Jan 04

Today’s News 4th January 2022

  • UK Government Greases Skids For Fleets Of Surveillance Drones Over Cities
    UK Government Greases Skids For Fleets Of Surveillance Drones Over Cities

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    In what appears to be a cynical PR stunt, the UK government is considering plans to allow women who feel threatened on the street to call upon surveillance drones that would arrive in minutes and shine a bright light on any potential attacker.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    “Women in fear of an attack will be able to use a phone app to summon a drone, which could arrive within minutes armed with a powerful spotlight and thermal cameras to frighten off any potential assailant,” reports the Telegraph.

    Trials will take place on campus at Nottingham University at a cost of £500,000 during which the tech will be used to “protect students and staff.”

    The scheme will be submitted to the UK government’s Innovate research program, and could eventually see helicopters being replaced by drones as a front line tool of law enforcement.

    “It is a high capability drone that costs just £100 an hour but can do 80 percent of what a police helicopter can do,” said Richard Gill, the founder of Drone Defence.

    “It cannot do high speed pursuits but it can do the other tasks such as searching for people and ground surveillance.”

    Gill noted that 25 drones could do the job of one police helicopter in London for the same price, with the drones being housed at five base locations across the city.

    The idea of countless government drones whizzing around a city keeping tabs on people is garishly dystopian.

    Allowing individuals to access the drones would also be completely open to abuse and misuse.

    Innumerable people would make a mockery of the system by constantly calling upon the drones to harass random people or use the drones for target practice.

    A far more effective means of preventing such attacks would be to allow women to be armed with pepper spray, but current law in the UK makes that illegal.

    Changing the law would give women the power to defend themselves while avoiding the dystopian nightmare that state surveillance drones would bring.

    The idea of giving women who feel threatened the power to summon drones is patently a cynical PR stunt to acclimatize the public into accepting the general introduction of drones as a tool of mass surveillance.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/04/2022 – 02:00

  • The Big Lie & The Elastic Truth: How To Invent A Coup
    The Big Lie & The Elastic Truth: How To Invent A Coup

    Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

    I’ve taken a guilty pleasure recently in watching the faux intellectuals on MSNBC and CNN pass judgment on not just Donald Trump, but also on everyone who shares his disdain for authoritarian pronouncements on COVID-19, election integrity, climate change and a host of other issues.

    From what I can tell after studying Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Jake Tapper and the late, lamented Chris Cuomo, liberalism today is characterized by a low regard for the intelligence of average Americans and a very high regard for the elastic nature of language.

    Essentially, words are expected to mean whatever Democrats and their media enablers want them to mean. This has been most evident in the war against Donald Trump since the 2020 election, but it was certainly in play earlier. For example, saying that Donald Trump is a “racist” meant he supports border security. Saying Donald Trump is a Russian “colluder” meant that Hillary Clinton had paid a British spy to manufacture a phony dossier implicating Trump.

    But the campaign to destroy Trump really lifted into the stratosphere after the Nov. 3 election. When they called his claim that the election was stolen “the Big Lie,” what they meant was they don’t agree with him. When they said he made his claims “without evidence,” they meant “without evidence that they agree with” or that they would even look at.

    Then — after the Jan. 6 House select committee voted to hold Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress — they pivoted and announced that the Big Lie was now “the Big Coup.” Meadows was chief of staff to President Trump, and since Trump clearly believed the election was stolen, it should be no surprise that Meadows was in constant communication with members of Congress and others who were working to prove that fraud had taken place. But in the Orwellian world of Democrats, trying to prove that fraud was committed by someone else means you are yourself guilty of fraud. Believing the election was stolen means that you yourself tried to steal the election. And worst of all, asking people to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol means that you were instructing them to riot and overthrow the government.

    As we approach the anniversary of the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” the unspoken truth is that Donald Trump had nothing to gain and everything to lose by the violent assault on the Capitol that day. The only chance of keeping Trump in the White House was not by invading the Capitol, but by keeping it secure while our representatives debated the validity of the election using the entirely constitutional process taking place inside the halls of Congress.

    The electoral votes of at least five states were being challenged — not in a coup, but in a lawful manner also used by Democrats in earlier elections, following the procedures mandated by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Republican senators and House members had lined up to make the case to the public and their fellow constitutional officers that something was rotten in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and that the election was therefore tainted. But the violence outside resulted in a sharply truncated debate inside that was virtually ignored, if not outright mocked or shamed, by the mainstream media. The riot instantly doomed any chance Trump had of prevailing in his argument that the election was stolen.

    So ask yourself who benefited from the supposed coup at the Capitol. Not Trump. Not the Republicans who had put themselves on the line to support him with evidence of voting irregularities in several states. Cui bono? Who benefits? None other than the very Democrats who for the last year have worked tirelessly to discredit Trump and to find some way to disqualify him from being elected president again in 2024.

    The latest claim is that Trump had criminally “obstructed an official proceeding of Congress” by encouraging his supporters to “Stop the Steal.” This is an absurd claim on several fronts.

    First of all, Trump’s belief that the election was stolen is protected by his First Amendment right of free speech. So is his right to use the courts and Congress to seek redress of his grievances. There is no evidence he had advance knowledge of the riot or planned it in any way. As noted, the particular proceeding of Congress in question was the only hope Trump had of remaining in office beyond Jan. 20, 2021.

    Moreover, the argument that Trump “allowed” the riot to take place because he did not send National Guard troops to intervene is wrong on both the facts and the logic of the case. As I showed in my last column, Trump did in fact request 10,000 National Guard troops to be deployed, but his request was ignored by the Pentagon, the speaker of the House, the Capitol Police and the mayor of Washington, D.C. Even more importantly, if Trump had used the power of the presidency to order a military presence at the Capitol, then the Democrats would have gotten exactly what they wanted — the appearance of a coup ordered by a reckless, out-of-control authoritarian who was trying to bend Congress to his will. In other words, Trump could not win that day no matter what he did. The violence made victory impossible.

    But to argue, as Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi do, that Trump didn’t have a right to contest the election is to replace the rule of law with the rule of intimidation. The Democrats and their partners in the media have used all their assembled might to coerce Trump and his allies into silence. His only crime is that he won’t shut up about the election being stolen. Nor for that matter is he the only one who thinks that the election was fraudulent. Millions of us independently reached the same conclusion. If any of those supporters had turned to violence at the Capitol, they should be appropriately tried, convicted and punished for their misdeeds, but that’s not on Trump any more than it is on the rest of us who encouraged our fellow citizens to work to prevent the installation of Joe Biden as president as long as doubts persisted about his legitimacy.

    But the Jan. 6 committee and its supporters don’t care about logic or facts. They trotted out text messages from Trump supporters condemning the violence and said that meant Trump himself must have supported the violence. They showed messages that indicated Trump had a strategy to try to prove to Congress and then to the Supreme Court that his rights had been violated, and they said that proved “the Big Coup.”

    Goodness, they really didn’t need to wait this long if that’s all it takes to prove a coup! They could have just read Trump’s speech from the morning of Jan. 6. He never hid the fact that he thought he had been cheated out of victory, nor did he ever pretend he would go gentle into that good night the way Democrats hoped he would. But they already knew all that. In fact, they impeached him over the same speech and failed to convict him. If they tried to convict him on the same charges again, under any guise, they would have violated the intent of the Constitution’s protection against double jeopardy. Not that they care.

    One last point: In general, the liberal elites appear to be incapable of recognizing that every argument has two sides. They honestly believe that whatever the Democratic leadership says is true, and whatever Donald Trump or his supporters say is false. Although this condition existed prior to the 2020 election, it was exaggerated afterwards to the point where we no longer have the expectation of honest debate. And that, contrary to the claims of politicians like Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney, is the real danger to democracy.

    When half the people are considered by the other half to be malignant, prevaricating miscreants, there is no hope for true democracy — rule by the people. The best you can expect is demi-democracy, rule of the people by half of the people. That may be the hope of the liberals, but they should be careful what they wish for. Despite their frantic attacks on the Deplorables, it is not yet certain who will prevail in the war they have unleashed. Not a war of weapons, but a war of words and a war of ideas.

    On the Democrat side, there are threats and intimidation, warning American citizens not to step out of line. Wear your mask. Get your shot. Turn in your gun. Do what we tell you, and keep your head down. You’ll be fine if you obey.

    On the other side, there is a rising chorus of voices, moms and dads, black and white, free-thinkers all, who ask for the right to raise their children as they see fit, insist on medical autonomy, expect elections to be fair, and don’t bow before authority unless it is legitimately wielded.

    The choice of two diametrically opposed futures has not been so clear since the Civil War, and Democrats — just as they did in that great conflict — seem intent once again on proving the truth of Lincoln’s dictum that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 23:40

  • Suicide Drones Marked With "Soleimani's Revenge" On Wings Attack US Base In Iraq
    Suicide Drones Marked With “Soleimani’s Revenge” On Wings Attack US Base In Iraq

    On Monday, at a time when Shia groups in Iraq and Iran are staging large anti-American rallies to commemorate the Jan.3rd 2020 killing of IRGC General Qassem Soleimani, a pair of armed drones were sent against a military base in Iraq which hosts US forces.

    “Two armed drones were shot down as they approached an Iraqi military base hosting US forces near Baghdad’s international airport, Iraqi security sources said, adding that nobody was hurt in the incident,” Al Jazeera reports. It happened at Camp Victory not far from the city’s international airport.

    Illustrative: Iranian Army drone test launch, via AP

    A US official called it “a dangerous attack on a civilian airport,” given the nearby presence of civilian aviation. The official said the base’s defense system thwarted “two fixed-wing suicide drones” that were inbound, but “they were shot down without incident.”

    But interestingly one of the drones was marked with the words “Soleimani’s revenge”, according to the report:

    Footage provided by the coalition showed what the official said was debris of two fixed-wing drones destroyed in the attack, with writing clearly visible on the wing of one drone reading “Soleimani’s revenge”.

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    Though there were no immediate claims of responsibility, the obvious suspected groups include factions under Iraq’s pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces.

    Alongside Soleimani, the Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis also lost his life on that day in the US drone attack two years ago, along with others in the caravan which was driving away from Baghdad International Airport at the time. 

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    In Tehran on Monday, Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi vowed a “martyr’s revenge” during a televised address on the second anniversary of Soleimani’s death.

    “If Trump and (former secretary of state Mike) Pompeo are not tried in a fair court for the criminal act of assassinating General Soleimani, Muslims will take our martyr’s revenge,” Raisi said according to Reuters. Given this, and the heightened passions and tensions, it’s likely there will be more small scale attacks to come targeting remaining US forces in Iraq this week.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 23:20

  • Race-Based COVID-19 Treatment Violates Federal Law
    Race-Based COVID-19 Treatment Violates Federal Law

    Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

    New York City has issued its latest guidance for the distribution of monoclonal antibodies (and other COVID-19 therapeutics) for the treatment of COVID-19. And it looks to your color, not your condition.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland, mask off.

    For the uninitiated, monoclonal antibodies are recommended by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and have been authorized by the FDA, for the treatment of COVID-19. According to the latest New York City guidelines, monoclonal antibodies are authorized as COVID-19 treatment “for people who have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.”

    “Other factors” that increase the risk for serious illness. What could those be?

    New York City has the answer:

    “Consider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities may contribute to an increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.”

    The distribution of potentially life-saving medications based on the color of a patient’s skin – or, at a minimum, treatments that prevent a COVID-19 patient from life-threatening complications – has already started. According to the New York Post, “one Staten Island doctor said he filled two prescriptions for Paxlovid this week and was asked by the pharmacist to disclose the race of his patients before the treatment was authorized.”

    This follows similar reports from other jurisdictions. In Texas, a white patient was denied medication because he didn’t fit the racial “criteria.”

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    The New York pharmacists referenced in the New York Post story were apparently unconcerned about the risk factors that transcend races: obesity, age, chronic kidney or liver disease, or diabetes. It was race that mattered. While the New York Post reporting states both patients were white, and that both patients were ultimately “granted” their prescriptions, the concern is that the NYC guidance is more broadly already in practice.

    Race-Based Treatments and the Law

    This gets us to the issue of the broader legality of “health equity”. While the above paragraphs describe mere “guidance” from New York City health agencies, the administration of treatments and drugs based on race can violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the Department of Justice explains:

    “Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.”

    The recipients of “federal financial assistance” may “include hospitals, health clinics, nursing homes, long-term care facilities, alcohol and drug treatment facilities, health research programs, almost all physicians, and Medicaid and Medicare programs.”

    Certainly there would be a statutory violation if one of these New York providers received federal funds and used race as a determining factor in providing medications. And if there is, the DOJ explains it is authorized to take action by termination funding or through litigation.

    At a minimum, the Biden Department of Justice should be pushing back on race-based treatment. Even if the legality can be debated (depending on whether a provider receives federal funds), the policy itself is certainly evil.

    With this ongoing discrimination, and with these options of enforcement, why is the Biden Department of Justice doing nothing?

    Perhaps because the Biden Administration is already playing politics with monoclonal antibodies. It recently instituted a dramatic reduction of shipments of monoclonal antibodies to Florida, claiming “such treatments are not effective against the omicron variant of the coronavirus.” As if omicron is the only variant out there. One can’t help but suspect that Florida residents are victimized, and will be victims themselves, because the Democrats don’t want Governor DeSantis (considered by many to be the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner) to succeed.

    Or perhaps the Biden Administration allows for discrimination in providing medical care because it condones discrimination overall. Their actions support this theory. Back in October 2020, the Trump DOJ initiated litigation under the same statute (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq.) against Yale for discriminating on the basis of race and national origin. The Biden DOJ dropped the case without explanation in February 2021, two weeks after Biden’s inauguration.

    If anything, the New York City policy of “health equity” is line with the Biden Administration’s broader racial equity priorities. The CDC is on the record with supporting “equitable” – and not necessarily equal – access to medical care, including the treatment of COVID-19.

    As to the costs of this “health equity”?

    It will be measured in lives.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 23:00

  • "Business Is Very Good" – Let's Go Brandon Store Chain Expands As Biden's Approval Rating Plunges
    “Business Is Very Good” – Let’s Go Brandon Store Chain Expands As Biden’s Approval Rating Plunges

    The growing “Let’s Go, Brandon” movement has expanded into a booming retail chain selling anti-President Biden merchandise. Business is thriving, and the small retail chain has big plans across the New England region. 

    FOX Business spoke Let’s Go Brandon store owner Keith Lambert, who is opening two new locations in Salisbury and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, increasing locations from eight to 10. Soaring demand for political merchandise comes as the Biden administration’s approval rating tumbled back to near record lows. 

    “A customer came into one of our locations [Tuesday] and bought a Let’s Go Brandon sticker and went out to his car and stuck it over his Biden sticker,” Lambert said. “And that was it, he was just like, ‘I’m done with this guy.'”

    “People have buyer’s remorse,” he added. “Business is very, very good right now.”

    The Let’s Go Brandon movement is a unique response to many Americans’ discontent with the media and the Biden administration. The slogan is a modern equivalent of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” used by the colonists to show their defiance against England. 

    Let’s Go Brandon movement began on Oct. 2. Race-car driver Brandon Brown won his first NASCAR Xfinity Series race. During the interview, NBC reporter Kelli Stavast’s questions were drowned out by “F*** Joe Biden” chants. Stavast was quick to declare, “you can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go, Brandon!”

    For months, the war cry has taken the nation by storm (see: here & here). People are fed up with the media and, most importantly, the Biden administration. Lambert said the community response to his stores has mainly been positive, but there’s always angry liberals that bombard the store with negative reviews online and message him death threats. 

    Lambert’s said he began losing trust with Biden after the botched exit of Afghanistan and the border crisis. 

    “His decision-making is not good,” he said. “I don’t think he’s doing the job that he should be doing, and I’m not happy with it, just like a lot of other people are not happy with it.”

    Lambert said when Biden leaves office, he’s not worried about anti-liberal merchandise going out of fashion.

    “Liberals always get so upset, so there’s always going to be a slogan, a phrase, and the Trump brand isn’t going anywhere. People still buy lots of Trump merchandise, and especially if he runs again, I’m sure we’ll be able to stay open and keep moving with that stuff,” he said. 

    Let’s Go Brandon is a rallying cry of defiance and is a way for many to tell both the president and the media to “mind the music and the step” because they are marching to a different tune than the American people. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 22:40

  • Dr. McCollough Says Outpatient Treatments For COVID-19 Have Been Suppressed
    Dr. McCollough Says Outpatient Treatments For COVID-19 Have Been Suppressed

    Authored by Jan Jekielek and Masooma Haq via The Epoch Times,

    Dr. Peter McCullough told The Epoch Times that the public should question why the governments and public health officials around the world have put little to no emphasis on outpatient treatments in their efforts to fight the COVID-19 virus, instead promoting a massive effort on vaccines.

    “Lots of messaging on the vaccine, but zero mentioning on treatment, none. And it’s been from the very beginning. There is a theme here, I hope everyone’s starting to get the theme. There is zero effort, interest, promotion, or care about early treatment, people who are sick with COVID-19,” said McCollough.

    “But there is a complete and total focus on people who don’t have COVID-19 and giving them a vaccine.”

    McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and lead author of the first paper on early COVID-19 outpatient treatment involving a multi-drug regimen. In a recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, he discussed a wide range of evidence on COVID-19 preventative treatments that are being used around the world.

    He said that drug treatments must be prioritized in the effort to stamp out the threat of COVID-19. “So early treatment markedly changes spreads. So, we reduce new cases, we reduce the intensity and severity and duration of symptoms. And by that mechanism, we reduce hospitalization and death.”

    The doctor cited some recent treatments that have been effective in killing the virus at the early stage of infection: Dr. Iqbal Mahmud Chowdhury conducted a protocol in Bangladesh that used a povidone-iodine rinse in the nose and eyes to kill the virus. Another treatment effort by a French doctor, Didier Raoult, who treated people using hydroxychloroquine, met with great success.

    “Chowdhury is the first author recognizing the fact that the virus is in the air, people breathe it in, it settles in the nose, and it begins to replicate. And it has to get to a certain threshold and overcome the other organisms in the nose and overcome our own immune system to become a clinical infection. So, there’s about a three-to-five-day window to actually zap the virus directly.”

    Masks and hand sanitizer are illogical and the data does not show them to be effective means to prevent COVID-19 infections because the virus is spread through the air, not hands, and is too small to be blocked by most masks said, McCollough.

    McCollough said COVID creates “terrible inflammation” and hydroxychloroquine has been shown to be effective to reduce that, but instead of seeing an increase in using and studying the effectiveness of that drug, it has instead been restricted and in some countries, doctors can be jailed for using it to treat their patients.

    A map of where hydroxychloroquine is currently being used around the world for COVID-19 on March 1. (Courtesy of c19study.org)

    In the United States, hydroxychloroquine can only be used in hospitals.

    McCollough detailed the events that led to these restrictions, saying that for one, “there was a falsified paper published in Lancet … which claimed to have tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19, hospitalized at multiple centers around the world, in their 40s, hospitalized with COVID-19.” He said the supposed study was not verified and claimed the drug had negative health effects.

    This “false” study led to medical professionals losing confidence in the drug and after which, “hospital messaging started to say, listen, don’t use hydroxychloroquine.

    “The NIH pulled the program on a fully-funded trial in the midst of our initial wave of COVID-19. And then, shortly after that, the FDA put out a statement: hydroxychloroquine should not be used across the board, period.

    “The next drug up on the block was Ivermectin.”

    The Epoch Times reached out to the NIH to ask what they thought of Dr. McCullough’s criticism of the NIH’s COVID-19 treatment guidelines. The NIH spokesperson declined to comment. She said that the NIH relied on a panel of many experts to develop the COVID-19 treatment guidelines.

    The FDA told The Epoch Times they are committed “to speed patient access to medicines to prevent or treat COVID-19 provided they meet the agency’s rigorous standards,” but that they believe the vaccines are the best way to prevent the disease and hospitalization.

    McCollough says along with anti-hydroxychloroquine messaging, the drug Ivermectin was also maligned after that the American Medical Association gave an opinion against it.

    “So, Americans saw the most confusing picture of hospitalized care of COVID-19 and a very confusing picture of outpatient treatment of COVID-19. My contributions, at least I tried to organize the outpatient treatment into concepts, where we would use drugs … in the middle phase treat inflammation, and in the late phase treat blood clotting; and we stuck with those principles all the way through,” said McCollough.

    McCollough said it’s highly unusual for hospitals to not conduct trials on treatments for a disease, but with COVID-19 no major trials have been done to improve treatments and there have been no outcomes publicized by hospitals.

    McCollough said improving treatments for those who are sick with COVID-19 has never been a priority for those in charge of public health because vaccines have been pushed from day one. He remembers how CVS pharmacies were advertising the vaccines even before they were fully authorized.

    CVS confirmed to The Epoch Times that they were advertising the vaccines in October 2020.

    A sign at a drug store advertises the COVID-19 vaccine in New York City on Nov. 19, 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

    He said the U.S. media has almost completely blocked out what is going on around the world with treatments for COVID. “Anywhere where there has been an early oral drug approach there has been success in terms of COVID-19. And now more recently, it was very fascinating, is anywhere where there’s any attention to decontamination in the nose and the mouth with direct by virucidal therapy. There have been stunning results.”

    He questions why the United States has not reviewed the work being done around the world to treat the disease.

    “We haven’t seen panels of collaborating doctors. We’ve never seen a symposium on local therapy, what works best for the nose. No mention by public health officials.”

    McCollough says those leading U.S. public health agencies are incompetent.

    McCollough suggests that there be a monthly review of new therapies used to treat COVID both at a national and global level, for doctors to review and learn from peers. “The idea that there’s no review, you’d think there would be the World Health Organization would actually assign a task force. This is the biggest public health problem, a monthly review of promising therapies.”

    “So the treatment, inpatient and outpatient, of the biggest illness of our time, after two years, is an enigma.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 22:20

  • Deja Vu? Texas NatGas Output Plunges Amid Cold Snap
    Deja Vu? Texas NatGas Output Plunges Amid Cold Snap

    U.S. natural gas futures rose late in the session on new data that showed a plunge in pipeline gas flows in Texas, which indicates the state’s power grid could be susceptible to failures amid a cold snap. 

    Front-month gas futures are up more than 3% to $3.84 around 1445 ET as commodity traders assess the situation in Texas. 

    “Production of the heating and power generation fuel in Texas fell on Sunday to the lowest since February’s freeze — when millions were sent into the dark for days — after temperatures plunged,” BloombergNEF pipeline data showed. Flows are expected to rebound when temperatures rebound. 

    Temperatures in The Lone Star State are expected to rebound in the coming days. 

    However, warmer weather might not return to much of the U.S. until next Tuesday. Mean temperatures will oscillate around a 30-year average for the next eight days, occasionally dipping to below-average levels. The coldest point is between Jan. 8-11. 

    Heating degree days for the U.S. show cold weather will increase the demand for energy to heat building structures. 

    A plunge in gas supplies comes right after the Electric Reliability Council (ERCOT) of Texas said the power grid is “winterized and ready to provide power.” 

    Last February, a cold snap froze wellhead across the state that parazyled gas flows. Power plants couldn’t get enough fuel to spin turbines, and combine that with extraordinarily high power demand from customers to stay warm, the grid was minutes from collapse — forcing ERCOT, the grid operator — to implement rolling blackouts. 

    Despite ERCOT’s confidence that grid stability can be achieved this winter, keep an eye on Texas and pray for warmer weather; if not, another energy crisis could be nearing. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 22:00

  • Beijing Sends Warning With Evergrande
    Beijing Sends Warning With Evergrande

    By Richard Frost, Bloomberg markets live commentator and reporter

    China’s authorities are sending a clear signal that there will be no let up in their crackdown on the property market, meaning the industry will remain a concern for investors for some time to come.

    Local governments are getting tough, with an order that Evergrande demolish 39 buildings in 10 days the latest extreme example. The timing and urgency of the demand is notable for a project that’s been problematic since at least 2018, when an official report showed it was inflicting damage to a vast area of coral reef.

    Similarly, the Shenzhen government’s bailout of China South City last week was heavily discounted, which “may indicate the state conducted very tough M&A price negotiations,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence credit analyst Andrew Chan. And the removal of a statement by authorities in Heilongjiang last month pledging “all out efforts” to support the property sector suggested it wasn’t the message the central government wanted to send.

    Beijing’s plans for the property industry has become a center of global investor focus, given its vital importance to the world’s second-largest economy. Evergrande has led a wave of defaults, with at least six developers failing to pay debts on time in the last quarter. Firms are being squeezed by a slump in sales, elevated borrowing costs and the economic slowdown. Contracted sales for 31 listed property companies fell 26% in December from a year earlier, according to Citigroup analysts.

    A gauge of Chinese property stocks slid 1.7% on Monday to near an almost five-year low. On a price-to-book basis, the index is approaching the cheapest level since at least 2005. The measure rose in the previous two weeks amid speculation officials would dial back curbs on the industry to limit the impact on the economy.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 21:56

  • Syrian al-Qaeda Looks To Elections To Court Western Support
    Syrian al-Qaeda Looks To Elections To Court Western Support

    Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

    Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, controls much of Syria’s Idlib Province. The group is, realistically, Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate in everything but name, and keeps trying to present itself as a more palatable partner for the west.

    This was al-Qaeda’s idea, originally. When the ceasefire in Idlib was being negotiated, HTS held a lot of the territory, and al-Qaeda was very public about the need for the Syrian faction to appear to be independent. This was done with an eye toward getting them support in the war, and now the plan is to play government in Idlib. HTS is planning local elections, and making their morality police much less visible.

    Wanted terrorist Abu Muhammad al-Golani posing with PBS News’ Martin Smith

    The Washington Post over the weakened seemed eager to present a “softened” al-Qaeda group in Idlib: “The Islamist militants attacked the radio station for years, because it played music, because it hired women, because its liberal values posed a challenge to Syria’s zealous men with guns,” the report began.

    “Lately, though, the attacks on the station have stopped, and its tormentor — a militant group once affiliated with al-Qaeda called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — is trying to convince Syrians and the world it is no longer as radical or repressive as it once was,” it continued.

    And here’s where WaPo actually tries to revive the “moderate rebels” label as applied to al-Qaeda: 

    Now the group says its focus has shifted to providing services to millions of people in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province through a fledgling government. It severed ties with al-Qaeda five years ago and says it is cracking down on other extremist groups. The founder of HTS, a veteran jihadist once seemingly ubiquitous in military fatigues, these days is photographed wearing suits.

    “That faction that used to harass us is trying to show people that they are moderate,” said Abdullah Klido, the chief executive of the radio station, called Radio Fresh. “They are trying to organize things so they appear in the image of a state.”

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

    With the war slowing down, HTS wants to give the appearance of a valuable alternative to Assad.

    As al-Qaeda’s affiliate, only Turkey was really willing to accept that. As al-Qaeda’s affiliate with a lot of window-dressing, they may well have more interested parties.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 21:40

  • The Real Winners In Afghanistan: Private Contractors
    The Real Winners In Afghanistan: Private Contractors

    After 20 years in Afghanistan which featured more than 22,000 US servicemember casualties, an official 46,000 civilians killed – including 7 children droned by the Biden administration on its way out, and trillions added to the US national debt, there are really two winners;

    The Taliban – which carved a path to Kabul in a matter of days and recovered billions of US military hardware left behind during the botch Biden withdrawal, and private contractors, who have raked in trillions according to the Wall Street Journal.

    A U.S. contractor checks on a military vehicle at Bagram Air Base in 2013.
    Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

    Those who benefited from the outpouring of government money range from major weapons manufacturers to entrepreneurs. A California businessman running a bar in Kyrgyzstan started a fuel business that brought in billions in revenue. A young Afghan translator transformed a deal to provide forces with bed sheets into a business empire including a TV station and a domestic airline.

    Two Army National Guardsmen from Ohio started a small business providing the military with Afghan interpreters that grew to become one of the Army’s top contractors. It collected nearly $4 billion in federal contracts, according to publicly available records. -WSJ

    Of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, approximately one-third to one-half of that went to contractors, with $2.1 trillion of that going to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – for services, weapons and supplies, according to the Costs of War Project maintained by Brown University.

    Of course, a constellation of smaller contractors made billions for various enterprises – including training Afghan (now Taliban) police officers, infrastructure expansion such as roads, establishing schools, and providing security services to Western diplomats, according to the report.

    According to former Green Beret and acting Trump Defense secretary Christopher Miller, “you have to outsource so much to contractors to do your operations” when you’re running an all-volunteer military without a draft.

    Approximately $150 billion of the funds spent in Afghanistan – a drop in the bucket – was overseen by the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, which catalogued waste and fraud across hundreds of reports. For example, a survey released in 2021 found that of $7.8 billion subject to inspection, just $1.2 billion, or 15%, was spent as expected on hospitals, factories, roads and bridges. At least $2.4 billion was spent on military planes, police offices, farming initiatives and other development projects that were destroyed, abandoned, or repurposed.

    A U.S. civilian contractor arrives at the Forward Operating Base Naray in 2006 near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Photo: Scott Peterson/Getty Images

    In yet more examples, $6 million was wasted on a project to import nine Italian goats in the hopes of boosting Afghanistan’s cashmere market. $270 million was allocated by the US Agency for International Development to build 1,200 miles of gravel road – a project which was canceled after just 100 miles were built in three years and over 125 dead due to insurgent attacks.

    The Pentagon has defended its slush fund imperialism – with spokesman Maj. Rob Lodewick claiming that the “dedicated support offered by many thousands of contractors to U.S. military missions in Afghanistan served many important roles to include freeing up uniformed forces for vital war fighting efforts.”

    The Inspector General who analyzed the reconstruction since 2012, John Sopko, said that many of the contractors were making best efforts to fulfill requirements by policymakers who made terrible decisions.

    “It’s so easy with a broad brush to say that all contractors are crooks or war profiteers,” said Sopko. “The fact that some of them made a lot of money—that’s the capitalist system.“

    The use of contractors is not new in American history. During the revolutionary war, the Continental Army made use of private firms for their military supply chain, and even to carry out raids on ships. During WWII, the US used one contractor for every seven service members, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

    The practice really took off in the 1990s surrounding the Gulf War, however, which accelerated even more after 9/11 when the United States set out to prosecute a global war on terror which left the Pentagon short-handed after downsizing the US military after the Cold War.

    In 2008, the U.S. had 187,900 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the peak of the U.S. deployment, and 203,660 contractor personnel.

    The ratio of contractors to troops went up. When President Barack Obama ordered most U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan at the end of his second term, more than 26,000 contractors were in Afghanistan, compared with 9,800 troops.

    By the time President Donald Trump left office four years later, 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, along with 2,500 troops. -WSJ

    “Contracting seems to be moving in only one direction—increasing—regardless of whether there is a Democrat or Republican in the White House,” said Heidi Peltier, program manager at the Costs of War Project, who added that the reliance on contractors has led to the rise of the “camo economy,” in which the true costs of war are camouflaged.

    According to statics from the Labor Department, more than 7,000 US service members died during two decades of war, while 3,500 US contractors died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Read the rest of the report here.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 21:20

  • The Collins And Fauci Attack On Traditional Public Health
    The Collins And Fauci Attack On Traditional Public Health

    Authored by Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff via The Epoch Times,

    On Oct. 4, 2020, with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Our purpose was to express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world; We proposed an alternative strategy of focused protection.

    The key scientific fact on which the GBD was based—a more than thousand-fold higher risk of death for the old compared to the young—meant that better protection of the old would minimize COVID deaths. At the same time, opening schools and lifting lockdowns would reduce the collateral harm to the rest of the population.

    The Declaration received enormous support, ultimately attracting signatures from over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals and over 800,000 members of the public. Our hope in writing was two-fold.

    • First, we wanted to help the public understand that—contrary to the prevailing narrative—there was no scientific consensus in favor of lockdown. In this, we succeeded.

    • Second, we wanted to spur a discussion among public health scientists about how to better protect the vulnerable, both those living in nursing homes (where ~40 percent of all COVID deaths have occurred) and those living in the community. We provided specific proposals for focused protection in the GBD and supporting documents to spur the discussion. Though some in public health did engage civilly in productive discussions with us, in this aim we had limited success.

    Unbeknownst to us, our call for a more focused pandemic strategy posed a political problem for Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The former is a geneticist who, until last week, was the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH); the latter is an immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). They are the biggest funders of medical and infectious disease research worldwide.

    Collins and Fauci played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the Declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized “a quick and devastating published takedown” of this proposal, which they characterized as by “three fringe epidemiologists” from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.

    Across the pond, they were joined by their close colleague, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest non-governmental funders of medical research. He worked with Dominic Cummings, the political strategist of UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Together, they orchestrated “an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket COVID-19 restrictions.”

    Ignoring the call for focused protection of the vulnerable, Collins and Fauci purposely mischaracterized the GBDl as a “let-it-rip” “herd immunity strategy,” even though focused protection is the very opposite of a let-it-rip strategy. It is more appropriate to call the lockdown strategy that has been followed a “let-it-rip” strategy. Without focused protection, every age group will eventually be exposed in equal proportion, albeit at a prolonged “let-it-drip” pace compared to a do-nothing strategy.

    When journalists started asking us why we wanted to “let the virus rip,” we were puzzled. Those words are not in the GBD, and they are contrary to the central idea of focused protection. It is unclear whether Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD, whether they deliberately mischaracterized it, or whether their understanding of epidemiology and public health is more limited than we had thought. In any case, it was a lie.

    We were also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD as a “herd immunity strategy.” Herd immunity is a scientifically proven phenomenon, as fundamental in infectious disease epidemiology as gravity is in physics. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity, and the pandemic ends when a sufficient number of people have immunity through either COVID-recovery or a vaccine. It makes as much sense to claim that an epidemiologist is advocating for a “herd immunity strategy” as it does to claim that a pilot is advocating a “gravity strategy” when landing an airplane. The issue is how to land the plane safely, and whatever strategy the pilot uses, gravity ensures that the plane will eventually return to earth.

    The fundamental goal of the GBD is to get through this terrible pandemic with the least harm to the public’s health. Health, of course, is broader than just COVID. Any reasonable evaluation of lockdowns should consider their collateral damage to patients with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, other infectious diseases, as well as mental health, and much else. Based on long-standing principles of public health, the GBD and focused protection of the high-risk population is a middle ground between devastating lockdowns and a do-nothing let-it rip strategy.

    Collins and Fauci surprisingly claimed that focused protection of the old is impossible without a vaccine. Scientists have their own specialties, but not every scientist has deep expertise in public health. The natural approach would have been to engage with epidemiologists and public health scientists for whom this is their bread and butter. Had they done so, Collins and Fauci would have learned that public health is fundamentally about focused protection.

    It is impossible to shut down society completely. Lockdowns protected young low-risk affluent work-from-home professionals, such as administrators, scientists, professors, journalists, and lawyers, while older high-risk members of the working class were exposed and died in necessarily high numbers. This failure to understand that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable led to the tragically high death counts from COVID.

    We do not know why Collins and Fauci decided to do a “take down” rather than use their esteemed positions to build and promote vigorous scientific discussions on these critical issues, engaging scientists with different expertise and perspectives. Part of the answer may lie in another puzzle—their blindness to the devastating effects of lockdowns on other public health outcomes.

    Lockdown harms have affected everyone, with an extra heavy burden on the chronically ill; on children, for whom schools were closed; on the working class, especially those in the densely populated inner cities; and on the global poor, with tens of millions suffering from malnutrition and starvation. For example, Fauci was a major advocate for school closures. These are now widely recognized as an enormous mistake that harmed children without affecting disease spread. In the coming years, we must work hard to reverse the damage caused by our misguided pandemic strategy.

    While tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals signed the Great Barrington Declaration, why didn’t more speak up in the media? Some did, some tried but failed, while others were very cautious about doing so. When we wrote the Declaration, we knew that we were putting our professional careers at risk, as well as our ability to provide for our families. That was a conscious decision on our part, and we fully sympathize with people who instead decided to focus on maintaining their important research laboratories and activities.

    Scientists will naturally hesitate before putting themselves in a situation where the NIH Director, with an annual scientific research budget of $42.9 billion, wants to take them down. It may also be unwise to upset the director of NIAID, with an annual budget of $6.1 billion for infectious disease research, or the director of the Wellcome Trust, with an annual budget of $1.5 billion. Sitting atop powerful funding agencies, Collins, Fauci, and Farrar channel research dollars to nearly every infectious disease epidemiologist, immunologist, and virologist of note in the United States and UK.

    Collins, Fauci, and Farrar got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results together with other lockdown proponents. The GBD was and is inconvenient for them because it stands as clear evidence that a better, less deadly alternative was available.

    We now have over 800,000 COVID deaths in the United States, plus the collateral damage. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries—less focused on lockdowns and more focused on protecting the old—have had fewer COVID deaths per population than the United States, the UK, and most other European countries. Florida, which avoided much of the collateral lockdown harms, currently ranks 22nd best in the United States in age-adjusted COVID mortality.

    In academic medicine, landing an NIH grant makes or breaks careers, so scientists have a strong incentive to stay on the right side of NIH and NIAID priorities. If we want scientists to speak freely in the future, we should avoid having the same people in charge of public health policy and medical research funding.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 21:00

  • Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Joins US Military 'Rocket Cargo' Program
    Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Joins US Military ‘Rocket Cargo’ Program

    Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. military to explore the possibility of someday using rockets to transport cargo and people anywhere in the world in one hour. 

    Blue Origin rocket company and the United States Transportation Command (US TRANSCOM), which supervises global military logistics, signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) on Dec. 17. 

    Under the CRADA, Blue Origin will share information about its rockets and capabilities. However, nothing is binding, and the government doesn’t have to commit to purchasing anything. 

    The military will use modeling and simulations to analyze just how effective it’s to deliver massive amounts of advanced weaponry and military cargo to anywhere in the world within short notice. Payloads can also include people. 

    “Not every option will call for logistics through space, but when we need to respond faster, or assure access in challenging environments, we recognize that space now offers a toolkit, not just a concept,” Vice Admiral Dee Mewbourne, deputy commander, USTRANSCOM, said in a statement. 

    “At USTRANSCOM, we want our understanding of space transportation’s potential to keep pace with the technical and operational realities that are being built now,” Mewbourne said. 

    USTRANSCOM has also signed a development agreement with SpaceX and Exploration Architecture for the rocket cargo project. 

    The development of the rocket cargo project was first announced in the Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Budget Estimates last summer. 

    Blue Origin’s entry into the military’s rocket cargo project comes as a federal judge rejected the space company’s dispute over who will build the lunar lander. It appears NASA went with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 20:40

  • Will Qatar's Investment In American Politics Pay Off In Central Asia?
    Will Qatar’s Investment In American Politics Pay Off In Central Asia?

    Submitted by James Durso,

    America’s retreat from Afghanistan was bad for U.S. taxpayers, and doubly so for Afghans abandoned in the dash to the exits.

    One beneficiary was Qatar, the Persian Gulf emirate that’s hosted the Taliban’s political office since 2013, and facilitated negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban starting in 2019.

    In November, the U.S. commissioned Qatar as the “protecting power” for U.S. interests in Afghanistan. Qatar will represent U.S. interests, provide consular services, monitor the condition of the abandoned embassy in Kabul, and “facilitate the exit of Afghans with U.S. Special Immigrant Visas.”

    The U.S. move was panned as “hiring an arsonist as [a] fireman,” but it demonstrated that Qatar knew “to be a player, you have to be a payer.”

    Until recently, Qatar’s public profile was as the host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the newest venue on the Formula 1 circuit, and an aspirant to be “the art Mecca of the Middle East.” Why did the U.S. give its mandate to a government that supports the Muslim Brotherhood, hosts the leadership of the terror group Hamas and funds its operations in the Gaza Strip, and is friendly to the Iranian regime with whom it shares management of the world’s largest natural gas field?

    It’s been said, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” In Qatar’s case, the “thrust upon” happened in 2017 when it was embargoed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt for alleged support for terrorism and extremism, hosting Al Jazeera, the widely watched television network, supporting the Arab Spring movements, and being chummy with Iran.

    Qatar had to neutralize its opponents, so it set about making friends in the U.S., the patron of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt, all well-represented in Washington. It had work to do: Saudi Arabia and the UAE spent almost four times as much in Washington as did Qatar, and U.S. President Donald Trump initially sided with the Saudis and Emiratis, who were trashing Qatar’s image in the media.

    The spralling Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

    Long before Qatar was practicing checkbook diplomacy, it remembered to gift “the big guy” – the United States. In 1996, after the previous emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, seized power, Qatar built the Al Udeid Air Base for the U.S. After an upsurge in anti-U.S. sentiment in Saudi Arabia after the U.S. attack on Iraq, U.S. forces relocated from Saudi Arabia to Al Udeid. Qatar’s hosting and improvements to the base, the headquarters for U.S. combat commanders in the Middle East, would be a brick-and-mortar reminder of the bilateral relationship. After the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan, Al Udeid was the first stop for many Afghan refugees headed to the United States.

    According to Sasapost, Qatar’s lobbying campaign after 2017 spent almost $54 million (out of $75 million spent during the last decade), which says more about expectations in Washington than Doha. Qatar’s largesse included over $1.2 million in contributions to more than 500 political campaigns and almost $300,000 to political action committees according to the Center for International Policy.

    Qatar’s campaign was made up of several elements: outreach to the White House and Capitol Hill, investment deals with U.S. states to corral their congressional delegations and highlighting the human rights violations caused by the blockade. The later issue was an opportunity for Qatar to explain how it addressed accusations of worker exploitation in construction projects for the World Cup.

    In June 2018, the U.S., the UAE, and Qatar called a truce in a battle over alleged subsidies received by the Gulf airlines that violated bilateral Open Skies agreements with the U.S. The Gulf airlines countered U.S. carriers’ allegations, accusing the Americans of benefitting from post-9/11 bailouts, subsidies to aviation infrastructure, and lenient regulation. The UAE and Qatar each likely thought resolving the issue would bolster their side in the blockade dispute, so a deal was soon tabled.

    The money, the local outreach, the free military base, the airline war cease-fire, and Qatar’s hosting of the Taliban political office contributed to favorably shaping Qatar’s image in Washington so, when the time came for the U.S. to deputize a representative in Kabul, Qatar was probably the only candidate.

    By accepting the U.S. commission, Qatar placed itself in the middle of events in Central Asia and South Asia.

    While the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan will be meeting Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar’s envoys will be meeting Taliban leaders in Kabul. Qatar can leverage that face time to pursue its own interests in the region. Those interests won’t necessarily be antithetical to U.S. desires, but the U.S. is facilitating another state’s influence in a region it engages sporadically, which will increase its future reliance on states with entrée like, say, Qatar.

    If Qatar can encourage the Taliban to facilitate trade between Central Asia and South Asia, that will boost the July transit trade agreement between Uzbekistan and Pakistan. An active trade space centered on Afghanistan will also comfort Iran that already has an established relationship with Qatar due to their shared interest in the South Pars/North Field natural gas reserve.

    China, which hasn’t indicated it will return to Afghanistan, may reconsider, and recognize the Taliban government if Qatar’s efforts lower the local temperature. If China Russia, Pakistan, Iran, India, and Central Asia engage the Taliban government, the U.S. will be isolated while it busies itself looking for that “over the horizon” base to strike targets in Afghanistan.

    Qatar knew how to succeed in Washington and turned its isolation into an opportunity for influence in Central Asia. Now, can it keep its footing along the Silk Road?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 20:20

  • "Year Of The Super Billionaire" – World's Richest Earned More Than $1 Trillion In 2021
    “Year Of The Super Billionaire” – World’s Richest Earned More Than $1 Trillion In 2021

    Tesla billionaire Elon Musk captivated the financial press during Q4 by selling a chunk of his shares in the EV carmaker after asking his Twitter followers whether he should sell or not. 

    But while Archegos secret billionaire Bill Hwang lost his entire fortune in 2021, Musk and other billionaires benefited from the ballooning equity valuations.

    According to Bloomberg, “for the wealthiest people on the planet, 2021 was a year of enormous gains, extreme losses and unprecedented scrutiny.” BBG went on to call it the “Year of the Super Billionaire”.

    And it’s not just soaring equity markets; rising valuations of everything from mansions to crypto to commodities boosted the collective fortune of the world’s 500 richest people by more than $1 trillion as the rest of the world struggled with the second year of the COVID pandemic. 

    Thanks to these gains, there are now a record 10 fortunes in excess of $100 billion, more than 200 above $10 billion and Musk has now surpassed the level of riches (adjusted for inflation) achieved by modern history’s previous wealthiest person. Combined, the net worth of the 500 billionaires now exceeds $8.4 trillion, greater than the GDP of all countries except the US and China.

    At year-end, 42 members of the billionaire’s index debuted on the ranking in 2021 mostly due to IPOs.

    The trajectory hasn’t changed much since last year, when we reported that the world’s richest 1% had earned more than $30 trillion combined. That number has no doubt increased dramatically this year.

    And back in October, we noted that, in some ways, we can’t help but sympathize with Neel Kashkari’s trumped-up “concern” about wealth inequality. Because in some ways, the US meets the standards of a banana republic, since the wealthiest 0.1% own as much assets as the bottom 90%.

    While the very richest benefited from bumper markets and loose fiscal policy, the pandemic pushed as many as 150M people into extreme poverty, even as millions of jobs went unfilled and inflationary pressures sent wages soaring across varioous industries.

    The reaction to this massive wealth creation has been reflected in political rhetoric from Washington to Beijing, where the CCP has started shaking down China’s wealthiest men and the companies they control for donations to the government’s new and as-yet-unformed “Common Prosperity” program.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 20:00

  • Johnstone: Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity
    Johnstone: Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

    In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

    I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world.

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

    We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

    “We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

    Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

    The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

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

    It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

    When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

    I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

    This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

    *  *  *

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 19:40

  • Iran Demands Trump Be Put On Trial For Soleimani Killing: "Muslims Will Take Revenge"
    Iran Demands Trump Be Put On Trial For Soleimani Killing: “Muslims Will Take Revenge”

    Iran is marking the second anniversary of the death of its popular commander of the IRGC Quds Force Gen. Qasem Soleimani, killed by US drone strike under the Trump administration while leaving Baghdad airport on Jan.3, 2020.

    Large rallies were held in Tehran and across major cities marking the occasion, which included a theme of “we are all Soleimani” and anti-American slogans and signs. Further Iranian leaders, as well as Soleimani’s daughter, Zeinab Soleimani, who has been outspoken since his death – have vowed they will see “vengeance” done against Washington. She said in a Monday speech: “We vow to move closer, hand in hand and step by step, to the horizon of exacting ‘harsh revenge’ on enemies whose hands are stained with their blood,” according to state media.

    But the comments from the day which grabbed international headlines, as they were by design meant to get Washington’s attention given the brazenness and outlandish nature of the “threat”, were issued by Iran’s hardline President Ebrahim Raisi. He vowed that Muslims would “take revenge” against the US if Trump and Pompeo aren’t arrested and brought to trial. 

    Source: Salon/AP

    “If Trump and (former secretary of state Mike) Pompeo are not tried in a fair court for the criminal act of assassinating General Soleimani, Muslims will take our martyr’s revenge,” Raisi said in a televised speech Monday, according to Reuters.

    Of course, no US leader in history has ever been put on trial for any alleged “war crimes” abroad, and Raisi without doubt knows this. But it comes after the Islamic Republic submitted a formal letter to the United Nations demanding that it hold both the US and Israel accountable for the 2020 killing.

    Iran and its allies in Iraq have argued that given Soleimani was on a diplomatic mission at the time of his death, the drone killing ordered by then President Trump was essentially an assassination of an active ambassador and top government official. According to Al Jazeera: 

    In a letter to the UN General Assembly published late on Saturday, the legal department of Iran’s presidential office called for “all legal initiatives in its power, including issuing a resolution”” to condemn the US government and discourage similar moves in the future.

    The letter said US governments have, for years, displayed an “excessive unilateralism” in their actions that has granted them the power to violate international laws and agreements.

    Interestingly and strangely, some Iranian officials took a jab at Trump over the Jan.6 Capitol events…

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

    In the days after the Jan.3rd killing, which shocked many regional leaders given the brazenness and unpredictable nature of the attack, Iran hit back by sending cruise missiles on some American bases in Iraq, specifically at at Al Asad and one in Irbil. Though no casualties were initially confirmed there began to slowly emerge reports of at least dozens of head injuries and concussions suffered by US personnel, described as “Traumatic Brain Injury” – but which the Pentagon tried to downplay.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 19:20

  • Jury Finds Theranos' Founder Elizabeth Holmes Guilty Of Fraud And Conspiracy
    Jury Finds Theranos’ Founder Elizabeth Holmes Guilty Of Fraud And Conspiracy

    (Update 7:15pm ET) – The jury (of 8 men and 4 women) has returned a verdict at about 7:15 pm ET, finding Holmes guilty on “multiple” counts. The verdict comes after “seven days of deliberations spanning more than 50 hours”, according to CNBC.

    Holmes has been found guilty on 4 charges, including one count of conspiracy and 3 wire fraud charges that can cost Holmes up to 20 years in prison (as well as a fine of $250,000 plus restitution), per count. 

    The jury found her not guilty of four other felony charges. On the three remaining charges, the jury was deadlocked.

    1. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud against Theranos investors: Guilty

    2. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud against Theranos paying patients: Not guilty

    3. Wire fraud against Theranos investors: wire transfer of $99,990 from Alan Jay Eisenman: No verdict

    4. Wire fraud against Theranos investors: wire transfer of $5,349,900 from Black Diamond Ventures: No verdict

    5. Wire fraud against Theranos investors: wire transfer of $4,875,000 from Hall Phoenix Inwood Ltd.: No verdict

    6. Wire fraud against Theranos investors: wire transfer of $38,336,632 from PFM Healthcare Master Fund: Guilty

    7. Wire fraud against Theranos investors: wire transfer of $99,999,984 from Lakeshore Capital Management LP: Guilty

    8. Wire fraud against Theranos investors: wire transfer of $5,999,997 from Mosley Family Holdings LLC: Guilty

    9. Prosecutors dropped this count in November, after making an error that put the count in peril.

    10. Wire fraud against Theranos paying patients: wire transmission of patient E.T.’s blood-test results: Not guilty

    11. Wire fraud against Theranos paying patients: wire transmission of patient M.E.’s blood-test results: Not guilty

    12. Wire fraud against Theranos paying patients: wire transfer of $1,126,661 used to purchase advertisements for Theranos Wellness Centers: Not guilty

    Holmes remained seated and expressed no emotion as the verdicts were read. Her partner Billy Evans likewise remained still.

    “She chose fraud over business failure. She chose to be dishonest with investors and with patients,” prosecutor Jeff Schenk said in his closing statement.

    *  *  *

    (Update 6:35pm ET) – It appears that the judge’s instructions to the jury to iron out their differences and come to a unanimous decision on all 11 counts have failed to inspire agreement, and moments ago the jurors told the court that “after considering all evidence and given instruction we have conclude that we cannot reach a unanimous verdict on 3 charges.”

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    So what happens next? Apparently, the the judge has indicated he’ll allow the jury to reach a verdict on eight of the 11 charges she’s facing, and on which the jury can agree on.

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    As Bloomberg notes, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila made his comments in court on the seventh full day of deliberations by the jury, which heard evidence from dozens of witnesses over the three-month trial. Jurors told the judge earlier on Monday that they were struggling to reach consensus on three charges.

    The panel of eight men and four women must decide whether Holmes, 37, is guilty of fraud and conspiracy charges filed in 2018, the same year that her blood-testing startup collapsed after previously reaching a valuation of $9 billion.

    Holmes is facing a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted.

    And now we wait for the jury’s verdict on the 8 counts in which it could reach a decision.

    * * *

    It looks as though the Elizabeth Holmes saga is nowhere close to over, and certainly not short of suspense. 

    In a note jurors sent to the judge overseeing the Holmes trial on Monday morning, jurors said that they had been unable to reach a unanimous verdict on 3 of the 11 counts against Holmes, the WSJ reported, raising the specter of a hung jury.

    The judge has reportedly encouraged the jury to work through their stalemate, advising the jury they can take as much time as they’d like, according to Bloomberg headlines mid-day Monday. The judge also reportedly asked jurors to “re-examine their own views” while lawyers for both sides have been “arguing” over what the next step for the trial should be.

    The note was delivered to the judge just before 10AM local time, the WSJ continued. “Take as much time as you need to discuss things. There is no hurry,” Judge Davila told the jury. He also told the jury to tell the court if they had additional questions. 

    Upon hearing the news, WSJ reports that Holmes “hugged her mother and partner”. Here is the slew of headlines that hit around 2PM EST:

    • HOLMES JUDGE WILL ASK JURY TO KEEP DELIBERATING ON 3 COUNTS
    • HOLMES JUDGE READS TO JURY INSTRUCTIONS AGREED ON BY LAWYERS
    • HOLMES LAWYER, PROSECUTORS ARGUING OVER NEXT STEP FOR JURY
    • HOLMES JUDGE READS TO JURY INSTRUCTIONS AGREED ON BY LAWYERS
    • HOLMES JUDGE ENCOURAGES 12-PERSON JURY TO WORK THROUGH IMPASSE
    • HOLMES JUDGE ADVISES JURORS: `RE-EXAMINE YOUR OWN VIEWS’ 
    • HOLMES JUDGE CAUTIONS JURORS: `THERE IS NO HURRY’ 

    Closing arguments were made in Holmes’ criminal trial in late December and the jury received its final instruction from the presiding judge before beginning deliberations during the last week of December.

    The jury deciding her fate consists of eight men and four women. They are tasked with trying to decide whether or not Holmes is guilty of both fraud and conspiracy charges that were leveled against her in 2018.

    If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison. 

    As we have noted in previous writeups, Holmes’ defense has been that her company failed and she made a series of business mistakes. Prosecutors portrayed Holmes as “exaggerating the capabilities and reliability of Theranos testing machines she pitched as revolutionary,” Bloomberg reported.

    Throughout the trial, jurors heard from lab partners, former employees and patients. 

    Holmes also took the stand in her own defense for seven days. She spent her time “deflecting blame”, “failing to remember” things and “accepting responsibility” for some mistakes, the report says.

    The defense claimed that Holmes never intended to deceive anyone.

    Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Schenk said during closing arguments that she “made the decision to defraud her investors and then to defraud patients.” 

    “She chose fraud over business failure,” Schenk continued.

    Holmes’ attorneys have claimed there is a “fundamental disconnect” between allegations of intentionally deceiving investors and making honest mistakes. 

    “She believed she was building a technology that would change the world,” Holmes’ attorney, Kevin Downey, said. He claimed Holmes “sacrificed her youth, friends and family relationships,” to make Theranos work. “She stayed. Why? Because she believed in this technology,” Downey told the jury. “She stayed the whole time. She went down with this ship.”

     

    Developing…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 19:15

  • The Truths We Dared Not Speak In 2021
    The Truths We Dared Not Speak In 2021

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

    As the long year of 2021 finally came to a close, there were a number of truths Americans on the Left found themselves privately acknowledging but unable to say in public for fear of doing damage to their political cause, their own reputations, or their sense of security.

    But as 2022 advances, it will become even more difficult to hide these truths. 

    Collusion, RIP

    No one wishes to speak of the “dossier” anymore. Everyone knows why: it was never a dossier. It was always a mishmash concoction of half-baked fantasies and outright lies, sloppily thrown together by the grifter and has-been ex-British spy and Trump hater, Christopher Steele—all in the pay of Hillary Clinton, the original architect of the collusion hoax. 

    Steele himself admitted that he had no sources or notes to substantiate his “research.” Most of those who had seeded the dossier around Washington now either agree it was fake, or “partially” false, or remain silent in embarrassment. 

    The perpetual NeverTrump revisionism is reduced to “The Russian Hoax Hoax,” in pathetic fashion suggesting Putin still colluded with Trump and such “collusion” is provable even without the dossier. 

    The logic is Orwellian: in 2017-2020 we heard, “But the dossier shows that ….” In 2020-2021 we heard, “Whoever said the dossier had anything to do with Russian collusion?” 

    The FBI—that in part used their paid informant Steele’s lies to birth FISA warrants—now disowns it. The entire 22-month, $40-million Mueller charade ended up in tragicomic style with Robert Mueller under oath denying he knew much of anything about either the purveyor of the dossier, Fusion GPS, or the dossier itself. 

    James Comey when asked about it and the investigations it spawned, on 245 occasions under oath claimed he lost his memory or had no knowledge of it. 

    The Russian collusion hoax will go down in history as one of the most shameful examples of Washington, D.C. mass hysteria, and of a concentrated effort to destroy an elected president, in modern American political history. 

    In the end, we always come back to where we started: Hillary Clinton. 

    She used the three firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie legal firm, and Fusion GPS, to pay Steele, a foreign national, likely barred by law from providing such dirt to a U.S. presidential campaign. 

    Steele then grabbed Clinton and FBI money, and in lazy fashion made a few calls to the now indicted Igor Danchenko, a Russian working in Washington, D.C. at the left-wing Brookings Institution, along with a Clinton crony Charles Dolan doing business in Moscow. Presto, Steele typed up their myths, in scary intelligence white-paper fashion, and passed them off as top-secret “Russian sources.” The dossier became the “proof” needed to show that Trump, in the words of former CIA director John Brennan, was “treasonous” or, as former Director of National Intelligence General (ret.) James Clapper alleged, was a “Russian asset.” 

    The Russian collusion hoax is now akin to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline; everyone knows it, but few bother to state the obvious—or rehash their now embarrassing earlier denials.

    When the Musical Chairs Music Stops 

    Everyone knows the government cannot keep running up astronomical annual deficits. It is piling up a near $30 trillion national debt, printing trillions of dollars—and hoping to keep inflation down to 7 percent per year. Everyone knows that, and no one wishes to talk, much less do anything, about it. 

    Instead, we simply will go on redistributing money, inflating the economy, and hoping that the middle classes are naïve enough to believe that their inflated paychecks outpace their greater inflationary costs that, in truth, have more than wiped out all their wage gains. 

    When the interest rate hikes invariably come—the longer we wait, the worse will be the reckoning—we will again know the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s. 

    The only calculus the Democrats weigh is whether they can print their way to a semblance of normality through 2022, in hopes the helium-over-inflated economy blows up only after the elections. 

    Who knows, maybe then they can blame Joe Biden in 2023 for empowering them to wreck the economy and losing the Congress, as a way of arguing his clear cognitive decline suddenly warrants resignation. 

    Spiraling Crimes without Criminals 

    Almost every statistic related to violent crime is up. Smash-and-grab has reached tony places like Union Square in San Francisco, Walnut Creek, and Carmel by the Sea. 

    Car-jackings are endemic. Gun sales are booming—among terrified upscale white liberals. 

    An entire blame-the victim protocol emerges—drive your oldest car, dress down, hide your jewelry, hire security guards for your person and business—because mysteriously there are no victimizers, or at least none that can be mentioned. 

    The once popular, but now discredited BLM has been reduced to a caricature, arguing that such violent crimes are constructs created by white people to jail black people, that Jussie Smollett was innocent and a victim of racism, and that the Waukesha massacre was the apparent start of a needed “revolution.” 

    Everyone knows that defunding the police failed and dangerously so. The public accepts that the Soros DAs are both incompetent and sinister. People of all classes and races look at crime statistics. They watch internet videos. They compare firsthand experience with robbery, assault, and theft. And they surmise that young black males are disproportionately—in terms of their percentages in the population—responsible for much of the violent crime wave, from murders to car-jackings to smash-and-grab mass thefts.

    The more the media fails to print descriptions of suspects in criminal assaults, the more universities cavalierly violate the federal Clery Act by failing to provide their campus communities needed information about criminal suspects’ descriptions, and the more big-city mayors and district attorneys deny an epidemic of violent assault, the more the public knows that crime is even worse than what they hear, see, feel, and experience first-hand.

    The public also assumes that voicing the truth is deemed “racist” and thus will earn them a doxing or canceling—and so in Soviet-style keep quiet. We do not dare speak of disproportionate black perpetrators of hate crimes, rare interracial crimes, and the killing of police.

    Yet such silence does not hide the truth that cannot be quite smothered . In a recent op-ed, Heather Mac Donald estimated that “A police officer is about 400 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police ­officer.” 

    So, we have a crime wave without criminals in the manner we had a SUV on autopilot without a driver that killed six and injured 62 in Waukesha. 

    Unofficially, the paradox plays out with the upscale blue-city suburbanite still with the BLM sign on his lawn but with a new 12-gauge under the bed, with the BLM hierarchs and their loud enablers living like Patrisse Cullors, Colin Kaepernick, or LeBron James in rich, mostly white areas, with ample walls and security fences and gates. 

    So, the year ended with a near record of black-on-black homicides, and a new record of lethal shootings—of police officers on duty. 

    Biden, A Robust 95? 

    Everyone knows that Biden may be chronologically 78, but mentally and physically he is at best 95 or more. People sense that he is failing at a geometric rate that makes his ability to last even another year “problematic.”

    But no one says much because the nation has never removed a president or, other than Richard Nixon, had a president resign. 

    The Left knows that they were on record from 2017-2020 with incessant 25th Amendment coup talk and went so low as to wheel out a Yale psychiatrist to claim Trump was crazy and needed an intervention removal. Their constant haranguing forced Trump to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment—which he aced and which Joe Biden most assuredly will not take, nor will be encouraged to take. 

    Apparently, Biden’s handlers believe in the next three years he can imitate the last few months of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, where the inactive president was kept incommunicado in bed while the wall of his family and close associates deluded the country and lied about Wilson’s true health condition. 

    Kamala Harris plays a bad Spiro Agnew. True, she is so incompetent that calls to ask Biden to step down resemble the early voices who asked the same of Nixon but were met with, “So you want Agnew?” 

    But unlike Agnew who resigned in disgrace after pleading nolo contendere to a single charge of tax evasion, Kamala Harris is in no legal jeopardy. And so, the idea of a “President Harris” who is not non compos mentis apparently is more frightening to the public than keeping Joe Biden who is non compos mentis. And thus, talk of Biden’s diminishing capacity always is interrupted by “So you want President Harris?” 

    In the end, we are left only with such ironies. The Left, which damned John McCain for selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, is mute about the far less qualified Kamala Harris as an actual vice president. The matters of race and gender preferences that ensured the incompetent Harris her job are now transmogrified into matters of racism that supposedly explain the charges of her critics. 

    The Virus is Dead, But the Virus Will Never Die! 

    We all know the administration has little clue how to deal with COVID-19. We nod that it does and meanwhile scramble in “everyman for himself” fashion. Who wishes to say or admit that his own government has no idea how to stop the virus, but has a great number of ideas about how to weaponize it for political purposes?

    Now there are more dead from COVID-19 in Biden’s tenure than during Trump’s, despite well over 60 percent of the population being fully vaxxed and 2-years’ experience in treating the virus. A 2020-Biden would demand that 2021-Biden be charged with responsibility for well over 400,000 COVID-19 deaths on his watch and thus should resign. 

    Everyone knew Biden had no plan, at least not any different from what Trump was doing. His autopilot agenda was simply to claim ownership of the Warp Speed inoculations and assume that by March 2021 COVID was finally burning itself out as it bumped into too many people with prior natural or vaccinated immunity. 

    In Biden’s logic, nature and Trump had stopped COVID-19, but he would credit his own inaction and 90-day miracle leadership from Washington. 

    Now Biden is a sanctimonious, Oedipus-like figure, the deliverer who cannot stop the plague that in an eerie way exposes his existential flaws. 

    So, Delta and then Omicron arrived. Breakthrough cases accompanied both. Suddenly Biden was calling for the states to step up, given “there is no federal solution” to the crisis. He meant that vaccinations do not guarantee immunity from COVID infections anymore. 

    Masks and social distancing do not stop Omicron’s spread. There is no federal success in supplying easy testing and an array of therapeutics and medicines to the public. 

    Like the proverbial cranky “get off my grass” neighbor, an oblivious and irate Biden still ignores the shortage of tests, the value of therapeutics and natural immunity, and the reality of thousands of breakthrough infections—caught in his senility warp to croak on about “masks” and “vaccinations.”

    In 2020, Biden was attacking Trump as if he were acting under “The Articles of Confederation” in outsourcing authority to governors to adopt and manage the crisis as they saw best. In 2021 Biden was praising such Trumpist federalism as he renounced his former much ballyhooed federal authority when blasting Trump as an anti-Federalist who followed the Articles of Confederation. 

    In the end, Americans are in 2022 where they were at the beginning of the virus in March 2020: China has successfully hidden the origins of the COVID. 

    The WHO cannot be trusted. 

    The CDC, NIH, and NIAID are incompetent and politically weaponized. 

    The pharmaceutical industries see relief only in more multi-billion-dollar booster rollouts and $700-a-pill remedies.

    Dr. “I am the science” Fauci in cyclical fashion is on TV all day. 

    He claims on Tuesday that what he said on Monday needed updating, with the intention of saying on Wednesday that his correction on Tuesday was also wrong, while he awaits more bookings for Thursday’s clarifications—all the while damning the ignorant mob who disseminates supposedly false information. 

    The Year’s Ironies 

    At the end of this second terrible year, we are left only with ironies. 

    Vaccinations are a must for soldiers and federal employees, but no barrier to entry for 2 million illegal aliens (is breaking the law a way to avoid the mandate?). 

    If you are vaxxed, you are safe; but if your antibody level is even higher from natural immunity, you are not? 

    If you get COVID, you are on your own, given the government has no idea what affordable pill you should swallow or what protocol you should follow. 

    Social distancing and masks are vital—unless you go out on the street protesting in concert with BLM or are a California official dining at the French Laundry, or a liberal politician getting your hair done.

    Those Americans in 2020 who claimed their president was all too real, know now they voted in a president who is all too false. 

    Those Americans who thought up every conceivable legal and illegal way of forcing the hated Trump out of office are racking their brains in vain to use those talents to find just one way of easing out their beloved Joe Biden. 

    Those Americans, who love the free cash for staying home, fear that the money they got might help to explain why it is now less valuable. 

    Those Americans, who claimed moral superiority for their masks and three shots—and still got COVID—cannot decide whether they were lied to by Donald Trump, lied to by Joe Biden—or simply lied to themselves. 

    Those Americans who praised defunding the police and excused looting, arson, and violence are pondering whether it is better to renounce their idiocy, or to stay quiet and take one more carjacking, one more assault, or one more break-in—for the cause.

    Those Americans who applauded the disreputable efforts of Michael Avenatti, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Adam Schiff, Christopher Steele, and Alexander Vindman to destroy Trump at all costs, got all they wanted—and thereby have all but destroyed the progressive cause, and likely made Donald Trump all the more powerful, the more so they sought to ruin him.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 19:00

  • UAE-Flagged Vessel Hijacked In Red Sea By Iran-Aligned Houthis
    UAE-Flagged Vessel Hijacked In Red Sea By Iran-Aligned Houthis

    On Monday a United Arab Emirates-flagged cargo ship has been highjacked by Iran-aligned Houthis off Yemen’s coast in the Red Sea, according to statements by the Saudi coalition.

    The vessel was taken near the western Yemeni port of Hodeidah, accused by the Houthi military which controls much of the country’s north of conducting “hostile actions” as it “entered Yemeni waters without authorization” overnight.

    Illustrative image: AFP

    A Houthi military spokesman further alleged upon seizure of the ship’s cargo that the UAE-flagged vessel was transporting military equipment, something denied by the Saudi coalition. The ship was initially bound for the Saudi port of Jizan, which lies just north of the Yemeni border. 

    However, a Saudi state media announcement dubbed the incident an act of “armed piracy” by the Houthis and said that the ship had only been carry medical equipment after a Saudi field hospital had been dismantled on the island of Socotra. 

    The coalition asserted the ship carried medical equipment from a dismantled Saudi field hospital in the distant island of Socotra, which lies 240 miles south of the Arabian peninsula. 

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    Saudi Brigadier-General Turki al-Malki in the Monday statement said, “The Houthi militia must immediately release the ship, otherwise the coalition forces shall take all necessary measures and procedures to deal with this violation, including the use of force.”

    The stretch of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in question remains a critical route for international trade and energy shipments, but has been scene for occasional vessel attacks in recent years connected to the half-decade, ongoing war in Yemen.

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    The region also of the Arabian Sea has seen the US Navy conduct multiple intercepts of vessels from Iran – in some cases weapons shipments are recovered that were believed destined for the Tehran-backed Houthis.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/03/2022 – 18:40

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