Jul 05

Today’s News 5th July 2022

  • Leaked Report Reveals Eiffel Tower Riddled With Rust, In Desperate Need Of Repair
    Leaked Report Reveals Eiffel Tower Riddled With Rust, In Desperate Need Of Repair

    French magazine Marianne cites confidential reports that show the Eiffel Tower is deteriorating and riddled with rust. The tower desperately needs full repair, not just a cosmetic refurbishment.

    “If Gustave Eiffel visited the place, he would have a heart attack,” an unnamed tower manager told Marianne.

    The Eiffel Tower, nicknamed “La dame de fer” (French for “Iron Lady”), was constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair. Engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower, only expected the wrought-iron lattice structure to only last two decades. 

    The tower still stands more than 130 years later, thanks to routine maintenance and fresh paint. But now, the 7,300-ton structure with more than 2.5m rivets is in poor condition and needs complete restoration.

    A 60 million euro project to repaint the tower is underway ahead of the 2024 Olympics. This will be the 20th time the structure has been repainted since its inception. 

    “Paint is the essential ingredient for protecting a metallic structure and the care with which this is done is the only guarantee of its longevity,” Eiffel wrote at the time. “The most important thing is to prevent the start of rust.”

    Experts told Marianne that the current work is only a cosmetic facelift — adding that some metal pieces need to be replaced. 

    A 2014 report by paint experts Expiris found the tower had cracks and rusting problems. 

     “Even if the general state of the anti-corrosion protection seems good to the eye, this can be misleading,” Expiris said a the time. “It is not feasible to envisage the application of a new coat of paint that can only increase the risk of a total lack of adhesion.”

    Bernard Giovannoni, the head of Expiris, told Marianne: “I’ve worked on the tower for several years now. In 2014 I considered there was an extreme urgency to deal with the corrosion.” 

    Another report in 2016 found the tower had 884 faults, including 68 that could affect “the durability” of the structure.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/05/2022 – 02:45

  • The Woke Inquisitors Have Come For The Freethinking Heretics
    The Woke Inquisitors Have Come For The Freethinking Heretics

    Authored by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute,

    Attacks on free speech are on the rise.

    A British college recently expelled a student for expressing support for the government’s official policy of deporting illegal immigrants. A Wisconsin school district charged three middle-schoolers with sexual harassment last month for refusing to use the plural pronoun “they” when referring to a single classmate. US President Joe Biden’s National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy recently encouraged social media companies to censor from their online platforms any opinions that contradict Biden’s climate change narrative.

    In its continued commitment to preserve the government’s monopoly over COVID-19 information, Twitter actually suspended a medical doctor for merely sharing a scientific study that suggests the Pfizer vaccine affects male fertility. And the NFL’s Washington Commanders fined defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio $100,000 and forced him to apologize only weeks ago for having expressed his opinion that 2020’s summer of riots across the United States after George Floyd’s death was more destructive than the few hours of mayhem at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    In contrast, it has become newsworthy that entertainment powerhouse Paramount has chosen not to censor old movies and television shows containing content that today’s “woke” scolds might find “offensive.” In a “cancel culture” world where censorship and trigger warnings have become the norm, preserving the artistic integrity of a film is now considered outright daring. In fact, even publishers of old literary classics have begun rewriting content to conform with “politically correct” sensibilities.

    Examples such as these, where personal speech is either censored or punished, are becoming much more frequent, and anybody who minimizes the threat this increased intolerance for free expression poses to a democratic society is either gullibly or willfully blind. As any defender of liberty knows, nothing more quickly transforms a free society into a totalitarian prison than crackdowns on speech. Of all the tools of coercion available to a government, preventing individuals from freely expressing their thoughts is most dangerous. Denying citizens that most basic societal release valve for pent-up anger and disagreement only heightens the risk for outright violence down the line. Either silenced citizens become so enraged that conflict becomes inevitable, or the iron fist of government force descends on the public more broadly to preemptively curtail that possibility. Either way, the result is a disaster for any free society.

    For Americans who cherish free speech, this undeniable war on language and expression is jolting but not shocking. Whenever censorship slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle of “good intentions.”

    Fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” destroyed anything that could be seen to invite or reflect sin.

    The notorious 1933 Nazi book burning at the Bebelplatz in Berlin torched some 20,000 books deemed subversive or “un-German”.

    During Communist China’s decade-long Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, the vast majority of China’s traditional scrolls, literature and religious antiquities went up in smoke.

    All three atrocities were celebrated as achievements for the “greater good” of society, and people inebriated with “good intentions” set their cultural achievements aflame with fervor and triumph. Much like today’s new censors who claim to “fight hate” because “that’s not who we are,” the arsonists of the past saw themselves as moral paragons, too. They purged anything “obscene” or “traditional” or “old,” so that theocracy, Nazism, or communism could take root and grow. And if Western institutions today are purging ideas once again, then it is past time for people to start asking just what those institutions plan to harvest next.

    We in the West are running — not walking — toward another “bonfire of the vanities” in which normal people, egged on by their leaders, will eagerly destroy their own culture while claiming to save it. This time around the “vanities” will be condemned for their racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-science or climate-denying ways, but when they are thrown into the fire, it is dissent and free expression that will burn.

    There will one day be much disagreement as to how the same Western Civilization that produced the Enlightenment and its hallowed regard for free expression could once again surrender itself to the petty tyranny of censorship.

    Many will wonder how the West’s much-vaunted “liberal” traditions could meekly fold to the specter of state-controlled speech.

    The answer is that the West has fallen into the same trap that always catches unsuspecting citizens by surprise: the steady encroachment on free speech has been sold as a “virtue” that all good people should applaud.

    First, certain thoughts became “aggravating factors” that turned traditional crimes into new “hate crimes” deserving of additional punishment.

    Then the definition of what is “hateful” grew until politicians could comfortably decree anything at odds with their agendas to be examples of “hate.”

    Who would be for “hate,” after all? Surely no-one of good sense or good manners.

    Now “hate” has transformed into an elusive description for any speech that can be alleged to cause the slightest of harms.

    From there, it was easy for the state to decree that “disinformation,” or rather anything that can be seen to contradict the state’s own official narratives, causes “harm,” too.

    Those who despise free speech told society, “If you do not punish hate, then you’re a bigot.” And today, if you oppose the government’s COVID-19, climate change, immigration, or other contentious policies, your harmful “disinformation” must be punished, too.

    It is a slippery slope, is it not? Once governments normalize censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is firmly stamped with an expiration date.

    After the Nazis went down this poisonous path, repentant Germans built a public memorial to remember the book burning at the Bebelplatz and ensure its tragic lesson was never forgotten. On a plaque in the square is a commemorative engraving, paraphrasing the 19th century German writer Heinrich Heine:

    “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

    That warning comes with no expiration date.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/05/2022 – 02:00

  • The People Crafting US Policy Aren't In America
    The People Crafting US Policy Aren’t In America

    Authored by Joseph Solis-Mullen via The Libertarian Institute/Mises.org,

    In a piece of news that shocked the mainstream media, but which shocked no one familiar with the academic industry writ large, retired US Army general John Allen was forced to resign as president of the Brookings Institution after it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for lobbying on behalf of the Qatari monarchy.

    Of course, the real news, scarcely noted by The Washington Post, New York Times, or any other purported paper of record, is that Allen was only really in trouble because he hadn’t fulfilled the pro forma legal requirements for those lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign agent or government.

    The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), under which such activities are regulated, includes several exceptions that allow for such activities without declaring a conflict of interest. Think tanks, a misnomer if ever there was one, operate under an “academic exception” that allows for engagement in “bona fide religious, scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits or the fine arts.”

    Anyone who has ever picked up one of the many deadly dull social science journals where actual, bona fide empirical academic work is done knows this constitutes perhaps a fraction of what think tanks almost daily churn out. Rather think tank commentary, touted as objective analysis, is regularly featured or cited by publications and outlets as apparently diverse as The Wall Street Journal and NPR.

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    Of course, think tanks are hardly alone. As Ben Freeman, a specialist on foreign influence on U.S. policy, has documented, such democratic bastions of liberal values as the UAE and Saudi Arabia donate hundreds of millions, even billions, to universities around the country.

    Of course, from a libertarian perspective, who is to say who should be giving money to whom and for what? Further, FARA’s provisions are so nebulous that virtually anyone could be targeted for virtually any reason, an obvious opportunity for unaccountable federal officials to impinge on Americans’ civil liberties.

    But the blatant hypocrisy of it all is what really stands out, as the same universities and think tanks regularly decry the apparently perfidious influence of countries like China, which they breathlessly warn uses our “open institutions” for its own gain. Should any of their number dare to go off message and report, for example, on the well-documented and wholly negative influence of countries like Israel on US foreign policy, they are tarred as anti-Semites, racists, or foreign agents themselves!

    The truth is the powerful Israel and Saudi Arabia lobbies have been able to steer US policy in directions clearly at odds with the best interests of the American people for decades. Unsurprisingly, perhaps nowhere has the deleterious effect of their money been more felt than in US policy toward Iran, with the Saudis, Israelis, and Emiratis dumping literally billions of dollars into attacks on a country the United States should have normalized relations with decades ago.

    The Uyghur lobby is another such interest group that enjoys an open door in Congress and the op-ed pages of prominent papers—this while its nakedly paramilitary arm advocates the violent overthrow of the Beijing government! And what are we, or foreign governments like China, to think when the parent organization of such extremists, the World Uyghur Congress, takes funding from the US government itself? We aren’t supposed to think about it at all.

    Just like we aren’t supposed to question any of the other nakedly self-serving policies. Who, for example, is surprised to learn there is a large and active Ukraine lobby in Washington? That has paid off handsomely, with our government now handing over $130 million daily to Kyiv with little to no oversight.

    And of course, most maddeningly, any critically thinking American who even dares to question the US government’s obviously dangerous and counterproductive policies, bought and paid for by literal foreign agents, are themselves accused of being in the pay of Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran.

    Never mind that all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

    Again, the American people aren’t expected to think at all, only to stay in line and keep the money flowing. This is the sad state of foreign policy in America, and it happens right out in the open.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 23:30

  • North Korea Shifts Blame On COVID Outbreak To "Alien Things" Coming From South Korean Border
    North Korea Shifts Blame On COVID Outbreak To “Alien Things” Coming From South Korean Border

    North Korea is blaming its Covid-19 outbreak on “alien things” near its border with South Korea.

    We guess they haven’t quite caught up to “the science” just yet.

    North Korea announced the results of an investigation into the country’s Covid origins and told its people to “vigilantly deal with alien things coming by wind and other climate phenomena and balloons in the areas along the demarcation line and borders,” according to the South China Morning Post. 

    While the official KCNA news agency didn’t mention South Korea by name, activists in South Korea have often flown balloons from the South with leaflets and humanitarian aid for those in North Korea, the report says. 

    South Korea’s unification ministry said there’s “no possibility” that the virus entered North Korea by those means. 

    Yet KCNA claims that one 18 year old and one 5 year old touched the materials “in a hill around barracks and residential quarters” and later showed symptoms. 

    Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul commented to the SCMP: “It’s hard to believe North Korea’s claim, scientifically speaking, given that the possibility of the virus spreading through objects is quite low.”

    Meanwhile, “the science” in the West says the risk of people getting infected through these means – specifically contaminated surfaces – is “low”, but still possible. 

    Some believe that North Korea is blaming South Korea because they can’t put the blame on China. 

    “If they concluded the virus was from China, they would have had to tighten quarantine measures on the border area in a further setback to North Korea-China trade,” said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University.

    Due to lack of testing supplies, North Korea has only been reporting the number of citizens with fevers. That number stands at 4.74 million people since April. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 22:45

  • Supreme Court Targets The Real Enemy
    Supreme Court Targets The Real Enemy

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

    The flurry of rulings from the Supreme Court has everyone’s head spinning. The most significant among them, even if it doesn’t capture all the headlines, is West Virginia vs EPA. The majority opinion is impressive but the part I found truly wonderful is the concurring opinion by Neil Gorsuch.

    This is where we see things headed, toward a major and much-welcome curbing of the power of the administrative state.

    Just to review what this thing is, it is the unelected bureaucracy that rules the country without oversight from voters or legislatures. For well over 100 years, most courts have given it a pass, just assuming that the “experts” in the bureaucracies are handling things just fine, faithfully interpreting legislation, and merely creating rules for easy compliance.

    Generations have gone by as this 4th branch of government has grown in size, scope, and strength. For the most part, its baneful impositions have been felt by one business or one industry at a time. You have heard the stories. The car dealer complains of how the Department of Labor is making him crazy. The machine-parts manufacturer is going bonkers about letters from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The energy company can never satisfy the Environmental Protection Agency.

    They are stories and we find them unfortunate but we’ve generally avoided thinking of these as systematic, all pervasive, and truly dangerous to the idea of freedom itself. However, there are some 432 of these agencies. The authors of the Declaration of Independence noted their existence back in the day when they accused the English king of having “erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.” They fought a revolution to end the tyranny but now we have a home-grown form, starting in 1883 with the Pendleton Act and continuing throughout the 20th century as each new administration creates its own bureaucracy.

    The thing has taken on a power of its own. Strangely, the topic hardly comes up at all during elections, and this is for a reason. Politicians running for office like to advertise their power to make change. They might even believe it. In reality, elected officials have very little influence over the conduct of public life relative to the administrative state. As Trump found it, not even the president is a match for the deep state.

    Here is what has happened since March 2020: the beast showed its face. Seemingly out of nowhere, these strange agencies and people for whom we never voted were ruling our lives. They restricted travel, forced us to cover our faces, closed our churches and schools, and forbid our businesses from operating unless they were big enough to afford a powerful lobbying arm in Washington. The whole scene was appalling. It caused many people—including some earnest judges—to take notice.

    Once you see the problem, you cannot unsee it.

    …

    When you consider the implications of this one decision, they are awesome. It doesn’t just apply to the EPA and its elaborate plans for changing the global climate through command and control. It also applies to every other agency, including the CDC and even the Federal Reserve itself.

    They all should be accountable to the people through their elected representatives. If we cannot get back to that system, we will lose everything.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 22:00

  • A Logarithmic Map Of The Entire Observable Universe
    A Logarithmic Map Of The Entire Observable Universe

    Among the scientific community, it’s widely believed that so far humans have only discovered about 5% of the universe.

    Yet, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, despite knowing about just a fraction of what’s out there, we’ve still managed to discover galaxies billions of light-years away from Earth.

    This graphic by Pablo Carlos Budassi provides a logarithmic map of the entire known universe, using data by researchers at Princeton University and updated as of May 2022.

    For a full-size option or to inquire about posters, please visit Pablo Carlos Budassi’s website.

    How Does the Map Work?

    Before diving in, it’s worth touching on a few key details about the map.

    First off, it’s important to note that the celestial objects shown on this map are not shown to scale. If it was made to scale with sizes relative to how we see them from Earth, nearly all of the objects would be miniscule dots (except the Moon, the Sun, and some nebulae and galaxies).

    Secondly, each object’s distance from the Earth is measured on a logarithmic scale, which increases exponentially, in order to fit in all the data.

    Within our Solar System, the map’s scale spans astronomical units (AU), roughly the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Beyond, it grows to measure millions of parsecs, with each one of those equal to 3.26 light-years, or 206,000 AU.

    Exploring the Map

    The map highlights a number of different celestial objects, including:

    • The Solar System

    • Comets and asteroids

    • Star systems and clusters

    • Nebulae

    • Galaxies, including the Milky Way

    • Galaxy clusters

    • Cosmic microwave background—radiation leftover from the Big Bang

    Featured are some recently discovered objects, such as the most distant known galaxy to date, HD1. Scientists believe this newly-discovered galaxy was formed just ​​330 million years after the Big Bang, or roughly 8.4 billion years before Earth.

    It also highlights some newly deployed spacecraft, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is NASA’s latest infrared telescope, and the Tiangong Space Station, which was made by China and launched in April 2021.

    Why is it called the “Observable” Universe?

    Humanity has been interested in space for thousands of years, and many scientists and researchers have dedicated their lives to furthering our collective knowledge about space and the universe.

    Most people are familiar with Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, which became a cornerstone of both physics and astronomy. Another well-known scientist was Edwin Hubble, whose findings of galaxies moving away from Earth is considered to be the first observation of the universe expanding.

    But the massive logarithmic map above, and any observations from Earth or probes in space, are limited in nature. The universe is currently dated to be around 13.8 billion years old, and nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light.

    When accounting for the expansion of the universe and observed objects moving away from us, that means that the farthest we can “see” is currently calculated at around 47.7 billion light-years. And since light takes time to travel, much of what we’re observing actually happened many millions of years ago.

    But our understanding of the universe is evolving constantly with new discoveries. What will we discover next?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 21:15

  • 'America, The Beautiful' Is Broken
    ‘America, The Beautiful’ Is Broken

    Authored by David Haggith via The Great Recession blog,

    The twaddle that comes out of the White House is deep right now. When our tottering president isn’t out enjoying a bike ride and falling down because Putin put gum in his stirrup so that he couldn’t get his foot out to steady himself, he is assembling a colorful team of Frisco-style professionals highly qualified in the field of transition to guide us through the vicissitudes of war, plague and famine that are swirling around the entire globe right now. (“Frisco” is the name the city loves to hate, so I chose it intentionally for a city I once found beautiful.)

    The LGBTQRS+++ hip chick that is the president’s talking mop at the press secretary’s podium spent her morning yesterday assuring us all that we are experiencing a “period of transition” right now — something I am sure she has much experience with — going from times of economic strength in which the vast majority of us are doing great into even better times. Thank goodness for people who can guide us through transition to understand what we are going through and where we will end up, which will be — if we follow MoJoe & Co. — coming out the opposite sex from whatever we we were when we came into this world:

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    The primary accomplishment of Team Biden by the end of his one term that has somehow managed to be even more divisive than Trump will be to recolor the flag behind her with prettier inclusive rainbow stripes than the binary red and white that it historically displays. Until then, at least, we now know what “Build Back Better” looks like. According to Jean-Pierre, we are already there and clearly moving into even better times.

    It would be my own analysis, on the other hand, that if she and her colleagues don’t see a recession anywhere in sight, I can recommend an eye doctor for all of them. Their own Dr. Powell Fauci Magoo, who, incidentally, was also Trump’s White House physician, doesn’t seem to be serving them well. In the very least, I recommend they step outside the White House for a few moments to escape the curling rings of herb smoke that cloud their vision and take a look around. Perhaps I can provide a guided tour for her, though I am sure she will hallucinate some deep state of Democratic delusions she wants to see so that her trip is not as bad as mine or yours is and is about to be:

    What is the true state of the disunion?

    While we continue to hear, albeit less confidently now, about the economy being strong, what I see is that the economy has rarely looked worse in numerous ways. Obviously, I am not smoking the right stuff to enjoy the “economy as it ought to be” trip; but here is what I see in black and white when not blinded by so many pretty colors swimming around my head as MoJoe & Co. apparently see in theirs.

    First, I note that increasingly a number of voices in the financial press — some mainstream, some not — are starting to hum along to my familiar tune — not very loudly or clearly yet, BUT they are starting to pick it up:

    Phoenix Capital now says, “The U.S. is Already In a Recession… Here’s How to Profit From It!“

    Everything else is imploding and has been for months.

    At least, some people can see the obvious that it does not pay to see when your job (or next term) depends on your convincing everyone they are seeing something else.

    Phoenix presents as evidence the rather sharp decent of Walmart and Amazon into the ashes of retail.

    Bill “the Dud” Dudley, a former New York Fed chief and one-time vice chair of the Fed’s money-printing FOMC, says with a friendly smile, “Welcome To The Recession.” For a moment there, it almost sounded like he agreed with me that a recession is already here, but in typical bansker safety-net style he adds “in another 12-18 months.” Still, that is better eyesight than can be found in the White House. He, at least, is certain the blurry blob he sees up ahead is a recession, and for a Fed guy he’s speaking rather out of turn:

    While the Fed’s forecasts have become more plausible over time, I see several reasons to expect a much harder landing. Much like Wile E. Coyote heading off a cliff, the US economy has plenty of momentum but rapidly disappearing support. Falling back to earth will not be a pleasant experience.

    Zero Hedge

    That’s hardly anywhere near as comforting as Jean-Pierre. I think I’ll have what she’s having.

    Just to be clear, Dudley states,

    If you’re still holding out hope that the Federal Reserve will be able to engineer a soft landing in the US economy, abandon it. A recession is inevitable within the next 12 to 18 months.

    So, not only can some people see a recession up ahead, but they are certain that it is “inevitable” and that a soft landing is a dream to be abandoned.

    The determining factors for the quality of our landing that Dudley lays out (the reasons we had better hope they line Powell’s runway with lots of bouncy houses and foam to soften the landing) are as follows:

    • First, persistent price increases have forced the Fed to shift its focus from supporting economic activity to pushing inflation back down. (“The central bank’s employment mandate is now subservient to its inflation mandate.”)

    • Second, the new focus on price stability will be relentless. (“Fed officials recognize that failing to bring inflation back down would be disastrous.”)

    • Third, the current economic expansion is uniquely vulnerable to a sudden stop. (“It’ll take time and a considerable monetary policy tightening to reduce demand and for that to translate fully into weaker production of goods and services. But when that time comes, the production adjustment is likely to be abrupt…. As inflation outstrips wage growth, the personal savings rate has plummeted, from 26.6% in March 2021 to 4.4% this April, significantly below its long-run average. No wonder consumer sentiment has fallen to levels last reached in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and Google searches for the word “recession” are hitting new records.”)

    • Finally, economic history points to a hard landing. (“The Fed has never tightened enough to push up the unemployment rate by 0.5 percentage point or more without triggering a recession.”)

    In other words, this:

    Biden and his talking mop on the other hand assured us that “recession is not inevitable” and is nowhere in sight. That is because, like the coyote, they forgot to look right beneath themselves. Oops.

    Some others also see a recession as “inevitable” and see happening in the near term as “more likely than not”:

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    Since people are not inclined to take my word for it, let my have a Nobel economist (I realize they cannot usually see a recession until it is behind them) reiterate the points for me as he did earlier this week:

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    Biden, on the other hand, assured everyone on the same day that another prize of an economist, Larry Summers, assured him “there’s nothing inevitable about a recession.” Never mind that even Summers did say a recession now looks highly likely … but just not … “inevitable.”

    Over the weekend, Nomura became the first bank to place the recession squarely within 2022.

    The Atlanta Fed, meanwhile, is now prognosticating the 2nd quarter of 2022 closes with precisely zero economic growth, which will still leave us in a trough that began last quarter. If that is the case, then GDP will have continued to scrape along a ceiling that is 1.5% lower than GDP was at the start of the year, now half a year gone by, meaning we entered and remained in a GDP trough since the start of the year.

    Nomura believes a mild recession starting in Q4 2022 is now more likely than not (ZH: expect the mood to deteriorate further as “mild” eventually becomes “jarring”)…. Consumers are experiencing a significant negative sentiment shock, energy and food supply disruptions have worsened and the outlook for foreign growth has deteriorated. All these factors will likely contribute to the expected downturn.

    Zero Hedge

    Amazing. People are starting to look up and see what has been obvious all around them for months now and are finally whipping up the courage to say what they are seeing.

    Nomura believes the Fed will skid right on past the QT stopping point as predictably as Wile E. Coyote skids past the cliff edge. Biden believes, if you don”t look down, what’s down there can’t hurt you. Of course that was what he believed when he was out riding his bike, too.

    Goldman Sachs is another bank that now joins those who are humming the same tune to say, at least,

    We now see recession risk as higher and more front-load…. We are increasingly concerned that the Fed will feel compelled to respond forcefully to high headline inflation and consumer inflation expectations.

    Yahoo!

    How “front-load[ed]” they don’t say. They, of course, expect it to be shallow and clear up like a short cloudburst.

    Piper Sandler … shows that the typical bear market follows the start of a recession with a delay of 95 days, and eventually exhaust itself with an average total drawdown of 40% which means that current recession probably already started some time in March:

    Zero Hedge

    Of course, following the worst start for stocks to a year since the Great Depression…

    … and also the worst start since 1932 in total return terms across all asset classes…

    … one would be excused to ask if instead of a garden variety recession, the US isn’t rushing straight into a depression.

    Summarizes the New York Post,

    Wall Street bets are growing that the U.S. economy tumbles into a recession next year as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates at the fastest pace in two decades in order to cool scorching-hot inflation. Bank of America Global Research strategists have ratcheted up the odds of an economic downturn to 40% in 2023…. “Our worst fears around the Fed have been confirmed: They fell way behind the curve and are now playing a dangerous game of catch up.”

    OK. Well, none of the banks, except the Atlanta Fed, are quite with me yet, but they are all getting closer and closer by the day.

    Now that the experts are lining up on the recession side of the fence, let’s look at a short list of major weaknesses I see in the US economy that are screaming recession is here or near:

    The auto industry remains a wreck

    In a recent article titled “The Real GDPig was a Whole Lot Uglier than it Looked!” I dug deep beneath the Bureau of Economic Asininity’s surface GDP numbers to reveal how the auto industry has been in a long slouch and was, contrary to overt claims by the BEA, a major factor in pulling the economy down last quarter and the quarter before. There was something I noted, based on loads of evidence from the BEA, that was seriously wrong with the BEAs claims about automobiles driving GDP up in Q4 and then down in Q1, probably because the industry is in such disarray that BEA doesn’t know how to sort out the anomalies in its own numbers.

    The auto industry has also been a major factor in the superheated CPI reports because scarcity due to lack of production has been driving up prices. Many tried to claim the auto industry was turning around, using it as a sign that the negative GDP print in Q1 was a one-off. I did not believe evidence bore that out, and that has turned out now to be the case:

    The S&P Global Sector PMI™ revealed that Automobiles & Auto Parts sector output contracted worldwide for a second successive month amid the sharpest reduction in new orders since the COVID-19 pandemic and renewed supply disruptions linked to the pandemic and Russia-Ukraine war.

    Seeking Alpha

    While that is a global production situation, it doesn’t look any better in the US:

    The U.S. light-vehicle market doesn’t appear to be in the best health. While many automakers now opt against issuing monthly sales reports, those that still do are posting some pretty brutal numbers. This does not bode well for an industry that seemed pretty certain that 2022 would be its recovery year.

    The Truth about Cars

    Manufacturers are still warning about supply constraints and an inability to manufacture at full scale. The auto industry has always been a major component in GDP and is continuing to pull it down. Some economists thought the industry would start getting back up to cruising speed this quarter. That does not appear to have been the case.

    As for sales volume, most automakers were posting double-digit declines for the month of May. Overall, the seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of sales (SAAR) for May fell dropped to a crippling low of 12.81 million, according to Motor Intelligence. That’s to be contrasted against April’s 14.6 million units and over 17 million average from May of 2021…. “The market faces a real risk of turning negative from 2021.”

    Well, that just doesn’t sound good at all, and that was the area where the optimists were most expecting some reprieve after the negative Q1 GDP print, which they chose to believe was the anomaly, rather than accept the idea that the high GDP increase in the quarter before was the clear outlier from the trend.

    Retail remains a mixed bag

    In another recent article titled “The Retail Apocalypse was Bloodier than it Looked,” I similarly described how the retail industry was a much bloodier picture than what many economists were making of it. It seemed like major retailers got ready to throw a party and one one came. Last quarter they stocked up all they could and remained laden with inventory from imports that are mistakenly thought to subtract from GDP, but that is a misunderstanding of how they are merely reconciled back out of other GDP inputs in which they are embedded.

    This quarter major retailers are threatening to unload, and that is seen by some as possible hope for a boom in retail; but at what price?

    America’s top retailers messed up – particularly the ones that focus on durable goods rather than groceries. Most of them released their earnings reports last month, saw shares take a beating and moved on….

    Then, the mega-retailer [Target] did something no one was expecting. On Tuesday, Target told investors it anticipated a profit margin more around 2%. It would slash prices on certain goods and cancel incoming orders. It’s highly unusual for a company to slash its profit expectations within weeks of its earnings report.

    Target said in its Tuesday press release that the profit slash comes from a need to “right-size” inventories. People aren’t buying items like televisions, outdoor furniture and kitchen appliances like they were last year….

    It’s all leading to what Forbes’ Madeline Halpert called “markdown mania,” and not just at Target. Gap is hawking $60 leggings for just $12. Target is selling televisions for 25% off and patio sets at a 52% markdown….

    The demand for random crap suddenly vanished, taking everyone by surprise.

    Freightwaves

    It is hard to imagine how massive price slashing to near-zero profit margins to unload inventory no one wants to buy is going to prove to be a positive for GDP! As reported in the headlines, GDP is measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, so I suppose the impact of the mess in retail inventories and sales will depend on how much prices are slashed and how successfully that gets consumers to pick up the unwanted merchandise. Regardless of how it impacts the GDP number, this extreme dislocation clearly speaks of a badly broken economy, not one humming along like a new car … or like new cars used to hum along. Sounds more like one that’s humming my tune.

    [ZH: An example of this is the fact that while we started the year with relatively ‘low’ inventory-to-sales, that has since exploded higher amid the ‘bullwhip’ effect…

    Why does this matter? Well, for a simple but critical reason: if one year ago we saw the hyperinflationary start of the bullwhip effect, we have entered the terminal phase of the “bullwhip effect”, where plunging inventory-to-sales ratios reverse violently higher, where supply chains unclog suddenly and rapidly amid a sudden chill in the economy, and where prices for so-called “core” goods collapse almost overnight, even as non-core prices (food and energy) explode even higher.]

    Something is broken. Likely it means that backlogged inventory arrived all at once a day late and many dollars short for the retailer. Lest you think I’m the only one who is struggling to rightly understand the peculiarities here, let me quote the expert in the article:

    To end, I’d like to emphasize that the vibes are abruptly off and no one really knows what’s happening.

    That’s a mess, not strength. That is log jams clearing through the ports then jamming up in warehouses, causing aberrations in how things are reported. Dysfunctional is not strong. Even executives at the…

    Gartner supply chain conference in Florida this week … were confused and not feeling very zesty…. Transportation managers canceled orders in early 2020 predicting a recession, then found their hastiness left shelves empty and consumers furious. Now that they’ve built back up, customers aren’t buying anymore and their balance sheets are destroyed. The whiplash is baffling.

    The truth is retail sucks so bad right now that even the retailers have no idea what to make of it, neither do the shippers. It’s just baffling whiplash. “Destroyed balance sheets” are not the stuff of strong economies. What we have is a trainwreck or a shipwreck, and retailers and shippers alike are struggling to figure out what to do with it and what it really means.

    Housing slides

    Housing prices and housing sales are already falling as mortgage interest has more than doubled. Consumer sentiment is already at an all-time low. (Hence the need for Jean-Pierre to tell us things are not as bad as they feel right now, and we are transitioning from great economic strength to strength that is even built back better.)

    The housing market isn’t at a level that will by itself put us into recession just yet, but it is certainly sliding rapidly that way … and rather all of a sudden, given that Fed interest rates are still on the hot stimulus end of the Fed’s normal scale. That is because mortgage rates our outpacing the Fed’s tweaks, anticipating where things are headed:

    The highest share of sellers on record dropped their list price during the four weeks ending June 12 as mortgage rates shot up to levels not seen since 2008….

    “The housing market isn’t crashing, but it is experiencing a hangover as it comes down from an unsustainable high,” said Redfin deputy chief economist Taylor Marr. “Housing demand has already cooled significantly to the point that the industry has begun facing layoffs.

    “Demand from homebuyers was still extremely high as recently as February, but rates are making it really tough. Going from 3% to nearly 6% almost instantly has scared a lot of people out of the market.”

    Redfin

    Prices have stalled and have begun to follow sales down in some areas. Employment in the industry definitely has started to fall. What housing moves now foretell is that, as all the other forces mentioned above drive us quickly into recession, housing will be bringing up the rear to stomp us down deeper, given that housing the biggest GDP drivers in the US economy, being a major factor even in retail sales of all the items that get built into a house, plus all the new furniture that fills the new homes.

    So, while the Biden-Powell team are calling all of this a strong and resilient economy, you had better think twice if they try to sell you choice waterfront real estate in Florida. It’s probably not in Miami or on the Gold Coast.

    The golden oldie of America’s pride

    If America’s economy is looking strong, why is America’s most golden of all cities now referred to in The Atlantic as a “failed city?” Herb Caen, San Francisco’s “beloved old chronicler,” once said that, If he ever got to heaven, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.” To read The Atlantic’s description today and many others I’ve read over the past two years, he might say today upon opening his eyes in San Francisco, “I knew I’d wind up in hell.” It’s such pretty beaten up version of the city he once loved that he would only recognize it as some upside down version of the old San Fran.

    Says a modern-day liberal chronicler,

    Progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.

    Today’s scene looks so bad it may finally liberate liberals from their own liberalism. Here, too, the smoke of herb has long circled the heads of those that lead, and look at how colorfully banal it has all become:

    On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.

    The Atlantic

    I used to think San Francisco was America’s most beautiful major city — the golden lady in my opinion — even if too liberal for my taste. Not now. Even the people who used to feel privileged to live there want to get out of town and head for the hills … forever. As they do, Californians are taking the values that destroyed their great cities and transporting them like transplanted cancer cells to Idaho, Montana, Colorado and Wyoming so they can wreck all that is beautiful about those places, too, replacing farmlands and ranches with MacMansions and shopping centers in order to do it all over again.

    But I digress. Let it suffice for now to say, the picture of San Francisco as it has become is a pretty good metaphor for the US economy as it has become. I’ll leave you, then, with words of the modern-day chronicler above:

    During the first part of the pandemic, San Francisco County lost more than one in 20 residents—myself among them. Signs of the city’s pandemic decline are everywhere—the boarded-up stores, the ghostly downtown, the encampments. But walking these streets awakens me to how bad San Francisco had gotten even before the coronavirus hit—to how much suffering and squalor I’d come to think was normal.

    Stepping over people’s bodies, blurring my eyes to not see a dull needle jabbing and jabbing again between toes—it coarsened me. I’d gotten used to the idea that some people just want to live like that. I was even a little defensive of it: Hey, it’s America. It’s your choice….

    I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass stating some variation of Nothing’s in the car. Don’t smash the windows….

    A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away…

    In lockdown the beauty became obscene. The city couldn’t get kids back into the classroom; so many people were living on the streets; petty crime was rampant. I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results….

    If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it. The fog keeps things temperate. There’s nowhere in the world with more beautiful views. City workers and volunteers bring you food and blankets, needles and tents. Doctors come to see how the fentanyl is progressing, and to make sure the rest of you is all right as you go.

    It’ll all get so much better when the water from the parched Colorado River is completely shut off later this summer, driving LA water-mob slobs to storm SF to get their hand’s on some liquid that may soon sell for more than the city’s old gold. The old lady, drowning in wokeness and tears and suffocating in the worn-out wraps of her own regulations and process has been laid to rest in a graveyard of intentional squalor for the sake of the impoverished at a cost of $60,000 per tent space born by the SF taxpayers. I’m sure the tolerance of criminal decline seen in the “smash and grabs” I wrote about at the start of the year for RT.com didn’t help. May she Rest In Rainbows as a testament to all that is dying in liberal, woke Amerika.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 20:30

  • Here's What We Know About Highland Park Shooting Person Of Interest Robert Crimo
    Here’s What We Know About Highland Park Shooting Person Of Interest Robert Crimo

    Update (2330ET): Robert Crimo III was taken into custody Monday evening following a shooting in Highland Park, Illinois that left at least six people dead and over two dozen injured despite having among the strictest gun-safety laws in the country.

    He is currently being referred to as a “person of interest” while Highland Park Police question him.

    The 22-year-old was apprehended without incident in nearby Lake Forest.

    Crimo has somewhat of a large internet footprint – performing online as “Awake the Rapper,” while IMDB describes Crimo as a “six foot Hip hop phenom” born on Sept. 20, 2000. “He’s the middle child of three and of Italian descent,” Fox News reports.

    Crimo began uploading his music to the internet at age 11, but first gained traction with his 2016 track “By The Pond” featuring Atlas, according to IMDB. His estimated net worth is “$100 thousand.”

    Crimo is the son of Bob Crimo, president at Bob’s Pantry & Deli in Highland Park. According to his Facebook account, the father ran for Highland Park mayor in 2020.

    The rapper released a cryptic track called “Are You Awake” on Oct. 15, 2021. The track appears to suggest that Crimo was planning a life-defining act beyond his ability to stop. The video includes drawings of a man aiming a rifle at another person. -Fox News

    He also “liked” several tweets endorsing the arrest of “every Congressmember who helped organize January 6th,” suggesting he’s a leftist.

    On the other hand:

    Crimo’s Instagram, Discord, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms have taken down his material.

    *  *  *

    Update (2010ET): Robert Cremo III, the suspect in Monday’s deadly shooting at the Highland Park, IL 4th of July parade, has been taken into custody according to CBS Chicago.

    *  *  *

    Update (1900ET): Police have announced Robert “Bobby” Crimo III as a person of interest in Monday’s shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.

    A catalog of online material from Robert Crimo, cataloged by @crabcrawler1 (click on tweet to jump into thread).

     

    *  *  *

    Update (1605ET): The death toll has increased to 6, with 24 injured.

    Update (1341ET): Five people were dead and 16 others wounded when a gunman opened fire on a Fourth of July parade that kicked off Monday afternoon in Highland Park, a city in the southeastern part of Lake County, Illinois, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. 

    The Highland Park Police Department said the shooter is still on the loose. They urged people to seek shelter. 

    Highland Park resident, Miles Zaremski, said: “I heard 20 to 25 shots, which were in rapid succession. So it couldn’t have been just a handgun or a shotgun.”

    Zaremski said he saw “people in that area that got shot,” including “a woman covered with blood . . . She did not survive.”

    Debbie Glickman, another resident, told Associated Press she was on a parade float when she turned around and saw people running away from the area. 

    “People started saying, ‘There’s a shooter, there’s a shooter, there a shooter,'” Glickman said. “So we just ran. We just ran. It’s like mass chaos down there.”

    * * * 

    A Chicago suburb canceled what was left of its 4th of July celebration after gunfire erupted during a parade in the affluent neighborhood of Highland Park, according to NBC5 Chicago.

    The Chicago Sun Times reports that multiple people were shot.

    A Sun-Times reporter saw blankets placed over three bloodied bodies. Other people, running, were visibly bloodied. Police told people: “Everybody disburse, please. It is not safe to be here.”

    Blood pooled at Port Clinton Square in Highland Park. Lynn Sweet/ Sun-Times

    “STAY OUT OF THE AREA – allow law-enforcement and first responders to do their work,” posted the sheriff on social media, while Illinois state police called the situation “active.”

    More via the Sun Times:

    Several witnesses said they heard multiple shots fired. One witness said he counted more than 20 shots.

    Miles Zaremski, a Highland Park resident, told the Sun-Times: “I heard 20 to 25 shots, which were in rapid succession. So it couldn’t have been just a handgun or a shotgun.”

    Zaremski said that after the shots at Central Avenue around Second Avenue in downtown Highland Park, he saw “people in that area that got shot,” including “a woman covered with blood . . . She did not survive.”

    …

    Police were patrolling the area with rifles, apparently looking for whoever fired the shots.

    Adrienne Drell, a former Sun-Times reporter, said she was sitting on a curb along Central Avenue watching the parade when she saw members of the Highland Park High School marching band start to run.

    “Go to Sunset,” Drell said she heard the students shout, directing people to nearby Sunset Food.

    A man picked her up off the curb and urged her to get out, Drell said.

    “The Illinois State Police is currently assisting Highland Park PD with an active shoot situation that occurred at the Highland Park Parade,” tweeted the police. “The public is advised to avoid the area of Central Ave and 2nd St. in Highland Park.”

    The city of Highland Park also cautioned people to avoid the area, writing on Facebook: “Fourth Fest has been canceled. Please avoid downtown Highland Park. More information will be shared as it becomes available.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 20:13

  • San Francisco Couple Gets $1,500 Fine For Parking In Their Own Driveway
    San Francisco Couple Gets $1,500 Fine For Parking In Their Own Driveway

    Things really seem to be going “uphill” in San Francisco. A couple from the city, who has parked in the same spot “every day for the last 36 years” was ticketed $1,542 for parking in their own driveway this month. 

    As many people do, the couple lives on a hill in a city where parking is always at a premium. The couple has been parking in the carpad in front of their house – which they say has been there since the house was built in 1910. 

    But now the city planning department is saying it is “illegal to park in the front yard of a house” and threatened further tickets should the couple – Judy and Ed Craine – continue to park where they have been. 

    “We always use the carport,” Judy told ABC 7 San Francisco. “Parked in that driveway every day and every night,” Ed added. “We got this email saying we can’t park in the pad anymore. I said what, that’s crazy.”

    Judy continued: “It was very surprising, to say the least. I wrote them back saying I thought this was a mistake.”

    But the city planning department confirmed the ticket. “And if we were found parking there again, it would be a $1,500 fine,” Judy added. 

    Ed asked: “Why are you taking away something that has great utility? To all of a sudden to be told you can’t use something that we could use for years. It’s, it’s startling. Inexplicable.”

    The city planning committee then made the couple prove that parking there was a historic use on the lot, so the couple started digging. “We could be grandfathered in. If we show them a historical photo that showed a car… or a horse-drawn buggy in the carport,” Judy said. 

    And the couple came up with a photo from 1938 which shows a car or buggy pulling into his driveway. But the planning department told them the photo was too fuzzy and that it couldn’t be used as evidence. 

    Today, their carpad sits empty and the couple is forced to park on the hill. “The onus is on us to prove we’re innocent… though I don’t feel guilty,” Judy concluded. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 19:45

  • Saudi Ex-Spymaster Pens Scathing Op-Ed On "Rethinking The Global Order"
    Saudi Ex-Spymaster Pens Scathing Op-Ed On “Rethinking The Global Order”

    With Saudi Arabia reportedly in discussions to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China), and President Biden set to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) – who he vowed to make “the pariah, that they are” during the 2020 elections over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi – a July 4 Op-Ed by former Saudi spymaster Turki bin Faisal Al Saud over the current state of affairs may provide key insight at this particular moment in geopolitics.

    In short, while fundamentally endorsing the UN’s globalist agenda, Al Saud argues that those leading the current international order have “failed to live up to the principles of good governance enshrined in the UN charter,” and that hypocritical world leaders “need to come to their senses” and reform “deeper structural problems” in order to adapt to the new, multipolar order pushed by Russia an dChina.

    “Our organizing principles still reflect the mentality of the post-war and Cold War era,” he argues, citing a UN report that concluded major reforms were needed.

    Authored by Turki bin Faisal Al Saud via Project Syndicate (emphasis ours),

    For decades, it has been obvious that the UN system needs to be reformed to account for the realities of the twenty-first century. Yet recommendations to restructure global governance have been ignored by those with the power to carry them out, leaving us with a world of multiplying crises for which there are few solutions.

    BAKU – Just as the world was beginning to recover from one of the biggest crises in recent decades, another one has erupted in Europe. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic underscored our common humanity, Russia’s war on Ukraine has reminded us of how fragile, interconnected, and interdependent our world is. As the Chinese say, “All is one under heaven.”

    Intensifying great-power confrontations and deglobalization are jeopardizing world peace and security. New crises seem to be lurking around every corner, but appropriate solutions are nowhere to be seen – not in the Far East, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, or Latin America. The popular mood has darkened, reinvigorating populism, nationalism, Islamophobia, and other atavistic trends that threaten the progressive achievements humanity has made since World War II.

    The Ukraine crisis itself is a symptom of deeper structural problems in the international order. That order, led by the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), has failed to live up to the principles of good governance enshrined in the UN Charter.

    New global orders tend to emerge from major wars. In the case of WWII, the victors created structures designed to preserve international peace and security. But while our increasingly integrated world has changed dramatically since the UN’s founding, our organizing principles still reflect the mentality of the post-war and Cold War era. Within the current framework, a failure to respond to global challenges is a failure of the entire international community.

    Can the system be reformed? Calls since the early 1990s to restructure the UN system – the avatar for the broader international order – have consistently fallen on deaf ears. Worse, Russia and China are now using their seats at the helm of the international order to push for a more multipolar system. Rather than working to reform the current framework, they are challenging its validity.

    Humanity’s collective achievements over the past seven decades are a testament to why we must work together to make the UN system more fair, inclusive, and attentive to people’s needs and aspirations. Indeed, that was the mission of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change in 2003.

    Consisting of 16 eminent figures from different parts of the world, and chaired by former Thai Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, the panel analyzed contemporary threats to international peace and security; evaluated how well existing policies and institutions had done in addressing those threats; and offered recommendations aimed at strengthening the UN and enabling it to provide collective security for the twenty-first century.

    The panel’s final report made clear that all of the UN’s principal organs needed reform, including the Security Council, which the panel argued should be expanded. Unfortunately, the Security Council’s veto-wielding permanent members simply ignored the panel’s recommendations, setting the stage for today’s paralysis and dysfunction.

    The Middle East is especially in need of a well-functioning, genuinely representative UN system. No region has suffered more from the unfair bipolar and unipolar dynamics of the past. We have been the altar on which the principles of the international order are routinely sacrificed. The same principles that led to the creation of the State of Israel also led to the Palestinians being deprived of their homeland and denied their basic rights to self-determination and statehood.

    As the Middle East has gone from one war to another, from one catastrophe to another, and from one UN resolution to another, justice has continuously eluded it. Every time an Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern issue comes up, the hypocrisy of the great powers that lead the international order becomes crystal clear.

    The leaders of those powers need to come to their senses. Reforming the existing order requires new thinking by all UN member states, including the Security Council’s five permanent members. The international order can preserve peace and security only to the extent that it is equitable and capable of meeting the challenges that humanity faces. Short of that, geopolitical upheavals will continue to threaten world peace and security.

    *  *  *

    His Royal Highness Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, Chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, was the Director General of Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency from 1977 to 2001, and has served as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and the United States.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 19:00

  • Dear America, Happy Birthday, Kind Regards From The Brits
    Dear America, Happy Birthday, Kind Regards From The Brits

    Here in the UK we should celebrate American Independence with more enthusiasm.

    After all, as MorningPorridge.com’s Bill Blain explains, it was an absolute stroke of genius – on our part!

    Independence Day was the culmination of our great plan to improve the UK. It was brilliant for its time. Over centuries we’d come to realise the main issues in the UK were down to a whole host of conflicting demographic and people problems – which we easily solved by exporting them elsewhere.

    In the 1600s the new Britain (not yet the United Kingdom) emerged from millennia of mostly slaying each other: Britons against Saxons, Saxon against Angles, Angles against Scots, Scots against Picts, Everyone against Vikings, Scotland vs England, Britain against Spain, France and anyone else wanting to have a go, Religious Wars and Civil Wars.

    Suddenly, peace (of a sort) broke out. The aristocracy moved from damp draughty castles into nice modern stately homes. The peasantry moved from disease riven mud-hovels into brick-built boxes in new cities. People stopped dying of preventable diseases and a lack of soap, and the population began to boom.

    The UK is a small island, and we don’t really have the space. We wanted to avoid the kind of unpleasantness we’d seen generated by civil wars, rebellions and overly dangerous political and religious ideas – like levelling up or social equality, questioning the divine authority of kings, or further outbreaks of religious intolerance.

    Hence, we came up with the wizard wheeze of exporting all the useless pains-in-our-backsides to New World across the Atlantic. So:

    • We got rid of surplus impoverished second, third and n+1 sons of the minor aristocracy (drones by any standard), and the middle classes by offering them land in the fertile south and shipping them off to found new agricultural estates.

    • We winnowed the cities of surplus labour by offering “opportunity” in the new world – shipping them off to work the land, build the cities and direct the industry and commerce of the new provinces.

    • We got rid of our religious nutters. The frankly dull, boring and mostly harmless ones dressed in black were shipped off to the new world and promised they could do whatever they wished in terms of their religion. They happily established themselves in New England and in typical Puritan style started burning old women as witches because the milk had gone sour. The more radical Catholic dissenters were shipped south.

    • The Scottish/English borderers – who’d spent centuries raiding each other – were offered Northern Ireland, or if particularly violent, given land in the New World with added attraction of being able to fight the French to the West and North.

    And every time we experienced a national tragedy, like wars and clearances in Scotland, or famine in Ireland – there was plenty of space for the inconvenient survivors in the colonies. As the colonies grew, it was easy to persuade bright young folk that a lifetime spent paying back the costs of their economic migration was worthwhile.

    Brilliant. Britain’s population excess solved.

    We got rid of our unnecessary surplus, and foisted them off on the Americas.. which then had the absolute temerity to complain about being taxed by London. Ungrateful little tykes. Enough is enough. Despite the fact we’d help them get established and protected them from the marauding French, we had our second genius moment. Why pay for the America’s to be our national dumping ground…? Let them pay for themselves!

    So we engineered a rather lame revolution, helped them write a rather ironic constitution that befuddles them still to this day, persuaded them to sort themselves out by adopting ridiculous political structures, and left them to get on with it, confident, in time they’d see things our way and become an English Speaking bastion on the unfashionable side of the Atlantic..

    Which from our perspective; has pretty much panned out as planned.

    But the fervid mix of hotheads, genetic misfits, bad ideas and even worse behaviours we shipped out do seem to be battering into each other rather appallingly these days.. 

    With all that in mind, in an effort to be fair and balanced, we give the last few words to American artist Ben Garrison, who reminds us all that ‘a house divided cannot stand’, so “choose wisely”…

    The Fourth of July used to stand for all Americans coming together to celebrate our independence day from tyranny.

    Now, too many demand the return of the very same tyranny our forefathers rebelled against. We’ve been around long enough and seen enough independence days to notice that America is now more divided than ever.

    In our younger days we observed how Democrats and Republicans didn’t often agree with each other, but such disagreements were done with a certain modicum of class and mutual respect. Both parties placed the overall interests of America first. This is no longer the case.

    Biden said he was not a ’nationalist’ and he placed globalism above America’s interests.

    Biden does not want to make America great again. It’s why we’re seeing such high gas prices at the pumps. It’s why we’re involved in another war that does not serve our interests. Biden doesn’t want America to be energy independent. He wants the globalist’s ‘climate change’ agenda to be forced upon us regardless of the consequences. Biden doesn’t want to control the borders. He wants America overrun and its middle class destroyed. The Democrats want everyone dependent on Big Government. Under Obama and now Biden, the Democrats hate America outright. They especially hate what it once stood for—freedom and liberty. Patriots were called ‘bitter clingers’ by Obama.

    The anti-American ‘woke’ Democrats want statues that commemorate America’s history pulled down. They want ‘green’ energy, which means much higher gas prices. They want more crime and wide open borders, an endless war a half a world away, abortion on demand, and even the end the very family structure itself. They are blurring and destroying the very definition of what men and women are, the Democrats have shown that they are anti-human. They urge women to get abortions in order to stay in the corporate workplace. This is anti-family.

    Many ‘RINO’ Republicans work with the Democrats, but overall the two parties are more divided than ever.

    We don’t see much changing that would remedy this situation. Our country is not going to come together again. The Democrats continue to impeach and impugn their arch-enemy, Trump, even though he’s not in office. They’ve resorted to the crassest lies to ensure he doesn’t run again and if they keep stealing elections, real fireworks will eventually begin.

    Our forefathers objected to taxation without representation and we must do the same if our Constitution is ignored while tyranny, criminality, and corruption run rampant among those who would rule us.

    With this is mind, cherish your families and this Independence Day weekend, don’t let it be your last.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 18:15

  • LA City Council Votes To Ban Homeless Encampments Near Schools
    LA City Council Votes To Ban Homeless Encampments Near Schools

    Via The Epoch Times,

    A hearing to reconsider an ordinance banning homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools and daycare centers is set for July 27 after the Los Angeles City Council failed to give the proposal its unanimous approval.

    The council voted 10-1 in favor of the ordinance, with Councilman Mike Bonin dissenting. Since the vote was not unanimous, the matter will return to the council for a second vote following the summer recess.

    The vote on June 1 came during a sometimes-raucous meeting that was repeatedly interrupted by shouting from the audience.

    The ordinance is an amendment to the city’s sweeping law regulating the location of homeless encampments. Municipal Code 41.18 prohibits sitting, sleeping, lying or otherwise obstructing the public right of way in several areas of the city.

    Those areas include within 2 feet of any fire hydrant or fire plug; within 5 feet of any operational or utilizable entrance or exit; within 10 feet of a loading dock or driveway; in a manner that interferes with any activity for which the city has issued a permit or restricts accessible passage as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act; or anywhere within a street, including bike paths.

    The law already protects the public right of way within 500 feet of “sensitive” facilities such as schools, day care facilities, parks and libraries—but only if each specific location is designated by the council for enforcement.

    The amendment given tentative approval on July 1, and approved last week by the council’s Homelessness and Poverty Committee, is a blanket ban on encampments within 500 feet of all schools.

    Councilmen Mitch O’Farrell and Paul Krekorian spoke in favor of the ordinance, dismissing allegations by opponents that the council is only trying to cover up the homelessness issue rather than address it through housing and services.

    Multiple opponents of the measure began shouting from the audience as the councilmen spoke, bringing the meeting to a halt while Council President Nury Martinez issued warnings then ordered at least three people to be ejected from the council chamber. O’Farrell and Krekorian, both visibly angered, said the conduct exemplified the “bullying” tactics of some organizations. O’Farrell accused them of spreading “disinformation.”

    “You can protest all you want, but it doesn’t change the truth,” O’Farrell said. “The truth is the city is engaged in housing people. It is our focus.”

    Krekorian added, “These bullies who want to disrupt our business do not want to acknowledge that kind of success.”

    “We need to move forward with common-sense solutions,” he said.

    “We are not criminalizing homelessness at all with this change. We are taking actions necessary to restore some degree of sanity and civility to our streets, and at the very same time we are protecting the young people of this city.”

    Bonin opposed the measure, suggesting that it will just move the homeless around and adding, “Making it less visible doesn’t make it go away.”

    “In some ways we actually make it worse,” he said. “By displacing people we actually disconnect people” from housing and other services.

    Councilman Joe Buscaino proposed the idea of an encampment ban near schools last year, but it never gained traction. The issue was revived earlier this year, in part due to the urging of Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who said teachers, principals and parents have expressed concerns about homeless encampments near campuses.

    “I’ve seen elementary schools with conditions that none of us as parents would find acceptable for children. Individuals with mental illness, some of them absolutely unclothed, shouting profanities in the listening ear of children,” Carvalho told the council previously.

    Buscaino, who sits on the Homelessness and Poverty Committee, said last week that approving the amendment will “ensure the most sacred places among us, our playgrounds and schools, are safe.”

    Numerous speakers appeared at the council meeting to speak on both sides of the issue.

    Supporters of the ordinance, including some parents and school workers, said the issue is a matter of safety for children who must walk by encampments on their way to classes.

    One parent and school worker told the council it “will help reduce the risk that my students, their families and my colleagues face on a daily basis because of the criminal activity that has been happening.”

    A school principal told the council the encampments expose students to “unsafe, unsanitary conditions.”

    Opponents said the move is a criminalization of homelessness. Some called it a vast expansion of an already restrictive ordinance restricting the movements of a homeless population in need of services and housing.

    “This isn’t about fixing homelessness, it’s about aesthetics,” one opponent said.

    The city ordinance already in place also prohibits encampments and sleeping in the following areas:

    • up to 500 feet of a designated overpass, underpass, freeway ramp, tunnel, bridge, pedestrian bridge, subway, wash or spreading ground, railroad track or where lodging unsheltered or in tents is unhealthy, unsafe and incompatible with safe passage.

    • up to 1,000 feet of a facility opened after Jan. 1, 2018, that provides shelter, safe sleeping, safe parking or navigation centers for persons experiencing homelessness.

    The ordinance also allows the city to prevent encampments for a period of no longer than one year in areas that are deemed an ongoing threat to public health or safety, including due to:

    • death or serious bodily injury of any person at the location due to a hazardous condition.

    • repeated serious or violent crimes or threats of serious or violent crimes, including human trafficking.

    • fires at the location.

    People who violate the ordinance face an infraction or citation, but “a person who willfully resists, delays or obstructs a city employee from enforcing this section or who willfully refuses to comply after being requested to do so by an authorized city employee” can face higher fines and a misdemeanor charge, according to the ordinance.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 17:30

  • Biden's Job Approval Enters Marianas Trench
    Biden’s Job Approval Enters Marianas Trench

    As we celebrate America’s founding on this 4th of July, mired in inflation that’s simply ‘not his fault,’ President Joe Biden also marks a special occasion – his lowest job approval ratings, ever – all while American pride hits a new low.

    According to a new CIVIQS rolling job-approval poll, Biden’s job approval has plummeted to 30% – with 57% flatly disapproving of the job he’s doing.

    Broken down by age group, just 22% of those aged 18-34 approve of the job Biden is doing, 27% for those 35-49, and 32% of those aged 50-64 thought Biden was doing an ok job. Where’s Biden’s support coming from? Old people – as 39% of those over the age of 65-years-old think Biden’s handling his job well.

    By political party, 85% of Democrats approve of the way Biden is doing his job, 5% disapprove, and 10% neither approve or disapprove, while 97% of Republicans disapprove vs. 2% who approve (with 2% who neither approve or disapprove). Among independent voters, 59% disapprove, 31% approve, and 10% neither approve or disapprove.

    According to an aggregate of polls tracked by RealClear Politics, Biden’s approval ratings continue to plummet in comparison to former President Donald Trump at the same point in his term.

    On the bright side, no more mean tweets.

    As William Campenni notes in American Thinker:

    It is so sad today to see a dystopian minority, aided by a dysfunctional media establishment, a depraved polity, and a disloyal corporate class, trash all that is so good in the land wherein they fortunately but ungratefully live.  Could not they too join in to say, “I swell with pride and deep within my breast, I thrill to see Old Glory paint the breeze”?

    Put another way:

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

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 17:00

  • Twitter 'Silenced' Physicians Who Posted Truthful Information About COVID, Lawsuit Alleges
    Twitter ‘Silenced’ Physicians Who Posted Truthful Information About COVID, Lawsuit Alleges

    Authored by Megan Redshaw via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Three physicians are suing Twitter, alleging the company violated its own terms of service and community standards when it suspended their accounts for posting “truthful statements regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment.”

    Drs. Robert Malone, Peter McCullough and Bryan Tyson on Monday filed the lawsuit in Superior Court in California, San Francisco County.

    Plaintiffs allege Twitter’s actions were a substantial factor in causing them harm, and are asking the judge to order Twitter to reactivate their accounts. (By Lightspring/Shutterstock)

    The complaint alleges Twitter breached the terms of its contract when it permanently suspended the plaintiffs’ accounts, silenced their voices and failed to provide them with “verified” badges.

    Plaintiffs allege Twitter’s actions were a substantial factor in causing them harm, and are asking the judge to order Twitter to reactivate their accounts.

    All three doctors are represented by attorneys Bryan M. Garrie and Matthew P. Tyson (no relation to the plaintiff, Bryan Tyson).

    Matthew Tyson on May 12, sent a letter to the directors and managing agents of Twitter requesting the company reinstate the accounts of five physicians, including the plaintiffs, and provide them with “verified” badges. Twitter failed to respond.

    In the letter, Matthew Tyson acknowledged Twitter is a “private company” and its terms state it can “suspend user accounts for any or no reason.”

    “However, Twitter also implemented specific community standards to limit COVID-19 misinformation on the platform, and Twitter was bound to follow those terms,” he added.

    According to the complaint, Twitter’s content-moderation terms included removal procedures for ineffective treatments and false diagnostic criteria, and measures for “labeling” information as “misleading.”

    Twitter has a “five-strike policy” as part of its COVID-19 misinformation guidelines and community standards.

    Twitter’s website states:

    “The consequences for violating our COVID-19 misleading information policy depend on the severity and type of the violation and the account’s history of previous violations. In instances where accounts repeatedly violate this policy, we will use a strike system to determine if further enforcement actions should be applied.”

    Strike 1 is “no account-level action.” Strike 2 results in a 12-hour account lock. Strike 3 results in another 12-hour account lock. Strike 4 results in a seven-day account lock and five or more strikes lead to permanent suspension.

    Plaintiffs claim they relied on Twitter to employ and enforce its terms in good faith and it was foreseeable to Twitter that plaintiffs would rely on the terms the company is obligated to follow.

    According to the complaint, a “truthful tweet regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment” would not violate Twitter’s terms of service, community standards, content moderation policies or misinformation guidelines.

    “None of these physicians posted false or misleading information, nor did they receive five strikes before suspension,” Matthew Tyson stated in his letter to Twitter.

    “It’s no accident that Twitter violated its own COVID-19 misinformation guidelines and suspended the accounts of Drs. Zelenko, Malone, Fareed, Tyson and McCullough,” he wrote.

    The letter stated:

    “Twitter received express and implied threats from government officials to censor certain viewpoints and speakers, lest Twitter face the amendment or revocation of Section 230, or antitrust enforcement. This was a financial decision for Twitter.

    “For the sake of profits, it chose to abandon its role as a neutral internet service provider and instead openly and intentionally collude with government to silence lawful speech.”

    In an email to The Defender, lead attorney Garrie and co-counsel Matthew Tyson said:

    “In this political climate, honesty is a rare commodity, and concerns over new and experimental vaccines and drug therapies and the safety and effectiveness of alternative outpatient treatments should be the subject of full and transparent public debate.

    “Drs. Malone, Tyson and McCullough are highly qualified and credentialed physicians and scientists who posted truthful information on Twitter that contradicted the mainstream narrative regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis, and treatment.

    “They shared fact-based information which furthered an important public interest as people around the world try to decide how to treat themselves and their loved ones for COVID-19. Twitter silenced them.

    “Our clients seek to hold Twitter liable not as a Section 230 publisher, but as a counterparty to a contract, as a promisor who has breached the very terms it put in place to moderate tweets. We will hold Twitter accountable in court and prove the truth of our clients’ statements for the world to see.”

    Twitter Refused to Verify Physicians’ Accounts

    In addition to being suspended from Twitter, the company refused to verify the plaintiffs’ accounts even though the accounts met Twitter’s criteria for verification.

    To be verified, an account must be “notable and active.”

    Twitter defines a notable account to include “activists, organizers, and other influential individuals,” including “prominently recognized individuals.”

    According to the complaint, Malone is an “internationally recognized scientist and physician” who completed a fellowship at Harvard Medical School as a global clinical research scholar and was scientifically trained at the University of California and Salk Institute Molecular Biology and Virology laboratories.

    Malone is the “original inventor of mRNA vaccination technology, DNA vaccination and multiple non-viral DNA and RNA/mRNA platform delivery technologies,” and has “roughly 100 scientific publications, which have been cited more than 12,000 times.”

    He holds an “outstanding” impact factor rating on Google Scholar and sits as a non-voting member on the National Institutes of Health [Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines] committee, which is tasked with managing clinical research for a variety of drug and antibody treatments for COVID-19.

    The complaint states Malone used his Twitter account to post truthful statements regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment. He received no strikes for his content and he did not violate Twitter’s rules, yet his account was permanently suspended.

    McCullough, according to the complaint, is a highly accomplished physician who is the founder and current president of the Cardiorenal Society of America.

    He has been “published more than 1,000 times, made presentations on the advancement of medicine across the world and has been an invited lecturer at the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency.”

    McCullough has also served on the editorial boards of multiple specialty journals and was a member or chair of data safety monitoring boards of 24 randomized clinical trials.

    He was a “leader in the medical response to COVID-19, has more than 30 peer-reviewed publications on the infection, and has commented and testified extensively on COVID19 treatment, including before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,” the lawsuit states.

    McCullough’s account was suspended, but Twitter allowed him to create a new account that is followed by more than 480,000 people. Yet, he is still unable to receive a “verified” badge.

    In a June 28 tweet, McCullough said “trouble is on the horizon for the “common carrier” whose only role is to provide a platform for communications operations,” referring to the lawsuit.

    Tyson is a licensed physician with15 years of hospital and emergency medicine experience. He practices with Dr. George Fareed, who also was suspended from Twitter for posting what he claimed was truthful COVID-19 information.

    Tyson and Fareed have “gained international recognition for providing successful early treatment to more than 10,000 COVID-19 patients, with zero patient deaths when treatment was started within 7 days,” the complaint states.

    Tyson testified in various proceedings about early treatment protocols and co-authored a book about COVID-19.

    He also ran as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives for California’s 25th Congressional District, yet was not deemed a “notable figure of public interest” regarding COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment, which prohibited him from obtaining a “verified” badge on Twitter.

    Tyson says he posted only truthful statements about COVID-19 policy, diagnosis and/or treatment with his account, and none of his tweets were classified as a “strike” or violated Twitter’s terms of service.

    Like Malone’s, Tyson’s and Fareed’s accounts were permanently suspended.

    “In a nutshell, these are five [physicians] of the most knowledgeable and helpful voices in the world regarding COVID-19 treatment,” Matthew Tyson wrote in his letter. “Disturbingly, Twitter silenced all of them.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 16:30

  • German Energy Giant In Talks Over €9 Billion Bailout Package
    German Energy Giant In Talks Over €9 Billion Bailout Package

    Remember when Germans laughed at Donald Trump in 2018 for saying they had become “totally dependent” on Russian energy? Well… yhey aren’t laughing now.

    Just a few days after we reported that the stock of German gas and power utility Uniper – and the single largest importer of Russian gas in Germany – crashed after the company slashed its outlook and said it was in talks with the government to secure liquidity, potentially including a full-blown bailout from the German government after Russia reduced natural gas deliveries to Europe, on Monday Bloomberg reports that the giant utility is in advanced talks with the German government over a bailout package of as much as 9 billion euros, (or $9.4 billion).

    The government is looking at applying a set of measures, including loans, taking an equity stake and also passing part of the surge in costs onto customers, said two people familiar with the talks.

    As part of the plan, Reuters reported earlier that Germany’s government is preparing legislation that will allow it to take stakes in utilities and impose emergency levies on consumers as ministers are scrambling to deal with the impact of soaring energy prices on electricity firms after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Economy Minister Robert Habeck recently warning of “a Lehman effect” as suppliers face soaring costs to meet obligations to customers. The new law will also allow for customers to shoulder more of the burden of rising gas prices. The cabinet is set to approve the bill this week.

    Uniper shares sank another 28% on Monday, taking the company’s market value to 4.14 billion euros, just shy of its all time low. The stock was worth roughly 4x more at the start of the  year.

    Germany, which has built its economic model on a cheap common currency (which has crushed Europe’s periphery ) to avoid the strong Deutsche mark, and even cheaper Russian gas, is wrestling with a squeeze in supplies and surging fuel prices as Moscow punishes Europe for its support for Ukraine. German Economy Minister Robert Habeck has warned the gas crunch risks triggering a collapse in the market, similar to the role of Lehman Brothers in the financial crisis. The surge in energy import prices has crushed Germany’s exporting powerhouse, sending its trade balance plummeting and as shown in the chart below at this rate Germany faces an unprecedented outcome: a negative trade balance, something that has not happened since the early 1990s.

    German utilities have been urging the government to impose a levy on consumers to help offset the rising cost of gas. Analysts estimate that curbed Russian flows are costing Uniper 30 million euros a day.

    Meanwhile, Habeck has said that the squeeze on Russian flows may get worse, and warned of the risk of a domino effect of failing companies. The broader economy is also in peril as the government is trying to contain the fallout for consumers and industry. Plans have been drafted for rationing, with Germany’s vast industry poised to suffer shortages.

    “We aren’t dealing with erratic decisions but with economic warfare, completely rational and very clear,” Habeck said on Saturday. “After a 60% reduction, the next one logically follows.”

    Well, maybe if it is all “rational and very clear”, then Germany should not have sided with Ukraine in the all too real war taking place just a few hundred miles east of Germany.

    So just how will Germany add another company to its bailout roster? According to Bloomberg, Chancellor Olaf Scholz signaled at the weekend the government could use bailout tools created during the pandemic to rescue Lufthansa in the current crisis.

    “The federal government should be given options along the lines of the Lufthansa aid,” a Reuters source said.

    Lufthansa’s bailout saw the state taking a 20% stake in the airline through an Economic Stabilization Fund, but without being able to exercise shareholder voting rights. The airline was not allowed to take over other companies until 75% of the state aid had been repaid, and its shareholders and managers could not benefit from taxpayers’ money, meaning dividends and bonus payments were put on hold.

    Decades after de-regulating their energy markets, governments across Europe are intervening to prop up utility companies buckling under sky-high prices, while also protecting consumers from soaring costs. Several European energy suppliers have gone bust over the past year, where they have had long-term contracts with customers and have been unable to pass on the swift spike in prices.

    To try to shield consumers from soaring energy bills, governments have also turned to windfall taxes on oil and gas companies, subsidies and discounts.

    Russia is Germany’s top supplier of gas, making it more exposed than other European states to an economic war with Moscow. Soaring prices have heaped political pressure on Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who on Monday will meet unions and employers to try to build a consensus on fighting inflation, reviving a concept established in 1967 in response to economic recession that ended the country’s post-war boom.

    Meanwhile, Germany’s government has warned of possible energy shortages and rationing in the winter months if it cannot fill its gas storage quickly enough.

    “The hope of filling the gas storage facilities to some extent by winter could be torpedoed by Russia at any time. Then there are hardly any compensatory possibilities left,” said a note from Sentix that tracks investor morale in the euro zone.

    “In Germany, some ideological boundaries have to be crossed to prevent a “Lehman moment” in the energy sector,” it said, referencing the U.S. bank whose demise help triggered the 2008 financial crisis.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 16:00

  • Declare Your Independence From Tyranny, America
    Declare Your Independence From Tyranny, America

    Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,

    Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials.

    Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off chance you’re doing something illegal.

    Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any kind (or anything that resembled a firearm) while in this country, it may get you arrested and, in some circumstances, shot by police.

    If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

    However, the scenario described above took place more than 200 years ago, when American colonists suffered under Great Britain’s version of an early police state. It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.

    No document better states their grievances than the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

    A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free.

    Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

    Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated. Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

    The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

    Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that 246 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

    In fact, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

    Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don’t bear a startling resemblance to the abuses “we the people” are suffering at the hands of the American police state.

    Here’s what the Declaration of Independence might look and sound like if it were written in the modern vernacular:

    There comes a time when a populace must stand united and say “enough is enough” to the government’s abuses, even if it means getting rid of the political parties in power.

    Believing that “we the people” have a natural and divine right to direct our own lives, here are truths about the power of the people and how we arrived at the decision to sever our ties to the government:

    All people are created equal.

    All people possess certain innate rights that no government or agency or individual can take away from them. Among these are the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

    The government’s job is to protect the people’s innate rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s power comes from the will of the people.

    Whenever any government abuses its power, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and replace it with a new government that will respect and protect the rights of the people.

    It is not wise to get rid of a government for minor transgressions. In fact, as history has shown, people resist change and are inclined to suffer all manner of abuses to which they have become accustomed.

    However, when the people have been subjected to repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the purpose of establishing a tyrannical government, people have a right and duty to do away with that tyrannical government and to replace it with a new government that will protect and preserve their innate rights for their future wellbeing.

    This is exactly the state of affairs we are under suffering under right now, which is why it is necessary that we change this imperial system of government.

    The history of the present Imperial Government is a history of repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the intention of establishing absolute tyranny over the country.

    To prove this, consider the following:

    The government has, through its own negligence and arrogance, refused to adopt urgent and necessary laws for the good of the people.

    The government has threatened to hold up critical laws unless the people agree to relinquish their right to be fully represented in the Legislature.

    In order to expand its power and bring about compliance with its dictates, the government has made it nearly impossible for the people to make their views and needs heard by their representatives.

    The government has repeatedly suppressed protests arising in response to its actions.

    The government has obstructed justice by refusing to appoint judges who respect the Constitution and has instead made the courts march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

    The government has allowed its agents to harass the people, steal from them, jail them and even execute them.

    The government has directed militarized government agents—a.k.a., a standing army—to police domestic affairs in peacetime.

    The government has turned the country into a militarized police state.

    The government has conspired to undermine the rule of law and the constitution in order to expand its own powers.

    The government has allowed its militarized police to invade our homes and inflict violence on homeowners.

    The government has failed to hold its agents accountable for wrongdoing and murder under the guise of “qualified immunity.”

    The government has jeopardized our international trade agreements.

    The government has overtaxed us without our permission.

    The government has denied us due process and the right to a fair trial.

    The government has engaged in extraordinary rendition.

    The government has continued to expand its military empire in collusion with its corporate partners-in-crime and occupy foreign nations.

    The government has eroded fundamental legal protections and destabilized the structure of government.

    The government has not only declared its federal powers superior to those of the states but has also asserted its sovereign power over the rights of “we the people.”

    The government has ceased to protect the people and instead waged domestic war against the people.

    The government has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, and destroyed the lives of the people.

    The government has employed private contractors and mercenaries to carry out acts of death, desolation and tyranny, totally unworthy of a civilized nation.

    The government through its political propaganda has pitted its citizens against each other.

    The government has stirred up civil unrest and laid the groundwork for martial law.

    Repeatedly, we have asked the government to cease its abuses. Each time, the government has responded with more abuse.

    An Imperial Ruler who acts like a tyrant is not fit to govern a free people.

    We have repeatedly sounded the alarm to our fellow citizens about the government’s abuses. We have warned them about the government’s power grabs. We have appealed to their sense of justice. We have reminded them of our common bonds.

    They have rejected our plea for justice and brotherhood. They are equally at fault for the injustices being carried out by the government.

    Thus, for the reasons mentioned above, we the people of the united States of America declare ourselves free from the chains of an abusive government. Relying on God’s protection, we pledge to stand by this Declaration of Independence with our lives, our fortunes and our honor.

    In the 246 years since early Americans first declared and eventually won their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have managed to work ourselves right back under the tyrant’s thumb.

    Only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making: the American Police State.

    The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.

    “We the people” are still being robbed blind by a government of thieves.

    We are still being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and monsters.

    We are still being locked up by a government of greedy jailers.

    We are still being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms.

    We are still being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers.

    We are still being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and corporate pirates.

    And we are still being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army in the form of a militarized police.

    Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

    Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

    It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

    The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of – police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc. – were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the problems we are facing will not be fixed overnight: that is the grim reality with which we must contend.

    Yet that does not mean we should give up or give in or tune out. What we need to do is declare our independence from the tyranny of the American police state.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 15:30

  • Despite Opposition From His Closest Advisors And Supporters, Biden Expected To Roll Back China Tariffs As Soon As This Week
    Despite Opposition From His Closest Advisors And Supporters, Biden Expected To Roll Back China Tariffs As Soon As This Week

    Joe Biden woke up on July 4, failed miserably when trying to read one word from the teleprompter…

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

    … and decided that the most patriotic thing the president could do, was leak that tariffs imposed on China by the Trump administration could be rolled back as soon as this week, a decision which the WSJ said is constrained by competing policy aims: on one hand addressing inflation (because supposedly easing tariffs will somehow shrink inflation) while on the other hand maintaining economic pressure on Beijing, not that that has been a policy goal of Joe Biden, who has become China’s de facto Manchurian candidate courtesy of his son Hunter.

    Citing ‘people familiar with the situation’, the Journal writes that what comes next could include a pause on tariffs on consumer goods such as clothing and school supplies, as well as launching a broad framework to allow importers to request tariff waivers.

    The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is conducting a mandatory four-year review of the Trump-era tariffs. A comment period for businesses and others who have benefited from the tariffs will close July 5, giving the administration an opportunity to calibrate its policy.

    A tariff rollback would mark Biden’s first major policy step on trade ties between the world’s two biggest economic powers. The president in recent weeks held a number of meetings with senior economic advisers where options for a decision on the Trump-era tariffs were discussed, Bloomberg adds citing its own sources.

    Hints that the Biden administration is considering an easing in some of the tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese imports have multiplied as inflation has accelerated, putting pressure on US officials to find ways to tamp down prices paid by consumers for everyday merchandise.

    Biden said last month he’ll be talking to Chinese President Xi Jinping “soon” and told reporters he was “in the process” of making up his mind about whether to lift tariffs. Some members of Biden’s Cabinet suggested he use the upcoming call with Xi to ask him for reciprocal tariff cuts on American goods currently facing import duties, though that idea was quickly shot down, the people said.

    Meanwhile, as he weighs a decision, Biden has been buffeted by policy disagreements both within his administration, and by outside forces including business, labor and lawmakers, which is why a plan to announce a tariff cut has been repeatedly postponed, as it reflects the “sharp divisions” within his own administration over the China tariffs.

    Among his own cabinet, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen – who recently admitted her cluelessness is behind the most catastrophic inflationary juggernaut unleashed in the US in more than 40 years – has called tariffs a drag on the economy, saying the administration is looking at ways to reconfigure them to help curb inflation. Yellen has said some of the inherited tariffs aren’t strategic and don’t address China’s unfair trade practices.

    “Reconfiguring some of those tariffs so they make more sense and reducing unnecessary burdens is something that’s under consideration,” Yellen said in an interview with ABC News on June 19.

    Most of Biden’s cronies, however, take the opposite view to that of the senile trasury secretary: on the other side are U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and National security adviser Jake Sullivan, who see tariffs as valuable leverage in getting concessions from China. These skeptics want a tariff cut paired with another measure designed to keep pressure on Beijing to change practices that the U.S. says put American companies and workers at a disadvantage.

    Among the possible steps are raising tariffs on strategic items such as industrial machinery and transportation equipment, while lowering duties on consumer goods. The U.S. also could start a fresh investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act focusing on China’s industrial subsidies on high-tech items, a policy the USTR has been preparing for months.  Such a policy could lead to tariffs on a new set of products.

    “From the domestic political perspective, there are two very strong, competing concerns. One is the need to be perceived as fighting inflation. And the other is the need to be seen to be very strong in standing up to China,” said Claire Reade, a longtime China official for the USTR who is now at the law firm Arnold & Porter.

    “The question is how do you take all of these divergent concerns and harmonize them into one policy?” she said.

    The catalyst behind the highly unpopular decision is an even more unpopular byproduct of the Biden administration – soaring prices. The White House has been struggling in vain to contain the fallout from high prices for food, gas and other consumer items, which will decimate the Democratic Party in the November midterm elections.

    Unsurprisingly, economists say removing Chinese tariffs isn’t likely to have a dramatic impact on inflation. Peterson Institute analysts Megan Hogan and Yilin Wang estimate that removing tariffs on Chinese imports could lower consumer-price index inflation by a marginal 0.26 percentage point at first. But “as U.S. corporations trim their markups to compete with imports,” that might eventually lead to a 1-percentage-point reduction in inflation, they added.

    Meanwhile republicans including Sen. Bill Hagerty (R., Tenn.) and others have rightfully pointed out that, for more than two years after the tariffs were introduced, there were few signs of inflation or discussions linked to their impact on consumer prices.

    “Wouldn’t removing these tariffs simply encourage more bad behavior,” Hagerty asked Tai at a recent hearing. “What kind of message would it send to China?”

    At the same time, proponents of tariff reduction – most of them generously funded by China – say it is important for Biden to show he is serious about fighting inflation, possibly by pausing tariffs on consumer goods purchased by American households. As the Federal Reserve is primarily responsible for controlling inflation, tariff reduction is one of the few policy options available to the president. Biden himself has said in recent weeks that he is considering a tariff cut, noting that the levies were introduced by the previous administration.

    Of course, this being the Biden administration where every incremental decision only lead to more chaos and pain, a decision to drop tariffs would only lead to even more acute attacks on the White House as it was Biden’s own advisors such as Tai (previously appointed by Biden) who has repeatedly defended the tariffs as a useful tool in confronting China over its trade practices.

    “The China tariffs are, in my view, a significant piece of leverage, and a trade negotiator never walks away from leverage,” Ms. Tai told a Senate subcommittee meeting on June 22.

    For its part, China has long pressed the U.S. to ease the tariffs, contending they hurt both countries.

    “With inflation rates running high across the globe, the U.S. needs to lift all the additional tariffs imposed on China, as this will serve the interests of businesses and consumers and benefit both countries and the world at large,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a June 15 press conference.

    As the main weapon of his trade war with China, former President Donald Trump imposed tariffs ranging from 7.5% to 25% on Chinese imports worth roughly $370 billion over four rounds between July 2018 and September 2019. The action was based on the findings of a Section 301 investigation over China’s practices related to technology transfer and intellectual property.

    While early rounds of the tariffs were placed on strategic items closely linked to the investigation, the lists were later expanded to consumer goods as Trump officials ramped up pressure on Beijing.

    There is one reason why we should be skeptical that Biden will order tariff cuts: labor unions and progressive Democrats, who have had a decisive sway on Biden’s trade policy, are among the most vocal opponents of tariff cuts. Among them are the members of the Labor Advisory Committee advising the USTR, representing top unions including the AFL-CIO, United Steelworkers and Service Employees International Union.

    They noted that nothing has changed in China’s practices since Trump’s 301 investigation that would merit lifting the tariffs. If anything, they wrote, Beijing has “only doubled down on their strategy and approach.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 15:15

  • Putin Won't Congratulate Biden On July 4th: "Hardly Appropriate"
    Putin Won’t Congratulate Biden On July 4th: “Hardly Appropriate”

    In prior years before there was a war on in Eastern Europe, it was customary for the Russian president to send a congratulatory commemorative message to the US president marking the July 4th holiday.

    As perhaps expected given the Ukraine invasion and Washington’s unprecedented sanctions against the Russian state and economy, including on Vladimir Putin himself, the Russian leader won’t congratulate Biden this year, according to a Monday Kremlin statement.

    “This is because this year, the U.S.’ unfriendly political discourse towards Russia has reached its culmination point,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, as cited in Interfax. He called it “hardly appropriate” at this time.

    Via Time

    “Under this circumstance, sending such a congratulatory message is hardly appropriate,” he explained.

    Not only have US-Russia relations reached a historic low-point of late, but there’s not even the basic level of diplomacy and communications one might expect as part of efforts to end the Ukraine war and achieve a ceasefire.

    Instead, the Biden administration has approved wave after wave of billion dollar weapons packages, also while signaling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to take a hardline ‘no compromise’ stance in refusing the possibility of any territorial concessions for the sake of ending the war.

    The Moscow Times observes of where things stand between Moscow and Washington in the following:

    In March, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the relationship between the Kremlin and the White House was “on the verge of a breakup.” Ryabkov said that the only way to “save” it would be for the U.S. to halt the supply of weapons to Ukraine and, instead, “project positive influence on Kyiv.”

    But as for the type of warmer, relaxed relations which might have allowed for exchanges of congratulatory holiday messages, that hasn’t happened since 2020.

    Getty Images

    Putin sent his last Independence Day message to Washington during that year of the Trump presidency, at a moment relations were already sliding in large part due to ‘Russiagate’ related election interference accusations being lobbed at Moscow.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 15:00

  • Beauty Contests And Market Bottoms
    Beauty Contests And Market Bottoms

    By Nick Colas of DataTrek Research

    Today we will discuss an early classic in the field of behavioral finance: John Maynard Keynes’ “Beauty Contest”. Its lesson is that market prices are set by what investors think other investors think. At present, that dynamic is creating ever-lower stock prices because of the increasingly consensus idea that the S&P 500 will bottom somewhere between 3,000 and 3,400. Those levels come from expectations of lower earnings due to a recession. The bottom will come when investors think other investors believe it has arrived.

    For Story Time Thursday this week we have a discussion of an early behavioral finance concept called the “Keynes Beauty Contest”. While distinctly out of step with modern values – the idea comes from John Maynard Keynes 1936 work “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” – it is still a hugely useful paradigm today. Especially today, frankly …

    Richard Thaler published a wonderful analysis of the Beauty Contest in 2015 (link below), which quotes from the 1936 Keynes work to describe how it works:

    • Imagine a newspaper contest “in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from 100 photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole …”

    • “ … each competitor has to pick, not those faces that he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view …”

    The analogy to equity markets:

    • Investors and traders look for investment ideas they think other market participants will find more attractive in the future.

    • The timeframe may be a day or a week for a trader and 6-12 months for an investor, but the idea is the same. Buy things that you expect other people will find more valuable at some future date. Any analysis worth pursuing must be in service to that goal.

    The hard bit about the Beauty Contest as far as its application to investing is that it is iterative. It is not enough to pick faces you think the crowd will find attractive. Everyone else is doing that too. To win, you must run multiple cycles of “what will the crowd think?”

    Thaler’s article updates Keynes’ idea with a numerical version which explains why this is so challenging:

    • “Guess a number from zero to 100, with the goal of making your guess as close as possible to two-thirds of the average guess of all those participating in the contest.”

    • “To help you think about this puzzle, suppose there are three players who guess 20, 30 and 40 respectively. The average guess would be 30, two-thirds of which is 20, so the person who guessed 20 would win.”

    • The naïve guess would be 50 – the midpoint between 1 and 100 – based on the assumption contestants are lazy and would just pick random numbers rather than latch on to the wrinkle of “two-thirds of the average guess”.

    • More educated guesses might be 33 (two thirds of that 50 naïve estimate) or 22 (on the assumption contestants have thought the problem through, but not iterated one level deeper).

    Math nerds will think of this as a Nash equilibrium problem, and Thaler makes the point the only viable answer using this approach is zero. Iterate the last point’s math ad infinitum and you get zero. Yes, this assumes only math Ph.D.s are playing the game. But it is a logical conclusion nonetheless.

    We can use this idea to estimate what market participants think fair value on the S&P 500 is today:

    The naïve guess is today’s close: 3785. We’ve had a horrible first half of 2022, and maybe all the bad news is finally baked into stock prices.

    The second order guess might be 3,386, if we assume investors will think other market participants will key off either pre-pandemic highs and/or discount a modest earnings recession:

    • This was the last S&P 500 high before the Pandemic Recession (February 19th, 2020).

    • It is also 18x S&P earnings of $188/share, which is roughly 15 percent (14.5 pct, to be exact) below current earnings power of $220/share.

    • While earnings typically decline 25 percent in a recession, perhaps any upcoming economic downturn will be milder than most. The 18x multiple is slightly richer than the 10-year average of 17x, but fair since investors tend to pay more for trough earnings as they anticipate higher earnings in a recovery.

    The third order guess could be around 3,000, if investors believe markets must discount a full-blown recession before there is enough general interest in stocks to make for a durable low:

    • Assume an average hit (25 pct decline) to S&P earnings from a recession and you get $165/share versus the current $220/share earnings power.

    • Put an 18x multiple on that $166/share and you get an S&P of 2,970.

    Takeaway: fair value on the S&P – or any other stock market index – is a function of what investors think other investors think. In bull markets those beliefs are iteratively revised upwards. In bear markets, such as now, those revisions trend lower until specific catalysts change investor perceptions. Then, the whole cycle starts all over again. At the end of a very difficult 6 months for stock prices, it is worth remembering that there is always a low and a next bull market. The goal now is to play defense until those arrive.

    Source: Thaler article: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/keyness-beauty-contest

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/04/2022 – 14:30

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