Today’s News 5th August 2024

• UK Riots: The Agenda Becomes Clear…
  UK Riots: The Agenda Becomes Clear…

  Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

  Those outside the UK might not have heard, but it’s been a violent week in the UK. Here’s a quick rundown of the official story so far:

  Four days ago a 17-year-old allegedly walked into a children’s “Taylor Swift dance class” (whatever that might be)  in Southport and started stabbing little girls, wounding 10 and killing 3.

  It was initially reported the boy was a muslim immigrant.

  This story was, however, reversed within hours, the new story “revealing” that he was actually born in Cardiff, the son of Rwandan immigrants. He was named as “Axel Muganwa Rudakubana” late yesterday.

  His  religious affiliation, if any, seems not to have been firmly established.

  Another young man was, allegedly,  arrested later while in possession of a machete and balaclava at  a vigil for the victims. He was, again, reportedly Muslim.

  This, allegedly, resulted in what are described as protests and riots, the destruction of a brick wall outside a mosque and the burning of a police van.

  Further alleged riots subsequently sprang up in London and Hartlepool.

  

  This is the current narrative. None of the details has been substantiated as yet, so how much you decide to believe is your personal preference at this point.

  At OffG we reserve the right to be sceptical. Of everything.

  There are a lot of unanswered questions, and the current level of  “mourning” by government institutions and groups in no way directly affected  by the tragedy always has a taint of the performative that shouldn’t be too quickly conflated with  insincerity or worse.

  And, of course, all of this is coming hot on the heels of the Manchester Airport incident, where police officers and Muslim youths allegedly clashed violently in as yet obscure circumstances.

  Plus the violence in Whitechapel and Leeds a couple of weeks ago.

  Then, as now, both sides were provided with adequate rage-bait to get them worked up.

  Whatever the truth of this latest incident, and whatever long term aims it might be used to further, this “strategy of tension” has an immediate political agenda already becoming clear – and it’s as predictable as ever.

  1. Further limit social media/free speech

  2. Normalise constant surveillance

  Attacking free speech is the ever-present, eternal agenda that comes before everything else and it’s been a real pile-on the last few days.

  The Hill headlines “Misinformation floods social media in wake of breakneck news cycle”, Sky News went with “Southport attack misinformation fuels far-right discourse on social media”

  ABC News reports: “Online misinformation fueled tensions over the stabbing attack in Britain that killed 3 children”

  The Byline Times collectively scolds society’s negligence: “‘We All Need To Consider Our Role in the Wild West of Social Media Hypercriminality’”

  The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (an NGO funded by the usual suspects) has timelined it all for our convenience: From rumours to riots: How online misinformation fuelled violence in the aftermath of the Southport attack

  The BBC asks “Did social media fan the flames of riot in Southport?” and Telepgraph answers very much in the affirmative, cutting right to the heart of the matter [emphasis added]:

  Unregulated social media disinformation is wrecking Britain – Free speech must come with accountability

  The Times skips past establishing the problem right to apportioning blame: “Who is behind Southport social media storm — and can they be stopped?”

  The Guardian has decided the answer is TikTok (and AI): “How TikTok bots and AI have powered a resurgence in UK far-right violence”

  The New York Times demands to know what social media companies are going to do about it:

  The U.K. Riots Were Fomented Online. Will Social Media Companies Act?

  One particularly drunk uncle decided the whole thing is Putin’s fault, for some reason, but most of the fire is directed at Twitter/X.

  Writing in Prospect, former-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger claims “Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport much worse”, while Forbes wails “Elon Musk Isn’t Stopping Misinformation, He’s Helped Spread It”.

  This is dual-purpose propaganda, it attacks the idea of free speech but also reinforces Musk/X’s totally false reputation as the savior of free expression.

  You cannot begin to fathom how irritating it is to the ruling class that ordinary people are allowed to just say whatever they want whenever they want – including having the audacity to fact check the media in real time, with no repercussions at all.

  That, more than anything else, has stalled the Great Reset in its tracks.

  So it has to go.

  Finally and forever.

  It’s why  almost everything in the news cycle – from disease to climate change – can  allegedly be “solved” with censorship.

  Because once free speech is abolished everything that comes afterward gets so much easier – including the second agenda being pushed right now: Mass surveillance and facial recognition technology.

  When it comes to this secondary goal the media are yet to reach the “call for action” phase. They are still locked into “fearmongering”, with widespread warnings about nineteen future “far-right” marches and calls to proscribe Tommy Robinson’s EDL as a “terrorist organization”

  Which, again, has the useful secondary effect of making this gentleman look more like a genuine force for opposition.

  Funnily enough, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was already discussing giving police “new powers to crackdown on antisocial behaviour” just a day before the Southport attack occurred.

  But it fell to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to formally lay it out in his address yesterday afternoon [transcript].

  Pledging to counter the “far-right” with a new police division, and increased use of surveillance and facial recognition technology to “limit their movements”:

  Wider deployment of facial recognition technology…And preventive action – criminal behaviour orders…To restrict their movements…

  And firing a warning shot across the bows of social media:

  And let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them…Violent disorder clearly whipped up online…That is also a crime. It’s happening on your premises. And the law must be upheld everywhere.

  He even pointedly made clear his response wasn’t just about now or about countering the “far-right”, rather it was about ALL civil disobedience, for any reason:

  A response both to the immediate challenge which is clearly driven by far-right hatred. But als “all violent disorder that flares up […] whatever the apparent cause or motivation – we make no distinction…Crime is crime.”

  That means everything.

  It means pro-free speech rallies, it means “bladerunners” cutting down ULEZ cameras. It means any potential anti-lockdown and/or anti-vaccine mandate protests during “the next pandemic”.

  This is the beginning of a new crackdown on digital free speech and real-world protest…

  and people are cheering him on, of course. Because they believe the State is our only shield from the nasty brick throwing baddies of the far-right.

  To sum up the last three days in British politics for those not well versed in reading past headlines  and propaganda:

  For the cost of one broken wall and a burnt out police van, the new “Labour” government have just won public approval  for new police powers and open season being called on  what remains of our free speech – and they get to distract from the now-inevitable tax raises too.

  Not a bad trade.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 08/05/2024 – 02:00

• PBoC's Gold Conduit Revealed: Chinese Central Bank Did Not Stop Buying Gold In May
  PBoC’s Gold Conduit Revealed: Chinese Central Bank Did Not Stop Buying Gold In May

  By Jan Nieuwenhuijs of Gainesville Coins

  This article is an analysis of how the Chinese central bank (PBoC) buys gold in London from Western bullion banks. Because the bullion banks take care of the gold transport for the PBoC, the shipments from London to Beijing are disclosed in UK customs data. The customs data reveals that the PBoC continued to buy gold in May — when it communicated to the market it discontinued buying — at a rate of 53 tonnes. The PBoC stated it stopped buying to dampen the gold price so it could acquire more gold.

  

  Several months ago, I discovered that supply in the Chinese gold market was outstripping demand. During my investigation of this anomaly, I found circumstantial evidence that led me to conclude the surplus is imported in 400-ounce bars from the United Kingdom, and surreptitiously procured by the PBoC.

  Let’s go through some of the mechanics of the global gold market before we can stitch it all together.

  PBoC Gold Buying Hidden in Plain Sight

  In global customs data — officially called International Merchandise Trade Statistics (IMTS) — all gold disclosed is “non-monetary,” meaning not owned by a monetary authority such as a central bank. In the United Nations IMTS rulebook it reads that customs data excludes monetary gold:

  Since monetary gold is treated as a financial asset rather than a good, transactions pertaining to it should be excluded from international merchandise trade statistics.

  Though, someone familiar with the matter but who prefers to stay anonymous, shared with me that gold import and export data can relate to monetary gold. Commonly, central banks will buy gold from Western bullion banks that arrange transportation and insurance of the metal. The moment these banks ship the gold from the UK it is thus non-monetary bullion, but when it arrives in China it is monetized (changes ownership) and brought to vaults of the central bank, supposedly in Beijing.

  Exports from the UK are mainly from the wholesale gold market in London where virtually all bars traded weigh 400 ounces. The retail market in Britain dealing in smaller bars pales in comparison, and the refining industry in the UK is relatively small.

  In turn, at the core of the Chinese domestic gold market, which excludes Free Trade Zones (FTZs), is the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) where predominantly 1Kg gold bars are traded.

  

  The private sector in China trades 1Kg bars through SGE, while the central bank buys “large bars” (400-ounce bars) abroad. As all gold on the SGE is traded in yuan, the PBoC can only diversify its international reserves by buying gold overseas with dollars or other foreign exchange. Aside from logic, there are multiple sources that have made clear the PBoC doesn’t purchase gold on the SGE. For example, the World Gold Council (WGC, page 9), the SGE (page 4), and it was confirmed to me personally by an ex-gold trader from a Chinese state-owned bank.

  The SGE captures the lion share of all gold trading in the Chinese private market. There are rules and incentives that steer most supply—imports, domestic mine production, and recycled metal—towards the SGE, which for liquidity reasons attracts most demand. Hence, the gold withdrawn from the SGE vaults is often used as a proxy for Chinese wholesale demand. In a formula:

  SGE withdrawals = net import + domestic mine output + recycled metal

  

  Before 2022, gold supply and demand in the Chinese market matched. SGE withdrawals were always higher, to varying degrees, than net import plus domestic mine output, the difference being gold recycled through the central bourse.

  If it were true that bullion banks ship gold to China, as non-monetary gold visible in customs data, that doesn’t flow into the SGE system, we would see a discrepancy between apparent Chinese gold supply and SGE withdrawals. As more gold would be supplied to China than sold through the SGE. In a formula:

  SGE withdrawals < net import + domestic mine output + recycled metal

  

  Indeed, both in 2022 and 2023 China’s net import plus mine output transcended SGE withdrawals (let alone if we would add recycled gold).

  

  As we shall see, the surplus in the Chinese gold market—imports that are not sold through the SGE—is being absorbed by the PBoC.

  Readers with deep knowledge of the Chinese gold market might think: “what if the large bars are refined in FTZs and loaded into SGE vaults without being withdrawn?” I checked with a source that has connections to refineries in China, and according to this person the refineries don’t use any large bars as feedstock for producing 1kg bars for the SGE*. Another contact I have, close to the SGE, shared with me that SGE inventory in April 2024 accounted for about 300 tonnes. Inventory had gone up recently together with a rise in the price of gold, this person said. However, the increase in SGE inventory can’t make up for the surplus in the market, which is at least 400 tonnes according to my calculations.

  More Data Supporting the Thesis

  By comparing estimated central bank purchases by the WGC, based on field research, to official statistics regarding gold buying by central banks, we know that since the start of the Ukraine war, in February 2022, monetary authorities in aggregate are secretly buying much more than they report. I have written before that these covert purchases can be attributed for roughly eighty percent to the PBoC.

  

  “Unreported” PBoC gold purchases exploded when $300 billion in foreign exchange reserves from the Russian central bank were frozen by the West early 2022 due to the war. Notably, the UK began exporting 400-ounce bars to China in huge tonnages at the same time. Coincidence? I think not. Ever since, China has taken over gold price control from the West and broke the gold price’s correlation with “real rates” (10-year TIPS yield).

  

  

  The final clue is that there is a relationship between what the Chinese central bank officially reports to be accumulating, and gold exports from the UK to China. What frequently happens, exposed by comparing these numbers, is that the PBoC starts buying gold a few months before it tells the world about it, and severely underreports its additions. This was the case in 2015, 2019, and 2022.

  

  Conclusion

  It all fits and makes sense: the motive, the data, and the anecdotal evidence. Let’s summarize our key findings:

  • The Chinese central bank desperately needs to diversify its foreign exchange reserves since the beginning of 2022. Since then, the PBoC secretly buys large amounts of gold.
  • At the same time, export of large gold bars from the UK to China explodes.
  • A “surplus” in the Chinese market appears, while the bullion is not to be found in SGE vaults. As if it has gone up in smoke.
  • A source indicates that gold shipments for central banks are often included in customs data.
  • There is a correlation between PBoC official buying and UK exports to China, suggesting the Chinese central bank buys gold in England’s capital and lets banks supervise transport (maybe because the PBoC reaches the limits of its own capacity to ship gold when volumes are sizable).

  It all points towards UK gold exports to China are destined for the PBoC—although probably not every ounce of these flows is for the Chinese central bank. Clearly, the PBoC is accumulating more gold than it wants to disclose.

  When the PBoC stated it had stopped buying gold in May 2024, after continuous purchases for 18 months, I didn’t believe it. The PBoC has few reasons to cease growing its gold reserves in the current geo-political and monetary landscape with a plethora of challenges.

  Probably, the PBoC wants the most gold for its dollars, so when the price rises fast it will signal it stopped buying, trying to cool the market. In the meantime, the United Kingdom exported 53 tonnes to China in May, of which likely most found its way to Beijing.

  Note, the PBoC also buys in Switzerland and other countries, flows that can be included or excluded in customs reports, but it’s impossible, from where I stand now, to measure all these separately.

  Finally, some of my previous analyses have been skewed by the above. Private demand in China has been lower because some (“non-monetary”) imports were taken by the central bank.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 23:20

• YouTuber WhistlinDiesel 'Full Sends' Cybertruck Through Durability Test, Including 'C-4' Denotation 
  YouTuber WhistlinDiesel ‘Full Sends’ Cybertruck Through Durability Test, Including ‘C-4’ Denotation 

  YouTuber Cody Detwiler, known as WhistlinDiesel, released a video on Friday in which he stress-tested a Tesla Cybertruck and a Ford F-150. Although Detwiler’s testing of the EV truck comes months after other social media users, his tests may be some of the most rigorous yet. 

  

  Before the series of durability tests started, the Cybertruck rolled off a rollback tow truck, surviving while the Ford F-150’s driveshaft instantly broke. Detwiler was infuriated that it took half the day to figure out how to charge the Cybertruck at a Supercharging station (full context: Detwiler did not have a Tesla account for charging). 

  While the Cybertruck outperformed the F-150 on the ‘speed bump test,’ ‘offroad test,’ and ‘pothole test,’ the EV truck suffered a rear frame separation of the tow hitch and bumper when pulling the stuck F-150.

  “Our whole frame just snapped!” Detwiler yelled, adding, “The hitch is hooked up to what? It just came off. You can’t even fix that.” 

  “The rear gigacasting… just fails! I mean, it just tears right off! You can see in the screenshot above that a bolt hole acts as a stress concentration,” car blog The Autopian noted after reviewing Detwiler’s YouTube video. 

  

  “Pulling an F150 will not break a Cybertruck’s rear frame,” one X user said, adding, “This video shows that prior to pulling the F150, the Cybertruck’s rear frame slammed onto a concrete block, which is what caused the actual damage.” 

  Pulling an F150 will not break a Cybertruck’s rear frame

  This video shows that prior to pulling the F150, the Cybertruck’s rear frame slammed onto a concrete block, which is what caused the actual damage: pic.twitter.com/45xrhji0lD

  — Adrian Dittmann (@AdrianDittmann) August 4, 2024

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

  After that, Detwiler strapped explosives to the door panels of both trucks. The YouTuber claims ‘C-4’… It appears the Cybertruck withstood the blast. 

  

  The F-150, not so much.

  

  The Autopian summarized the rest of the video as follows: “The rest of the video shows the Cybertruck’s numerous build quality issues, its steer-by-wire failure making it hard to tow the thing onto a trailer, and other problems, though it does ultimately demonstrate the truck’s superior off-road capability and the toughness of its body panels.”

  The auto blog concluded, “The Cybertruck’s performance in the video is mixed, though the host ultimately crowns the F-150 the winner by one point.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 22:45

• Nearly Half Of Dementia Cases Could Be Prevented Or Delayed: Lancet Commission
  Nearly Half Of Dementia Cases Could Be Prevented Or Delayed: Lancet Commission

  Authored by A.C. Daahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  An estimated 57 million people around the world are living with dementia, and that number is expected to increase to 153 million by 2050.

  

  But a new report published by the Lancet Commission on dementia estimates that almost half of the cases of the neurological disease can likely be avoided or delayed. Twenty-seven of the world’s leading dementia experts co-authored the report.

  These experts point to 12 existing risk factors and two new ones that could prevent or delay dementia.

  The two new risk factors included are vision loss and having high low-density lipoprotein or LDL cholesterol.

  The previous 12 risk factors include less education, hearing loss, depression, traumatic brain injury, physical inactivity, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, excessive alcohol consumption, social isolation, and air pollution.

  Some of these risk factors play a greater contributing role in early life rather than late life. For example, having less education is a more prominent risk factor in early life. Risk factors like social isolation, air pollution, and untreated vision loss are greater risk factors in late life, while the other risk factors pose a greater risk in midlife.

  “In short, these factors put a person at higher or lower risk of developing dementia,” Carol Brayne, professor of public health medicine at the University of Cambridge, and her doctoral student Seb Walsh told The Epoch Times over email.

  “That means that you cannot say to an individual person, if you stop smoking, or if you get your blood pressure under control, then you definitely won’t get dementia. But if we do this for many people across society then we expect some reduction in dementia prevalence across age groups, even though not ‘preventing’ it entirely.”

  14 Risk Factors

  The risk factors were determined from data from 37,000 participants aged 45 and older who participated in the Norwegian HUNT study. The Commission looked at evidence from the data and other reviews to decide what factors were most likely associated with dementia.

  Specifically, new evidence supports vision loss and high cholesterol as new modifiable risk factors for dementia, the report notes.

  The initial 12 risk factors were linked with 40 percent of cases, but the new report notes that addressing all 14 factors could prevent or delay 45 percent of dementia cases.

  The report did not assess the number of years dementia may be delayed if a person reduces their risk factors.

  “Dementia increases exponentially with age. So we are generally talking about a population where, if you delay its onset by a few years, some will die of other things in the meantime and dementia will effectively be ‘prevented’ for that person. For others, they will still develop dementia but later in their life and closer to death,” said Brayne and Walsh.

  In particular, the report found that high LDL cholesterol and hearing loss had the greatest weighting in their link to dementia. The two factors were attributed to around a third of preventable dementia cases.

  Less education in early life was associated with 11 percent of all preventable cases, leading to a call for good quality education and “cognitively stimulating activities in midlife to protect cognition” by the Commission.

  For those risk factors that occurred during midlife, depression and traumatic brain injury comprised 6 percent of preventable cases respectively, and physical inactivity, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity were all associated with 2 to 4 percent of preventable cases.

  Among all risk factors, depression in midlife had the lowest prevalence but made up a significant proportion of preventable dementia cases.

  “Depression is both risk and early symptom as well as often being present during dementia progression until moderate stages. So it’s a particularly challenging risk to examine and many studies look earlier in life to try and tease out the risk factor element specifically to make sure it is a risk not a prodrome,” Brayne and Walsh said.

  For cases affecting older individuals, social isolation was associated with around 10 percent of preventable cases, while air pollution was associated with 5 percent.

  The Commission noted that prevention should be “ambitious.” “Prevention involves both policy changes at national and international governmental levels and individually tailored interventions.”

  The Commission recommended specific actions to reduce dementia risk across one’s life. They include:

  • Having good quality education and engage in cognitively stimulating activities in mid-life
  • Using hearing aids and reducing harmful noise exposure, for those with hearing loss
  • Treating depression
  • Using helmets and head protection in contact sports and when riding
  • Exercising
  • Reducing smoking
  • Preventing or reducing hypertension
  • Detecting and treating high LDL cholesterol from midlife
  • Maintaining a healthy weight and treating obesity as early as possible; this can also help to prevent diabetes
  • Reducing high alcohol consumption
  • Prioritizing age-friendly and supportive community environments and housing
  • Reducing social isolation by facilitating participation in activities and living with others
  • Making screening and treatment for vision loss accessible

  Will tackling all risk factors completely ameliorate dementia cases?

  “Some people will still develop dementia,” Professor Gill Livington said in an interview with The Epoch Times. “We expect those that do to have a longer life span of which they are healthy and a shorter time with dementia at the end of their life.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 22:10

• Bronx ADA Resigns After Being Caught On Camera Allegedly Attempting To Meet 13 Year Old Boy
  Bronx ADA Resigns After Being Caught On Camera Allegedly Attempting To Meet 13 Year Old Boy

  A prosecutor for the Bronx has been forced to resign after being caught on camera allegedly trying to meet up with a 13 year old boy he met online, the New York Post reported last week. 

  30 year old William C.C. Kemp-Neal resigned from the Bronx District Attorney’s office after Dads Against Predators posted a video of him in a Target parking lot in Mount Vernon.

  In the July 8 footage, vigilantes confront Kemp-Neal, identifying him as “Marcus,” causing him to flee. According to the Post, Kemp-Neal, a Fordham Law graduate, earned $84,990 as an ADA, focusing on assault, harassment, and child endangerment cases.

  “Excuse me everybody, this man right here came to meet a 13-year-old boy,” the vigilantes can be heard yelling, while chasing Kemp-Neal. 

  

  “You wanna take him to get a milkshake, right Marcus?” another asks after they catch up to him. 

  The chase ended when a bystander intervened, putting Kemp-Neal in a chokehold, according to the footage. Kemp-Neal struggles to breathe and tries to escape while being interrogated by one of the men, before police broke up the scene, the report said. 

  A police statement said officers “encountered several individuals making allegations of wrongdoing,” and said they would undertake a “comprehensive investigation.”

  He has not been arrested or charged with a crime so far. Meanwhile, DA Darcel Clark’s office told The Post: “William Kemp-Neal worked here as an ADA from June 28, 2020, until July 17, 2024.”

  Video of the confrontation can be seen here. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 21:35

• Same Pig, Different Lipstick: COVID & The Green Revolution
  Same Pig, Different Lipstick: COVID & The Green Revolution

  Authored by Mark Oshinskie via The Brownstone Institute,

  f, as on Family Feud, you asked a hundred people who know me to identify one of my characteristics, most might say that I talk too much about the Scamdemic. But 53 months ago, the thing that—sadly—may have been at the top of the list is that I eat a lot of food, and that much of it is weird. 

  I won’t deny that I have a large appetite. But I don’t agree that Cheese Doodles and Dr. Pepper should be considered normal and collards and chia weird. 

  I’ve never watched more than ten seconds of a cooking show; “That looks delicious!” doesn’t work for me. Yet, for several reasons, I was inordinately interested in food long before Michael Pollan and Barefoot Contessa burst onto the scene and America became a foodie culture. First, growing up, we didn’t always have enough food in the house. Second, sensible eating helps people to stay healthy. Third, I like tasty stuff. 

  Therefore, I’ve often read, listened to, and thought about which foods are the most nutritious and how these might be sustainably produced. I’ve grown food for the past twelve years and have applied some of my acquired knowledge, or belief. 

  Historically, many people have had less to eat than they’ve needed to thrive, or simply survive. Hence, many have hailed the Green Revolution: a late 20th-century agricultural project encompassing plant genetic modification, modern irrigation systems, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides that increased food production, especially of wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans. 

  

  But the Green Revolution hasn’t been a cost-free, magic bullet. Neither mass nor energy is created nor destroyed; everything physical derives from something else physical. Newer crop varieties yield more because they use more water, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, expensive farm equipment, and fuel. 

  Green Revolution practices have caused serious environmental harm. Aquifers are being depleted as irrigation water is pumped from the ground faster than rain recharges it. Unimaginable amounts of fertile soil have been washed or blown away. Fertilizers and pesticides pollute soil, air, and water beyond the agricultural lands themselves, including rivers and oceans. Converting forests, grasslands, and wetlands into farmland has destroyed much wildlife/game habitat and lessened atmospheric carbon uptake. Consequently, the natural resources needed to produce food have been degraded, portending eventual, widespread crop failure and food shortages. 

  Economic and social damage has also been done. Green Revolution inputs were too costly for small farmers. Therefore, they couldn’t compete against larger, well-capitalized, or debt-leveraged growers, whose higher yields glutted markets and depressed prices. Hence, smaller farmers lost their livelihoods and land. Rural communities have emptied, both in the United States and abroad. Many displaced farmers have killed themselves. Others moved to cities or emigrated, as have rural Mexicans to the United States.

  Additionally, eating too many Green Revolution staples can make people unhealthy. Carbohydrate-heavy diets and high-fructose corn syrup, developed to use surplus corn, have increased obesity and diabetes rates. Newer, dwarf wheat strains are harder to digest. Regular consumption of soy is said to disrupt endocrine function. Insecticides and herbicides have harmed farm workers and food consumers.  

  During 53 months of Coronamania, I’ve often thought that the Covid response resembled the Green Revolution. Fundamentally, both processes exalted “science,” “technology,” and “expert-driven” management.

  Despite much media hype, top-down interventions in both realms have caused much harm.

  To begin with, the “solutions” in both settings failed to eliminate the underlying problem. No matter how much food farmers grew using Green Revolution methods, hunger remains because many can’t afford the food produced via this input-intensive method. The WHO says that 828 million people are chronically hungry. 

  Similarly, regarding public health, although America continually spends more on medical care—over the past 60 years, medical costs have increased from 6% of GDP to 19%—life spans flattened and have recently diminished. Specifically, despite the Covid lockdowns, masks, tests, and vaccines, people—nearly all of them very old and/or very sick—nonetheless died. Many died sooner from lockdown effects, iatrogenic hospital treatments, and vax injuries than if lower tech, lower cost, less disruptive practices had been implemented, or if simpler, more effective treatments had been administered, not suppressed. But overall, there are 350 million more humans on the planet than in March 2020. 

  Both the Green Revolution and the Covid response are based on the unsound notion that it’s better to intervene aggressively and resource-intensively than it is to consider the secondary effects of any intervention and to show appropriate restraint. Why, e.g., lock down all people in response to a respiratory virus when only a clearly identifiable group was at risk? First, do no harm.

  In both the ag and medical/public health settings, judicious policy requires awareness that, ultimately, human life spans and ecosystems are bounded by nature. Ultimately, only so much food can be sustainably produced. And no matter what measures we take to extend human life, people get old and die. Hence, our attempts to manage both agriculture and human health must be tempered by reality and humility. 

  Nonetheless, the interventionist mindset/model prevails because it’s profitable. The Green Revolution expanded via the combined efforts of the US government, leading “philanthropies” and corporations to expand markets. These methods were strongly exported to the US Agency for International Development (“USAID”), which facilitated foreign investment, while the World Bank and organizations like the Ford Foundation and the oil-funded Rockefeller Foundation subsidized road building, mechanized farm equipment, and rural electrification projects to pump groundwater. The Green Revolution built lucrative markets for pesticides, seeds, petrochemical fertilizers, irrigation systems, tractors, and combines. 

  The Green Revolution’s public/private partnerships provided a template for Covid Era government/corporate/WHO vaccine campaigns, which have benefitted hospitals, Pharma, and their investors, like Gates, the latter-day Rockefeller. 

  During Coronamania, corporations and stockholders also made billions selling such items as harmful medications, ventilators, masks, plexiglass, and limitless, useless tests. Others, like Amazon, Zoom, and Netflix, cashed in on government edicts via online commerce and such products as educational software. Thus, as during the Green Revolution, the Covid response further enriched the rich. 

  But simultaneously, these interventions impoverished many. Just as small farmers lost markets during the Green Revolution, during Coronamania, small businesses closed and middle-class people lost wealth to large businesses and investors, respectively. Both the Green Revolution and Covid mitigation gained favor because they made money for investors. They didn’t benefit the public when the full range of effects were considered.

  The Green Revolution established the technological and institutional foundation for a subsequent era of genetically modified crops, globalization of agriculture, and even greater dominance of agribusiness giants. While grain and soy production has increased, so—as processed foods have replaced flesh foods, fresh vegetables, and fruits—has the number of people with diet-driven diseases. 

  Analogously, the Covid response has laid the groundwork for more intensive government-enforced social controls, including an ever-growing series of mandated injections, social credit scores, central bank digital currencies, implanted tracking chips, and censorship of purported, but not actual, “misinformation.” 

  Green Revolution food is, as noted above, nutritionally inferior. Similarly, the Covid “vaccines” seem to have damaged immune function and caused many deaths from cardiovascular damage, cancers, miscarriages, et al. Further, just as insects and weeds evolve to avoid control by pesticides, viruses evolve and elude the Covid “vaxxes.”

  The Green Revolution transformed not only farming systems, but local food markets and culture, as farmers swapped traditional seeds and growing practices for the new varieties of corn, wheat, and rice that accompanied this package of technologies. The seeds from these hybrids can’t be saved from one season to the next, as heirloom varieties typically had been. Thus, farmers must purchase costly new seeds each year. Over time, the loss of traditional crops and growing techniques have decreased food system resilience. 

  Similarly, instead of taking personal steps to build health, many Americans naively rely on Pharma products, with very mixed results. The Covid overreaction also isolated people and thus, caused social and psychological, as well as physical, harm. 

  Some advocate shifting away from resource-intensive Green Revolution agriculture and toward more sustainable, crop-diversified methods. 

  In the same manner, many without a pecuniary interest who seek to improve public health want to deemphasize Med/Pharma interventions and, instead, incentivize healthy eating and spending more on non-medical means, such as malaria nets and toilets, to improve health. 

  Some maintain that Green Revolution technologies have been essential; that we don’t have enough societal wealth to grow, in sustainable, labor-intensive ways, enough food for everyone. 

  Initially, it seems that food shortages are more about maldistribution than scarcity. Much food is wasted. And by the look of things, some people eat too much food, especially that which is derived from modern strains of wheat, rice, corn, and soy. 

  Agricultural and medical subsidies skew markets and adversely affect consumer decisions. Food could be grown more sustainably if government subsidies didn’t distort farmers’ markets and decisions, and if consumers were willing to spend a larger slice of their individual incomes on what they eat. 

  Similarly, in health care, we could reduce medical insurance mandates and government subsidies that support high-cost, low-yield medical testing and practices. Less can be more. If people used their own money, or that of charities, to fund medical care, they would make cost-effective decisions, limiting the tests, treatments, and drugs they demand and taking better care of themselves. Many assert that unlimited medical care is a right. But this doctrinaire stance is bankrupting societies and governments, and not delivering commensurate public health outcomes. 

  Ultimately, reality will settle questions regarding the Green Revolution’s role in feeding a growing population. We’ll learn, by doing, if it’s possible to continue to grow food this way on a mass, exponentially expanded scale. In the scheme of human history, agriculture is relatively new; it’s only been going on for 12,000 years. As the economist Herb Stein said, “That which is not sustainable will end.” 

  The same is true of medical and public health finance.

  Just as some maintained that Green Revolution crops were needed to end hunger, public health “experts” asserted that lockdowns were needed to prevent millions of Covid deaths.

  Yet, by inducing an economic coma, Covid lockdowns lowered the incomes of the poor and made food unaffordable to them. Though the media failed to report this, and while Americans gained weight during the lockdowns and closures, according to the WHO, the lockdowns’ economic slowdown caused 150 million additional people to go hungry in poorer nations. Thus, the virtue-signaling, “compassionate,” “kind” people who said they were saving grandma instead killed multitudes via their simple-minded, politically-motivated altruism.

  Many attribute the Green Revolution to Norman Borlaug, who died in 2009. Toward the end of his life, Borlaug wondered when “an ever-burgeoning humanity becomes too much for Mother Earth to bear.” I doubt that Birx, Fauci, Collins, or the lockdown politicians will ever show corresponding humility about their ham-handed Covid edicts and their posturing about the deaths of the old and unhealthy.

  On their deathbeds, the Covid operatives will tell themselves that they were geniuses and benefactors of humanity. They’ll also disregard the vast, lasting suffering and damage they caused. The media will eulogize these bureaucrats by echoing their falsehoods. Most people will continue to buy the bureaucratic and media lies.

  The Green Revolution was, at least in concept, a much worthier undertaking than was the Covid response. Hunger is a far more serious problem than Covid ever was. Malnutrition kills infinitely more potentially healthy, younger people than did this respiratory virus. Compared to the Covid mitigation, which was an out-and-out Scam, the Green Revolution practices seem well-intentioned. Despite what looks, in retrospect, like blind technological optimism and economic opportunism, at least the Green Revolution’s exponents did what they set out to do: feed more people. 

  In contrast, the world would have been far better off over the past 53 months if there had been no public health or biosecurity bureaucracies to incite irrational fear and to implement measures that intentionally, opportunistically caused tremendous harm and shortened, not extended, many lives. We’d also have been far better off consuming sitcoms, pop songs, and cat videos than TV, radio, or Internet news. 

  Ultimately, both the Covid response and the Green Revolution have caused much damage because they disregarded biology and sociology. These interventions diverted resources from lower-intensity approaches that would have benefitted far more and hurt many fewer, people. The cost/benefit analysis was much easier during the Covid response; so much plainly foreseeable harm has been so disingenuously done since March 2020 under the pretense of protecting public health. 

  In agriculture, public health, and medicine, we should stop envisioning and hyping magic technological bullets that empower governments and enrich investors more than they benefit their purported target populations. We should consider not only the ostensible short-term benefits of agricultural, public health, and medical interventions but also the broader, long-term social and human costs of these practices. 

  Or at least we should recognize the structural dysfunction and self-interest that taints other “expert-managed,” “science-driven” public/private partnerships.

  Republished from the author’s Substack

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 21:00

• Musk Responds To Don Lemon Lawsuit, Cites "Series Of Impressively Insane Demands"
  Musk Responds To Don Lemon Lawsuit, Cites “Series Of Impressively Insane Demands”

  Elon Musk has responded after fired CNN journalist Don Lemon sued Musk and his social media platform X for breach of contract, after Musk scrapped Lemon’s show on X prior to its debut.

  

  According to a new court filing late last week, Lemon is accusing Musk and X of “fraud, negligent misrepresentation, misappropriation of name and likeness,” along with “unjust enrichment.”

  Musk hit back, saying in a Friday post on X that Lemon “made a series of impressively insane demands. We declined. Therefore, there was no deal.”

  He made a series of impressively insane demands. We declined. Therefore, there was no deal.

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 2, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsLemon wanted (among other things):

  • A free Tesla Cybertruck
  • A $5 million upfront payment on top of an $8 million salary
  • An equity stake in X, and the right to approve any changes in X policy as it relates to news content.

  As the Epoch Times notes, in January, the two entered a content agreement involving Lemon hosting his own show on the platform, court documents say. The deal was worth $1.5 million annually in addition to advertising revenue, full authority over his content, and financial incentives.

  According to the lawsuit, filed in San Francisco state court, Lemon claims Musk made “false representations and promises” about the exclusive partnership.

  Musk canceled the partnership in March, and the complaint alleges that Lemon had already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into creating the show.

  The complaint says that while there was no signed agreement with X, Lemon had a phone conversation with Musk in June 2023 during which Musk asked him to enter the exclusive partnership despite having initial reservations.

  The show was set to be centered around politics, culture, sports, and entertainment divided into three 30-minute episodes a week.

  X would be given exclusive rights to the content 24 hours before it was shared to other platforms, and Lemon was promised 60 percent of gross advertising revenue generated from his content and performance threshold payments based on follower counts, the complaint says.

  On March 13, Lemon announced in a post on X that Musk had terminated the deal “hours after an interview” Lemon conducted with him on March 8 for the premiere episode of the new show, saying Musk’s “commitment to a global town square where all questions can be asked and all ideas can be shared seems not to include questions of him from people like me.”

  In a response on the same day, X said that the platform reserves the right to make decisions regarding its business partnerships, and that, “after careful consideration,” it decided not to enter into a commercial partnership with the Don Lemon Show.

  Under the same post, Musk replied that Lemon’s “approach was basically just ‘CNN, but on social media’.”

  Lemon alleges in the lawsuit that X enriched itself and reaped the benefits of using Lemon’s name, likeness, identity, and reputation in an effort to entice advertisers after a number of major companies suspended their ads from the platform in 2023.

  Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion before rebranding the platform as X. Since the axed deal, Lemon continues to post content on his X account.

  Lemon was fired from CNN last year after 17 years with the network following a slew of controversial on-air comments and personal scandals during that time.

  “Lemon was a top prospect for X, and thus, Defendants saw an opportunity and sought to reach an exclusive partnership deal with Lemon, following his termination at CNN, at a time when Lemon was vulnerable,” reads the suit.

  The Epoch Times has reached out to representatives of both parties for comment.

  Lemon is seeking an unspecified amount in monetary damages, including attorney fees and injunctive relief.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 20:25

• Taliban Gets $239 Million In US Aid After State Dept. Fails To Vet Recipients
  Taliban Gets $239 Million In US Aid After State Dept. Fails To Vet Recipients

  By Judicial Watch

  Less than a year after Judicial Watch reported that the Taliban has established fake nonprofits to steal millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Afghanistan, a new investigation reveals that the terrorist group has also received hundreds of millions in development assistance from Uncle Sam because the State Department fails to properly vet award recipients. At least $239 million have likely filled the coffers of the extremists running the Islamic republic since the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal, according to a report published this month by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The money was disbursed by State Department divisions known as Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) to implement development projects intended to help achieve American foreign policy and national security goals in Afghanistan.

  

  Investigators found that the State Department failed to comply with its own counterterrorism partner vetting requirements in Afghanistan before awarding at least 29 grants to various local entities. The agency has a system to identify whether prospective awardees have a record of ethical business practices and is supposed to conduct a risk assessment to determine if programming funds may benefit terrorists or terrorist-affiliates before distributing American taxpayer dollars. In the more than two dozen cases examined, the agency did not bother and failed to keep proper records.

  “Because DRL and INL could not demonstrate their compliance with State’s partner vetting requirements, there is an increased risk that terrorist and terrorist affiliated individuals and entities may have illegally benefited from State spending in Afghanistan,” the SIGAR report says.

  “As State continues to spend U.S. taxpayer funds on programs intended to benefit the Afghan people, it is critical that State knows who is actually benefiting from this assistance in order to prevent the aid from being diverted to the Taliban or other sanctioned parties, and to enable policymakers and other oversight authorities to better scrutinize the risks posed by State’s spending.”

  The watchdog found issues with 29 awards distributed by DRL and INL. For instance, DRL failed to properly screen the recipients of seven awards totaling about $12 million, investigators found. INL did not provide any supporting documentation for 19 of its 22 awards totaling about $295 million so there is no way to determine if they complied with the vetting requirements. The State Department acknowledged that not all its bureaus have complied with document retention requirements, which makes it conveniently impossible to fully assess the magnitude of its transgressions. The explanation offered for INL not retaining records is “employee turnover and the dissolution of the Afghanistan-Pakistan office,” according to the report. SIGAR points out that, given the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, it is critical that U.S. government activities adhere to the laws, regulations, and policies intended to prevent certain transactions with terrorists.

  Besides establishing fraudulent non-governmental organizations (NGO) to loot big chunks of the $3 billion in humanitarian aid that the U.S. has given Afghanistan since the Biden administration’s abrupt military withdraw, the Taliban has raked in millions more by charging taxes, permit fees and import duties. That money has flowed through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a famously corrupt State Department arm that got $63.1 billion for foreign assistance and diplomatic engagement this year, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the government’s international broadcasting services that aims to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.

  The United Nations has also received $1.6 billion in U.S. funding for Afghanistan and a large percentage of that money most likely went to the Taliban as well, according to a federal audit, because the U.S. government does not require the leftist world body to report on taxes, fees or duties incurred on American funds for activities in Afghanistan.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 19:50

• Buffett Calls The Top: Berkshire Quietly Dumps Half Its Apple Shares Amid Unprecedented Selling Spree
  Buffett Calls The Top: Berkshire Quietly Dumps Half Its Apple Shares Amid Unprecedented Selling Spree

  When yesterday we said, when discussing Buffett’s ongoing liquidation of his Bank of America stake, that “Berkshire’s rising cash stockpiles merely reflect the firm’s inability to find deals in today’s overvalued and weak economic environment”, little did we know just how accurate that would be, because fast-forwarding just one day later we find that far from only dumping Bank of America, the 93-year-old Omaha billionaire had been busy quietly dumping his most iconic holding in an unprecedented selling spree that sent Berkshire’s cash pile soaring by a record $88 billion to an all time high $277 billion at the end of Q2.

  

  As shown in the chart below, in the second quarter (which ended June 30, and thus just two weeks after the Apple’s Developer Conference which took place on June 10 and which was – at least on the day of – a total bust), Berkshire sold a net $75.5 billion worth of stock, the bulk of which we now know, came from Buffett’s liquidation of half his Apple shares.

  

  While there was no 13F filed yet to go with the Berkshire’s 10Q, the company did provide a snapshot of its top holdings, revealing that as of June 30 it held only $84.2 billion in Apple stock, down sharply from $135.4 billion as of March 31 and $174.3 billion as of Dec 31, 2023. This translates into just 400 million shares of AAPL held as of June 30, down almost 50% from 789.4 million as of March 31 and 905.6 million as the end of 2023.

  

  The rest of Berkshire’s top 5 holdings (Bank of America, American Express, Coca Cola and Chevron) was left untouched in Q2, meaning that Buffett clearly decided that it was time for Apple to go (we have since learned that subsequent to the end of Q2, Buffett also started to dump a large portion of his Bank of America shares where he is the single largest shareholder).

  While Berkshire’s cash balance rose by a record $88 billion – where proceeds from the sale of Apple were the bulk of the new cash – the company also generated substantial cash from its own operations, and in Q2 Berkshire reported operating earnings of $11.6 billion, up from $10 billion for the same period a year ago.

  Berkshire has for years struggled to find ways to deploy its mountain of cash in a sluggish deal environment, lamenting the lack of cheap opportunities. At the firm’s annual shareholder meeting in May, Buffett said he wasn’t in a rush to spend “unless we think we’re doing something that has very little risk and can make us a lot of money.” It now appears that not only was Buffett not in a rush to spend, but taking advantage of the AI bubble, he has been aggressively liquidating his biggest holding.

  What is perhaps most remarkable is when and how Buffett dumped half his Apple holdings: Berkshire managed to offload a stunning $84 billion, or some 390 million shares, in AAPL at a time when the stock was appreciating rapidly, and especially after the meltup following the WWDC24 developer conference. In other words, the smart money was furiously dumping to retail, because as we noted at the time, hedge funds were certainly not buying tech at this time, as we reported on July 1 in “Getting Out Of Dodge: Hedge Funds Are Selling And Shorting Stocks At The Fastest Pace In Two Years“, almost as if they had notice that Buffett was dumping…

  

  It also makes one wonder if Buffett may not have had something to do with Apple’s bizarre performance after the WWDC24 conference. As a reminder, the kneejerk response to Tim Cook’s “earthshattering” reveal of a chatGPT Siri was a huge dud, with the stock dumping on the day of WWDC24.

  *APPLE EXTENDS DECLINE AMID DEVELOPER CONFERENCE PRESENTATION

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 10, 2024

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

  It wasn’t until the next day when, thanks to a relentless barrage of bullish sellside reports and kickstarted by a furious buyback order from the company itself, the stock proceeded to surge and regain the world’s most valuable slot from Microsoft. Almost makes one wonder if Buffett didn’t call in a few favors from his banker friends on this one…

  Finally, it’s not just AAPL that Buffett believes is overvalued and is aggressively dumping: the billionaire clearly believes the entire market is way expensive, and Berkshire bought back only $345 million of its own shares during the quarter, the lowest amount since the company changed its buyback policy in 2018. It’s hardly a surprise why:  as we noted in “Berkshire’s Growing Cash Pile Has A Hidden Message On Stocks” the Buffett Indicator has rarely signaled a more expensive market.

  

  Bottom line: unlike October 2008, when Buffett led the clarion call to “Buy American“, this time he is selling American at a never before seen pace.

  

  Are you?

  One thing we know, Buffett is fearful.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 18:50

• Secret Service Takes 'Full Responsibility' For Assassination Attempt On Trump
  Secret Service Takes ‘Full Responsibility’ For Assassination Attempt On Trump

  Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said on Friday the agency takes full responsibility for the tragic events at former President Donald Trump’s rally last month, pledging changes such as flying drones.

  “This was a mission failure,” said Rowe at a press conference in Washington.

  

  Rowe replaced Kimberly Cheatle as director of the Secret Service amid intense scrutiny after she resigned in the wake of the attempted assassination of Trump, which saw one rallygoer killed and two more injured in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month.

  Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, was struck at the tip of his ear by a bullet fired by 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks while he spoke at a campaign rally. Crooks, who fired several bullets, was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper.

  But agents should have had eyes on the roofs and other vantage points, Rowe said. And despite offers by local enforcement to fly drones, the Secret Service didn’t put one up.

  That will change, Rowe said.

  “We thought we might have had it covered with the human eye,” he said. “But clearly we are going to change our approach now, and we are going to leverage technology and put those unmanned aerial systems up.”

  “We did not have a drone on site. We did not put a drone up. Based on the information I have right now, I am aware that there was a request from a local agency to offer to fly a drone on that day. And that is also part of the mission assurance review that I’ve asked to get some better insight in,” Rowe added.

  Rowe said that the Secret Service also failed to communicate with local law enforcement over the radio at the rally. He said that the agency “fell short” of their responsibility to ensure Trump’s safety. “I’m working to make sure that this failure does not happen again,” he said.

  Local police had identified Crooks as a suspect over an hour before the incident, but the Secret Service failed to secure the warehouse he fired from, which local police couldn’t cover.

  Congress, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, and an independent review directed by President Joe Biden have been launched into the assassination attempt.

  The Secret Service’s own Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting a mission assurance review. Rowe said disciplinary action would be taken if necessary, and procedures would be changed.

  There should have been more of a physical law enforcement presence on site, Rowe said, given how close the building used by the shooter was to the stage where Trump spoke. If no law enforcement presence on the roof, there should have been “better security” preventing someone from getting up there, he said.

  “That building was very close to that outer perimeter and we should have had more of a presence,” he said.

  It’s hoped that a larger physical presence of law enforcement on site will deter future attempts.

  “We want to deter people from even thinking about doing something like this again,” Rowe said.

  Rowe also commended the bravery of the Secret Service agents who responded during the assassination attempt, noting their swift action to shield Trump’s body with their own “within three seconds of bullets ringing out in an unflinching act of bravery.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 18:40

• Kamala Harris & The Masque Of Magical Thinking
  Kamala Harris & The Masque Of Magical Thinking

  Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

  Although the last few weeks have had their alarming aspects – chief among which was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, the odds-on favorite candidate for president – they have also had their amusing moments.

  In the latter category, I place the sudden queen-for-a-day-like coronation of Kamala Harris.

  

  True, that coronation was in the nature of an anti-democratic semi-soft-coup (or anti-democratic “inversion of a coup”). Biden and his handlers, right up until  the morning of July 21, were insisting that he was not dropping out, that he was “in it to win,” etc.  But someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and out he went.

  Here’s the amusing bit.  Until the moment Biden was chased out of the race, Kamala Harris functioned primarily as political life insurance.  “You might not like me,” Biden communicated, “but if I go, you’re stuck with her.”

  Biden’s polls were in the toilet and, following his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, were circling the drain, poised for oblivion. But Kamala’s polls were even worse. She was cordially disliked by—well, by everyone. Her staff, her colleagues, but above all, by voters. In the 2020 race, she got no delegates: none, zero, zip.  She dropped out of the race for president but was then tapped to be VP only because this half Indian, half Jamaican woman was swarthy enough to pass as black and Biden had promised to select a black female as a running mate. Kamala truly is, as Biden himself acknowledged recently, a DEI vice president.

  And sure enough, Kamala was every bit the disaster people predicted she would be. As a matter of clinical interest, she proved that senility is not the only cause of supreme rhetorical incoherence. Some people, and she is one, come by it naturally.  Her tenure as vice president is littered with examples, and she provided another doozy just a couple of days ago when she attempted to comment on the prisoner exchange with Russia.

  It’s painful, as are all the many video clips of Harris angrily denouncing people who say “Merry Christmas,” of her presiding as “border czar” over the disaster of our non-existent southern border, of her outlining how she wants to give Medicare, as well as the franchise, to all illegal immigrants, and how she wants to develop a national data base of gun owners so that she can confiscate firearms by force.

  Can such a person win the presidency?  No.

  Then, how can we explain the sudden efflorescence of Harrismania? Democrats are wetting themselves with glee over their sudden fundraising windfalls ($200 million in a week, it is said) and sudden surge in the polls.  New York magazine just beclowned itself with a cover showing Kamala sitting on top of the world with Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and even Joe Biden dancing and whooping it up below.  “Welcome to Kamalot,” we read: “In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.”

  Was it? Again, the answer is no.  It is a temporary sugar high caused partly by the feeling of liberation following the sudden release from Joe Biden, partly by the slobbering media jumping all over the reinvention of Kamala like dogs vibrating over a bitch in estrus. The feeling of intoxication may linger through the Democratic convention, but there are already signs that it is fading.  I think James Piereson is correct. Kamala’s position now is akin to that of Michael Dukakis (remember him?) in 1988.

  Dukakis was way ahead of George Bush in the summer of 1988.  Then it all unraveled.  His helmet-moment in the tank sealed the deal. But it was his whole left-wing outlook that really did him in.  And Dukakis was Ronald Reagan compared to Kamala Harris.  “Once her views are made known to the public,” Piereson notes, “Harris’s support will begin to melt away. . . . [B]y mid-September, Trump will have opened up a six-point lead in the polls that will remain intact for the balance of the campaign.”

  Although I would hesitate to be quite so arithmetically precise, I think that Piereson is also by and large correct in his electoral prediction. “Notwithstanding the euphoria today,” he writes,

  Trump will win the election by six points—forty-nine to forty-three percent—winning 339 electoral votes, including all of the so-called swing states, plus the Democratic-leaning states of Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire.  Republicans will pick up three or four seats in the Senate and perhaps twenty seats in the House, giving them safe majorities in both chambers. This will give Trump the margins he needs to implement a good piece of his agenda in 2025 and 2026.

  I think this is right—though, again, I hesitate to be quite so exact in attaching numbers to Trump’s victory.

  Back in 2020, I wrote a column on “The Democratic Art of Magical Thinking.” Magical thinking, I explained, “is the irrational belief, rampant among primitive peoples and those exposed to too many woke college seminars, that our thoughts influence or ‘constitute’ reality.”

  There can be a certain entertainment value to the phenomenon, which is why I added the word “masque” to the title of this piece.  A “masque” was a form of “courtly entertainment” that combined dance, music, fancy-dress, and architectural fantasy “to present a deferential allegory flattering to the patron.”  That’s essentially what we have here with Kamala Harris.  That New York magazine cover depicting her cackling astride the globe would be a suitable playbill for this intended deep state entertainment. But I doubt that the Democrats will be able to maintain their willing suspension of disbelief far beyond the convention when the masque ends and the players disperse.

  How did the magical thinking arise in the first place? One source is the habit of credulity that is a by-product of all utopian thought. The Democrats have mutated into the party of nowhere, so it is not surprising that they prefer pleasing fantasy to sobering reality.

  The other chief source is the attack on objective truth that, in various ways, has been the gospel proclaimed by fancy professors for the past several decades. Students everywhere are taught to be suspicious of truth, to proclaim the relativity of values. This is a brain-addling teaching, but one that you would have to look far and wide to find a place it hasn’t reached.

  As I noted in that earlier column on magical thinking, epistemic nihilism is the order of the day in all the best colleges and universities. But the result is not so much a failure as a promiscuity of belief. Hence the hyperventilating media shamans with their intoxicating potions. Some conservative pundits are fretting that Kamala Harris represents a credible challenge to the Trump juggernaut. Absent an assassin’s bullet, the successful rekindling of  Democratic lawfare, or some other praeternatural intervention,  I think the Democrats are setting themselves up not only for major disappointment but for staggering disillusionment. That’s the trouble with magical thinking. Sooner or later, reality intrudes and destroys the web of fantasy that the spurious magic has spun. Donald Trump is an avenging angel of reality. The Dems, as well as certain besotted anti-Trump conservatives, are dancing now.  They won’t be gyrating when the music stops and the hall empties.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 17:30

• Suspected Houthi Missile Hits Container Ship; Rebel Forces Claim US MQ-9 Drone Downed Amid Regional War Risks
  Suspected Houthi Missile Hits Container Ship; Rebel Forces Claim US MQ-9 Drone Downed Amid Regional War Risks

  The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ top leader, in Tehran last week has brought the Middle East closer than ever to the brink of all-out war ahead of the US presidential elections in November. After a two-week lull, Iran-backed Houthis targeted a Liberian-flagged container ship traveling through the Gulf of Aden, and rebel forces claimed to have downed a US military spy drone this weekend.

  Bloomberg reported a Houthi missile struck the container ship “Groton” just above the waterline, causing minor damage to the hull. 

  British maritime agency UKMTO said Groton was “hit by a missile,” adding, “No fires, water ingress or oil leaks have been observed.”

  

  Bloomberg maritime data shows Groton left Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates about a week ago, bound for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The incident occurred on Saturday. Following the incident, the ship’s transponder was turned off, and the vessel’s location only reappeared on Sunday—with Groton now moored in the East African country of Djibouti.

  

  Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed the attack on Groton on X on Sunday morning. He also said rebel forces “shot down an American MQ-9 aircraft.” 

  

  Possible footage of the downed MQ9 drone. 

  Images of the fragmented advanced MQ9 drone of the US Air Force, which was shot down by Yemen’s Ansarullah . pic.twitter.com/3vi1fENJO6

  — S p r i n t e r (@SprinterFamily) August 4, 2024

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

  Bloomberg Noted, “The rebels have targeted more than 70 vessels with missiles and drones in a campaign that has killed four sailors. They have seized one vessel and sunk two in the time since.” 

  Meanwhile, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group is set to replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group in the Middle East.

  Eight months after the Biden administration launched Operation Prosperity Guardian to ensure freedom of navigation in the southern Red Sea, the Houthi threats remain ongoing. The clogging of one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints has resulted in a supply shock. 

  One of the biggest fears the Biden administration has is if Iran launches a retaliatory attack on Israel that sends Brent crude prices above $100/bbl. This threat was detailed in early March under the note “The Weaponization Of Crude Could Trigger The Next Financial Shock.”

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 16:55

• Transgender Or Intersex? Confusion Reigns Over The Gender Status Of Two Olympic Boxers
  Transgender Or Intersex? Confusion Reigns Over The Gender Status Of Two Olympic Boxers

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  On Saturday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued a surprising correction after claiming for a week that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting were actually born women and have Differences in Sexual Development (DSD), a range of rare conditions in which a person’s genitalia do not necessarily match with their chromosomes or hormone levels. In this weekend’s column, I cited that IOC claim that Khelif is not a transgender athlete. Yet, there remains considerable confusion on how the IOC and the boxing governing body is framing this issue and the question of gender.

  

  IOC chief Thomas Bach said: “We have two boxers… who were born as women, raised as women, who have passports as women, who have competed for many years as women. And this is a clear definition of a woman.”

  Bach chastised critics and warned them not “confuse the two issues,” stressing that this was not “about the transgender issue.” However, he then confused many by saying “this is not a DSD case.”

  The IOC later issued a correction:

  In today’s IOC – Paris 2024 press briefing, IOC President Bach said: ‘But I repeat, here, this is not a DSD case, this is about a woman taking part in a women’s competition, and I think I have explained this many times.”

  What was intended was:

  ‘But I repeat, here, this is not a transgender case, this is about a woman taking part in a women’s competition, and I think I have explained this many times.’

  The key claim of the IOC is that both boxers were “born women.” Clearly, the identification on their passports (and how they were raised) can differ from country to country.

  In 2023, the International Boxing Association (IBA) President Umar Kremlev explained the IBA’s decision to disqualify Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting and Algeria’s Imane Khelif from 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships. While there remains confusion on the testing used by the IBA (or the reliability of those tests), it issued this statement:

  “Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women. According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition.”

  Various media also did their own “fact checks” with outlets like USA Today stating that the “outcries from anti-trans celebrities and politicians” were based on false claims and the boxers were born women.

  NBC also cited “attacks from anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives online who claim they’re transgender.”  It stressed that the IBA could not be trusted since the group was banned by the IOC. (IBA was banned for corruption and financial related issues).

  Notably, buried down in the CNN report on the controversy is a line that would seem significant that “Khelif… has not said she has DSD.”

  In the meantime, IOC spokesman Mark Adams has said that these determinations are left up to each sport’s international governing body because “they know their sport and their discipline the best,” Adams added that “I hope we all agree that we’re not calling for people to go back to the days of sex testing which was a terrible, terrible thing to do. This involves real people and we’re talking about real people’s lives here.”

  Yet, it seems odd that such major criteria of qualification would be left up to each governing body. There should be a consistent rule across the Olympics. Yet, the Human Rights Watch maintains that gender testing violates fundamental rights to privacy and dignity.

  My friend Marc Siegel, Fox medical analyst, argues that the testing side can be a simple as a hormone swab.

  Media is still insisting that these are not transgender athletes. Many articles cited GLAAD and InterACT. On Sunday, GLAAD was insisting that Khelif is not transgender, but is now referring to the DSD claim as something the IOC has maintained:

  Imane Khelif is a woman.

  Imane Khelif is not transgender and does not identify as intersex.

  Because Imane Khelif was disqualified from the 2023 International Boxing Association (IBA) championship due to an unspecified gender eligibility test, which has different eligibility criteria than the IOC, there have been unconfirmed reports that she may have a variation in her sex traits, also known as differences of sexual development (DSDs).

  DSDs are a group of conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs. According to the NIH, some people with DSDs are raised as female but may have sex chromosomes other than XX, or elevated testosterone levels.

  Athletes with variations in their sex traits, or DSDs, are not the same as transgender athletes. Conflating the two is inaccurate.

  It is not verified that Imane Khelif has a variation in sex traits or DSDs.

  If you are confused, you are not alone.

  Legally, there continues to be a debate on the criteria used in these competitions. However, the GLADD statements seems to suggest that there is uncertainty on the underlying facts.

  Some of the confusion may be due to the use of transgender versus intersex.

  There is a difference between transgender athletes and intersex athletes.

  Transgender refers to someone who has a gender identity that is not in alignment with their sex.

  Intersex refers to someone who has reproductive anatomy or genes that align with conventional definitions of male or female, including different chromosomal profiles. ESPN explained that “an example is someone who is partially or completely insensitive to androgens, such as testosterone. They may be assigned female at birth but have XY chromosomes because of their body’s physiological insensitivity to androgens.”

  The athletes defending these two boxers have supported the claim that they are intersex athletes who were born female but have chromosomal differences.

  What is most striking about the boxing controversy is that there appears little agreement on the underlying facts and testing. It is not even clear what Khelif has claimed in the past on these issues. That seems curiously undefined and irregular for a classification criteria. That was brought home by the confusion of Bach himself in warning against confusion on the issues.

  On Saturday, Khelif defeated another female contestant, Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori and Taiwan fighter Lin Yu-Ting also won the day before to advance to the semi-finals.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 16:20

• Guess Who Kamala Harris Blames For Disastrous Jobs Report?
  Guess Who Kamala Harris Blames For Disastrous Jobs Report?

  Following last week’s horrendous jobs report, the Kamala Harris campaign issued a statement blaming – you guessed it – Donald Trump!

  

  “Donald Trump failed Americans as president, costing our economy millions of jobs, and bringing us to the brink of recession,” said Harris for President spokesperson James Singer in a statement.

  “Now, he’s promising even more damage with a Project 2025 agenda that will decimate the middle class and increase taxes on working families, while ripping away health care, raising prescription drug costs, and cutting Social Security and Medicare — all while making his billionaire donors richer.”

  According to Singer, “We’ve made significant progress, but Vice President Harris knows there’s more work to do to lower costs for families,” and “will make building up the middle class the defining goal of her presidency, taking on greedy corporations that are price gouging consumers, banning hidden fees, and capping unfair rent increases and drug costs.”

  So – robotic talking points centered around blaming the guy who’s been out of office for 3.5 years.

  On Friday the Labor Department revealed that US job growth cooled sharply in July, while the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose to the highest level in nearly three years. According to the report, the US added just 114K payrolls, a huge miss to expectations of 175K and also a huge drop from the downward revised June print of 206K, now (as always ) revised to just 179K. This was the lowest print since December 2020 (at least prior to even more revisions)…

  

  As we wrote in response, these being numbers published by the corrupt Biden, pardon Kamala Department of Goalseeked bullshit, the previous months were revised lower as usual, with May revised down by 2,000, from +218,000 to +216,000, and the change for June was revised down by 27,000, from +206,000 to +179,000. With these revisions, employment in May and June combined is 29,000 lower than previously reported. It gets better because as shown in the next chart shows, 5 of the past 6 months have now been revised lower.

  

  But while we have long known that the real payrolls number is far worse than reported, what was the true shock in Friday’s “data” is the long overdue admission that the US is effectively in a recession because as the rule named for pro-Biden/Kamala socialist Cluadia Sahm indicates, a recession has now been triggered. The rule, for those who don’t remember is that a recession is effectively already underway if the unemployment rate (based on a three-month moving average) rises by half a percentage point from its low of the past year. And that’s what just happened, with the unemployment rate surging 0.6% from the year’s low.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 15:45

• Jittery Israel Braces For 'Five Front' War As Officials Predict Iran To Attack Monday
  Jittery Israel Braces For ‘Five Front’ War As Officials Predict Iran To Attack Monday

  This weekend has continue to see limited exchanges of fire involving Hezbollah along Israel’s northern border, but the jittery wait persists with Israelis heading into a new work week with the expected big Iranian retaliation immediately on the horizon for the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last Wednesday.

  Many international airlines have already suspended flights to Tel Aviv and Beirut in anticipation for a wider conflict. In a fresh weekend speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has presented a scenario of Israel already finding itself in a multi-front war. “We are striking every one of its arms with great force. We are prepared for any scenario — both offensively and defensively,” he told his weekly cabinet meeting. He said in the Sunday remarks that Israel is “in a multi-front war against Iran’s evil axis.”

  

  “I reiterate and tell our enemies: We will respond and we will exact a heavy price for any act of aggression against us, from whatever quarter,” he added.

  This time it’s expected that Hezbollah could play a bigger role in any Iranian retaliation (compared to the first ballistic missile and drone attack of April 13). Israeli officials have also expressed concern for the many citizens traveling and working abroad – as they too could be targets of an Iranian reprisal attack or terrorist act.

  The NY Times observed, “For Israel, the travel disruptions added to the sense that it was no longer in control of its own fate and had no clear plan for quieting its many conflicts.”

  Several Israeli and US defense officials have told Axios that they expect a major Iranian retaliation to come as early as Monday. Not only has the Pentagon moved extra naval assets into the Eastern Mediterranean area, but the head of Central Command (CENTCOM), Gen. Michael Kurilla has traveled to the region for a pre-planned trip.

  Israeli media and officials have warned that a ‘five front’ war could open up, and they are seeking the support of an international coalition of allies that once again includes America and Britain:

  The Israeli security establishment is on “peak alert” and members of a US-led international coalition — including Britain and allied Arab states — aimed at thwarting potential Iranian attacks on “several fronts” are braced to try to deter and intercept them, Channel 12 reported.

  Among the precautions taken are patrols by combat aircraft and warships of allied countries in the area, the report said, without citing sources or providing further details.

  Israel’s leadership has been holding discussions on how the country would respond to such attacks, including what the network described as “a readiness for an entry into all-out war in this context.”

  The five fronts would involve attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian assets in Syria, Iraqi paramilitary units, and direct missile launches from Iran itself.

  UPDATE
  • Iran attack seen as early as Monday
  • US 🚢, forces arriving in region
  • CENTCOM chief ✈️ Israel tom.: @BarakRavid
  • Israel says plans in place
  • Foreign nationals leaving Lebanon
  • Hezbollah +allies coordinate response
  • Strikes in Gaza,🇱🇧, Houthis target ships

  — Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) August 4, 2024

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

  Whatever happens is expected to be bigger that the April 13 attack which saw many dozens of drones and ballistic missiles rain down on Israel, but most of which were intercepted, also with the help of US fighter jets. A new Wall Street Journal report says that Tehran has responded to urgings from regional diplomatic channels that it temper its response by saying ‘it didn’t care’:

  Iranian leaders have vowed to retaliate. On Saturday, Iran told Arab diplomats it didn’t care if the response triggered a war, according to people familiar with the conversations.

  Italy announced Sunday that G7 ministers expressed “strong concern about the recent events that could lead to a wider regional spread of the crisis, starting with Lebanon.” The statement calls on “the parties concerned to desist from any initiative that could hinder the path of dialogue and moderation and encourage a new escalation.” Many Israeli citizens and opposition leaders have accused Netanyahu of leading the country to the brink of bigger war for the sake of his political survival and furtherance as a war time prime prime minister.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 15:10

• Bitcoin Is Crashing Ahead Of The Japan Open
  Bitcoin Is Crashing Ahead Of The Japan Open

  Bitcoin, and the entire crypto universe, is crashing after yet another huge sell order was unleashed by a time-triggered algo, the same algo that has activated selling momentum on each of the past 7 trading days at 10am ET, just after the US cash open (a move meant to cripple any dip-buying intentions in early market trading), yet which algo was left on for the weekend, arguably to spark an HFT-driven pile up of selling and shorting, and to force levered longs to capitulate, ahead of the Japanese open where a bloodbath is expected to take place (see below). One can see the algo in action in the red boxes below: exact same time every day, exact same sell-momentum ignition.

  

  We have previously discussed how Sam Bankman-Fried’s alma mother, HFT trading shop Jane Street, has frequently been involved in such attempts to force-liquidate the market by activating selling momentum, and it appears that this weekend Jane Street’s crypto “market-making” peer, Jump Trading, joined the fray and sparked a market rout by dumping and shorting billions in various coins during the most illiquid of markets while assuring the worst execution possible by repeatedly taking out the bid stack over and over, in what is an attempt to aggressively reprice cryptos.

  Jump Crypto, one of the biggest crypto shops is unwinding its crypto operations following CFTC probe (and SEC case? idk), Kanav was its President

  They had hundreds of millions of ETH and SOL

  They’ve been sending dozens of millions hourly to exchanges on an illiquid weekend pic.twitter.com/x1Ou3xGPBV

  — Wazz (@WazzCrypto) August 4, 2024

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

  The liquidation panic has been boosted by three factors:

  i) Friday’s crash in US stocks

  ii) the rout expected in Japan when stocks there open for trading on Monday as they catch down to Friday’s plunge in the USDJPY, where a rough estimate suggests about 6-8% of additional downside after the Topix lost 10% in the past 2 days, effectively putting Japanese stocks in a bear market just days after the biggest policy error by the BOJ in recent history (just as we expected)…

  BOJ preview: whatever is the dumbest possible thing that can happen, is what will happen. 100% guaranteed

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 30, 2024

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

  … and forcing the Bank of Japan to resume easing and rate cuts just days after it hiked ever so slightly, from 0.10% to 0.25% while Japan’s economy is shrinking again.

  iii) fears of an imminent (re)start of the (theatrical) war between Iran and Israel. As readers may recall, back in April when the first quote-unquote war between Iran and Israel took place, a highly choreographed, skilfully produced event, bitcoin would tumble every single time a red flashing Bloomberg headline of some new missile attack hit the tape. Expect nothing less tonight when the next scripted “war” is expected to take place.

  Meanwhile, keep an eye on what Larry Fink and the rest of the ETF complex is doing. As we have observed on countless occasions, it has been Blackrock’s favorite pastime to buy the dip created by the aggressive selling of futures by various HFT shops (and CZ hands) in hopes of increasingly cornering the crypto market, and the past week has been no different.

  >BTC down 10%
  >Grayscale dumping $2B ETH
  >Middle East on the brink

  but Blackrock is STILL buying. pic.twitter.com/IlNBapzaCR

  — Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) August 1, 2024

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 14:35

• "Suddenly Recession Is On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue… Wow, Did That Happen Fast!"
  “Suddenly Recession Is On The Tip Of Everyone’s Tongue… Wow, Did That Happen Fast!”

  By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

  The Fed Dot Plod

  Suddenly everyone is raising the number of Fed cuts this year and early next year. Without a doubt Friday’s job report was Weak with Few Redeeming Qualities. While we argued that the Fed SHOULD have cut at the July meeting, there are several reasons why the market may be getting ahead of itself in terms of rate cuts and bond yields.

  In any case, while last weekend’s title of Baby Pool Closed for “Maintenance” may be even more appropriate this weekend (clearly something is going on that markets don’t like), we are going with the Fed Dot Plod, because the Fed is now likely going to plod along slower than what the market priced in by the end of the week.

  It is somewhat awkward to be bearish on the economy, while expecting the Fed to now disappoint, but we think there is evidence to support it.

  Jobs and the Fed

  According to Google trends, the “Sahm Rule” suddenly attracted a lot of attention. Powell even had to answer a question about it during the press conference. It makes sense that it would attract attention, but let’s remember that it is a “rule” only in the world of economics. Anywhere else it would be conjecture, based on logic, which has been useful in the past. However, I’m old enough to remember when inverted curves were a good rule of thumb to predict recessions.

  In any case, while Friday’s job report was not good, it is questionable how much any one data point will change the Fed’s view.

  • ADP, which came out Wednesday ahead of the FOMC announcement and press conference, came in at 122k jobs. Headline NFP came in at 114k jobs (even with 97k for the private sector). Since ADP changed its methodology to more accurately predict NFP we should assume that the Fed at least had an inkling that the report would be weak. As a side note, I wish ADP kept their old methodology of trying to track how many jobs were created or lost based on their unique data set because I think that it better served market participants.

  • We sent out a quick note post JOLTs that the Quit Rate was at 2.1, tied with last month for the lowest since Covid and worse than the 2.2 average that we had in 2019. The Hires Rate was only 3.4, the worst since Covid, and below the 3.9 average in 2019. JOLTs was not strong. The “job openings” seemed okay, but we have concerns that it doesn’t do a good job of catching “ghost” jobs, “fishing” expeditions, or even those jobs that used to exist, but no one has bothered to remove them from the job sites. The payment plan for many sites/companies doesn’t create the incentive to remove job postings the way it used to with traditional/old fashioned approaches.

  • While ISM employment was abysmal, what happened to all of the people who as recently as last month were quick to point out manufacturing is only a small part of the economy?

  The case that the Fed should have expected weakness, even with relatively little “new” information since Chair Powell told the world that the labor market was in good shape, seems at least somewhat convincing.

  Let’s not forget that he repeatedly told us that the Fed will not react to a single piece of data.

  Now, let’s move to the more interesting, curious, and weird part of this report – the willingness to believe in bad data.

  The Willingness to Believe in Bad Data

  The theme of “garbage in, garbage out” is a recurring topic in T-Reports. What is incredibly concerning, from my perspective, is the willingness to take data that might be questionable and use it to make policy (or longer-term decisions). For trading, whatever the number is, it will move markets. However, and this hurts my head, this is in part because we know policy makers look at the data as is, which lets algos loose to trade on it. It is only over time that reality hits and decisions made based on bad (or questionable) data become apparent.

  

  Here we examine private payrolls versus the number of jobs purportedly created (the birth/death model). From January 2011 until February 2020 (just before Covid hit), we see relatively few instances where the number of jobs created by the model was greater than the number of jobs reported (appears as negative numbers in this chart).

  It occurred 19 times out of 111 data points (17%). The average for this period was 124k. Though you can see that since 2016 the frequency has increased, which we continue to associate with the rise of the “gig” economy creating many more “self-employed” people.

  Something seems to have happened since February 2022. Yes the data is cherry-picked, but it is quite striking, and very different than anything we have seen in the past decade during “normal” times (the Covid shocks make a mess of a lot of the data).

  

  Since February 2023, 33% of the reports would be negative for private jobs if it wasn’t for the birth/death model. The average number of private sector jobs (taking out the birth/death adjustment) dropped from 124k to 44k.

  57% of all YTD jobs are statistical fakes, thanks only to the Birth/Death adjustment pic.twitter.com/utYosI0k7S

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 2, 2024

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

  I’m not arguing that the birth/death model makes sense, but what I am arguing is that it has become a disproportionately large contributor to the total number of private sector jobs.

  Maybe it makes sense, or maybe the model hasn’t been properly calibrated to deal with work from home, the GIG economy, or the shift from being employees to setting up LLCs, etc.

  While the Fed (and especially the media) seems happy to take the NFP reports on full faith and credit, color me skeptical.

  Just a quick note on “revisions.”

  “2-month total revisions” should have the most updated information as it provides more time for survey responses to arrive. According to the BLS Survey Response Rates, the response rates remain low (I was focused on employment, though CPI housing also caught my eye). Again, what is the “fudge factor” and how good is the BLS at it?

  When looking at 2-month net revisions (a bit overstated, I think due to double counting), we’ve had 14 of the last 18 months revised downward. That seems statistically unlikely. It also shows a rather significant number of total downward revisions.
  Where I am coming out on the jobs data:

  • Initial, headline numbers – American Exceptionalism.

  • Looking into details, examining trends on revisions, data “plugs,” and estimations – American “meh-ism.”

  In the U.S. you don’t convict someone of a crime if there is a “reasonable doubt” so why would we make policy on data that, at least for me, also creates a “reasonable doubt”?

  

  Speaking of crimes, which data set do you believe? The CPI Owners’ Equivalent Rent or Zillow’s?

  This chart seems to highlight a few things:

  • The Fed was slow to hike because they were using data that was not capturing the move in rents! It is almost impossible to believe that anyone reading this report didn’t face this issue directly, or with family or friends! Rents were skyrocketing in 2021 while we were still embarked on QE.
  • The “pain” the average person felt around inflation, which seems to show up in sentiment surveys, seems to reflect the Zillow pattern better than the OER pattern. Across the board, people seemed to experience a much higher level of inflation compared to what actually made it into the official data.
  • Now, the OER is “catching up,” and we seem (at least to some extent) to be letting what is likely a number higher than reality affect CPI – and in turn policy.

  Why we talk about CPI, where shelter has a relative importance of 36%, with such obvious flaws, is beyond me! Supposedly, OER, at one time made sense, and was the best we could do (we also used to have to lace up sneakers), but does it make any sense today?

  At Academy, we often discuss the risk of fighting the last war, and not only does the Fed seem to be fighting the last war, but they are also fighting it with bad intel!

  Should Versus Will

  Clearly, we are in the camp of they should cut! That they should have cut! That they are behind the curve! So why are we hesitant to join the crowd expecting the Fed to suddenly accelerate their cuts?

  • The Fed, the media, and many others have been comfortable with taking data at face value. So, why would they start digging into this in more detail now?

  • The Fed has told us, in no uncertain terms, that no single data point will define policy. They weren’t willing to cut on Wednesday and there really hasn’t been that much “new” data.

  • The Fed (or at least enough influential members) has been so scared of a resurgence in inflation that it seems difficult to believe that they will do an about face or even panic any time soon.

    • At this point, I do agree that enacting the Fed “Put” would trigger inflation. While I think we are seeing inflation come under control, and some areas are even experiencing deflation, if the Fed does anything that looks or smells like they are eager to embrace the Fed Put, we would likely see inflation – starting with risk assets. They are caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of being able to be aggressive.

  • No one wants to admit they were wrong (clearly, I have to revise my target on 10-year yields, as what looked good 6 trading days ago, makes no sense now). That applies to the Fed as well. They just had their biggest stage. Fed speakers are now on the circuit after the 2-day meeting, followed by a 45-minute press conference. How do you back off those decisions and words, when, for all intents and purposes, nothing much has changed?

  • I am quite literally scared about how politicized any decision they make might become. It won’t be a political decision on their part, but I think a 50-bps cut in September would fuel rage on social media which could spill into the real world. Maybe I am overestimating how strongly some segments of the population can be made to feel about a rate cut in terms of helping or harming their candidate, but I have moved to trepidation (if not fear) on this risk.

  Maybe we will get more cuts (sooner), but the market got ahead of itself.

  Liquidity, De-Risking, Vol Selling, and More

  I’m getting tired of writing, and you are probably getting tired of reading, and we’ve covered these before, so we will be brief:

  • Liquidity. The world of algo-driven “faux” liquidity is being tested almost daily (in both directions) and it is not going to get better. Lack of liquidity works in both directions – just look at Wednesday’s stock surge.

  • De-Risking. The ETFs I’m tracking most closely showed mixed results early in the week, but moved towards “buying the dip” as the week went on. XLK, QQQ, TQQQ, SQQQ, NVDL, and ARKK pointed to some risk taking and certainly didn’t scream “capitulation.” That may lead to a bounce, but I remain convinced that the worst is not behind us.

  • Picking up nickels in front of a steam roller. That is a polite way of saying one of my favorite Wall Street phrases – “Eat like a mouse, poop like an elephant.” Vol selling has become “de riguer“ in this market. Any self-respecting RIA has their clients selling vol – directly, via funds/ETFs that specialize in those trades, or even, perhaps unwittingly, in leveraged ETFs. Many write puts because “if the stock gets there, you want to own it anyways.” My view remains that what they really mean is “if the stock gets there, for no good reason, you want to own it” as more often than not price drops are associated with negative news that make what was at one time a good and obvious price a little more dangerous. Also, it helps if you weren’t fully invested and didn’t write too many puts, otherwise you might need to sell rather than buy.

  • The Japanese Yen. The strength there is sparking a lot of chatter about the “unwind of carry trades” where investors borrowed cheaply in depreciating yen to buy other assets. I’m never too sure how big or real that risk is, but with the JPY appreciating almost 10% in less than a month it is something to watch.

  • Fake passive. When indices, from narrow to broad, become heavily concentrated in a handful of stocks, your intuition on “passive” is likely to be incorrect. Selling pressure (which we’ve seen less of than I would have expected given the moves) will hit the big leaders. Since momentum has been the best factor, that leaves us open for more selling. Just like inflows went disproportionately to a handful of companies enhancing their narrative, outflows will also hit them, through no fault of their own, other than the success of their stocks. Hopefully, stock pickers will win here! Since June 30th, the S&P 500 equal weight index is up 1.5% while the regular (market cap weight) index is down 2%.

  Bottom Line

  The Fed will be more “plodding” than what the market has priced in.

  U.S. 2s vs 10s is the least inverted since June 2022. Continue to look for “normalization” as the Fed can control the front end, but not much on the back end.

  While we had been looking for weaker economic data, I was shocked (painfully) by how quickly 10s moved and got below 3.8% to finish the week. I’m incredibly bearish, at least for a trade here, as I cannot find a reason (in anything I look at) to bring my range below 4% – 4.2%. I will have to adjust to the case that while we’ve been comfortable thinking about a slowing economy and lower inflation, it was not as widely held as we thought.

  Stocks. We continue to think that we have not seen the bottom and that we will be lower at some point in August than we are today (cannot discount a possible bounce again from here, but am waiting for lower levels to buy this market). On the Nasdaq 100 the current target is 17,500. Just below the 200-day moving average, where we would expect support, though that is still above the April 19th low of 17,000. If anything, the risk of breaching that remains high. The S&P 500 is a bit trickier as it is still above the 100-day moving average, but 5,000 seems like a good target (the 200-day moving average and the April lows).

  Buy energy here on the recent weakness. Yes, the economy is slowing. There are more and more questions about whether AI, Data Centers, etc., and everything associated with it (power for example) got ahead of itself, but geopolitical risk is extremely high and anything we see on that front will lead to supply shocks for energy.

  Credit. Should outperform, but it will start moving much more in line with equities as the equity move is starting to reflect more than just valuation concerns. Credit spreads were well protected against valuation concerns but will not be as protected as we move into “bumpy” landing concerns. Lower Treasury yields won’t help spreads, and we should see a much larger than expected August calendar develop to take advantage of the move in all-in yields.

  Holy recession, Batman! We’ve been on the side more concerned about the economy for some time now. It felt like we were swimming upstream at times, and Wednesday’s stock surge felt like we were swimming in a baby pool “closed for maintenance.” Then suddenly recession is on the tip of everyone’s tongue! Deservedly so, but wow, did that happen fast!

  Good luck, as this summer is turning more turbulent rather than less turbulent!

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 14:00

• Anti-Immigration Protests In UK Spreads As Elon Musk Warns "Civil War Is Inevitable" 
  Anti-Immigration Protests In UK Spreads As Elon Musk Warns “Civil War Is Inevitable” 

  European countries on the front lines, such as Greece and Italy, have been overwhelmed with migrants over the years due to failed open-border policies facilitated by radical leftist politicians. These unaccountable leaders (elected & unelected) have created the perfect storm of migrant crime and chaos across the continent. 

  Just a fraction of the Brits murdered by foreigners recently.

  And they expect zero pushback from that? pic.twitter.com/rP9uj292AA

  — iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) August 3, 2024

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

  For readers, who are not caught up with the news cycle, anti-immigration demonstrations have erupted across the UK following the horrific stabbing of three children in Southport by the 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants. 

  Here’s the latest reporting: 

  • Riots Erupt In England After Teenage Child Of Migrants Goes On Stabbing Spree

  • UK Prime Minister Calls For Crackdown On Angry Brits – Violent Migrants Get A Pass

  Now weekend anti-immigration demonstrations were seen in Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, Hull, Belfast, Stoke, and other cities. Some turned violent while others did not. 

  Citizens are enraged with progressive officials who have promoted open borders, leading to an influx of migrants. This has resulted in increased crime and chaos and has adversely affected working-class families by pushing down wages for low-skilled jobs. 

  The Guardian quoted protesters on Saturday as chanting, “Get them out” and “Yorkshire.” 

  In the southwest city of Bristol, folks shouted, “We want our country back,” while others yelled, “England ’til I die.” There were small pockets of counter-protesters who called called anti-immigration protesters ‘racist’. 

  It seems that the working-class people in the West are beginning to speak up. After all, Christianity played a major role in the development of Western civilization. 

  “F*ck Islam”, shouted British patriots in London. UK one step away from civil war? pic.twitter.com/IF1D1gQPkw

  — RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) July 28, 2024

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

  On Sunday, Policing and Crime Minister Diana Johnson told Sky News that unrest is viewed as “criminal disorder” and that people participating were “thugs.” She said some protesters may face “imprisonment.” 

  Folks are not happy about the two-tier judicial system. Where have we seen this before? 

  Britain has officially gone. pic.twitter.com/M5MX8qDCc5

  — Queen Natalie (@TheNorfolkLion) July 28, 2024

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

  Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the nation that the government will do “whatever it takes” to quell the violence. 

  🇬🇧 Riots in the UK are quickly getting out of control. pic.twitter.com/ZbPHY514Ak

  — DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) August 3, 2024

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

  On Saturday evening, Musk weighed in on the unrest, warning: “Civil war is inevitable.”

  Civil war is inevitable

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 4, 2024

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

  Musk’s assumption might not be too far off from what could be coming to Europe. In fact, far-left EU elites who have pushed years of open borders, flooding countries across the bloc with hundreds of thousands of migrants, if not millions, have intentionally or unintentionally stoked incredibly high divisions among the population over migration. Meanwhile, failed open-border policies have supercharged nationalist movements. 

  One interesting note: leftist corporate media are pushing that X has been the epicenter of fueling misinformation and disinformation, as it’s likely EU leftist officials are going to attempt to clamp down some more (remember the Olympics censorship) on Musk’s free speech efforts. 

  Mark my words – Britain’s leftist government will use this outbreak of violence to launch a crackdown on free speech, specifically against Elon Musk’s X platform.

  — Ben Kew (@ben_kew) August 4, 2024

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

  Here comes the censorship. 

  Anti-immigration activist Martin Sellner gave a lecture yesterday on censorship.

  The police showed up to shut it down. pic.twitter.com/WYuYhrHr5g

  — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 4, 2024

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

  Europe’s slow-motion crisis has undoubtedly gained momentum as social unrest ignites. This couldn’t have come at the worst possible timing as Russia and Ukraine are locked in a multi-year war in Eastern Europe with elevated risks of broadening conflict. Furthermore, risks of broadening conflict are also seen in the Middle East between Iran and Israel. 

  The West is in chaos, thanks to far-left lawmakers from the US to Europe who have promoted failed open-border policies – destroyed meritocracy – and still can’t describe what a woman is.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 13:25

• The Usual Stimulus Tricks Won't Work This Time Around
  The Usual Stimulus Tricks Won’t Work This Time Around

  Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via substack,

  The global economy is slowing, and central banks and governments are deploying the usual stimulus tricks: 1) lowering interest rates to encourage more borrowing and spending, and 2) running large fiscal deficits so government spending fills the gap left by sagging private-sector spending.

  But these usual stimulus tricks won’t work this time around, and the reason why is very simple: all the conditions that allowed these tricks to work were one-offs that are now done and gone. These one-offs weren’t policies that can be tweaked or reinvented; they were real-world conditions that are no longer present. They cannot be brought back with any amount of money or will.

  

  Let’s start with China.

  China bailed the world out of the last three recessions triggered by credit-asset bubbles popping: the Asian Contagion of 1997-98, the dot-com bubble and pop of 2000-02, and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. In each case, China’s high growth and massive issuance of stimulus and credit (a.k.a. China’s Credit Impulse) acted as catalysts to restart global expansion.

  The context of this is China’s unprecedentedly rapid industrialization added a new (initially low-cost) very productive workforce of 450 million to the global economy, roughly equivalent to the entire workforces of the U.S. and the European Union. This was a one-off on multiple layers: an enormous workforce, ample reserves of cheap coal and aggressively mercantilist government policies fueled a boom unlike any other in history. (I first visited China in 2000, shortly before its entry into the World Trade organization, so the boom is not an academic abstraction for me; I was there, witnessing it on the ground.)

  This boom generated enormous capital flows into China (a.k.a. FDI, foreign direct investment), soaring corporate profits as developed-nations’ corporations slashed production costs by offshoring industries to China, and spurred domestic consumption in China as a nation of 1.4 billion people who had been held back for decades rushed to replace hundreds of millions of bicycles with hundreds of millions of autos and old brick houses with millions of high-rise apartments.

  This one-off is now spent.  Even in 2000, there were signs of overproduction / demand saturation: TV production in China in 2000 had overwhelmed global and domestic demand: everyone in China already had a TV, so what to do with the millions of TVs still being churned out?

  Daily life in China is high-tech, orderly, busy and prosperous–what visiting Westerners see and praise–but the narrative of China’s ascent to global dominance via endless expansion of its economy has been punctured, again for a very simple reason:  China’s model of economic development that worked so brilliantly in the “boost phase” of the S-Curve, when all the low-hanging fruit could be so easily picked, no longer works at the top of the S-Curve.

  

  China’s model of economic development from 1985 to the present was classic mercantilism–government policies encouraged industrialization to ship low-cost exports to the world–and classic expansion of home ownership: though the state owns all land in China, government  policy shifted from public housing to issuing long-term leases to residents and to developers to build new housing that would be sold to households.

  These policies have now reached the saturation-decline phase of the S-Curve, on multiple levels. Housing is now in surplus–millions of middle-class households already own investment apartments as a form of savings / household wealth–and half the populace is too poor to buy expensive flats: 600 million people get by on $150 or less per month.

  These policies have led to an extreme concentration of household wealth in real estate, and those who invested in China’s stock market have suffered major losses.

  

  There is little demand for existing flats outside the inner rings of Tier One cities, and so the resale value of millions of empty investment flats is a looming question mark. Small banks have folded or are limiting cash withdrawals, sparking protests, and an estimated 20 million flats that homeowners have paid for are unfinished as the developers ran out of money.

  This is the problem with overproduction as a model of endless growth: it eventually overwhelms demand and the income needed to pay for it.

  On the export front, China’s heavy-handed policies (Wolf Warrior diplomacy) have alienated both the developing-nations who took on huge loans from China for Belt-and-Road Initiative projects–many of which are empty white elephants or plagued with quality issues–and the developed-world economies facing a tsunami of Chinese exports that are now viewed as mortal threats to domestic industries and national security.

  Simply put, housing and mercantilist exports are no longer engines of growth, and China has no replacement. The current strategy of moving up the value chain to dominate electric vehicles and semiconductors is triggering pushback in the form of tariffs and restrictions that will only increase as the global economy slips into recession.

  Whatever reflects poorly on the leadership is suppressed–statistics are simply no longer reported or are dismissed as PR–and so it takes on-the-ground reporting to learn that youth unemployment is likely around 40%, civil servants such as police have had their salaries cut 30%, and that the citizenry now view the present as “the Garbage Time of History.”: Deals like the “Poor Guy’s Package” and “Blind Box of Leftovers” point to significant changes in the Chinese economy affecting the lives of ordinary people.

  China’s credit stimulus–breathlessly anticipated as the savior of the global economy–generated nothing more than a shrug. China has burned through the boost phase and has no answers to the decay phase of the S-Curve.

  Constructive demographics were another one-off–for China and for the world.

   

  Where China’s workforce was growing during the boost phase, now the demographic picture has darkened: China’s workforce is shrinking, the population of elderly retirees is soaring, and China has no national universal pension / healthcare programs like Social Security and Medicare, so the cost burdens of supporting a burgeoning cohort of retirees will have to be funded by a shrinking workforce.

  This is a global phenomenon, and there are no quick and easy solutions. Skilled labor will become increasingly scarce and able to demand higher wages regardless of any other factors, and that will be a long-term source of inflation. Governments will have to borrow more–and probably raise taxes as well–to fund soaring pension and healthcare costs for elderly retirees. This will bleed off other social spending and investment.

  The era of zero-interest rates and unlimited government borrowing has ended.  As Japan has shown, even at ludicrously low rates of 1%, interest payments on skyrocketing government debt eventually consume virtually all tax revenues. Higher rates will accelerate this dynamic, pushing government finances to the wall as interest on sovereign debt crowds out all other spending.  As taxes rise, households have less disposable income to spend on consumption, leading to stagnation.

  At the start of the cycle–either 1985 or 1994, take your pick–global debt levels, both government and private-sector–were low. Now they are high.  The boost phase of debt expansion and debt-funded spending is over, and we’re in the stagnation-decline phase where adding debt generates diminishing or negative returns.

  The era of low inflation has also ended for multiple reasons. Exporting nations’ wages have risen sharply, pushing their costs higher, and as noted, skilled labor in developed economies can demand higher wages as this labor cannot be automated or offshored–and offshoring is reversing to onshoring, raising production costs and diverting investment from asset bubbles to the real world.

  The techno-optimist fantasy is that technology will extract all the minerals and resources we need to completely remake the global energy sector and every device that consumes energy at current low prices. This has yet to proven correct at scale, and common sense suggests it will be proven false as we’ve already consumed all the easy-to-extract resources in locales that aren’t extreme. OK, so there’s oil under the Arctic Sea. Nice, but it won’t be cheap and easy to get like the oil that’s already been extracted and consumed.

  Higher costs of extraction will push inflation higher.  So will rampant money-printing to “boost consumption.”

  The tech boom was also a one-off.  Economists were puzzled in the early 1990s by the stagnation of productivity despite the tremendous investments made in personal and corporate computers, a boom launched in the mid-1980s with Apple’s Macintosh and desktop publishing, and Microsoft’s WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Windows operating system.

  By the mid-1990s, productivity was finally rising and the emergence of the Internet as “the vital 4%” triggered the adoption of the 20% which then led to 80% getting online combined with the computing revolution to generate a true revolution in sharing, connectivity and economic potential.

  The buzz around AI holds that an equivalent boom is now starting that will generate a glorious “Roaring 20s” of trillions booked in new profits and skyrocketing productivity as white-collar work and jobs are automated into oblivion.

  There are two problems with this story:

  1) The projections are based more on wishful thinking than real-world dynamics

  2) If the projections come true and tens of millions of white-collar jobs disappear forever, there is no replacement sector to employ the tens of millions of unemployed workers.

  In the previous cycles of industrialization and post-industrialization, agricultural workers shifted to factory work, and then factory workers shifted to retail, services and office work. There is no equivalent place to shift tens of millions of unemployed workers, as AI is a dragon that eats its own tail: AI can perform many programming tasks so it won’t need millions of human coders.

  As for profits, as I explained in Musings #1 (AI Boosts Productivity: Hype, Reality or Mirage?), Musings #26  (The Simple Reason Nothing Is Fixable: Addiction Capitalism) and #27 (Will Hollywood and the Music Industry Survive the Super-Abundance of Original AI Content?), everyone will have the same AI tools and so whatever those tools generate will be overproduced and therefore of little value: there is no pricing power when the world is awash in AI-generated content, bots, etc., other than the pricing power offered by addiction and fraud–both extreme negatives for humanity and the global economy.

  Either way it goes–AI is a money-pit of grandiose expectations that will generate marginal returns, or it wipes out much of the middle class while generating little profit–AI will not be the miraculous source of millions of new high-paying jobs and astounding profits.

  To recap: here are the one-offs that drove growth and pulled the global economy out of bubble busts / recessions for the past 30 years:

  1)  China’s industrialization.
  2)  Growth-positive demographics.
  3)  Low interest rates.
  4)  Low debt levels.
  5)  Low inflation.
  6)  Tech boom.

  These one-offs no longer exist. They’re gone or have reversed.  What we now have is a hyper-centralized, hyper-connected (i.e. tightly bound), hyper-globalized and hyper-financialized global economy of extreme fragility.

  For all these reasons, the usual stimulus tricks won’t work this time around.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/04/2024 – 12:50

Digest powered by RSS Digest