Apr 04

Today’s News 4th April 2023

  • French Minister Slammed For Playboy Photoshoot As Paris Protests Intensify
    French Minister Slammed For Playboy Photoshoot As Paris Protests Intensify

    Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

    It’s the latest in a long line of PR disasters for President Macron’s government…

    A French government minister has been scolded by members of her own party after posing for a photoshoot for the cover of Playboy magazine during a time of deep civil unrest following the government’s controversial pension reforms.

    In another government faux pas, Marlene Schiappa, who serves as minister for the social economy, will become the first female politician to appear on the front cover of the magazine when the April edition is published.

    The 40-year-old minister was fully clothed for the shoot with leaked photos showing her posing in a bow-tied white dress, and another with her wrapped seductively in the French flag. The headline on the front cover reads: “A liberated minister.”

    The photo shoot is accompanied by a 12-page interview in which she talks about women’s and LGBT rights.

    Political opponents and allies alike have criticized Schiappa for the move, questioning both the timing and its appropriateness.

    Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne reportedly scolded the minister for her decision to appear on the magazine cover, telling her it “was not at all appropriate, especially in the current period,” according to BFMTV citing government sources.

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    “I thought it was April Fool’s Day in advance,” added Ludovic Mendes, a Renaissance party colleague of Ms. Schiappa’s.

    “I can understand the feminist fight, but I don’t see why we would do it in Playboy. There are other ways to do it,” he added.

    Sandrine Rousseau, a Green Party politician, questioned the timing of the stunt and suggested it was being used to detract from the headlines on the ongoing mass protests across the country over the French government’s decision to bypass a parliamentary vote on its controversial pension reform.

    “We are in the middle of a social crisis, there is the issue of policing, there are people between life and death; it mostly strikes me as a smoke screen,” she told BFMTV on Friday.

    Left-wing radical and former presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said that “France is going off the rails” making reference to Schiappa’s Playboy appearance and President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to give an interview to children’s magazine Pif Gadget despite avoiding the media for weeks.

    “In a country where the president expresses himself in Pif and his minister in Playboy, the problem would be the opposition. France is going off the rails,” Mélenchon tweeted on Saturday.

    Schiappa took to the social media platform herself over the weekend to defend her decision.

    “Defending the right of women to exercise control over their bodies is everywhere and all the time. In France, women are free. With all due respect to the backsliders and the hypocrites,” she wrote.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/04/2023 – 02:00

  • CJ Hopkins: The New Normal Left
    CJ Hopkins: The New Normal Left

    Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

    So, I went to London to speak to the Left … no, not “the Left” you’re probably thinking of.

    Not the mask-wearing, Ukrainian-flag-flying Left. Not the pronoun-using, segregationist Left. Not the WEF, WHO, FBI, CIA, DHS, and MI6-loving Left. Not the global-capitalist New Normal Left.

    The other Left. The old-school Left. The “Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Putin-loving, far-right-extremist” Left.

    There were approximately 150 of us, and we gathered in a “homophobic church” in Islington. Yes, Islington, which is more or less the British headquarters of the New Normal Left.

    We did not care.

    “Let them come for us,” we said.

    They didn’t. It was a Saturday. They were probably out shopping or hunting down imaginary anti-Semites.

    So, we went ahead and did our thing.

    Our “thing” was a conference loosely based on leftist opposition to the WEF and its assorted dystopian visions for our future … you know, eating the bugs, owning nothing, being happy, that kind of stuff. I was invited by this group called Real Left to speak on a panel with Fabio Vighi, a professor of Critical Theory at Cardiff University. We didn’t talk about the WEF very much. We mostly talked about global capitalism, totalitarianism, and “the New Normal Left.”

    Here are the broad strokes of what I said the conference.

    *  *  *

    In order to understand what happened to the Left (i.e., how it became the New Normal Left), you have to understand the history of global capitalism over the last 30 years or so. Actually, you have to go back a bit farther, back to the early 20th Century, when the Great Ideological Game was still afoot. Back then, capitalism, having overthrown the aristocracies, was on the march, transforming the world into one big marketplace. It was challenged by two opposing ideologies, fascism and communism. They fought it out. Long story short, capitalism won.

    Global capitalism (“GloboCap”) was born. It’s one big global-capitalist world now. It has been since the early 1990s. GloboCap has no external adversaries, so it has nothing to do but Clear and Hold, i.e., wipe out pockets of internal resistance and implement ideological uniformity. Which is what it has been doing for the last 30 years, first, in the former Soviet bloc, then, in “The Global War on Terror,” and finally, in our so-called “Western democracies,” as we have just experienced up close and personal during the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal, and are continuing to experience, albeit somewhat less dramatically.

    In other words, GloboCap is going totalitarian. That is what the New Normal is. It is not your granddad’s totalitarianism. It is a new, global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. It displays a number of familiar features — suspension of constitutional rights, official propaganda, goon squads, censorship, ubiquitous symbols of ideological conformity, gratuitous restrictions of freedom of movement and other aspects of everyday life, hatred and persecution of official “Untermenschen,” segregation, criminalization of dissent, mob violence, book burning, show trials, etc. — but there won’t be anyone goose-stepping around in jackboots shrieking about “the master race.” It’s not that kind of totalitarianism.

    To understand it (which it would behoove us to do), we need to understand global-capitalist ideology, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. Global capitalism has no ideology … or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you have no ideological adversaries, you don’t need an ideology. You’re basically God. “Reality” is whatever you say it is, and whoever disagrees is a “science denier,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” or a “malinformationist,” or some other type of deluded “extremist.” You don’t need to argue ideology with anyone, because you have no ideological opponents. Society is divided into two fundamental groups, (a) “normal people,” who accept “reality,” and (b) the “deviants” and “extremists,” who do not. Your political and ideological opponents are pathologized, preemptively delegitimized. After all, who would argue against “reality” except liars and the clinically insane?

    Yes, of course, there is intramural political and ideological conflict within the confines of so-called “normality,” just as there is intramural competition between global corporations, but challenging the ideological system itself is impossible, because there is no ground outside it from which to mount an attack. This is probably the hardest thing for most of us to come to terms with. There is no ideological territory outside global capitalism. There is no “outside.” There are no external adversaries. There are only insurgencies, and counterinsurgency ops.

    The rest is intramural competition.

    And here’s another thing that we need to understand about global-capitalist ideology, and it isn’t going to make my conservative readers, or my libertarian readers, or my leftist readers, happy. But it is essential to understanding the New Normal Left and the shape of the current ideological landscape. I’m going to try to keep this as simple as possible and not get lost in a bunch of post-structuralist mumbo jumbo.

    Ready? OK, here we go.

    Capitalism is a values-decoding machine. It decodes society of despotic values (i.e., religious values, racist values, socialist values, traditional values, any and all values that interfere with the unimpeded flows of capital … capitalism does not distinguish). This is how capitalism (or democracy if you’re squeamish) freed us from a despotic “reality” in which values emanated from the aristocracies, kings, priests, the Church, etc. Basically, it transferred the emanation and enforcement of values from despotic structures to the marketplace, where everything is essentially a commodity.

    So, hurrah … capitalism freed us from despotism! I’m grateful. I’m not a big fan of despotism. The problem is, it’s just a machine. And it has no off-switch.

    And now it dominates the entire planet unopposed or restricted in any meaningful way.

    So it’s doing what it is designed to do, stripping societies of their despotic values, rendering everything and everyone a commodity, establishing and enforcing ideological uniformity, neutralizing pockets of internal resistance.

    The vast majority of that resistance is reactionary. I do not mean that in the pejorative sense.

    Most of the opposition to the New Normal has come from the traditional political right, from folks who are trying to preserve their values, i.e., to prevent them from being decoded by the GloboCap values-decoding machine. A lot of these folks don’t see it that way, because they do not want to face the fact that what they are resisting is global capitalism, so they call it other names like “crony capitalism,” “corporatism,” or “cultural Marxism.” I don’t really care what they call it, except when they call it “communism,” which just makes them sounds extremely silly.

    The point is, these folks comprise a reactionary force that is pushing back against the advance of global-capitalism and its ideology, whether they know what they are resisting or not. Russia is another such reactionary force, at least insofar as it is attempting to defend what remains of its national sovereignty. Syria and Iran are two other examples. All of these reactionary forces are integrated within the GloboCap system and at the same time are resisting their absorption by it. The dynamics are complex. It isn’t a cartoon or a Hollywood movie with “good guys” and “bad guys.”

    Anyway, the battlefield looks like this … you’ve got GloboCap conducting its Clear-and-Hold op, and you’ve got the reactionary (“populist”) backlash against it. And that’s it.

    Those are the only significant forces on the battlefield, currently.

    Which brings us to the miserable state of the Left.

    The Left – and I mean “the Left” broadly, so liberals, and both serious and Brooklyn leftists – are in an ideological double-bind.

    Either they align with an increasingly totalitarian GloboCap or they align with the reactionary backlash against it.

    They can’t align with the reactionaries, because a lot of them are … well, you know, somewhat bigoted, or they believe in God, or they object to drag queens rubbing themselves all over kids. Many of them own multiple firearms (i.e., the reactionaries, not the drag queens) and fly giant American flags outside their homes (or whatever flags they fly in Great Britain). Many of them voted for Donald Trump, or Brexit, or the AfD here in Germany, or the National Rally in France, or The Brothers of Italy. These are not BBC/NPR-listening people. These are not pronoun-using people. These are scary working-class people.

    So the Left has aligned with GloboCap, which, after all, is still decoding all those nasty despotic values (i.e., racism, and other forms of bigotry), and is opposing dictators and religious zealots, and is spreading “democracy” all across the planet. You might think I am being facetious. I am not. Global capitalism is still doing that. Which I support, as do all liberals and leftists.

    The catch is, as global capitalism continues to do that, and makes a big show of doing that, it is also going totalitarian. It is not decoding those despotic values out of the goodness of its heart. What it is doing is establishing ideological uniformity. The problem is, it has no ideology. All it knows how to do is decode values, transforming societies into markets and everything in them into valueless commodities. Which it is doing in totalitarian fashion. The Nazis referred to this process as “Gleichschaltung,” the synchronization of all elements of society according to official ideology. That is what is happening, currently, globally.

    GloboCap has begun the transition from a “reality” of competing ideologies, sovereign nation-states, cultures, and values to a new, supranational, post-ideological, eventually trans-human, globalized “reality,” and the message is, “you are either with us or against us.”

    The New Normal Left is obviously with GloboCap.

    New Normal Leftists will furiously deny this, as they shriek for more censorship of dissent and cheer for actual Sieg-heiling Nazis. Just as the “populist” Right cannot accept the fact that what it is opposing is a form of capitalism, the New Normal Left cannot accept the fact that it is aligned with a new form of totalitarianism. It is literally inconceivable to them.

    You can show them screenshots of their posts and Tweets in which they called for “the Unvaccinated” to be locked up in camps, and pictures of when they formed fanatical mobs and threatened people who wouldn’t chant their slogans, and they will look at you as if you are out of your mind.

    *  *  *

    And so we are in a bit of a fix. Which is basically what I told the conference in London. I wish I had some brilliant plan of action to offer. Sadly, I do not. Probably no one does at this stage of things. After all, the New Normal is just getting started.

    That said, one thing I’m sure about is, if you don’t want to end up eating the bugs and owning nothing and being happy in your AI-monitored 15-minute city while you wait for your social-credit app to update your vaccination record so you can access your CBDC account and make another minimum payment on your ever-deepening credit-card debt, it would probably be a good idea to try to understand what is actually happening.

    Or maybe not. What do I know? I’m just an old “far-right extremist lefty.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/04/2023 – 00:00

  • China's Soaring Loan Demand Overstates Its Business Recovery
    China’s Soaring Loan Demand Overstates Its Business Recovery

    By Ye Xie, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

    While the US banking turmoil has eased lately, the economic damage from an inevitable tightening in lending may only be starting.  

    In China, the opposite seems to be happening. The latest central bank survey shows that credit demand surged to the highest in more than a decade. That lending boom, though, may overstate the recovery in business and consumer confidence.

    On Monday, the US ISM manufacturing index slumped to the lowest level since May 2020. It may be one of the earliest signs of the knock-on effect from bank failures last month. While the deposit outflows at small banks seem to be stabilizing, the underlying issue is far from being resolved. The yield advantage of money-market funds is likely to force banks to raise rates to compete for deposits. The resulting higher funding costs could cap banks’ willingness and capacity to lend.

    In China, a different dynamic is on display. The PBOC’s quarterly survey of bankers released Monday showed loan demand surged to the highest in 11 years.

    The survey result is in-line with the actual bank lending data, which show long-term corporate loans are shooting through the roof, thanks to lower borrowing costs. It is in sharp contrast with the deleveraging in the household sector amid housing turmoil.

    At first glance, strong long-term borrowing seems to suggest a resurgence of business confidence as entrepreneurs expand factories or invest in new businesses.

    But the central bank’s surveys of businesses and households cast doubt on this interpretation. The macroeconomic heat index of entrepreneurs only recovered in the first quarter to a level seen a year ago, with domestic and export orders showing only marginal improvement. The profitability index actually fell to the lowest level since March 2020. On the household side, the survey also shows a modest recovery in consumer confidence.

    All in all, business and consumer confidence seems to be on the mend, but it’s far from a full recovery. That suggests at least part of the demand for corporate debt may be companies borrowing new money to refinance existing debt, as opposed to expanding their business.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 23:40

  • With Assist From Manhattan DA, Trump Once Again Enjoys United GOP Support
    With Assist From Manhattan DA, Trump Once Again Enjoys United GOP Support

    Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,

    Donald Trump again made history Thursday evening, this time by becoming the first former president of the United States to be indicted, stemming from charges related to illegal hush money payments made to a porn star in 2016.

    And yet even while in legal jeopardy, blindsided by an indictment he hoped to avoid, Trump has tightened his grip on the GOP. His wrongful persecution has become the defining cause of the right. At least that’s how many Republicans see it.

    “When our justice system is weaponized as a political tool, it endangers all of us,” said Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. “This is a blatant abuse of power from a DA focused on political vengeance instead of keeping people safe.”

    Allies close to the former president previously cautioned him to avoid controversy and to move beyond personal politics to focus on the challenges facing the nation. If he could just do that, Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted in an interview last summer with RealClearPolitics, Trump had “a damn good chance of winning” not just the nomination but once again the White House.

    “If it is a grievance campaign,” the South Carolina Republican almost sighed, “then he is gonna have a problem.” Less than a year later, Trump is a candidate again. And Trump is very much aggrieved. But this time, the grievance isn’t exactly by his own invitation. Graham now sees it central to his return to power.

    “How does this end, Sean,” the senator told the host of Hannity on Fox News, “Trump wins in court. And he wins the election. That’s how this works.” A loyal surrogate for that presidential campaign, he urged viewers three different times to go donate to the former president because “he has spent more money on lawyers than most people spend on campaigns – they’re trying to bleed him dry.”

    Graham isn’t wrong, not just about mounting legal expenses, but more broadly about Trump’s mounting lead in the polls since predicting nearly two weeks ago that he would soon be arrested. He was already the undisputed front runner in the polls before the indictment.

    Now defense of the former president is the united cause of the Republican Party. It instantly shifted the 2024 landscape. The scope of the indictment is not known, though some early reporting suggests Trump could face more than 30 counts related to business fraud. Forthcoming legal details, however, were immediately eclipsed by political considerations Thursday evening.

    The indictment was just more of the same, Trump said in a statement, likening it to “Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”

    For Republicans, it was muscle memory to rally to Trump’s defense like they have done so many times before. “Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said in a statement echoed across all corners of the right from old Trump rivals, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who said the indictment signaled “the death of the rule of law,” and new Trump allies, like Ohio Sen. JD Vance who called it “political persecution.”

    Trump loyalists seem to have been caught off guard Thursday by leaked news that a grand jury voted to indict the former president. Given that federal prosecutors declined previously to take up the issue of hush payments made ahead of the 2016 election, they had hoped that Bragg wouldn’t ultimately follow through.

    Alina Habba, Trump’s attorney, said in an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News that she was “shocked” by the news. She confirmed that a booking at the New York City courthouse, complete with fingerprinting and a mug shot, was soon expected.

    If the coming legal wrangling is unprecedented, the political fallout was somewhat familiar. Although Trump’s 2024 rivals were quick to condemn the looming indictment, either by accident or design, the Manhattan district attorney has shifted the national political landscape just 10 months before the Iowa caucuses.

    Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is expected to make his own bid for the White House, said the treatment of his old boss was an “outrage” that amounted to “political persecution.” A representative for the Nikki Haley campaign pointed RCP to previous comments the former ambassador made condemning the then still rumored indictment as motivated by “revenge.”

    But perhaps the most significant development came from another Florida Republican, the only other potential candidate polling within striking distance of Trump.

    That state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, earlier incurred the wrath of Trump and many in his orbit for not speaking out sooner when the former president prematurely predicted his indictment. When first addressing the controversy, DeSantis pledged to avoid “the circus” altogether. Worse in the eyes of MAGA? DeSantis made reference to the underlying facts of the case.

    “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” DeSantis said at a press conference. “I just, I can’t speak to that.”

    But the governor did not take any shots, veiled or otherwise, at Trump Thursday evening. Instead, DeSantis condemned the indictment as “un-American.” DeSantis vowed that Florida, if it came to that, would not cooperate with forcing the former president from his estate in Mar-a-Lago to face charges in New York.

    “Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda,” he said in a statement.

    And just like that, with an assist from a local Democratic district attorney in a state no Republican has carried since 1984, it seems that rather than revisiting old grievances, a newly aggrieved Trump has moved one step closer to the Republican nomination. Lindsey Graham seemingly spoke for the GOP, while making little distinction between opposing an allegedly politicized prosecution, supporting Trump, and defending America itself.

    “This is the most irresponsible and dangerous decision by a prosecutor in the history of the country,” the South Carolina Republican said. “He’s opened up a Pandora’s box against the presidency itself.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 23:00

  • Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Makes Florida A Permitless Carry State
    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Makes Florida A Permitless Carry State

    A bill allowing individuals to carry concealed firearms without a permit was signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday.

    The governor’s office confirmed DeSantis’ signing in this press release:

    Today, Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill (HB) 543 which strengthens Floridians’ Second Amendment rights by allowing Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a government-issued permit. HB 543 goes into effect on July 1, 2023, making Florida the 26th state to enact Constitutional Carry legislation.

    “Constitutional Carry is in the books,” said Governor Ron DeSantis.

    After July 1, concealed carry permits will no longer be required. The measure has received criticism from gun control supporters. Those against the bill have expressed concerns that permitting individuals to carry concealed firearms in public without training and eliminating an extra background check requirement may be disastrous.

    Meanwhile, Second Amendment advocates, such as the bill’s sponsor, and State Rep. Chuck Brannan, R-Macclenny, said:

    “This bill is a big step, a big step to help the average law-abiding citizen, to keep them from having to go through the hoops of getting a permit from the government to carry their weapon.

     “It is also not going to change who can and who cannot carry a gun. People that are prohibited now are still going to be prohibited.”

    However, Luis Valdes, the Florida director of Gun Owners of America, told Tampa Bay Times the bill is a move in the right direction. He said, “permitless concealed carry is a good thing. But it’s not constitutional carry that we were promised.”

    The legislation was approved with a 76-32 vote in the House and a 27-13 vote in the Senate, with most of the votes following party lines. The majority of amendments proposed by Democrats were unsuccessful.

    “This doesn’t change you into James Bond with a license to kill,” Carey Baker, owner of A.W. Peterson Gun Shop in Mt. Dora and former state lawmaker, told local media outlet Welsh 2. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 22:40

  • Is China Winning?
    Is China Winning?

    By Russell Clark, author of the Capital Flows and Asset Markets substack

    A preferred trade for the last few years has been long GLD/short TLT – it represents the trade off facing western central bankers. Either destroy the bond (and assets) market, or face inflationary pressure. I have been surprised at how well this trade has held up in the face of an oil price falling from USD 120 to USD 80.

    But the GLD/TLT trade also has a significant political element to it. When we look at the very long graph (replacing TLT with a long dated treasury index), we can see the spike in the late 1970s. The sell off in the 1970s, represented the failure of the US. Its currency was very weak, treasuries had lost significant value, the Vietnam war had been lost, and the preceding decade had seen three major leaders assassinated, JFK, Bobby Kennedy and MLK. Ronald Reagan survived an attempted assassination in 1981. As an old New Yorker told me, in 1970s it felt like the US was a failed state. At that time, in confrontation with the USSR, soaring oil prices was a win for the Soviets and a loss for the US. The best thing about the US (and democracy in general), is that voting public do not like losers and losing policy, and Thatcher and Reagan were elected to change that, and move policy to pro-capital, a policy that is essentially deflationary.

    China is not the USSR. China has a functioning stockmarket, has the second most billionaires in the world, and is one of the largest markets globally for luxury goods (all decidedly un-communist features). As the largest importer of oil, rising oil prices are not a win like it was for the USSR. However, it is very much in China’s interest to see treasuries dislodged as the reserve asset for the global monetary system. China has been selling down its treasuries, and after the US froze Russian central bank holdings, who could blame them.

    Falling treasury holdings in China could be seen as deflationary. Certainly when total foreign reserves were falling in China in 2015, was a deflationary period that saw treasuries outperform gold. Now we see Chinese foreign reserves hold up, while its treasury holdings are falling.

    Another big change in last two years is that US inflation has been much higher that the China.

    One of my arguments is that when governments run pro-labor policies, inflation will be much stronger. To keep inflation in check, financial conditions need to be much tighter. Another way to think about it, is that you need to keep rich people spending in check, while the spending of the poor rises. China has been much “better” in making life tougher for rich people. Using USD High Yield indices in Asia and the US, Asian (mainly Chinese) high yield market has been much weaker.

    And here is the problem, the US is trying defeat China, while not making any true sacrifices. Financial conditions were much tighter through the 1980s than they are today, which is what drove the treasury bull market, and its acceptance as a reserve asset. Now the US is trying to hold on to this privilege while offering negative real interest rates and bail outs.

    Perhaps the various trade and technology sanctions that the US has place on China will work, and China will devalue and collapse. But when I look at the recent performance of Chinese luxury consumption stocks like Hermes and Louis Vuitton, I am somewhat unconvinced the China growth model is in decline.

    I like GLD/TLT as it represents government policy to favor workers over capital. But it has a geopolitical angle – do foreigners want to keep the USD as the reserve currency? Obviously China and Russia would prefer not. And I wonder whether India would also like to be subject to US control on its trade policy? I doubt it. If the US really wants to retain reserve currency status, its going to have to learn how to make rich people suffer – a tough ask in a political systems where elections cost billions.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 22:20

  • OPEC Succeeds In Nuking Crude Oil Shorts, Puts $100 Brent "On The Horizon"
    OPEC Succeeds In Nuking Crude Oil Shorts, Puts $100 Brent “On The Horizon”

    Last Wednesday, we advised readers that the shorting of oil among the systematic community (i.e. CTAs) had hit near record levels, and with some $30BN in short positions, the “chase” was about to begin.

    It wasn’t just CTAs: as we also observed one day prior, on March 28, hedge funds were liquidating exposure in virtually all kinds of petroleum products at the fastest pace in years…

    … but then something clicked, and as we discussed last week on our private twitter feed, first Goldman’s FICC desk – which unlike the bank’s sellside research group is spot-on most of the time with its trade recos – said that it was time to pursue “opportunistic upside” in Brent…

    … which coupled with the sharp jump in oil prices after falling to a 15 month low in mid-March, led to a painful reversal in positioning as managed money shorts unwound bearish bets on WTI crude by the most since 2016…

    …. almost as if they knew something was coming.

    Maybe they did, maybe not, but something was indeed coming and on Sunday, OPEC+ stunned the world when it announced its second coordinated output cut in under half a year.

    While TS Lombard noted earlier that there was a clear political angle to the timing of this announcement, coming shortly after US officials effectively ruled out new crude purchases to replenish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2023, underscoring the souring of US-Saudi relations, and just days after Riyadh pledged its allegiance to Beijing, the surprise OPEC+ production cut was aimed squarely at one audience: the near record shorts that had pushed oil prices to levels that forced the oil cartel to respond.

    According to Bloomberg, it’s a return to the tactic first used by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman in 2020, when he famously said he wants “the guys in the trading floors to be as jumpy as possible” and vowed that “whoever gambles on this market will be ouching like hell.”

    Of course, as today’s market action clearly showed, the assault on short sellers was successful. Markets were wrong-footed and oil futures surged as much as 8%, repricing assets from equities to bonds. Yet OPEC+ also caught consumers and the global economy in the crossfire, spurring concerns about inflation and prompting bets on further interest rate hikes.

    As Bloomberg reports, OPEC+ began to see the need for a change in oil policy on March 20, just days after we first hinted at another OPEC+ output cut…

    … when Brent crude slid to a 15-month low near $70 a barrel as a banking crisis threatened to hobble the economy. The Saudis reflected that short sellers were due a reminder of the pain OPEC+ can still inflict on them, the BBG sources said.

    Once the wheels were in motion, the decision to hold back more than 1 million barrels of oil from the market was finalized in just a few days, and in a very tight circle. Some delegates said they found out just a day or two before the announcement. Two officials said they were completely blindsided by the decision which makes sense since most of OPEC+ is leaky like a 50 year old oil barrell and most delegates are quick to spew all secrets to their preferred leggy female media reporters (you’ll never guess what takes place in those glitzy Vienna hotels late at night).

    The impact was all the greater because, in the buildup to an OPEC+ committee meeting scheduled for Monday, Prince Abdulaziz had repeatedly said the group would hold output steady for the entire year to keep markets stable.

    In the end, the announcement on Sunday in the European afternoon, with markets closed, was chosen for maximum impact, the sources said. Sure enough, Brent jumped more than $6 a barrel when Asia woke up, the biggest move in more than a year.

    Explaining the decision, delegates pointed Bloomberg to market data on the build-up in short-selling…. the same market data we shared with readers just one day earlier.

    As prices slumped with the banking crisis in late March, speculators piled up bearish bets on US crude to the highest in four years and reduced bullish positions to the lowest in more than a decade, according to figures from the CFTC. The financial fears abated toward the end of the month and those short positions were dialed back, but by that point the Saudis were feeling nervous, the people said. The hastily brokered takeover of Credit Suisse Group AG had sparked fears that financial contagion could damage the global economy.

    That said, the announcement wasn’t meant to be only a short squeeze trigger: fundamental concerns also emerged, and as the Saudi kingdom grew more concerned about the strength of oil demand, evidence emerged that supply was more than ample. In late March, a key export pipeline from Iraq was halted because of a legal spat between the Kurdish regional government and Baghdad, knocking about 400,000 barrels a day off global supply. Yet crude rose just 4%, strengthening the view that bearish speculators held sway over the market, said one person.

    “The market had become a playing field for these shorts” and OPEC+ wanted to drive them out, Amrita Sen, director of research at Energy Aspects Ltd., said in a Bloomberg television interview. The producers group is saying “take us on, but at your own peril.”

    The OPEC+ fight with short-sellers also has political implications. It brings most of the group into alignment with Russia, which kicked off the unilateral production cuts in February with a 500,000 barrel-a-day reduction in retaliation for international sanctions. By extension, the output cut also aligns the world’s most powerful oil exporting body squarely against the White House, which was livid after the surprise announcement sent oil – an gasoline – prices sharply higher.

    Those curbs haven’t yet fully materialized and their positive impact on prices had been erased by the banking crisis. Now, with OPEC+ members joining in, the oil revenue that feeds the Kremlin’s war machine will be bolstered. Ironically, it comes at a time when the Western anti-Russia alliance is cracking, with the WSJ reporting yesterday that Japan was given an exemption to buy Russian oil above the price cap, a move which most nations will quietly follow.

    Last but not least, the Saudis also had to weigh how the decision would affect its relationship with Washington, which has been strained by the kingdom’s repeated refusal to heed American requests for more oil. As Bloomberg puts it, “If the production cuts bring $100 crude back into play, with everything that would mean for high inflation and rising interest rates, US consumers and the White House could join the short sellers in “ouching like hell.“

    That’s ok though, at least the Biden admin will have a full SPR to release when times get tough… oh wait.

    And speaking of the lowest SPR inventory in nearly 40 years, it’s time to concede that $100 a barrel is finally back into the frame, especially considering that required capex spending to maintain output is woefully inadequate.

    “There’s a bullish narrative,” Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House energy official, said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Monday. “If they cut into a bullish narrative, then $100 — we’ll go through it at high speed.”

    Beyond the initial market reaction in the hours after the OPEC+ announcement, the key marker for the physical impact of the cuts and the price trends in the coming months will be oil inventories. There had been signs that stockpiles were in decline in recent weeks. In the US where official figures are most visible because they are published weekly, oil stocks dropped by more than 20 million barrels over the last two weeks. Global onshore inventories had fallen in seven of the last nine weeks, according to Vortexa.

    But there is still a long way to go. At the start of April, global onshore crude stockpiles were still about 140 million barrels above the level seen a year earlier, Kayrros data show. Taking an extra million barrels a day of supply out of the market in a period when demand should steadily ramp up will erode that surplus.

    “The move is extremely bullish as draws on inventories will be immediate,” said Nadia Martin Wiggen, an analyst at Pareto Securities. “This cut proves again that OPEC+ is proactive in managing the supply-demand balance and requires $90 to $100 a barrel.”

    Not everyone agreed of course, and as usual, Wall Street’s most vocal oil permabear – who has the lowest oil price targets of all Wall Street analysts – Citi’s Ed Morse said in a Bloomberg TV interview that “there is a scenario for $100 a barrel oil. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet.”

    He also wrote in a report overnight that “OPEC+’s actions are clearly focused on shoring up a market that was looking increasingly weaker.” He added that “given market positioning and short covering, a spike now seems inevitable, but could be followed by realization that the market is a lot weaker than people think.”

    Or maybe the market is a lot stronger, and China was merely masking its economic recovery precisely to inflict the most damage not only on shorts, but the Biden white house. In a time when the multi-polar world order is breaking down and virtually every nascent superpower (or just plain old “power”) is taking on the senile 80-year-old in the White House, this is certainly a credible scenario.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 22:00

  • Bolton Says Grand Jury Indictment Could Serve As 'Rocket Fuel' For Trump's 2024 Campaign
    Bolton Says Grand Jury Indictment Could Serve As ‘Rocket Fuel’ For Trump’s 2024 Campaign

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

    Former National Security Adviser John Bolton said the indictment of former President Donald Trump could serve as “rocket fuel” for his third bid for the White House.

    “I’m not worried about Alvin Bragg hurting Donald Trump. I’m worried about Alvin Bragg benefiting Donald Trump,” Bolton told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, referring to the Manhattan district attorney who secured the indictment from a grand jury.

    “If Trump is acquitted or he gets the case dismissed because it’s not legally sufficient or for whatever reason, that will be rocket fuel, because he can say, ‘I told you it was a political prosecution, I told you I was being picked on, and now I’ve been vindicated,’” Bolton added.

    Former National Security Adviser John Bolton speaks to reporters after speaking in a panel hosted by the National Council of Resistance of Iran–U.S. Representative Office (NCRI-US) at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington on Aug. 17, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    Bolton, who served in the Trump administration from April 2018 until September 2019, argued that if Trump is convicted, it would dampen his presidential bid.

    “If he’s convicted, however, at some point before the campaign ends, I think that will have a very different impact on people,” Bolton said. “If he’s convicted of a crime, I think most Americans actually don’t want a convicted felon to be their president.”

    Then-U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton, speaks to the media at a press conference on the second day of the 2018 NATO Summit in Brussels, Belgium, on July 12, 2018. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

    Trump

    The specific charges against Trump remain under seal, but they are believed to be related to his involvement in providing $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign.

    On Sunday, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to criticize Bragg and New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is expected to arraign the former president on April 4.

    “The Corrupt D.A. has no case. What he does have is a venue where it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to get a Fair Trial (it must be changed!), and a Trump Hating Judge, hand selected by the Soros backed D.A. (he must be changed!),” Trump wrote.

    Since the indictment was publicized, Trump has increased his lead in polls over a potential run from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2024. According to a poll by McLaughlin and Associates, which surveyed 1,000 likely general election voters over two days ending on April 1, Trump defeated DeSantis 51 percent to 21 percent, increasing his lead from January when the former president was at 43 percent and the governor at 31 percent.

    Forty-seven percent said Trump would not get a fair trial in Manhattan, while 37 percent said he would, according to the poll.

    Bolton, who said he is “still considering” a White House run in 2024, lamented that many Republicans have continued to support Trump.

    “I have to say, watching the response to the indictment has not been encouraging for the future of the party,” Bolton said. “Trump is a cancer on the Republican Party. We need his supporters. That’s absolutely true. Most of them have correct values.”

    “I think what Republicans need to do to save the party and, frankly, to save the country, is they can be as concerned about poor Donald Trump being mistreated by this prosecutor as they want,” Bolton added. “But … the reward, the cure for that mistreatment is not to make Donald Trump the Republican presidential nominee. Those are two completely different subjects.”

    Support

    Many Republican lawmakers have criticized the case as politically motivated and expressed support for the former president.

    “Alvin Bragg’s decision to indict him is blatant election interference and a direct assault on the tens of millions of Americans who support him,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said in a statement. “The American people will see this for exactly what it is: a grave miscarriage of justice.”

    Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 3, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has announced that she will join the New York Young Republican Club for a “peaceful protest of Alvin Bragg’s heinous attack” on Trump at noon on April 4.

    “Protesting is a constitutional right and I am going to NY on Tuesday to protest this unprecedented abuse of our justice system and election interference,” Greene wrote on Twitter.

    “I also reject any attempt and anyone who dresses in MAGA but incites violence or commits violence while pretending to be one of us,” the congresswoman added. “You are not one of us, you are one of them.

    “We will not live in fear and we will lawfully stand against tyranny and corruption while we show our support for President Trump.”

    On Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he will leave Florida on Monday and arrive in New York later the same day.

    “I will be leaving Mar-a-Lago on Monday at 12 noon, heading to Trump Tower in New York. On Tuesday morning I will be going to, believe it or not, the Courthouse. America was not supposed to be this way!” Trump wrote.

    Trump will then deliver a speech at Mar-a-Lago at 8:15 p.m. on Tuesday, after returning from New York.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 21:40

  • "Too Damn Messy": Flooded California Farmland Delays Plantings
    “Too Damn Messy”: Flooded California Farmland Delays Plantings

    California’s vast amount of agricultural land is facing a significant issue due to a series of atmospheric rivers in recent months, which have saturated fields to the point where planting crops has become difficult.

    “It’s just too damn messy and muddy to create a quality pack. You don’t want a bunch of mud on the produce,” Christopher Valdez, president of the Grower-Shipper Association of Central California, told USA Today. 

    More than a dozen powerful storms later, 78 trillion gallons of water has been dumped on California, reversing a multi-year drought in a matter of months. Now the agricultural powerhouse state, producing about a third of the country’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruits and nuts, faces planting delays due to washed-out fields. 

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    According to USA Today, the planting delays experienced by California’s 69,000 farms may disrupt the supply of vegetables and fruits.

    Flooded orchard of walnuts in Colusa, Cali. Source: Mitchell Yerxa

    In some instances, farmers have delayed plantings since January. Valdez noted:

    “I don’t expect there will be shortages, but there will be some gaps.” 

    California is the top-producing state of figs, table grapes, kiwis, nectarines, peaches, persimmons, plums, and pluots. The wet, cool weather is expected to slow plant development this spring. 

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    Additionally, California produces around 90% of the country’s processed tomatoes and over a quarter of the global total. The current challenge is that fields are too wet for transplanting greenhouse tomato seedlings, resulting in delays for the next crop cycle. 

    It’s still being determined whether shortages will occur and lead to increased supermarket prices. The economic impact is already hitting farmers and field workers. 

    “We’re talking about workers who aren’t getting jobs, and their homes may also have been flooded,” said Daniel Sumner, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis.

    California consistently faces challenges in producing crops, no matter if it’s wet or dry. It may be a good idea to consider starting your own garden as a precaution against potential supply disruptions that could emerge later in the year.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 21:20

  • Shellenberger: Why Renee DiResta Leads The Censorship Industry
    Shellenberger: Why Renee DiResta Leads The Censorship Industry

    Authored by Michael Shellenberger via ‘Public’ Substack, (emphasis ours)

    How a former CIA fellow came to lead US government efforts to stamp out disfavored speech on the Internet…

    Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation

    It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors.

    Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a network of U.S. government agencies, and government-funded think tanks. Over the last six years, these entities have coordinated their efforts to both spread disinformation and to censor journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans. They have done so directly and indirectly, including by playing good cop/bad cop with Twitter and Facebook. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been involved in these censorship and disinformation campaigns in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.

    We now know, thanks to the Twitter Files, emails released by the Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana, and research by others, that the Censorship Industrial Complex is violating the First Amendment by coordinating with government agencies and receiving government funding to pressure and help social media companies to both censor information, including accurate information, while spreading disinformation, including conspiracy theories.

    And such efforts are continuing if not accelerating. At Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” last week, US allies in Europe demanded that Facebook censor “false narratives” and news that would “weaken our support to Ukraine.” Facebook agreed.

    One of the most intelligent, influential, and fascinating public-facing leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex is Renee DiResta, Research Manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Diresta has, more than anyone else, made the public case for greater government-led and government-funded censorship, writing for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and other major publications, and through public speaking, including on podcasts with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris.

    Renee DiResta, CIA Fellow turned Stanford Internet Observatory research manager

    To many journalists and policymakers, DiResta is one of the good guys, advocating as a citizen and hobbyist for greater U.S. government action to fight disinformation. DiResta has argued that the U.S. has been unprepared to fight the “information war” with Russia and other nations in her bylined articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, and many others. And in her 2018 Senate testimony DiResta advocated “legislation that defines and criminalizes foreign propaganda” and for allowing law enforcement to “prosecute foreign propaganda.”

    DiResta, as much as any other public person in the Western world, has sounded the alarm, repeatedly and loudly, for stronger governmental and non-governmental coordination to get social media platforms to censor more information. “The Russian disinformation operations that affected the 2016 United States presidential election are by no means over,” wrote DiResta in the New York Times in December 2018. “Russian interference through social media is a chronic, widespread, and identifiable condition that we must now aggressively manage.”

    In 2021, DiResta advocated for creating a government censorship center, which she euphemistically referred to as a “Center of Excellence,” within the federal government. “Creation of a ‘Center of Excellence’ within the federal government,” she said, “could tie in a federal lead with platforms, academics, and nonprofits to stay ahead of these emerging narratives and trends.” DiResta argued that her censorship center could also help spread propaganda. “As narratives emerge,” she explained, “the Center of Excellence could deploy experts to relevant federal agencies to help prepare pre-bunking and messaging, to identify trusted voices in communities, and to build coalitions to respond.”

    Did the Department of Homeland Security act on DiResta’s proposal to create a censorship center? It did. But it didn’t call it a “Center of Excellence.” Instead, it called it a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which it announced publicly in April 2022.

    DiResta’s rise to the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence community struck me back in December of last year as improbably meteoric. DiResta had repeatedly described her involvement in fighting disinformation as having started in 2013 when she became a new mom and grew concerned about spreading anti-vaccine information online. “In 2013,” she explained to Kara Swisher, “I had my first kid… You know, you have to do that preschool thing here, you’ve got to get them on a list a year early. I didn’t want to be in a preschool with a bunch of anti-vaxxers, candidly.” Two years later she was helping to fight ISIS online and by 2018 she was testifying before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

    While these suspicions nagged at me, I waved them away because DiResta is brilliant, was already working in high tech, and was succeeding in the new field of fighting foreign disinformation on social media platforms. Of all the people in various government agencies and government-funded think tanks making the case for U.S. government censorship, DiResta is, by far, the most persuasive. She received a degree in computer science in 2004, worked as a trader at Jane Street until 2011, was a high-tech VC until 2014, and founded a cloud-based shipping management software company that was acquired in 2021.

    And, given the historical dominance of high tech by founders in their 20s and 30s, and the challenges of older people to understand social media, I convinced myself that a person with DiResta’s limited experience battling disinformation online might leapfrog over the hundreds if not thousands of researchers, analysts, and intelligence experts who conduct research and combat foreign disinformation for the U.S. government and government-funded think tanks and academic institutions.

    But then I learned that DiResta had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The journalist Matt Taibbi pointed me to the investigative research into the censorship industry by Mike Benz, a former State Department official in charge of cybersecurity. Benz had discovered a little-viewed video of her supervisor at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex Stamos, mentioning in an off-hand way that DiResta had previously “worked for the CIA.”

    In her response to my criticism of her on Joe Rogan, DiResta acknowledged but then waved away her CIA connection.

    “My purported secret-agent double life was an undergraduate student fellowship at CIA, ending in 2004 — years prior to Twitter’s founding,” she wrote. “I’ve had no affiliation since.”

    But DiResta’s acknowledgment of her connection to the CIA is significant, if only because she hid it for so long. DiResta’s LinkedIn includes her undergraduate education at Stony Brook University, graduating in 2004, and her job as a trader at Jane Street from October 2004 to May 2011, but does not mention her time at the CIA.

    And, notably, the CIA describes its fellowships as covering precisely the issues in which DiResta is an expert. “As an Intelligence Analyst Intern for CIA, you will work on teams alongside full-time analysts, studying and evaluating information from all available sources—classified and unclassified—and then analyzing it to provide timely and objective assessments to customers such as the President, National Security Council, and other U.S. policymakers.”

    Unlike DiResta, Stamos didn’t appear to believe that DiResta’s time working for the CIA was too trivial, or too far in the past, to bother mentioning. When Stamos introduced DiResta to a Stanford audience, he described her as having “worked for,” not merely “interned” with, the CIA.

    Is DiResta telling the truth when she claims she’s had “no affiliation since”? Perhaps. But one of the things I have heard from multiple people, including people within the intelligence community, is, “Nobody ever retires from the intelligence community.” Such a claim is, no doubt, exaggerated. But there is truth to it. Moreover, one of the main characteristics of spycraft is the deployment of agents and assets not publicly affiliated with the CIA or other intelligence agencies.

    A large amount of CIA involvement in content moderation requests was discovered through Twitter Files. “CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020,” writes Taibbi, “and companies like Twitter and Facebook received ‘OGA [Other Government Agencies, which is code for CIA] briefings,’ at their regular ‘industry meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

    And it striking how many former CIA Directors are involved in the censorship industry.

    Seven former CIA chiefs are on the board of The Atlantic Council, the organization that partnered with DiResta’s Stanford Internet Observatory on the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project. The Chief Strategy Officer and the Director of Federal Programs at Graphika, another DiResta partner organization, are former CIA officials.

    Whatever DiResta’s true history and continuing affiliations, she is without question one of the most, if not the most, influential leaders within the network of for-profit and nonprofit organizations and government agencies that comprise the Censorship-Industrial Complex. As research director of Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta was the key leader and spokesperson of both the 2021 “Virality Project,” against covid vaccine “misinformation” and the 2020 “Election Integrity Project.”

    The question now is why. If we hope to defund and dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex, we must understand what makes its leaders tick, why they rose to the top, and how they can be defeated. Who is Renee DiResta, and why is she, and not somebody else, the public-facing leader of the censorship industry and a trusted advisor to Democrats in Congress? Why is she doing it? And what will it take to defund the Stanford Internet Observatory, dismantle the censorship industry, and disempower DiResta?

    To answer those questions, we first need to understand how DiResta got away with and was even rewarded for participating in one of the most outrageous and likely illegal, election disinformation campaigns in recent history.

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    A Case Of The Bot Calling The Kettle Black

    In 2017, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, donated  $750,000 to American Engagement Technologies (AET), an election campaigns consultancy founded by a former Obama administration official. Of that money, $100,000 went to another political consulting firm, “New Knowledge,” to run a social media disinformation operation to help Alabama Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Doug Jones defeat Republican Roy Moore in a December special election.

    New Knowledge ran something called “Project Birmingham,” which created fake Russian Twitter social media accounts that followed Moore, resulting in news stories that the Kremlin was backing Moore in the race.  A 12-page New Knowledge memo dated Dec. 15, 2017 described the operation. “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

    Renee DiResta went to work for political disinformation firm New Knowledge in January 2018, after it had waged a disinformation campaign in Alabama a few weeks earlier. The news media, and leading Senate and House Democrats, have promoted her as a disinformation expert ever since.

    DiResta was intimately involved with both of the key organizations overseeing the Birmingham disinformation effort. She told the Washington Post that she helped AET get financial backing from Hoffman and took a seat on the board of AET. Then, in January 2018, two weeks after the New Knowledge memo, DiResta became the organization’s Research Director.

    The memo claimed that the work of New Knowledge had shifted enough votes for Jones to win the election, which had been decided by fewer than 22,000 voters. How? Through the use of disinformation to “radicalize Democrats, suppress unpersuadable Republicans (‘hard Rs’) and faction moderate Republicans by advocating for write-in candidates,” said the memo.

    New Knowledge also “planted the idea that a Russian botnet amplified the Moore campaign on social media. We then tied that botnet to the Moore campaign digital director, making it appear that he had purchased the accounts.”  Wrote the Washington Post, “During the campaign, journalists wrote stories about Twitter accounts that appeared to be Russian followers of Moore.”

    During the same period, 2017 – 2018, New Knowledge helped a former FBI agent named Clint Watts, and a U.S. government-funded think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy, run yet another disinformation campaign, one which smeared ordinary Americans as Russian bots and then used that disinformation to generate dozens of news stories, including for CNN (“Russian bots are using #WalkAway to try to wound Dems in midterms”) and the New York Times (“After Florida School Shooting, Russia’s Bot Army Pounced”).

    Hamilton 68 offended even Twitter’s chief censor, Yoel Roth. As context, it’s important to remember that Roth loathed Trump. In 2017, Roth tweeted that he believed there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.” But when it came to evaluating Hamilton 68, Roth was shocked by the flagrant effort to smear work-a-day conservatives as Russians. “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [Hamilton 68] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” Roth urged his colleagues to “call this out on the bullshit it is.”

    Unfortunately, Roth’s supervisors worried about the political consequences and let New Knowledge’s Hamilton 68 disinformation continue. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” wrote Twitter executive Emily Horne in February 2018. Notes Jacob Siegel in Tablet. “Horne had previously worked at the State Department, handling the ‘digital media and think tank outreach” portfolio. According to her LinkedIn, she ‘worked closely with foreign policy reporters covering [ISIS] … and executed communications plans relating to Counter-[ISIS] Coalition activities.’ Put another way, she had a background in counterterrorism operations similar to Watts’ but with more of an emphasis on spinning the press and civil society groups.”

    Siegel notes similarly suspicious timing for the arrival of Horne. “From there she became the director for strategic communications for Obama’s National Security Council, only leaving to join Twitter in June 2017,” writes Siegel. “Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.”

    Naturally, everyone involved denied involvement. DiResta claimed “she became concerned with the opaqueness of the project and severed ties with” AET.  But if DiResta genuinely felt New Knowledge’s creation of the Birmingham hoax was so terrible, why did to to work for it, and help it raise $11 million? And why did the Senate Intelligence Committee recruit DiResta and New Knowledge write a report claiming Russians had elected Trump?

    New Knowledge and another group, Graphika, pointed to evidence, in their reports, that ten million people in the U.S. had seen social media ads. DiResta’s findings were widely respected and publicized. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper called the evidence that Russia had influenced the election “staggering.” University of Pennsylvania communication professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson claimed it proved Trump would not have been president without the Russians.

    But there is no evidence that the Russians influenced the 2016 campaign, much less that they won it for Trump. Conservative voters did not consume much social media compared to news media in 2016. While 40 percent of Trump voters said, Fox was their primary news source, only 7 percent said Facebook.

    “People promoting the idea that Russia swung the election will often cite that Russian Facebook posts reached about 126 million Americans,” said a team of researchers who debunked DiResta’s disinformation. “But that refers to anyone whose news feed ever included such a piece of content, regardless of whether they saw it, or whether it may have been drowned out in their minds by hundreds of other posts.” Moreover, 56% of the Russian troll farm’s pages appeared after the election while 25% were seen by no one.

    DiResta has constantly sought to emphasize, creepily, that “fighting disinformation” is not a free speech issue but rather a national security one. In her 2018 Senate Testimony, DiResta said fighting disinformation “is not about arbitrating truth, nor is it a question of free speech.” Rather, she claimed, it is “a cybersecurity issue, it is an ongoing national security issue, and it must be addressed through a collaboration between governments responsible for the safety of their citizens and private industry responsible for the integrity of their products and platforms” [my emphasis].

    DiResta consistently demands censorship to prevent harm, which is a core value for liberals, according to social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, and has traditionally been the main restriction to free speech. The Supreme Court has upheld strong First Amendment protections and modestly constrained them in cases causing harm, like fraud and immediate incitement of violence.

    “One of the things that the platforms are looking at now is this notion of healthy discourse,” DiResta told Kara Swisher in an interview published at Vox. “What are the metrics for healthy discourse?… I know some of the [liberal philanthropic] foundations [such as George Soros’ Open Society Institute, Carnegie Foundation, and Atlantic Council] are also working on thinking about how do we quantify this…”

    And nobody caused more harm than President Donald J. Trump. “I think that the particularly belligerent, constantly hostile, constantly outrageous tone that [Trump] prefers is deeply harmful,” DiResta told Swisher.

    DiResta thinks this question isn’t just important for fighting “foreign disinformation.” Rather, what content “we” should “let” remain online is a question she believes the U.S. government must decide for every major social and political issue in society since her overarching framework is the legitimacy of governing institutions.

    In her 2021 video for the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Diresta says, “Our team at [Stanford Internet Observatory] SIO and CISA’s team have done some pioneering work in partnership thinking.” What is “partnership thinking”? It’s the thinking done by DiResta and other self-appointed censors for how the government can censor without violating the First Amendment.

    But if DiResta and her colleagues at CISA violate the First Amendment, why mention it? Why not simply avoid mention of it altogether? Part of the reason is likely to assuage concerns by the government officials, including the elected ones, who approved the project in the first place. But I have long felt, having spent hours of studying DiResta, that she is also heavily focused on changing social norms around what kind of behavior we believe is acceptable regarding censorship.

    “The Overton window is the collection of societally acceptable political opinions,” noted DiResta. “So, shifting the Overton window or expanding the Overton window means increasing or changing the types of positions, political positions, that are considered mainstream or that are considered respectable, some things that we’re willing to discuss.”

    As such, DiResta’s labeling of Republican leader Devin Nunes as a “crackpot” for his views of vaccines and Benz as a “crank” is not accidental. DiResta’s attitude is that she, and other elites, should decide what media people get to consume.

    But there is something else. Consider how DiResta talks about whether or not the government should allow certain content online. “The way that the intelligence communities think about leaving hostile content up online, letting the ISIS accounts stay, for example, are you getting more information than you otherwise would?”

    Why, in the end, is it Renee DiResta, and not somebody else, the leader of the Censorship Industrial Complex? A big part of the reason is because she is the intellectual architect, and most articulate public advocate, of government funding of, and cooperation with, non-governmental actors, such as Stanford Internet Observatory, to increase social media censorship of disfavored views and disfavored users, particularly if she and her colleagues deem them “superspreaders” capable of sending “misleading information” go viral.

    But there is another, deeper reason. Like other American elites, DiResta believes that it is the role of people like her to control what information the public is allowed to consume, lest they elect a populist ogre like Donald Trump, decide not to get vaccinated, or don’t accept whatever happens to be mainstream liberal opinion on everything from climate change to transgenderism at the time.

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    How The Censorship Industry Ends

    Dismantling the taxpayer-funded censorship industry and disempowering self-appointed censors like DiResta won’t be easy. Much of the mainstream corporate news media is sympathetic to or affiliated with the Censorship Industrial Complex. They have showered DiResta with puff pieces. They refuse to cover the Twitter Files or the Facebook Files. The Stanford Internet Observatory is receiving large government and private sector grants. And the news media, the censorship industry, and a shocking number of Democrats in Congress support government censorship of social media platforms.

    But the backlash to the censorship industry is growing. Jacob Siegel’s long essay in Tablet, along with the work of Benz and Taibbi, has put into historical context the censorship industry’s rise to power. Our appearances in Congress, and on independent podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, have been seen by millions of Americans. And, let’s face it, the American people don’t want elites like DiResta deciding what they can and can’t read, and not simply because it’s grotesquely unconstitutional.

    Visit CensorshipIndusrialComplex.org to learn how to defeat it.

    And now, DiResta has responded defensively to my criticisms and, in the process, has issued new, easily-disproved lies. For example, DiResta claimed, “Shellenberger… never asked me about these ‘undisclosed CIA ties.’” That claim is false.

    In an October 13 email, which she had asked me to send over What’s App, that I sent to her, I asked her four questions: “According to recorded remarks by your supervisor at Stanford, Alex Stamos, you have previously “worked for the CIA.” Is that true? What did you do for the CIA? What funding and/or employment and direction have you taken from government agencies?  If you did work with the CIA, and/or other government agencies, activity, why haven’t you mentioned it in your previous biographies and 2018 Senate testimony?”

    DiResta claims, “…Shellenberger continues to mislead. He cited fabricated statistics and claims from a crank…”

    The so-called “crank” DiResta refers to is Benz, whose information has proven highly reliable. My colleagues and I have confirmed Benz’s facts directly and on his website. We have not found Benz making a single unsubstantiated accusation, much less peddling conspiracy theories. As for the supposedly “fabricated statistics” come directly from DiResta’s “Election Integrity Project” and Virality Project. EIP claims that it classified 21,897,364 individual posts comprising unique “misinformation incidents” from August 15, 2020, to December 12, 2020, from a larger 859 million tweets connected to “misinformation narratives.”

    DiResta claims that Stanford Internet Observatory has not been using government funding for censorship. Writes DiResta, “we received an NSF grant after our 2020 election and 2021 covid projects had ended and no government funding went into this work.”

    But the National Science Foundation awarded its grant to Stanford, through the University of Washington, in July 2021, when the Virality Project was underway. And in DiResta’s October 2021 video presentation about “partnering,” she said, “Over the spring and summer of 2021,” she says, “VP partnered with federal, state, and local stakeholders, as well as civil society organizations and coalitions of medical professionals, to support their efforts to understand encounter vaccine hesitancy.”

    In the same CISA video, DiResta claims it was Stanford interns — not US government officials — who came up with the idea while at CISA. “In August 2020, students from the Stanford Internet Observatory were doing an internship with CISA, and they identified a massive gap in the capability of federal, state, and local governments to become aware of, to analyze, and to rapidly respond to mis- and disinformation, both foreign and domestic, targeting the 2020 election.”

    Others confirm this. “This initiative, the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, came together in June of 2020 at the encouragement of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA,” wrote EIP partner, the Atlantic Council’s Disinformation Forensic Laboratory. And why doesn’t DiResta mention the 2022 elections? Perhaps she doesn’t want you to know that her SIO, and its EIP partners, were also involved in social media censorship last year.

    DiResta made other false claims. She said I told Rogan that she and SIO “had censored Shellenberger, his book, and Rogan himself.” That is simply ridiculous. I said no such thing. DiResta said I had “personal grievances” and had been “speculating about whether I’m a good mom.” Also false. Here’s what I actually said: “I agree with her [Renee] on some things. I’m sure she’s a fine person in her personal life. She’s probably a good mother,” to which Joe said, “You’re trying to be nice,” which was true. Anyone who listens to the exchange can tell I was making clear that my criticism of DiResta was not personal.

    Finally, DiResta claimed, “we never discussed climate,” but we did, at length, as the audio file and transcript of our interview, which she permitted me to record, proves. We spent over 12 minutes discussing the censorship of accurate climate change information on Facebook. I raised the exact same climate censorship issue on the podcast with Bari Weiss and Sam Harris on February 1 and made clear both times that it was an extremely important issue to me personally. (Transcript here.)

    Would you be surprised to learn that DiResta is a master of misleading people? In her response to me, she appears to be denouncing censorship and advocating more free speech. Consider this sentence: “I’ve long advocated against content and account takedowns in favor of the context – the counter-speech – of a label in the majority of relevant situations.”

    The power of language is such that you might have read that sentence, as I first did, and missed that she’s not denying that she advocates “content and account takedowns.” All she’s saying is that she advocates labeling more frequently than she advocates de-platforming and removing posts. And, notably, in our conversation, DiResta described the fact check label as “not censorship in any way, shape, or form.”

    While “labeling content” sounds harmless, it has repeatedly been used as a way to spread the kind of disinformation that DiResta claims to be fighting, such as against legitimate opinions about covid vaccines, covid’s origins, The New York Times’ accurate Hunter Biden laptop story, and climate change.

    And exaggerating Russian influence may help Putin, or the people trying to win his favor. “When we propagate the idea that Russian propaganda is the all-powerful source of disinformation in American politics,” writes Benkler, “we reinforce precisely this primary goal: We sow confusion.” Wrote Facebook in 2022, “These actors… have an interest in exaggerating their own effectiveness…”

    And, as is now clear, DiResta and her colleagues are, in fact bringing to the US the same kinds of influence operations the US government, through the CIA and others, has used to influence elections in past decades, including in South Vietnam and Japan, El Salvador, Haiti,  Guatemala, Brazil, Israel, Lebanon, Panama, Iran, Greece, Italy, Malta, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines.

    The good news is that change is happening and quickly. In the wake of broad public backlash, the Department of Homeland Security in August 2022 terminated the Disinformation Governance Board. CISA removed information about domestic-facing censorship from its website and scrapped its MDM (“Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation”) subcommittee. And Congress has been holding multiple hearings on the rise of the censorship industry, including one last week that included the Attorney General of Louisiana and the former Attorney General of Missouri.

    While we must defund and dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex, the greatest change must happen within ourselves. We must be suspicious of those who raise the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation” and demand greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. As such, we should take a page from our would-be censors and make ourselves more resilient to their disinformation.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 21:00

  • Cornell University Draws The Line, Refuses To Insert 'Trigger Warnings' Before Class Discussions
    Cornell University Draws The Line, Refuses To Insert ‘Trigger Warnings’ Before Class Discussions

    Cornell University has refused to cave to student government demands that a “traumatic content” trigger warning be included in class syllabi, according to an email obtained by the Daily Caller.

    The students, who can’t even, unanimously voted on March 23 to approve Resolution 31, which would “require instructors who present graphic traumatic content that may trigger the onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to provide advance notice to students and refrain from penalizing students who opt out of exposure to such content.”

    According to Cornell, however, the resolution violates the university’s commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry.

    “Academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle in higher education, establishes the right of faculty members to determine what they teach in their classrooms and how they teach it, provided that they behave in a manner consistent with professional ethics and competence, and do not introduce controversial matters unrelated to the subject of their course,” reads the email obtained by the Caller. “And freedom of inquiry establishes the right of students, researchers, and scholars to select a course of study and research without censure or undue interference.”

    The trigger warnings would inform students that content in the course could include reference to “sexual assault, domestic violence, self-harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment [and] xenophobia,” according to the resolution. Students who opt out of participating in the discussion would not be penalized.

    Professors can choose to inform students of content discussed in class or explain why a topic is being discussed but cannot be forced to preface it in the syllabus, the email reads. Requiring faculty to disclose any topic that could be upsetting for students would infringe on faculty members’ “fundamental right to determine what and how to teach” and prevent that from adding topics throughout the semester. -Daily Caller

    Cornell also believes the resolution would “have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea,” and would stifle a student’s ability to openly ask questions or discuss in the classroom, the email continues.

    Allowing students to opt out of learning about subjects that might upset them would “have a deleterious impact both on the education of the individual student, and on the academic distinction of a Cornell degree.”

    Valeria Valencia, president of the Cornell Student Assembly, told the DCNF: “Although I embrace the shared governance system of Cornell University, I was disappointed to hear that President Pollack rejected Student Assembly Resolution 31: Mandating Content Warnings for Traumatic Content in the Classroom,” adding “I disagree with the idea that by implementing content warnings in the classroom, we would be infringing on the principle of academic freedom and freedom of speech. This resolution was created with the intention of supporting students, not anything else. In the future, I hope to see administration, faculty, and students working together to explore this idea and come up with an amicable solution.”

    The absolute state of adult children in America…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 20:40

  • North Korea Says Ukraine 'Gambling' With People’s Destiny Over Nuclear Ambitions
    North Korea Says Ukraine ‘Gambling’ With People’s Destiny Over Nuclear Ambitions

    Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    North Korea has accused Ukraine’s leader of “gambling” with the lives of his people by pursuing nuclear weapons or placing U.S. nuclear weapons in the war-hit country, North Korea’s official mouthpiece said on Sunday.

    Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, delivers a speech during the national meeting against the coronavirus, in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Aug. 10, 2022. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)

    Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, referred to a petition posted on the Ukrainian president’s website that calls for Ukraine to develop its nuclear arsenal or host U.S. nuclear weapons on its territory.

    The petition, posted on the website on March 30, had gathered 611 signatures as of Saturday. It requires at least 25,000 to elicit a response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

    In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Kim said the petition was “a product of the Zelenskyy authorities’ sinister political plot” but did not provide any supporting evidence.

    “The Ukrainian authorities, seized with the incurable megalomania that can defeat Russia, are incurring a nuclear disaster threatening their existence without any elementary consciousness of foresight and any ability to cope with its ensuing consequences,” she said.

    “Zelenskyy’s talk about the introduction of U.S. nuclear weapons and the independent development of nuclear weapons is a manifestation of his very dangerous political ambition to prolong his remaining days at any cost by gambling with the destiny of his country and people,” Kim added.

    Kim said that Ukraine will never be a rival to Russia, and that Zelenskyy would be mistaken to believe that relying on the United States’ nuclear umbrella would enable his troops to defeat the Russians.

    “If the Zelenskyy authorities calculated that they can avoid the powerful fire of Russia only when they go under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, which had already been perforated, they are going to the wrong path, the last path,” she said.

    The petition was submitted to Zelenskyy’s website after Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed plans to place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which borders Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania.

    Putin said that his military would have control of any weapons that are stationed in Belarus, which was used in part by Russian forces to help stage last year’s invasion of Ukraine.

    North Korea Supplying Weapons to Russia: US

    The United States has assessed that Russia is sending a delegation to North Korea to offer food in exchange for weaponry, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday.

    “As part of this proposed deal, Russia would receive over two dozen kinds of weapons and munitions from Pyongyang,” Kirby told reporters.

    Kirby previously accused North Korea of supplying weapons to Russian private military contractor Wagner Group, pointing to images allegedly showing Russian railcars traveling to North Korea in November 2022. Both North Korea and Wagner have denied this.

    The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control recently sanctioned a Slovakian national named Ashot Mkrtychev for allegedly attempting to facilitate arms deals between Russia and North Korea.

    “Russia has lost over 9,000 pieces of heavy military equipment since the start of the war, and thanks in part to multilateral sanctions and export controls, Putin has become increasingly desperate to replace them,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

    “Schemes like the arms deal pursued by this individual show that Putin is turning to suppliers of last resort like Iran and the DPRK,” she said, referring to North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

    North Korea fired more than 70 missiles last year, one of which involved the intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong-17, which experts dubbed a “monster missile” capable of striking anywhere in the United States.

    China and Russia had vetoed a resolution that would have tightened sanctions on North Korea for its missile launches, which have been banned under U.N. Security Council resolutions since 2006.

    Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 20:20

  • Elon Musk Kills The Twitter Blue Checkmark Cult With An $8 Fee
    Elon Musk Kills The Twitter Blue Checkmark Cult With An $8 Fee

    This week corporate media journalists were in an uproar over the apparent revocation of the New York Times “blue checkmark” status on Twitter, accusing Elon Musk of targeting the left wing outlet while verifying more “right wing” accounts. 

    The reality, though, was far less conspiratorial.  

    Twitter had announced changes to the platform’s verification process effective April 1st which made the once coveted Blue Checkmark an easily obtained status for $8 a month, and a gold checkmark for some institutions would cost $1000 per month.  Multiple legacy media companies from CNN to Politico and even the White House refused to pay, and apparently, many of them assumed that because of their supposed cultural prominence they would be given a checkmark anyway for free.  The NYT was one of the first organizations to lose their checkmark due to lack of payment. 

    For those people that don’t use social media often this news might seem irrelevant, but there is much to learn about the psychology of elitism here.

    Under the previous Twitter regime the blue checkmark was considered a symbol of exalted status, a badge of honor.  And no, this is not a joke, this is reality.  The blue check was an indicator of a “notable user” of the platform and the verification process was highly selective and arbitrary.  At times, Twitter management would even pause verifications, making the check even more rare.  

    In 2019-2020, less than 0.1% of all accounts on Twitter had received verification and a checkmark.  Verification was based on a number of factors including number of followers, online press coverage, public notoriety and institutional “legitimacy.”  The application process was only available once a month for users and ultimately, verification was up to Twitter staff – If they didn’t like you or your politics, or they designated you as a peasant, you probably would not get the check.  

    In fact, one of the only sure ways to get a blue check account was to buy it through back channels.  After Musk’s takeover of the company, it was revealed that under the previous management Twitter staff were actually selling blue checkmarks to some users for up to $15,000 a pop.  This might explain why certain people and organizations are so angry that Musk is now selling them for only $8 a month. 

    The social media company had created artificial scarcity of a digital tulip that represented nothing more than a symbol of online vanity.  It’s hard to think of anything more representative of today’s social media culture and the narcissism that pervades it than the blue check.  

    Now, that elitist world is being flipped on it’s head and establishment journalists, corporate CEOs and some Hollywood celebrities are not happy about it.  If anyone can get verification for $8, then the checkmark is meaningless to them.  Multi-million-dollar companies and wealthy individuals don’t want to pay $8 because the verification of identity was not the point – The point was to feel special.  To feel superior to others.  That was what they were buying when they were spending $15,000 bucks a year ago; to show the peons in the general public they are better.

    While most people with celebrity status or government status were sure to get a checkmark, blue checkmark holders outside of that realm have been predominantly on the left side of the political spectrum.  Receiving a check was almost a kind of virtue signal in itself, a brand of loyalty to the cult.

    Whether one cares about Twitter or not, it’s impossible to deny that Musk’s buyout of the platform has been entertaining.  The dissolution of the checkmark club is representative of the leveling of the playing field, a condition which elitsts and the political left despise.  The outrage on display over an $8 fee tells us all we need to know about them.      

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 20:00

  • Hospitals See Most First Quarter Defaults Since 2011
    Hospitals See Most First Quarter Defaults Since 2011

    By Andrew Cass of Beckers Hospital Review

    Bonds of eight hospitals lapsed in “impairment” – meaning they experienced covenant issues amounting to a technical or monetary default – in the first quarter of 2023, the highest number of hospitals disclosing default since 2011, Bloomberg reported March 31. 

    Only one hospital disclosed default in the first quarter of 2022, according to the report. 

    The data comes from Municipal Market Analytics. Lisa Washburn, the organization’s managing director, told Bloomberg that an unusual aspect of the impairments is some are coming from large, highly-rated systems. 

    “Some of the unusual parts about the impairments that we’re seeing is that they are coming from sometimes large, highly-rated systems,” she said in an interview. “That’s actually something that struck us at the beginning of the year when it started to happen because you wouldn’t expect normally to see covenant breaches happening for an A-rated system.”

    Ms. Washburn said that is due to a combination of negative investment returns in 2022, federal COVID-19 relief funds drying up and rising costs, particularly labor, according to the report. She added that a backlog of patients who need to move to nursing homes but cannot due to staffing shortages also have affected finances. 

    “And now add to it that debt costs are higher,” she told Bloomberg. 

    Another source of pressure is competition for patients, Chris George, a senior managing director at FTI Consulting, told the publication. 

    “You’re seeing a very slow evolution of care moving to an ambulatory setting,” he said. 

    “A lot of local hospitals, their biggest challenge is access to capital,” George told Bloomberg in an interview. “It’s going to be a tough year this year.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 19:40

  • "Don't Talk About Nord Stream": WaPo Report Further Demolishes Official Narrative
    “Don’t Talk About Nord Stream”: WaPo Report Further Demolishes Official Narrative

    German investigators are now expressing severe doubts about the official Nord Stream sabotage narrative that was pushed hard in the aftermath the bombshell Seymour Hersh report which pointed the finger at a joint CIA-US Navy covert operation, with help from Norway. Last month, Hersh published an article on Substack that said the CIA planted a cover story for the Nord Stream bombings that was fed to The New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit. Likely this was in direct reaction to Hersh’s findings. A source within the US intelligence community told the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, “It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story.”

    The favored narrative became one that said pro-Ukraine partisans did it in a rogue op. Hersh has maintained this was by design concocted in order to shield the US and Biden administration for ordering the operation. The Die Zeit report cited German officials to assert that the pipeline sabotage bombings were carried out by six people using a yacht rented in Poland that was owned by two Ukrainians. In the days that followed, several Western media outlets seized on that narrative and published similar articles reinforcing the cover story.

    But now a fresh, lengthy investigative Washington Post story published Monday is actually confirming many of Hersh’s conclusions. Indeed the ‘cover story’ is already fast unraveling. What’s more is that the WaPo article bluntly states Western officials are not at all eager to talk about the Nord Stream sabotage, suggesting a continued cover-up in progress, or in effect a limited hangout. Also very telling is that Western accusations directed at Russia have long ago quieted down. 

    The 50-foot-long charter yacht Andromeda at the center of the ‘pro-Ukraine’ partisans narrative. Image source: RTL/ntv

    Below are some surprising and damning excerpts from the WaPo report – again which reveal a dramatic narrative shift once again in progress… [emphasis ours]

    * * *

    Doubts about the suspicious sailboat and the ability of any entity without the direct backing of a government (which has the resources and means) to be able to pull it off:

    But after months of investigation, law enforcement officials now suspect that the 50-foot yacht, the Andromeda, was probably not the only vessel used in the audacious attack. They also say the boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general. 

    …Experts noted that while it was theoretically possible to place the explosives on the pipeline by hand, even skilled divers would be challenged submerging more than 200 feet to the seabed and slowly rising to the surface to allow time for their bodies to decompress.

    More on the sailboat as “decoy” – and ‘evidence’ which seems planted and overly obvious:

    The German investigation has determined that traces of “military-grade” explosives found on a table inside the boat’s cabin match the batch of explosives used on the pipeline. Several officials doubted that skilled saboteurs would leave such glaring evidence of their guilt behind. They wonder if the explosive traces — collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners — were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.

    “The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture,” said one person with knowledge of the investigation.

    Polish and Ukrainian state connections?

    The German investigation has linked the yacht rental to a Polish company, which is in turn owned by a European company that’s connected to a prominent Ukrainian, fueling speculation from Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv that a deep-pocketed partisan may have financed the operation. The identity of the Polish company and the Ukrainian individual, as well as his potential motive, remains unclear.

    Based on the initial German findings, officials have been whispering about the potential involvement of the Polish or Ukrainian government in the attack.

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

    Secretive “tips” given to German investigators which were suspiciously concrete: 

    As the Nord Stream mystery has turned into an international game of Clue, German investigators have scoured the Andromeda for leads. Officials first became interested in the vessel after the country’s domestic intelligence agency [Germany] received a “very concrete tip” from a Western intelligence service that the boat may have been involved in the sabotage, according to a German security official, who declined to name the country that shared the information.

    Andromeda’s whereabouts and past stopovers left a virtual “trail of breadcrumbs” that were a bit too obvious:

    Mola Yachting rented out the boat on Sept. 6 from Hohe Düne harbor in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic, near Rostock, which is about 145 miles north of Berlin. The rental location is in plain sight of a huge vacation complex, home to a five-star hotel, seven restaurants and a high-end shopping area, with views across the harbor.

    Investigators said the boat then traveled in a northeasterly direction, stopping in Hafendorf Wiek, or “Wiek harbor village,” on the northernmost part of Rügen island.

    …A stop in Hafendork Wiek may have offered the Andromeda’s crew a final chance to stock up on supplies before heading to the explosion site.

    “Lots of things are loaded on the boats … including groceries,” Redmann said. “Some people stop to tank up on fuel.” Redmann would not confirm that the Andromeda stopped there, citing the continuing law enforcement investigation.

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

    Crucially, the WaPo report features a very telling subheading: ‘Don’t talk about Nord Stream’:

    For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out.

    At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.

    Incentives not to “talk” as well as self-willed ignorance:

    Since no country is yet ruled out from having carried out the attack, officials said they were loath to share suspicions that could accidentally anger a friendly government that might have had a hand in bombing Nord Stream.

    In the absence of concrete clues, an awkward silence has prevailed.

    “It’s like a corpse at a family gathering,” the European diplomat said, reaching for a grim analogy. Everyone can see there’s a body lying there, but pretends things are normal. “It’s better not to know.”

    * * *

    Once again, all of the above is more in line with what Hersh has reported from the beginning – and yet his detractors have remained just as fierce in their attacks and denunciations, despite his legendary track record of getting things right, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib to Syria.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 19:20

  • Berenson: The Fiercest Vaccine Advocates Are Starting To Admit The Truth About The mRNAs
    Berenson: The Fiercest Vaccine Advocates Are Starting To Admit The Truth About The mRNAs

    Authored by Alex Berenson via ‘Unreported Truths’ Substack,

    Even the New York Times can’t hide reality about the mRNA jabs forever.

    Last week, the Times published an article headlined, “Should You Get Another Covid Booster?”

    The article’s subheadline noted “Britain and Canada have authorized another round of booster shots,” implying the United States has somehow been negligent in not doing so.

    And the piece was written by Apoorva Mandavilli, among the worst Covid reporters. So I assumed the article would be filled with the usual nonsense, especially since the first person Mandavilli quoted was Dr. Celine Gounder, who has loudly pushed mRNA jabs.

    After Gounder’s husband died of an aortic aneurysm, she lashed out in January at mRNA skeptics (including me) who questioned if the shots might be linked to his death – even though doctors have repeatedly reported cases of post-jab aneurysms.

    In her January piece, Gounder even complained Congress’s repeal of the armed forces Covid vaccine mandate “threatens military readiness.” (Nonsense, of course. Frontline soldiers and Marines are young, fit, and healthy, putting them at far higher risk from mRNA-related myocarditis than Covid itself.)

    So I was stunned that Gounder offered the most tepid possible recommendation for further mRNA doses to Mandavilli.

    Most people should not have boosters, even once a year, she said. She endorsed regular shots only for “immunocompromised people and people in nursing homes.”

    The real tell there is “nursing homes.”

    In mentioning them, Gounder was not suggesting that everyone over 65 – or even 85 – should get more shots. Nursing homes are effectively hospices for most residents. About one-third of their residents die each year, a 2018 study found; a 2010 study had even grimmer findings, reporting a median survival of five months after admission.

    What Gounder was saying that only the very frail – who likely have little risk or benefit from the shots (or, in reality, any medical intervention) – should still receive them regularly.

    In contrast, in October, Gounder offered very different advice, recommending boosters for everyone over age 50 “as soon as possible.”

    (Celine Gounder sees the light.)

    Gounder’s rejection of annual boosters is particularly stunning because she and other public health specialists happily promote annual flu jabs despite their demonstrated uselessness. The theory seems to be that flu shots get old folks out of the house, or boost Walgreen’s profits, or something. Anyway they probably don’t do any harm even if they don’t do any good, so why not?

    Yet Gounder is no longer applying the same logic to the mRNAs.

     I do not think that annual boosters for everyone makes sense.

    Which implies either Covid is now even less dangerous than the flu (possible but unlikely), or the shots are even more useless (which would imply negative efficacy), or else… they’re actually more dangerous than inactivated virus flu jabs.

    Which they are.

    But Gounder was not the only vaccine advocate quoted in the Times piece. Mandavilli also talked to Dr. Paul Offit. No one will ever confuse Offit with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – he is director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

    In April 2021, Offit had this to say about the mRNA jabs:

    Certainly, no one would have predicted that these mRNA vaccines would have worked as well or been as safe as they are… I don’t think you could have devised a vaccine that appears to be more perfect.

    Less than two years later, Offit rejected more doses of those “perfect” vaccines.

    For everyone. Even the immunocompromised.

    But even more stunning than Offit’s rejection were the words he used:

    “Given the lack of data, I don’t think it’s fair to say to people, ‘Inject yourself with a biological agent,’” said Dr. Paul Offit.

    (Perfection no more…)

    Vaccine advocates strenuously avoid this kind of language, for obvious reasons.

    Inject yourself with a biological agent? Yeah, I’ll pass.

    But the failure of the mRNAs is now so obvious that Offit and his fellow vaccine advocates have no choice but to try to ring-fence it if they want to save other jabs.

    *  *  *

    Subscribe to Unreported Truths

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 19:00

  • Blackstone BREIT Redemption Requests Surge To $4.5 Billion, Only $666 Million Granted
    Blackstone BREIT Redemption Requests Surge To $4.5 Billion, Only $666 Million Granted

    With the beginning of a credit event triggered by the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hike cycle, which has already claimed at least three smaller US banks and initiated an unprecedented surge in deposit bank runs, the commercial real estate market might be the next shoe to drop. 

    For the fifth consecutive month, Blackstone’s $71 billion real estate income trust (BREIT) has restricted redemption withdrawal requests in March, according to Bloomberg, citing a letter from the PE firm.

    Last month investment advisors of high-net-worth individuals asked Blackstone to redeem $4.5 billion from BREIT, but the PE firm only allowed $666 million to be withdrawn, or about 15% of what was requested. In February, advisors tried to pull out $3.9 billion. 

    Blackstone limits withdrawals to approximately 5% per quarter. Having already reached 2% monthly caps in January and February, investors were left with a much narrow exit route in March. 

    However, should rates keep rising, it is likely that the April redemption flood will continue. 

    BREIT is a huge player in the real estate industry, acquiring properties from student housing to apartment complexes and warehouses. The trust was first hit with redemptions limits last December. 

    The letter also noted BREIT reserved the right to limit redemptions to prevent massive outflows:

    “This structure was designed to both prevent a liquidity mismatch and maximize long-term shareholder value, and is working as planned,” the letter to investors said. “In fact, BREIT has paid out nearly $5 billion to redeeming shareholders since November 30.”

    A reason for the concern and stampede to the exit is the prospect of commercial real estate being the next area of turmoil following the regional banking crisis. 

    Professional subs have been well aware of these rumblings in two latest pieces, “Hartnett: Commercial Real Estate Is The Next Shoe To Drop” and “State Of Commercial Real Estate: Goldman Expects Sharp Spike In Office Delinquency Rates.” 

    Since the Federal Reserve initiated its interest rate hiking cycle, US office REITs have been battered.

    And recall last month, Blackstone defaulted on a €531 million ($562 million) bond backed by a portfolio of offices and stores owned by Sponda Oy, a Finnish landlord it acquired in 2018. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 18:55

  • LA County Floats "Decarceration" Plan To Give Criminals Slap On Wrist Instead Of Jail Time
    LA County Floats “Decarceration” Plan To Give Criminals Slap On Wrist Instead Of Jail Time

    Since Los Angeles apparently isn’t violent enough, the County Board of Supervisors have devised an ingenious plan to “decarcerate” jails by citing and releasing anyone with bail of $50,000 or less, Fox News reports, citing city documents.

    Inmates attend a life skills class at the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles. (Reuters / Jason Redmond / File)

    The Board has added the agenda item to this coming Tuesday’s meeting, titled “Los Angeles County to Take Actionable Next Steps to Depopulate and Decarcerate the Los Angeles County Jails,” and which was introduced by Democrat supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Hilda Solis, who probably don’t live where where there’s a lot of crime.

    The proposal would “Declare the State of mental health services and overcrowding in the Los Angeles County jails a humanitarian crisis, requiring the County to move with all deliberate speed on meaningful solutions; and prioritize decreasing the number of individuals entering the Los Angeles County Jails.”

    If passed, the local sheriff would be instructed to review its bail thresholds and to cite and release “individuals with aggregate bail amounts set at $50,000 or below.” The Los Angeles Superior Court would be directed to “implement the Emergency Bail Schedule that was in place at the height of the COVID pandemic” in an effort to “prioritize increased opportunities for pre-trial release.” -Fox News

    According to Eric Siddall, vice president of the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the idea is “dangerous” (ya think?).

    “The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ (BOS) motion to gut parts of the criminal justice system without input from stakeholders is dangerous and recklessness,” Siddall told Fox News. “The authors sought no advice from those who know and understand public safety issues. They seek to lower the jail population without addressing the root causes of crime or protecting the public.”

    The Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail is seen in Los Angeles, Feb. 16, 2021. (Reuters / Lucy Nicholson)

    Siddall said that under the proposal, the police would be under orders to cite and release suspects accused of illegally carrying firearms, domestic violence, possession of child porn, residential burglary, robbery, or assault with a firearm.

    Activists in Los Angeles called for the closure of the Men’s Central Jail in the downtown area of the city last week, protesting near the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Thursday morning, according to KTLA.

    They demanded that the Board of Supervisors commit to a closure timeline that would shutter the jail by March 2025. The protests came after it was reported that three inmates in L.A. died over the course of one week, including one in the Men’s Central Jail. -Fox News

    Meanwhile, nowhere in the Board’s agenda is any discussion of how to “protect the community from violent criminals.”

    “This catch-and-release program comes without any plan or infrastructure to protect the community from violent criminals apprehended by law enforcement. Further, it creates no lockdown facilities for the mentally ill. This program benefits no one, except for career criminals. We need to make sure the most dangerous offenders don’t get out, that first-time offenders don’t come back and that those with serious mental illnesses get appropriate care and help. This does none of that,” he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 18:40

  • The Fourth Turning Tipping Point
    The Fourth Turning Tipping Point

    Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

    A Fourth Turning is a period in history when all the negative developments over a four-generation period reach a crescendo – a time when the sociopaths are the rulers and are putting the squeeze on the populace.

    In addition to an effort to institute totalitarian rule, symptoms include the breakdown of both morality and logic. Black is white; up is down. Confusion and chaos increase in both frequency and magnitude as the Fourth Turning advances.

    Those of a libertarian mindset tend to be especially sensitive to and cognizant of these symptoms as they unfold. Since a classic Fourth Turning takes place over roughly twenty years, by the time the halfway mark is reached and the symptoms are peaking, it may appear that “It just keeps getting worse. Won’t people ever wake up and understand that this is crazy?”

    Well, historically, the answer has always been “Yes.”

    There’s always a turning point, even if it seems that it’s not only a long time coming but that there’s no level of oppression that won’t be tolerated by the masses.

    The reason for this is that a Fourth Turning is made possible by complacency. Although there has been a deterioration in self-reliance and reasoning for three generations, a population does not become truly complacent until the latter stages. The deeper the complacency, the greater the oppression by leaders.

    Interestingly, complacency is at its greatest in populations where there previously was the greatest prosperity. Therefore, in the present Fourth Turning, the countries that have been most dramatically impacted have been those that had previously been the most prosperous.

    Not surprising, then, that the level of governmental controls and, indeed, the oppression of social wokeness is now most extreme in the US, UK, Canada, EU, etc., as, since the last Fourth Turning in the 1940s, they have been the world’s leaders in prosperity. In Second and Third World countries, the level of oppression – and the chaos and confusion that go with it – has been significantly less.

    So, if we are to see a turning point, when will it be, and what will cause it?

    Historically, there is generally both a political turning point and a social one. They’re not always concurrent, and that’s the case this time around.

    In February of 2022, the US placed sanctions on Russia as a result of the Ukraine war. This was predictable. However, the US concurrently confiscated the private property of Russian citizens.

    At the time, this didn’t get a lot of publicity in the West, but I believed that, in retrospect, it would be seen as the political turning point. The reason is that most of the countries in the world do not see themselves as world powers. They see themselves as countries that are continually impacted by world powers.

    As such, they try to cooperate with the big boys and suffer as little as possible from what the big boys do.

    For them, the announcement by the US was a direct threat: “Omigod, if they confiscated assets of the Russian people, they could do the same to us.”

    This generated a quiet move away from US influence. Representatives of many countries started to travel to Moscow and Beijing to form new alliances, new trade agreements, and new loyalties to replace the ever-riskier relationship with the US.

    Such changes don’t happen overnight, but in the last year, we’ve seen moves away from the petrodollar, the US reserve currency, and increased applications to join the BRICS. Recently, Malaysia became the first country to announce that its preparation to step away from the US is now complete, and they are formally distancing itself from the US.

    This trend will expand over the coming year as more countries “come out” in their intention – a trend that will serve both to isolate the US and to increase the collective strength of the BRICS.

    But what of that other concern – the social tipping point?

    Again, complacency is the overriding stumbling block. In recent years, conservative thinkers have become more and more irate over socialistic notions and, particularly, wokeism. The overreach of Black Lives Matter, climate change, LGBTQ rights, presumed white privilege, and vaccine mandates have become increasingly dominant and seemingly unending.

    But recently, there have been cracks in what seemed to be a developing permanence of wokeism. To wit:

    • Stanford Law School students drove out a conservative speaker, with angry insults, with students even calling for his daughters to be raped. The moderating Administrator added to the fire, denouncing the speaker as he left. But, in a surprise move, the otherwise liberal Dean suspended the Administrator and announced that all students would be required to attend training on “freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession.”

    • Ana Kasparian of the left-wing “Young Turks” broke with her peers to state, in no uncertain terms, that “I’m a woman. Please don’t ever refer to me as a person with a uterus, a birthing person, or a person who menstruates.How do people not realize how degrading this is?”

    • Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer, has become extremely popular with young men and boys due to his presentation as ultra-masculine. His followers comment that Tate represents “everything about their nature that they’ve been forced to suppress.”

    This is just a sampling of an increasing surprise reversal of the woke trend. And the key to it is that it has not emanated from the conservative side; it’s coming from liberals themselves.

    Essentially, what we’re seeing is the effects of overload – those who previously supported wokeism… until it had taken over their lives. A breaking point is being reached in increasing numbers of liberals as wokeism is simply becoming intolerable.

    So, what does this mean for the future? Is the globalist push nearing an end? No, unfortunately, even if it is to be defeated, it still has years to go. And the worst is yet to come. But the pushback is now quietly underway for the first time.

    Is wokeism a dead duck? Hardly. But we may be witnessing the turning point – the point at which the narrative becomes intolerable to increasing numbers of people, and the tide turns.

    To be sure, leaders never tire of the rhetoric that they create. But sooner or later, their minions – those who are pushing their propaganda – get a bellyful and move on.

    This doesn’t happen overnight, but we may be reaching a turning point when it begins to lose its appeal to the very people who are spouting it.

    *  *  *

    It’s clear there are some ominous social, political, cultural, and economic trends playing out right now. Many of which seem to point to an unfortunate decline of the West. That’s precisely why legendary speculator Doug Casey and his team just released this free report, which shows you exactly what’s happening and what you can do about it. Click here to download it now.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 04/03/2023 – 18:20

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