Today’s News 2nd November 2021

• How Emissions In Asia Are Changing (Spoiler Alert: They're Rising!)
  How Emissions In Asia Are Changing (Spoiler Alert: They’re Rising!)

  At the COP26 conference in Glasgow, world leaders are discussing climate goals and how to potentially limit global warming to 1.5°-2° Celsius. The event is seen by many as the last chance to reach this Paris Agreement goal. However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, high-level cancellations by Chinese President Xi Jinping or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have cast doubts on whether the conference can succeed. Asia, with its many rapidly developing economies, plays a major part in the outcome, with China especially having a pivotal role.

  Data from the Climate Action Tracker shows that while China is responsible for some of the highest climate gas emissions in Asia and the world, the policies and actions already put in place in the country show the biggest potential for emissions reductions until 2030.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  China has recently slightly updated its Paris Agreement targets and additionally pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2060. The Climate Action Tracker is expecting China to about meet its 2030 goals with the updated policy. While the initiative rates the goal as a fair contribution by China, the country’s effort was still associated with an increase of the global temperature by up to 3° Celsius.

  Elsewhere in Asia, for example in major developing economies India and Indonesia, emissions are lower overall than in China, but they are expected to keep rising – if slowly – until 2030.

  In Russia, which is also a large polluter in the region, they are expected to stagnate, while they have been falling in Japan.

  In the case of India and Indonesia, analysts from the Climate Action Tracker conclude that 2030 Paris Agreement goals set by the countries are actually much less stringent than what the countries are expected to achieve through the policies and action already in place, leaving an accountability gap.

  Both countries have not tightened their Paris Agreement targets yet, but are expected to reach results associated with a 2° Celsius warming (India) and a 3° Celsius warming (Indonesia).

  The situation in Japan is the opposite. While emissions are falling, the ambitious target that would limit warming to 2° Celsius at most will not be met. Instead, the projected emissions also represent the equivalent of a warming of around 3° Celsius.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/02/2021 – 02:45

• Will Hungary And Poland Be The Next Victims Of US/EU Regime Change?
  Will Hungary And Poland Be The Next Victims Of US/EU Regime Change?

  Authored by José Niño via The Mises Institute,

  No country is safe from the Eye of Sauron that is the modern-day American national security state. Even some of the US’s ostensible allies can’t escape its all-seeing eye.

  

  Hungary and Poland, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), have faced significant criticism from the chattering classes of DC and Brussels in recent years.

  While on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden compared countries such as Hungary and Poland to “totalitarian regimes.” Moreover, former president Barack Obama declared that both countries are “essentially authoritarian” despite being “functioning democracies” not too long ago.

  Similarly, Mark Rutte the prime minister of the Netherlands, has gone as far as to call for the expulsion of Hungary from the EU for its recent passage of a law that would criminalize the promotion or portrayal of sex reassignment or homosexuality to Hungarians younger than the age of eighteen in media content.

  As for Poland, several of its municipalities and regions have passed largely symbolic “LGBT-free” resolutions in opposition to several of the excesses of the cultural Left. Like Hungary, Poland’s traditionalist moves have ruffled feathers in the West. They even drew a harsh rebuke from the Trump-appointed US ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, who boldly proclaimed Poland was “on the wrong side of history” in 2020.

  Beyond cultural matters, Poland is in a long-standing tiff with the European Commission over its judicial affairs. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) insists Poland has exclusive authority over judicial questions, while Brussels maintains that EU laws trump the laws of member countries. The European Commission doubled down by calling on the EU’s main court to fine Poland for daring to not follow Brussel’s managerial script.

  It’s amusing how politicians, journalists, and NGO mouthpieces from the world’s premier superpower and the Continent’s supranational political union would launch a two-minute hate campaign against countries within their alliance structures. After all, we’re supposed to be living in the “end of history,” when liberal democracy is supposed to resoundingly triumph against illiberalism. However, social engineers in the West cannot appreciate true diversity when it comes to the way countries handle their own affairs. Some countries will not bend to the universalistic whims of outsiders.

  As members of the Visegrad Group—a contrarian bloc of countries within the EU made up of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—Hungary and Poland have differentiated themselves from their Atlanticist peers in how they have not bought into some of the obsessions with multiculturalism, mass migration, and alternative lifestyle habits most Western democracies vigorously promote both in the state and corporate sectors. Similarly, Hungarian and Polish leaders’ constant reminders to their constituents that they belong to a broader Western Christian civilization further enrages the lifeless technocrats in Brussels, who worship at the altar of managerialism.

  To be sure, the legislation the two Visegrad Group members have passed is perhaps controversial to the interventionists who want to turn every political jurisdiction into a facsimile of Brussels and Washington. As controversial as the two Visegrad Group countries’ moves may be, it’s hyperbolic to suggest that Poland and Hungary are sliding into some form of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Both countries count on parliamentary systems to elect leaders and pass legislation. Contrast that to the EU—a political behemoth filled with tons of unelected bureaucrats who constantly impose regulations and arbitrary edicts on otherwise sovereign nations.

  If anything, so-called liberal Europe should be explaining itself for its hate speech laws and other regulations that impede people’s freedom of expression, not to mention the wrong-headed green energy policies that prevent EU member nations from having access to cheap and reliable energy sources.

  In terms of political economy, Hungary and Poland are interesting cases. While they’re no free market luminaries, they’re ranked fifty-fifth (Hungary) and forty-first (Poland), according to the Heritage Foundation’s Index for Economic Freedom, which means they haven’t completely gone off the market path and still nominally protect property rights. These countries do shine in a handful of instances. For example, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has repeatedly stood up against tax harmonization efforts—a euphemism for corporate tax hikes. Hungary’s corporate tax rate hovers around 9 percent, a tax burden that is one of the lowest on the European Continent. On the energy front, Hungary and Poland aren’t sipping on the green energy Kool-Aid. Both the Hungarian and Polish political leadership have had choice words for the EU’s energy policies, further showcasing their dissenting streaks.

  Despite all the evidence showing that Hungary and Poland are not totalitarian countries by any stretch of the imagination, there’s reason to believe liberal internationalists in the West will continue harassing them. Hungary is a particularly easy target due to an assortment of reasons that go beyond its domestic politics. Hungary’s clever use of geopolitical balancing and courting countries like Russia and China will definitely not make it any friends in Brussels and Washington, DC. Hungary has been open to working economically with both countries, which have had increasingly deteriorating relations with the West. With regard to China, Hungary previously blocked an EU statement when China decided to crack down on Hong Kong, much to the consternation of the EU and the international NGO-industrial complex.

  Reasonable people, even outsiders, can have disagreements with foreign governments’ actions. But calling for wholesale regime change—be it through subversion or outright interventionism—is simply delusional. The resulting destabilization just creates additional problems and other unforeseen consequences that foreign policy tinkerers could never anticipate. But here’s the thing: when talking about foreign policy, we’re dealing with people who have long taken leave of their senses. Truth be told, there’s not much rational thinking going on in those spaces.

  It would be inaccurate to view the US as a world power that exclusively uses brute force. Just as it operates domestically, the US state can turn to a combination of vigorous hard power and clever soft power to make wayward actors submit. The infamous “color revolutions”—movements that intelligence agencies, NGOs, and assorted domestic actors use to interfere in foreign elections with the purpose of generating an electoral crisis—are one of many tools the US deep state and its EU allies could use to harass wayward states and compel them to submit to their will.

  Covertly mixing it up with Hungary and Poland would serve as solid tune-up fights for an empire that has faced recent reversals abroad in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. The irony here is that the US would be subverting two countries that are in its alliance network. As long as liberal internationalist zealots slither across the halls of Congress, one can only expect continued regime change efforts. All corners of the globe are fair game at this point.

  A sea change in the way foreign policy decision-makers view the world is a prerequisite for any correction to take place in the way America conducts foreign affairs. If the status quo persists, the interventionist cabal in DC will always find ways to harass and destabilize nations abroad.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/02/2021 – 02:00

• RBA Abandons Yield Target Due To 'Economic Improvement'
  RBA Abandons Yield Target Due To ‘Economic Improvement’

  In what many have called the most important event of the week (presumably until Powell unveils the taper), tonight’s Reserve Bank of Australia policy decision – having sat on their hands as short-dated Aussie yields exploded higher in the last two weeks – is likely to ease or further inflict a lot more pain on traders one way or another. As the chart shows, the last time RBA defended its 0.10% yield target was 10/22; since then, things have gone just a little bit turbo.

  

  Interestingly, among the carnage in credit land, Aussie dollar has been an almost totally disinterested spectator over the past week…

  

  As Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid pointed out earlier, he has “absolutely zero idea what they are going to do tomorrow which should help you all tremendously but their absence again this morning gives a decent indication. I was taught economics in an era where central banks liked to keep an element of mystery and surprise. As such I’ve always disliked the forward guidance era as it encourages markets to pile on to much riskier, one way positions that a normally functioning market should naturally allow. But to go from forward guidance to silence (that rhymes) is a recipe for huge market turmoil if the facts change.”

  So who will be right (FX or bonds) and what will RBA do?

  The global backdrop for today’s meeting is one in which the “transitory” view of inflation is losing ground. If the RBA drops its policy of yield curve control, that will inevitably fuel the narrative of global central bank tightening.

  The decision is – and RBA has decided to discontinue the target of 10 basis points for the April 2024 Australian Government bond:

  The decision to discontinue the yield target reflects the improvement in the economy and the earlier-than-expected progress towards the inflation target. Given that other market interest rates have moved in response to the increased likelihood of higher inflation and lower unemployment, the effectiveness of the yield target in holding down the general structure of interest rates in Australia has diminished.

  And while this shift is economically-confident and hawkish, RBA tweaked the language around rate-hikes:

  This will require the labour market to be tight enough to generate wages growth that is materially higher than it is currently. This is likely to take some time. The Board is prepared to be patient, with the central forecast being for underlying inflation to be no higher than 2½ per cent at the end of 2023 and for only a gradual increase in wages growth.

  The Board will not increase the cash rate until actual inflation is sustainably within the 2 to 3 per cent target range.

  The reaction is interesting as the Aussie dollar weakened…

  

  And bonds were modestly bid…

  

  Finally, it is worth reminding traders that RBA will continue to purchase government securities at the rate of $4 billion a week until at least mid February 2022.

  *  *  *

  Full RBA Statement below:

  At its meeting today, the Board decided to:

  • maintain the cash rate target at 10 basis points and the interest rate on Exchange Settlement balances at zero per cent
  • continue to purchase government securities at the rate of $4 billion a week until at least mid February 2022
  • discontinue the target of 10 basis points for the April 2024 Australian Government bond.

  The Australian economy is recovering after the interruption caused by the Delta outbreak. As vaccination rates increase even further and restrictions are eased, the economy is expected to bounce back relatively quickly. The central forecast is for GDP growth of 3 per cent over 2021 and 5½ per cent and 2½ per cent over the following two years. One important source of uncertainty continues to be the possibility of a further setback on the health front.

  The Delta outbreak caused hours worked in Australia to fall sharply, but a bounce-back is now underway. The Bank’s business liaison and the data on job ads suggest that many firms are now hiring, which will boost employment over coming months. The central forecast is for the unemployment rate to trend lower over the next couple of years, reaching 4¼ per cent at the end of 2022 and 4 per cent at the end of 2023.

  Inflation has picked up, but in underlying terms is still low, at 2.1 per cent. The headline CPI inflation rate is 3 per cent and is being affected by higher petrol prices, higher prices for newly constructed homes and the disruptions in global supply chains. A further, but only gradual, pick-up in underlying inflation is expected. The central forecast is for underlying inflation of around 2¼ per cent over 2021 and 2022 and 2½ per cent over 2023. Wages growth is expected to pick up gradually as the labour market tightens, with the Wage Price Index forecast to increase by 2½ per cent over 2022 and 3 per cent over 2023. The main uncertainties relate to the persistence of the current disruptions to global supply chains and the behaviour of wages at the lowest unemployment rate in decades.

  Housing prices are continuing to rise in most markets and housing credit growth has picked up due to stronger demand for credit by both owner-occupiers and investors. The Bank welcomes APRA’s recent decision to increase the interest rate serviceability buffer on home loans. It is important that lending standards are maintained at a time of historically low interest rates.

  Financial conditions in Australia remain highly accommodative, with most lending rates at record lows. Bond yields have increased recently and bond market volatility has also risen significantly. The exchange rate has appreciated a little, but remains within the range of the past year.

  The decision to discontinue the yield target reflects the improvement in the economy and the earlier-than-expected progress towards the inflation target. Given that other market interest rates have moved in response to the increased likelihood of higher inflation and lower unemployment, the effectiveness of the yield target in holding down the general structure of interest rates in Australia has diminished.

  The Board is committed to maintaining highly supportive monetary conditions to achieve a return to full employment in Australia and inflation consistent with the target. While inflation has picked up, it remains low in underlying terms. Inflation pressures are also less than they are in many other countries, not least because of the only modest wages growth in Australia.

  The Board will not increase the cash rate until actual inflation is sustainably within the 2 to 3 per cent target range. This will require the labour market to be tight enough to generate wages growth that is materially higher than it is currently. This is likely to take some time. The Board is prepared to be patient, with the central forecast being for underlying inflation to be no higher than 2½ per cent at the end of 2023 and for only a gradual increase in wages growth.

  The Governor will conduct a webinar, including a question and answer session, at 4.00 pm AEDT today. This will be broadcast live on rba.gov.au.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 23:40

• Huxley's New World, Part 2: The War On Science
  Huxley’s New World, Part 2: The War On Science

  Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

  Huxley makes it crystal clear that he considers the world to be overpopulated, and that science and progress cannot be free to advance without limits.

  

  In Part 1 the question was discussed what was Aldous’ real intention in writing the Brave New World; was it meant as an exhortation, an inevitable prophecy or as an Open Conspiracy? An Open Conspiracy closely linked to not only H.G. Wells, who clearly laid out such a vision in his book by the same title, published in 1928, but a vision also in the vein of Aldous’ famous grandfather Thomas Huxley “Darwin’s bulldog” and mentor to Wells.

  It is from here that we will continue to discuss what exactly were Aldous’ views on such matters, did he in fact believe in the need for a scientific dictatorship? A scientific caste system? Was he actually warning the people that such a dystopia would occur if we did not correct our course or was it all part of a mass psychological conditioning for what was regarded as inevitable, and that Aldous’ role was rather to “soften the transition” as much as possible towards a “dictatorship without tears”?

  The War on Science

  “ ‘A New Theory of Biology’ was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: ‘The author’s mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published.’ … A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose – well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes – make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being [as happiness and comfort], but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.”

  – Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”

  This is the credo for all scientific dictatorships, to forbid any search for knowledge whose purpose is the discovery of a universal truth, something that “is beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere.” Something that is and will remain always true, and not just true so long as people are led to believe it is so.

  Thus, a scientific dictatorship must deny purpose by all means and promote an artificial “cushy” conception of happiness and comfort, since the former makes for very bad servants/slaves and the latter for very good ones.

  Purpose leads to unpredictability in the status quo, there are no sureties for an oligarchic system of governance in a world that is motivated by a purpose towards truth, beauty, and knowledge, as Mustapha Mond succinctly lays out.

  It is also the case that whenever one discovers a universal truth, it unifies rather than divides, truth is thus the very enemy of tyranny, for it offers clarity. And one can no longer be ruled over when they can see a superior alternative to their oppression.

  Therefore, under the rule of tyranny, truth must when possible be snuffed out, otherwise it is contorted until it is no longer recognizable, it is broken into fragments of itself in order to create factions, schools of opposing thought that are meant to confuse and lead its followers further astray.

  To deny purpose is thus the necessary condition to rule within a scientific dictatorship. Whether its controllers believe in purpose or not is irrelevant, since it is simply not admissible.

  The question thus is, where does Aldous fit into all of this? For starters let us take a look at Aldous’ family roots to see if indeed the apple did not fall too far from the tree…

  Aldous’ grandfather T.H. Huxley (1825-1895) had made a name for himself by the age of twenty-five and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950. Within a span of just a few years he would rise to become a leading member of Britain’s scientific establishment.

  By the late 1700s, discoveries in geology began to contradict the accepted religious view of Creation. It was increasingly found that steady changes were the primary cause of most geological formations which developed over very long spans of time and that these changes had even led to the extinction of certain organisms/creatures. This was the first time that the biblical view of Creation was ever challenged as a mainstream argument within the sciences.

  By the first part of the 1800s the scientific community was primarily in agreement that living processes and their environments did indeed “evolve.”

  In the 1820s Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), once friends, had come into severe disagreement over the origins of anatomical forms which lead to a historic debate in 1830, raising issues that have yet to be resolved to this day.

  In 1838, upon reading Thomas Malthus’ “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” (who is known for calling for the courting of the plague to address the crisis of overpopulation), Darwin formulated his theory for “evolution” based on the “natural selection” of the fittest, he coined the term as an analogy of what he termed the “artificial selection” of selective breeding, with reference in particular to the practice of horse breeding. Darwin saw a similarity between farmers picking the best stock in selective breeding, and a Malthusian “Nature” selecting from chance variants.

  That is, Darwin’s ideas of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” implied no directionality to evolution but rather was based upon Nature’s selection of random variants. But how does one part of an organism evolve without affecting the other parts of said organism?

  According to Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, there is an inherent “potential” in evolution; the potential for change is inherent within the organism, and the shaping of its many parts occurs in a harmonic, coherent way. That is, change moves in a purposeful manner, not a random manner.

  The evolution of wings for flight, the eyes for sight, the nervous system for thought; Geoffroy was stating that these were not the result of countless minute mutations occurring and being selected upon separate from the other, but that the transformations were occurring with the very intention to create forms of flight, sight and thought.

  By Darwin rejecting this thesis, he created a paradox within his own theory. Either the potential for change is inherent in the organism in which many parts are able to change in a harmonic/coherent way, or it is not. However, if it is the latter, as Darwin claims it to be, random change of any part by itself without acknowledgement of the whole would more often than not lead to the death of the organism, as seen in studies of embryo formation, or would create a Dr. Moreau’s Island of freaks (which by the bye is another novel by our anti-hero H.G. Wells).

  The elegant creations we actually do see arise through evolutionary processes would be an extreme rarity in such a world of randomness.

  With everything we know today of the incredibly intricate details of biochemistry, the coordination of metabolic processes which occur in their thousands of “parts” would all need to evolve as randomly separate processes and yet, would also need to occur simultaneously and in conjunction with the other functioning parts. This would make Darwin’s concept for the selection of random variants within a coordinated functioning whole fundamentally impossible.

  Not only is the evolution of the eye one of the miracles of evolution, it has countless variations upon itself, such that there is no one standard model for what is an “eye.” Are we thus to believe that this has randomly occurred not only once but thousands of times in each species with its own distinct variation of what is an “eye”?

  In the early 1850s, Huxley had been introduced to Darwin and by the middle of the 1850s they were in close collaboration. Though Huxley never fully took to Darwin’s theory, he did become an avid defender and promoter of it nonetheless.

  At the time there was strong opposition to Darwin and Huxley within Europe and the United States. James Dwight Dana (1813-1895), a contemporary of T.H. Huxley, was among the American leadership that opposed this view, and argued that evolution did progress with a directionality, using examples such as the observation that biological organisms were proceeding towards greater “cephalization.” That is, that evolution was forming a general trend towards increasingly sophisticated nervous systems that could respond and interact with their environment. Thus, evolution was towards greater forms of complexity with more sophisticated forms of function.

  However, Thomas Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog” was vehemently against this view of purposeful directionality in Nature. It did not matter that Darwin’s theory was just that, a theory, which still failed to explain much that was being observed in the evolutionary process.

  Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss this in further detail (for more refer here), one cannot deny two major changes that occurred in “modern science” as a result of T.H. Huxley’s avid promotion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, that 1) Nature, and thus one could say the Universe, was not governed by purpose but rather by randomness, and that 2) man was but a beast, no longer to be among the children of God, no longer regarded as partaking in anything that was divine or sacred.

  And if man is but a beast what does he care for higher truths? What more does a beast need than the simple forms of comfort and happiness?

  Modern Science begets Modern Religion begets a Modern Utopia?

  Before we go on to speak about Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley, I will say just a few words on his father Leonard.

  Leonard Huxley published in 1926 his “Progress and the Unfit,” which was subsequently used to promote the Eugenics movement, to which H.G. Wells and Leonard’s son Julian were outspoken avid supporters of. Leonard also wrote favourably of his father T.H. Huxley’s views and that of Charles Darwin.

  In his book, Leonard discusses how modern-day science is only to look at the interdependence of body and mind, that the existence of the soul has been discredited by modern science, and thus that conditions for improvement on the human condition must solely rely upon the social and biological.

  He goes on to state that modern society has too long tolerated the proliferation of the feeble minded and so creates an ever-lasting burden for itself. He claims that mental defectiveness (which ranged from criminal behaviour, insanity, physical deformities and forms of mental retardation to addictions such as alcoholism and gambling, homelessness, owing massive debt etc. etc.) were all to be considered heritable qualities.

  Thus, those in possession of such unwanted qualities should be segregated from society or sterilised. He acknowledges that such measures may appear immoral, but that it is only immoral when coercion is used against persons of “normal intelligence,” for those who are deemed abnormal, unable to use reason, such standards of morality do not apply. This also appertained to what were considered to be the “lower” races, to which, T.H. Huxley was outspoken in his view that the “white race” was indeed the most superior race of all and that the “black race” was amongst the most inferior.

  With “modern science,” what stood in the way of the “mechanics of enforced good breeding” if humankind were to be regarded as no different from other beasts? And if we were judged to have no soul, the application of so-called “morality” was up for interpretation if not deemed entirely irrelevant.

  Julian Huxley (1887-1975), the older brother of Aldous, after serving in WWI became a Fellow at New College Oxford, serving as Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In 1925 he moved to King’s College London to work as Professor of Zoology. However, after only two years he resigned his chair to work full-time for H.G. Wells and his son G.P. Wells on “The Science of Life.”

  For those who are not too familiar with the views of H.G. Wells, I think it apt to share a quote, from part of his “new Bible” trilogy, “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought” published in 1901:

  “It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental to the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. “

  I assure you, there is plenty more where that came from.

  “The Science of Life,” which was also a part of Wells’ “new Bible” trilogy, was to give a popular account of all major aspects of biology as known in the 1920s. It is credited in introducing modern ecological concepts and emphasised the importance of behaviourism and Jungian psychology.

  At the very end of the 900 page volume, it is written:

  “To have a world encumbered for a time with an excess of sterile jazz dancers and joy riders may be a pleasanter way to elimination than hardship and death. Pleasure may achieve what force and sword have failed to do. The world can afford it; it is not a thing to fret about. It is only a passing fashion on a grand scale this phase of sterilized “enjoyment.” The great thing is that it should be able and willing to sterilize itself…The types that have a care for their posterity and the outlook of the race will naturally be the types which will possess the future.”

  This, believe it or not, is H.G. Wells at his best behaviour, amply toned down so to speak. To Wells this is a rather humane proposition, since those who are considered of defective biological stock are simply to be sterilised but are otherwise free to mingle within society, free to live out a comfortable life of pleasures in all their degeneracies with no threat that such contaminants will continue on in the future breeds of humankind.

  Thus, the age of pleasure will be more effective than the age of the sword (such as WWI), at diminishing the lower castes into a more “manageable” number. Within a generation, the human stock will be purified and a “Modern Utopia,” another book of H.G. Wells, can finally begin. Earth will become a paradise full of plenty, largely made up of a higher caste of reasonable, intelligent, healthy and attractive individuals and we will finally obtain world peace and harmony, until perhaps the next purge….

  Besides Julian Huxley acting as Vice-President from 1937-1944 and President from 1959-1962 of the British Eugenics Society, he was also the first director-general of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1946, to which he wrote its mandate “UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy” that same year.

  In it Julian lays out the need for a world government as the only means for avoiding war, and that the full sovereignty of separate nation states should be transferred over to this world government accordingly, under one political unity to which he expands upon, writing:

  “At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.” (For more on this refer here.)

  In 1928, H.G. Wells publishes his “The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution,” where he calls for the reform of religion into a “modern religion,” which was only fitting now that science had become a “modern science.” In his concept of modern religion, he states that it will be necessary to strip religion down to its raw elements of service and subordination. Wells also wrote “The New World Order” in 1940, and no doubt, was a guiding influence on Julian’s outlook when he wrote the manifesto for UNESCO.

  The reader should also know that T.H. Huxley was the mentor of H.G. Wells and introduced him to the writings of Thomas Malthus and Charles Darwin.

  [Refer to Part 1 of this series for an in-depth discussion on how H.G. Wells influenced the works of Aldous Huxley.]

  The 20th Century Descent of Man

  At the very start of the 20th century, the influential International Congress of Mathematicians organised a conference in Paris, France 1900. It was at this conference that David Hilbert, a leading mathematician at Göttingen University was invited to speak on the future of mathematics, where he stressed the need for the field of mathematics to “prove that all axioms of arithmetic are consistent” and to “axiomatize those physical sciences in which mathematics plays an important role.”

  What Hilbert was calling for in his challenge for the future of mathematics was that all scientific knowledge be reduceable to the form of mathematical “logic” so to speak; that it be contained within a minimum of accepted truths and rules of derivation, which could be proven by consistent and complete formal mathematical proofs.

  Thus, all scientific knowledge would in the future be deduced from such mathematical models, there was nothing left to “discover” in the typical sense of what defined scientific investigations during the 19th century and earlier, they only need refer to the appropriate mathematical model.

  In 1900, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead set out to meet Hilbert’s challenge which resulted in the “Principia Mathematica,” published thirteen years later.

  Although Kurt Gödel would disprove the entire premise for the “Principia Mathematica” with his “incompleteness theorems” which show the limits of provability in formal axiomatic theories, the “Principia Mathematica” is one of the most influential works of the 20th century, on not only shaping modern logic but also formed the basis for the latter development of cybernetics and systems analysis by Russell’s student Norbert Wiener during WWII.

  Before you conclude that Russell himself didn’t personally believe that irrationality was a fundamental force in the Universe simply because he tried formalizing said Universe, it is worth reading a section of his bitterly misanthropic view of humanity presented in his 1903 “A Free Man’s Worship”:

  “That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand… Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

  Whether deterministic or random in view, the goal was the same, to promote a concept of the Universe that had no governing purpose, no directionality and no morality, that it was essentially a mechanism, discoverable by a few simple laws. This was not something new, the Enlightenment had already done much to emphasize individualism, skepticism and “science” reduced to the confines of empiricism and agnosticism.

  With such a view our connection to the Universe becomes inconsequential, with the Universe seen as something cold, unknowable and ultimately dead or dying. Such a concept only further enforces that there is no real meaning to anything, there is no purpose, at least, it is not a purpose that we have any place in.

  During the First World War, Aldous Huxley spent much time at the Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a lover of Bertrand Russell, who believed (as Aldous and Julian would also), in the concept of open marriage. Although T.H. Huxley knew Russell’s parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, it was at the Garsington Manor that Aldous first met Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury Group.

  It is also where he met his first wife Maria Nys, a wartime Belgian refugee who had been invited to stay with Lady Ottoline Morrell. Maria, who was bisexual, had entered into a several year love affair with Lady Ottoline starting at the age of sixteen. Maria did finally accept Aldous’ proposal and they were married in 1919 keeping an open marriage.

  The Bloomsbury Group or Set, which met regularly at Lady Ottoline’s was an association of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists which reflected in large part the influence of G.E Moore (who wrote the “Principia Ethica” in 1903) and Bertrand Russell who were amongst the founders of analytic philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead was also a member of the group.

  As Dorothy Parker, American poet and writer, described them in a famous quote of hers, “they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

  Aldous Huxley would maintain a loose association with the Bloomsbury Group. It appears Aldous had a similar approach to Russell as he did with Wells, although he seems to have a serious dislike for both men, he nonetheless was greatly influenced by their works. In 1932, Russell exclaims in a letter to his publisher that the “Brave New World” was “merely an expansion of the two penultimate chapters of his ‘The Scientific Outlook,’ “ adding that “the parallelism applies in great detail, e.g., the prohibition of Shakespeare and the intoxicant producing no headache.” Russell went so far as to contemplate charging Aldous with plagiarism, to which his publisher dissuaded him from pursuing.

  In Russell’s “The Scientific Outlook” published in 1930 he describes a caste system with the need for two separate modes of education, one for the elite ruling class and the other for the slave class. The ruling class is to be concerned with improving the scientific technique, while “the manual workers [are to be] contented by means of continual new amusements.”

  Aldous echoes this sentiment in his “Brave New World Revisited,” where he writes:

  “The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries.”

  Although it is said that Aldous wrote the “Brave New World” as a satire of the works of H.G. Wells, and what appears to be the works of Russell as well, as already shown in Part 1 this is not true. Aldous is incorporating the ideas of Wells and Russell into his works, and though he may find these men dislikeable, he nonetheless never actually contradicts their views in any of his writings or lectures. The entire premise for his “Brave New World Revisited,” published in 1958, instead reinforces those very views.

  Aldous makes it crystal clear that he considers the world to be overpopulated, that this is a crisis that must be checked, and that science and progress cannot be free to advance without limits. He restresses these very themes again in his last novel “The Island” as well.

  In “Brave New World Revisited” he writes:

  “The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices – famine or pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other…how can those who ought to take the pill, but don’t want to, be persuaded to change their minds?…In reducing the birth rate of those industrially backward societies where such a reduction is most urgently needed?…Or consider the backward societies that are now trying to industrialise. If they succeed, who is to prevent them, in their desperate efforts to catch up and keep up, from squandering the planet’s irreplaceable resources as stupidly and wantonly as was done, and is still being done, by their forerunners in the race?”

  Here we need only replace the word “pill” with “sterilisation” and not much has changed.

  In fact, as published in The Guardian, “Huxley was in favour of genetic breeding programmes to arrest the multiplication of the unfit. In a particularly unsavoury article, published in 1930 in the Evening Standard, he confessed anxiety about the proliferation of mental defectives and called for their compulsory sterilisation.”

  Brave New World was written one year later in 1931.

  It looks like the apple did not fall too far from the tree after all…

  [Part 3 will discuss Aldous’ role in shaping the Esalen Institute, the Vedanta Society, his relationship to William Sargant and the CIA’s MKUltra, and how Aldous’ form of ideological spirituality went on to shape the drug-counter-culture movement.]

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 23:40

• Next-Gen Stealth Drone Spotted Over Area 51 Airspace
  Next-Gen Stealth Drone Spotted Over Area 51 Airspace

  The latest photo of what appears to be the Northrop Grumman RQ-180 stealth flying-wing surveillance aircraft was posted on Oct. 31 by Dreamlandresort.com website, according to The War Zone. 

  Joerg Arnu, who maintains Dreamlandresort.com, described how he and a friend captured an image of the RQ-180 over Area 51 restricted airspace: 

  “A friend who wishes to remain anonymous and I were at the Groom Lake Road gate yesterday. I heard a faint aircraft noise and noticed a contrail straight above us, inside the Area 51 restricted airspace, heading roughly SSW. Through my IS [image stabalized] binoculars, I first thought I was looking at a B-2 until I realized it had a POINTED tail. The B-2 has a serrated tail. My friend took the enclosed photo (two enhanced versions superimposed). It is clearly a twin-engine aircraft.”

  Arnu said they were using a Canon 20Mpix camera and captured the drone flying at around 70,000 ft. He believes the aircraft was headed to Edwards Air Force Base in California. 

  

  Another sighting of the RQ-180, or another aircraft that was based on platform, was sighted over the Philippines in September. 

  

  Exactly one year ago, another RQ-180 was spotted near Edwards AFB. 

  

  The repeated sightings of the RQ-180 suggest that the stealth drone is in limited operational service, or at least in some form of real-world testing. Simultaneously, we suspect Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider stealth bomber to be in the final assembly, with a debut expected in early 2022. 

  Is American air supremacy to be reignited? 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 23:20

• The Challenging Art Of Pro-Liberty Persuasion
  The Challenging Art Of Pro-Liberty Persuasion

  Authored by Sheldon Richman via The Libertarian Institute,

  Anyone who hopes for a peaceful pro-liberty intellectual revolution is interested in the art of persuasion. But is it a practical art? Can enough people be persuaded to abandon long-held anti-liberty views for something quite different?

  I’m assuming here that one wishes to persuade people of positions that one really thinks to be right and true. Demagogues may try to sell propositions they don’t actually hold, but let’s leave them out of the story. Of course, even wrong and bad people can believe what they say and seek to persuade others of those views. But I’m thinking only of the good-faith efforts of people of intellectual integrity to persuade others to their side.

  

  That persuading people of the truth can be difficult is captured by popular cliches. For example, someone said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” That’s often attributed to Mark Twain, but Snopes says the evidence is lacking. (This sort of thing is so often the case.) Snopes says that Twain did write in his autobiography, “How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!” That’s pretty close.

  Then there’s this one (and its variations): “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” That’s also commonly attributed to Twain, but we are told we have reason to doubt it. Jonathan Swift, Thomas Francklin, and others, however, referred to the respective speeds of truth and falsehood. (I guess Abraham Lincoln was right when he said you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.) Another saying goes something like this: “It isn’t what we don’t know that hurts us. It’s what we know that isn’t so.” Nope, again not Twain, as far as we know, but he and others came close. It’s been attributed to probably a dozen authors.

  My point isn’t about who did or didn’t say these things, of course; it’s that observers have long understood that dissuading people from erroneous beliefs is no easy task. (I’ve tried long enough.) It can be like swimming upstream, which is understandable as well as frustrating.

  Many thinkers have written about the various biases we all have and other impediments to clear thinking, such as the common logical fallacies. (Steven Pinker’s Rationality would be the latest book in this genre. Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter also gets into this regarding people’s solid biases regarding international trade and immigration.) It seems to me that a big reason for the difficulty in getting others to understand one’s contrary position, much less embrace it, is the simple preference for the familiar that so many hold. Whether this has something to do with our descent from people who lived in and trusted only small and somewhat isolated groups, I do not know. But I’m not sure that an evolutionary explanation is necessary. The appeal of the familiar — the safe — seems obvious enough.

  As we grow we develop a worldview, and it becomes the default position. It’s what we know (or “know”). It’s home. Asking that we abandon it for something else is a big deal. It’s such a big deal that it’s not merely a matter of examining the evidence. One would have to be convinced that examining the evidence is worthwhile. That in itself is a big barrier to surmount. I think many people commonly assume that if a newly encountered idea were true, they would have heard about it before. They haven’t heard it; therefore something must be wrong with it. The inclination to doubt the new can readily find subjectively satisfying supporting grounds: the advocate of the news must have cherry-picked the data or left out conflicting theoretical considerations, and so on. Confirmation and other biases can be powerful if one is not vigilant. Nothing is easier than restoring one’s inner equilibrium.

  Another barrier to persuading people to embrace freedom fully is that many propositions are counterintuitive; they require thought based on at least some knowledge of a special discipline. Libertarians spend a lot of time trying to teach people that a society unguided by a central authority can be peaceful, orderly, and efficient. Unfortunately, that’s not obvious. We grow up learning to plan our day, our lives. We see other people doing it. So how could society as a whole work smoothly and well without a central plan and planner?

  It’s not easy to explain this to people who’s never encountered the idea of spontaneous order. Asking them to trust individual freedom and the market can seem like asking them to have blind faith in something alien. This is true about many economic propositions and other esoteric subjects that require training in a particular way of thinking. Fear of the strange is a powerful inducement to stick to what you “know.”

  On the other hand, some people are eager for the unfamiliar and go out of their way to seek it out. Who can say why in a given case? Maybe they are simply rebelling. Or maybe they’ve spotted intellectual and empirical problems with their original worldview that other people overlook. If you were raised in a communist society and believed what you were indoctrinated to believe, you might eventually notice that the society is no worker’s paradise, with all the regimentation and deprivation. That could lead you to reject your inherited worldview. But not everyone does this. What’s clear to A may be far from clear to B, even siblings who grew up in the same environment. Human beings are interesting.

  Those of us who are trying to persuade people to embrace the nonaggression obligation–that is, classical liberalism, or libertarianism, may have an advantage though. Most people already believe that they shouldn’t rob, hit, or kill, or otherwise aggress against others. So those of us who are merely asking that this already widely accepted principle be applied across the board — even to people calling themselves the government — may have an easier job than we thought.

  On the other hand, freedom can be scary for some people. It obviously requires self-responsibility, which requires effort and brings the possibility of failure. Not everyone relishes that. In Monthy Python’s Life of Brian, the condemned hero tells a Roman centurion that he doesn’t have to follow orders to kill him — to which the centurion responds, “I like orders.”

  Who can say which inclination will be stronger in enough people? The best we can do is start with the familiar; be clear; and be honest. That’s our only hope.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 23:00

• Bank Of America Sees Oil Hitting $120 By June; Could Rise Much Higher
  Bank Of America Sees Oil Hitting $120 By June; Could Rise Much Higher

  Brent oil will hit $120 per barrel by the end of June 2022, Bank of America’s commodity analyst Francisco Blanch said in a research note from Oct 29. The catalyst for BofA’s increased price forecast is the same one that has prompted every other bank to turn bullish on commodities  – the current global energy crisis that has seen prices for crude oil, coal, natural gas, and LNG skyrocket as the market tightens, which in turn is causing rampant gas-to-oil substitution; an increase in air travel only adds to the bullish picture.

  Just a month ago, BofA forecast that oil could reach $100 over the next six months, and that was only if we had a “very cold winter.” At the time, this was expected to be the most important driver of the global energy markets.  Fast forward one month and BofA feels even more confident now that the global oil demand recovery will continue to outpace supply over the next year and a half, resulting in dwindling inventories that set the stage for higher oil prices.

  Looking at the recent turmoil in the energy sector, BofA writes that while oil has been playing catch-up to other fuels, petroleum markets have been mostly led by bunker fuel and naphtha since January 2020 (Exhibit 4) as factories, petrochemicals, and trade surged, while refinery run cuts limited supply. With COVID-19 having a disproportionate impact on mobility, the biggest price laggards in the energy space have been gasoline, jet fuel and diesel, otherwise the usual summer and winter season leaders. Yet things have started to change in recent months, with gasoline and distillate demand firming up (Exhibit 5) ahead of winter

  

  This is how Blanch justifies what would be the highest oil price since the summer of 2008:

  We up our oil price forecasts and targets for 2022, 2023…

  Oil prices have recently risen above $80/bbl, led by gas-to-oil substitution and an increase in air travel. Where will we go next? Pent-up demand for oil was the main reason we laid out a $100 target for Brent in 2022 back in June. Yet we now believe that the run-up in global gas and coal prices has turbocharged the Brent and WTI price recovery. As we look into 2022 and 2023, we still expect oil to move from a steep deficit that has seen global inventories draw at a rate of 1.2mn b/d in the past 6 months to a more balanced market. Still, structural oil demand and supply rigidities are emerging, and we now forecast Brent and WTI crude oil prices will average $85/bbl and $75 and $82 and $70 in 2022 and 2023, respectively, compared to $75 and $65 (for Brent) and $71 and $61 (for WTI) prior.

  

  …as we see gasoline, diesel demand leading prices higher

  Forward oil balances do not appear exceptionally tight and non-OPEC+ supply growth should be able to keep up with demand over the next 2 years. Yet, spare OPEC+ capacity is dwindling due to underinvestment. Also we estimate the price elasticity of US shale supply has dropped by more than half. Plus oil demand growth should stay robust thanks to easy policies, as oil prices remain below the point where demand destruction could kick in. And even if the potential return of Iranian barrels helps keep a lid on prices in 2022, a combination of rapidly growing gasoline demand and an ongoing recovery in middle distillates, coupled with refinery constraints, could squeeze oil prices higher in 2022. For this reason, we also raise our end-1H22 Brent oil price target to $120/bbl.

  

  Looking ahead, Blanch warns that oil prices are at risk of entering a demand rationing phase, as the expectation of peak oil demand this decade due to climate change pressures has kept long-dated oil prices depressed relative to the forward for now. Yet, if the COP26 conference that started today fails to deliver a clear “aggressive” or “Net zero” decarbonization path, the world will likely need more oil than currently available on a forward basis to meet demand growth in the 2020s.

  Furthermore, even if we see a relatively balanced oil market in 2022 and 2023, there is very little crude oil in inventory across the OECD to deal with a sustained demand surge into 2025-2030. Thus, should policy center mostly on supply and not address demand simultaneously, a playbook similar to the one just observed in global gas markets may emerge for oil. Read: hyperoilflation.

  Needless to say, any future collision of demand and supply rigidities in oil prices à-la-gas could be much more detrimental to the world economy. For now, inflationary pressures are feeding rising local currency prices for diesel and other fuels. Since early 2020, many EM central banks have hiked interest rates, but developed markets are nowhere close to tightening monetary policy in a significant way. At a micro level, rising energy costs are also driving light-medium oil differentials wider.

  Fast forward to BofA’s ominous conclusion, Blanch writes that should COP26 fail to reassure the market that energy demand is on a clear decarbonization path over the next decade, oil could join gas in the final episode of the energy squeeze game, even as a China slowdown, supply chain issues, and an SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) release are near-term downside risks for oil.

  * * *

  While we will have to wait 7 months to find if BofA’s stagflationary forecast is accurate, OPEC+ production will be reevaluated on Thursday this week, although it is widely expected that the group will stick to its plan to add back in another 400,000 barrels per day. The issue with this plan for added production is that OPEC+ has failed to add back the barrels under its plan so far.

  Other traders and banks feel oil is heading for $100, with Goldman Sachs estimating that oil demand is nearing 100 million bpd (a pre-Covid figure) leading to a $90 Brent price by year end, and demand is only set to strengthen as the winter heating season approaches and on calls for increasing jet fuel demand early next year.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 22:40

• China's "Satellite Crusher": Space Pearl Harbor Is Coming
  China’s “Satellite Crusher”: Space Pearl Harbor Is Coming

  By Gordon Chang of Gatestone Institute

  • The satellite, according to China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., is “tasked with demonstrating technologies to alleviate and neutralize space debris.”

  • As Beijing sees it, American satellites constitute “debris.”

  • “[Communist China’s satellite] is a real-world offensive capability that can hunt and destroy American systems and render the U.S. military on earth deaf, dumb, and blind.” — Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, to Gatestone.

  • At one time, America was dominant in space, and American political leaders decided to go slow on developing anti-satellite weapons for fear of triggering a competition.

  • All that American restraint did was to allow the Chinese and Russian militaries to grab commanding leads in the race to deploy these impossible-to-defend-against delivery systems for nuclear weapons.

  • Unfortunately, “the Department of Defense is still unbelievably bureaucratic and slow.”

  • The Pentagon’s bureaucracy “is just brutal.” — Outgoing Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Hyten, CNN, October 28, 2021.

  • Fortunately, there is also Elon Musk, a bureaucracy of one.

  On October 24, China launched its Shijian-21 into orbit. The satellite, according to China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., is “tasked with demonstrating technologies to alleviate and neutralize space debris.”

  As Beijing sees it, American satellites constitute “debris.”

  

  Shijian-21 has a robotic arm that can be used to move space junk—there are more than 100 million pieces of it floating around the earth—or capture, disable, destroy, or otherwise render unusable other nations’ satellites. That arm makes Shijian-21 a “satellite crusher.”

  Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, tells Gatestone that the Chinese satellite was launched into geosynchronous orbit, where many of America’s most sensitive satellite systems—those critical to Nuclear Command, Communications, and Control (NC3), surveillance, and military communications—are located.

  “Because the U.S. satellites in geosynchronous orbit are so far away from earth, they are both expensive and hard-to-replace,” he notes. “Losing any of these systems, with no replacements on hand, would give China’s military an unprecedented advantage in the event of an outbreak of hostilities.”

  China has designed its new space station, Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center tells me, “to incorporate additional large military modules that can be equipped with lasers, microwave, or missile-based anti-satellite systems.”

  In September 2008, China’s Shenzhou-7 manned mission came within 45 kilometers of the International Space Station as the Chinese crew was launching a microsatellite, “an obvious simulated ISS-intercept mission,” says Fisher. One of the veterans of that mission, Fisher tells Gatestone, is now the commander on board the Chinese space station.

  “They’re going counterspace in a big way,” said Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Hyten on October 28 at an event sponsored by the Defense Writers Group. Hyten, previously commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command, said Chinese military officers “are doing all those things because they saw how the United States has used space for dominant advantage.”

  “For many years, Washington has taken its space superiority for granted,” Weichert observes. Complacency is not the only American disease, however. American blindness also had a role. At one time, America was dominant in space, and American political leaders decided to go slow on developing anti-satellite weapons for fear of triggering a competition. With the U.S. having the most assets in orbit, the reasoning went, the U.S. would have the most to lose with a race.

  That view was the product of a fundamental misunderstanding of Chinese and Russian attitudes. The misunderstanding also directly led to America falling behind in another crucial space technology. The U.S. was the early leader in hypersonic flight with the X-15 reaching Mach 6.7—6.7 times the speed of sound—in 1967. Now, however, America is about a half-decade behind China. The U.S. is also trailing Russia.

  “We had held back from pursuing military applications for this technology,” Ambassador Robert Wood, U.S. representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, told Yahoo! Wood, as described by that site, “implied that U.S. officials had tried to avoid spurring a scramble for hypersonic missiles.”

  All that American restraint did was to allow the Chinese and Russian militaries to grab commanding leads in the race to deploy these impossible-to-defend-against delivery systems for nuclear weapons. In late July, Beijing shocked the Pentagon with an orbital test of a hypersonic glide vehicle.

  Similarly, America is now behind China in the ability to take down satellites. “The Shijian-21 satellite is a game-changer,” says Weichert, who also produces The Weichert Report. “It is a real-world offensive capability that can hunt and destroy American systems and render the U.S. military on earth deaf, dumb, and blind.”

  Space, of course, is the ultimate strategic high ground, conferring control of the earth. Therefore, American leaders should have known that China would try, as Weichert explains, to build the capabilities “to first knock the Americans out of orbit and then to place their own systems there.”

  The U.S. has the ability to catch up, of course, but big course corrections are necessary. For one thing, American satellites are easy pickings for the Chinese military. As General Hyten put it, “we actually put the president in a tough spot because we have a handful of fat juicy targets, while the adversary has built hundreds of targets that are difficult to get after.”

  The result, the general said, is that America does not have “a resilient space architecture.”

  A resilient architecture, Hyten correctly believes, would be composed of lower-cost surveillance satellites that, in the words of SpaceNews, “can be mass produced and deployed fast.”

  Unfortunately, “the Department of Defense is still unbelievably bureaucratic and slow,” Hyten observed. The Pentagon’s bureaucracy “is just brutal.” So don’t count on the U.S. military, which has taken a decade to design a yet-to-be-launched survivable space network.

  Fortunately, there is also Elon Musk, a bureaucracy of one. His SpaceX is building the Starlink constellation of telecommunications satellites in low-earth orbit. When complete, there will be some 42,000 satellites that can be used by the satellite-dependent U.S. military when China has crushed, lasered, shot down, or bumped out of orbit America’s military assets in space.

  Of course, China will also try to take down the Starlink constellation too.

  Beijing, Weichert tells Gatestone, is planning a “Space Pearl Harbor.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 22:20

• Australia Is Now Threatening Citizens With Seizure Of Homes & Bank Accounts Over Covid Violations
  Australia Is Now Threatening Citizens With Seizure Of Homes & Bank Accounts Over Covid Violations

  Multiple reports out of Australia over the past days have confirmed that state and territory governments are threatening to seize the homes and bank accounts of citizens over unpaid ‘COVID violation’ fines. This as much of the country’s population are now living under vaccine mandates linked to employment: take the jab or face termination, many Aussies are being told.

  For example, a new report in Daily Mail has reviewed fresh government data compiled by the Queensland health authority. It found that “Queenslanders who received fines for breaking Covid-19 rules risk having their homes seized and bank accounts frozen in a government crackdown to collect $5.2 million in repayments.”

  

  Over 3,000 cases of unpaid fines have piled up across the large northeast Australian state – but the current number may be much more – given the last available data tracks the overdue fines through the end of September.

  Writing on the potential punitive actions that the State Penalties Enforcement Register (SPER) is now threatening Australian citizens with, the Brisbane Times details: 

  SPER was undertaking “active enforcement” on another 18.4 per cent of fines, worth about $1 million, which a spokesman said “may include garnishing bank accounts or wages, registering charges over property, or suspending driver licenses”.

  The remaining 25.2 per cent of fines were either under investigation or still open to payment without further action being taken.

  So effectively large swathes of Australia are seeing the government now exercising total control over their lives – taking away everything from citizens, who apparently still have no recourse: private citizens’ money, property, and even ability to freely transport their own vehicles are under threat. 

  Essentially the state in Australia can now seize people’s homes for not paying covid fines.

  That escalated quickly.

  — PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) October 29, 2021

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  Since the start of the pandemic, Australia (as well it’s smaller Pacific neighbor New Zealand) has been at the global forefront of absolute Covid nuttiness – whether it’s authorities arresting people at public parks for not wearing masks, or police showing up at residence’s doorsteps to question them on their anti-lockdown stances, or also forcing perfectly healthy people into weeks of hotel quarantine at individual expense.

  At that latter note, Brisbane Times says that an even larger number of people may have their credit history destroyed as the state calls in debt collectors for prior expenses stemming from forcible hotel quarantine: 

  Outside SPER’s work, Queensland Health took the unusual step of calling in private debt collectors to chase up $5.7 million amounting from 2045 significantly overdue invoices for hotel quarantine.

  “Queenslanders rightly expect travellers will pay for their hotel quarantine stays and not leave taxpayers to foot the bill,” a Queensland Health spokeswoman said.

  In the Orwellian newspeak of Covid enforcement lunacy, those who are forced by the state to be locked up inside hotel quarantine in mandated total self-isolation for weeks on end are dubbed merely “travelers”.

  Meanwhile, in neighboring New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is now comfortable enough to bluntly and openly admit what many of these draconian Covid state crackdown actions are really all about…

  WATCH 🚨 New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern admits that she has created two classes of people in the country, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

  pic.twitter.com/QTlkvbtyU2

  — Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) October 24, 2021

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 22:00

• Did Ibram X. Kendi Just Give Away The Con?
  Did Ibram X. Kendi Just Give Away The Con?

  Op-Ed Authored by Andrea Widburg via The American Thinker (emphasis ours),

  Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) has made a name for himself as an “anti-racist” activist, which is an Orwellian way of saying that his entire career is based upon arguing that America is a systemically racist country and that all White Americans are complicit. However, in a tweet that he swiftly deleted, Kendi effectively acknowledged that power in America lies with racial minorities, not with Whites. Oh, and he’s a transphobe.

  

  Kendi’s breakout best-seller, How To Be An Antiracist, is on every Critical Race Theory reading list, whether in America’s K-12 schools, its colleges (some of which have made it mandatory), its corporations, or the American military. In 2019, Kendi wrote an essay for The Atlantic claiming, as all race hustlers do, that America’s real founding was 1619, when the British brought slaves to America’s shores:

  Her name was Angela, one of the first known Africans in British North America.

  His name was John, the first known antiblack racist in colonial America.

  In 1619, this black woman and white man—what they embody—arrived months apart in 12-year-old Virginia, the first of the 13 British colonies that became the United States. Angela was the original embodiment of enslavement, of survival, of the 400-year African American struggle to survive, to be free of racism. John was the original embodiment of elite white male power, of the democracy of racists, of its 400-year struggle to survive, to be free of anti-racism.

  And there you have the whole systemic racism theory in full. Of course, even ardent leftists, if honest, concede that this is all an ahistorical lie.

  But we shouldn’t expect more from Kendi, for he’s not the brightest bulb in the box. Watch him struggle to explain what constitutes racism. It’s embarrassing but also really funny:

  In which academic discipline is this circular, naive, deer-caught-in-the-headlights response to a basic and urgent question considered insightful or excellent?

  A national culture exempting this (which, sadly, is typical of him) from judgment is unintentionally racist itself. pic.twitter.com/n493NpjFmx

  — John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) June 1, 2021

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

  Of course, Kendi could have stood there picking his nose and he would have been feted, because he’s saying what leftists long to hear. Dividing America along racial lines is the perfect way to break this country and lead it into the glorious new morning of socialism.

  Still, the intellectual deficit is Kendi’s Achilles heel. It explains why he tweeted (and then deleted) a message that undercuts everything he’s been hustling – namely that white people are masquerading as minorities in order to gain an advantage on college applications.

  

  Wow! America must be really racist if the only way Whites can get into college is if they pass as minorities. Oh, wait! Never mind….

  That was bad enough but, when people started calling Kendi out on the true import of that now-deleted tweet, he pulled the race card, which is only the only card in his deck:

  

  

  Kendi’s tortured “logic” reminds me of Tweedledee’s and Tweedledum’s logic in Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland:

  “I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”

  “Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

  Yes, indeed, Prof. Kendi. “That’s logic.”

  Kendi may have a bigger problem than just picking fights with people smarter and better informed than he is. It turns out that Kendi doesn’t admire so-called transgender people:

  In a video posted on Twitter Ibram X. Kendi, the man celebrated by the left for his efforts to insert Critical Race Theory in the nation’s schools, said it was “horrifying” when his daughter announced she wanted to be a boy.

  “Even talking about gender, you know, I think it was last week my daughter came home and said she wanted to be a boy,” Kendi said in a video that includes his name on the screen. “You know, which was horrifying for my wife to hear, myself to hear.”

  “And so of course, you know, we’re like, okay, what affirmative messages about girlhood, you know, can we be teaching her to protect her from whatever she’s hearing in our home or even outside of our home that would make her want to be a boy,” he continued.

  I agree with Kendi on this one but he’s going to discover that, when you pick fights with the activist alphabet people, you’re going to lose. Expect Kendi’s groveling apology any day now. After all, he’s got to sell his upcoming book, How to Raise an Anti-Racist. I expect a new chapter about How to be a Transophile.

  Here’s an idea for Xendi: Celebrate the fact that you’re in America, not Africa, and that, by virtue of your skin color, even the fact that you’re incredibly ill-informed and really not very bright hasn’t stopped you from reaching the pinnacle of woke society.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 21:40

• Ags Join Commodity Melt-Up As Wheat, Cotton Soar
  Ags Join Commodity Melt-Up As Wheat, Cotton Soar

  Global food prices continue to move higher with no end in sight. Wheat prices tagged a new multi-year high; cotton, coffee, corn, and soybean oil are also surging as concerns about persistent food inflation mount. 

  

  The Bloomberg Agriculture index is moving higher. 

  

  On Monday, the most-active wheat futures rose more than 3% to $7.97 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, hitting 8.5-year highs. Prices have gained more than 11% since mid-October. 

  

  European wheat prices are nearing all-time highs. 

  COMMODITY INFLATION: Add European milling wheat to your inflation watch. Front-month European wheat prices (Matif) about to hit an all-time high, currently just a couple of euros below the peak set in 2008 | #OATT pic.twitter.com/HjfWMyE1Y2

  — Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) November 1, 2021

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  A combination of factors is driving wheat prices higher. First, global demand is robust, and second, supplies are tightening worldwide. Demand is increasing when supplies are shrinking due to poor weather during harvest in top export countries. That helped catapult prices higher in recent weeks. Then Saudi Arabia booked a monster purchase of the cereal grain. Leading importer Egypt also returned to the market Monday after making a large purchase last week. 

  Pressuring prices higher are farmers faced with a whole host of inflationary woes, from soaring fuel, fertilizer, labor, and machinery costs to adverse weather conditions that may result in fewer plantings in 2022. 

  Then there are adverse weather conditions:

  “The Russian Ministry of Agriculture had said that farmers would drill 19.5 million hectares this autumn, but prolonged dry weather has resulted in delays,” U.K.-based trader Frontier Agriculture said late Friday. “Ukraine is also suffering from low soil moisture, raising concerns for the country’s winter drilling potential.

  Wheat prices may remain elevated in 2022 and pressure food inflation higher. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization recently showed global food prices are fresh decade highs.  

  

  Last week, palm oil, the world’s most consumed vegetable oil, surged to a new record high, which seems like an ominous sign for emerging market economies where soaring food prices will stress households and result in what SocGen’s Albert Edwards has said since December: soaring food prices will destabilize vulnerable countries. And add soaring energy costs to the mix and we suspect Biden’s approval rating may head even lower.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 21:20

• Bitcoin Mining And The Global Semiconductor Shortage Are On A Collision Course
  Bitcoin Mining And The Global Semiconductor Shortage Are On A Collision Course

  Authored by ‘Shinobi’ via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  A shortage of semiconductor production is at the forefront of geopolitics and it’s inevitable that this issue’s relation to Bitcoin mining will be as well.

  

  Supply chain shortages are starting to reveal many geopolitical dependencies on external actors for different resources, and the overall fragility that those dependencies can create for any given nation when supply chains are stressed.

  All it takes is for one little domino to tip and problems cascade through the entire system. It should come as no surprise that nations are starting to view these compounding problems as national security issues and responding accordingly.

  ADDRESSING THE SEMICONDUCTOR SHORTAGE

  For instance, the U.S. Department of Commerce under the Biden Administration has become very involved recently in addressing supply chain issues, specifically in the context of semiconductor shortages. As far back as April and May 2021, it has been meeting with semiconductor companies involved in different points in the supply chain to better understand and address the issues underlying these supply shortages. In the wake of the most recent of these meetings in September, the Commerce Department sent out a request for information to all semiconductor companies across the entire supply chain in order to gain more insight into the specific bottlenecks and flows of the supply chain as a whole.

  It wants to know where companies fit in the supply chain, the node nanometer (nm) size of their chips, the type of chip or products they produce, estimated sales, backstocks of products, etc. It is a very comprehensive request, essentially asking for everything there is to know about companies’ products, sales, stock numbers, and anything related.

  Effectively, what it is trying to do is establish a baseline for a live view into the logistic flow of everything from fabrication to product packaging and delivery.

  This request has been met with serious backlash in both Taiwan and South Korea, highlighting the massive geopolitical importance of chip fabrication capacity in the global economy.

  THE GEOPOLITICAL IMPORTANCE OF CHIP FABRICATION

  The South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy as well as the Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairs have both expressed serious concern over the scope of the information requests. Specifically in Taiwan, where the largest chip fabrication company TSMC is located, politicians have gone so far as to question whether complying with the informational requests could give up information ultimately threatening TSMC’s global dominance in the future.

  In-depth information such as nm size, types of chips being produced or who is purchasing them, could all theoretically be used to position investments in infrastructure to effectively snatch customers away from TSMC and successfully meet all of their needs. For a country like Taiwan, the importance of the semiconductor industry is potentially a major factor in disincentivizing attacks from China. To lose that dominance is possibly of much more importance than just the economic considerations.

  Given that the United States Senate has recently passed the “U.S. Innovation and Competition Act,” which will spend $52 billion dollars on increasing domestic semiconductor fabrication capacity, and the “CHIPs for America Act” being introduced in the Senate to create income tax credit for semiconductor companies, Taiwan’s fears might not be unfounded.

  The U.S. has been working to rebuild its semiconductor industry domestically since the Trump administration, and ironically a TSMC fabrication plant in Arizona negotiated under Trump just began construction this summer. Action in that direction has rapidly accelerated after the supply shortages due to lockdowns, as the modern day computer chips are required for all kinds of things you wouldn’t expect, like kitchen appliances, cars and even lightbulbs.

  BITCOIN AND SEMICONDUCTOR SECURITY

  Semiconductors are the oil of the digital age. Every nation is going to need their own national security plan around semiconductor supply reliability in the way that they have plans around energy reliability. It is a reality that cannot be put off acknowledging any longer.

  So, what does any of this have to do with Bitcoin? ASICs. Mining hardware is useless if you don’t have the energy to power it, but energy to power miners is also useless if you don’t have miners themselves.

  As far as 7-nm-or-under fabrication capacity goes (the cutting edge), the only games in town are Intel, Samsung and TSMC. This leaves these companies with a lot of political weight to throw around in terms of manufacturing cutting-edge ASICs.

  The dynamics of who can and can’t produce semiconductors in general is already coming to the forefront of politics as nations realize the importance of minimizing reliance on foreign actors to maintain such capacity. It is only a matter of time before how these issues relate to Bitcoin mining starts to come to their attention as well.

  What form will that take? Who knows. Maybe it acts as another accelerant for larger nations to expand their domestic fabrication capacity. Maybe nations with capacity ban exports of miners to enemy nations. Maybe nations engage in espionage to acquire intellectual property relating to cutting-edge fabrication techniques.

  Whatever form the realization takes when it happens, it will happen, and the effect on the mining ecosystem will be interesting to say the least.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 21:00

• US B1-B Bomber Flies Over Mideast With Israeli & Saudi Escorts In Warning To Iran
  US B1-B Bomber Flies Over Mideast With Israeli & Saudi Escorts In Warning To Iran

  Over the weekend the US flew a B-1B strategic long-range bomber over the Middle East, and specifically over the Strait of Hormuz near Iran, in what the US Air Force called a “presence patrol” to send a message to Tehran. The Air Force revealed details and photos of the provocative fly-over on Sunday.

  Importantly at various points along the route, which went from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Yemen and then through Israel and Jordan and then over the Persian Gulf, US allied fighter jets escorted the bomber – most notably aircraft from Israel and Saudi Arabia.

  

  Politico noted based on the US Air Force statement “Fighter jets from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia flew alongside the bomber” in different intervals and locations.

  The report further recalled that “The Strait of Hormuz has been the scene of attacks on shipping blamed on Iran in recent years, while the Red Sea has seen similar assaults amid an ongoing shadow war between Tehran and Israel”; however, it remains “The Islamic Republic has denied being involved in the attacks, though it has promised to take revenge on Israel for a series of attacks targeting its nuclear program.”

  The flight mission was a rare one given the bomber took off from the remote Diego Garcia outpost, given the B1-B’s present deployment to the island was a recent first in the past 15 years. 

  

  The US Air Force described what was essentially a circumnavigation of the entire Arabian Peninsula as follows:

  The flight was a five-hour, non-stop multilateral mission with participation from air forces to include: Bahrain, Egypt, Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia…. Multiple partner nations’ fighter aircraft accompanied the B-1B Lancer at different points during the flight, which flew over the Gulf of Aden, Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Red Sea, Suez Canal, Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman before departing the region.

  Following the Abraham Accords, which involved the Gulf countries of the UAE and Bahrain signing a historic peace treaty with Israel in 2020, there have been growing calls for Saudi Arabia to also normalize relations with Tel Aviv.

  That Saturday’s US bomber flight involved the participation and cooperation of both the Israeli and Saudi militaries is also somewhat unprecedented, and suggests a deepening and continuing de facto military and intelligence relationship between the two (especially since the war in Syria).

  pic.twitter.com/NFRJDeaG7d

  — Israeli Air Force (@IAFsite) October 30, 2021

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  Meanwhile the US and Israel have vowed to pursue “other options” should there be no restored nuclear deal to come out of Vienna talks. This new B1-B flight is a clear message to Iran as part of the continuing pressure campaign to get Iran back to the table after talks have stalled since June. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 20:40

• The Military's Social Policy Suggests A Lack Of Real-World Threats
  The Military’s Social Policy Suggests A Lack Of Real-World Threats

  Authored by Tate Fegley via The Mises Institute,

  Over the course of this year, conservatives have expressed a number of grievances they have with the US military. Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue questioning Joe Biden’s emphasis on the issuance of flight suits designed for pregnant women.

  (Noteworthy is that Tucker is not against women in combat roles per se, since he states, “If the Pentagon can show that pregnant pilots are the best, we will be the first to demand an entire Air Force of pregnant pilots.” I don’t believe anyone has accused Tucker of thinking carefully about tradeoffs.)

  Other conservatives, however, do express disagreement with filling combat roles with women. A recurring demand in pursuit of egalitarianism is extending mandated registration for the Selective Service to young women, opposition to which is typically due to the prospect of drafting women to fight, rather than the morally correct position of opposing involuntary servitude for anyone.

  A further gripe is the trend of the military’s embrace of wokeness, as evidenced by statements made by General Mark Milley defending the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and the need to “understand white rage,” as well as the approach taken in recent recruitment ads. While Chinese and Russian military recruitment campaigns appeal to a sense of patriotism, one US Army ad features a woman inspired by the activism of her two moms and who feels the need to compete with her sorority sisters in doing something meaningful with her life. How she does this through operating Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Missile Defense Systems is left unexplained.

  One of the latest controversies involving the military is Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, which leaves service members potentially facing a dishonorable discharge if they refuse to be vaccinated. Hundreds of thousands of US troops have not yet complied with this mandate. While it is unlikely that all of them would continue to refuse if the alternative were a dishonorable discharge, a significant percentage will. Hundreds of Navy SEALs who have refused the vaccine are currently considered undeployable.

  

  Many believe that some or all of these issues hurt troop morale and render the US military a less capable fighting force. This is unambiguously the case when discharging or not deploying personnel who are otherwise qualified and on whom millions of dollars have been spent to train.

  It serves as an illustration of something those of us skeptical of US military adventurism already knew: Americans in the continental US are incredibly geopolitically blessed in terms of being able to live at peace with the rest of the world, if only those with political authority allowed it. We have mostly friendly neighbors to the north and south, no one who poses a threat close by, and thousands of miles of ocean between us and everyone else. And because of this the US military has the luxury of engaging in terrible, wasteful decision-making that undermines effectiveness without much cost in terms of domestic civilian lives lost from foreign aggression (with the exception, of course, of blowback caused by US foreign policy).

  So why would the US military embrace wokeness and other policies if they could possibly come at the slightest cost of effectiveness or morale?

  The military is a bureaucracy (or rather a set of bureaucracies) and the primary institutional goals of bureaucracies are to preserve their own existence and increase their budgets. Fully embracing the cultural concerns of establishment leftism certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of encouraging the mainstream Left to forget their former opposition to Bush’s wars. Congressional Republicans will present no serious opposition to wokeness in the military, certainly not in terms of reducing their budgets. The CIA seems to be employing a similar strategy. Promoting the fact that they hire gay people covers a multitude of sins, such as assassinations, torture, and regime change. Furthermore, vaccine mandates help purge the military of personnel willing to question certain types of orders.

  Indeed, pursuing this strategy seems to come with little downside risk. If it does, in fact, reduce the ability of the military or intelligence agencies to protect Americans (to the extent that that is still considered part of their purpose) and results in civilian deaths, their budgets are far more likely to be increased rather than decreased. Their failure to prevent the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11 led to unprecedented increases in their powers and resources. We are now told that their failure to prevent whatever you want to call what happened on January 6 (setting aside their role in facilitating it) justifies further increases in their powers. For them, failure is success.

  Thankfully, the veil is being lifted and those with previously promilitary sensibilities are seeing that the military is not unambiguously their friend. This is a necessary step to achieve the ends of peace and a noninterventionist foreign policy. Questioning the military is increasingly considered within the realm of reasonable discourse for those who consider themselves patriots. Polls have traditionally found that the military enjoys among the highest levels of trust among the general public. This is changing and that’s a good thing.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 20:20

• Biden Shows Urgency Of Climate Crisis By Falling Asleep At COP26; MSNBC Admits "Embarrassing" Moment
  Biden Shows Urgency Of Climate Crisis By Falling Asleep At COP26; MSNBC Admits “Embarrassing” Moment

  So much for climate change being humanity’s “greatest threat” – as President Joe Biden previously warned military service members just months ago. Here’s what he said in June…

  “Y’know when I was over in the tank in the Pentagon, and I was first elected vice president with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were, the greatest physical threats.”

  “This is not a joke. Y’know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was?“

  “Global warming,” Biden said.

  Biden appears to fall asleep during COP26 opening speeches pic.twitter.com/az8NZTWanI

  — Zach Purser Brown (@zachjourno) November 1, 2021

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

  Today, Biden was seen dozing off during the opening speeches of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland – an event widely dubbed in the media as humanity’s “last best chance” to reign in the “out of control” specter of incoming climate “disaster”. So much for that.

  The video showing an apparently unenthused and unimpressed US president trying to initially fight sleep before succumbing completely – after which an aide has to come prompt him awake – has gone viral since being shared by The Washington Post’s Zach Purser Brown.

  The question must be asked: does even the president himself or the administration really believe its own apocalyptic climate alarmist rhetoric? At the very least, the body language says no…. 

  

  It must have been rather warm in the conference assembly room.

  Fox News points out that Biden may have inadvertently “spoke” for the majority:

  Former President Trump has long referred to his political rival as “Sleepy Joe” and Monday’s video presumably won’t help make that nickname go away anytime soon. However, many conservatives joked that Biden nodding off during the climate conference was the most relatable thing he’s done as president.

  The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis responded, “Can you blame him?” 

  MSNBC on Joe Biden falling asleep during climate change conference:

  “These can be embarrassing situations.” pic.twitter.com/KRCKLH2mow

  — The First (@TheFirstonTV) November 1, 2021

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

  Indeed as we previously noted, the notion that anything “meaningful” will actually happen at this summit is almost laughable. The developed nations of the world haven’t even managed to reach their targets from the last major global climate conclave back in 2015, when the Paris Accords were signed.

  Surprisingly, even MSNBC noted the “embarrassing situation”. The network’s correspondent said in a segment covering the moment Biden was caught dozing:

  “Cameras are all around and the camera caught President Biden who turns 79 later this month with his eyes closed for a period of time. These can be embarrassing situations – you have the contrast of leaders including President Biden calling for the urgency of these issues of addressing climate, and a moment like that in an session can be a political obstacle.”

  Biden was not alone in his sleepiness…

  

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 20:00

• Minneapolis Votes On Tuesday To Replace Police With Peace Officers
  Minneapolis Votes On Tuesday To Replace Police With Peace Officers

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

  Voters in Minneapolis will decide whether to replace police in city charter with department of public safety workers.

  

  Referendum on Banning Police

  The first election in Minneapolis since the George Floyd killing is a Referendum on Ending the Police Force.

  A ballot initiative would replace the police department in the city charter with a department of public safety that would take a public health approach to safety and include sworn peace officers if deemed necessary. The number of officers in the new department would no longer be set at a required level based on the city’s population. The plan would likely include more money for violence-prevention programs and the diversion of some police calls to social workers and others.

  Despite calls from the city council to reimagine policing after Mr. Floyd’s killing in May 2020, activists say changes haven’t gone far enough. Crime has gone up and the police force has shrunk. Tuesday’s election will be the first time the voters will have a say in the future of Minneapolis since the upheaval began.

  The ballot question has drawn big spending to the municipal election. Yes 4 Minneapolis, the group that wrote the ballot initiative, reported this week that it has raised $1.8 million this year, while All of Mpls, which opposes the initiative, said it has raised nearly $1.6 million.

  In a poll sponsored by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, MPR News, KARE 11 and Frontline in September, 42% of the city’s Black residents supported the charter amendment, compared with 49% of voters overall. And 75% of Black voters wanted more police officers, not fewer, compared with 55% of voters overall.

  Failed City

  If the poll is accurate, the bill will fail. Curiously, more whites than blacks support the measure.

  That close to 50% support this absurd measure is a sure sign Minneapolis is a failed city. 

  Replacing police with “peace officers” whatever the hell that means is just plain nuts. 

  Meanwhile, police have been quitting in droves. In 2019 the Minneapolis police force was 853. Today the police force is 598, a reduction of 30%. 

  Crime, including homicides has soared. But hey. let’s replace police with peace officers. 

  Part of me hopes this passes just to prove how stupid it is. But people’s lives are at stake, so hopefully common sense prevails.

  *  *  *

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

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 19:40

• How Central Banks Unleashed A Devastating 6-Sigma VaR Shock
  How Central Banks Unleashed A Devastating 6-Sigma VaR Shock

  As we discussed over the weekend, in the last week front-end curves have experienced unprecedented volatility and even wilder P&L swings.

  As DB’s FX strategist George Saravelos summarizes in a note “It’s a VaR shock now”, in Australia alone, we have added 75bps of hikes over the next twelve months in just three days. At the same time, the Canadian curve added nearly two upfront hikes following the latest BoC meeting. At the same time back-end government bond yields have moved lower in an unprecedented twist flattening of the curve.

  As Saravelos first discussed back in May, and repeated against more recently last week, “the general flattening of curves is backed up by the very latecycle dynamics of the global economy plus our pessimistic view on global r*.” But what is happening now runs beyond macro and as the DB strategist writes, confirming what we said last week, “it is a plain and simple Value at Risk (VaR) shock driven by positioning and the inability to appropriately calibrate central bank reaction functions in such an uncertain environment.“

  To put things in context: the Aussie bank bill yield rise is the largest 3-day change since 1996 and represents a 6 standard deviation move. In Canada, it is the largest move since 2009 and a 4 standard deviation move.

  

  This, as Saravelos writes, is the closest we can get to a distressed Treasury market and as the next chart shows Europe appears set to join the chaos as rate hike odds represented by 3M Euribor Dec 22s tumbled after last week’s dismal ECB press conference in which Lagarde failed to push back against market expectations for tightening, indicating the market is now also expecting higher rates in the eurozone, a move which suggests that the ECB – which has been adamant there will be no tightening for a long time – is also losing control of the front-end.

  

  Commenting on this ongoing VaR shock, another DB credit strategist, Francis Yared, writes over the weekend that while it may be difficult to interpret from a macro economic perspective, if there was to a be an “original macro sin” for such moves, it would be the excessive reliance of central banks on forward guidance.

  According to Yared, while forward guidance is hailed by central banks as a great monetary policy tool, “when close to the lower bound it suffers significant drawbacks. Indeed, using as an example the ECB situation as summarised in our ECB preview, there are intrinsic limitations to the forward guidance.”  Yared explains:

  • First and foremost and as pointed out by former Fed governor, Jeremy Stein, forward guidance may end up being self defeating: “There is always a temptation for the central bank to speak in a whisper, because anything that gets said reverberates so loudly in markets. But the softer it talks, the more the market leans in to hear better and, thus, the more the whisper gets amplified. So efforts to overly manage the market volatility associated with our communications may ultimately be self-defeating. “
  • Second, to be more “credible” the ECB would need to adopt a calendar based forward guidance (or equivalently as the RBA did a target for e.g. 3-year rates). However, this will imply a degree of certainty that central banks should be wary of pretending to have. It would be the equivalent of doubling up in a difficult position. It could solve the issue in the short term, but will increase the stakes when either (1) time will comes from exiting this reinforced forward guidance or (ii) facts challenge the forward guidance (cf. the RBA).
  • Third, the forward guidance is ultimately based on the ability to forecast inflation. A lot has been written as to why inflation has been low in the past decades. Inflation expectations being adaptive, the conclusions have been extrapolated to the indefinite future. But little credit has been given to the fact that inflation is subject to regime shifts which can be generated by (a) monetary and/or fiscal policy shifts or (b) exogenous supply shocks. In particular, coordinated monetary and fiscal policies is the textbook way of generating inflation. Therefore, in presence of a very pro-active fiscal policy following Covid, introducing a new monetary policy framework predicated on years of low inflation is the theoretical perfect combination to create a challenging environment for forward guidance. Some credit should also be given to the uncertainty generated by the potential negative supply shock associated with addressing climate change.
  • Fourth, in the case of the Fed, the forward guidance is also predicated on the ability to forecast NAIRU. A causal look at historical revisions of estimates of NAIRU highlights the degree of uncertainty associated with it. In fact, as NAIRU is derived ex-post from the combination of the observed level of unemployment and inflation, estimates will turn out to be backward looking and ignoring the regime shifts that could impact inflation. For instance, the US labor market is currently behaving as if was through full employment.

  As Yared concludes, it may very well turn out that following the US mid-term elections a significant fiscal tightening will force inflation back lower. But no matter the outcome, it “should not distract from the fact that an excessive reliance on  forward guidance is not the silver bullet that current central bank rhetoric suggests.” To this, one can only add that if central bank guidance can not be relied upon – i.e., if central bankers are just as clueless as everyone else – then this is actually wildly bullish for risk assets and hyperinflation, as it means that when the inevitable policy error hits and both the economy and markets swoon, these same central bankers will unleash much more of the same “wealth effect” in hopes of undoing their current round of errors, which will do nothing to actually normalize a market that is beyond broken and do everything to push asset hyperinflation to never before seen highs.

  This dynamic will continue indefinitely – as there is nothing preventing the Fed from creating a few more trillion or quadrillion in fiat “money” with the push of a button – and the only possibly constraint for future such catastrophic behavior is when the class inequality finally leads to mass riots and the appearance of the proverbial pitchforks in front the Marriner Eccles building.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 19:20

• The US Is Now Closer To A Dictatorship Than A Democratic Republic
  The US Is Now Closer To A Dictatorship Than A Democratic Republic

  Op-Ed submitted by Elizabeth Vaughn,

  Former President Ronald Reagan once famously said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

  

  Notwithstanding the Cold War, Reagan’s words may have been considered somewhat hyperbolic at the time. Today, they are especially appropriate.

  While painting a dresser on Sunday, I listened to a replay of the previous night’s version of Fox News’ “Watters World.” When that video ended, an April 2015 speech from journalist Glenn Greenwald entitled “Edward Snowden and the Secrets of the National Security State” came on and covered with paint, I listened to it.

  Greenwald discussed the National Security Agency’s collection of billions of communications of ordinary, law abiding U.S. citizens. He emphasized the point that, even then, six and a half years ago, America was closer to a totalitarian state than a democracy. Thinking about it, I realized he was right.

  And if Greenwald was right then, how much more do his remarks apply today?

  President Joe Biden has been in office a little over nine months and his administration’s actions have steered the country  on a direct path toward authoritarianism. His regime thinks it’s okay to force Americans into choosing between taking a controversial vaccine or losing their livelihoods, to monitor our bank accounts for all transactions over $600 and to sic the FBI on parents who confront school boards about their childrens’ curricula.

  Needless to say, if the Trump Administration initiated any of those actions, he would have been impeached – again.

  American politics have always been messy. But the corruption that began in the Obama Administration has deepened and accelerated to a dangerous level.

  In 2015, the deep state began an effort to spy on potential 2016 Republican presidential nominees. After it became clear that Donald Trump would win the party’s nomination, Obama Administration officials sent spies into his campaign in an effort to derail his candidacy. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, which she essentially controlled after bailing them out financially, via Marc Elias, then a partner at the Perkins, Coie law firm, hired Fusion GPS to prepare a dossier of damaging stories about Trump.

  Then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama in July 2016 about Clinton’s actions and he did nothing to stop it.

  Using this collection of false stories, the FBI, once a highly-revered U.S. institution, applied to the FISA Court for a warrant (and three renewals) to tap the communications of Trump campaign staffers looking for anything that might destroy his candidacy. They began investigations into Gen. Michael Flynn, junior campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and others and after Trump’s victory, arrested them. And the FBI was aided every step of the way by a complicit media.

  Following an interview with dossier author Christopher Steele’s primary subsource in January 2017, the FBI knew the allegations against President Trump were lies. Yet then-FBI Director James Comey weaponized his agency against him anyway hoping to force him out of office.

  After Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions was convinced by several DOJ insiders to recuse himself from the FBI’s investigation, the ethically challenged Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to a Special Counsel. The ensuing investigation cast a shadow of illegitimacy over Trump’s presidency and facilitated a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms which led to two bogus impeachments.

  The deep state conducted business as if they were leaders of a third-world dictatorship.

  Next, skirting the state legislatures, Democrats used the pandemic to change the way elections would be conducted, allowing the introduction of mail-in voting on a massive scale. This opened the door to what I continue to believe was a stolen election.

  No one has ever been held accountable for any of this malfeasance. In fact, the DOJ just reinstated the pension of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by Jeff Sessions after the DOJ Inspector General found he had lied repeatedly to investigators.

  The dubious Biden victory has brought the U.S. closer than ever before to becoming a totalitarian state. The Biden Administration itself is the most serious national security threat America faces today.

  What can we do about it?

  Virginia and New Jersey voters can send a powerful message to this administration by getting to the polls on Tuesday to cast their ballots for Republican candidates Glenn Youngkin and Jack Ciattarelli. That would be a good start toward the restoration of sanity in the country.

  The rest of us can continue to resist. We can and we must engage in civil disobedience.

  Please follow me on Twitter.

  Please visit my archives: American Free News Network and The Western Journal

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 19:00

• Manchin Destroys Pelosi's Chessboard – Slams "Budget Gimmicks" And "Shell Games" To Force Through Economic Package
  Manchin Destroys Pelosi’s Chessboard – Slams “Budget Gimmicks” And “Shell Games” To Force Through Economic Package

  Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) dispelled any rumors that he’s ‘on board‘ with Democrats’ Build Back Better Act, despite its new $1.75 trillion topline set by the White House (down from $3.5 trillion).

  

  On Monday, Manchin held a seven-minute press conference to set the record straight. The key takeaway is this; nothing is happening on the reconciliation bill until the bipartisan infrastructure bill is passed by the House, and more clarity is provided in general.

  “To be clear, I will not support the reconciliation legislation without knowing how the bill would impact our debt and our economy in our country we won’t know that until we work through the text,” he said, adding “It is time to vote” on bipartisan infrastructure package.”

  In response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rumored plan to appease progressives by forcing both bills through at once, Manchin insisted that “Hiding this bill hostage is not going to work for getting in support for the reconciliation bill,” adding that he “will not support a bill that is this consequential.”

  “Enough is enough,” he continued. “While I’ve worked hard to find a path to compromise, it’s obvious: compromise is not good enough for a lot of my colleagues in Congress. It’s all or nothing.”

  Watch:

  Last week, Pelosi had planned to hold a vote on just the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill – only to be sidelined by House progressives.

  “Both bills pass together — and when the full legislative text of the popular Build Back Better Act is ready and agreed to, we’ll be thrilled to pass the President’s entire agena [sic],” tweeted Congressional Progressive Caucus leader Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) on Friday.

  Jayapal’s comments followed a “great meeting” with Sen Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), one of two moderate Democrats who have insisted on a slimmed down Build Back Better bill, which started out at $3.5 trillion and now sits at $1.75, per the White House.

  Then, on Sunday, the Washington Times reported a rumor that Pelosi was planning to hold votes on both massive spending packages this week, which would mean both Manchin and the Progressives overcame their longstanding obstacles to moving forward.

  Looks like that’s all out the window now…

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/01/2021 – 18:44

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