC as soon as it has the ATM ability and they know their purchase will go to new uranium purchase. High conviction bulls feel the uranium price will be double in a few years or less… It’s the biggest no brainer safe trade you can find. If only a double in 10 years that’s 7 percent per annum. And it will double in 2 years or less, bulls say.

    Institutions, high net worth, and retail investors will flock to it. So as some will argue.. that’s just noise. It was gonna happen anyhow.  Well on to the next part… it’s not just about soaking up the spot market it’s about releasing this a new beast and what it does to the market psychologically. Fuel buyers / utilities are going to soon panic as they see the UPC doing volume every day and issuing shares. They will be following the spot market and wondering like all of us where the price will go next.  How many more marginal lbs are available in the spot market? Potential sellers of spot will likely decide to hang on and ‘see’ what happens. It’s a totally new dynamic and it’s effect shouldn’t be under estimated.

    In the past, just prior to an issuance by a upc or yellow cake they would put a call into a trader or Denison on behalf of upc.

    Transformational deal.

    Utilities will learn they overplayed their hand, now they will PAY up. We can’t tell you how many times we have said that in an asset class this mispriced things just happen to realize the value. And this is one of those things.

    This deal between Sprott and UPC is transformational. It has the potential to be immense.

    If run like their other commodity trusts, which we see no reason why not, it now puts a daily bid in the market. It allows for pure price speculation on a daily basis – which heretofore has  not existed. It doesn’t require establishment of storage agreements by investors. They can just express their view in the market every day. This will take UxC’s bullshit broker average price that shows up daily based on bullshit trader bids and asks and render it useless as the price will be the last traded price . And with flows into a trust that buys uranium – well. That is new to this market. A constant bid in the market. This is what happens when something is absurdly cheap – it attracts capital.

    Utilities with spot referred contracts – good luck. They may not figure it out right away. They will when investors have a vehicle to buy uranium every day.

    Also, we assume that they will correct some of the features of UPC that held it back. For example, we assume they will maintain an evergreen prospectus and tap overnight markets to be agile. And, also we assume they will remove the restriction that procurement can only happen at a premium to NAV while buying uranium at a significant discount to market. That was always stupid.

    Also the WMC guys are sharp. They will bring credibility to the investor marketing. And, assuming their liaison role extends to procurement and sales (building a small book to cover fees) they are quite familiar with the principles a fund needs to follow in these areas to maximize value for its investors (versus maximizing value for traders and utilities).

    A Decade after Fukushima, Japan Restarting Nuclear

    Japan; Governor has officially approved restart of 3 more nuclear reactors in Takahama-1 & 2 and Mihama-3. Minister says Japan “will use nuclear power sustainably into the future” – promising grants for further restarts.

    Meanwhile…

    Japan’s Coal Pipeline is Bare After Last Planned Project Axed – Link Here

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 16:45

  • Aussies Trying To Return Home From India Face Up To $66,600 In Fines Or Five Years Imprisonment
    Aussies Trying To Return Home From India Face Up To $66,600 In Fines Or Five Years Imprisonment

    Australians trying desperately to return home from COVID-stricken India will face fines and jail time, according to treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who defended the hardline approach as “drastic” but necessary, and denied it’s “irresponsible” to leave fellow Australians stranded.

    “https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/30/australian-gover…,” said Frydenberg, adding “We’ve acted on the medical advice.”

    “The situation in India is dire. It is very serious. More than 200,000 people have died and there are more than 300,000 new cases a day.”

    As The Guardian reports, the move comes after two Australian cricketers circumvented a travel ban after traveling from India to Qatar before returning home, after the government banning all direct flights from India.

    After Friday’s meeting of the national cabinet, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, issued a statement saying governments “noted the measures that have been put in place to restrict entry into Australia of people who have previously been in high-risk countries determined by the chief medical officer”.

    “National cabinet noted the chief medical officer’s assessment that India is the first country to meet the threshold of a high-risk country,” the statement said.

    It foreshadowed “further measures to mitigate risks of high-risk travellers entering Australia” but did not flag criminalising returns explicitly.

    Earlier in the day, Morrison told Sydney radio station 2GB a loophole whereby travellers could get around the India flight ban by transiting through a third country was closed on Wednesday evening. -The Guardian

    “That flight that those cricketers were on managed to get away just before that,” added Morrison. “We had information on Monday that that wasn’t possible.”

    Australian health minister, Greg Hunt, announced the strict measures late Friday night, adding that anyone attempting to sidestep the regulations would be hit with fines of up to $66,600 or five years in prison, or both.

    “The government does not make these decisions lightly,” said Hunt, invoking powers granted under the Biosecurity Act to introduce the measures. “However, it is critical the integrity of the Australian public health and quarantine systems is protected and the number of Covid-19 cases in quarantine facilities is reduced to a manageable level.”

    The new rule will take effect beginning Monday and will be reviewed on May 15.

    Biosecurity regulations invoked to manage public health during the pandemic already give government authorities sweeping powers.

    Biosecurity control orders currently allow authorities to require an individual to provide contact details, regularly update an officer of their health status, restrict movement by remaining at the individual’s place of residence for a specified period, undergo decontamination, provide body samples for diagnosis, undertake treatment or receive a vaccination, remain in Australia for up to 28 days, or be isolated at a medical facility.

    In addition to control orders, the regulations give the health minister scope to determine biosecurity emergencies. These powers allow the minister to “determine any requirement that he or she is satisfied is necessary” to prevent entry or spread of disease. -The Guardian

    Last week, Australia suspended direct commercial and government repatriation flights from India until mid-may, leaving around 9,000 Australian nationals who have registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs in limbo. According to the report, around 650 of them are considered vulnerable.

    Approximately 20,000 individuals have returned to Australia from India since March 2020.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 05/01/2021 – 16:20

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