Today’s News 31st July 2022

• They Can't Let Him Back In
  They Can’t Let Him Back In

  Authored by Michael Anton via CompactMag.com,

  The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again. In fact, they made this clear in 2020, in a series of public statements. Simply for quoting their words in an essay for The American Mind, I was mercilessly mocked and attacked. But they were quite clear. Trump won’t be president at noon, Jan. 20, 2021, even if we have to use the military to drag him out of there.

  

  If the regime felt that strongly back then, imagine how they feel now. But you don’t have to imagine. They tell you every day. Liz Cheney, Trump’s personal Javert, has said that the 45th president is literally the greatest threat facing America today – greater than China, than our crashing economy, than our unraveling civil society.

  That’s rhetoric, of course, but it isn’t merely that. It’s safer, and generally more accurate, to assume that your adversaries mean what they say.

  If you doubt this, ask yourself: When was the last time they acted more moderately than they talk?

  Even if it is just rhetoric, the words nonetheless portend turbulence. “He who says A must say B.” The logic of statement A inevitably leads to action B, even if the speaker of A didn’t really mean it, or did mean it, but still didn’t want B. Her followers won’t get the irony and, enthused by A, will insist on B.

  Take some time to listen to the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be long; five minutes should do. Then spend another five or so reading the statements of prominent politicians other than Trump. To round it out, sacrifice another five on leading intellectuals. It should become abundantly clear: They all have said A and so must say—and do—B.

  And B is that Trump absolutely must not be allowed to take office on Jan. 20, 2025.

  Why? They say Jan. 6. But their determination began much earlier.

  And just what is so terrible about Trump anyway? I get many of his critics’ points, I really do. I hear them all the time from my mother. But even if we were to stipulate them all, do Trump’s faults really warrant tearing the country apart by shutting out half of it from the political process?

  Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it.

  Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.

  Again, why? I think it’s because, while Trump’s core MAGA agenda is decidedly not outside the historic bipartisan mainstream, it is well outside the present regime’s core interests. Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three. The old America—the one in which Republicans cared about the heartland and weren’t solely valets to corporate power, Democrats were pro-worker and anti-war, and Bill Clinton and The New York Times could advocate border security—is in the process of being replaced, if it hasn’t already been, by one in which there is only one acceptable opinion on not just these, but all other issues.

  Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

  Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

  People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.” How are we supposed to have “democracy” when the policies and candidates my side wants and votes for are anathema and can’t be allowed? How are we supposed to live together with the constant demonization from one side against the other blaring 24/7 from the ruling class’s every propaganda organ? Why would we want to?

  More to the point: How are we supposed to get through the next two and a half years? The regime would prefer to get its way via the path of least resistance. The ideal situation, at least for those of a less punitive cast of mind who would be satisfied seeing Trump gone but not necessarily in jail, would be for Trump to just walk away. But how likely is that? He doesn’t, to say the least, seem primed for a graceful exit in which he passes the baton to Ron DeSantis (or whomever). Even if he did, how many in his base would convince themselves that the fix was somehow in? “They threatened his children,” etc. That kind of thinking leads not to demoralization but to outrage. That might be irrational, but this isn’t a math competition; it’s politics in a hyper-partisan, supercharged time.

  Since the long goodbye has about as much chance as Kamala Harris completing a sentence without cackling,

  Plan A is to use the Jan. 6 show trials to make it impossible for Trump to run again, or barring that, to win again.

  But that isn’t working; at least, not well enough.

  They may have dented Trump a little in opinion polling, but not nearly enough to prevent him from getting the GOP nomination. Perhaps they still can; I doubt it, but who knows? But more likely, even if they do further damage, Trump will have plenty of time to get his numbers back up.

  And the ruling class will surely help him in that endeavor by being ever-more radical, hateful, and incompetent. They have shown time and again that there is no moderation in them. They can’t let up even a single mile per hour, not even when easing back is in their clear interest. Whether they are driven by the demands of their base, their own internal conviction, or some supernatural force, I couldn’t say.

  Plan B is for the Jan. 6 committee to lay the groundwork for an indictment of Trump.

  The Justice Department is already leaking that “seditious conspiracy” might be the charge.

  Now, I personally believe that such a charge would be ludicrous. Seditious conspiracy, when it is charged at all, which it rarely was before Jan. 6, is typically reserved for the likes of Omar “Blind Sheikh” Abdel-Rahman, who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. And they are going to try it against a former president, for phone calls and texts ambiguously connected to a protest in which many walked through doors held open by Capitol Police, minimal property damage occurred, the only people who died were unarmed protesters, and which may have been a setup, or at least egged-on, by the feds.

  I am under no illusion that I’m going to convince regime apparatchiks of any of this. However, if any are reading, I would ask them the following. I know you think it’s perfectly obvious that “Trump Is Guilty!” and that anyone who doesn’t agree is not merely insane, but A Danger to the Republic. But just as I know I can’t convince you, I also know that you can’t convince 100 million Trump supporters. Do you realize that, too? Do you consider it a feature, not a bug?

  Moreover, if the regime goes forward with this, it’s going to try him in the District of Columbia’s 77 percent Democratic and 92 percent virulently anti-Trump jury pool, which lately has been acquitting obvious Democratic miscreants and convicting Republicans on silly charges that never used to have been brought in the first place.

  It’s just a fact—perhaps, to many, a baleful fact—but nevertheless a fact that somewhere between a third and half the country is going to find this totally illegitimate and be outraged by it.

  I know what some of our masters are thinking because they are already saying it: Justice must be done, come what may. We must stand on principle, consequences be damned. This sounds noble in the abstract.

  Is it? I suspect some of them are thinking: 

  This is win-win for us. If we convict him, or damage him enough that he can’t run, and there isn’t a huge backlash, then mission accomplished. Or if there is, well, those people were already, or soon-to-be, insurrectionists and so we will be justified in unleashing the security state against them. Indeed, there are benefits to flushing them out now, before they are fully organized for the “Second Civil War” we know the insurrectionists are already plotting.

  At any rate, a conviction would all but ensure a Senate vote under Article I, Section 3, making Trump constitutionally ineligible to run (at least half the Republicans would sign on).

  But what if, somehow, Trump is acquitted or gets his case tossed out?

  Then I think you will see the same indignant reaction, but from the other side. Suddenly it will be Blue America declaring all our institutions, and especially the courts, illegitimate. You might even see some attempts at blue secession, e.g., “Calexit.”

  Plan C, if none of this works, is to have Trump declared ineligible under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

  This is riskier than Plan B. If they couldn’t get a Senate vote in favor (and, absent a conviction, I don’t think they could), it would come down to a mere court opinion.

  If you think Trump’s base will howl over a conviction in a DC kangaroo court, wait until you see their reaction to some Democratic-appointed appeals judge saying Trump can’t run. Even if the regime got the Supreme Court to uphold that 9-0 (and they won’t), Trump’s base won’t accept it.

  Plan D—just beat him at the ballot box—is also risky. The country is in desperate shape. Biden is enormously unpopular. Harris is spectacularly unpopular. Getting rid of one of them will be hard. Getting rid of both? The first black, South-Asian, and female vice president and heir apparent? Does anyone think the race-and-sex-obsessed Democratic base of 2024 is going to tolerate that?

  And then who do they replace them with? Gavin Newsom? A ciswhite male? Even if they can get past that non-trivial problem, which they can’t, Newsom has no appeal outside deep-blue America. I’m not saying he would certainly lose, but it’s dicey as hell, especially with a demoralized base and the very strong likelihood that the state he governs will be deep in recession by election time.

  Plan E is to cheat. I know what you are thinking. But I’m not talking about Dominion voting machines. I mean the kind of “pre-cheating” that the regime boasts about as “election fortification”: change the rules in advance in ways that favor Democrats and hurt Republicans, especially in swing states. There is no question that they will do this. Why wouldn’t they? It worked last time, and the more overt cheating they can avoid, the better.

  They are already using the federal government to thumb the scale in favor of Democrats. Biden’s Executive Order 14019, “Promoting Access to Voting,” requires “every federal agency to submit a plan to register voters and encourage voter participation. It also required agencies to form strategies to invite nongovernmental third parties to register voters.” That is to say, a federal takeover of state elections by the Biden administration. This is a replay, with federal power, of the $400 million in “Zuckerbucks”—money donated by the tech-oligarch founder of Facebook—that pre-rigged the last election, but this time with taxpayer dollars, a White House aide (Susan Rice) coordinating, and cabinet agencies like Housing and Urban Development implementing, in conjunction with leftwing NGOs. That combination will be hard to beat.

  But suppose it is. There is always cheating-cheating. If you believed that Trump presents an unprecedented threat to the republic, would you really object to a few boxes of extra ballots falling off trucks near vote-counting headquarters in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta? When the Survival of Our Democracy Is on the Line?

  One has to tip one’s hat to the rhetorical disadvantage they have imposed on us. All questioning of any election they win is denounced as paranoid, unpatriotic, “racist,” and a threat to the integrity of the process. (Never mind that they always do it when the right wins; see, for instance, 2000, 2004, and 2016.) The questionable practices such as late-night ballot dumps that lead to our questions are never explained, much less ended. They get to engage in shenanigans that make elections look fishy; we get blamed for saying they look fishy. When we point out that, hey, something looks off there, the response is invariably: How dare you sow doubt about the election! You are undermining confidence in Our Democracy™. Not their shenanigans, but our doubts undermine confidence.

  But there is reason to wonder if they can get away with it next time. Whatever happened in 2020, a supermajority of Republicans doesn’t believe that the election was on the level. The regime is extremely worried about this, which is why the propaganda on it is so intense. They know that to pull off a win in 2024, and have it accepted by the 2020 doubters, the next election is at least going to have to look a lot cleaner than the last. Making it look cleaner is hard to do without actually making it cleaner. The downside to that, though, is obvious.

  So the choice before them is: Do what(ever) they did last time—and more so, if necessary—and risk an even bigger reaction, or take their chances that they can win a fair fight. (The latter assumes that they have complete control of their minions who run elections at the local level.) But to repeat a point: Perhaps they consider the reaction a feature, not a bug?

  Which leaves Plan F, which they have already sketched in broad outlines. I don’t know exactly what form it will take, but they have made clear that “under no circumstance” can Trump be allowed to take office again. Among the “circumstances” covered by the word “no” would seem to be an Electoral College majority, or a tie followed by a House vote in Trump’s favor.

  What happens then? Well, in the words of the “Transition Integrity Project,” a Soros-network-linked collection of regime hacks who in 2020 gamed out their strategy for preventing a Trump second term, the contest would become “a street fight, not a legal battle.”

  Again, their words, not mine.

  But allow me to translate: The 2020 summer riots, but orders of magnitude larger, not to be called off until their people are secure in the White House.

  On Sept. 20, 1911, the RMS Olympic—sistership of the ill-fated Titanic—collided with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke, despite both vessels traveling at low speeds, in visual contact with one another for 80 minutes. “It was,” writes maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham, “one of those incredible convergences, in full daylight on a calm sea within sight of land, where two normally operated vessels steamed blithely to a point of impact as though mesmerized.”

  Our sea isn’t calm, nor are our vessels normally operated. But we do seem headed for a point of impact, with the field of vision before us as clear as it was on that day.

  And the regime isn’t changing course. It must want this—or else is so high on its own supply that it can’t see what it is doing.

  Rest assured, if what I fear might happen, happens, we will be blamed for it.

  And the fire next time will make their reaction to Jan. 6 look like a marshmallow roast. I don’t know which possibility is scarier: that they haven’t thought any of this through, or that they have.

  *  *  *

  Michael Anton, a former National Security Council staffer in the Trump White House, is a lecturer in politics at Hillsdale College’s Washington, DC, campus.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 23:30

• These Are The World's Top 10 Restaurants In 2022
  These Are The World’s Top 10 Restaurants In 2022

  This year’s edition of ‘The World’s 50 Best Restaurants‘ by publishing group William Reed Business Media has just been released.

  

  As Statista’s Anna Fleck notes, the ranking is one of the most highly anticipated events of the culinary calendar.

  The so-called “Oscars of gastronomy” have named the Danish restaurant Geranium as the top restaurant in the world, followed by Central in Peru’s Lima and Disfrutar in Barcelona, Spain.

  

  The top ten roundup includes three Spanish and four Latin American venues.

  Founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, Geranium has quickly climbed to the top of the 50 best restaurants list, moving from 49th place in 2012 to second place last year. Geranium specializes in meat-free dishes and was the first restaurant in Denmark to obtain three Michelin stars.

  The highest ranked US restaurant was ground-breaking Korean eatery Atomix in New York City, which placed 33rd on the list.

  

  The World’s 50 Best Restaurants was first launched 20 years ago by the British magazine Restaurant Magazine, as an alternative to the Michelin stars system. The ranking has faced criticism in recent years for elitism, with claims of jurors favoring restaurant owners they know, and for restaurants only in Europe or North America having won the top places.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 23:00

• Is Pro-Life Now Hate Speech?
  Is Pro-Life Now Hate Speech?

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  Below is my column in The Hill on a shift in the rhetoric in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. From politicians to pundits, pro-life positions are being treated as virtual hate speech.

  The demonization of those with pro-life views is meant to cut off any debate on the basis or scope of abortion rights. It is the latest attack on free speech as critics seek to silence those with opposing views.

  

  Here is the column:

  With the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, it is no longer enough to be pro-choice. Indeed, the term “pro-choice” has been declared harmful by the now ironically named “Pro-Choice Caucus.” Today, it seems you must be anti-pro-life to be truly pro-choice — and, across the country, pro-life viewpoints are being declared virtual hate speech.

  We have seen this pattern before.

  With the rise of the racial justice movement on campuses across the country in 2020, a mantra emerged that it was no longer enough to not be a racist, you must be anti-racist. As National Public Radio’s media critic explained, “you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.”

  Similarly, after the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it seems, you must be anti-pro-life and stop others from voicing their views.

  On Sunday, almost half of the University of Michigan’s incoming medical school class walked out of a “White Coat Ceremony” to protest keynote speaker Dr. Kristin Collier. Collier was not planning to discuss abortion, but — because she holds pro-life views — students launched an unsuccessful campaign to block her from speaking.

  The cancel-campaign petition had the usual nod to free speech before calling for it to be gutted. According to the Michigan Daily, the petition — signed by hundreds of incoming, current and past students — declared that “while we support the rights of freedom of speech and religion, an anti-choice speaker as a representative of the University of Michigan undermines the University’s position on abortion and supports the non-universal, theology-rooted platform to restrict abortion access, an essential part of medical care.” In other words: We support a diversity of viewpoints so long as we don’t have to hear any opposing views.

  Ironically, until four years ago, Collier was “a pro-choice atheist” who admitted that she had “great animosity towards those who held either pro-life views or deeply held religious commitments.” When she held those views, she was a celebrated professor with a long line of publications in peer-reviewed journals. She then had a conversion on the issue after speaking with a senior faculty colleague, Dr. William Chavey, a professor of family medicine who was pro-life — and she quickly became persona non grata.

  She is not alone at the university.

  A week earlier, a campaign was launched to fire football head coach Jim Harbaugh after he declared, “I believe in having the courage to let the unborn be born.”

  Harbaugh is accustomed to penalty calls for unnecessary roughness on the field, but nothing likely prepared him for what came next. While he is widely known to be a devout Catholic, his public statement of his values was considered an outrage by some and made his continuation as coach unacceptable to them, even though he just signed a five-year, $36.7 million contract.

  In addition to calls for his termination, Harbaugh was accused of being “full of deep seething hatred of women” and “publicly expressing his distaste for women’s rights.” The liberal Palmer Report posted (with thousands of “likes”) that “no one who actively attempts to deny women their most basic rights should ever be allowed to hold a position of influence at a public university … He’s a public employee. Fire his ass.”

  Actually, being a public employee is one reason Harbaugh was not fired. As a public university, Michigan is subject to the full weight of the First Amendment.

  Many others are not protected like Harbaugh, however. Some pro-life workers face long, hard fights against companies eager to satisfy pro-choose advocates. In 2017, Charlene Carter, a former Southwest Airlines flight attendant, was fired for posting criticism of the Transportation Workers Union of America (TWU) and its president, Audrey Stone, for their pro-choice positions. Southwest allegedly told Carter that Stone and the union contacted the company and cited her comments as threatening or harassing; Southwest then fired her. Five years later, this month, she was awarded more than $5 million for her wrongful termination.

  There is an obvious effort to portray pro-life views as inherently threatening, making most any countermeasures justified. Recently, some pro-life centers and churches have been attacked. Even some crisis pregnancy centers, offering support to pregnant women and alternatives to abortion, have been denounced as a threat to women. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has declared that “crisis pregnancy centers … are there to fool people who are looking for pregnancy termination help. … We need to shut them down here in Massachusetts, and we need to shut them down all around the country. You should not be able to torture a pregnant person like that.”

  Sen. Warren, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and other Democrats in Congress have sponsored a bill that would shut such centers and hit charities with fines of $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion.

  Similar crackdowns are being pushed by some Democratic governors. Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) vetoed $20 million in funding for groups and advertising offering non-abortion resources and counseling. Such counseling efforts were denounced as “deceptive” attempts to “prey” on women.

  While some activists have previously argued that pro-life views or advertisements like “abortion hurts women” constitute “hate speech,” the Supreme Court has refused to allow such laws as the Ku Klux Klan Act to be used against abortion protesters as being motivated by a “class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus.”

  Demonizing pro-life viewpoints avoids the need to deal with abortion’s details. While a majority today support Roe, an even greater number support limits on abortion. A recent poll conducted by Harvard found that 72 percent of Americans would allow abortion only until the 15th week of pregnancy or support an even more restrictive law. That view transcends party affiliation; even 60 percent of Democrats believe abortion should be prohibited after the 15th week or a more restrictive limit.

  Yet, clearly, some do not want to have a debate of the issue while pushing virtually absolute rights to abortion. It is far easier to attack those who voice pro-life views as monolithic, “theology-rooted” extremists. One benefit in being anti-pro-life is that you can be anti-free-speech — all in the name of being pro-choice.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 22:30

• 'No Immediate Solution' As New Mexico Town Has Only 50 Days Of Drinking Water Left
  ‘No Immediate Solution’ As New Mexico Town Has Only 50 Days Of Drinking Water Left

  The city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, has less than two months of drinking water after a massive wildfire contaminated a river the town pulls from, according to local news KOAT 7. 

  Not to be confused with Las Vegas, Nevada, the 13,000-person city in San Miguel County relies solely on the now contaminated Gallinas River, which is full of ash and debris after the Calf Canyon-Hermits Peak Fire. 

  

  New Mexico Gov. Michelle Grisham declared “a state of emergency in Las Vegas” on Friday after the town’s drinking water storage had only 50 days of stored water left. 

  I’ve declared a state of emergency in Las Vegas due to burn scar flooding threatening the area’s drinking water supply.

  We’ve made $2.25 million in state funding available to support the city’s work to ensure Las Vegas residents continue to have a safe supply of drinking water. pic.twitter.com/qpiSqJykUu

  — Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (@GovMLG) July 29, 2022

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

  Las Vegas Mayor Louie Trujillo said the municipal water treatment facility could not treat the contaminated water. The town is running out of options and has implemented Stage 6 water restrictions. 

  The new measures include no watering outside, no refilling pools, restaurants are prohibited from serving water to customers except when asked, fire departments use foam to fight fires rather than water, and large commercial customers delay consuming large quantities of water. 

  There’s no immediate solution for a secondary water source for the town nor a timeframe when parts of Gallinas River will be suitable for water treatment. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 22:00

• California Recession Incoming
  California Recession Incoming

  Authored by John Seiler via The Epoch Times,

  A recession is hitting California. The only question is how hard it will be.

  

  The July Finance Bulletin by Keely Bosler, director of the California Department of Finance, calculated for the personal income tax (PIT), “Cash receipts for June were $3.345 billion below the forecast of $16.939 billion.” The actual receipts were $13.594 billion.

  Receipts vary month to month because of when people file their tax reports. So it’s best to compare a particular month to the same month in the previous year. According to the July 2021 report, “Cash receipts for June were also $1.783 billion above the month’s forecast of $15.312 billion.” So the actual receipts were $17.095 billion a year ago June.

  Put them together. June 2021 actual receipts were $17.095 billion and for June 2022, $13.594 billion. That was a drop of $3.501 billion, or 20 percent. If that continues, the yearly loss for fiscal year 2021-22, which began on July 1, would be $42 billion.

  The expected $97 billion surplus would be only $55 billion. All that surplus money Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature promised to spend in June would have to be cut by $42 billion.

  And this recession is only starting, its depth unknown. If the PIT receipts drop another $42 billion, the surplus is slashed to $13 billion.

  Do it again, and it’s a deficit of $29 billion.

  Fortunately, the Enacted Budget report says it “includes $37.2 billion in budgetary reserves.” If a $29 billion deficit were deducted from that, only $8.2 billion in reserves would be left.

  I’ll haul up there with the numbers, because we’re getting into too much speculation.

  But the point is the state’s $97 billion surplus could evaporate faster than a 7-Eleven 32-ounce Big Gulp poured on the concrete at noon in July in Needles, Calif.

  This has been the spastic pattern for decades, especially since the state became a high-tech center. Good years bring record profits, dividends, and spending by the wealthy tech titans. Bad years bring slowdowns and even bankruptcies.

  Yet the state never uses the surpluses sensibly as a bridge for tax reform that would even out the ups and downs.

  The Washington Post headlined on July 23: “Big Tech lay-offs and hiring freezes prompt recession fears.” The story: “News of layoffs and hiring slowdowns have become commonplace across Silicon Valley. Start-ups are saying capital is drying up.”

  One reason the tech companies go in big cycles is purchases of their products can be postponed. People have to eat, but the new iPhone purchase can be postponed, and the Netflix subscription can be suspended.

  The July 2022 Department of Finance Bulletin also calculated, “California real GDP contracted by 1 percent in the first quarter of 2022 on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) basis, following 9.5-percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2021 and annual growth of 7.8 percent in 2021.”

  A negative second quarter would indicate a recession.

  June inflation hit 9.1 percent, the highest in four decades. Some analysts think it will subside. But even if it goes down to, say, 6 percent, that’s still a big problem.

  There’s also the question of the real inflation rate. The calculations were changed three decades ago by the Clinton administration to make itself look better. The site ShadowStats, which calculates using the old formula, pegs the “corrected” number at 17.3 percent, the highest in 75 years.

  If you’ve filled up your car lately, or bought hamburger, you know the ShadowStats figure is more accurate than the official government number.

  Meanwhile, on Wednesday, July 27, the Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates again by 0.75 percent to a range of 2.25 percent to 2.50 percent. It’s supposed to dampen inflation. If it doesn’t, then more rate hikes will be coming down the pike.

  Which will mean an even worse recession. I hope you’re ready. The state of California is not.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 21:30

• Family Of Six Moves Into Toolshed To Escape Inflation Storm
  Family Of Six Moves Into Toolshed To Escape Inflation Storm

  A family of six downsized from a single-family home into a 500-square-foot toolshed in northwest Arkansas after government-enforced COVID lockdowns of the 2020s paralyzed the economy and led to job loss and evaporation of personal savings. 

  “One of the things people find really weird about us living in a shed is that we use a composting bathroom rather than a traditional toilet,” Jessica Taylor, 30, told NYPost, who lives in the shed with her husband Lath, and four children. 

  

  Taylor said the shed has the basics, such as electricity, running water, a heat/cooling system, a kitchen, and an entertainment space. One thing she noted is the toilet has a “bucket system … and [when] you [urinate or defecate], you cover it with wood chips each time. After two days, whether the bucket is full or not, we dump [the waste] into a composting bin in the woods, and then after a couple of years, [the waste] turns into the soil for ornamental plants.”

  A combination of tax returns, stimulus checks, and unemployment distributions, plus $17,000 in savings, funded their housing project. 

  

  “More and more people are breaking free from the mindset that you have to have the big expensive, fancy house to feel like they’re making it,” said Taylor, adding, “there’s value in living modestly. We can spend more time together gardening and enjoying nature rather than working to afford lavish accommodations.”

  

  Taylor explained that when she and her husband lost their jobs during the pandemic — renting a $1,100 single-family home became unaffordable. The couple has reduced monthly expenses from $2,000 to $400. 

  “Since we moved into the shed, we’ve become really financially stable, and we’re getting close to being debt-free,” Taylor added. Their excess savings allowed them to expand the shed’s footprint.

  

  The timing of the so-called ‘shed life’ comes as the worst inflation in decades decimates lower-tier consumers, depleting their savings and purchasing power. People want to break free from the corporate system that has imprisoned them with insurmountable debts.

  Tiny homes are only gaining more popularity as a tidal wave of evictions could be nearing, with 8.4 million Americans, or about 15% of all renters, behind rent payments in June. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 21:00

• Argentina’s Government Collapsing, People Refuse To Work Amid Major Subsidy Cuts
  Argentina’s Government Collapsing, People Refuse To Work Amid Major Subsidy Cuts

  Authored by Autumn Spreadermann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Protests have erupted in Buenos Aires over the past 90 days and continue to build inside the capital as residents battle with their center-left government over sizeable amendments to social programs.

  

  Cuts to subsidies in the energy sector based on household income already began in June.

  Other subsidies, including the country’s notorious welfare program, are also on the chopping block, triggering thousands of angry residents to take to the streets.

  State-sponsored aid for civilians has soared in the past 20 years, leaving 22 million Argentinians dependent on some form of government assistance.

  In the first quarter of 2022, the national employment rate was 43 percent, according to government figures.

  

  The country’s state funded programs extend to nearly every aspect of the economy, from wages to utilities, education, and health care.

  Argentina already spends an estimated 800 million pesos per day—a sum of more than US$6 million—on state benefit programs.

  Concurrently, inflation in the South American nation hit 58 percent in May and soared above 60 percent in July. By comparison, national inflation was just over 14 percent in 2015.

  Harry Lorenzo, chief finance officer of Income Based Research, told The Epoch Times the spending habits of Argentina’s government are at the root of the escalating problem.

  “The Argentine government has been grappling with a collapsing economy for some time now. The main reason for this is the government’s unsustainable spending, which has been funded in part by generous welfare programs,” Lorenzo explained.

  Deeper Into Economic Chaos

  Cries for more state money, freedom from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and for President Alberto Fernandez to step down echoed within the angry crowds gathered near the president’s office—Casa Rosada —during the nation’s independence day celebration on July 9.

  Since then, scheduled demonstrations have continued, led by professional protest organizers or “piqueteros” demanding the abolition of the proposed subsidy cuts and a wage increase.

  “This is madness. What the piqueteros are asking for is madness,” Alvaro Gomez told The Epoch Times.

  Gomez has lived and worked in Buenos Aires for more than 15 years and currently is a taxi driver. As the years have passed, he’s watched his country dive deeper into economic chaos.

  “I’ve seen five presidents come and go in that time; nothing has improved. Half of our country doesn’t want a job, and the ones that do, don’t want to pay the taxes for the others,” he said.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 20:30

• Mystery Surrounds Man's Death After Exiting Cargo Plane Without Parachute 4,000 Feet Above North Carolina
  Mystery Surrounds Man’s Death After Exiting Cargo Plane Without Parachute 4,000 Feet Above North Carolina

  A person without a parachute exited a twin-engine cargo plane before an emergency landing Friday afternoon at Raleigh-Durham International Airport (RDU) in North Carolina. 

  Local media ABC 11 reported the CASA C-212 Aviocar medium cargo plane experienced landing-gear issues ahead of landing at RDU. The story took a dramatic turn and a weird one when a person exited the plane thousands of feet in the air. 

  

  Darshan Patel, the Operations Manager for Wake County Emergency Management, said law enforcement found the missing plane passenger hours after the emergency landing, around 1915 ET. 

  According to Patel, “There was no indication” that the 23yo man, Charles Hew Crooks, had a parachute as he exited the plane. His body was found near Sunset Lake Road and Hilltop Needmore Road in Fuquay-Varina, about 17 miles from RDU. 

  

  “We had officers that were responding in the area for the search and were flagged down by a resident. They had heard something in their backyard which led to us finding this individual,” Patel said.

  Before Crooks exited the aircraft (the reason remains a mystery), there was only one other passenger: the pilot. 

  “At this time, what we know is that the passenger was wearing tan pants and a logo-branded shirt,” Patel said. “We don’t have the color, but that’s all the description we have at this time. We are working with RDU and the FAA and the pilot.”

  A video of the emergency landing was posted by ABC 11. 

  Internet sleuths tracked the C-212 (tail number “N497CA” that took off from nearby Raeford West Airport, where the pilot reported landing gear issues. 

  Rampart Avn CASA 212 (N497CA, built 1983) was damaged in an emergency landing on runway 23L at Raleigh-Durham Intl (KRDU), NC. Pilots reported gear issues after take-off at Raeford West and diverted to RDU. No injuries reported.https://t.co/xeFZsB8jti pic.twitter.com/hLlRqw6vtp

  — JACDEC (@JacdecNew) July 29, 2022

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  Flight tracking service Flightradar24 shows the cargo plane was at an altitude of 4,000 feet when the man fell or jumped out. 

  

  ABC 11 pointed out the plane is registered to Spore LTD LLC in Colorado Springs, which is connected with Rampart Aviation, a special-forces veteran-owned business that conducts aviation support operations across the U.S. and internationally. 

  

  FAA and National Transportation Safety Board are searching for answers to why the young man exited the plane without a parachute. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 20:00

• Arizona Attorney General Sues Biden Administration Over Gun-Control Rules
  Arizona Attorney General Sues Biden Administration Over Gun-Control Rules

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich says that he’s suing the Biden administration over rules imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that would treat firearm parts as finished guns.

  “The ATF is attempting to overshoot the authority granted to it by Congress,” Brnovich said in a July 27 statement about the lawsuit.

  “The rulemakings are unconstitutional, impractical, and would likely put a large number of parts manufacturers out of business.”

  

  The Arizona Republican was joined by 16 other attorneys general, the Gun Owners of America, and other groups in the lawsuit over the ATF rule that attempts to regulate unfinished parts as if they were complete firearms, which, according to the suit, will imperil “the American tradition of private firearms manufacturing that predates the Revolution.”

  The suit was filed against the ATF, the acting head of that agency, and the Department of Justice.

  The new ATF rules would lead to the “illegal creation” of a federal firearms registry that would require gun retailers to keep sales records beyond a 20-year requirement and turn them over to the ATF instead of destroying them, according to the suit.

  “The final rule unconstitutionally subverts Congress’ authority, exercising quintessentially legislative powers in a manner that could never pass either (let alone both) houses of Congress today, which is precisely why defendants have no intent whatsoever to ask for legislative authorization to take such unprecedented actions,’’ the lawsuit states.

  “Yet under our Constitution, the president (much less unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats within the executive branch) is not a king who can exercise this sort of unbridled power unilaterally.’’

  Ghost Guns

  In April, the Biden administration announced it would crack down on what it calls “ghost guns,” privately made firearms that don’t have a serial number.

  “Because ghost guns lack the serial numbers marked on other firearms, law enforcement has an exceedingly difficult time tracing a ghost gun found at a crime scene back to an individual purchaser,’’ the White House said in a statement at the time.

  The lawsuit revolves around a North Dakota resident, Eliezer Jimenez, who manufactures his own firearms from spare parts.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 19:30

• Crypto Still Popular Despite Crash
  Crypto Still Popular Despite Crash

  The price of Bitcoin has crashed drastically since around the beginning of April, accelerating its loses from the November 2021 peak. Many other cryptocurrencies – including stablecoins – have also been caught up in the turmoil.

  

  However the crypto crash does not seem to have really unsettled investors in the United States so far, as our Global Consumer Survey special “Finance & Assets” shows.

  According to the report, 18 percent of those own investments also have cryptocurrencies. 15 percent of the total of just over 1,000 respondents intend to invest money in coins in the next two years.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  As Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, the comparison with the previous survey shows that investors in the US now take cryptocurrencies much more seriously than they did in 2020.

  The increase in popularity is likely spurred on by the profits made in the recent past. According to an estimate by Chainalysis, total profits from cryptocurrencies amounted to around $163 billion in 2021.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 19:00

• Three Hostile Foreign Actors Breached US Federal Courts System In 2020 Cyberattack: NY Congressman
  Three Hostile Foreign Actors Breached US Federal Courts System In 2020 Cyberattack: NY Congressman

  Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, revealed on July 28 that “three hostile foreign actors” carried out an “incredibly significant and sophisticated” cyberattack against the federal courts’ document management system in early 2020.

  

  The cyber breach “has since had lingering impacts on the department and other agencies,” Nadler said during a congressional hearing on Thursday.

  “Perhaps even more concerning is the disturbing impact the security breach had on pending civil and criminal litigation, as well as ongoing national security or intelligence matters,” Nadler added.

  Judiciary

  The U.S. Judiciary issued a statement about the breach on Jan 6, 2021, saying that its Case Management/Electronic Case Files system (CM/ECF) had become a victim of “an apparent compromise.” The system allows attorneys to file case documents, such as pleadings, motions, and petitions, with the court online.

  The Judiciary added the breach happened because of vulnerabilities in its system that greatly risked compromising highly sensitive non-public documents, particularly sealed filings.

  “Due to the nature of the attacks, the review of this matter and its impact is ongoing,” the statement concluded, adding that the Judiciary was working with the Department of Homeland Security on a “security audit.”

  

  Nadler added that the committee learned in March of the “startling breadth and scope” of the system’s security failure. The cyberattack was unrelated to the massive SolarWinds hack that was exposed in December 2020, Nadler added.

  The congressman from New York then asked Matt Olsen, assistant attorney general for the National Security Division (NSD) at the Department of Justice, what types of cases, investigations, or U.S. attorneys’ offices were “impacted most” by the breach.

  In response, Olsen said he couldn’t speak directly to the nature of the ongoing investigation regarding the effort to compromise the public judicial dockets.

  However, He did say his division was focused generally on cyber threats from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

  “This is, of course, a significant concern for us, given the nature of the information as often held by the courts,” Olsen added.

  Olsen also said he couldn’t “think of anything in particular” when asked if the break had impacted any NSD investigations.

  “I can assure you, based on my own personal experience, that we are working very closely with the judicial conference and judges around the country to address this issue,” Olsen said.

  

  China

  While neither Nadler nor Olsen named any country responsible for the breach, the Chinese communist regime is likely at the top of the list.

  In January, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the Chinese regime has unleashed “a massive, sophisticated hacking program that’s bigger than those of every other major country combined.”

  “The Chinese government steals staggering volumes of information and causes deep, job-destroying damage across a wide range of industries—so much so that, as you heard, we’re constantly opening new cases to counter their intelligence operations, about every 12 hours or so,” Wray added.

  Wray pointed to the 2021 Microsoft Exchange Server hack as an example of recent Chinese cyberattacks, saying China “compromised the networks of more than 10,000 American companies in a single campaign alone.”

  In March, cybersecurity firm Mandiant reported that a hacker group backed by Beijing successfully compromised at least six U.S. state government networks between May 2021 and February 2022.

  “I would say that the challenge, when it comes to the sophisticated nation-state type activity that we see in cyber, the challenge is significant,” Olsen said. “And it’s very difficult to ever be in a position to say that any system is 100 percent safe when it comes to sophisticated nation-states that seek to obtain persistent access to these systems.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 18:30

• National Rankings Show San Francisco Falling Further Behind
  National Rankings Show San Francisco Falling Further Behind

  Authored by Kerry Jackson via InsideSources.com,

  What has happened to San Francisco, often thought of in the past as the most beautiful city in the country, if not the entire world? The transition from beloved by almost all to profoundly repellant to many is the sad story of a great city being toppled from within.

  

  The “Paris of the West” has been tarnished by rampant homelessness, rough and dirty streets much like those of its Barbary Coast past, and crime as ugly as it appears on all those videos we’ve seen.

  Of course, those are the more well-known sores. Though mostly unseen, there are others just as troublesome.

  Once a city of opportunity, San Francisco has become a millstone that crushes entrepreneurs’ dreams. In a study of 20 large U.S. cities, the Institute for Justice found that the cost to start a restaurant in San Francisco, at $22,648, is higher than the cost in New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston and Atlanta. In fact, no other city in the study came close to San Francisco’s cost. At $13,973, Minneapolis is the only other city where costs reached five digits.

  San Francisco also “has the highest average cost to start up across all five business types” — restaurants, retail bookstore, food truck, barbershop, home-based tutoring — “at $10,474,” which turns out to be “much more expensive than the already-high $2,555 average for all cities studied,” the Institute for Justice report says.

  One of the factors is not a local policy but a state law, the California Environmental Quality Act, which “can easily add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of starting up,” and often delays projects for years.

  But the existence of CEQA does not mean that San Francisco deserves none of the blame. The city “has 212 business license categories — the highest number of all cities studied, forcing entrepreneurs there to navigate complex lists of licenses to figure out which apply to their business.” Zoning rules effectively bar home-based tutoring businesses, and the overall complexity of navigating the process is frequently overwhelming.

  What else should be expected, though, from the second-worst run city in the country?

  According to WalletHub, the government of Washington, D.C., is the only one of the 150 city governments studied that is operated worse than San Francisco. (Oakland, Calif., is the 143rd-worst run city — there must be something in the waters of the Bay.)

  While city officials argue the point, WalletHub has the evidence: San Francisco’s outstanding per capita long-term debt is tied for the highest with Washington, the streets are poor (tied for last with the California cities of Oakland, San Jose and Fremont), and “safety” is rather middling.

  At least the kids are apparently getting schooled. WalletHub ranks the city 11th in education.

  But then, there aren’t many children in San Francisco to be educated. It might be the most childless city in the nation and continues to trend downward.

  Could it be that it’s simply too expensive to raise kids in the city where it takes an average net worth of $5.1 million to be considered wealthy, $1.3 million more than in 2021, and to be “financially comfortable” requires a net worth of $1.7 million?

  Yes, it could, and it probably is.

  Each of these wounds results from the friendly fire of decades of poor public policy choices (and corruption), and while serious, they’re not deadly — at least not yet.

  The optimistic view is that city officials have a chance to reverse the damaging policies before the stream of people leaving becomes a rushing river.

  The reality-based view is that they don’t have long.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 17:30

• Nine Sri Lankan Navy Sailors Jump Ship In USA
  Nine Sri Lankan Navy Sailors Jump Ship In USA

  Nine Sri Lankan Navy sailors who’d participated in a massive joint naval exercise in the Pacific Ocean have jumped ship in a bid to stay in the United States.

  Sri Lanka has been gripped by an economic crisis that led then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign and flee the country on July 13, after hordes of protestors stormed the official presidential residence. On Wednesday, the Sri Lankan parliament ratified a state of emergency declared by new President Ranil Wickremesinghe, as he seeks to quell demonstrations and unrest. 

  According to Economy Next. the sailors left Sri Lanka on June 4 as part of a 50-person contingent that was taking part in the massive, 26-country Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) joint naval exercise between Hawaii and Southern California.  

  Following the training, the sailors were slated to return to their country on a Sri Lankan ship that was a gift from the United States. The vessel — which was previously the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Douglas Munro and for now is identified only as “P627” —  was officially transferred to the Sri Lankan Navy in October, but has been undergoing restoration in the United States. 

  

  “A big crew went to the USA to bring in a ship that was donated to the Sri Lanka Navy,” an official Sri Lankan source told Economy Next. “From that crew, nine people have gone missing.” 

  While reporting does not indicate where they slipped away from their crewmates, earlier coverage of the transfer of the vessel said it was expected to depart for Sri Lanka from Seattle in May. The sailors represent a variety of ranks and ages between 27 and 36. 

  “We understand that several sailors have absconded from the training, a matter that has been referred to U.S. law enforcement,” a U.S. embassy spokesman told Economy Next. “Individuals who break U.S. immigration laws can be subject to arrest, detention, and deportation, and those who accrue unlawful presence in the United States can be prevented from returning to the U.S. for up to 10 years.”

  The sailors are among many Sri Lankans trying to start new lives somewhere else, with boats venturing not only to India but as far away as Australia, which is some 3,500 miles away. 

  The Sri Lankan navy previously aided one particularly notable emigre…   

  🇱🇰 BREAKING NEWS🇱🇰

  Footage emerges said to be of President Rajapakse fleeing Sri Lanka aboard a Navy Vessel. pic.twitter.com/yvaYv5uGvB

  — UNN (@UnityNewsNet) July 9, 2022

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

  Sri Lankans storm Presidential Palace due to economic shutdown. And President Gotabaya has fled the country. The people raided the bedroom, swimming pool and kitchen. Sri Lanka has experienced months long of high inflation, shortage of drugs, fuel and high commodity prices 😳. pic.twitter.com/uOaw5tN2Aj

  — Elijah Tembo (@elijah_23039) July 9, 2022

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 17:00

• Deafening Silence On Dobbs Leak Undermines Supreme Court As An Institution
  Deafening Silence On Dobbs Leak Undermines Supreme Court As An Institution

  Authored by Benjamin Weingarten via The Epoch Times,

  Chief Justice John Roberts is said to see defending the Supreme Court as an institution as pivotal to his role on it.

  

  On its face then, the Court’s silence some two months after Justice Roberts announced an investigation into what he termed an “egregious breach”—the assault on the institution of the Court that was the leak of the draft Dobbs opinion that would prevail, returning the question of abortion to its rightful place within the states—is itself an egregious breach.

  As the Associated Press recently reported, the Court is at present mum on whether it’s still even investigating the leak, as well as on a host of other basic questions about the probe.

  There were already glaring outstanding questions regarding those few elements of the investigation to which we were privy.

  For example, we do not know why the marshal of the Supreme Court was particularly well-equipped to lead it, nor the resources the marshal was bringing to bear.

  We do not know what the probe entails, or entailed, beyond the fact perhaps that rankled staff at the Court leaked that it was asking of clerks that they provide cell phone records and sign affidavits in connection with it, and that reportedly the marshal obtained electronic devices “from some permanent employees who work closely with the justices.”

  We do not know whether the Court will publicly announce the findings of its investigation in whole or part—starting with who the leaker was—nor the punishment the leaker will face, and the steps the Court will take to ensure such a leak never happens again.

  Now the universe of people who could have obtained and leaked the opinion—the leaker described as “a person familiar with the court’s proceedings” in the Dobbs case—is small.

  If the Court does not by now know who leaked the opinion, it would seem to constitute a breathtaking display of incompetence.

  If the Court does know who leaked the opinion, yet for whatever reason is sitting on its findings, it would seem to constitute a breathtaking display of politics.

  That’s because, on the merits, the silence is indefensible.

  What could be of greater import to the institution’s integrity and credibility than to demonstrate that it will stop at nothing to, and with great haste, find and bring to justice an individual who would so grievously undermine the Court’s ability to do its most basic duty: deliberate, discreetly and insulated from political pressure and intimidation.

  Silence on the leak probe only compounds the error of not ruling expeditiously in the wake of the leak, which fueled what else but a campaign of political pressure and intimidation up to and including threats to the life and limb of the judges.

  Does the chief justice, so attuned to public opinion about the Court, think the probe can be cast as some kind of internal matter to be handled privately, and made to fade into the ether?

  Do the findings implicate one or several justices, and as such, is the chief justice unsure how to proceed with the public?

  The longer he remains silent, the greater the speculation will grow. Surely the chief justice does not think promoting such speculation is in the interest of the Court as an institution.

  Or could it be that the Roberts Court’s silence is representative of the fact that the chief justice’s understanding of protecting the Supreme Court as an institution differs from ours?

  Chief Justice Roberts’s past attempts to protect the Court as an institution can be seen in his: rewriting of Obamacare as a tax, lest President Barack Obama’s signature achievement be properly rendered unconstitutional; failed attempt to split the baby in issuing a similarly tortured Dobbs concurrence, while also failing to flip Justice Brett Kavanaugh towards his position and away from that of Justice Samuel Alito; and in the overarching “incrementalist” approach reflected in many of his rulings, whereby Chief Justice Roberts eschews hewing to the law if in his view the results would be too practically jarring, or not deferential enough to precedent, no matter how wrongheaded.

  For the purported institutionalist, the chief justice’s continued silence on the Dobbs probe will perpetuate the damage of the “egregious breach” the longer it persists.

  It strains credulity to think that after two months the Court would still be in a posture of neither confirming nor denying anything about an investigation that it already announced, and one of the utmost importance.

  This is about more than meting out justice to an individual for a single act.

  That act was, in Chief Justice Roberts’s own words, a “betrayal of the confidences of the Court” – a singular blow against this most hallowed of institutions.

  When is the chief justice going to act like it?

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 16:30

• CDC Gave Big Tech Platforms Guidance On COVID Censorship
  CDC Gave Big Tech Platforms Guidance On COVID Censorship

  The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave censorship ‘suggestions’ to social media companies and Google in order to censor users who expressed skepticism or criticism of COVID-19 vaccines, according to the Washington Free Beacon, which obtained a trove of internal communications obtained by America First Legal.

  

  The emails, between the CDC, Google, Twitter and Meta staffers – some of whom (as Just the News notes) were former Hill and White House aides – were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and show extensive cooperation which included thinly veiled threats for failing to more aggressively remove content.

  Over the course of at least six months, starting in December 2020, CDC officials regularly communicated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over “vaccine misinformation.” At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as “example posts.”

  In one email to a CDC staffer, a Twitter employee said he is “looking forward to setting up regular chats” with the agency. Other emails show the scheduling of meetings with the CDC over how to best police alleged misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. -Free Beacon

  In one April 2021 email between a CDC staffer and Facebook, concern was raised after “algorithms that Facebook and other social media networks are apparently using to screen out posting by sources of vaccine misinformation are also apparently screening out valid public health messaging, including [Wyoming] Health communications.”

  Another email from March 2021 from a senior CDC staffer states: “we are working on [sic] project with Census to leverage their infrastructure to identify and monitor social media for vaccine misinformation.”

  What’s more, one email chain reveals that a CDC official showed up at Google’s 2020 “Trusted Media Summit” conference, which was held for “journalists, fact-checkers, educators, researchers and others who work in the area of fact-checking, verification, media literacy, and otherwise fighting misinformation.”

  When asked by an organizer if the senior CDC official would allow her remarks on YouTube, she declined, saying she was not authorized to speak publicly.

  In the same email chain with a senior CDC official, a Google staffer offers to promote an initiative from the World Health Organization about “addressing the COVID-19 infodemic and strengthen community resilience against misinformation.” That same Google staffer offers to introduce the CDC official to a Google colleague who is “working on programs to counter immunization misinfo.” -Free Beacon

  Meanwhile, Facebook gave the CDC $15 million in ad credits to use on the company’s platforms in April, 2021.

  “This gift will be used by CDC’s COVID-19 response to support the agency’s messages on Facebook, and extend the reach of COVID-19-related Facebook content, including messages on vaccines, social distancing, travel, and other priority communication messages,” reads an internal memo.

  As the Beacon notes, the level of coordination between government and big tech raises questions over what extent other private companies are working with the federal government in order to censor the public – including payment processors, Uber and other platforms which have banned the unwashed for wrongthink.

  The revelations have also caused the New Civil Liberties Alliance to file a Thursday court document seeking to revive their lawsuit against the government on behalf of deplatformed users.

  New Civil Liberties Alliance attorney Jenin Younes told Just the News it incorporated “the revelations about the CDC emails” into a filing Thursday seeking to reopen its case against the feds on behalf of deplatformed users.

  A federal court dismissed that litigation a month before a whistleblower leaked documents suggesting the Department of Homeland Security’s since-scrapped Disinformation Governance Board planned to “operationalize” its relationship with social media companies to remove content. NCLA cited those documents in its initial motion to reopen in June. -JTN

  JTN further notes that the document dump is also likely to come into play in a lawsuit by Missouri and Louisiana AGs against the government for alleged collusion with Big Tech to censor content on the origins of COVID-19, as well as Hunter Biden’s laptop and vote-by-mail election integrity.

  The feds filed a motion to dismiss two weeks ago for lack of legal standing and failure to state a claim. The AGs’ responses aren’t due until next week.

  AFL’s documents show the CDC shared specific tweets and Facebook and Instagram posts as examples of content to remove, including an interview with a former Pfizer vice president, Michael Yeadon, who advised against taking “top up” vaccines, meaning boosters.

  The agency inserted its own COVID recommendations into Google’s code, received $15 million in Facebook ad credits to promote its messaging, and even notified Facebook that Wyoming’s public health messages were getting throttled as misinformation. -JTN

  Recall that just one day after top health officials had a conference call to discuss a Zero Hedge article which highlighted a now-withdrawn paper from researchers in India suggesting “HIV-like insertions” in COVID-19, Twitter banned our account for roughly two months – with the tech giant claiming we doxxed a Chinese scientist (with publicly available information) in another article.

  Thanks to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Fauci’s emails, we know that the National Institutes of Health was not only aware of the Indian report, but were actively discussing how to handle it.

  A January 31, 2020 email from AFP’s Issam Ahmed asks NIH immunologist Dr. Barney Graham for comment:

  “I was told by a contact you may be willing to give an opinion of this paper that has just gone live. It suggests the new Coronavirus has four inserts similar to HIV-1 and this is not a coincidence,” reads the email.

  

  Graham immediately forwards the correspondence to the Office of Communications and Government Relations (OCGR), saying “This is one we don’t want to answer without high-level input, but wanted you to know about the rising controversy.”

  

  Two days later, Jennifer Routh OCGR replies, telling Graham: “OCGR is going to send a note to the reporter to decline, noting that the paper is not peer-reviewed. Please let us know if you receive similar requests.”

  

  That same Sunday morning, Fauci is looped in – with Sir Jeremy Farrar forwarding Zero Hedge‘s article after mentioning how World Health Organization Director Tedros Adhanom and the organization’s cabinet chief were in ‘conclave’ – ostensibly on how to manage the narrative – noting “If they do prevaricate [bullshit the public], I would appreciate a call with you later tonight or tomorrow to think how we might take forward.”

  “Do you have a minute for a quick call?” Fauci replies, after having called the Indian paper “really outlandish.”

  Wow! @zerohedge gets mentioned! @JeremyFarrar pic.twitter.com/OKvo5ekL8G

  — Jess (@uacjess) June 1, 2021

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

  Of course, the Indian paper was quickly withdrawn by its authors, and the notion that COVID-19 could have been man-made was rendered radioactive – for a while.

  Is it any question how our Twitter (and Google) deplatformings happened, before both companies chose to reverse their decisions?

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 16:00

• Three Arrows Capital Is Sorry (Maybe): Recap Of The Biggest Crypto News In The Last Week Of July
  Three Arrows Capital Is Sorry (Maybe): Recap Of The Biggest Crypto News In The Last Week Of July

  By Donovan Choy of Bankless

  Three Arrows Capital founders break silence

  The founders of 3AC broke their silence this week in a widely publicized Bloomberg piece. The article doesn’t shed light on any new salient information, but is noteworthy because it’s the first we’re hearing from the co-captains that steered a gargantuan financial catastrophe. Here’s a summary of reasons Zhu and Davies gave for 3AC’s downfall in the interview:

  1. They got too close to Do Kwon and overestimated LUNA’s potential
  2. They traded Grayscale BTC successfully “at the right window” but because many crypto firms “copied us into that trade… then the trust went… to a far bigger discount than anyone thought possible.”
  3. Bitcoin went from 30K to 20K and that was “extremely painful for us”
  4. “We had different types of trades that we all thought were good, and other people also had these trades,” Zhu said. “And then they kind of all got super marked down, super fast.”

  In short, we made risky trades that went south but it’s not all on us, because, well, everyone else did them too, and we couldn’t have foreseen that Bitcoin crash, so we got caught with our pants down by systemic risk. Well, okay. It’s true that no one can see the future. That’s exactly why an entire industry exists around risk management. They’re called hedging and diversification and every modern financial institution uses them except for 3AC which utterly failed to take them seriously.

  And then something that sounded… nothing like an apology:

  “People may call us stupid. They may call us stupid or delusional. And, I’ll accept that. Maybe,” Zhu said. “But they’re gonna, you know, say that I absconded funds during the last period, where I actually put more of my personal money back in. That’s not true.”

  “The whole situation is regrettable,” Davies said. “Many people lost a lot of money.” “We believed in everything to the fullest,” added Davies. “We had all of our, almost all of our assets in there. And then in the good times we did the best. And then in the bad times we lost the most.”

  And then there’s this attempt at signaling humility:

  The [$50 million yacht] “was bought over a year ago and commissioned to be built and to be used in Europe,” Zhu said, adding the yacht “has a full money trail.” He rejected the perception that he enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle, noting that he biked to work and back every day and that his family “only has two homes in Singapore.” “We were never seen in any clubs spending lots of money. We were never seen, you know, kind of driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis around,” Zhu said.

  By the way, I live in Singapore. The average cost of a car is ~150K USD which explains why the mass majority of Singaporeans commute to work by public transportation. If you’re biking to work, you probably live in the wealthiest estates of the city-state, and we already know that one of Zhu’s home was a 31,000-square-foot home worth $35M. So whatever two humble abodes Zhu was hopping in between, they were more like palaces relative to the average person.

  Common y’all. Su ain’t flashy, he rides his bike to work and to the marina where his superyacht is moored.

  ONLY 2 homes, brah you straight slumming it in the Kampong aka Tanglin. pic.twitter.com/hFhEs8jyBV

  — Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) July 22, 2022

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  Coinbase insider trading

  The big story this week revolves around Coinbase. Here are the quick facts:

  1. Between June 2021-April 2022, former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi who worked on the assets listing team tipped off two others – his brother and a friend – about 25 to-be listed coins and collectively raked in profits of up to $1.5M.
  2. Some early signs emerged in mid-April when Cobie tweeted about a wallet that scooped up 100K+ worth of tokens 24 hours before it was published on the Coinbase Asset listing post.
  3. The US DOJ is charging the trio with “wire fraud conspiracy… in connection with a scheme to commit insider trading in cryptocurrency assets by using confidential Coinbase information”, and calling it “the first ever insider trading case involving cryptocurrency markets.”

  Story so far: TradFi insiders making money from insider deals. Nothing out of the ordinary yet, we know that TradFi bad, blockchain good. 

  But that’s not quite the drama at hand here. The SEC continued to separately file charges of “securities fraud” against the insider traders, alleging that nine of the traded assets listed by Coinbase were unregistered securities (AMP, DDX, DFX, KROM, LCX, POWR, RGT, RLY, XYO). As a result, Coinbase is taking a hit as its stocks are down 21% and Cathie Wood of Ark Invest is reportedly dumping 1.41M Coinbase shares.

  To no one’s surprise, Coinbase and the broader crypto community isn’t happy. CFTC Commissioner Caroline Pham is calling this a “striking example of regulation by enforcement” or what is sometimes referred to as “rule by law”, a pejorative term to label state authoritarianism.

  The crux of the matter is this: The SEC’s charges contain a loaded premise, namely that these handful of Coinbase-listed tokens are indeed securities. Should the insider traders be convicted, it indirectly puts Coinbase and those token-issuers on trial for violating U.S. securities law.

  But even if the charges get dropped eventually, the accusation in itself is damning. It kicks up a fog of regulatory uncertainty for dozens of crypto exchanges that are listing the same tokens, as well as token-issuers broadly. This happened when the SEC brought an enforcement action against Ripple (XRP) back in 2020, and it’s happening again now.

  Ironically, Coinbase is most conservative in its token listings relative to its main competitors Binance and FTX. (If CZ or SBF reads this humble newsletter, please don’t let any insider traders screw this up.)

  But look, Coinbase is a regulated public company operating obediently within the confines of the official rulebook. If regulators have problems with Coinbase who plays nice and is rule-observing, decentralized exchanges that allow any token listing should be quaking in their boots.

  Asides from that, crypto being pigeonholed as a tradable security under U.S. securities law would mean being tangled up in the same TradFi regulatory apparatus. That means fines, regulatory burdens, and heightened entry barriers for new players. That’s bad for crypto innovation and goes against the fundamental permissionless ethos of the Web3 project.

  More interesting but hard to settle is the normative question of whether digital assets should be considered securities. The U.S. traditionally determines whether something is a “security” based on the Howey test, where the criteria is an investment contract that includes an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others”. Asides from a profit motive, regulators also look to the extent of its centralization i.e., whether the token has an active managerial team behind it.

  Which tokens would fit both those criteria? Does that exclude L1/L2 tokens like ETH or OP that function as a commodity (gas) to power an ecosystem? How about tokens like DYDX after they migrate to their own Cosmos chain – would that turn the DYDX token into a non-security? What about “reserve currency” tokens like OHM – are they a “store-of-value” asset like gold/Bitcoin, making them a non-security? Let’s not forget NFTs. Most buyers mint them with an expectation of a profit, but does that make it a security? 

  It’s all very fuzzy. I’ve written in a previous newsletter about why this debate amounts to a lot of arbitrary semantics. 

  Stop trying to solve everything w/ regulated crypto banks.

  That’s what the Genslers want.

  The answer to listing front running is Uniswap where anyone can list.

  The way we prevent another Celsius is by using Aave where loans are onchain.

  We have the solution it’s called DeFi.

  — RYAN SΞAN ADAMS – rsa.eth 🦇🔊 (@RyanSAdams) July 22, 2022

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  Web3 News Roundup

  Uniswap

  Uniswap fees are through the roof this week, with a higher 7 day average than the Ethereum, BNB Chain and Bitcoin networks put together.

  🤯 pic.twitter.com/qsiiI9W3rr

  — hayden.eth 🦄 (@haydenzadams) July 25, 2022

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  At present, Uniswap the DAO does not make any profits as all revenues go to liquidity providers (for more on which DeFi protocols are profitable, see Ben’s article this week). This is part of Uniswap’s strategy to maintain a competitive advantage, until it turns on the so-called “fee-switch” that would let the DAO earn by redirecting fees from liquidity providers.

  Recent Uniswap governance discussions show the Uniswap community taking its first steps towards flipping on the fee-switch on pools with deep liquidity, relatively high volume and least potential of impermanent loss.

  Goerli testnet

  The Goerli testnet, the final testnet before the Merge has been announced by Ethereum developers on August 6-12th.

  BREAKING:

  Ethereum developers announce merge date for Goerli testnet: Aug 6th-12th

  This is the LAST STEP before The Merge

  Bullish🚀

  — bankless.eth (@BanklessHQ) July 28, 2022

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  Other news:

  The WNBA is using POAPs; Solana has physical stores; Mirror is launching Web3 subscriptions, which lets users subscribe to publications with their wallets; WalletConnect introduces a DM feature connecting users on any chain; Rainbow rolled out support for L2 NFTs; Optimism launches a Get Started onboarding quest.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 15:30

• Biden Tests Positive For 'Rebound' COVID, Goes Back Into Isolation
  Biden Tests Positive For ‘Rebound’ COVID, Goes Back Into Isolation

  One day after hanging around a bunch of CEOs (without a mask), fully vaccinated President Joe Biden has once against tested positive for COVID-19 in a so-called ‘rebound’ case after being treated with Paxlovid, his physician said in a Saturday letter.

  

  Unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, Biden reportedly “continues to feel quite well,” according Dr. Kevin O’Connor. “This being the case, there is no reason to reinitiate treatment at this time, but we will obviously continue close observation.”

  O’Connor added that Biden tested negative on Tuesday evening, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning before testing positive again on Saturday.

  When we saw Biden this week after he tested negative, he did not wear a mask around others as CDC says he should. WH says he was sufficiently distanced from others but CDC guidance says nothing about distance when requiring recently-positive people to mask for a few days pic.twitter.com/y76T32s60y

  — Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) July 30, 2022

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  pic.twitter.com/u7THNeau0G

  — Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) July 30, 2022

  How about two doses, two boosters, and a full cycle of Paxlovid? https://t.co/r66LRaaeZf

  — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 30, 2022

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  Twice vaxxed, twice boosted, full round of Paxlovid….

  There’s your $PFE short thesis https://t.co/WplL2U4iD4

  — Inflation Production Act Swan (@TheWuhanClan) July 30, 2022

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 15:00

• Court Rejects Google's Attempt To Dismiss Rumble's Antitrust Lawsuit, Ensuring Vast Discovery
  Court Rejects Google’s Attempt To Dismiss Rumble’s Antitrust Lawsuit, Ensuring Vast Discovery

  Authored by Glenn Greenwld via greenwald.substack.com,

  A federal district court in California on Friday denied Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the Silicon Valley giant is violating federal antitrust laws by preventing fair competition against its YouTube video platform. The lawsuit against the search engine giant, which has owned YouTube since its 2006 purchase for $1.65 billion, was brought in early 2021 by Rumble, the free speech competitor to YouTube. Its central claim is that Google’s abuse of its monopolistic stranglehold on search engines to destroy all competitors to its various other platforms is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which makes it unlawful to “monopolize, or attempt to monopolize…any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.”

  

  It is rare for antitrust suits against the four Big Tech corporate giants (Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon) to avoid early motions to dismiss. Friday’s decision against Google ensures that the suit now proceeds to the discovery stage, where Rumble will have the right to obtain from Google a broad and sweeping range of information about its practices, including internal documents on Google’s algorithmic manipulation of its search engine and the onerous requirements it imposes on companies dependent upon its infrastructure to all but force customers to use YouTube.

  Founded in 2013, Rumble began experiencing explosive growth in the run-up to the 2020 election. Americans were encountering escalating and aggressive Big Tech censorship of political content as the election approached. Conservative politicians, followed by a wide range of heterodox voices on the right and left, began migrating by the millions away from Google’s YouTube to Rumble, which has promised and thus provided far more permissive free speech rights. That was at the time when Google and other Big Tech platforms — at the urging of the Democratic-controlled Congress, began aggressively increasing its censorship of political video content on YouTube on the grounds of “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

  The explosive user growth which Rumble enjoyed in 2020 has continued to rapidly increase, as Big Tech generally, and Google specifically, clamped down further on dissident views in the name of the COVID pandemic, and now even more so with respect to the US/NATO role in the war in Ukraine. More and more prominent politicians, journalists and commentators, along with smaller content creators, have either been banned by YouTube or left on their own accord to join Rumble as Google’s crackdown on free speech intensifies. The ability to speak more freely on Rumble regarding the most contentious political debates has become one of the key drivers of the exodus of users — both those with large public platforms and ordinary citizens alike — from YouTube to Rumble.

  During the COVID pandemic, Rumble allowed far greater questioning of the claims and policies of U.S. health policy official Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization — regarding the virus’s origins, the efficacy of masks, and the justifiability of vaccine mandates — than Big Tech platforms permitted. For the first year of the pandemic, Big Tech users who questioned or rejected the official story that COVID-19 was zoonotic rather than due to a lab leak in Wuhan were silenced or banned: a censorship policy that was reversed only when the Biden administration itself admitted that it did not know the answer to that question and would officially investigate it.

  Similarly, Americans who were stifled or outright barred by Big Tech from citing pre-election revelations about Joe Biden from the archive of his son obtained by The New York Post found a place, on Rumble, where they could openly reference and discuss them. And Rumble has aggressively resisted pressure campaigns from the U.S. government and corporate media outlets and outright legal bans enacted by the EU requiring all platforms to cease allowing “pro-Russian” news outlets such as RT and Sputnik to be heard.

  Rumble’s user growth, driven overwhelmingly by growing anger toward Big Tech censorship and de-platforming, has continued to swell this year. As Investor Place’s Ian Cooper wrote in April, “its user base hit a new record of 41 million monthly active users in the first quarter of 2022. That is 22% growth quarter-over-quarter.” Moreover, “Rumble is setting user engagement records. In the first quarter of 2022, Rumble users watched about 10.5 billion minutes per month.”

  As discussed on this page and as was reported by The Washington Post, I was one of a group of nine journalists and commentators, along with former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), to make Rumble my primary home for video journalism in mid-2021 based on support for its free speech principles and the need for alternatives to centralized Big Tech repression. Though the purpose of that Post article was to predictably malign Rumble as a cesspool of hate speech and disinformation — relying on and extensively quoting a “disinformation” expert who happens to partner with U.S. and British intelligence agencies and Big Tech platforms such as Google and Facebook — The Post was forced to acknowledge how significant Rumble’s growth has been (and since that August, 2021 Post article, the growth has increased further):

  Rumble has grown from 1 million active users last summer to roughly 30 million, said the site’s chief executive Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian tech entrepreneur who worked a brief internship at Microsoft and founded a viral-joke website before launching Rumble in 2013. And its traffic has exploded: According to data shared with The Washington Post by the analytics firm Similarweb, visits in the United States to the site grew from about 200,000 in the last week of July 2020 to nearly 19 million last week — a 9,000 percent increase.

  Though Rumble’s audience size is still significantly smaller than YouTube’s, the threat posed by Rumble to YouTube is real. Rumble’s imminent merger with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) CF Acquisition Corp. VI will effectively make Rumble a public company and is likely to arm it with far greater capital to compete even more robustly with YouTube.

  But the major obstacle to competing with Big Tech giants generally, and Google specifically, is that these companies have acquired such extreme market dominance in so many key areas of the internet that they abuse that power to prevent competition and crush any competitors who pose a challenge. That these four Big Tech giants are classic monopolies in violation of the antitrust law was the emphatic conclusion of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law’s comprehensive 2020 report, a conclusion that now has ample support from leading members of both parties.

  ---

  The lawsuit brought by Rumble against Google is designed to ensure free and fair competition, so that the public is not effectively forced to use YouTube but can instead fairly choose among Google’s competitors as well. The primary allegation is that Google abuses its power as the dominant search engine and destroys free competition for online video platforms by manipulating its algorithms to prevent YouTube’s competitors, including Rumble, from being found by the public.

  Attempts to find Rumble videos through Google searches are purposely thwarted by burying Rumble’s videos and instead redirecting the user to YouTube, the lawsuit alleges. Google’s “chokehold on search is impenetrable, and that chokehold allows it to continue unfairly and unlawfully to self-preference YouTube over its rivals, including Rumble, and to monopolize the online video platform market.” I often am unable to find my own videos using Google’s search engines even when I recall the title of the video more or less perfectly, and have frequently heard the same complaint from viewers.

  Further illegal monopolistic acts alleged by the complaint include Google’s manufacturing of its Android phones with a pre-installed YouTube app as the default video setting, and imposing agreements on other Android-based mobile smart device manufacturers to pre-install YouTube, place it in the most prominent position, and prevent users from deleting it. The court summarized the alleged anti-competitive results of Google’s behavior this way (citations omitted):

  [Google] “requires Android device manufacturers that want to preinstall certain of Google’s proprietary apps to sign an anti-forking agreement.” [Rumble] alleges that once an Android device manufacturer signs an anti-forking agreement, Google will only provide access to its vital proprietary apps and application program interfaces if the manufacturer agrees: “(1) to take (that is, pre-install) a bundle of other Google apps (such as its YouTube app); (2) to make certain apps undeletable (including its YouTube app); and (3) to give Google the most valuable and important location on the device’s default home screen (including for its YouTube app).”

  As another example, [Rumble] asserts that “Google provides share of its search advertising revenue to Android device manufacturers, mobile phone carriers, competing browsers, and Apple; in exchange, Google becomes the preset default general search engine for the most important search access points on a computer or mobile device.” And, by becoming the default general search engine, Google is able to continue its manipulation of video search results using its search engine to self-preference its YouTube platform, making sure that links to videos on the YouTube platform are listed above the fold on the search results page.” [Moreover], Google’s revenue sharing agreements allow it to maintain a monopoly in the general search market and online video platform market).

  As a result of the denial of Google’s motion to dismiss the complaint, the lawsuit will now proceed to the discovery stage. After denying Google’s request to dismiss the lawsuit prior to discovery, the judge scheduled a conference at which a discovery plan would be established. This phase of the lawsuit is when one party can obtain a broad range of documents from the other relevant to the claims of the lawsuit.

  The antitrust specialist Matt Stoller, Research Director of the American Economic Liberties Project, said about the ruling: “Getting past the motion to dismiss stage is quite meaningful, and depending on what turns up in discovery Google could be in serious trouble.” This ruling should enable Rumble to acquire and utilize extremely revealing documents about how Google exploits its algorithms to manipulate search results on its dominant search engine, as well the burdensome requirements it imposes on other companies dependent on Google’s infrastructure to ensure prominent promotion of YouTube.

  Google did not respond to requests for comment on the judicial ruling. Rumble’s statement was naturally celebratory: “We welcome the court’s decision, which is a significant step toward ending Google’s unlawful preferences for YouTube and helping to put creators first. We look forward to starting discovery.”

  When Rumble first filed the suit, its founder and CEO, Chris Pavlovski, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that the company’s data specialists had determined that, with its search engine algorithmic manipulations, “Google has redirected up to 9.3 billion visitors to YouTube instead of to Rumble.” These anti-competitive practices by Google, he argued, destroy the possibility for innovation and competition: “Imagine being a tech entrepreneur trying to build an online video platform. You absolutely do not have a shot. You do not have a chance. You have pre-installed YouTube apps on phones. You have a rigged search engine. You have no ability to compete in this market.”

  Lawsuits like these have the ability to unite people across the political spectrum. Stoller, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the question of Big Tech monopolistic dominance, noted that “the case leverages antitrust action by the government pursued under both Trump and Biden. It’s also notable that this ruling came from an Obama-appointed judge. Clearly concentrations of power worry both sides.”

  Regardless of whether one is an avid admirer of the modern iteration of capitalism, there is nothing to cheer when a tiny group of corporate giants can corner a market and prevent competition. That is particularly true when — as is obviously the case for Big Tech — the “market” in question is now the primary means by which Americans gather information, politically organize, receive and disseminate news, and question and debate the most consequential political controversies. The political and propagandistic aspects of these anti-competitive practices substantially elevate the public interest in fostering free and fair market competition. To allow a tiny number of tech giants to maintain a stranglehold on the digital public square is self-evidently dangerous, especially as they escalate their censorship regime, due to some combination of their own political interests, the demands of the majority political party in Washington, and the incessant grievances of their own work force.

  These dangers are not abstract. Perhaps they were most vividly seen in January, 2021, when Parler — designed as a free speech alternative to Facebook and Twitter — became the most-downloaded app in the country, fueled by anger over the pre-election censorship of the New York Post‘s reporting on Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China as well as the banishment of President Trump by a consortium of Big Tech giants. As soon as Parler rose to the top spot, Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and censorship activists groups such as Sleeping Giants demanded that Google and Apple immediately remove Parler from their app stores, preventing any further downloading. Other Democratic lawmakers then demanded that Amazon Web Services, the dominant hosting company that had enabled Parler’s website, terminate its agreement with Parler.

  Within forty-eight hours, all three Silicon Valley monopolies complied with these demands. Parler instantly went from the most popular app in the country — thanks to the free speech principles it upheld — to utterly crippled if not destroyed. It attempted to come back but never really recovered. That was as brute and stark a display of Big Tech’s ability and willingness to destroy any successful competitors as one might imagine. And in the process, they not only abused their anti-competitive dominance to destroy one of their few successful competitors but also, heeding the demands of Democratic Party politicians, abolished one of the few significant venues on the internet where Americans could gather to freely question and dissent from the orthodoxies and pronouncements of their leaders.

  

  There are other antitrust actions currently pending against the Big Tech giants from both private companies and, increasingly, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). But this suit from Rumble has enormous potential to open competition in the vital video uploading market and, perhaps even more importantly, shed substantial light on the extremely opaque and guarded algorithmic manipulations Google uses to force down the public’s throat the content it wants them to see while hiding that which it does not want them to see.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 14:30

• Food Banks Across America Report Record Demand And Record Shortages
  Food Banks Across America Report Record Demand And Record Shortages

  Food pantries and food banks are a key economic indicator for tracking poverty levels and financial instability in the US, and in the past few months they have been ringing alarm bells.

  Stagflationary pressures have all but wiped out the savings of the average American and driven up credit card debt to historic highs.  Only in the past month have credit spending and debt levels begun to slide, but this is more a sign that consumers are tapped out rather than a sign of a return to normalcy.  High prices are slowly but surely overwhelming lower wage workers in particular.  The average living wage across most US states is around $16 an hour; over 30% of American workers make less than $15 an hour. 

  Democrats and leftists will of course claim that this is because the Federal Minimum Wage is too low and needs to be increased, but the minimum wage has become irrelevant in the post-covid economy.  Many retail and service companies now pay around $11-14 an hour, well above minimum wage, in order to retain workers. And STILL prices are too high for many of these people to keep up with expenses.

  Can average workers demand more money?  Probably not.  Low skill and no-skill workers are going to have a hard time rationalizing $16-$20 an hour for flipping burgers, brewing coffee or running cash registers.  Such a broad wage increase would also trigger even higher prices on most goods, defeating the purpose of higher pay.    

  The notion of a low wage worker revolt is a bit of a fantasy, and in some ways it can be dangerous for those that believe in it.  The trillions of dollars in covid stimulus unleashed in 2020 may have boosted retail sales and employment for a couple of years, but that’s coming to an end quickly.  Workers can only opt out of certain jobs for a short time (as long as their parents will let them freeload), and bargaining for more money is dependent on their ability to get employment elsewhere.  It’s a sure bet that by mid-2023 many “wage revolutionaries” will be begging for their old burger jobs back.     

  Stagflation is not a wage issue so much as a money supply issue.  There are too many dollars chasing too few goods.  This is coupled with numerous supply chain problems caused by covid hysteria in export nations like China that are holding up a large number of cargo ships for weeks or months at a time.  When it comes to food in particular, there are weather issues, war issues and governments sabotaging food production within their own countries using nonsensical climate change restrictions (as we are seeing in places like the Netherlands).     

  So, if people aren’t going to get higher wages, and prices are going to continue climbing, what are they going to do?  They generally turn to charities to help get through the month.  

  

  Food pantries usually don’t offer enough supplies to fully feed a family, but they do supplement your existing income by adding a week or two worth of sustenance per month.  Many people will visit more than a couple food pantries at a time in order to stock enough for their families.  The problem with price inflation is that it tends to directly affect and reduce the amount of donations that pantries receive and the amount of food they can give away.  

  In the past month there has been a steady stream of reports from pantries across the US stating that they are now hitting record high demand and record low supply.  From New York to Wisconsin to Ohio to Missouri to Florida to Arkansas to California and beyond, pantries are running out.  On top of that, it’s the middle of summer – The busiest time for food banks and the Salvation Army is during the winter holidays.

  The majority of pantries indicate that they are most in need of cash donations and that these have started to fade out.  When it comes to necessities, most people will not or cannot reduce the frequency of their purchases.  Food, gas, housing, utilities, etc. are fixed income costs, and when these costs rise workers must cut costs elsewhere.  Charities are usually the first to see the chopping block.    

  The avalanche of reports suggests that this winter will be high in food demand and dismal in terms of supply, with little relief from charities.  The most advisable option would be to stock dry and canned goods with a long shelf life now while they are still available and prepare for the cold season when demand skyrockets even higher.  Even people in financial distress can utilize pantries today and stock supplies for the months ahead if they plan carefully.  Those same pantries may not exist when winter rolls around, so now is the time to act.      

  Still, don’t call it a recession (or depression)… 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/30/2022 – 14:00

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