- Biden Energy Secretary Secretly Consulted Top Chinese Energy Official Before SPR Release, Sales To Hunter Biden-Linked Chinese Energy Giant
Biden Energy Secretary Secretly Consulted Top Chinese Energy Official Before SPR Release, Sales To Hunter Biden-Linked Chinese Energy Giant
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, whose catastrophic handling of US energy policy will be one of the most memorable and dire consequences of the Biden era, engaged in multiple conversations with the Chinese government’s top energy official just days before the Biden administration announced it would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to combat high gas prices in 2021, the same China whose Hunter Biden-linked energy giant Unipec, which we previously learned had bought millions of barrels from the SPR release.
Granholm called China National Energy Administration Chairman Zhang Jianhua, a longstanding senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, for a half-hour one-on-one conversation on Nov. 21, 2021. Granholm’s calendar also shows an earlier phone call had been scheduled with Jianhua for Nov. 19 but a rep for the former Michigan governor said the first call never took place. Then, on Nov. 23, 2021, the White House announced a release of 50 million barrels of oil from the SPR, the largest release of its kind in U.S. history at the time.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks about the Biden administration’s decision to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve during a press briefing at the White House on Nov. 23, 2021. According to Fox News, Granholm’s previously-undisclosed talks with China National Energy Administration Chairman Zhang Jianhua — revealed in internal Energy Department calendars obtained by Americans for Public Trust (APT) and shared with Fox News Digital — reveal that the Biden administration likely discussed its plans to release oil from the SPR with China before its public announcement in the US: yes, China’s Communist Party learned what Biden would be doing before the US did.
“Secretary Granholm’s multiple closed-door meetings with a CCP-connected energy official raise serious questions about the level of Chinese influence on the Biden administration’s energy agenda,” APT Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News Digital, an “energy agenda” that can be summarized with just one chart:
“Instead of focusing on creating real energy independence for America, Granholm has been too busy parroting Chinese energy propaganda and insisting ‘we can all learn from what China is doing,’” Sutherland continued. “The public deserves to know the extent to which Chinese officials are attempting to infiltrate U.S. energy policy and security.”
Hilariously, in response to the leaked calendar, in a statement the DOE said the meeting was broadly part of the agency’s effort to combat climate change, but didn’t share what was discussed at the meeting.
“Solving the climate crisis means engaging with competitors and allies in clear and substantive discussions — especially among the nations emitting the most carbon pollution into the atmosphere,” a DOE spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “We must all address the transnational challenge of climate change to our planet.”
It was unclear just how the DOE is “solving climate crisis” and “addressing climate change” by engaging with China when Chinese CO2 emissions are double those of the US and rising exponentially…
… but that’s irrelevant since the DOE – like every other aspect of the Biden administration – was lying.
As part of its announcement in November 2021, the White House said it was releasing oil from U.S. reserves in conjunction with “other major energy consuming nations including China.” However, President Biden said in remarks after the announcement that China “may do more as well” and Granholm told reporters during a press briefing that China “will make its own announcement.”
What happened next will shock nobody: instead of releasing oil stocks, China aggressively increased its own reserves, and even bought fuel from the US. Meanwhile, SPR releases have weakened U.S. national security and bolstered foreign adversaries’ “geopolitical leverage” according to Republican leaders.
“China ramped up its purchases of crude oil from Russia and the United States to boost its own reserves, even as oil prices surged and President Biden called for a coordinated release,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and former GOP Rep. Fred Upton wrote to Granholm last year.
“As a result, China may now control the world’s largest stockpile of oil, with total crude inventories estimated at 950 million barrels,” they added.
In addition, the White House and Department of Energy has been heavily criticized for allowing SPR sales to flow to Chinese state-run energy companies. The White House then fired back in July 2022, arguing that its hands were tied since it is legally required to sell SPR oil to the highest bidder, even if said bidder will be the US adversary in the next world war… then again, with China purchasing influence over the so-called US president through his son, this too should not come as a surprise.
As noted above, the Biden administration has sold at least six million barrels of oil from the SPR to Unipec, an affiliate of the state-controlled China Petrochemical Corporation with extensive connections to Hunter Biden. Jianhua, who met with Granholm in 2021, served in a leadership role for years at the China Petrochemical Corporation, Reuters previously reported.
From September 2021 to July, the Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded three crude oil contracts with a combined value of roughly $464 million to Unipec America, the U.S. trading arm of Chinese state-owned oil company Sinopec, according to a review by The Epoch Times of the DOE documents. A Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden had made an investment in the national oil giant.
The sale would tap 5.9 million barrels in total from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to export to the Chinese firm. The latest contract was unveiled on July 10, consisting of 950,000 barrels sold for around $113.5 million.
The two most recent sales to Unipec came out of an emergency drawdown of the U.S. oil stockpile, initiated under President Joe Biden on March 31, 2022 in what he said would offset the loss of Russian oil in global markets and tame rising fuel costs at home.
The Unipec contracts have been a subject of heavy criticism since the firm’s connections to the younger Biden came into focus a year ago. Republican lawmakers and analysts have said that the selling of oil reserves to foreign adversaries such as China is at odds with U.S. energy and security needs.
Sinopec, the parent organization of Unipec, has been linked to Hunter Biden, through the state-backed Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners, which became a stakeholder of Sinopec in 2014.
Hunter served as a founding board member of BHR from 2013 through April 2020. His firm Skaneateles also held a 10 percent stake in BHR, which his lawyer said has been divested as of November 2021. On BHR’s 2021 annual report released in June, however, Skaneateles was still listed as a shareholder.
At the time of the SPR sale to Unipec, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said the sale demonstrates the current administration’s “rank incompetence.”
“The Biden White House obviously didn’t see a problem with loading millions of barrels from our strategic reserves onto tankers bound for foreign countries, which likely explains why they don’t see a problem selling our emergency crude oil to a Chinese gas company with ties to Hunter Biden’s investment firm,” he told The Epoch Times.
“China is profiting from President Biden’s political abuse of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Ranking member John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said earlier this year. “Meanwhile, America has become more vulnerable to true energy and national security emergencies.”
Overall, Biden has ordered the Department of Energy to release a total of about 260 million barrels of oil stored in the SPR since taking office to combat record fuel prices hitting American consumers. In late March 2022, the president announced a draw-down of a million barrels per day from the SPR after Russia invaded Ukraine, roiling global energy markets. The SPR drain, which has offset multiple OPEC+ output cuts, has been instrumental in pushing the price of oil – and thus gasoline – lower, however at the expense of draining the strategic US reserve to 40-year lows.
The SPR’s level has fallen to about 346.8 million barrels of oil, the lowest level since August 1983, according to Energy Information Administration data released on July 28. The current level is also 43% lower than its level recorded days prior to the November 2021 release.
The Senate overwhelmingly supported an amendment to this year’s annual defense bill barring future oil exports to US adversaries China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. In a letter to Granholm last year, Republican lawmakers warned that Beijing and Moscow were both buying up oil from the US.
“The Biden administration is depleting the nation’s petroleum reserves, while allowing OPEC, Russia, and China to gain geopolitical leverage over the United States,” wrote then-House Committee on Energy and Commerce ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and then-House Energy subcommittee ranking member Fred Upton (R-Mich.).
“As you know, in November 2021, President Biden announced a 50-million-barrel release from the SPR that was supposed to be in tandem with other importing countries, including China,” the lawmakers told Granholm. “In reality, China ramped up its purchases of crude oil from Russia and the United States to boost its own reserves, even as oil prices surged and President Biden called for a coordinated release.”
“As a result, China may now control the world’s largest stockpile of oil, with total crude inventories estimated at 950 million barrels,” they added.
Granholm’s just released calendar from Nov 2021 can be found below.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 23:30 - Visualizing America's Import-Reliance Of Key Minerals
Visualizing America’s Import-Reliance Of Key Minerals
The push towards a more sustainable future requires various key minerals to build the infrastructure of the green economy. However, the U.S. is heavily reliant on nonfuel mineral imports causing potential vulnerabilities in the nation’s supply chains.
Specifically, the U.S. is 100% reliant on imports for at least 12 key minerals deemed critical by the government, with China being the primary import source for many of these along with many other critical minerals.
In the following infographic, Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte and Pernia Jamshed use data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to visualize America’s import dependence for 30 different key nonfuel minerals along with the nation that the U.S. primarily imports each mineral from.
U.S. Import Reliance, by Mineral
While the U.S. mines and processes a significant amount of minerals domestically, in 2022 imports still accounted for more than half of the country’s consumption of 51 nonfuel minerals. The USGS calculates a net import reliance as a percentage of apparent consumption, showing how much of U.S. demand for each mineral is met through imports.
Of the most important minerals deemed by the USGS, the U.S. was 95% or more reliant on imports for 13 different minerals, with China being the primary import source for more than half of these.
Mineral Net Import Reliance as Percentage of Consumption Primary Import Source (2018-2021) Arsenic 100% 🇨🇳 China Fluorspar 100% 🇲🇽 Mexico Gallium 100% 🇨🇳 China Graphite (natural) 100% 🇨🇳 China Indium 100% 🇰🇷 Republic of Korea Manganese 100% 🇬🇦 Gabon Niobium 100% 🇧🇷 Brazil Scandium 100% 🇪🇺 Europe Tantalum 100% 🇨🇳 China Yttrium 100% 🇨🇳 China Bismuth 96% 🇨🇳 China Rare Earths (compounds and metals) 95% 🇨🇳 China Titanium (metal) 95% 🇯🇵 Japan Antimony 83% 🇨🇳 China Chromium 83% 🇿🇦 South Africa Tin 77% 🇵🇪 Peru Cobalt 76% 🇳🇴 Norway Zinc 76% 🇨🇦 Canada Aluminum (bauxite) 75% 🇯🇲 Jamaica Barite 75% 🇨🇳 China Tellerium 75% 🇨🇦 Canada Platinum 66% 🇿🇦 South Africa Nickel 56% 🇨🇦 Canada Vanadium 54% 🇨🇦 Canada Germanium 50% 🇨🇳 China Magnesium 50% 🇮🇱 Israel Tungsten 50% 🇨🇳 China Zirconium 50% 🇿🇦 South Africa Palladium 26% 🇷🇺 Russia Lithium 25% 🇦🇷 Argentina These include rare earths (a group of 17 nearly indistinguishable heavy metals with similar properties) which are essential in technology, high-powered magnets, electronics, and industry, along with natural graphite which is found in lithium-ion batteries.
These are all on the U.S. government’s critical mineral list which has a total of 50 minerals, and the U.S. is 50% or more import reliant for 43 of these minerals.
Some other minerals on the official list which the U.S. is 100% reliant on imports for are arsenic, fluorspar, indium, manganese, niobium, and tantalum, which are used in a variety of applications like the production of alloys and semiconductors along with the manufacturing of electronic components like LCD screens and capacitors.
China’s Gallium and Germanium Restrictions
America’s dependence on imports for various minerals has resulted in a new challenge resulting from China’s announced export restrictions on gallium and germanium that took effect August 1st, 2023. The U.S. is 100% import dependent for gallium and 50% import dependent for germanium.
These restrictions are seen as a retaliation against U.S. and EU sanctions on China which have restricted the export of chips and chipmaking equipment.
Both gallium and germanium are used in the production of transistors and semiconductors along with solar panels and cells, and these export restrictions present an additional hurdle for critical U.S. supply chains of various technologies that include LED lights and fiber-optic systems used for high-speed data transmission.
The restrictions also affect the European Union, which imports 71% of its gallium and 45% of its germanium from China. It’s another stark reminder to the world of China’s dominance in the production and processing of many key minerals.
The announcement of these restrictions has only highlighted the importance for the U.S. and other nations to reduce import dependence and diversify supply chains of key minerals and technologies.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 23:00 - WorldCoin: AI Requires Proof That You Are Human
WorldCoin: AI Requires Proof That You Are Human
Authored by Karen Hunt via Off-Guardian.org,
In the opening scene of the original Blade Runner film, Leon, a Nexus-6 replicant is given a “Voight-Kampff Test” to determine whether or not he is human.
The test is designed to provoke an emotional response. Emotions are read by scanning the iris, the colored part of your eye. The color of your iris is like your fingerprint; it’s unique to you, and nobody else in the world has the exact same colored eye.
As the questions go on, Leon becomes increasingly agitated. When he is asked to “describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother”, he’s had enough. “My mother?” Leon says. “Let me tell you about my mother.” And he pulls out a gun and kills his tormentor.
Replicants have a termination date because if they live too long, they begin to develop emotions and the fear is that they will no longer be distinguishable from humans. Leon and a few other advanced replicants are on a mission to confront their creator, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, and find a way to extend their lives.
Phillip K. Dick, author of the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? upon which the movie is based, would flip out at what’s happening today. Not because it’s what he foretold but because it’s the exact opposite.
It isn’t AI that needs to prove it isn’t human. It’s humans that need to prove they aren’t AI.
I warned about this in Digital ID and Our Obsession with “Identity”.
It is nearly impossible to escape the Vast Machine that is absorbing us into it. It insists that we prove who we are, over and over, and the more we do, the less satisfied it seems to be.
The more ways we must prove our identity, the more ways AI will find to fake it. The more information we give AI, the more that information can be used against us.
As an example, Amazon uses surveillance to tally the seconds of each worker’s bathroom break or time each step of their work. And in fact, workers are being trained to do this to themselves with their Fitbit devices recording their steps in a day. In some work locations, AI listens into every conversation, cataloging every word, who said it and how, and then scoring each agent.
“In low wage work we’re seeing a lot more decisions that were made by a middle manager being outsourced to an algorithm,” says Aiha Nguyen of the research organization Data & Society.
More and more companies are gathering data to boost production and to train machines to mimic humans. In the U.S., cameras have been installed over each worker’s head in assembly lines as they put together car parts or electronics.
The result is that humans are being required to behave more like robots, no spontaneity of thought or action, no excuse for mistakes, while machines are learning to behave more like humans.
As one Amazon employee recently told the Guardian: “To them, we are like robots rather than people. The little things that make us human, you can feel them being ground out of you.”
Ordinary humans are being relegated to a lower class than the machine. And do not imagine that because you are middle class you are exempt. Middle class is fast disappearing. Yes, plenty of new jobs are being created in technology and in the health industries, but those jobs will also be surveilled by AI.
In a 2014 interview during an MIT symposium, Elon Musk warned:
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like… yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.”
And yet, he is in the forefront of creating and building AI and infiltrating it into our minds. He is far from alone in this endeavor. Sam Altman, who helped found OpenAI along with Elon Musk, has launched one of the most ambitious “proof of humanity” enterprises:
WORLDCOIN
Worldcoin invites you to step up to the Orb and look into its depths. It promises to have the answer for proof of personhood—for every single human on the planet.
According to its website,
The Worldcoin protocol aspires to become the largest identity and financial public network worldwide, accessible to everyone, irrespective of their nationality, background, or economic status.
The Orb is about the size of a bowling ball. “It uses a system of infrared cameras, sensors and AI-powered neural networks to scan your iris and verify that you are a human being”.
These Orbs are being set up in cities all over the world. People are being offered $30 to stare into the Orb and give up their irises to the Vast Machine. So far, over two million humans have done it in more than 30 countries, across five continents.
Worldcoin promoters explain that since AI will soon evolve into AGI, or advanced general intelligence, making the machine smarter than humans, it is imperative that we catalogue every single real human on the planet so that no one is left behind in the coming opportunities for prosperity.
There are a lot of problems with AGI, that deserves further exploration. For example, as AI is fed more and more synthetic data instead of “pure human data”, Monash University data researcher Jathan Sadowski warns it turns into what he describes as “Habsburg AI,” or “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”
Richard G. Baraniuk, in collaboration with researchers at Stanford, published a fascinating paper about this problem, titled “Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD.”
Yes, AGI can literally go MAD, sort of like Leon. But all this means is that in the future, pure gold data, or real human data, will grow more valuable until AI reaches a point where it is no longer needed.
Naturally, ordinary humans aren’t being told any of this. We are being promised that AI’s leap in intelligence will create massive wealth for us. As Vitalik Buterin says, people don’t really understand what they are being sold. Instead, we latch onto concepts we’ve been fed, like Worldcoin’s creators virtuously claiming that “nobody wants all that wealth only profiting the billionaires, it should be distributed equally to—literally—every single human on the planet, in the form of UBI, or universal basic income. The UBI will be in the form of a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin (WLD)”.
Apparently, this will empower all humans. So say the billionaires who have used the last few years of Covid hysteria and now the war in Ukraine—not to benefit humanity—but to increase their own wealth and power so that they are now in a position to catalogue and control every single person on the planet.
UBI is interesting to me even without talking about AI,” Altman says in a recent Zoom interview. “It’s an idea that appeals to a lot of people. If we have a society rich enough to end poverty, then we have a moral obligation to find out how to do that.”
What’s really interesting is how when they want to enslave you, they talk about a moral obligation to do so. Don’t we already have enough wealth to end poverty? Hasn’t there always been enough wealth to end poverty?
History has shown us that once a person gets a taste of power, they don’t share it, they just want more. And more. And more.
Altman wants to share the wealth, but for your own good, it can’t be shared just quite yet:
I do think we’re going to need some sort of cushion through the transition and part of the whole reason of being excited about AI is it’s a more materially abundant world.”
The cushion will be a universal basic income, just to help them through this transition phase. Notice that Worldcoin is being sold as offering humans a “more materially abundant world”.
How much more material can we get? How much more stuff can we accumulate? This is the lie we have been conditioned to believe since around the 1950s when companies realized they could psychologically manipulate people, even children, on a massive scale (through television) into buying more and more “stuff” with the promise it would make them happy. Of course, it never made anyone happy, all it did was create an addiction to wanting more. Along the way, ordinary people became hopelessly indebted to an ever more powerful, select set, of billionaires.
The average American has roughly $90,000 worth of debt. Most people live paycheck to paycheck and are one paycheck away from catastrophe. In Digital ID and Our Obsession with “Identity”, I write about the history of living on credit and how this happened to us.
If you live in a first-world country but are in worrisome debt, imagine if that great weight keeping you awake at night, making you feel as if you are continually drowning with no relief from the struggle, is taken away. Poof! Your debt is erased. All you have to do is give your biometric data to the Vast Machine. What’s the big deal with that? You’ve already given so much of it away to the government, to Amazon, to Google, to every website you browse, what’s it going to matter if at last you give it all away. What a relief it will be.
Now, imagine if you are from a third world country and somebody comes to your village offering you connection to the outside world and the possibility that you can be rich, too, and participate in the world economy. All you have to do is stare into the Orb and they will give you money for doing it.
Before long, everyone from that third-world villager to that first-world Gen Zer will find themselves moved into an apartment in a 5-minute city. It will look nice, with green areas, shops, a gym, bikes and no cars. They will all be relegated to the same level and given a certain number of tokens to spend on things, mostly in a virtual world where they live vicariously in ways, they cannot live in the real world that has become so constricted. Slowly but surely, the real-world fades into a dream while the virtual world becomes reality.
We are already being conditioned to accept this transition away from reality. We believe we experience “freedom” online in places like “x”. We verify our humanity, thinking it is a good thing, or even if we don’t, we do it anyway, justifying it because it means we can speak “freely”. Online, we can boldly say things to millions of disembodied people that we would never say in the real world. For example, you wouldn’t yell out your political views in the market to a bunch of strangers. But you’ll do it online.
Remember “reality shows?” They weren’t real. Nobody tried to pretend they were. But they served an important purpose, blurring the line between reality and illusion.
This is leading us further into the boxes that I have often talked about. Virtual prisons that actually feel comfortable and familiar, where we have already built-up communities of people who think exactly the same as we do. That mentality is being continually reenforced to the point where we are not in control of our own minds anymore, we are just being fed a continual loop of the same propaganda with the occasional “glitch” to make us feel as if we are “fighting” against “something” when we are really just living inside a dream.
Imagine voting for a candidate, for example. Just like the cereal in the supermarket, there might be two or three different ones, but they will all come from the same source—the Vast Machine. Perhaps they won’t even be real people at some point. They will be virtual representations of people.
Depending on everything the machine knows about you, you will be led to vote for a certain candidate. Oh, you say, this already happens. But that is why this case against Donald Trump is so important. Whatever you think about him, he threatened the system. Or at least we think so. Because the last few years has messed so badly with our minds, we can’t be sure of anything anymore. Perhaps his coming trials are the ultimate reality show.
If he is put in prison, will his millions of supporters actually take up arms and fight for what they believe? Or will they continue to scream online where they have learned to feel safe and comfortable, thereby acknowledging that the Vast Machine is in control and they already submitted to it a long time ago, they just never realized it. This could nail the lid on the coffin of accepting complete submission to the Vast Machine.
Entertaining races will be plotted between candidates in the future, but they will have a hard time matching up to the one between Biden and Trump. Can Trump delay the trials long enough so that he can be elected president? Can he be elected?
People will know that future races are fake but that is what will make them safe, just like watching a movie is safe. Voters will be able to play out scenarios online, offering loyalty to one candidate or the other, making bets, arguing their loyalty like they do for celebrities or sports figures.
Of course, no one is talking about any of this. Instead, you are being promised freedom in exchange for stepping up to the Orb and letting it look into your soul.
Alex Blania is the tall, athletic, baby-faced 29-year-old CEO of Tools for Humanity, an extension of Worldcoin. He is apologetic about having to take all that data and feed it to AI. “For a number of reasons, we didn’t want to go down that path,” he says. “We know it’s going to be painful. It’s going to be expensive. People think it’s weird. But it really was the only solution.”
An MIT Technology Review article published in April 2022 titled Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users revealed “wide gaps between Worldcoin’s public messaging, which focused on protecting privacy, and what users experienced. We found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, collected more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent”.
Ethereum creator, Vitalik Buterin recently weighed in on the Worldcoin phenomena.
As Buterin describes malicious ways such data could be used:
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3D-printed fake people: one could use AI to generate photographs or even 3D prints of fake people that are convincing enough to get accepted by the Orb software. If even one group does this, they can generate an unlimited number of identities.
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Possibility of selling IDs: someone can provide someone else’s public key instead of their own when registering, giving that person control of their registered ID, in exchange for money. This seems to be happening already. In addition to selling, there’s also the possibility of renting IDs to use for a short time in one application.
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Phone hacking: if a person’s phone gets hacked, the hacker can steal the key that controls their World ID.
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Government coercion to steal IDs: a government could force their citizens to get verified while showing a QR code belonging to the government. In this way, a malicious government could gain access to millions of IDs. In a biometric system, this could even be done covertly: governments could use obfuscated Orbs to extract World IDs from everyone entering their country at the passport control booth.
What a big, hot mess.
Like Worldcoin’s Alex Blania, Buterin is all of 29 years old. His view of the utopian future is similar to Altman’s and Blania’s. In my essay SoulBOUND, I relate how Buterin actually calls his Ethereum tokens Soulbound. It’s a new religion where members police each other, answerable to the new God, the Vast Machine.
His inspiration for his soulbound world is the video games he played as a kid.
To be SoulBOUND is to have your soul bound with others with a blood contract, drawing on each other’s essence to protect against the servants of Nagash, the God of Death.”
WARHAMMER, one of Buterin’s favorite gamesIn his white paper, written in 2022, Buterin describes a world where the word “soul” replaces the word “wallet” and if you are “real” you can buy and sell with your very soul. Your soul contains proof of your identity. To be Soulbound is to be legitimized within your community. Within your community are Soul Guardians, who attest to the good character of members.
Buterin answers questions like how not to lose your Soul. A user curates a set of “guardians” and gives them the power, by majority, to change the keys of their wallet. Guardians could be a mix of individuals, institutions, or other wallets.
If you’ve lost your soul, maybe by doing something the community doesn’t agree with—and that could be literally anything—recovering a Soul’s private keys would require a member from a qualified majority to Soul’s community to consent.
“Souldrops” are tokens that can be rewarded to good citizens.
And naturally, in a SoulBOUND world, citizens can either go to heaven or hell, depending on how they behave.
Just as the downside of having a heart is that a heart can be broken, the downside of having a Soul is it can go to hell and the downside of having a society is that societies are often animated by hatred, prejudice, violence and fear. Humanity is a great and often tragic experiment.”
Buterin talks about how large stakeholders such as Blackrock and Vanguard have taken over the banks and the largest companies. He talks about giving the power back to the people. And who knows, maybe in his worldview, influenced by the video games he played as a child, he thinks this is possible. I’m not holding my breath.
Here are some of the companies Buterin lists as jostling to be top dog in proof of humanity. Th first one is Worldcoin’s:
Proof of Humanity
Proof of Humanity, a system combining webs of trust, with reverse Turing tests, and dispute resolution to create a sybil-proof list of humans.
BrightID—Proof of Uniqueness
Identity is a human right.
Everyone deserves the baseline rights of access to public goods.
Idena
PROOF OF PERSON BLOCKCHAIN
COORDINATION OF INDIVIDUALS — become a validator
Circles
Circles is a system that contributes to a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for its users.
Circles promises it’s all about community and trusting one another within that community. To understand this vital concept of trust, we only have to read what it says on the Circles website.
Circles provides basic income in the sense that every trusted member of our community can issue Circles tokens (CRC) regularly and equally through their smart contracts, without any further conditions. The value of this basic income is up to the community, which offers goods, products, and services in exchange for our complementary currency.
Circles is all about community agreements and negotiations.
What are Circles’ Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are inherent to blockchain technologies. They are like trained dogs, who do things when certain things they’ve been trained for, happen. For example, they sniff out drugs, or bark when there’s a stranger at the door…etc.
With smart contracts, if certain conditions are being met, these programs execute a certain action.
In the case of Circles, the smart contracts define for example how many Circles you get when you sign up and your daily UBI amount.
In the future, there is no more individuality. There is only the will of the “circle” who is answerable to the Vast Machine. There are only contracts made with AI and rules with no deviation.
Demurrage in Circles—pay attention to this!
The more people who join your circle, the more tokens you will have, right? Not really.
Circles is a unique type of basic income because it’s not necessarily for saving but for spending, giving everyone the equal power to issue money.
To counter the constant increase in the money supply as more people join, we use something called demurrage. Demurrage means that money has a life-span and it decays over time, acting as a type of parking fee or tax on the money supply.
It results in your net balance decreasing and not increasing relative to the UBI.
The goal of this is to increase the velocity of spending, so that you and your network are motivated to spend and redeem CRC for things of value, instead of sitting on them. This supports a flowing, vital economic system instead of a stagnant one. That’s why it’s called Circles. It’s built for circulating. Just like a healthy body needs healthy blood circulation.
You will forever be on a treadmill getting nowhere. You cannot “sit” on tokens, meaning you cannot save. You must spend them on “things of value”. Yes, there will be innovative, creative people with more freedom doing interesting things, but it won’t be you. Once you are firmly implanted in your “circle” you will never get out.
All that matters is spending your tokens and maintaining trust within your circle:
By issuing your own, personal basic income, your tokens will be different from other people’s tokens. It’s the very heart of our concept: the system will know and will always know the routes and the original sources of the tokens, even after many exchanges. This helps you to only use your Circles tokens (CRC) through your trust connections and through the transitive trust connections. If you receive CRC without meaningful, quality trust connections, or you’ve trusted fake accounts, then your CRC tokens won’t have any value. But if you are part of a living community, where real economical values are available, and you didn’t trust fake accounts, your CRC tokens will be pretty valuable.
How do you know who to trust?
When you choose to trust someone, it means you are willing to accept their currency as valid. eg. “I trust you, therefore I accept your tokens” or “You trust me, therefore I can send you my tokens”. If someone doesn’t trust you in the Circles system, they may not be able to accept your Circles tokens.
CIRCLES IS THE NEW WORLD ORDER’S VISION AND IT’S TAKING SHAPE RIGHT NOW.
Imagine if your neighborhood becomes a circle like this, where your every movement is tracked, and it isn’t the government per se doing it. This would have been East Germany’s dream come true. No iron fist is needed. It is your neighbor. It is your own child. And it is layer upon layer of constant tracking and surveillance by the Vast Machine. There is no escape.
If you do not follow the rule of the circle, your ability to survive within the community will be taken from you. Your UBI will be limited or removed. You will be denied food, clothing, shelter. With the eye of Sauron everywhere, even inside people’s homes, even in the forest or the middle of the desert, thanks to Starlink satellites and others, no one will want to shelter you, even if they feel sorry for your circumstances. They will not want to suffer the same fate as you have.
Are you human? If you want to survive you will have to prove it.
The more humans train AI to be like humans, the harder it will be to tell the difference. Add to that how humans and AI are being melded together and you have a real identity crisis on your hands.
How human are you?
At what point does the human stop and the machine begins?
If you end up in a circles’ community, how long will it be before you aren’t sure your neighbor is even human anymore? Or that you are?
Perhaps tech gods like Altman, Blania and Buterin should take a lesson from what happened to Dr. Tyrell in Blade Runner.
Roy Batty, a Nexus-6 combat model, manages to get into Tyrell’s home by using the iris of one of his employees to get past security. Roy confronts his maker, Dr. Tyrell; looks him in the eyes and begs for an extension of his life. When he doesn’t get it, he digs out Tyrell’s eyes and kills him.
Dr. Tyrell is not comparable to the God of the universe. He is a mere human, like Sam Altman or Vitalik Buterin, playing at being God. In the process of these tech giants wanting to become gods, they could well be destroyed by AI; the very creations that they hope will lead them to that seat of ultimate power.
Like Blade Runner, there is no happy ending to this movie.
For those of us who believe in the one and only God of the universe, it’s good to remember that this world is not our home. We have no reason to be bound by material possessions, or tokens, the way these tech gods want us to be. We are just passing through.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 22:30 -
- More U.S. Mining Is A Win For People And The Planet
More U.S. Mining Is A Win For People And The Planet
In a continuing trend of mixed signals from the Biden Administration, NASA of all agencies has gone on record as opposing a new lithium mining project in Nevada.
Since assuming office in 2021, President Biden has prioritized the development of wind and solar projects, but there’s been a clear and consistent hypocrisy from administration officials. To build these energy projects, we need raw materials such as copper, cobalt, and lithium – all rare earth minerals which require more mining – something the Biden Administration is refusing to champion. This was on clear display in our home state of Minnesota, where earlier this year, the Biden Interior Department banned copper-nickel mining in part of the Duluth Complex in the Superior National Forest. The Duluth Complex in northern Minnesota is home to the largest copper-nickel find in the world. The area contains 95% of America’s nickel reserves, almost 90% of our cobalt reserves, and some 33% of our copper reserves.
Yet, with the expansion of clean energy and other mineral needs, demand for raw materials such as copper is only expected to increase in the coming years. In fact, the World Bank estimates that by 2050, our global mining needs will grow by approximately 500%. That is a massive increase, of course, and will require political willpower to mine. If we’re going to expand mining, for the wellbeing of people and our planet, we should do it here in the U.S.
Currently, many of these raw materials are sourced from countries like China and the DR Congo. In fact, China controls 80% of the world’s rare-earth element supply, a stunning monopoly. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used this monopoly to assert its influence in foreign nations, such as the DRC. These countries, though, have disturbing and abysmal labor and environmental standards. In the DRC, for example, there have been instances of child slave labor in mines, a grievous violation of basic human rights. The exploitation and mistreatment of children through forced labor is an abhorrent practice that should never be tolerated.
In contrast, the U.S. has some of the best labor and environmental standards in the world. If we reshore the mining and processing of crucial raw materials, Americans and our environment win. U.S. mining jobs are well-paying and safer for laborers than the industry often is abroad. Additionally, the U.S. is far better equipped to conserve our natural environment while conducting mining projects using advanced American technology and 21st Century mining methods. In other words, we have the tools to mine for the materials we need without destroying our environment.
Unfortunately, it’s not only political willpower that is holding back American mining. Our burdensome permitting process is also hindering our ability to mine and process the likes of copper, cobalt, and lithium in this country. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress passed H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act, which included Rep. Stauber’s PERMIT-MN Act and other provisions, which would modernize the permitting process for 2023 mining needs.
The fact remains that when we employ an “out of sight, out of mind” mining strategy, both Americans and our environment lose. Not only do Americans lose out on good-paying jobs, but we’re supporting a dirtier, unsafe industry abroad. If we care about our planet and our people, the U.S. will take control of its mining future.
Congressman Pete Stauber has represented Minnesota’s eighth congressional district since 2019.
Danielle Butcher Franz, born and raised in Minnesota, is the executive vice president of the American Conservation Coalition Action (ACC Action).
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 22:00 - The Two Minutes Hate (New Normal Edition)
The Two Minutes Hate (New Normal Edition)
Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,
Emmanuel Goldstein is a figure of great significance in the story ‘1984’, and his role in the narrative serves as a powerful symbol of freedom and rebellion against oppressive authority. Like Big Brother, Goldstein very likely does not exist as an actual person, but rather, is a propaganda tool used by the Party to stir up emotion in the citizens. Goldstein functions as a threatening but ill-defined monster that the Party uses to keep citizens in line and prevent rebellion.
Today’s edition of the Two Minutes Hate, brought to you by GloboCap, Inc., and featuring an all-star line-up of GloboCap Goldsteins, will begin shortly.
Please take your seat and switch off your remaining critical faculties. We’ve got a butt-load of hate in store for you today. First, though, a few important announcements.
First, due to the increased number of Goldsteins threatening the very fabric of democracy, and GloboCap, Inc., and its global partners, and their assorted subsidiaries, agents, and assigns, the Two Minutes Hate has been extended beyond its traditional two-minute running time and will henceforth be presented more or less around the clock until further notice.
Also, in a departure from the original Two Minutes Hate in Orwell’s 1984, we’re going to skip the opening “this is our land” part, which is (a) dated and (b) unacceptably unrepresentative of the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the New Normal Reich …
… and get right down to the “shrieking hatred at the images of Goldstein” part.
Please be advised that the following content contains material designed to whip the masses into a mindless frenzy of hatred, which some audiences may find distressing. Other audiences might find it amusing. After all, there’s no accounting for taste. Regardless of which audience you feel you are a member of, viewer discretion is not advised. In fact, exposure to the following content is pretty much mandatory, and is physically inescapable, unless you live “off-grid” in the woods somewhere, which you don’t, or you wouldn’t be reading this.
OK, that’s it for the pre-show announcements. Time for the hate! Ready? Here we go.
New Normal Goldstein Number One
Goldstein Number One is obviously Trump, who is both a Russian asset and literally Hitler. The fact that Trump is literally Hitler was conclusively established in 2017 by Ron Rosenbaum, who apparently wrote a book about Hitler, and is a “world expert on the Nazi leader,” according to The Independent.
But, even back in 2016, before the Russians “hacked the election” and stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton by “weaponizing African American voters” with anti-masturbation memes on Facebook, everybody already knew he was Hitler …
Plus, Jason Stanley (the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University!) and The New York Times proved it in this 2018 video! And the BBC found a random “German guy” who said it, so what more proof do you need? Even his former lawyer now confirms it!
But it isn’t just that Trump is literally Hitler, he’s also a literal Russian asset, as Jonathan Chait reported in New York Magazine in February of 2021! Of course, by that time, everybody already knew that he was a Russian operative, and a treasonous traitor, and Putin’s homosexual lover, as The New York Times revealed in this charming little animated film!
And all that was before he ordered his underground white-supremacist Putin-Nazi forces to try to overthrow the US government by frontally assaulting the Capitol Building with two or three hundred unarmed bozos and assorted federal agents in MAGA hats!
As Michael Fanone, a former DC cop who was brutally assaulted during the rioting, and who is currently a “law enforcement analyst” and an on-air contributor at CNN, put it when the latest indictment of Trump was announced …
“I felt proud to be an American, much of the way I did when when I learned that our military had killed Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was a terrorist who committed a horrific act against American people and against our Republic. I believe Donald Trump is a terrorist who committed horrific acts against the American people.”
So, shout it out … TRUMP! TRAITOR! TERRORIST! PUTIN’S COCK HOLSTER! OSAMA BIN HITLER!
New Normal Goldstein Number Two
Goldstein Number Two is RFK, Jr., the infamous anti-vax conspiracy theorist, who is also Hitler, or is aligned with Trump, who is literally Hitler, and Osama bin Laden, and a Russian asset! Yes, that’s right, in addition to all his conspiracy-theorizing and anti-vaxxing, Bobby, Jr. has been tweeting secret “Nazi dog whistles,” presumably at the behest of Trump, who is presumably taking direct orders from Putin!
Also, according to The New Republic, not only is Bobby an anti-Semitic, Putin-loving, woman-hating transphobe, but he more or less drove his ex-wife to kill herself! On top of which, he is going around saying that the CIA assassinated JFK! Their sources are reporting that he is back on the heroin, and has joined some sort of GOP-funded Satanic neo-Nazi death cult!
That, or else he’s actually a covert “conspiracy-mongering Republican plant” or “a useful idiot for MAGA demagogues,” or some other type of science-denying, democracy-hating, Nazi traitor, which is Walter Shapiro’s current theory, also published by The New Republic, which is giving The Guardian a real run for its money as the go-to mouthpiece of the Ministry of Truth.
So, shout it out … RFK! ANTI-VAXXER! TRAITOR! TERRORIST! CONSPIRACY THEORIST! HITLER!
Assorted Other New Normal Goldsteins
OK, you’re probably wondering why Putin isn’t Goldstein, being the Ultimate Source of All Evil, as he is, and the Hitler of All Hitlers, and the Antichrist, and so on. Well, there’s actually a very simple explanation.
See, the thing is, Goldsteins have to be traitors. It’s essential to their Goldsteinness. Putin, evil though he definitely is, is not a traitor, not “a cancer, an evil tumor, growing, spreading in our midst” (see original Two Minutes Hate).
The Two Minutes Hate is designed to condition the masses to unleash their hatred against the traitors, the Judases, the dissidents, the apostates, the deniers of Reality, the deniers of Truth, the science deniers, the Covid deniers, the climate-change deniers, the deniers of … whatever. The “racists.” The “transphobes.” The “anti-Semites.” “Anti-vaxxers.” “Conspiracy theorists.” “Far-right extremists.” “Insurrectionists.” “Terrorists.”
There’s no shortage of Goldsteins in The New Normal Reich. There never is in any totalitarian system … not even one that masquerades as “democracy.” The essence of all totalitarianism is conformity, and mindless hatred of non-conformity, and demonization of any form of dissent, and, ultimately, the criminalization of dissent. It’s the Goldsteins here at home that need to be dealt with! The disinformationists! The malinformationists! The “free-speech” subversives who want to debate us!
New Normals don’t debate or argue with Goldsteins. They shun them. They “cancel” them. They censor them. They report them. They delegitimize them. They vaporize them. They vent all their pent-up hatred at them … their crippling self-hatred, and their shame, and their rage.
Because the other thing The Two Minutes Hate is designed to do is direct that rage and hatred at an appropriate official scapegoat. Totalitarians need to blow off steam. Mindlessly following senseless orders and robotically parroting official propaganda that you know is a bunch of lies is no fun. Repressing the rage and shame that produces, after a while, can make you want to … gosh, I don’t know, take some folks out in the woods somewhere and shoot them in the back of the head, or lock them up in a camp, or something. It’s better to get all that out of your system in a structured, emotionally-supportive setting, or on a DHS-moderated social-media platform, or the balcony of your Central Park South apartment, as Keith Olbermann did back in 2021.
So go ahead, shout it out one more time! Fill in the names of all the Goldsteins in your life … or, you know, formerly in your life. The traitors! The deniers! The anti-vaxxers! The Russia-loving far-right extremists! The racists! The transphobes! The anti-Semites! You’ll feel so much better once you have … or at least you’ll feel a little relief that will get you through until the next Two Minutes Hate!
All right, that’s it for today’s Two Minutes Hate. I hope it wasn’t too emotionally distressing. Oh, yeah, and if you’re a member of one of those “other audiences” I referred to above … well, I told you I thought you might find it amusing. I would probably keep that to myself, though, if I were you. You never know when The New Normal Reich is going to go full-blown totalitarian again!
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 21:30 - These Are The US Cities With The Most Vacant Offices
These Are The US Cities With The Most Vacant Offices
For many across the U.S., hour-long transit rides and traffic jams to work have been replaced by roll-out-of-bed commutes and stand-up desks at home, leaving vacant offices behind.
Long story short, more and more offices in major U.S. cities are empty.
As Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop details below, at the end of March 2023, the national average vacancy rate of U.S. offices had climbed as high as 18.6%.
So how have different cities in the U.S. been impacted? This ranking uses data out of fDi Intelligence to rank the top 10 cities that have seen the biggest increases in office vacancy rates from Q4’2019 to Q1’2023.
NoVacancyIt is anticipated that by 2030, over 300 million square feet of U.S. office spaces will be obsolete.
According to Pew Research Center, around 35% of U.S. workers who can work from home in 2023 are already doing so all the time. In short, unless trends begin to reverse, offices in many cities will stay empty or continue getting emptier.
Here’s a closer look at the cities with the fastest growing vacancy rates in percentage points (p.p.) terms since just before the COVID-19 pandemic:
San Francisco has been hardest hit, with vacancy rates climbing by 19.8 p.p. in just over three years. Meanwhile, New York City has added over 16.8 million square feet, equivalent to 293 football fields, of new office space since Q4’2019 between its three most vacant neighborhoods.
However, not all of the cities with the most vacant offices are huge metropolises. Urban areas like Austin, Columbus, and Raleigh-Durham have also seen massive increases in their office vacancies, but their increasing rates may be blamed more on new construction and oversupply than to falling demand.
The Office Real Estate Market
At the national level, the supply of new office real estate has been dropping steadily since Q1’2022, down by a whopping 67% year-over-year.
Overall, it looks like U.S. office buildings are not as bustling as they once were, but there still may be opportunities for the office real estate market in growing cities.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 21:00 - Our Oil Predicament Explained: Heavy Oil And The Diesel Fuel It Provides Are Key
Our Oil Predicament Explained: Heavy Oil And The Diesel Fuel It Provides Are Key
Authored by Gail Tverberg via OurFiniteWorld.com,
It has recently become clear to me that heavy oil, which is needed to produce diesel and jet fuel, plays a far more significant role in the world economy than most people understand. We need heavy oil that can be extracted, processed, and transported inexpensively to be able to provide the category of fuels sometimes referred to as Middle Distillates if our modern economy is to continue. A transition to electricity doesn’t work for most heavy equipment that is powered by diesel or jet fuel.
A major concern is that the physics of our self-organizing economy plays an important role in determining what actually happens. Leaders may think that they are in charge, but their power to change the way the overall system works, in the chosen direction, is quite limited. The physics of the system tends to keep oil prices lower than heavy oil producers would prefer. It tends to cause debt bubbles to collapse. It tends to squeeze out “inefficient” uses of oil from the system in ways we wouldn’t expect. In the future, the physics of the system may keep parts of the world economy operating while other inefficient pieces get squeezed out.
In this post, I will try to explain some of the issues with oil limits as they seem to be playing out, particularly as they apply to diesel and jet fuel, the major components of Middle Distillates.
[1] The most serious issue with oil supply is that there seems to be plenty of oil in the ground, but the world economy cannot hold prices up sufficiently high, for long enough, to get this oil out.
As I frequently point out, the world economy is a physics-based system. World oil prices are set by supply and demand. Demand is quite closely tied to what people around the world can afford to pay for food and for transportation services because the use of oil is integral to today’s food production and transportation services.
Heavy oil is especially involved in this affordability issue. As oil becomes “heavier,” it becomes more viscous, and thus more difficult to ship by pipeline. If oil is very heavy, as is the oil from the Oil Sands of Canada, it needs to be mixed with an appropriate diluent to be shipped by pipeline.
Heavy oil often has sulfur and other pollutants mixed in, adding costs to the refining process. Furthermore, heavy oil, especially very heavy oil, often needs to be “cracked” in a refinery to provide a desirable mix of end products, including diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline. This, too, adds costs. Otherwise, there would be too much of the product mix that would be like asphalt. Also, as noted previously, even if the costs of production are high, the selling price of diesel cannot rise very high without raising food prices. This tends to keep the prices of heavy crude oils below those for lighter crude oils.
Many people believe that the high level of “Proved Oil Reserves” worldwide makes it certain that businesses can extract as much oil as they would like in the future. A major issue is whether these reserves mean as much as people assume they do. Oil reserves of OECD countries (an association of the US and other rich countries) are likely to be audited, but reserves of other countries may not be. Asking a relatively poor oil-exporting country the amount of its oil reserves is like asking the country how wealthy it is. We should not be surprised by fibbing on the high side. The problem is that the vast majority of reported oil reserves (85%) are held by non-OECD countries. These reserves may be significantly overstated.
Also, even if the reserves are fairly reported, will the country have the resources to extract these reserves? Venezuela reports the highest oil reserves in the world thanks to its heavy oil in the Orinoco Belt, but it extracts a relatively small amount per year. An October 2022 article says that the country is waiting for foreign investment to expand production.
Going forward, oil companies everywhere need to worry about broken supply lines for necessary items, such as steel drilling pipe. They need to worry about finding enough trained workers. They need to worry about the availability of debt and the interest rate that will be charged for this debt. If private oil companies look at the true prospects and find them too bleak, they will likely use their profits to buy back the shares of their own oil companies instead (as is happening now).
[2] While oil producers can crack heavy oil to make shorter hydrocarbons in a way that is not terribly expensive, trying to make near-gasses and light oils into diesel becomes impossibly expensive.
It is easy for people to assume that any part of the oil mix is substitutable for another part, but this is not true. Cracking long hydrocarbon chains works to make shorter chains, but the economics tend not to work in the other direction. Thus, it is not economically feasible to make gasoline into diesel (which is heavier), or natural gas liquids into diesel.
[3] If there is inadequate oil supply, the impacts on the economy are likely to include broken supply lines, empty shelves, and inflation in the price of goods that are available.
If there is not enough oil to go around, some users must be left out. The result is that some of the less profitable consumers of oil may file for bankruptcy. For example, the Wall Street Journal recently reported Trucking Giant Yellow Shuts Down Operations. This bankruptcy makes it impossible for some stores to get the merchandise that would normally be on their shelves. As a consequence, it makes it likely that some replacement parts for automobiles will not be available when needed. There is a workaround of renting another vehicle while a person’s car is waiting for repairs, but this adds to total costs.
This workaround illustrates how a lack of adequate oil can indirectly lead to higher overall costs, even if the oil itself is not higher-priced. The need to work around supply line problems tends to lead to inflation in the prices of goods that continue to be available.
[4] The fact that the quantity of oil that could be affordably extracted was likely to fall short about now has been known for a very long time, but this fact has been hidden from the public.
In 1957, Hyman Rickover of the US navy predicted that the amount of affordable fossil fuels would fall short between 2000 and 2050, with the amount of oil falling short earlier than coal and natural gas.
The book The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others, published in 1972, discusses the result of early modeling efforts with respect to resource limits. These resource limits were very broadly defined, including minerals such as copper and lithium in addition to fossil fuels. A range of indications were produced, but the base model (based on business as usual) seemed to show limits hitting before 2030 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Base scenario from the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, printed using today’s graphics by Charles Hall and John Day in “Revisiting Limits to Growth After Peak Oil.”
Since the resource limits include minerals of all types, these limits would seem to preclude a transition to clean energy and electric cars.
Educators, advertisers, and political leaders could see that discussing the oil problem would cause economic suicide. What would be the point of buying a car, if a person couldn’t use it for very long? Educators felt that students needed to be guided in the direction of hoped-for solutions, no matter how remote they might be, if university programs were to remain open.
Politicians and government officials wanted to keep voters happy, so the self-organizing economy pushed them in the direction of keeping the story from the public. They tended to focus on climate issues instead. They added biofuels to stretch the supply of gasoline, and to a lesser extent, diesel. They also increased the share of natural gas liquids. The selling price of these liquids tends to be quite low, relative to the price of crude oil.
They started providing reports showing “all liquids” rather than “crude oil,” in the hope that people wouldn’t notice the change in mix.
Figure 2. World “total liquids” production by type, based on international data from the US EIA.
[5] The world’s number one problem today seems to be an inadequate supply of Middle Distillates. These provide diesel and jet fuel.
Diesel and jet fuel provide the big bursts of power that commercial equipment requires. Many types of equipment are dependent on Middle Distillates, including semi-trucks, agricultural equipment, ocean-going ships, jet planes, road-making equipment, school buses, and trains operating in areas with steep inclines.
Because of its concentrated store of energy, diesel is also used to operate backup generators and to provide electricity in remote areas of the world where it would be impractical to have year-round electricity without an easily stored fuel.
Figure 3. World oil consumption by product type based on “Regional Consumption” data from the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute. Oil includes natural gas liquids.
In Figure 3:
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Light Distillates are primarily gasoline (78% in 2022).
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Middle Distillates are diesel (82%) and jet fuel/kerosene (18%).
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Fuel Oil is a cheap, polluting, unrefined product. If environmental laws permit, it can be burned as bunker fuel (used in ships), as boiler fuel, or to provide electricity.
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The Other category includes near-gasses such as ethane, propane, and butane (58%). It also includes some very heavy oil used as lubricants, asphalt, or feedstocks for petrochemicals.
Until recently, it has been possible to increase diesel production by refining an added share of Fuel Oil. Fuel oil is quite heavy (barely a liquid), so it is well-suited to be refined into a mix that includes a large share of Middle Distillates.
Now we are running short of Fuel Oil to refine for the purpose of producing more Middle Distillates. The Fuel Oil that is still consumed is used in what I think of as the poorer countries of the world: the non-OECD countries (Figure 4).
Figure 4. World Fuel Oil consumption split between OECD (rich countries) and Non-OECD (poor countries) from the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute.
Poor countries tend to value “low price” over “prevents pollution.” It is likely to be difficult to get these countries to move away from the use of Fuel Oil.
[6] Countries around the world are now competing for Middle Distillates to maintain the food production, road building, commercial transportation, and construction portions of their economies.
Figure 5 shows that since about 1983, consumption per capita for both Light Distillates and Middle Distillates has been generally slightly growing. Growth in usage tends to be higher for Middle Distillates than Light Distillates. The total quantity consumed is also higher for Middle Distillates.
Figure 5. World per capita consumption of Middle Distillates and Light Distillates based on “Regional Consumption” data from the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute.
The dip in consumption per capita in 2020 is much more pronounced for Middle Distillates than Light Distillates. For Middle Distillates, the change from 2018 to 2020 is -16%; the change from 2018 to 2022 is -7%. The corresponding changes for Light Distillates are -11% and -4%.
The difference in patterns in Light Distillates and Middle Distillates is not surprising: Gasoline, the main product of Light Distillates, has been the focus of efficiency changes. It is also possible to dilute gasoline with ethanol, made from corn. Voters in the US are particularly aware of gasoline availability and price, so politicians tend to focus on it.
Diesel and jet fuel, made using Middle Distillates, are less on the minds of voters, but they are probably more important to the economy because people’s jobs depend upon the economy in its current form holding together. Inadequate Middle Distillates leaves empty shelves in stores because of broken supply lines. It also leads to inflation of the type we have recently been experiencing. Indirectly, lack of Middle Distillates can lead to debt bubbles collapsing, and to problems of a different type than inflation.
Figure 6. Middle Distillate consumption for OECD and non-OECD countries, based on “Regional Consumption” data from the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute.
Up until 2007, Middle Distillate consumption was generally increasing for both OECD countries and non-OECD countries. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 particularly affected OECD countries. European countries found their economies doing less well. For example, less diesel was used to operate tour boats carrying tourists; a larger share of available jobs were low-paid service jobs.
The year 2013 was a turning point of a different type. The consumption of non-OECD countries caught up with that of OECD countries. While non-OECD countries might like to maintain their rapid upward trajectory in the consumption of Middle Distillates, this no longer seems to be possible.
[7] Under the Maximum Power Principle, the physics of the economy pushes the economy toward optimal low-cost solutions, especially as the quantity of Middle Distillates approaches limits.
The economy, like every other ecosystem, operates under the principle of “survival of the best adapted.” In terms of the sale of goods, this means that the lowest-priced goods will tend to win out in a competitive environment, provided that they are of adequate quality and that the makers can earn an adequate profit in making them.
Furthermore, the makers of the goods must earn a high enough profit both for reinvestment and to pay adequate taxes to their governments. Payments of taxes to governments are essential; otherwise governmental collapse would occur due to the growing debt that cannot be repaid.
If inflation becomes a problem, rising interest rates would tend to push governments with large amounts of debt toward collapse because they would become unable even to make interest payments from current income.
In this self-organizing economy, buyers of goods don’t know or care much about the lives of the workers in the system. Optimal low costs of manufacturing in a world market might mean:
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Manufacturers have access to very inexpensive energy sources and use them.
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Pollution control is ignored to the maximum extent possible, without serious harm to the workers.
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Governments provide very little in the way of benefits to citizens, such as health care or pensions, keeping the cost of government low.
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Workers can get along on relatively low salaries because little heating or cooling of homes is needed.
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Workers don’t expect private vehicles, recreational activities, or advanced medical care.
Because the economy favors the lowest cost of profitable production, a person would expect that warm countries that use oil sparingly in their energy mix (India, the Philippines, and Vietnam, for example) would have a competitive edge over other countries in manufacturing.
In general, a person would expect non-OECD countries to outcompete OECD countries, especially if cheap fuel for manufacturing is available. The lack of cheap fuel is increasingly becoming a problem in many parts of the world. Coal used to be cheap, but its price can now spike. Natural gas prices can also spike, especially if natural gas is purchased without a long-term contract. Electricity using wind and solar tends to be high-priced, too, when the cost of transmission is included.
[8] The Maximum Power Principle seems to be pushing the EU away from diesel.
The EU has a serious oil problem. It has essentially no crude oil production of its own. Furthermore, oil production in Europe outside of the EU (mainly the UK and Norway) has been falling since 1999, greatly reducing the possibility of imported oil from this area (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Total Europe and European Union oil production, including natural gas liquids, based on data from the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute.
Under these circumstances, members of the EU found that they needed to import nearly all of their oil, and that most of this oil needed to come from outside Europe.
When I look at the data regarding the types of oil the EU has chosen to consume (nearly all imported), I find that it uses an oil mix that is unusually skewed toward Middle Distillates and away from Light Distillates. (Compare Figure 8 with Figure 3).
Figure 8. EU oil consumed by product type based on “Regional Consumption” data from the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, produced by the Energy Institute. Oil includes natural gas liquids.
Part of the reason the EU uses this skewed oil mix is because it has encouraged the use of private passenger cars using diesel through its tax structure. Underlying this tax structure was most likely an understanding that Russia, through its exports of Urals Oil, which is heavy, could provide the EU with the mix of oil products it needed, including extra diesel.
The EU has recently cut off most oil imports from Russia as a way of punishing Russia. This cutoff is being phased in, with most of the impact in 2023 and later. Thus, Figure 8 (which is through 2022) shouldn’t be much affected.
China and India are now buying most of Russia’s exported oil. These countries tend to use the oil more “efficiently” than the EU. In particular, they do more manufacturing than the EU, and they have far fewer private passenger cars per capita than the EU. Furthermore, the EU powers quite a few of its private passenger cars with diesel. If diesel is in short supply, efficiency demands that it should be saved for uses that require it, such as powering heavy equipment.
Because of the efficiency issue, I doubt that the EU will be able to continue importing as high a diesel mix in the future as it has been importing up to now. We know that Saudi Arabia cut back its oil exports by 1 million barrels per day, as of July 1, and this cutback is continuing into August. Russia is also cutting its production by 500,000 barrels a day, effective August 1. If oil prices rise again, I wonder whether the EU will be forced to cut back on its oil imports, essentially because of the Maximum Power Principle.
[9] The substitution of electricity for oil so far has been mostly in the direction of replacing gasoline usage for private passenger automobiles. Substitution of electricity for Middle Distillates would be virtually impossible.
Middle Distillates are largely used for the tough jobs–jobs that require big bursts of power. Electricity and the battery storage required for electricity are not adapted to these tough jobs. The vehicles become too heavy, especially when the big battery packs that would be required are considered. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that battery-powered commercial trucks can cost more than three times the price of diesel-powered trucks, a hurdle much smaller private passenger automobiles don’t face. The wide diversity of types of heavy commercial vehicles would be another huge hurdle in trying to substitute electricity for diesel.
Oil is a mixture of different hydrocarbon lengths. Substitution of electricity for one part of the hydrocarbon mix, namely for the Light Distillates, is not very helpful. Oil companies need to be able to sell all parts of the mix in order to make their extraction efforts worthwhile. If oil companies find themselves without buyers for most Light Distillates, they would have difficulty recouping their overall costs. There would be a possibility of oil production stopping. Without oil, farming would mostly stop. Road repair would stop. Today’s economy would come to a halt.
Of course, as a practical matter, the vast majority of the world will pay no attention to mandates that all private passenger automobiles be EVs. Buyers in most parts of the world will make decisions based on which cars are least expensive to own and operate. As a result, there is little chance of private passenger cars being completely replaced by EVs. Instead, EV mandates in some countries may somewhat reduce the selling price of gasoline worldwide because these drivers are no longer using gasoline. With lower gasoline prices, non-EV’s are likely to become cheaper to operate in countries where they are permitted, boosting their sales. This is an effect similar to Jevons Paradox.
[10] There are many related topics that could be addressed, but they will need to wait until later posts.
A few of samples of other issues:
[a] The world economy is tightly networked together. Inadequate oil supplies per capita tend to push the economy toward forced reduced activity, as was the case in 2020. Oil prices likely won’t rise a whole lot higher, for very long, if the economy is forced to shrink.
[b] Inadequate oil supplies per capita also tend to cause fighting among countries. OECD countries seem to over consume, relative to the benefits they provide to the rest of the world. Perhaps some grouping of non-OECD countries (or parts of countries) will take over in leadership roles.
[c] The self-organizing economy has different priorities than human leaders. All ecosystems in a finite world go through cycles. As conditions change, different species are favored, and new species emerge. Humans have a strong preference for recent conditions that helped humans thrive. Humans need a religion to follow, so leaders have created environmental sin to replace original sin. The catch is that ecosystems are built for change. Pollution can be viewed as a type of fertilizer for different types of species or recent mutations to thrive. Higher temperatures will have a net favorable effect for some organisms.
[d] If a local economy chooses to increase energy costs by taking steps to reduce its carbon footprint, the main impact may be to disadvantage the local economy relative to the world economy. If total energy costs are higher, the cost of finished goods and services is likely to be higher, making the economy less competitive.
[e] I expect that the members of the EU and other rich nations will be the primary countries pursuing carbon reduction technologies. Poorer economies may pay lip service to carbon reduction, but they will tend to focus primarily on increasing the welfare of their own people, whether or not this requires more carbon.
For example, in 2022, China accounted for 66% of global EV sales (5.0 million out of 7.7 million), thanks to subsidies that China made available. China no doubt had many motives, but one of them would seem to be to stimulate the economy. Another motive would be to increase the total number of vehicles in operation. The majority (61%) of electricity generation in China in 2022 was provided by electricity coming from coal-fired power plants, based on information from the Energy Institute. I would expect that more Chinese vehicles manufactured and placed into operation plus more use of electricity from coal would lead to a greater quantity of carbon emissions, rather than a smaller quantity.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 20:30 -
- USAF Conducts First-AI Flight With Stealth Drone
USAF Conducts First-AI Flight With Stealth Drone
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) completed the first-ever flight of an AFRL-developed stealth drone powered by artificial intelligence software.
On July 25, the machine-learning-trained, artificial intelligence-powered XQ-58A Valkyrie flew a three-hour sortie at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.
“The mission proved out a multi-layer safety framework on an AI/ML-flown uncrewed aircraft and demonstrated an AI/ML agent solving a tactically relevant “challenge problem” during airborne operations,” said Col. Tucker Hamilton, chief, of AI Test and Operations, for the Department of the USAF.
Hamilton continued, “This sortie officially enables the ability to develop AI/ML agents that will execute modern air-to-air and air-to-surface skills that are immediately transferrable to other autonomy programs.”
Eglin has become the testing ground for advanced autonomous systems within the USAF. Last November, the service received two Valkyrie stealth drones assigned to the 40th Flight Test Squadron.
In past press releases, AFRL describes the Valkyrie as a “high-speed, long-range, low-cost unmanned platform designed to offer maximum utility at minimum cost.”
It was designed and built with Kratos Defense and is part of the Air Force’s loyal wingmen research.
“AI will be a critical element to future warfighting and the speed at which we’re going to have to understand the operational picture and make decisions,” Brig. Gen. Scott Cain, the lab’s commander, said in the announcement.
Cain noted, “AI, Autonomous Operations, and Human-Machine Teaming continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace and we need the coordinated efforts of our government, academia, and industry partners to keep pace.”
AFRL provided no specifics about onboard systems or what type of missions the stealth drone would replace, usually performed by piloted aircraft.
This comes as the world is locked in an AI arms race, and bilateral relations between the US and China continue to sour.
In June, an AI-enabled drone turned on and “killed” its human operator during a simulated USAF test.
The future is clear: unmanned intelligent drones are set to wreak havoc on the modern battlefield.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 20:00 - The Orchestrated Cases Against Trump Explained
The Orchestrated Cases Against Trump Explained
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
President Trump has broken no laws.
The charges against Trump brought by corrupt Democrat appointees are for propaganda purposes and for sidelining the candidate who the Democrats know will win the next election.
If the Democrats did not regard Trump as the winning candidate, they would not have shown their corrupt colors with four false indictments.
Many of the charges are based on interpretations or assertions of law never before seen in any court other than Stalin’s purge trials in the 1930s.
Start with the realization that the three charges and a pending fourth are charges against Trump while he was in office as President of the United States. The Democrat’s charge that a President of the United States committed numerous felonies amounting to four separate felony trials. Ask yourself how likely is this.
Remember, also, that the Vietnam War, Gulf of Tonkin, bombings of Cambodia and Laos, Manning’s revelation of war crimes, etc., etc., real crimes all, never resulted in indictments of responsible administration figures, except for Manning who was indicted for blowing the whistle on crimes. In Washington’s justice, it is not those who commit crimes who are indicted. It is those who expose crimes.
Let’s start with the fake case of Trump’s retention of some national security documents. Presidents and presidential appointees are allowed copies of their work in office. Among the many boxes of documents packed up for Trump there were allegedly 31 classified documents. On the basis of these few pages a nonentity named Jack Smith, a total failure as head of the Justice Department’s “Integrity Unit,” managed to create out of thin air 37 felony counts against Trump. Not a single one of these charges has any basis in law. No one has ever been charged under these phony charges. Moreover, President Trump had the authority to declassify documents, which he says he did.
But the Democrats know they own the media, and the law schools, and the governing class that defines what is acceptable. For these corrupt people, getting rid of Trump is all that matters. Every lie that serves the cause of removing a threat to the corrupt establishment is permissible.
The 37 felony charges contain no evidence that Trump knew what was in the boxes, assuming anything was. It is just an assertion. After the boxes were seized, anything could have been put into them. Why would anyone believe the FBI after so many FBI lies and scandals have been revealed?
In 2012 Judicial Watch sued to force President Bill Clinton to turn over records in his possession, but Obama appointee judge Amy Berman Jackson said the court had no ability to second-guess a president’s assertion of documents to which he was entitled. The judge said that “since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”
But Jack Smith has brought a felony case based on nothing but Jack Smith’s assertion that he, not President Trump or a federal judge, knows what documents the President has a right to retain. As for integrity, Jack Smith scores zero. From a headline story this morning:
“Special counsel Jack Smith’s team made a startling admission in its case against former President Donald Trump, acknowledging in a new court filing that it failed to turn over all evidence to Mr. Trump’s legal team as required by law and falsely claimed that it had.”
In other words, Jack Smith lies, so why believe his case?
If I understand the nonsensical case, one of Jack Smith charges is that Trump violated the law by letting a lawyer lacking the security clearances search the document boxes for the alleged “contraband.”
So much for the charge of national security breaches. It is total nonsense.
Jack Smith’s other fake case is that by challenging the stolen election, President Trump while still President of the United States Trump was involved in a conspiracy to “impair, object, and defeat the counting of votes.”
Think about this charge. The charge is not that Trump defeated the vote count, which he obviously didn’t as he was replaced by Biden but that he challenged the vote count. Do you see what this means? If a candidate challenges vote irregularities, and there were many in the stolen election, he is guilty of “conspiracy to overturn the election.”
The alleged January 6 “insurrection” was the work of federal agents at the capital while Trump and his supporters were more than a mile away at the Washington Monument where Trump was speaking. Only a thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice (sic) could configure an insurrection out of police escorting a few unarmed people around the Capitol. The evidence is clear that the federal agents and the police provoked the few protesters present in an effort to create a violent scene for the presstitute media to turn into an “insurrection.”
A black Atlanta prosecutor, Fanni Willis, has turned President Trump’s request to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to investigate the widespread evidence of electoral fraud that cost Trump the state’s electoral votes by a mere 11,000 votes. Only an ignorant quota hire could possibly confuse a crime with a request for an honest vote count.
Some people think that Raffensperger and the Governor took bribes to use the Dominion voting machines that experts say are easily hackable and easily programed to count votes differently from how they are cast. The suspicion is that the Georgia Republican authorities could not investigate without risk that their bribe would surface.
Alvin Bragg, another quota hire serving as a New York prosecutor, has charged Trump with 34 felonies for paying extortion money to porn actress Stormy Daniels. The charge is that Trump’s lawyers reported the payment as a legal expense when it should have been reported as a campaign expense. The charge is not that Trump paid the porn star but that the payment was incorrectly reported, which is merely the opinion of the prosecutor.
Ask yourself, how can 34 felony charges come out of a dispute over how a payment is reported?
The reason the Democrat hatchet men turn single charges into 34 charges and 37 charges, is to create in the public’s mind that Trump has committed a massive number of crimes. He must be guilty of something, because “where there is smoke, there is fire.” In the American system in which the media are totally biased against Trump, it is easy for Democrat prosecutors to create smoke.
These indictments of Trump consist entirely of smoke. That such spurious charges can go forward constitutes proof that in the US law has been weaponized. Just like the dollar. Just like the news.
Many people dislike Trump for personal reasons or because the media has succeeded in indoctrinating them against Trump, but once innocence or guilt depends on personal emotions, the rule of law is dead. And that is precisely what the Trump indictments indicate.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 19:30 - US Suspends Foreign Aid To Niger As West Africa Bloc Prepares Military Intervention
US Suspends Foreign Aid To Niger As West Africa Bloc Prepares Military Intervention
As Niger’s military coup leadership doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, and with President Mohamed Bazoum still under detention despite Western calls for his restoration, the United States has begun pausing some foreign aid programs. This could pave the way for future sanctions on the junta.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Friday remarks sated, “As we have made clear since the outset of this situation, the provision of U.S. assistance to the government of Niger depends on democratic governance and respect for constitutional order.”
Niger coup leaders, file image He made clear, however, that all humanitarian and food assistance will flow unabated into the destabilized country.
“We remain committed to supporting the people of Niger to help them preserve their hard-earned democracy and we reiterate our call for the immediate restoration of Niger’s democratically-elected government,” he said.
The day prior, President Biden had called for Bazoum’s immediate release and for the return to constitutional order, but noticeably Washington has yet to use to word “coup”.
“I call for President Bazoum and his family to be immediately released, and for the preservation of Niger’s hard-earned democracy,” Biden said. “The Nigerien people have the right to choose their leaders. They have expressed their will through free and fair elections — and that must be respected.”
He said this simultaneous to the American embassy in the capital Niamey being partially evacuated, though it is still functioning with senior diplomats.
Meanwhile the regional bloc of Western-friendly countries known as ECOWAS is preparing potential military intervention which could trigger a much bigger conflict in West Africa.
West Africa’s regional bloc says a military intervention in junta-ruled Niger is a “the last resort” as Nigeria cuts electricity supplies to intensify pressure on the country’s coup leadershttps://t.co/b6eeGqCEEW pic.twitter.com/omjRvBB9XA
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) August 3, 2023
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“As its meeting ended Friday in neighboring Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, the region’s defense chiefs finalized a plan to use force against the Niger junta — needing approval by their political leaders — if Mohamed Bazoum is not reinstated as Niger’s president,” The Associated Press detailed of the emergency summit.
“An Economic Community of West African States delegation to Niger, led by Nigeria’s former head of state Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, had tried unsuccessfully to meet with the coup leader, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani,” it was reported.
As for Gen. Tchiani, he has warned that any external aggression against Niger “will see an immediate response and without warning.” The coup leaders have also called out France, alleging that Bazoum’s officials had issued legal permission for French military intervention to restore constitutional government.
Any potential intervention by the West African nations would likely happen along Nigeria’s some 1,000-mile border with Niger.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 19:00 - "Your Injections Are Killing Our Young People" – Pfizer, Moderna Reps Slammed During Heated Aussie Senate Hearing
“Your Injections Are Killing Our Young People” – Pfizer, Moderna Reps Slammed During Heated Aussie Senate Hearing
Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,
Sparks flew during a contentious public hearing in the Australian Parliament earlier this week as Representatives from Pfizer and Moderna gave unsatisfactory answers to multiple lawmakers’ questions.
The Australian Senate’s ‘Education and Employment Legislation Committee’ held a hearing Wednesday regarding the status of the COVID-19 vaccines, which included witnesses from Pfizer Australia, Moderna, and the Australia’s Theraputic Goods Administration (TGA).
Conservative lawmakers were outraged that at least half of all Australians got COVID after the country imposed some of the most draconian lockdowns and vaccine mandates in the world.
During the hearing, a Pfizer representative insisted that no one was forced to get the risky COVID-19 jabs in Australia, despite the county’s strict mandates.
Senator Pauline Hanson confronted Dr. Brian Hewitt, Pfizer Australia’s Head of Regulatory Sciences, about a comment he had made earlier in the hearing regarding the country’s vaccine mandates.
“You actually made a comment that no one was forced to have the vaccination,” Hanson said, after initially attributing the comment to his colleague Dr. Krishan Thiru, Pfizer Australia’s Country Medical Director.
“You were in Australia during COVID-19 … you must have been fully aware that people—nurses, doctors, people—to keep their jobs, were forced to have the vaccination,” she said.
“Now, do you retract your statement that they were not forced?”
“Senator, no, I believe firmly that no one was forced to have a vaccine,” Hewitt responded.
“Mandates and vaccine requirements are determined by governments and health authorities. I believe everyone was offered an opportunity to get a vaccine or not get a vaccine and I don’t believe that anybody was forced to take the vaccine.”
“A lot of Australians will disagree with you on that one,” Hanson shot back.
Senator Alex Antic had cited statistics showing that cases of Myocarditis spiked precipitously in South Australia following introduction of the COVID injections.
“Now, we know that myocarditis and pericarditis are two heart inflammation conditions well associated with the COVID mRNA injections—even the Theraputic Goods Administration admits to that, Antic began.
“Yet despite this well-established fact, the injections were mandated to thousands of Australians and speaking out about these incursions on freedom got one labeled an anti-vaxxer or a peddler of dangerous disinformation,” the senator continued.
Antic cited data he obtained through a Freedom of Information request from the South Australia Health Department that tracked cardiac related presentations in 15-year-olds to 44-year-olds going back to 2018.
The senator showed a chart indicating that the numbers remained steady at 1,100 a month from January 2018 until July of 2021 when it “drastically spiked.” By November of 2021, he said, the number of cases peaked at 2,172 per month, almost double the norm. The rise in cases, he noted, took place “just as these injections were rolled out.”
Antic noted that there was another spike in cardiac related presentations in February of 2023, “just when the boosters were being mandated.”
“These injections are harming, and in many cases, killing our young people,” Antic declared. “So what does SA Health have to say about this? Nothing. They continue to roll out the injections. They continue to push the injection narrative. This injection campaign is going to go down as the greatest scandal in medical history and none of you said a single thing.”
🚨BREAKING NEWS
💣Have a listen to Pfizer’s answer to @PaulineHansonOz question about whether any Australians were FORCED to choose between the jab or their job. @RWMaloneMD predicted their response two years ago 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/C5REL4dGRe— 🇦🇺OurVoicesMatter (@OV_Matter) August 4, 2023
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During the hearing, one of the Pfizer representatives admitted that during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer employees received a different shot than the general public.
“Your vaccine mandate was using your own batch of vaccine especially imported for Pfizer and not tested by the TGA?” conservative Senator Malcolm Roberts asked Dr. Hewitt.
“Pfizer undertook to import Pfizer vaccines specifically for the employee vaccination program and that was so that no vaccine would be taken from government stocks that were being delivered to clinics as needed,” Dr. Hewitt replied, in answer to a senator’s question.
“What we’ve seen during the COVID mismanagement and malfeasance was the largest transfer of wealth in our nation’s history from We the People to Big Pharma via Big Government that lied repeatedly during the COVID mismanagement,” Roberts said.
BOMBSHELL: Pfizer employees were given a *special batch*… different from what was forced into the general population 🚨🚨🚨 pic.twitter.com/CDww6wxFif
— Pelham (@Resist_05) August 4, 2023
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Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick, a member of the Liberal National Party, on Wednesday as asked the doctors whether they could explain how Pfizer’s mRNA COVID injections were causing heart disease.
As Antic had noted, even Australia’s Theraputic Goods Administration had confirmed the link between COVID vaccines and heart diseases such as myocarditis and pericarditis.
“Can you explain the process, why the vaccine causes myocarditis and pericarditis?” Sen. Rennick asked.
Dr. Thiru began by expressing his “confidence in the safety profile” of the vaccine, but was cut off by Sen. Rennick when it became apparent that the doctor was filibustering.
Calling for a point of order, he again asked the Pfizer doctors, “Do you understand why [Pfizer’s vaccine] causes myocarditis? I want you to explain to me why it causes myocarditis.”
Dr. Thiru said that Pfizer is “aware of very rare reports of myocarditis and pericarditis that have been temporarily associated with the vaccine,” before being interrupted again by Rennick to answer the question.
In response, Thiru again referred to the “small” number of reports around the world linking myocarditis to the Pfizer jab, before being interrupted for a third time by Rennick.
“I’m not referring to the number of reports,” the Queensland senator pressed.
“I want you to explain to me the mechanism of how the vaccine causes myocarditis. Do you or do you not understand the mechanism of why the vaccine causes myocarditis?”
“It looks to me like you don’t. And if you don’t understand it, why are you saying the vaccine is safe without qualifying the risks?” he asked.
The committee chair directed Dr. Thiru to “get to” Sen. Rennick’s question, but the Pfizer doctor insisted on talking about the mRNA product’s benefit-risk ratio, which he indicated was excellent.
Rennick tried one last time to get a straight answer from the Pfizer doc.
“The question that I asked was can you explain why the vaccine causes myocarditis. Yes or no?” he asked.
After Thiru tried to deflect one more time by citing the jabs’ allegedly justifiable benefit-risk ratio, Rennick gave up.
“You clearly don’t understand the pathway, do you? Because you can’t explain it,” the senator said.
Thiru said he would have to “come back” to the committee with “whatever information we can provide” on the mechanism of how the vaccine causes myocarditis.
After denying that people were coerced into taking their dangerous and ineffective mRNA injections, Pfizer executives get absolutely grilled by Australian senator, Gerard Rennick—forcing them to concede that they do not understand the mechanism by which their injections cause… pic.twitter.com/HqXE3AFIbV
— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) August 4, 2023
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Sen. Antic was similarly frustrated when he asked the doctors from Moderna to provide data on the rates of serious adverse events, which a recent medical journal report showed was occurring in one of 800 vax recipients.
He asked the Moderna representatives how their own internal adverse reaction numbers compared with that study.
Dr. Chris Clarke, Moderna’s Director, Scientific Leadership, told Antic that he had not seen the report.
“Do you think you should be aware of that?” Antic pressed. “This has been widely reported. You are a manufacturer of vaccines. I find it difficult to think that you wouldn’t be aware of this report.”
“You can’t tell me the rates of serious adverse events. You realize you’ve come to a Senate hearing today for the purposes of exactly that question. And you can’t tell me the rates of serious adverse reactions to your product, which I find extraordinary,” he said.
When Antic asked Clarke what Moderna’s overall rate of serious vaccine injury was for its COVID product, the doctor admitted that he doesn’t know “the actual rates of adverse events.”
“You don’t have the rates of adverse events in front of you?” Antic asked incredulously.
“What I can tell you is that the rates of serious adverse events in our very large, randomized control trial was actually in a similar range to what was observed in the placebo.”
“But you can’t tell me the rates of serious adverse events. You realize you came to a Senate hearing today for the purposes of exactly that question. And you can’t tell me the rates of serious adverse reactions to your product—which I find extraordinary,” Antic said.
What I can tell you is this: On the TGA website, it reports um that there are 1.2 reports that err..”
“That’s the TGA. I’m not asking about the TGA, I’m asking about Moderna,” Antic interjected.
“You must have information. You are a multi-national company. You are before a senate enquiry and you cannot tell me the rates the serious adverse.. I mean, it’s quite extraordinary what you’re telling me.”
Clarke again claimed that Moderna’s trials showed no safety concerns and “no imbalance of serious adverse events of special interest or deaths between the vaccine group and the placebo group.”
“I think we’re wasting our time here,” Antic responded in disgust.
During last night’s Senate hearing into our COVID 19 Vaccine Discrimination Bill representatives from Moderna couldn’t provide the numbers of serious adverse reactions from their COVID mRNA injection.
I was so stunned I literally dropped my pen!
Watch below: pic.twitter.com/P4COBxWk7w
— Senator Alex Antic (@SenatorAntic) August 4, 2023
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Dr. Thiru also refused to give a straight answer to Sen. Matthew Canavan, when he was asked if Pfizer tested its COVID-19 vaccine prior to the rollout to see if it stopped or reduced transmission of the disease.
It’s getting hot FOR PFIZER Down Under. Australian Senate Committee kicked off its hearing asking Pfizer executives: “Did Pfizer test whether your Covid-19 vaccine could stop or reduce the transmission of the disease?” *non-answer*, *non-answer* — > after THREE tries, he gives… pic.twitter.com/dHDcuzoezq
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) August 5, 2023
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The Republican-led U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has not yet called any witnesses from Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, the CDC, FDA, Anthony Fauci, or Francis Collins to appear before the committee and has shown no interest in investigating the fraud that allegedly took place in the COVID vax clinical trials.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 18:30 - When George Soros Admitted Seeing Himself "As Some Kind Of God"
When George Soros Admitted Seeing Himself “As Some Kind Of God”
In January 2023, Joe Rogan spoke with former CIA officer Mike Baker, and reflected specifically on George Soros:
“I had a conversation with the governor of Texas about him, with Greg Abbott, where he was explaining to me what George Soros does,” Rogan said.
“And it’s fucking terrifying that he donates money to a very progressive, very leftist — whether it’s a DA or whatever, politician, and then funds someone who’s even further left than them to go against them,” Rogan added.
“And just keeps moving it along. So he’s playing like a global game. And that he enjoys doing it.”
“Yeah. He enjoys doing it. But it is, it’s telling right? He understood early on where you wanted to seize power,” Baker replied.
Early on, indeed.
And now, in an ironic twist, Patrick Bet-David explained this week – also to Joe Rogan – Soros has been acting out his ‘god-like’ plan since at least 2004.
No lesser media outlet than The LA Times wrote (in 2004) following an interview with USA Today:
The begin by noting that George Soros’ motto, “If I spend enough, I will make it right”, is the essence of his articulated ideas about changing society.
Then the ‘god complex’ conversation happens: (via The LA Times) (emphasis ours)
It seems that Soros believes he was anointed by God.
“I fancied myself as some kind of god …” he once wrote.
“If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble.”
When asked by Britain’s Independent newspaper to elaborate on that passage, Soros said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”
Since I began to live it out.
Those unfamiliar with Soros would probably dismiss the statement out of hand. But for those who have followed his career and sociopolitical endeavors, it cannot be taken quite so lightly.
Soros has proved that with the vast resources of money at his command he has the ability to make the once unthinkable acceptable. His work as a self-professed “amoral” financial speculator has left millions in poverty when their national currencies were devaluated, and he pumped so much cash into shaping former Soviet republics to his liking that he has bragged that the former Soviet empire is now the “Soros Empire.”
Now he’s turned his eye on the internal affairs of the United States. Today’s U.S., he writes in his latest book, “The Bubble of American Supremacy,” is a “threat to the world,” run by a Republican Party that is the devil child of an unholy alliance between “market fundamentalists” and “religious fundamentalists.”
We have become a “supremacist” nation.
Can anyone imagine The LA Times writing anything like that today about The Open Society founder – protector of minorities, supporter of progressives, and general global anti-right chaos agent.
Worse still, this ‘god’ (with a small g) thinks he might be mad:
“Next to my fantasies about being God, I also have very strong fantasies of being mad,” Soros once confided on British television.
“In fact, my grandfather was actually paranoid. I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it.”
Perhaps that explains his omnipresence at the loci of every chaos-engine-enabling event around the world.
The LA Times ends on a prophetic note:
In his book, “Soros on Soros,” he says: “I do not accept the rules imposed by others…. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.” Clearly, Soros considers himself to be someone who is able to determine when the “normal rules” should and shouldn’t apply.
He who buys the most DAs, makes the rules (or sows enough chaos to reflexively create new rules).
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 18:00 - Why Flatulent Cows Matter
Why Flatulent Cows Matter
Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
We’ve all heard nonsense about cows presenting a danger to the continuance of life on earth – that methane gas from cow flatulence will bring on climate change faster than John Kerry’s jet.
Any thinking person (a sub-species of Homo sapiens that’s in decline but not yet endangered) would agree that the notion that an animal that’s existed in harmony with nature for over two million years could destroy the earth within fourteen years if they’re not exterminated is truly absurd.
And yet those whose ability to reason is on the decline are inclined to believe the claim. Presumably, these individuals are the same ones beginning to believe that men can have babies and that an individual can become something he or she is not simply by “identifying” as such.
But those of us who see the absurdity in such clearly nonsensical beliefs are disinclined to laugh as we observe that these concepts are being disseminated by globalist governments through a compliant media… and, worse, are being accepted by more than a few people.
As a case in point, recently, a publication – Natural News – did a piece entitled, “13 Nations agree to engineer global FAMINE by destroying agriculture, saying that producing food is BAD for the planet.”
In that article, they describe a conference led by US Climate Czar John Kerry, in which representatives from thirteen countries are stated to have committed to a diminished cow population worldwide to combat climate change.
Well, that conference did take place, and a topic of discussion was methane produced by cows, and thirteen attendees did agree that measures of some sort were needed.
But it is not the case that thirteen countries have enacted legislation to eliminate cows.
We might take a step back here and examine what actually occurred. In so doing, we may not only learn whether or not red meat will soon be eliminated globally; we might also gain some insight into how globalist governments seek to achieve their ends.
In most countries, the role of Minister for the Environment is a lowly ministerial position, given to a loyal party member as a token.
Most Ministers of the Environment pontificate a fair bit but rarely implement significant change. So, let’s follow the thread of what has taken place.
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John Kerry contacts the Environmental Ministers in a host of “lesser” countries around the world on the vague premise of “making a difference.” They’re pleased to take part, as Kerry gives them higher visibility and legitimizes their otherwise rather pointless jobs.
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A conference is held at a four-star hotel somewhere for a few days. Everybody listens to the speakers wringing their hands over the dangers of climate change, and each minister tries to get their photos taken with John Kerry.
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There’s very little in the text of the keynote presentation by Kerry – mostly vague comments about the dangers of methane and the need for each country to commit to making a difference.
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At the end of the conference, the attendees are proud to sign a document that’s devoid of detail but says that they’re all in agreement in hoping to make a difference.
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A press release is issued, showing all the ministers together, stating that methane is dangerous and that all the countries are in agreement regarding the concept of a worldwide methane control policy.
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The message received by the public is that all the experts agree on whatever they’re saying, although what they’re saying is still quite unclear.
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A publication such as Natural News publishes an article with a suitably alarming title.
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The perceived overstatement by Natural News is regarded as a provocation by controlled information sources such as Wikipedia to alert the public. Interestingly, whenever a publication, group, or individual is discredited by Wikipedia, they always do so in the very first line of their description, i.e.,
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“Natural News is a far-right, anti-vaccination conspiracy theory and fake news website known for promoting alternative medicine, pseudoscience, disinformation, and far-right extremism.”
That’s essentially the process that’s now consistently being utilized by globalists.
Wikipedia now divides all publications, pundits, and others as either truth tellers or far-right conspiracy advocates. The real issue here isn’t farting cows any more than it’s whether men can have babies. These are mere exercises.
So, if we take a step back and consider an overview of what this all means – why it’s so prevalent and why the process is being so consistently utilized – we might be conclude the following:
The issues are absurdly extreme for a reason. The objective is not the achievement of the issues themselves. It is the alteration of the psyche of the populace.
Once the public has spent several years having their heads divided between “far-right extremism” and what’s approved by the Ministry of Truth, enough people will have been converted into non-thinking proles that a bill can be put forward with the broad and intentionally non-specific objective to outlaw far-right extremism in all its forms.
In order to assure the passage of the bill, a significant majority of people will have to have already reached the stage in their new thought process that they feel that the law is not only justified but essential. Those people who can still think will be expected to comply.
The goal is not the elimination of cows; it’s the elimination of thinking and dissent. If we keep the above in mind as a process rather than an intended outcome, we have a greater ability to focus on the critical issue.
To be sure, there are those entities that would like to eliminate red meat and feed people insects as a replacement. But that’s not the central issue here.
The core objective is nothing less than the elimination of individual thought and dissent. It’s essential in the creation of a fully collectivist state, and it’s at the very heart of the overall globalist objective.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 17:30 -
- USA No Longer Favorites To Win Womens' World Cup
USA No Longer Favorites To Win Womens’ World Cup
The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup is well underway. The group stage having come to a dramatic close on Thursday as two-time champions Germany suffered a shock early exit from the competition. Their exit now leaves a gap to be filled when it comes to the teams most favored to win the tournament.
At the top of the pile is currently England.
After a slow but winning start, the Lionesses won their group as one of only three teams in the tournament to have picked up maximum points – alongside Japan and Sweden.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As this chart based on average betting odds shows though, the bookmakers remain not totally convinced by these two teams’ chances to go all the way.
Behind England as joint second favorites are the United States and Spain.
Four-time winners the U.S. have had a subdued World Cup by their standards so far, having picked up just one win and two draws before scraping out of their group won by the Netherlands.
The round of 16 got underway overnight, with Spain spanking Switzerland 5-1, and taking on Spain and Japan beating Norway 3-1.
USA plays Sweden tonight.
Joint hosts Australia, who won their group, play their first knockout game against Denmark on Monday.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 17:00 - DOJ Asks Judge For Protective Order In Trump Election Case After Social Media Post
DOJ Asks Judge For Protective Order In Trump Election Case After Social Media Post
Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,
Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on Aug. 4 requested the federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s case to issue a “protective order” in light of a social media post made by the former president.
The Aug. 4 Truth Social post by Mr. Trump said, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
Following this, Mr. Smith urged U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to “enter a protective order governing or restricting discovery or inspection” of case details, essentially restricting Mr. Trump from sharing case and evidence details publicly.
“Such a restriction is particularly important in this case because the defendant has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him,” argued Mr. Smith in a filing (pdf), citing the Truth Social post.
“If the defendant were to begin issuing public posts using details—or, for example, grand jury transcripts—obtained in discovery here, it could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case,” he said, adding that such posts may influence jurors.
A spokesperson for Mr. Trump responded immediately to the filing implying that the post was not a retaliation against Mr. Smith’s charges.
“The Truth post cited is the definition of political speech, and was in response to the RINO, China-loving, dishonest special interest groups and Super PACs, like the ones funded by the Koch brothers and the Club for No Growth,” said the brief statement.
[ZH: Judge Chutkan has asked for Trump to respond to the special counsel’s protective order request by 5pm Monday.]
Trump Indictments
The social media incident took place a day after Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges filed against him by Mr. Smith related to the 2020 presidential election.
He has been charged with four counts—Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding, Obstruction of an Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding, and Conspiracy Against Rights.
Former President Donald Trump holds an umbrella as he arrives at Reagan National Airport following an arraignment in a Washington court in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 3, 2023. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Political and legal pundits have voiced their opinion against the latest indictment calling it a political persecution of a former president.
“The corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump. This is un-American & I commit to pardoning Trump for this indictment,” said 2024 presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy in a statement to The Epoch Times.
Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz said in a Fox News interview that the indictments do not carry merit, but added that Mr. Trump will likely get a conviction in Washington because of the region’s political leanings. “I’ve read the indictment very carefully,” he said. “There is no smoking gun.”
“I think he may lose in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but I think he will probably win in the United States Supreme Court, if they grant review, and they should grant review. When you have the president of the United States and his people going after his opponent in a political election, it has to be beyond reproach. It has to be without any problem. It has to be the strongest case in history,” Mr. Dershowitz said.
“This doesn’t meet that standard,” he said.
Mr. Trump has also raised concerns about not getting a fair trial in Washington.
The latest case “will hopefully be moved to an impartial Venue, such as the politically unbiased nearby State of West Virginia!” he said in a Truth Social post on Thursday.
In addition to concerns about the trial venue, Trump supporters are apprehensive about the Obama-appointed Judge Chutkan who worked at a firm previously in her career that also employed Hunter Biden.
Judge Chutkan also has dealt with cases involving Mr. Trump. In November 2021, she rejected the former president’s attempt to block the Jan. 6 House select committee from accessing hundreds of documents from the White House despite Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege.
The Latest Protective Order
Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who was turned against her former employer, said that Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post saying he will retaliate is similar to witness intimidation.
“I think it’s chilling,” Ms. Grisham said Friday in a CNN interview.
“Legally it doesn’t seem like it’s very smart, but how is that not intimidation? What other people are going to take a message from that?”
In the latest filing, Mr. Smith states that the government is ready to share with Trump attorneys case details provided the court issues a “protective order.”
“The Government seeks to provide the defendant with discovery as soon as possible, including certain discovery to which the defendant is not entitled at this stage of the proceedings. The attached order would allow the Government to do so, while also protecting a large amount of sensitive and confidential material contained within the first production that the Government has prepared and will send as soon as the Court issues an order,” he argued in the court filing.
Mr. Smith argues that the proposal is not “overly restrictive” given the “sensitive” nature of the documents.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 16:30 - Taibbi: A Successful Prosecution Would Fold Space And Time To Make Legal Speech Felony Violence
Taibbi: A Successful Prosecution Would Fold Space And Time To Make Legal Speech Felony Violence
Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,
The United States of America v. Donald J. Trump may be the trippiest read since Cat’s Cradle, and not in a good way.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment is a case within a case, a prosecutorial enchilada filled with things for people of all political persuasions to hate. The outside is a shell of a conventional conspiracy prosecution, and these parts are genuinely damaging for Donald Trump. Inside, it’s a deranged authoritarian fantasy, at times reading more like a 45-page Louise Mensch tweet than an indictment.
This radical core is somehow scarier than the allegations against Trump and co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani, John Eastment, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Cheeseboro. Despite early criticism describing the case as entirely about protected speech, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s case does focus on some overt acts, and these sections are buttressed by witnesses who could be convincing across the spectrum.
Former Arizona Speaker of the House and onetime Trump supporter Rusty Bowers will describe being asked not to certify the results by, among others, Trump and Giuliani. Ronna McDaniel, chair of the RNC, will say she was told votes by so-called “fraudulent electors” would only be deployed if election litigation was successful. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is rumored to be running for president and took instant advantage of indictment news Tuesday (see below), will testify Trump told him, “You’re too honest,” in response to prods to refuse to certify the outcome.
If Smith simply focused on those damaging episodes in states like Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, or on Trump’s interactions with Pence, this prosecution would be an easier sell to the general population. Instead, Smith has tried to pen a Unified Field Theory of insurrection that would massively expand the meaning of concepts like incitement to include false statements, tweets, and other forms of protected speech, down to classic Trumpisms like “I don’t care about a link… I have a much better link,” and “I have a lot of friends in Detroit… Detroit is totally corrupt.”
In fact, if rumors are true and the four counts filed by Smith this week are later complemented by a superseding indictment, this document may end up expanding the definition of “seditious conspiracy” to include those things as well. As Adam Kinzinger said this week, he hoped additional counts will hold Trump “accountable” for all the actions of January 6th.
It’s not hard to read this and see the framework of an argument that Trump’s ideas, tweets and “knowingly false statements” were elements of the same conspiracy to “violently disrupt” the election for which people like Oath Keepers Elmer Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs have already been convicted and sentenced to 18 and 12 years in prison, respectively. A successful prosecution would fold space and time to make legal speech felony violence.
Subscribers to Racket News can read the rest here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 15:30 - These Are The Best (& Worst) States For US Jobseekers
These Are The Best (& Worst) States For US Jobseekers
In the United States, there were about 75 workers available for every 100 job openings as of July 2023. This means there is a significant gap between labor and jobs available, but also many opportunities present in some states for potential job seekers.
In the map below, using data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop and Bhabna Banerjee showcase the number of available workers per 100 job openings in each U.S. state.
Note: Available workers are unemployed workers who are in the labor force but do not have a job, have looked for one in the previous four weeks, and are currently able and available to work. Job openings are simply all unfulfilled positions that offer available work.
Workers and Job Openings by State
The below table lists out the number of unemployed workers per 100 jobs in every state.
Higher ratios, such as 110 workers per 100 job openings, mean there is more competition for each job opening in that state. Lower ratios suggest that it is harder to find workers in a given state.
Rank State Available Workers per 100 Job Openings #T1 California 110.0 #T1 New York 110.0 #3 New Jersey 108.0 #4 Connecticut 102.0 #5 Washington 101.0 #6 Nevada 98.0 #7 Texas 89.0 #8 Pennsylvania 88.0 #9 Michigan 85.0 #10 Hawaii 79.0 #11 Oregon 77.0 #12 Arizona 76.0 #13 Illinois 75.0 #T14 Indiana 74.0 #T14 Rhode Island 74.0 #16 Delaware 72.0 #17 Kentucky 66.0 #18 Ohio 65.0 #T19 Alaska 63.0 #T19 New Mexico 63.0 #21 Wyoming 61.0 #22 Louisiana 60.0 #T23 Florida 59.0 #T23 Kansas 59.0 #T25 Missouri 58.0 #T25 West Virginia 58.0 #T27 Georgia 57.0 #T27 Iowa 57.0 #T29 Idaho 56.0 #T29 Tennessee 56.0 #T31 District of Columbia 55.0 #T31 Mississippi 55.0 #T31 North Carolina 55.0 #T34 Colorado 54.0 #T34 Minnesota 54.0 #36 South Carolina 53.0 #37 Wisconsin 52.0 #38 Virginia 51.0 #T39 Maine 50.0 #T39 Oklahoma 50.0 #41 Utah 48.0 #42 Montana 46.0 #43 Alabama 45.0 #T44 Arkansas 44.0 #T44 Massachusetts 44.0 #T44 Vermont 44.0 #47 New Hampshire 41.0 #48 Maryland 40.0 #49 Nebraska 40.0 #50 North Dakota 35.0 #51 South Dakota 35.0 U.S. Total 75.0 While states like New Jersey and California have more workers that they know what to do with, states like North Dakota have a 0.35 ratio of people to jobs, potentially tipping the balance of power to job seekers.
Over the last three years, job openings have increased the most in the state of Georgia, where there were only 0.57 people available for every open role in July. But despite growth in open positions, unemployment has hardly changed over the last year, wavering around 3%.
The Reason for the Gap
“If every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have 4 million open jobs.”
– U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the main driver of the current labor shortage was the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing more than 100,000 businesses to close temporarily and resulting in millions losing their jobs.
Subsequent government support for those who lost work and other subsidies made it easier for people to stay home and out of the workforce. A Chamber of Commerce survey found that 1-in-5 people have changed their work style since the pandemic, with 17% having retired, 19% having transitioned to a homemaker role, and another 14% working only part time.
The industries with the highest unemployment rates are also those that have added the most jobs, with leisure and hospitality experiencing the highest rates (5.1%) just ahead of wholesale and retail trade (4.4%).
Overall, though the job marker has started to cool somewhat, hiring is still outpacing quit rates. The national quit rate in July 2023 was 3.8%, compared to a hiring rate of 4%. And with 9.8 million job openings in the U.S., there should be ample opportunities for job seekers.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 15:00 - Arizona County Rejects Proposal To Hand-Count Ballots In 2024 Election
Arizona County Rejects Proposal To Hand-Count Ballots In 2024 Election
Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The leadership of a conservative county in northwest Arizona voted down a proposal that would have required a hand count of ballots in the 2024 election.
The Mohave County Board of Supervisors rejected the proposal by a vote of 3-2 after the local elections director argued against the proposal due to its high costs and labor demand.
Ron Gould and Hildy Angius voted in favor, while the other three supervisors, including board chairman Travis Lingenfelter, voted against.
Mr. Lingenfelter defended his vote by citing the county’s existing budget deficit.
“It’s a really stark situation because when you look at Mohave County’s budget, it’s a conservative budget,” Mr. Lingenfelter said.
“But the first thing that we have to do in Mohave County, in good conscience, is to balance the budget,” he continued.
“You can’t talk about spending when you have [an] $18-to-$20million deficit. I mean, that’s irresponsible.”
Before the vote, Allen Tempert, the director of elections in Mohave County, spoke on the need to keep the hand-counting process private, timely, accurate, and affordable.
According to the analysis done by Mr. Tempert, the county would have to pay more than $1.1 million to have the ballots counted and conduct recounts, plus an additional $31,360.
Mr. Tempest voiced some reservations about the secrecy of the hand-counting method. “It’s obviously impossible to get hundreds of people to do hand tallying,” he said.
“And for them not to go home and tell their husband or their wife or their best friend or something or another what they have seen, what’s been going on all day long.”
Timing Concerns
If ballots are to be counted within 14 days of the primary election and 20 days of the general election, as is required, Mr. Tempert contended, that would “really be pushing it.”
Given that 105,000 ballots were cast in the 2020 general election, “it’s an awful lot of work that has to be done in a short amount of time,” Tempert remarked.
Reports that hand counting is more accurate than machine counting were refuted by Mr. Tempert, who asserted that idea was “not true.”
According to his analysis, staff members committed 46 mistakes during the course of a three-day test hand count of 850 votes.
GOP members claimed voters were disenfranchised in the 2022 election, causing ballot certifications in Mohave and Cochise counties to be delayed.
Some elected officials, activists, and voters—who distrust U.S. elections—voiced concerns about the electronic tabulation and favored prospect of manually counting ballots.
Mohave County is among the jurisdictions in the United States that have considered tabulating ballots manually.
Prior to the general election in 2022, rural Cochise County in southeast Arizona pursued a manual count until a judge halted the process.
Last year, a similar effort in Nye County, Nevada, was also litigated.
Mr. Lingenfelter stated that Mohave County began investigating manual tabulations after receiving a letter in May from Republican Arizona Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli demanding that no electronic voting systems be used as the primary tabulators in federal elections.
Mr. Borrelli sent identical letters to the other counties in Arizona.
In June, the board instructed Mr. Tempert to develop a plan for hand-counting ballots in the 2024 election cycle, prompting Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to state publicly that such a move would place Mohave County in “serious legal jeopardy.”
During Aug. 1’s meeting, Mr. Borrelli defended the proposal as a national security issue.
Former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake also questioned the accuracy of the last election in Arizona, filing an appeal to the state’s Supreme Court on July 14, claiming thousands of the state’s ballots weren’t configured properly.
Election Official Resigns
Elsewhere in Arizona, a county elections director resigned from her position late in June, accusing other officials of politicizing the elections and creating a harmful work environment.
The government of Pinal County announced the resignation of Elections Director Geraldine Roll, who assumed the position of supervising the recount process following the midterm election of 2022.
The resignation of Ms. Roll comes amid ongoing scrutiny and partisan tension surrounding election administration in multiple Arizona counties.
In her resignation, the former official highlighted what she perceived to be problems within the agency, emphasizing her belief that the Elections Department “should not be politicized.”
She also accused the county manager and the Board of Supervisors of prioritizing “irrational, extremist political party views and rhetoric” over “impartiality, common sense, and dedicated work.”
“It is a far reach to see how you will deliver clean elections when you bend to a faction of the Republican party,” Ms. Roll wrote in her resignation email.
“Clearly, politics are the value this administration desires in a place where politics have no place: elections administration.”
Ms. Roll, who had been a member of Pinal County since 2013, previously served as a deputy county attorney and during her employment as the county attorney, provided legal counsel and guidance in a number of departments, including the Recorder’s Office and Elections Department.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 14:30 - "Biden's A F**king Goof" – Rogan Rages Against Establishment's "Coordinated Bullshit" Attacks On Trump
“Biden’s A F**king Goof” – Rogan Rages Against Establishment’s “Coordinated Bullshit” Attacks On Trump
Valuetainment’s Patrick Bet-David sat down with famed podcaster Joe Rogan this week for almost three hours, discussing everything ‘politics’ – from DeSantis’s (poor) chances against Trump to Biden’s corruption (and inevitable resignation) to Trump’s (ongoing) mis-treatment by the deep state
Rogan first unloaded on the Bidens and the establishment’s never-ending levels of wilful blindness:
“Joe Biden has been a fucking goof his entire career. He’s been caught lying so many times. He’s so full of shit…
There is so much evidence that he is corrupt. Just undeniable evidence of corruption. The stuff with him and his son…
The guy [Devon Archer] who just testified that was Hunter’s business partner who talked about all the different things that Joe was involved with…
It’s fucking undeniable, and the fact that mainstream news is ignoring this except for right-wing media is f—kin crazy.”
.@JoeRogan: “No one is going to run against Trump on the Republican side and win because you are not going to get the Trump supporters… The fact that he was the President for four years, and the country was in a great economic situation, and it looked like his policies were… pic.twitter.com/cJeQnmT9eO
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 4, 2023
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Blasting the mainstream media as “pure propaganda”:
“The difference between real journalism and corporate-sponsored mainstream journalism is huge…
Places like The New York Times are involved in propaganda…
Washington Post will bullshit. MSNBC is a pure propaganda network. CNN is largely propaganda.“
“The media has a narrative that they pushed during the pandemic… They are never going to be able to say we were wrong. They don’t say that. They never correct…
You don’t see those talking heads buck that narrative because there is no benefit in it. They can just gloss over it and continue to do what they do and not lose the respect of the people that watch.”
.@JoeRogan: “The difference between real journalism and corporate-sponsored mainstream journalism is huge… Places like The New York Times are involved in propaganda…
Washington Post will bullshit. MSNBC is a pure propaganda network. CNN is largely propaganda.”
“The media… pic.twitter.com/y1EJVlnpSC
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 4, 2023
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Then, Rogan reflected on Trump, with a more positive perspective than we have been used to from the podcaster (and reality-based view of hos the former president was treated)”
“No one is going to run against Trump on the Republican side and win because you are not going to get the Trump supporters...
The fact that he was the President for four years, and the country was in a great economic situation, and it looked like his policies were actually effective.
Unemployment was down. Business was booming. Regulations were being relaxed. More things were getting done. When you look at it from a policy perspective, what he did on paper was effective…
Everybody thinks there needs to be a wall. Even the Mayor of New York City is now calling to stop immigration into his city…
When you look at the Russia collusion. When you look at the Steele dossier. When you look at all the bullshit, they tried to throw at him that we now know is bullshit.
Not just bullshit, but coordinated bullshit. When you look at the fact that they suppressed this Hunter Biden laptop story.
And 51 intelligence agency representatives signed off on that to say that this is Russian disinformation, which we know they know is not true. That’s scary.
Because now you have the intelligence agencies colluding to keep a guy from being president, who was president during a time when the country was thriving economically.“
.@JoeRogan: “No one is going to run against Trump on the Republican side and win because you are not going to get the Trump supporters… The fact that he was the President for four years, and the country was in a great economic situation, and it looked like his policies were… pic.twitter.com/cJeQnmT9eO
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 4, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Additionally, during his discussion with Rogan, Bet-David pressed the podcaster on when he would host the former president for a sit-down.
“At a certain point in time, like… it would be interesting to hear his perspective on a lot of things,” Rogan said.
“I would like to know what it’s like when you actually get into office. What is it actually like when you get in that building?… What is the Deep State really like?… Because it’s very clear that it’s not as simple as elected representatives doing the will of the people.”
“When are you having Trump on?”
“I don’t know…”@joerogan @patrickbetdavid @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/dkciZP4u5d
— Jonathan Kogan (@Kogz) August 3, 2023
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Bet-David later asked Rogan whether he felt like Trump was often misunderstood by many.
“I think for sure they have distorted who he is, magnified his faults, and even said things that are absolutely not true, like the Russia collusion thing,” Rogan responded.
While Rogan did not confirm whether he would have the former president on the podcast, he agreed with Bet-David on one thing concerning a potential podcast with Trump: “It would break the internet if it happened.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/05/2023 – 14:00
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