Feb 06

Today’s News 6th February 2022

  • Are Secret "Puppeteers" Still Directing American Public Policy
    Are Secret “Puppeteers” Still Directing American Public Policy

    Submitted by Larry Kadish of the Gatestone Institute,

    Over the years much has made about the lobbyists and advisors who prowl the corridors of power in Washington D.C. Many seek publicity profiles in the hope it will convince potential clients and countries that they have high-level “access.” Others cultivate their cable news appearances as pundits and commentators, relishing the limelight.

    Yet what we have come to learn over time that the greater the media exposure, the less these individuals play a role in actually affecting the nation’s policies and politics.

    Consider the role of Michael Podhorzer.

    According to published reports, Mr. Podhorzer is a long time senior advisor to the president of the AFL-CIO, one of the most powerful labor federations in the nation.

    There are some 57 unions under its umbrella and they represent some 12.5 million people. His fellow Democrats are reputed to call him a “wizard” for his skill in leveraging technology on behalf of the union’s public policy agenda as well as their chosen candidates. Marry that communication technology with a field force of millions of union men and women and Mr. Podhorzer has a potent national weapon to wield in determining who will implement America’s foreign and domestic policies and who might even be trying to undermine our Constitution (here, here and here).

    Until a recent Time magazine exposé, he was very much out of sight, and deliberately so, as he provided strategic direction to the union.

    According to the Time profile he was also a key member of a group that applied enormous organizational and computing power to the task of electing their preferred candidates.

    Over time, it would become obvious that former President Donald J. Trump was not their preferred candidate.

    In our democracy, it is neither unusual nor inappropriate to create campaigns on behalf of a favored political party, public policies or individual candidates. Correctly, efforts have made to confront “dark money,” where large amounts of cash are put into campaigns by individuals cloaked in deliberate anonymity. Dark Money, according to The New York Times, “is notoriously hard to track. Dark money is driving a privatization of politics, funding ads, voter turnout and lawsuits — things once left to campaigns and parties. One entity on the left, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, spent $410 million in 2020 — more than the Democratic National Committee. “ [Emphasis in the original]

    In a digital era, however, when secretive online campaigns using mega data driven by algorithms can potentially manipulate election outcomes, the threat to our democracy comes from a new and far more dangerous direction.

    The Time expose’ regarding the role of Mr. Podhorzer suggests a calculated strategy to ensure that Joe Biden would win on Election Day. Far removed from oversight, or the give and take of traditional American democracy, the article speaks to his skillful ability to apply massive computer power for the purpose of affecting voter behavior. Working in coordination with others who shared his goal, the Time report applies sunlight to his strategy, participants, and objectives. It reveals a skilled professional working far from public scrutiny. The current occupant of the White House underscores just how effective he and his colleagues were in 2020. One can only imagine their plans for the mid-terms.

    Much has been written about the role of hostile nations seeking to influence American public policy through the use of social media, and masquerading as Americans questioning our values and national direction. Without firing a shot or launching a missile, our enemies seek to apply online digital strategies to unravel the fabric of our democracy. Our response has been to aggressively “out” those efforts and confront those who troll the American electorate.

    Yet the Time profile is a stunning reminder that the far bigger threat to our democratic future and our Constitution might lie within our own borders.

    As Shakespeare suggested in the play Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 23:30

  • Elon Musk Promises "Rapid" Starlink Antenna Production Despite Chip Shortage
    Elon Musk Promises “Rapid” Starlink Antenna Production Despite Chip Shortage

    The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, also the greatest salesman ever, continues to sell dreams of trips to Mars, full self-driving and Robo-taxi Teslas, solar roof shingles, brain chips, robots, and space internet. We can’t help but notice Musk’s latest tweet of possibly overpromising and underdelivering again (not surprising whatsoever), this time with his space internet company, Starlink. 

    For some context, many Starlink customers have waited at least a year or longer for space internet. They placed $100 preorders to secure a dish as Musk promised them “a nationwide rollout by the end of October” 2021. People who lived in rural communities with internet speeds as fast as dial-up from the mid-1990s jumped for joy when they heard about the imminent rollout of affordable and high-speed internet from space. 

    However, Starlink notified customers in November 2021, one month after Musk proposed an imminent nationwide rollout, that their orders would be delayed another 6-12 months (or in some cases until 2023). People were beyond frustrated, and some canceled their preorders, saying the “whole thing felt like a ruse.” 

    The reason we bring up Starlink is that Musk is possibly at it again, tweeting this week, “SpaceX standard antenna production rises rapidly this year, so those with orders shouldn’t have to wait long.” 

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

    Musk has mastered the modern selling strategy of ‘act now or be left behind,’ allowing him to capitalize on people’s emotions. He routinely incites ‘fear of missing out’ (otherwise known as FOMO) syndrome among Tesla fans who gladly put down payments on future products but barely receive them in the initially promised timeframe. 

    The question we have is if Musk is telling the truth about increasing Starlink antenna production considering the ongoing chip shortage. Tesla even noted last month that new models this year would be delayed due to the lack of chips.  

    Some people responded to Musk’s tweet, saying, “So why did you back my delivery date up a year?” 

    The problem with Musk and his companies, timelines are very unpredictable. If Starlink doesn’t deliver the bulk of the orders that were delayed to the end of this year, we could see a mass exodus of customers canceling orders. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 23:00

  • Escobar: The Year Of The Tiger Starts With A Sino-Russian Bang
    Escobar: The Year Of The Tiger Starts With A Sino-Russian Bang

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

    The Year of the Black Water Tiger started, for all practical purposes, with a Beijing bang on Friday, as Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, after a live meeting before the initial ceremony of the Winter Olympics, issued a joint statement on international relations.

    That represents a crucial move in the Eurasia vs. NATOstan chessboard, as the Anglo-American axis is increasingly bogged down in Desperation Row: after all, “Russian aggression” stubbornly refuses to materialize.

    After an interminable wait arguably due to the lack of functionaries properly equipped to write an intelligible letter, the US/NATO combo finally concocted a predictable, jargon-drenched bureaucratese non-response “response” to the Russian demands of security guarantees.

    The contents were leaked to a Spanish newspaper, a full member of NATOstan media. The leaker, according to Brussels sources, may be in Kiev by now. The Pentagon, in damage control mode, rushed to assert, “We didn’t do it”. The State Dept. said, “it’s authentic.”

    Even before the leak of the non-response “response”, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was forced to send messages to all NATO foreign ministers, including US Secretary Blinken, asking how they understand the principle of indivisibility of security – if they actually do.

    Lavrov was extremely specific: “I am referring to our demands that everyone faithfully implement the agreements on the indivisibility of security that were reached within the OSCE in 1999 in Istanbul and in 2010 in Astana. These agreements provide not only for the freedom to choose alliances, but also make this freedom conditional on the need to avoid any steps that will strengthen the security of any state at the expense of infringing on the security of others.”

    Lavrov hit the heart of the matter when he stressed, “our Western colleagues are not simply trying to ignore this key principle of international law agreed in the Euro-Atlantic space, but to completely forget it.”

    Lavrov also made it very clear “we will not allow this topic to be ‘wrapped up’. We will insist on an honest conversation and an explanation of why the West does not want to fulfill its obligations at all or exclusively, selectively, and in its favor.”

    Crucially, China fully supports Russian demands for security guarantees in Europe, and fully agrees that the security of one state cannot be ensured by inflicting damage on another state.

    This is as serious as it gets: the US/NATO combo are bent on smashing two crucial treaties that directly concern European security, and they think they can get away with it because there is less than zero discussion about the content and its implications across NATOstan media.

    Western public opinion remains absolutely clueless. The only narrative, hammered 24/7, is “Russian aggression” – by the way duly emphasized in NATO’s non-response “response”.

    Wanna check our military-technical gear?

    For the umpteenth time Moscow made it very clear it’s not going to make any concessions on the security demands just because the Empire of Chaos keeps threatening – what else – extra harsh sanctions, the sole imperial “policy” short of outright bombing.

    The new sanctions package, anyway, is ready to go for quite a while now, arguably capable of cutting Moscow off from the Western financial system and/or casino, and targeting, among others, Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank and Alfa-Bank.

    And that brings us to what’s Moscow going to do next – considering the predictable “extremely negative attitude” (Lavrov) from NATOstan. Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko had already hinted NATO knows perfectly well what’s coming, even before the non-response “response”:

    “NATO knows perfectly well what kind of military-technical measures may follow from Russia. We make no secret of our possibilities and are acting very transparently.”

    Still the American “partners” are not listening. The Russians remain unfazed. Grushko framed it in realpolitik terms: concrete measures will depend on the “military potentials” that could be used against Russia. That’s code for what sort of nuclear weapons will be deployed in Eastern Europe, and what sort of lethal equipment will keep being unloaded in Ukraine.

    In fact Ukraine – or country 404, per Andrei Martyanov’s indelible definition – is just a lowly pawn in their (imperial) game. Adding to Kiev’s misery on all fronts, the head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Alexei Danilov, all but gave away the (regional) game.

    In an interview to AP, Danilov said that “the Minsk Agreements can create chaos”; he admitted that Kiev totally lost the war in 2014/15 and then signed the Minsk Agreements “under threat of Russian arms” (false: Kiev was soundly defeated by the Donbass militias); but most of all he admitted Kiev never had any intention of fulfilling the Minsk Agreements.

    So Kiev, essentially, is breaking international law: the Minsk Agreements are guaranteed by the UN Security Council resolution 2022 (2015), adopted unanimously. Even the US, UK and France voted “Yes”. So breaking the law is not hard to do, as long as you’re enabled by “big powers”.

    And on that invisible “Russian aggression”, well, even Danilov can’t see “the readiness of Russian forces near the border for an invasion, which will take three to seven days.”

    Bring on the Dancing Horses

    None of the above alters the fundamental fact that the USUK combo – plus the proverbial NATO chihuahuas Poland and the Baltics – are spinning around like mad trying to provoke a war. And the only way to do it is to Release the False Flags. It may be sometime in February, it may be during the Beijing Olympics, it may be before the onset of Spring. But they will come. And the Russians are ready.

    The preamble has been staged straight from Monty Python Flying Circus – complete with Crash Test Dummy, a.k.a. POTUS yelling to comedian Zelensky that, in a trashy Mongol revival, “Kiev will be sacked” (to the sound of Bring On the Dancing Horses?); an outraged Zelensky telling POTUS to, c’mon man, back off; and the White House swearing that the US has gamed 18 scenarios for the “Russian invasion” (Lavrov: 17 were written by the intel alphabet soup, the 18th by the State Dept.)

    Cue to non-stop, frantic weaponizing of country 404 – everything from Javelins to MANPADs to overpriced Blackwater/Academi-tinged waves of “advisers”.

    Switching away from farce, not to mention misguided scenarios starting from the faulty premise of an “invasion”, the only rational move Moscow may be contemplating is to de facto recognize the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and send in a contingent of peacekeepers.

    That, of course, would enrage the neo-con infested War Inc. matrix to intergalactic paroxysm, as it would nullify all those elaborate psyops geared to instill the Fear of God on the unsuspecting victims of the Remixed Khanate of the Golden Horde, burning and looting all the way to…the Hungarian plains?

    Then there’s the tricky question of how to de-Nazify Western Ukraine: that will be a strictly Ukrainian matter, with zero Russian involvement.

    The ghost of Mackinder is in total freak out mode contemplating in impotence the imperial brilliance of deciding to fight a two-front war against the Russia-China strategic partnership. At least there’s Monty Python to the rescue: the Ministry of Silly Walks has been gloriously revived as the Ministry of Silly Strategies.

    Pride of place goes to the phone call placed by Little Blinkie to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi – which contains all the elements of a brilliant comic sketch. It stars with the combo behind that cipher, “Biden”, thinking that the Beijing leadership could influence Putin to not exercise “Russian aggression” against 404. On the sidelines, perhaps there could be some discussion about the “Indo-Pacific” racket.

    The plot went downhill when once again Wang Yi – remember Alaska? – made shark fin’s soup out of Blinkie. The key take aways: China totally supports Russia; it’s the US that is destabilizing Europe; and were more sanctions to come, Europe will pay a terrible price, not Russia, which of course can count on a serious helping hand from China.

    Now compare it with the phone call between Putin and Macron. It was, to start with, cordial. They discussed “brain-dead” (copyright Macron) NATO. They discussed the proverbial Anglo-Saxon shenanigans. They even discussed the possibility of forming a pan-European group – a sort of anti-AUKUS – with Russia included, curbing the influence of the Five Eyes and bent on avoiding by all means a war in European soil. For the moment, it’s all talk. But the game-changing seeds are all there.

    Misguided scenarios insist that Putin skillfully exploited the imperial obsession with the rise and rise of China to re-establish Russia’s sphere of influence. Nonsense. The sphere was always there – and won’t move. The difference is Moscow finally got fed up with the heavy symbolism permeating the unresolved 404 mess: the intermingling of raw Russophobia in Washington and containment/encirclement NATO knocking at the door.

    Metaphorically, this may turn out to be the Year of two – sanctioned – Black Water Tigers, one Chinese, one Siberian. They will be harassed non-stop by the headless eagle, blind to its own irreversible decay and always resorting to the serial Hail Mary passes of the only “policy” it knows.

    The ultimate danger – especially for the European minions – is that the headless eagle will never let go of its former “indispensable” status without provoking another devastating war. In European soil. Still the tigers persist: in Beijing, before the Games commence, they will be taking yet another step to irreversibly bury the “rules-based international order”.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 22:30

  • How Much Does It Cost To Host The Olympics?
    How Much Does It Cost To Host The Olympics?

    The scope of the Olympics has scaled up drastically.

    Over a century ago, the first modern games had approximately 280 athletes competing from 12 different countries – these days, more than 10,000 athletes from 200+ countries participate in this prestigious athletic event.

    And, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, as the games have increased in scope and size, so too has the cost of putting them on.

    How much does it cost to host the Olympic games? Over the years, the final price tag has varied greatly from city to city. Here’s a look at the estimated cost of hosting the games (both summer and winter) since 1998.

    Estimated Cost of Hosting the Olympics, by City

    A major expense for a host city is building out infrastructure to support the tourism and traffic generated by the games.

    For instance, when Sochi hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014, the city spent roughly $50.7 billion on non-sports-related infrastructure—approximately 85% of its total budget.

    Of course, the hope is that non-sports-related infrastructure will benefit the host city long-term, which is how countries rationalize the cost.

    But sports-related facilities also cost a fortune to build, and are often not utilized once the games are over. For instance, Beijing’s national stadium cost $460 million to build initially, with millions needed to maintain it each year. The facility has barely been used in the years following the 2008 games.

    That said, it is worth noting that Beijing plans on using the national stadium for the Opening and Closing ceremonies when they host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 22:00

  • Saturday Satire: Trudeau Vows To Break Biden's Record For Consecutive Days Hiding In The Basement
    Saturday Satire: Trudeau Vows To Break Biden’s Record For Consecutive Days Hiding In The Basement

    Authored (satirically) by Simon Balck via SovereignMan.com,

    Two days into his courageous, self-imposed quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19, the triple vaccinated Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, vowed to remain in hiding for “as long as it takes” to break Joe Biden’s record.

    “I know there are legions of angry truckers out there rampaging across our capital city. But right now my highest duty as Prime Minister is to remain in my basement and watch PornHub.”

    When asked by sole, carefully selected reporter who was allowed to attend the press conference how long he expected to remain in isolation, Trudeau replied,

    “Well, since there’s actually no public health reason for me to be in isolation, I’m pretty much going to keep making it up as I go along. I know that President Biden had spent a record 63 consecutive days in his basement during the 2020 campaign, and I’m certain I can break that record. So basically I’ll be here as long as it takes.”

    The Prime Minister went on to explain that he had even been in touch with Dr. Anthony Fauci from the United States to find out how long #science says he could remain quarantined in his basement.

    Dr. Fauci’s reply? “Forever.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 21:30

  • FAA Grants FOIA Request To College Kid Who Tracks Elon Musk's Private Jet
    FAA Grants FOIA Request To College Kid Who Tracks Elon Musk’s Private Jet

    The college kid who created a proprietary Twitter bot that tracks Elon Musk’s private jet announced an FAA FOIA request “went through” and now can track three SpaceX jets. 

    19-year-old Jack Sweeney, the mad genius behind the Twitter account “Elon Musk’s Jet,” announced early Saturday morning that his “FAA FOIA request went thru, Now I have all the registration and airworthiness documents for all the SpaceX jets.” 

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    Elon Musk’s Jet uses public flight data to track not just Musk’s private jet but two others. Sweeney uploaded registration and airworthiness documents of three SpaceX jets (including Musk’s Gulfstream G650 and two other Gulfstream G550s). 

    Days ago, Musk blocked Sweeney on Twitter after the billionaire became annoyed that Elon Musk’s Jet account has hundreds of thousands of followers tracking his location. 

    Musk offered the kid a lousy $5k to delete the account last month. Sweeney responded to the billionaire and asked for $50k or a Tesla Model 3. Musk didn’t comply and told him that he was concerned about “crazy people” tracking his location. 

    Tracking corporate jets of dealmakers is nothing new. Quandl, a flight monitoring company that sells flight data, uncovered a Warren Buffett deal before it happened after a big shot in the oil and gas industry flew to Omaha, Nebraska. 

    As we’ve said numerous times, Sweeney should offload his bots to hedge funds before Musk finds a way to nuke the account. 

    “Elon might not be interested in my offer, but I’m sure hedge funds that already use flight data to track corporate execs will find my flight tracking software one of the best out there. It’s because I’m working with the most extensive open network ADS-B Exchange which is practically the best coverage for flight tracking that doesn’t block any corporate execs.

    We all know FlightAware and FlightRadar24, but they censor many flights of corporate execs. My software doesn’t. The rapid increase in Twitter followers proves hundreds of thousands of people who want this data,” Sweeney told us. 

    A question we have for Sweeney: What’s your endgame? Instead of asking for a Model 3, shoot for the stars and ask for a Plaid. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 21:00

  • New Private Currency Uses Bills Filled With Real Gold
    New Private Currency Uses Bills Filled With Real Gold

    By Jackson Elliott of The Epoch Times

    Modern currencies such as Bitcoin expect to find success in a more technological world, but a new currency known as Goldbacks might corner the post-apocalyptic currency market.

    Goldbacks in several different denominations

    In 2019, Goldback president Jeremy Cordon said he had a dream in which he saw people paying for groceries using golden bills. Cordon had previously worked for years trying to make gold into functional money, but the dream gave him a new idea: What if a bill small enough to buy groceries could include a tiny percentage of gold?

    “This felt like an epiphany because I saw people using gold as a regular money,” he said. “This fit into the vision that anyone anywhere could use gold as their currency of choice.”

    For thousands of years, anyone who wanted to buy goods with gold faced “the small coin problem,” Cordon told The Epoch Times. A 1-ounce gold coin, worth about $2,000, is far too expensive for everyday use, but a cheap gold coin is impractically small.

    “Gold is the best money, but it can’t buy a loaf of bread,” he said.

    To solve this problem, Cordon used new technology to create a bill that sandwiches a particle-thin gold layer between two layers of polymer—the Goldback. The result can be worth as little as $3.80.

    Be Prepared

    At a time when Bitcoin has devoured most of the private and local currency market, Goldbacks have arrived late to the private currency world. In the 1980s and ’90s, private currencies experienced a boom around the United States, according to University of Central Oklahoma professor and local currency expert Loren Gatch. But since then, they’ve been on the decline.

    “That’s something which [has] pretty much gone downhill in the last couple decades,” Gatch said.

    Cities such as Ithaca, New York, and Berkshire, Massachusetts; businesses such as coal mining camps; and political groups such as left-wing activists and libertarian anti-government enclaves have all used private currencies.

    But even amid a private currency decline, Goldback has $20 million of bills in circulation, according to Cordon. They’re recognized as legal tender in Utah and Wyoming and are legal for use in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Dakota.  This number puts Goldbacks at the top end of what private currencies have ever achieved.

    “It’s totally off the scale,” Gatch said. “$20 million is far greater than what I think any of the experiments that I’m familiar with—in the last quarter-century—have ever tried to do.”

    Gatch said the idea of filling bills with gold seems like a gimmick. Gold-backed currencies already work when the gold is in a vault, and people still must trust the banker at some point.

    “You’re basically not getting away from the problem of public credibility if you issue these currencies that claim to have a little bit of gold in it,” he said. “They could be gold, it could be something else. You have to establish the public’s confidence in it.”

    But a post-apocalyptic setting might make the gold inside the bills more valuable, according to Gatch. If all of society were to collapse, it would be better to have gold in hand than in a bank vault somewhere.

    Even so, Gatch doubted that people would need gold money after a societal collapse.

    “It’s true that if the world collapsed, the dollar probably wouldn’t be worth very much,” he said. “But, man, that’s the least of your worries.”

    Apocalypse Money

    If society collapses, Goldbacks are made of something that has remained valuable throughout human history, Cordon said.

    “You can barter with gold just about anywhere in the world. And that’s part of why people buy gold,” he said. “If it’s the apocalypse, if our electrical grid goes down, you don’t want Bitcoin or dollars.”

    Goldback director of sales and marketing Kevan Mills speculates that the dollar’s collapse into worthlessness grows closer every day. Studies show that no fiat currency has lasted for more than four generations.

    “We are just getting towards the end of the second generation, if we’re counting from when [President Richard] Nixon canceled the gold standard to now,” he said. According to tech website TechJury, the average fiat currency lasts 27 years, although some exceptions, such as the British pound, have lasted for centuries.

    A wallet filled with Goldbacks

    For now, it seems that Goldback is betting that such a collapse isn’t imminent. People can exchange dollars for Goldbacks, according to Mills. He noted that there’s value in owning a diverse pool of assets.

    “It also makes sense to have some assets and precious metal, just in case,” he said.

    For Cordon, who is a Mormon, preparedness is an article of faith. The Mormon church teaches that believers should have a three-month supply of food in their homes in case of disaster.

    “We encourage members worldwide to prepare for adversity in life by having a basic supply of food and water and some money in savings,” the Mormon Church’s website reads. Mormons have a reputation for being the first “preppers,” and Utah hosts apocalypse prepping conferences.

    Whatever their motives, most Goldbacks users appreciate the freedom, beauty, and security that gold offers, Cordon said. People from all political affiliations and walks of life want the new currency.

    “It’s really anybody that loves liberty,” he said. “I think the reason why gold has been money for thousands of years is that it’s just really beautiful.”

    A Goldback note. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

    Gold in Hand

    According to Mills, Goldbacks practically advertise themselves as they spread through transactions. People are eager to use a currency when they know it’s gold.

    “This is the first company I’ve ever worked with where the product sells itself,” Mills said. “In 25 years of marketing, I’ve never been involved with a product where consistently in board meetings and executive meetings we’re saying, ‘What do we do to slow demand?’”

    Today, more than 200 Utah businesses advertise that they take Goldbacks. But for at least seven of those businesses, receiving Goldbacks from customers has mostly been a theoretical transaction. Only one of those business owners said he receives Goldbacks on a consistent basis.

    Skyler McCallson, owner of Utah’s Wok the Line restaurant, said Mills asked him to sign up as a business that accepts Goldbacks.

    “We probably see maybe 2 percent to 3 percent of our sales in Goldbacks,” McCallson said. “But you know, that’s 2 percent to 3 percent of sales we weren’t normally seeing, so we’ll take it.”

    He said he keeps the Goldbacks he gets paid.

    The rest of the contacted businesses say they’ve seen only one purchase in Goldbacks. Often, the purchaser was a representative from Goldback.

    Paul Mooney, owner of Utah’s Alien IT Services, has yet to receive a single purchase in Goldbacks, although he said he would accept them on principle.

    “You never know. I don’t know,” Mooney said. “I just have to see if anybody wants to go that route.”

    One real estate business owner said that he has agreed in theory to accept Goldbacks in payment for a house, but has never had anyone offer them to him for that purpose. However, the bills are a common sight in his community.

    “I have seen them used even in garage sales,” he said.

    In just a week, Mills said he paid a landscaper, grass seeder, and shed builder in Goldbacks for their services. Although none of these businesses had received Goldbacks before, they quickly accepted them.

    “Heck, yeah, I would! I’ve been collecting gold and silver coins for 30 years, I’d love to take payment in gold,” the planter told Mills.

    Making Money

    In a way, Goldbacks reverse many modern currency trends. From 1879 to 1933 dollars were effectively receipts for gold. Any American could exchange dollars for an equivalent amount in gold. Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed an executive order that made the practice illegal. President Richard Nixon continued this trend, taking America off the gold standard in 1971.

    But President Nixon separated the dollar’s value from gold. Today, dollars are a “fiat currency”—they’re worth what the federal government says they’re worth. As a result, fiat currencies often struggle with inflation.

    “It’s happened hundreds of times where a fiat currency can hyperinflate and lose all of its value,” Cordon said.

    But the Goldback is valuable because of its gold, making it “commodity money.”

    Business owners can rest assured that their Goldbacks are secure for several reasons, according to Cordon.

    In the eternal race between counterfeiters and currency-makers, the advanced technology used to make Goldbacks gives the currency a 15-year head start, he said.

    “You’re looking at about $10 million worth of equipment before you can counterfeit a Goldback. And you’re looking at about 10 years of expertise,” he said.

    Also, because the gold that backs each Goldback is in the bill itself, users don’t have to trust that Cordon’s business has enough precious metal to back each bill.

    All in the Name

    No matter their suitability for the apocalypse, Goldbacks face their biggest threat from the federal government. If private currencies too closely resemble U.S. currency, the federal government will prosecute its creators for counterfeiting. In 2009, Bernard von NotHaus, the creator of the Liberty Dollar, was arrested for counterfeiting. At its height, there were about $5 million in silver-backed Liberty Dollars in circulation.

    Unlike traditional counterfeiters, Von NotHaus was open about the money he manufactured, which didn’t resemble any bill or coin currently in circulation. But he used the word “dollar” and the phrase “Trust in God” on his coins. To the government, this constituted counterfeiting.

    Von NotHaus was also rampantly anti-government, according to Gatch. His company’s original name was the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code.

    “What you cannot do is pretend that your currency is U.S. dollars,” Gatch said. “Then that’s where the government gets mad at you.”

    The government confiscated Von NotHaus’ silver reserves when he was arrested, but returned them in 2014.

    The FBI also argued that the Liberty Dollar worked as a multi-level marketing scheme. Von NotHaus also sold Liberty Dollars for much more than the gold and silver in the coins plus the addition of coin minting costs.

    But compared to other small gold products, Goldbacks are impressively cheap, according to Max Hockley, a longtime gold collection expert.

    Cordon said his company has learned from the fate of the Liberty Dollar. He designed Goldbacks to be impossible to mistake for dollars. The bills feature lengthwise images, no dollar signs, and Bible verses that don’t appear on dollars.

    “We don’t want anybody thinking Goldbacks are dollars,” he said. “Their value is higher than dollars.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 20:30

  • This Is The Worst Earnings Season Since Covid Emerged And It's About To Get Much Worse
    This Is The Worst Earnings Season Since Covid Emerged And It’s About To Get Much Worse

    Amid seemingly pervasive gloom and doom that the market is this close from crashing, the reality is that with more than half of S&P 500 companies (accounting for 75% of earnings) having reported earnings, 78.8% of companies have beaten expectations (compared with an average of 84% over the past four quarters, according to Refinitiv).

    That’s the good news.

    The bad news is that, as Bank of America has calculated, 4Q consensus EPS is tracking just 2% above where it stood on Jan 1, led by tech (but this is about to get hit badly) and financials, while revenue beats are even more precarious, tracking at just +1% versus consensus …

    … which is far weaker than prior quarters since COVID when EPS was +11% on average vs. consensus by Week 3.

    The proportion of beats is also tracking at the weakest level since COVID: 72%/73%/58% beat on EPS/sales/both, better than the post-Week 3 historical average of 64%/58%/44%, but well below the post-COVID average of 80%/77%/67%.

    “It was huge beats last year and that’s shrunk,” said Nick Raich, CEO of The Earnings Scout. “It’s partially reverting back to normal, but it’s also the supply-chain pressures and inflationary pressures taking a toll.”

    Ominously, the growth stocks which have long served as the market’s “generals”, have underperformed value stocks by 8ppt YTD, representing the biggest underperformance since Feb 2001. A hawkish Fed is seen as the major culprit of the sell-off, but fundamentals have started to weaken relative to Value. Since the end of 3Q21, 2022 earnings estimates for NDX fell 0.8%, while estimates for the S&P 500 rose 1.9%, indicating weaker fundamentals for Growth stocks relative to the overall market. That’s also why according to BofA, despite the big underperformance in Growth YTD, we believe it is still too early to rotate into Growth stocks.

    With revenue and EPS beats are clearly stalling, net margins (ex-Fins) are tracking largely in-line with conservative expectations of a big 100bp drop QoQ – margins have driven only a 1% EPS beat, while beats in prior post-COVID quarters have mostly come from better margins. Meanwhile, companies that beat on both sales & EPS performed in-line with the S&P 500 the following day on average, underscoring the backdrop of elevated sentiment/valuations.

    This is also why with (stalling) growth priced to perfection, for yet another quarter there has been no reward for beats, as companies that beat on both the top and bottom line see no upside one day after reporting, while the punishment for misses remains stark.

    One bright spot of the earnings season is a jump in capex, rising 38% YoY and +20% on a 2-yr basis, accelerating from last quarter’s +3% 2-yr growth rate. It is still early with just 100 companies reporting 4Q capex, but with lingering bottlenecks in the economy, we expect more capex to boost efficiency, particularly on automation.

    Drilling down into the cost side of the income statement, BofA’s Corporate Misery Indicator – a macro indicator for profit environment – slightly improved QoQ, as pricing (CPI) accelerated faster than costs (wages). However, a further rise in wages is a bigger risk to corporate margins than PPI or commodities, where labor represents as much as 40% of total costs according to the BEA. The BofA Corporate Misery Indicator, which uses average hourly earnings as a negative input, has been highly correlated to YoY earnings growth (66%). The correlation drops significantly to just 28% using PPI instead of average hourly earnings, and to negative 46% using the Bloomberg Commodity Index (Exhibit 13). To BofA, this means that corporate margins are at risk amid rising wage pressure.

    Paradoxically, none of this is registering yet at the macro level, as analysts still expect the S&P 500 to break margin records in 2022
    As shown in the chart below, analysts expect 4Q to mark the near-term trough in corporate margins and forecast margins expanding in 2022 to a record high by 2Q. What’s harder to swallow is that this is attributable to two sectors reaching new margin highs: Consumer Discretionary (4Q21 at 5.5% to 3Q22 at 9.0%) and Industrials (4Q21 at 8.6% to 3Q22 at 11.0%) where these are two of the most labor-intensive sectors.

    Even though Wall Street refuses to see what’s in front of it, corporate America is starting to freak out: based on BofA’s Predictive Analytics team’s analysis, corporate sentiment remained weak so far this quarter, only slightly recovering from last quarter, which was the lowest level since 3Q20. This matters because sentiment score has been highly predictive of the following quarter’s earnings growth YoY (54% r-sq), and points to slowing earnings growth ahead.

    While Q4 is ugly, Q1 2022 is looking even worse, with sales estimates for COVID laggards (e.g. Airlines, Restaurants, etc.) further cut in recent weeks, -4% since Omicron news (vs. +0.6% for the S&P 500). BofA card data suggests continued slowdown in services spending, but the indirect impact on labor and supply chain outweighs the direct impact on services spending.

    Which brings us to the punchline: amid persistent optimism among investors that the current earnings soft patch will promptly recover, the guidance ratio from corporations – who know their business better than anyone – has plummeted to Feb 2020 level. The biggest deterioration has been in guidance, where BofA’s guidance ratio tracker (# of above- vs. below-consensus guidance) has tumbled to just 0.29x so far in January only slightly better than the Feb 2020 level when COVID first hit (0.26x), with a 3-mo. ratio of 0.67x (vs. the long-term average of 0.80x). Consistently, 1Q EPS also fell 0.6% since the earnings season began, representing the first downward revision for FQ1 EPS since COVID. Similarly, the bank’s earnings revision ratio (# of upward vs. downward revisions) also sharply fell to 1.4x in January so far vs. the 2.9x peak in August 2021.

    However, as this is taking place, full-year 2022 EPS has risen 0.5%, implying that analysts are penciling in a temporary blip in 1Q amid Omicron. What’s harder to swallow is analysts expect margins improving to new highs by 2Q, driven by the most labor-intensive sectors (Consumer Discretionary and Industrials), despite a step-up increase in wages.

    Putting it all together, we go to BofA’s Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett, whose latest uber-bearish note we published yesterday, “BofA Says Endgame Begins: Global Rate Shock Has Triggered Tech Wreck, Recession Countdown And “Systemic Event“”, and which among many things, pointed out why stocks keep slumping as expectations for more rate hikes build – because normally hikes come in a time of economic growth not a slowdown like we have now as indicated by the rapid drop in ISM new orders…

    … and also why in addition to slumping economic growth, BofA is now expecting global EPS growth to tumble to 0-10% by the summer. Translation: earnings growth turns negative some time in Q3, just in time for the Fed to throw in the towel on its rate hikes and the economy to slide into recession.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 20:00

  • Pentagon Responds To DoD Whistleblowers' Claim Of Spiking Disease Rates In The Military After COVID Vaccine Mandate
    Pentagon Responds To DoD Whistleblowers’ Claim Of Spiking Disease Rates In The Military After COVID Vaccine Mandate

    Authored by Enrico Trigoso via The Epoch Times,

    Three United States military doctors have blown the whistle on documents allegedly from The United States Department of Defense (DoD) that they had access to, which show “skyrocketing rates of disease” since the introduction and mandating of the CCP virus vaccines in armed forces, human rights attorney Leigh Dundas told The Epoch Times.

    Dundas was recently approached by Dr. Samuel Sigoloff, Special Forces flight surgeon Lt. Col. Peter Chambers, and Aerospace occupational medicine specialist Lt. Col. Theresa Long.

    They handed documents to Dundas, who appeared recently with attorney Tom Renz in a five-hour hearing organized by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) titled “COVID-19: Second Opinion.”

    Renz shared some of the numbers related to medical disorders in the U.S. military data with The Epoch Times.

    The whistleblowers, who are represented by Renz, gave him the data “under penalty of perjury,” he said during the hearing.

    Renz intends to submit the information to the courts, he told Johnson.

    The DoD responded that the DMED (Defense Medical Epidemiology Database) data from 2016 to 2020 that the whistleblowers brought up was erroneous and incomplete, and is currently under review.

    “DHA’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division (AFSD) conducted a complete review of the data contained in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) and found that the data was incorrect for the years 2016-2020,” Maj. Charlie Dietz, a spokesperson for the DoD, told The Epoch Times.

    “DMED is a web-based tool to query de-identified active component personnel and medical event data contained within the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS).

    “Comparing the DMED database to the source data contained in DMSS, AFHSD discovered that the total number of medical diagnoses from 2016-2020 that were accessible in DMED represented only a small fraction of actual medical diagnoses for those years. In contrast, the 2021 total number of medical diagnoses were up to date in DMED.  Comparison of 2021 to 2016-2020 resulted in the appearance of significant increased occurrence of all medical diagnoses in 2021 because of the under-reported data for 2016-2020. AFHSD has taken DMED offline to identify and correct the root-cause of the data corruption,” Dietz said.

    Renz responded:

    “The DoD has claimed that the DMED data from the years 2016-2020 was incorrect. This is absurd. We spend millions of dollars per year on DMED and people monitoring DMED which is one of the premier epidemiological databases in the world. Accuracy in this database is critical as it is used to monitor for health issues in our troops.

    “The DoD would have us believe that the DMED database was wrong from 2016-2020 but then magically was corrected in 2021 despite the fact that they had not noticed it was wrong until we pointed it out in our testimony before Senator Johnson. Further, we are asked to believe that in 2020, the year of what they claim to be the greatest pandemic since 1918, and despite the fact that it is documented that the CDC was also watching this database, no one noticed an error of 20 million-plus injury/disease codes per year,” Renz told The Epoch Times.

    “The Department of Defense, the Biden administration is on notice they must preserve these records and this must be investigated,” Johnson said in the five-hour hearing in Washington.

    “Renz also informed me that some DMED data showing registered diagnoses of myocarditis had been removed from the database. Following the allegation that DMED data had been doctored, I immediately wrote to you on January 24 requesting that you preserve all records referring, relating, or reported to DMED. I have yet to hear whether you have complied with this request.” Johnson wrote in a letter (pdf) to Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary.

    Medical Data

    Dundas told The Epoch Times that “in January of 2021. They introduced the vaccine, they mandated the vaccine for the U.S. military members. And in just the first 10 months of that vaccination year, anxiety jumped from 37,000 typically prior to that to 931,791 cases. It was a 2,400 plus percent increase.”

    She went on to say that breast cancer was “pretty formulaic,” ranging from 500 to 900 cases for the five years prior to the introduction of the mandatory vaccination.

    “First 10 months or 2021. They were at 4,068 cases. Again, it was about 450 some odd percent increase.

    “Female infertility 2,200 cases a year a bad year would be 2,300 cases a year, first 10 months of 2021 after the vaccine 10,713 cases. ”

    Even diseases that have not been connected so far with the vaccines saw a dramatic spike.

    “Esophageal cancer in the U.S. military. Very, very minimal. Twenty-five, 26 cases, maybe a bad year is 39 cases. Jumps to 200 plus cases,” Dundas said.

    “January acute myocarditis was in 176 cases, but now it’s practically down to 70 … bad that stuff going on,” she continued.

    “Bell’s palsy 400 cases a year on average in the first 10 months of 2021 over 1,300 cases.”

    “Cognitive issues way up altered mental status way up. Congenital male malformations doubled.”

    “HIV 400 cases on average [per year] and now over 2,400 cases in the first 10 months.”

    Miscarriages

    According to the whistleblower documents, miscarriages in the military were at 1,400 to 1,500 a year in the first three quarters of 2020, and it increased to over 4,000 during the first 10 months of 2021.

    The Epoch Times reached out to Dr. Christiane Northrup, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist with more than 30 years of experience and the former president of the American Holistic Medical Association.

    Particularly alarming is the increase in miscarriages, she said.

    “Here’s what we were finding—starting in April of 2021. All of us in the five Doc’s group, Dr. Lee Merritt, Dr. Carrie Madej, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and Dr. Larry Palevsky, and me. We were hearing stories from all over the country about women who were having abnormal bleeding, miscarriages, and stillbirths, just from being around the people who had recently had the shot,” Northrup told The Epoch Times.

    “We all got together and we said, Wait a minute. We’ve got to study this,” Northrup went on.

    “People that I knew in the fertility business, we’re finding that all these women were having problems. I was getting a lot of personal calls. ‘What do I do?’ … we were very concerned.”

    Michael Yeadon, the former Pfizer vice president and chief scientist for allergy and respiratory research, and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg issued a petition (pdf) for administrative action regarding confirmation of efficacy on several of their findings regarding the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus vaccines.

    “We detailed a series of mechanistic toxicology concerns which we believed were reasonable to hold, unless & until proven not to occur,” Yeadon told The Epoch Times.

    “Among those was that adverse impacts on conception & ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable,” he added.

    “It’s important to note that none of these gene-based agents had completed what’s called ‘reproductive toxicology.’ Over a year later, this battery of tests in animals still has not been done. So there was & still is no data package supporting safety in pregnancy or prior to conception.”

    One of the whistleblowers, Dr. Pete Constantine Chambers, has been practicing medicine for 25 years, 16 of which he served as a flight surgeon attached to Special Operations.

    “Here is a question that troubles me,” Chambers told The Epoch Times via email.

    “After having my orders cut short leaving me no medical insurance coverage, losing my pay and leave that I had accumulated without any forewarning for exhibiting the Army Value of Personal Courage, and practicing the safe standard of care medicine by an entity I have served for so long; 1) What will happen to my enlisted troops? 2) How many? How many soldiers and airmen will experience adverse reactions, some of which result in disabilities or God forbid, death.

    “One might call a provider such as myself an ‘anti-vaxxer.’ Nothing is further from the truth,” he further noted.

    “I took the full course starting in January. I trusted my government and medical leaders. I have taken every vaccine the Army has given me since my first day as a private, in 1983. However, I too have experienced adverse reactions and am currently in the care of medical specialists exploring the signs and symptoms post second vaccine as well as the ominous finding on my brain MRI.

    “I love my country, my state, and the heroes I work with and for. I believe all Americans are worth the sacrifices we make to keep us safe. I also believe as a provider in the first stanza of the Hippocratic Oath; ‘First of all, do no harm.’”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 19:30

  • Visualizing Where Cryptocurrency Is Most Heavily Used
    Visualizing Where Cryptocurrency Is Most Heavily Used

    A report by Chainalysis shows which countries are the heaviest users of cryptocurrencies around the world, weighing transaction values by purchasing power and, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, putting a special focus on non-professional and peer-to-peer use to gauge which countries have really made strides in adopting crypto use across a larger swath of their populations.

    Infographic: Where Cryptocurrency Is Most Heavily Used | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Vietnam is the undefeated winner of the ranking, scoring high on overall crypto transaction value as well as payments made by individuals. The smaller country’s incoming cryptocurrency transaction value wasn’t far below that of much larger India.

    One of the reasons cryptocurrencies are proving popular in Vietnam – and other developing countries – is that they are used as an investment tool in lieu of other good options, according to the report. Trying to preserve the value of one’s savings when local currencies are faltering is another incentive to invest in crypto, putting Venezuela, Argentina and Turkey on the map of cryto adopters.

    Individuals in developing countries also use crypto in peer-to-peer payments. In this segment, African countries like Nigeria and Kenya rank high. African countries have been on the forefront of adopting innovative P2P payment methods, for example mobile payments, in the process of leapfrogging options like bank transfers and those digital payment options tied to them.

    Among developed countries, cryptocurrency use was most widespread in English-speaking countries – first and foremost the United States, but also the UK, Canada, South Africa and Australia. Emerging economies India, China and Brazil also registered as heavy users. In the case of Russia’s and Ukraine’s intensive use, Chainalysis ties these to widespread mistrust of institutions and possibly capital flight and tax avoidance.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 19:00

  • After Enabling Violent, Far-Left Extremists; GoFundMe 'Steals' Millions From Freedom Convoy Fundraisers
    After Enabling Violent, Far-Left Extremists; GoFundMe ‘Steals’ Millions From Freedom Convoy Fundraisers

    Update (1830ET): Just as we anticipated, it looks like a crypto-based crowd-funding platform Tallycoin has helped supporters of the Canadian truckers re-route their donations to help support the people on the front lines of the protest.

    In the day that has passed since GoFundMe announced its plans to quash a fundraising effort for the truckers, more than $700,000 has been raised to benefit the truckers on Tallycoin.

    Last night, GoFundMe announced that it would be seizing all the money donated to the cause, and that donors would only see their donations refunded if they specifically requested that the money be returned. Otherwise, it would be forwarded to another cause of GoFundMe’s choice. Well, this didn’t go over too well with the donors, who many of whom threw a fit online.

    Now, in what could become a major threat to GoFundMe, anybody interested in the new platform can donate as little as a single Satoshi (presently, about 2,400 satoshis make up $1), and the fundraiser has a target of 500,000,000.

    The fundraiser on Tallycoin has the following message affixed to it: “The Canadian Bitcoin community would like to have a second financial access point for #FreedomConvoy2022. Legacy financial infrastructure can sometimes be politicized and clamped down upon, whereas Bitcoin is a truly censorship resistant method of communicating value. Don’t allow your voices to be silenced, and don’t allow your financial sovereignty to be trampled upon. Love, unity and freedom – let’s raise some hard money for hard workers!”

    * * *

    Update (1056ET): Conservatives are livid after GoFundMe caved to the Canadian government and canceled a massive donation campaign that had reached C$10 million (US$7.9m).

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) tweeted: “It is a fraud for @gofundme to commandeer $9M in donations sent to support truckers and give it to causes of their own choosing,” adding “I will work with @AGAshleyMoody to investigate these deceptive practices — these donors should be given a refund.”

     

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    Rep Jim. Jordan (R-OH) pointed out that “GoFundMe promoted the ANTIFA-occupied CHOP zone in Seattle, But they shut down fundraisers for truckers protesting #COVID mandates.”

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    Benny Johnson captured the prevailing sentiment on Saturday, tweeting that the “Go Fund Me story was my breaking point. Blood boiling. FUCK GO FUND ME. Put them in prison. Authoritarian boot-licking thieving scum. Not another dollar to them – EVER.”

     Others were similarly outraged.

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    GoFundMe’s Trustpilot rating page was just suspended after people began to bombard it with negative reviews.

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    For example:

    Meanwhile, a GiveSendGo campaign for the Freedom Convoy reached $1.1 million in donations overnight, however the platform is currently inaccessible and has said it’s under DDOS attack.

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    Let’s review GoFundMe’s previous support of far-left violence:

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    *  *  *

    Update (0725ET): After the radical leftists in San Francisco who operate GoFundMe seized millions of dollars from the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” and vowed to refund donations to donors (upon request) or disburse the funds to “credible charities” (like Black Lives Matter, Greenpeace, and Planned Parenthood Matter), the internet went absolutely mental Friday night about the crowd-sourcing platform’s decision.  

    Rebel News’ Ezra Levant equated GoFundMe’s decision as “stealing the money.” He said the crowd-sourcing platform should have “automatically refunded its donors.” 

    Hours later, around 0200 ET Saturday, GoFundMe released another statement that said, “due to donor feedback, we are simplifying the process and automatically refunding donations.”

    The audacity that leftists at GoFundMe thought they could redistribute the money elsewhere is shocking. It is a wake-up call for freedom-loving people who band together to take their funding operations elsewhere (ever hear of BTC or ETH?). GoFundMe’s poor judgment to only now automatically refund donors has shown their true liberal colors (this blunder has sparked a trust issue with the platform). 

    All donors received this emailed statement early Saturday morning: 

    We are automatically refunding your Freedom Convoy 2022 donation.

    GoFundMe supports peaceful protests and we believe that was the intention of the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser when it was first created. However, as a result of multiple discussions with local law enforcement and police reports of violence and other unlawful activity, the Freedom Convoy fundraiser has been removed from the GoFundMe platform.

    The update we issued earlier enabled all donors to get a refund and outlined a plan to distribute remaining funds to verified charities selected by the Freedom Convoy organizers. However, due to donor feedback, we are simplifying the process for you. We will automatically refund your contributions directly – you do not need to submit a request. You can expect to see your refund within 7-10 business days.

    GoFundMe also tweeted part of the statement. The tweet was immediately ‘ratioed,’ which means replies outnumbered retweets and likes, indicating the tweet was very unpopular. 

    The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, and a supporter of the truckers tweeted a meme comparing the amateur thieves robbing railcars in Los Angeles to “professional thieves” at GoFundMe. The tweet went out to 72 million of his followers. 

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    Here’s what others are saying:

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    The damage is already done. It’s only a matter of time before an alternative crowd-sourcing platform is discovered and or created. 

    * * *   

    Despite initially refusing to cave to pressure from Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and his allies, GoFundMe announced late Friday evening that it had decided not to disburse any more money to the “Freedom Convoy” and its supporters gathered in Coutts, Alberta, and Ottawa. Users will now need to request a refund of their donation, or risk the possibility that the company will instead reroute it to an “approved” charity.

    As Rebel News Editor-in-Chief Ezra Levant reported in a tweet, GoFundMe has decided to take – or some might say steal – the roughly CAD$9 million that was supposed to be used to pay for supplies like gas, food and other necessities for the truckers and instead dole that money out to charities of the company’s choosing, unless donors fill out a request form.

    Why the company has decided on this policy, instead of instating automatic refunds for donors, isn’t clear. But as Levant joked, “what a windfall” for Black Lives Matter, Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood.”

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    GoFundMe claimed that the fundraiser is in violation of “Term 8” of its terms of service clause, and also explained that it often works with local authorities to “make sure we have a detailed understanding…of facts on the ground.”

    The decision was made in order to ensure GoFundMe “remains a trusted platform”.

    Others wondered how any of this is legal.

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    The Ottawa police, meanwhile, insist that demonstrators in the city are acting “unlawfully”. Several have been arrested (mostly for charges that may seem serious but actually aren’t) for making threatening statements on social media and for other issues.

    Ottawa Police have also warned that they will be collecting as much digital and financial information as they can from both the truckers and anybody who donates to support them. In a threatening statement, the police implied that supporters of the Freedom Convoy could face prosecution just for donating.

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    At this point, there’s really nothing else for users to do but request their refund (so that GoFundMe doesn’t simply take their money) and never donate to another fundraiser on the platform again.

    Readers can find the link below:

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    After all, there are plenty of other crowd-raising platforms out there.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 18:44

  • Wokism Could Provoke A Global Anti-American Backlash
    Wokism Could Provoke A Global Anti-American Backlash

    Authored by José Niño via The Mises Institute,

    “What starts here changes the world.”

    The University of Texas at Austin’s motto not only applies to the research university’s overall impact on world affairs, but also to the outsized role cultural and political developments within the United States have on the rest of the planet.

    Ever since it became the world’s premier superpower after World War II, the US has left its mark from New York City all the way to Tokyo. Doubly so during the Cold War, when the US used, as geopolitical analyst Niccolo Soldo described, the “four cultural ICBMs” of Coca-Cola, rock ’n’ roll, Bugs Bunny, and Levi’s Jeans to project soft power abroad in its struggle with the Soviet Union.

    Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the US entered a unipolar moment in the 1990s when it seemed that it had no peer competitors on the horizon. However, the rise of China and Russia as more assertive geopolitical actors in the last fifteen years has gradually whittled away at this state of unipolarity.

    Despite the rise of new competitors on the world stage, the US remains the most powerful country on the planet. With two moats in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and a vast nuclear arsenal, the US is virtually unassailable by external threats, not to mention its overall economic base, which is leaps and bounds ahead of all other nations.

    As far as soft power is concerned, the US maintains its primacy in that regard. One need only look at the foreign box office numbers of the Marvel franchise to see how strong the US’s cultural reach is, even in rival countries such as China and Russia.

    It’s not just Hollywood content that’s proliferating internationally. Even the US’s most obnoxious cultural developments, such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) fanaticism, are making their way across the globe.

    The wave of BLM protests that swept across Europe and even reached Japan illustrated the level of cultural power the US is able to wield. When LGBT and BLM flags adorned the South Korean embassy, one couldn’t help but ignore the US’s cultural influence on the international stage.

    Given the breadth of US cultural power, George Mason University professor of economics Tyler Cowen argued in a piece titled ”Why Wokeism Will Rule the World” that wokism would likely engulf entire nations. He believes that “American culture is a healthy, democratizing, liberating influence” and therefore should be extended. Such pretensions are commonplace among denizens of the Beltway.

    While the US can boast many great achievements—from its competitive federalist system to its robust entrepreneurial culture—other facets of its culture have been declining precipitously over the past century. This decline has been so notable that foreign countries are now beginning to have doubts about the US as some immaculate polity that can do no wrong. Most countries simply don’t want to be remade in the US’s image, especially in its current “woke” iteration.

    While Cowen raises some thought-provoking points about wokism’s potential appeal abroad, the US’s soft power projection may be reaching its limits.

    For example, the International Olympics Committee initially banned athletes from wearing BLM apparel during the Tokyo Olympics. Russian president Vladimir Putin has even condemned the growing culture wars in the US and likened them to the kulturkampf that the Bolsheviks immediately provoked once they toppled the preceding Czarist regime.

    Even in the United Kingdom, no bastion of right-wing populism, the Tory government pushed back against BLM unrest during a time when leftist agitators went on an iconoclastic frenzy against the monuments to British historical figures ranging from English merchant Edward Colston to famed prime minister Winston Churchill.

    Conservative columnist Ed West of the British publication UnHerd was utterly perplexed at the arrival of American-based racial categories such as BIPOC (black, indigenous, [and] people of color). Such American classifications have even made their way into the National Health Service’s website for staff to learn. As if having a shoddy state-run healthcare service weren’t bad enough, now British citizens must put up with a system that has been thoroughly enveloped by wokism.

    Even the French, no stalwarts of restrained governance both domestically and abroad, are becoming perturbed by the US’s obsession with woke politics. President Emmanuel Macron, who comes from a thoroughly technocratic background as an investment banker and former minister of the economy, industry, and digital affairs is not very keen on adopting American-style wokism wholesale. When BLM-inspired riots kicked off across France, Macron stood his ground and rejected any efforts to remove monuments of French colonial-era figures.

    In a similar vein, French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer warned about the divisive nature of America’s racialized politics and how woke ideas are beginning to gain traction throughout several French institutions. Furthermore, Macron himself expressed his exasperation with how American-style wokism has washed up on French shores and fomented racial divisions in the Western European country.

    Broadly speaking, a strong reaction against the excesses of Americanism is brewing across France. Over the past five years, France’s political environment has shifted rightward on a host of cultural issues. Moreover, French political figures have grown increasingly skeptical of mass migration and American-dominated institutions. In November 2019, Macron described the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as brain dead. Growing divergence in terms of the foreign policy priorities that France and the US—the country that dominates the alliance—hold have called into question the continued viability of the military alliance.

    On top of that, Macron is facing challenges to his right from the likes of journalist Eric Zemmour, who has had choice words about American hegemony. Unlike the most fervent Atlanticists, Zemmour wants France to leave NATO and has even floated the idea of a rapprochement with Russia.

    All told, wokism and US foreign policy should not be viewed as isolated phenomena but rather inextricably linked concepts given the US’s universalist foreign policy modus operandi. However, the increasingly ornery nature and dysfunctional state of the US may make countries think twice about their continued alignment with it, especially once they see what the consequences of embracing wokism look like. Not only that, but if the US continues using color revolutions and similar methods of projecting soft power, it may alienate many nations and potentially incentivize them to join competing power blocs as a means of checking American hegemony.

    The rest of the globe would be better off categorically rejecting the US’s social maladies. The world is already afflicted by unrestrained central banks, monstrous bureaucracies, and crippling levels of taxation. Why add American cultural problems into the mix?

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 18:30

  • Biden Admin Halts $11.3 Billion Refresh Of Post Office's 165,000 Gas-Powered Truck Fleet, Citing Environmental Concerns
    Biden Admin Halts $11.3 Billion Refresh Of Post Office’s 165,000 Gas-Powered Truck Fleet, Citing Environmental Concerns

    The Biden administration has tried to stop a plan by the U.S. Postal Service to replacing its aging fleet of mail trucks with 165,000 new gasoline-powered delivery trucks.

    The USPS was preparing to spend up to $11.3 billion to replace the fleet, but the Biden administration has held up those plans, citing “the damage the polluting vehicles could inflict on the climate and Americans’ health”, according to The Washington Post. 

    Both the EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality sent letters to the Postal Service this week, telling the USPS to rethink its plans to buy the gas-powered vehicles, the report said. The letter requested that the USPS conducts a new search for environmentally friendlier alternatives. 

    The agencies also asked the Postal Service to hold a public hearing about their plans. 

    The U.S. Postal Service’s “Next Generation Delivery Vehicle” (Photo: WaPo)

    Vicki Arroyo, the EPA’s associate administrator for policy, wrote: “The Postal Service’s proposal as currently crafted represents a crucial lost opportunity to more rapidly reduce the carbon footprint of one of the largest government fleets in the world.”

    Postmaster General Louis DeJoy now stands at odds with Biden officials and environmentalist groups, the report continued. DeJoy’s previous plans included “only 10 percent of the new trucks to be electric and offering only a 0.4-mile-per-gallon fuel economy improvement over the agency’s current fleet,” WaPo wrote. 

    If DeJoy snubs the Biden officials’ requests, environmental groups would likely sue the USPS. 

    Adrian Martinez, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told WaPo: “It is hard to predict what courts will do, but the Postal Service’s work here is just so embarrassingly flimsy. They don’t reveal the source of the information for many of their conclusions, instead dismissing electrification outright.”

    “While we can understand why some who are not responsible for the financial sustainability of the Postal Service might prefer that the Postal Service acquire more electric vehicles, the law requires the Postal Service to be self-sufficient,” USPS spokeswoman Kimberly Frum concluded. 

    You can read the full report here.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 18:00

  • GoFundMe Just Proved Bitcoin's Use-Case
    GoFundMe Just Proved Bitcoin’s Use-Case

    Update (1830ET): Just as we anticipated, it looks like a crypto-based crowd-funding platform Tallycoin has helped supporters of the Canadian truckers re-route their donations to help support the people on the front lines of the protest.

    In the day that has passed since GoFundMe announced its plans to quash a fundraising effort for the truckers, more than $700,000 has been raised to benefit the truckers on Tallycoin.

    Last night, GoFundMe announced that it would be seizing all the money donated to the cause, and that donors would only see their donations refunded if they specifically requested that the money be returned. Otherwise, it would be forwarded to another cause of GoFundMe’s choice. Well, this didn’t go over too well with the donors, who many of whom threw a fit online.

    Now, in what could become a major threat to GoFundMe, anybody interested in the new platform can donate as little as a single Satoshi (presently, about 2,400 satoshis make up $1), and the fundraiser has a target of 500,000,000.

    The fundraiser on Tallycoin has the following message affixed to it: “The Canadian Bitcoin community would like to have a second financial access point for #FreedomConvoy2022. Legacy financial infrastructure can sometimes be politicized and clamped down upon, whereas Bitcoin is a truly censorship resistant method of communicating value. Don’t allow your voices to be silenced, and don’t allow your financial sovereignty to be trampled upon. Love, unity and freedom – let’s raise some hard money for hard workers!”

    * * *

    Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

    In case you were wondering what life under a CBDC will look like

    By now, everybody is probably aware of the Canadian #FreedomConvoy and how GoFundMe, at the behest of the Mayor of Ottawa and Justin Trudeau, summarily closed their fundraiser, which had exceeded $10 million. They also announced that they would literally redistribute funds to other “approved charities”. Those those approved charities would presumably be those mentioned by name by the likes of Trudeau (like the avowedly Marxist BLM, who have fundraising issues of their own owing to lack of financial transparency).

    This kind of incident is a microcosm of exactly why the world needs Bitcoin, decentralized crypto-currencies and communications protocols.

    Because we now live in a world run by collectivist technocrats. They sincerely think that what they believe should be rules and what you or I believe should be thought crimes.

    On its own this would be merely annoying, having to perpetually deal with shrill, sanctimonious hysterics, perpetually shrieking in your face about things they want you to think and how they want you to live.

    But it’s a problem when these people congregate around the choke-points of a centralized, bureaucratic technocracy and impose their personal neuroses onto the rest of society. Not only as policy, but as official canon on what is truth itself.

    The final straw is when dissent is criminalized and plunder legitimized. When all actions against those dissenters are fair game, while any civil (and constitutionally protected) resistance is by definition reprobate, then we have arrived in dystopia. At the very least: authoritarianism.

    Reality will always intrude…

    The Fourth Turning people observe that the generational cycles oscillate between individuality and collectivism. By extension, right now we’re in a phase of peak collectivism. They’re not wrong, but I think that misses the overall progress of humanity. On a scale of individual autonomy and empowerment, the long term trajectory is always “up and to the right”.

    Anybody reading Rothbard or Hayek knows that the construct of The State is more accurately a racket whereby small cadres of self-anointed elites appoint themselves the overlords of the masses. Rigging society so that the vast bulk of wealth accrues to themselves and any attempts by the rabble to defend their own interests increasingly fall outside the scope of what is permissible.

    Slavery, let’s call it for what it is, became more subtle over the centuries. Physical slavery, the treatment of other people as property is now universally abhorred and those who undertake it regarded as criminals (except for everybody who fraternized with Jeff Epstein).

    In the industrial era slavery had evolved into economic slavery. Debt is what kept the underclass in line and the entire monetary system was designed to perpetuate it. The thin scab of elites that formed The Establishment were by and large Cantillionaires for whom the rules were specifically constructed to benefit at the expense of wider society.

    Via Wait, why is The Fed buying my largest competitors’ bonds?

    In the information era, the elites need a different type of slavery. It needed to be digitized. But their problem is that the inexorable push toward wider autonomy and freedom for all humanity threw them a curveball called “decentralization”.

    As described so presciently in the Holy Bible of Crypto, with digital communications technology and encryption, the fundamental architecture of power changed, irrevocably.

    Even though globalist elites convene at places like Davos to reimagine everybody else’s future, they are still thinking in terms of linear extrapolations the past. While they promise transhumanist utopias in a largely made-up metaverse to industrial era debt serfs, the actual action in human affairs is happening out here in The Real World.

    Cryptographically Secured Hard Money Changes Everything

    Elitist shills like Paul Krugman, et al, fail to successfully marginalize crypto using the same tired tropes (climate hysteria, criminals, right-wing, etc), thankfully to no real avail.

    When all else fails they finally adjust their blinders and fall back to “there’s no use case”, that Bitcoin

    “manages both to seem futuristic and to appeal to old-style goldbug fears that the government will inflate away your savings … So crypto has become a large asset class even though nobody can clearly explain what legitimate purpose it’s for.”

    Really?

    GoFundMe just showed us two elite-class aspirations in one fell swoop: Confiscation and redistribution.

    Needless to say Bitcoin fixes this.

    Today it is GoFundMe. In the future, when central banks roll out Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), it’ll be all economic activity that falls within the purview of national and Supra-national government and bureaucracy.

    When those days arrive, everybody who will be reliant on government economic entitlements will be enduring a type of neo-Fuedalism: veritably digital slavery.

    Those MMT-ers who are promising you a cost-free UBI maybe not even realize themselves what the trade-offs will be that will come with it (aside from skyrocketing debt levels and hyper-inflation). Those will be the social credit hooks which will invariably be built into the CBDCs (or maybe it’s not a trade-off but a feature).

    Biden’s failed nominee for Comptroller of the Currency authored a white paper called “The People’s Ledger” which called

    “[for] a comprehensive reform of the structure and systemic function of the Fed’s balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance. In essence, it offers a blueprint for democratizing both access to money and control over financial flows in the nation’s economy.”

    Sounds benign, but what it really did was outline a blueprint for the complete takeover of the private banking system and would bake-in protocols for a compulsory investments and arbitrary deposits and withdrawals

    Omarova’s run at the position is finished. Don’t think for a second the sentiment behind her People’s Ledger is.

    But since we’re talking about Canada’s #FreedomConvoy, we can look at how the Bank of Canada’s white paper on CBDCs expresses enthusiasm around the same capabilities of “Smart contracts and the benefits of programmability”:

    Although still early in their development, smart contracts could enable entirely new digital economy applications with many potential benefits. To start, smart contracts could enable programmable money by adding certain attributes to it. For example, money could be programmed to gain or lose value over time, or it could be programmed to be used in transactions for only specific goods or services. Furthermore, smart contracts can enable programmable payments—automated payments that are executed after certain conditions are met. These can range from simple push payments to more complex ones. For instance, smart contracts could enable automatic routing of tax payments to authorities at the point of sale, pay-as-you-go insurance or payments that can support IoT applications.

    Sounds generic and non-biased enough. However take a look around. Those “certain attributes” and “certain conditions” may well end up being things like what Justin Trudeau, or whomever replaces zim thinks about your activities (or “unacceptable opinions”).

    Donating to #FreedomConvoy? Listening to Joe Rogan Experience? Those aren’t approved activities. That’ll cost you some demerits.

    You may not even know it’s happening, just that the GovCoin that hits your phone every month is not as much those other, more compliant, people. Or when you go to spend it, the prices adjust to different levels. That’s if  your GovCoin app even allows you to complete the purchase, after evaluating it against a scorecard devised by woke ideologues who think you’re fringe.

    As for #GoFraudMe

    The company initially put the onus on those who donated to request a refund, and would thereafter redistribute the convoy’s money to other approved charities.  Given the pushback (it’s basically theft), they have since announced they would refund all donations.

    Personally, I will never donate via GFM again, not out of some cancel-culture based spite, but because they are demonstrably unreliable and willing to change the game on-the-fly (something that can’t happen in crypto).

    From now on whenever anybody asks to raise money via GFM just tell them you’ve love to help, but given their past actions you have no assurances that your donation would actually go to its stated purpose. Instead of going toward helping some child with her cancer treatment it may simply be confiscated and sent to Greta Thunberg instead.

    Offer to mail them a cheque directly or even better: send them some Bitcoin or other crypto.

    *  *  *

    I’m assembling with a team of cryptographers to create a new, privacy enhanced cryptocurrency for Canadians resisting tyranny: COVID today, and whatever the pretext will be in the future (climate alarmism, alien invasions, whatever). Sign up on the Bombthrower mailing list to remain in the loop as this progresses, and I’ll also send you a free copy of The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto when you do. If you want to get involved, you could also DM me on Twitter or Gettr

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 17:30

  • MSNBC Misinfo: Zeke Emanuel Peddles Fear, Says Unvaxxed Children 'Likely To Get Serious Case Of Covid'
    MSNBC Misinfo: Zeke Emanuel Peddles Fear, Says Unvaxxed Children ‘Likely To Get Serious Case Of Covid’

    Dr Ezekiel Emanuel – former Biden Covid-19 adviser and brother of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (and the real ‘Ari Gold’ from Entourage) appeared on MSNBC Wednesday, where he proceeded to peddle the lie that unvaccinated children are ‘likely’ to get a ‘serious’ case of Covid.

    “This repeats what we’ve seen in older kids, five and above, where we know the vaccine does protect very well. And there we still have under 50%, I believe, of the children vaccinated, and that’s a serious problem for the country,” Emanuel told host Kristen Welker after she asked about parents’ willingness to vaccinate their children. “Parents have to be more willing – I think they hear some of these rare side effects and think they’re very common.”

    “With the omicron variant, kids are either going to get the vaccine or they’re likely to get a serious condition of omicron. Having omicron with the vaccine is almost invariably going to be better and safer for children,” Emanuel added. “I am confused about parents’ attitudes. Five and above seems like a no-brainer. Two to five, I understand some hesitancy. Two and under with the small dose, I think probably a very good idea.”

    It’s been widely established that Omicron is a relatively mild strain of Covid – from which children face an extremely low risk.

    Another recent study cited by economist Emily Oster also reiterated the extremely low risk young children face of severe COVID-19 outcomes. “What we can say is that based on everything we know, the risks to small children from COVID-19 are extremely small,” she wrote. –Fox News

    MSNBC faced harsh criticism over Emanuel’s statement.

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

    The network even tweeted (and then deleted) the easily debunked misinformation, receiving a serious ratio of comments to ‘likes.’

    Intentional? Or…

    Following the backlash, Emanuel issued a Saturday tweet in which he says he “misspoke.”

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

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 17:00

  • Biden Admin Restores Sanctions Waiver In Key Iran Deal Breakthrough
    Biden Admin Restores Sanctions Waiver In Key Iran Deal Breakthrough

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, 

    On Friday, the Biden administration restored sanctions waivers for Iran’s civilian nuclear program, a move the State Department said was meant to help facilitate talks to revive the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.

    The waivers mean any foreign countries, including Russia, China, and countries in Europe, that work with Iran on its nuclear program cannot be targeted by US sanctions. The waivers are an aspect of the JCPOA and were rescinded by the Trump administration in 2020.

    Bushehr nuclear power plant, Mehr News Agency via AP file

    “The waiver with respect to these activities is designed to facilitate discussions that would help to close a deal on a mutual return to full implementation of the JCPOA and lay the groundwork for Iran’s return to performance of its JCPOA commitments,” the State Department said in a notice to Congress.

    According to The Associated Press, the waivers allow foreign countries and companies to work on civilian projects at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power station, its Arak heavy water plant, and the Tehran Research Reactor.

    The waiver is a hopeful sign for the JCPOA. Negotiators are expected to return to Vienna soon in what could be the final round of talks, although Iran said earlier this week that “significant issues” remain.

    Iran hawks were quick to criticize the move, and State Department spokesman Ned Price insisted that the waivers were not “sanctions relief.”

    “We did NOT provide sanctions relief for Iran and WILL NOT until/unless Tehran returns to its commitments under the JCPOA. We did precisely what the last Administration did: permit our international partners to address growing nuclear nonproliferation and safety risks in Iran,” Price wrote on Twitter.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 16:30

  • Ex-Clerk For Biden SCOTUS Hopeful Edited Wikipedia Pages To Make Her Look Better, Rivals Worse
    Ex-Clerk For Biden SCOTUS Hopeful Edited Wikipedia Pages To Make Her Look Better, Rivals Worse

    Two days after the retirement of Associate Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was announced, a former law clerk for a judge believed to be on President Biden’s short-list of nominees began stealth-editing her Wikipedia page in an effort to make her look like a more attractive candidate.

    According to a Friday Politico report, Matteo Godi, a former clerk for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, began altering her page on January 28, while also editing the pages of her rivals to make them look worse. In total, Godi made more than 20 edits under the username “H2rty.”

    Other former Jackson clerks confirmed it was Godi.

    In a statement, the former clerks for Jackson — who requested anonymity in order to identify the online editor — said Godi has edited his former boss’s Wikipedia page “as a matter of course” for several years. They said Jackson was not aware of Godi’s edits on the pages of other judges.

    Those edits display a pattern: The page for Jackson, seen by many as a Supreme Court frontrunner, was tweaked to paint her in a more favorable light for a liberal audience, while the pages for other potential nominees — South Carolina federal district court Judge J. Michelle Childs and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger — were altered to make them potentially less appealing to a left-leaning audience. -Politico

    On Jan. 30 and Feb. 1, Godi made “significant changes” to Jackson’s WikiPedia page – deleting a reference to her position on the advisory board of “a Baptist school,” as well as two rulings she made against the Trump administration that were reversed by the DC Circuit – which was replaced with a defense: “Ahead of her confirmation hearing, ‘Bloomberg Law’ reported that conservative activists were pointing to certain decisions by Jackson that had been reversed on appeal as a ‘potential blemish on her record,’ in order ‘to tarnish her so she won’t get picked for the Supreme Court.’”

    A section covering Jackson’s most famous ruling – requiring former White House counsel Don McGahn to obey a congressional subpoena was also altered.

    The New York Times noted Jackson’s “slow pace” helped then-President Donald Trump “run out the clock on the congressional oversight effort” before the 2020 election; Jackson’s updated Wikipedia page seems to shift the blame for the ruling’s timing from Jackson to the D.C. Circuit court.

    Previously, the page said the ruling was “subsequently” appealed “and was only resolved when … McGahn testified,” while the updated version emphasizes that Jackson’s ruling was “immediately” appealed, and “it took the full D.C. Circuit nine months to affirm part of Jackson’s decision.” The case “remained pending before the court of appeals,” the updated Wikipedia page states, when McGahn agreed with the Biden administration to testify behind closed doors. -Politico

    Godi’s alterations to Childs’ and Kruger’s pages emphasized characteristics that call into question their liberal beliefs. It suggests Childs’ sides with corporations over people – noting her “reputation for being an expert in employment and labor law” from her time at South Carolina-based law firm Nexsen Pruet, adding that she worked on behalf of “employers dealing with allegations of race based and gender based discrimination, employee efforts to unionize, and other alleged civil rights violations.”

    Kruger’s page now emphasizes that she is “sometimes considered one of the swing votes” on the California Supreme Court, adding that she “is seen as a moderate on the seven-member court — moderately liberal on civil cases, more conservative on criminal matters.”

    Read the rest of the report here.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 16:00

  • Crypto Liquidity & The Lifecycle Of Ponzi Schemes
    Crypto Liquidity & The Lifecycle Of Ponzi Schemes

    Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

    With the Federal Reserve set to begin raising rates in a few weeks I thought it time to dive back into a discussion of crypto now that the ‘easy money’ era post-COVID is over.

    I know many still don’t believe the Fed can stop QE, no less shrink its balance sheet, and because of that the refrain, “You can’t taper a Ponzi,” can be heard from every corner of financial media.

    I tend to agree with that sentiment because, of course, all Ponzi schemes require new money to constantly come in to prop up the asset values of of the previous round of funding. This is the definition of a Ponzi scheme, after all.

    But in a world of Ponzis built on top of Ponzis built on top of Ponzis the idea that the biggest one, on which all the others are built, can’t save itself for a time by popping all of the daughter Ponzis is a bit disingenuous, if not outright obtuse.

    And it’s not because debt-based currency regimes aren’t inherently Ponzi schemes. They are. It’s because once the pile of currency is created it has the ability to move where it is treated best and away from those assets most vulnerable to liquidation.

    So, the situation in the real world, as it unfolds in real time, is far more complicated than just “You can’t taper a Ponzi.” In the long run, yes, that is correct. But in the time frames where people actually make decisions on where to put their money to provide them a return, it is absolutely not true.

    And this is the hardest thing I’ve tried to teach my readers and my patrons over the years. It’s one thing to accurately state what the end state of a particular system will be. In the case of the U.S. dollar reserve system, total and complete collapse is inevitable.

    It’s quite another to put a time on when that will occur and in what order will the system collapse.

    This is the fundamental problem I personally had to overcome during the early years of my financial writing career. When publishing a newsletter where you lay out an investment thesis and give people your best ideas it simply isn’t good enough in 2013 to say, “in ten to fifteen years all of these losing picks in gold or oil will be winners because the dollar is doomed.”

    My approach had to become better, more nuanced and, frankly, more in tune with the ebbs and flows of markets while still maintaining my Austro-libertarian analytic framework.

    I remember a particularly difficult moment back in January 2015 when I finally admitted that no matter how much I hated the U.S. dollar with respect to a hard asset like gold, my opinion didn’t matter and the market was still king.

    The Fed and the other central banks still had plenty of caché with investors and therefore still had plenty of ammunition in their monetary artillery. Yeah, all they were doing was kicking the can down the road to create a bigger problem tomorrow, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t money to be made from it today.

    That was the moment I had to face becoming better at this or getting out of the game completely. It meant truly humbling myself before the market and realizing you aren’t a ‘unique snowflake’ or any other such nonsense. You are treading a path others have before and you will again.

    It meant going all in on what I do now, marrying the global macro picture with the political and social trends and place them in a context of seemingly unlimited corruption capable of sustaining hundreds of Ponzi schemes around the world simply because everyone wanted to believe in them.

    For years, I’ve had a running discussion with Dexter White over the liquidity of the cryptocurrency market. He consistently points out that liquidity in cryptocurrencies is mostly a function of the capital flow into and out of bitcoin (BTC).

    Everything else is a derivative of that and, in effect, if you control the flow into bitcoin you control what Ponzi schemes are sustainable within that market. That argument, in my opinion, was far truer in 2017/18, however, than it is today.

    Since the high in April of 2021, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have been in a weird place. Bitcoin is clearly grinding through a counter-trend bear market while the rotation out of it and into other areas of the crypto-space have seen spectacular booms and equally spectacular busts.

    Following that liquidity sloshing through various projects has made a lot of people a lot of money and cost a lot of people as well.

    First with the Fed tightening dollar liquidity starting last June and now with the Bank of England getting ahead of the Fed in raising rates in the face of crippling inflation, we’re now looking at a much different milieu than we were this time last year when everything crypto was coming up roses.

    It was that massive bull market through the first half of 2021, however, that saw tremendous liquidity flow into all sorts of new projects, new ideas for generating yield to attract capital. Whether they are or were Ponzi schemes is irrelevant.

    Looking at the current DAO-pocalypse occurring in rebasing projects like OlympusDAO and it’s hard not to come to that conclusion. You pay out 7000+% for any amount of time without any reason to stay in the token other than ‘number go up’ and you are worse than any emerging market subject to ‘hot money flows.’ You are literally a time bomb with a short fuse waiting to blow up in everyone’s face.

    From $800 to $35 and back to around $60 in two months, I think qualifies as an explosion, especially for a project less than a year old.

    There wasn’t any real doubt about that. Just paying a yield in order to attract capital with no intention of doing anything with that capital other than holding it is playing a game of chicken with investors, waiting for the first guy to cash out and starting the avalanche of selling.

    It doesn’t matter if you’re the Bank of Turkey or some guy with a few servers and a Github repository.

    What we’re seeing in crypto is a massive acceleration of the lifecycle of these types of projects. Olympus has already spawned a ton of imitators simply because at its peak it attracted nearly $2 billion in capital in just a few months.

    I’d say why something like that happened is equal parts stupid greed, the insane amount of price appreciation in crypto fueling it and the honest desire to build something new.

    Projects like that only exist because the current system of capital formation is even more corrupt and less equitable than some bit of code with only minimal controls over the money flow.

    Unfortunately, this is the way innovation occurs; a lot of painful trial and error and a lot of crippling losses. But without this environment there is no way off the current hamster wheel of Central Bank-backed Ponzi schemes.

    For crypto to ‘grow up’ it has to build upon bitcoin’s foundation in a sustainable way, one where the replacements for the current upper layers of Exter’s Pyramid are self-contained such that the capital that flows into bitcoin at the bottom is treated well enough it has no desire to leave and go back to the fiat one.

    It is rare that a new technology comes out the gate perfect the first time. So, I don’t look at Olympus as a failure because it’s pointing innovators into new and interesting directions trying to solve the Ponzi math and create that ever elusive sustainability which only comes from turning capital into real world assets.

    They do this because the goal is laudable, end the systemic thievery of debt-based fiat money. In the case of one new crypto project I’ve found, even reverse the time risk of traditional lending in such a way that it frees the entrepreneur from the vultures of Wall St.

    Bitcoin maximalists believe bitcoin achieved this perfection, and they have yet to be proven wrong. But neither have they been proven right. Only time will tell as imitators come and go. And I’m happy to remain both bullish on that prospect and skeptical of it simultaneously.

    That said, bitcoin alone isn’t enough to contain the entirety of human activity or desired outcomes. This is where we are today and why things like the spectacular booms and busts of the various DeFi platforms are necessary growing pains.

    We humans always do this. We go through every bad idea and iterate on them until something sustainable comes out of it, if ever. Even projects that have had their fundamentals challenged, like Olympus, and are still learning from their mistakes, have a future to help us understand what can be done to avoid the trap of the Ponzi structure.

    One of the valid knocks against crypto is what’s the point if we can’t utilize these tokens, these magic beans which throw off yield, to procure real things in the real world? After all, isn’t that all money really is?

    A place to temporarily park your savings on the way to getting some thing in the future you want/need. As the old system teeters and cracks and the ones who broke it try to shuck and jive us to throw good money after bad while their Ponzis collapse, it is this critical moment in time where new ideas flourish, good and bad.

    Someone will crack that code, to turn the promise of math into real world wealth more efficiently, in the same way that someone will always try to manipulate it so that they don’t have to work for their dinner.

    *  *  *

    Join my Patreon if you believe in work

    BTC: 3GSkAe8PhENyMWQb7orjtnJK9VX8mMf7Zf
    BCH: qq9pvwq26d8fjfk0f6k5mmnn09vzkmeh3sffxd6ryt
    DCR: DsV2x4kJ4gWCPSpHmS4czbLz2fJNqms78oE
    LTC: MWWdCHbMmn1yuyMSZX55ENJnQo8DXCFg5k
    DASH: XjWQKXJuxYzaNV6WMC4zhuQ43uBw8mN4Va
    WAVES: 3PF58yzAghxPJad5rM44ZpH5fUZJug4kBSa
    ETH: 0x1dd2e6cddb02e3839700b33e9dd45859344c9edc
    DGB: SXygreEdaAWESbgW6mG15dgfH6qVUE5FSE

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 15:30

  • Gas Prices At Pump Highest Since 2013; Biden Losing War Against Inflation
    Gas Prices At Pump Highest Since 2013; Biden Losing War Against Inflation

    President Biden is about to have yet another major problem as the average price of gasoline surged to the highest level in seven years, according to new AAA fuel data. For this time of year, seasonal trends show prices are the highest since 2013. 

    Despite Biden’s attempt to squash surging fuel costs (as his war chest runs thin), AAA reported regular gasoline at the pump rose to $3.423 a gallon, a high most Americans haven’t seen since September 2014.

    Crude prices increase amid signs of backwardation in futures contracts as demand exceeds supplies in some markets. Factor in Biden’s warmongering with Russia over Ukraine, the geopolitical risk premium rises and has lifted Brent prices to over $92 a barrel. 

    “Having drawn a line in the sand at $80 crude and about $3.30 gasoline, $3.40-plus gasoline will raise the pressure” on Biden, Paul Horsnell, head of commodities research at Standard Chartered, told Bloomberg. He said the administration could be holding back on another SPR release if tensions heat up with Russia.

    The problem for Biden now is that SPR stocks are at their lowest since Oct 2002…

    But maybe another SPR release won’t work this time around as crude futures point to significantly higher gas prices at the pump in the months ahead. 

    Retail gas prices at the pump for this time of year have only been higher in 2012 and 2013… and even then, it was only marginally higher. Given the chart above, we are well on our way to recording seasonal prices…

    It’s becoming a fact that Biden’s ability to impact fuel prices is rapidly diminishing. OPEC+ has snubbed Biden’s request to rapidly increase supply.

    And without being able to do anything about it (except maybe incentivize domestic production and blow the minds of his progressive wing), we suspect the crossover in the chart below will continue to grow…

    The transition to a summer grade versus winter fuel grade will increase prices further, possibly exceeding $3.50 nationally in the coming months.  

    Also, inflation is widespread as consumers are plagued with some of the highest food prices in a decade and could soon pay record-high prices by spring. 

    Biden is losing the war on inflation as the growing discontent for this administration will force households to vote with their depleted pocketbooks during the midterms this fall. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 02/05/2022 – 15:00

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