- British Army's New Ajax Tank Makes Troops Sick
British Army’s New Ajax Tank Makes Troops Sick
The British Army is modernizing its forces with new armored fighting vehicles. One vehicle, in particular, called the “Ajax,” produced by General Dynamics UK, has been in testing with the service after a multi-billion dollar deal. But there’s a problem, the vehicles are so noisy and vibrate violently during operations that tank crews are becoming sick, according to The Times.
The UK government ordered 589 Ajax tanks, formerly known as the Scout SV (Specialist Vehicle), a family of armored fighting vehicles being developed by General Dynamics. A deal between the service and the defense firm was inked in 2014 for $4.5 billion, and after trials in November, it appears these tanks are far from battle-ready.
It prompted the service to pause testing from late November to March. Over 20 mph, tank crews experience extreme vibrations and loudness, resulting in some troops suffering from swollen joints and ringing in their ears.
A defense industry source told The Times the tanks were so loud during operation that up the chain of command, there were fears that long-term use of these new tanks, crews would develop “neurological issues.”
The military has issued special noise-canceling headsets to correct the issue.
When the tank is underway, extreme vibrations have caused a much larger problem – tank crews cannot fire the cannon on the move with precision.
General Dynamics issued a statement and said it “continues to work closely with the British Army and Ministry of Defence to complete the remaining demonstration phase activities.”
“A small number of remaining issues are being reviewed and closed out in partnership with the British Army.”
The Ministry of Defence also issued a statement:
“We are committed to the Ajax program, which will form a key component in the Army’s modernized war-fighting division, with current plans for initial operating capability scheduled for summer 2021.
“The MoD can confirm some training on the Ajax vehicles was paused as a precautionary measure. This is a normal measure for the demonstration phase of projects.
“The health and safety of our personnel is of the utmost importance.”
Meanwhile, Russian forces are being equipped with fifth-generation fighter jets and hypersonic missiles, and a “revolutionary” new main battle tank called the T-14 Armata.
Some Western military experts are concerned that the Armata could outclass NATO’s tank fleets, such as the US’ M-1 Abrams, Germany’s Leopard 2, and Britain’s Challenger 2.
The UK modernization efforts with faulty tanks don’t seem like a winning success if the West taunts the Russian bear.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/07/2021 – 02:45 - Putin Says That First Line Of Nord Stream 2 Is Now Complete
Putin Says That First Line Of Nord Stream 2 Is Now Complete
Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that laying the pipes for the first of two lines of the prospective Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany has now been “successfully completed.”
Addressing an economic forum in St. Petersburg on June 4, Putin also said that “work on the second line is continuing.”
While the underwater section still needs to be linked to the section on German territory, Russian energy giant Gazprom “is ready to start filing Nord Stream 2 with gas,” he added.
Gazprom shares went up 0.6 percent after Putin’s comments, reaching 273.80 rubles ($3.74) — their highest level since mid-2008.
The United States, which has strongly opposed construction of the new Russian pipeline, last month announced new sanctions against Russian companies and ships involved in the project.
But the administration of President Joe Biden decided to waive sanctions against the company overseeing the project and its CEO.
In Washington, the move was met with criticism from Republicans and some Democrats, while the Kremlin hailed it as a “positive signal” ahead of a June 16 summit between Biden and Putin.
The Baltic Sea pipeline was at the center of a political tussle between Berlin and Washington during the previous administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump. Since coming into office in January, Biden has sought to heal relations with Europe after they were bruised under his predecessor.
U.S. officials have warned the pipeline will make Europe more dependent on Russian energy supplies and bypass Ukraine, which relies on gas transit fees.
The German government has refused to halt the project, arguing that it is a commercial venture and sovereign issue.
Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that Russia will continue pumping 40 billion cubic meters of gas via Ukraine a year in line with the existing five-year contract.
Kyiv is locked in a confrontation with Moscow over Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Black Sea Crimean Peninsula and the Kremlin’s support of separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Describing the U.S. use of the dollar as a political weapon, Putin also said that European states should pay for Russian gas in euros, a day after Moscow said it would remove dollar assets from its National Wealth Fund while increasing the share of the euro, Chinese yuan, and gold.
“The euro is completely acceptable for us in terms of gas payments. This can be done, of course, and probably should be done,” he said.
Russia has long moved to reduce the dollar’s share in its hard-currency reserves as it has faced waves of U.S. sanctions amid heightened tensions with the West over issues including the conflict in Ukraine, cyberattacks allegedly by Russian hackers, and Russia’s treatment of jailed opposition activist Aleksei Navalny.
In an interview with state-run Channel One television on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg forum, Putin said he expected “no breakthrough” from his meeting with Biden, but expressed hope that the talks will be held in a “positive atmosphere.”
“But the very fact of our meeting, that we will speak about possibilities for restoring bilateral relations, about matters of mutual interest, and, by the way, there are a lot of them, is quite good as such,” he added.
Late last month, Biden said he would press his Russian counterpart to respect human rights when the two leaders meet.
The U.S. president in March said he believed Putin was a “killer,” which prompted a diplomatic row that led to Moscow recalling its ambassador to Washington for consultations.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/07/2021 – 02:00 - The DARPA-Taped Letters
The DARPA-Taped Letters
Via Harvard2TheBigHouse Subsatck,
Why have several researchers with close ties to the CCP been undermining the dissemination of peer reviewed research which looks at a lab origin of the COVID-19 Pandemic and gain-of-function research?
Few things are as nerve-racking as your first day at a brand-new school in a brand-new state, that’s on the other side of the country.
And so I was beyond relieved when the teacher of my second grade class Mrs. Mongelluzzo – easy to spell with the Mickey Mouse Club cadence – told everyone at the end of a rough first day that to help break the ice, everyone should try and bring a joke back to class the next day as their only homework. Knowing my dad seemed to at least think he was pretty hilarious, I waddled home so fast that I almost started rolling at one point, eager to call my dad at work to get the joke to help me fit in with a class of eight and nine year-olds the next day.
I’m not sure I’ve ever raised my hand faster in my life that next day, when Mrs. Mongelluzzo asked if anyone had remembered their homework and returned with a joke. Brand news class, all eyes on me, time to show I can fit in:
“Alright, so… how do you tell a male chromosome, from a female chromosome?
(At this point I assumed the confused looks meant my classmates were deeply pondering this profound genomic kaon.)
“Well… of course – YOU JUST PULL DOWN ITS GENES!!”
And so I learned my first hard lesson in the school of having a Microbiology PhD father trying to help you navigate through novel social situations. Or any social situations. But I digress.
However the good news was that although my dad’s job might not have made fitting in among my peers any easier, he more than made up for it during my first Take-Your-Kid-to-Work Day a few weeks later. Riding the Red Line from the Shady Grove Metro decades later while living in a halfway house as an ex-con and felon for the rest of my life, GPS anklet banging around underneath my extra-long khakis, I had a hard time imagining myself back then, staring out the window, oblivious to so much of the world that prison would later reveal to me.
But for eight-year-old me, the metro was the first part of the most incredible adventure of my life up to that point.
After the metro it was just one science-fiction escalator ride towards an impossibly distant windy pinpoint, stopping to ask the friendliest pair of glasses I could find for directions to the right building, and then one elevator later – I stepped into a massive slew of cubicles, absolutely terrible haircuts and pocket-protectors as far as the eye could see – but most importantly for me, a crowd that would appreciate my sense of humor.
After the laughs and smiles it was kaleidoscopic protein models that spun and danced on screens and the same microscopic structures that I remembered from my dad’s t-shirts blow-up to preposterous proportions and popping up on office walls and projector screens, I felt like I’d walked into a movie set – watching discoveries and knowledge get summoned into existence in real-time, and being able to poke around and find a community that loved the fact I had something of a precious science vocabulary and wasn’t afraid to ask what might be a stupid question… since the other hand of that is it just might be a really good one too.
So all of these happy formative memories swirled back to the surface when shortly after our paper examining a laboratory origin of the COVID-19 Pandemic was published in August 2020, the end of a journey that’d started with its submission back in April, a handful of random folks emailed us. My assumption initially and for several weeks afterwards was that at least one of them had been an old colleague of my father’s, since I mean – after you have your PhD for about 40 years you tend to build up a fairly long list of contacts.
However once a bit of time had passed and I thought about it, I wasn’t aware of my dad ever significantly interacting with a former Secretary of the Navy and Obama advisor directly attached to defense work, a federal global technology S&T researcher interested in engaging with China and who it’s hard to imagine hasn’t been extensively involved with defense programs, an MIT artificial intelligence and cyber-security wonk with extensive ties to the defense industry, and a scientist part of another team which denigrated my father’s career and said he never should’ve written a paper like ours also with extensive ties to DARPA and the defense industry.
Even more bizarre, that former Secretary of the Navy spent much of 2020 directly lobbying with the help of Johns Hopkins for more scientific and academic engagement and cooperation with the CCP, alongside the sitting Director of National Intelligence (and soon to be oxymorons), Avril Haines. And so maybe it should raise a few eyebrows that the sitting Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, attempted to scrub existence of his company’s efforts to aid and abet the CCP placing students and researching into American institutions and especially key STEM programs via multi-million dollar contracts from the internet.
This company, WestExec Advisors, is also tied to the current Press Secretary, Jen Psaki.
And it was only co-founded by Blinken, it’s other founder writes whitepapers alongside Avril Haines, since it’s all one big happy not-even-vaguely-corrupt-and-compromised mob family.
Oh and Ms. Psaki just spent today telling the American people that there’s no grounds whatsoever that would cause President Biden to fire Tony Fauci. Not even treason?
In a time of war? Because the punishment for that very clearly isn’t losing your job – it’s losing your life via state execution. And so aiding and abetting the the Chinese Military in covering up the worst war-crime in human history would certainly be nominal groups for a bullet to the head, or however the government is doing it these days.
And in case any of this sounds a bit outlandish, turns out there’s been a high-level defector from China in America for several months, working alongside the DIA exclusively since “DIA leadership believes there are Chinese spies or sources inside the FBI, CIA, and several other federal agencies.”
The idea that there’s even a discussion as to whether or not SARS-CoV-2 was engineered is entirely absurd, the only people acting like this is in doubt at all are looking to cover as many asses as they possibly can while directly aiding and abetting a disinformation campaign being run by the Chinese Military, and simultaneously keep the door open to violate as many Natural Laws as they possibly can.
Most notably, Alina Chan, who’s already designed a protocol to insert freaking Ebola into human cells, and has been falsely presenting herself as some sort of honest actor while literally attempting to bribe other scientists to hide the truth.
And so as our emails with this giant wildly corrupt and conflicted cabal of DARPA-JHU-WestExec squad of fuckbois below recounts, their contact with us has become even stranger considering what’s happened since… and what hasn’t happened. Instead of our ideas being embraced by the wider scientific community like I would’ve expected from my childhood, they’ve been marginalized and our voices largely ignored.
My father wouldn’t even let me take the super-cool U.S. Government pens to use in school since it could technically considered stealing, he’s never sniffed anything resembling defense work or the hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to do it, been anywhere near Big Pharma, or sought membership in some sort of international group or organization that’s supposed to somehow give one credibility since you can say you’re a part of it and it allows you to claim expertise you simply do not have.
And maybe my dad’s existence as just a simple scientist a good thing.
Because if this pandemic has demonstrated anything, it’s that our international institutions have not only failed us as they’ve enabled the profiteering of public citizens that’s turned what was once a historic wealth gap in human history into one that’s only ever been demonstrated before in science-fiction movies, all the while we die off in the worst ongoing mass casualty event in generations. And these international organizations and their false sense of authority enable charlatans like Peter Daszak to corrupt and defile the scientific process by hiding behind imaginary xenophobia, when all he’s really been doing is running interference for the people providing the funding for his work.
Because if one thing is certain, it’s that he has no interest in anything other than preserving the many hundreds of millions of dollars of funding he collects a six-figure salary to coordinate – as opposed to being worried about saving human life or getting to the bottom of this pandemic. And yet he doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the “dual-use” side of the gain-of-function methodologies like serial passage refer to their possible uses in the defense industry, and now by those wishing to continue playing God and attempting to directly alter the human genome in at attempt to cheat nature’s basic strictures.
Maybe it’s more than a coincidence that the last point made by the biggest cinematic franchise in history is that playing games with reality and attempting to manipulate the popular media’s perception of it can put an enormous number of lives at risk, and that there’s a lot of money to be made and power to be seized when seemingly benign international groups present themselves with authority they do not have, and with responsibilities they refuse to uphold.
Maybe those movies were on to something.
However, sure, maybe my dad and I are mistaken and there is something wrong with our paper which accounts for so many seeking to exclude it from the discussion at this point and keep our voices out of the media.
We’re waiting.
From: Karl Sirotkin PhD Date: Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 10:51 AM
Mr. Danzig, Dr. Kwik-Gronvall, Mr. Triolo, Dr. Leighton, and Mr. Mallery:
When you all initially contacted my son and I about our paper, Might SARS‐CoV‐2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture? my initial thoughts went to fond memories I have from much earlier in my career when I was publishing more.
On both occasions, scientists reached out to me after a paper I’d written was published, excited about my work, and asked me to present it at conferences.
However, since your group initially contacted us to point out that we hadn’t properly supported one of our assertions, to which we replied with the citation which we had mistakenly left out, we have heard nothing at all from any of you since. Unlike my previous experiences, your group doesn’t seem at all interested in helping what you called “a real contribution” to the discussion around the origins of COVID-19 gain any traction anywhere, either among fellow professionals or the popular press.
Your contact seems different and outside my normal experience as a professional. If Mr. Danzig was simply curious about the 1977 influenza incident, I would have simply expected him to ask, so the rest of the distribution seems a bit mysterious, and frankly we are curious about the motivation especially considering the silence since and where things now stand.
The larger distribution seems odd to me, since the four of you come from such diverse backgrounds. And it was made ever stranger after Dr. Kwik-Gronvall’s team at John Hopkins asserted that I was not qualified to write our paper, as part of a team with extensive ties to DARPA and the defense industry. A characteristic that, to an outsider, would also seem to bind your group together as well?
Unless I am mistaken and the four of you have some other longstanding interest in gain-of-function work outside of DARPA and other defense work that brought you together to email us about the use of serial passage in our paper?
Finally, are you aware of Alina Chan, who is attached to the Broad Institute and MIT as many of you are, actively telling reporters to ignore the peer review process, and presenting herself as some kind of expert after this article which reads like badly-researched fan-fiction from a lovesick writer was published? This article was published nearly a month after our peer reviewed paper was. And long after Zero Hedge made international headlines getting kicked off Twitter for asserting the possibility of a laboratory origin. Events this Boston Magazine article ignores entirely as it attempts to create a parallel universe. Since you were so concerned about an incorrect citation in a peer reviewed paper published from strangers, certainly you’re concerned about someone with ties to the same institutions as many of you denigrated the scientific process, and allowing herself and her research to be misrepresented in the press.
So my question is: Why did the four of you contact me and my son? If it was to make sure the science is presented and communicated correctly, why has there been only silence since? And Dr. Kwik-Gronvall, why did your team assert I was unqualified to write this paper after you were already so familiar with it? I appreciate the fact JHU retracted that statement, but I assume that was only after my son emailed asking very politely for a correction.
With the entire globe in the grips of this pandemic, accurate and honest scientific reporting and research has never ever been more important. It is already looking as if continually updated vaccines might be required to control COVID-19 as it mutates, and with confidence in vaccines already low – aren’t the four of you concerned with the potential damage that can be done when the scientific peer review process is not respected? Such lack of respect causes lowered belief in the entire scientific enterprise.
Alina presented herself as superior to out peer reviewed paper by telling journalists that it would be ok to ignore it, but of which we have yet to see specific criticisms other that Richard’s excellent question. When four scientists as accomplished and connected as you take all that time to reach out about our paper, but then remain silent afterwards which this implied criticism by one with which you seem to have an association?
So maybe you can help us understand your motivations and the larger context of your interest? Since I’m baffled that this even seems to be a question when reviewing a field, in any context, scientific or journalistic: Is it professional and appropriate to ignore or encourage others to ignore a peer reviewed article? The clear answer is, “No,” unless specific criticisms are part of that assertion. And we are happy to discuss this, if there is any question about this being appropriate behavior for a scientist, since Alina is rather young and perhaps hasn’t been properly trained.
And since all of this is so bizarre, and since several articles have already appeared in the popular press which ignore the peer reviewed science, and so many others with backgrounds in finance and politics seem to be coming out of the woodwork writing articles and pretending to have the ability to address the science when all they hold no relevant degrees and have only ever written popular pieces, acting like their research and work should be considered with the same seriousness as ours – this email will be posted to a public forum for open discussion.
Dr. Karl Sirotkin
Richard Danzig responded to that email chain below:
Saturday, Jan 23, 10:14 AM
Karl,
When I read your and your son’s paper I wrote to you about what seemed a mistaken description of a previous paper. You quite properly wrote back acknowledging the mistake. I haven’t written further because there doesn’t seem more that I can contribute. I am not a scientist, but rather simply someone with some expertise on national security questions who wants to understand what is happening in relevant domains of science and technology. As shown in my message, I copied several scientists who I knew were interested in this topic. They do not constitute “a group” and hadn’t seen my message before I sent it. I cannot speak for them. I have copied these others on this email and also included John Mallery who ably supervises the “biosecurity analysis” mailing list. As John has said he does not want these communications directly circulating on that list, I leave to him whether he wants to circulate this further. I hope this addresses your concerns about my original message and why you have heard no more (save for this!) from me.
Sincerely,
Richard
Since all this seemed to do was dodge any sort of explanation, Dr. Sirotkin tried again below:
Sunday, Jan 31, 9:37 PM
Dr. Danzig, Dr. Kwik-Gronvall, Mr. Triolo, Dr. Leighton, and Mr. Mallery:
Dr Danzig, Your courtesy is appreciated, but not of the questions I’ve asked have been addressed, so apparently, I need to be more direct.
I’m including the bio-security mailing list in this distribution since there are unanswered questions here that go well beyond SARS2’s origins and affect National Security from the biotechnology perspective. Dr. Danzig, you sent the first email to a handful of people as well as a email list of anonymous recipients in what seemed to be an attempt to sideline our work and push aside questions about gain of function research – we should be able to answer to that same distribution, especially because in your follow up to that same distribution, you seemed to say we agreed we were mistaken in the context of pandemic influenzas viruses. But the only mistake was a missing citation, we neveragreed that any of the conclusions were mistaken, nor have we seen any criticism of the logic and conclusion of our August 2020 Bioessays peer reviewed publication. A letter is in press that adds the citation, and goes into more signs regarding serial passage and this novel coronavirus.
And we address you along with everyone else, Dr. Danzig, because these questions don’t relate to granular scientific issues but instead are more ones of integrity and the common public good. By the way, for a non-scientist you really must have been following the scientific field closely both to spot our paper and notice it was missing a citation.
Due to the number of lives on the line, and that fundamental issues of scientific and professional integrity seem to be in question, I hope you can provide direct answers to the following questions which I’ve tried to make as clear as possible. Some questions only a few on the initial distribution will be able to answer, but I hope those on the mailing list will respond as well since these questions obviously relate to biosecurity and go way beyond SARS2’s origins.
In my more than four decades as a practicing scientist I have never felt this sense of bewilderment and concern over the conduct of other professionals, and especially now in the middle of a pandemic that has no end in sight – to have the scientific community act with such apparent duplicitous intent, in a possible effort to secure their own access to billions of dollars of funding is truly disconcerting, a feeling I would expect to be shared by everyone who considers themselves a part of the wider scientific community.
Question 1: What were the context of the discussions were that led you to initially use the rather broad email distribution that you used as well as the national security list? I also want to restate for this question that the missing citation did not cause any of our logic or conclusions to be compromised, it did not affect our analysis of the current pandemic, instead only provided a nice narrative parallel to it. However, you decided to contact us in the first place, and include others on that initial email distribution which also included a broad anonymous list, so out of professional courtesy and transparency I’m simply asking how the decision was made to contact us, with such a broad distribution list and then to avoid answering our questions?
Question 2: At least two of you appear associated with the Johns Hopkins team which stated that I was unqualified to write a paper covering the origins of SARS2. Why did your team make that judgment? What made your group more qualified than myself when my experience includes teaching molecular virology, molecular biology, and performing nearly two decades of genetic engineering wet-work, and as a bioinformatics scientist I have much longer tenure in the field than anyone on that report’s author list. Why has the entire John Hopkins COVID-19 tracking unit been either pretending that our paper does not exist, or actively trying to undermine its credibility – when they’re obviously entirely aware of it, and how sound it is? To the point of not even citing us in their list of peer reviewed literature citations?
Question 3: How much more death is needed before the discussion around gain-of-function work is opened back up and the moratorium against it (or at the very least monitoring by those who do not have a conflict of interest) is reconsidered? And shouldn’t there be intense, independent scientific scrutiny of all gain-of-function genome-altering work that asks, not only: “What might be the benefit?” but also, “What can possibly go wrong?” We cannot help but wonder if the DARPA-funded Foundry , or work on the recent Apollo report, played a role in what appeared to be an attempt to discredit us, and if this distribution list has an interest in that work going forward, and is part of the efforts to minimize such moratoriums or safety monitoring?
I sincerely hope everyone on this list has National Security interests foremost in your priorities and we are wrong to be worried about your desire to continue the inadequately monitored gain-of-function work which puts humanity at such terrible risk.
Question 4: How is it that all of you are concerned enough about academic integrity to contact us about a missing citation, but have sat back and done nothing as our peer-reviewed work is appropriated in the popular press? And since this is so obviously a public health issue, do you believe that journalists should report on the peer reviewed science, or be encouraged to make their own opinions about what the state of the science really is? This would not be an issue for me, if any honest detailed criticism of our paper at all was known to me, however since it is not – If academic integrity was at the heart of your initial contact with us, why have you been sitting back spectating as our ideas have been stolen and misrepresented to the general public at large by multiple mainstream outlets?
We look forward to your responses.
Karl Sirotkin, PhD
Strangely enough, they were never heard from again!!
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 23:30 - US Troops In Iraq Targeted By Increasingly Sophisticated Combat Drones
US Troops In Iraq Targeted By Increasingly Sophisticated Combat Drones
The thousands of US troops still in Iraq are increasingly monitoring the threat from the skies, as a series of combat drones from an unknown source have reportedly targeted American bases over the past few months, according to a Friday report in The New York Times. The report blames “Iran-backed militia” for deployments of sophisticated small drones, citing the usual anonymous sources.
The following day on Saturday, a new attack on Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq was reported: “The air defense system at Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq, where American forces are stationed, shot down two drones that attempted to attack the base on Saturday night, according to the Iraqi Security Media Cell.”
Drone exercises, file image: Reuters In Saturday’s incident the base’s C-RAM anti-air system was activated and shot down the pair of drones as they reportedly tried to attack the base. There were also Saturday incidents involving rocket attacks targeting a US-run diplomatic center in Baghdad, as well as Baghdad’s international airport.
The Associated Press details the string of incidents believed to involve Iran-backed militias as follows:
The Iraqi army said Sunday that two drones were destroyed above a base housing US troops, one month after the same base was targeted by an armed drone.
The US military’s C-RAM defense system was activated to shoot down the drones above the Ain al-Assad base, located in Iraq’s western desert, the Iraqi military said.
Several hours earlier, a rocket was shot down above Baghdad airport, “without causing casualties or damage,” said Colonel Wayne Marotto, spokesman for the US-led military coalition in Iraq.
The Times report had underscored that pro-Iranian militias are now in possession of “more sophisticated weaponry, including armed drones,” given that at least “three times in the past two months” they’ve been able to deploy “small, explosive-laden drones that divebomb and crash into their targets in late-night attacks on Iraqi bases.”
#BREAKING: U.S.’ C-RAM downed two drones above the Ain al-Assad base in #Iraq on Sunday. If they were armed, this would mark the second such drone incident above Ain al-Assad in a month and at least the fourth in the past two months in Iraq, generally.https://t.co/JbXMoOv0Fd
— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) June 6, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Both the pro-Iranian Iraqi paramilitaries and much of the Iraqi public have long pressured Baghdad government officials to order foreign troops out of the country, which like Afghanistan could soon reach two whole decades of American occupation.
This new small drone threat appears part of the direct pressure campaign on the US military with the goal of inducing a quicker Pentagon departure.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 23:00 - The Cotton Controversy: The Dark Anniversary Of The Surrender Of The New York Times
The Cotton Controversy: The Dark Anniversary Of The Surrender Of The New York Times
This week is the one-year anniversary of one of the lowest points in the history of modern American journalism.
During the week of June 6, 2020, the New York Times forced out an opinion editor and apologized for publishing the editorial of Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) calling for the use of the troops to restore order in Washington after days of rioting around the White House. While Congress would “call in the troops” six months later to quell the rioting at the Capitol on January 6th, New York Times reporters and columnists called the column historically inaccurate and politically inciteful. Reporters insisted that Cotton was even endangering them by suggesting the use of troops and insisted that the newspaper cannot feature people who advocate political violence.
One year later, the New York Times published a column by an academic who has previously declared that there is nothing wrong with murdering conservatives and Republicans.
As I observed at the time of the Cotton column, I disagree with the basis or wisdom of invoking to the Insurrection Act to address the rioting in Washington. (The Act was not invoked to deploy national guard to end the Capitol riot). However, I also noted that the column was historically accurate. Critics never explained what was historically false (or outside the range of permissible interpretation) in the column. Moreover, writers Taylor Lorenz, Caity Weaver, Sheera Frankel, Jacey Fortin, and others said that such columns put black reporters in danger and condemned publishing Cotton’s viewpoint.
In a breathtaking surrender, the newspaper apologized and not only promised an investigation in how such an opposing view could find itself on its pages but promised to reduce the number of editorials in the future. In a statement that will go done in journalistic infamy, the newspaper announced:
“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication. This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reduction the number of op-eds we publish.”
One of the writers who condemned the decision to publish Cotton was New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones applauded the decision of the Times to apologize for publishing such an opposing viewpoint and denounced those who engage in what she called “even-handedness, both sideism” journalism. Opinion editor James Bennet was rustled out to make a pleading apology. That however was not enough. He was later compelled to resign for publishing a column that advocates an option used previously in history with rioting.
Notably, not long after Bennet was thrown under the bus, Hannah-Jones herself tweeted out a bizarre anti-police conspiracy theory that injuries and destruction caused by fireworks was not the fault of protesters but actually part of a weird police conspiracy. She later deleted the tweet but there was no hue and cry over accuracy or “both sideisms.”
Nor was there such calls for reexamining standards when Hannah-Jones’ famous “1619 project” (which earned her a Pulitzer Prize) was found to have fundamental historical flaws and researchers claimed the New York Times ignored them in raising the errors. Hanna-Jones will soon be teaching journalism at the University of North Carolina.
The sacking of Bennet had its intended effect. Writers and columnists with opposing or critical views were soon forced off newspapers around the country, including at the New York Times.
Cotton and conservatives are also rarely seen on the pages of the New York Times unless it is to criticize the party or Trump. The writers have condemned the “both sideism” of allowing conservative viewpoints in the newspaper and insisted that Cotton and others must be banned as favoring potential violent actions against protesters. Yet, the newspaper has published people with anti-free speech and violent viewpoints in the last year. While the New York Times stands by its declaration that Cotton should never have been published, it had no problem in publishing “Beijing’s enforcer” in Hong Kong as Regina Ip mocked freedom protesters who were being beaten and arrested by the government.
Indeed, just before the anniversary of the Cotton controversy, the New York Times published a column by University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, who defended the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. (Loomis has also been ridiculed for denouncing statistics, science, and technology as inherently racist).
Loomis’ article on “Why The Amazon Workers Never Stood A Chance” did not include his violent philosophy. It was in my view a worthy and interesting column for publication. So was Cotton’s column. However, NYT reporters and columnists have insisted that figures like Cotton should not be published because they have supported violence against protesters. Yet, they have no apparent problem in publishing someone who has declared that there is nothing wrong with actually murdering conservatives. The paper also has no problem with someone who is partially responsible for the systemic and violent suppression of democracy protesters.
As I said on the publication of Regina Ip, I would like to see all of these writers published. Even if I find some of their views wrong or even grotesque, newspapers should be forums where readers are exposed to different and even unsettling viewpoints. Self-censoring does not extinguish such views. It only fuels an appetite to control and censor opposing views.
I was hoping against experience that the media, and particularly the New York Times, would run a self-critique of its actions on the one-year anniversary of the Cotton controversy. Such a review would have allowed for a critical look at many of the assumptions of that week. For example, virtually every news outlet in the country ran stories that week on the clearing of Lafayette Park. Indeed, many justified the Cotton action in light of the Lafayette operation, which used an unnecessary level of force. However, the media reported, as a fact, that Attorney General Bill Barr cleared the park to allow for Trump’s much-maligned photo op in front of St. John’s church. That allegation was quickly refuted and there is now ample evidence that the clearing operation was ordered before any plans for the photo op. It was ordered due to the high level of violence and destruction over the weekend protests around the White House. Yet, news organizations have never corrected their reporting. Indeed, legal experts like University of Texas professor and CNN contributor Steve Vladeck continue to claim that Barr ordered federal officers “to forcibly clear protestors in Lafayette Park to achieve a photo op for Trump.”
Likewise, much of the media lionized D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for her stance at the time. She received national acclaim for painting “Black Lives Matter” on the street next to the park and renaming it “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” Bowser denounced the force used by the Trump administration, including the use of tear gas. It now turns out (as revealed last week in court filings) that the District used tear gas a block away to enforce Bowser’s curfew. The debate over the denial of using tear gas by the federal operation raged for a year (the federal government insists that it used pepper balls, which has basically the same effect on protesters). Yet, over that year,, neither Bowser nor her government stepped forward to say that D.C.’s Metropolitan Police used tear gas in their operations a block or so from Lafayette Park. The District is now arguing that the use of tear gas was entirely reasonable and the BLM lawsuit should be dismissed.
In the meantime, the Biden administration agrees that the BLM case should be dismissed entirely. The Department of Justice (DOJ) maintains that “Presidential security is a paramount government interest that weighs heavily in the Fourth Amendment balance.” The DOJ’s counsel, John Martin, added that “federal officers do not violate First Amendment rights by moving protesters a few blocks, even if the protesters are predominantly peaceful.”
The media has virtually blacked out coverage of the change in the position of Bowser, the admission of the District, or the position of the Biden Administration. Over the last year, the media has instead plunged headlong into advocacy journalism. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation.
Not surprisingly, over this year, the faith in the media has continued to plummet. A survey by the global communications firm Edelman (via Axios) found only 46 percent of Americans trust traditional media. That mirrors polls by Gallup showing an even lower level of trust. We are living in a new age of yellow journalism at a time when real journalism has never been more needed.
Once again, they would be wise to heed the words of Louis Brandeis in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) when he declared “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
So, for what it is worth, happy anniversary to the staff and writers of The New York Times.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 22:30 - Soaring Used Car Prices May Result In "Shocking" Inflation Report Next Week
Soaring Used Car Prices May Result In “Shocking” Inflation Report Next Week
Used car prices in the US continue to surge due to both the country’s economic recovery and an ongoing supply crunch.
There are two components to watch in the core inflation report due next week. First is, and most importantly, are used car prices and second is the rent of shelter.
Core inflation in April saw a more significant contribution to used car prices pushing inflation upwards of 2% YoY mainly because prices of used vehicles on the month jumped 21% YoY.
For those who haven’t seen what is going on in the used car space, here is a chart of the Mannheim used car index:
“Prices on used vehicles increased by an astonishing 21 % YoY in April (contributing 0.8% to the yearly change in core inflation). According to Manheim Consulting, prices on used cars and trucks are expected to climb further to 50 pct YoY in May or June (3 months lag). If we assume a 50% yearly increase in used cars in May (Manheim may exaggerate the yearly price increase a bit), then core inflation will potentially surpass 4%. Supply chain disruptions, shortage of semiconductors and Covid-19 restrictions have all played a part in disturbing the price action in the car market, but bottlenecks are not always the root cause of inflation – they can also be seen as a symptom,” said Nordea.
This means that the May inflation report next week (due June 10) could be an absolute shocker.
“We see clear risks of a big positive surprise to the May inflation report as well with core inflation around or just above 4%. The market is still buying the transitory inflation narrative but for how long? Lately, increasing (US) inflation has been the main concern of markets,” Nordea said, adding that, “We are likely in for another inflation shocker in June, but the question is whether the market will explain it away as a transitory effect.”
Peering into the real world, Financial Times speaks with people within the industry and in financial markets about what’s fueling used car prices.
Carey Cherner, a 36-year-old used car dealer in Maryland, sold a 2001 Ford F-150 pick-up truck with close to 200k miles for $7,500, more than 50% higher than pre-pandemic prices.
“There are more people buying cars than there are cars in the market, which makes it go kind of crazy,” Cherner said.
Policymakers, such as Federal Reserve members, continue to soothe the market with the word “transitory” almost daily, as a form of a communication tool to admit there are inflationary pressures but avoid market participants from panicking.
Lael Brainard, a Fed governor, said earlier this week that used car cost pressures “may persist over the summer months, I expect them to fade and likely reverse somewhat in subsequent quarters”.
But the problem here is that policymakers have been telling us that these pressures are “transitory” for months and keep pushing out the goalposts of when they want everyone to believe inflation diminishes.
Nathan Sheets, the chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income and a former under-secretary at the US Treasury, said there is an “unprecedented level of stimulus plus other forms to support spending” floating around the economy. A combination of helicopter drops by the federal government and supply chain disruptions resulted in the quickest “V-shaped” recovery that ultimately sparked supply constraints, driving up prices.
“How sure am I that I am right that inflation is going to dissipate? Probably 80 percent, but that is still a pretty fat tail,” Sheets said.
“It’s incredibly tight right now: you have more demand . . . that is supported by fiscal stimulus, so it’s just like a perfect storm. And we see that clearly in prices,” said Laura Rosner, a senior economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives.
But Jonathan Smoke of Cox Automotive, a consultancy for automobile dealers, noted that “several leading indicators of what’s happening at our auctions” suggest “the price appreciation streak is likely going to end.”
However, in Maryland, Cherner doesn’t believe there will be a “steep drop-off [in prices] until there’s way more supply than there is demand. They [automakers] still have to build the new cars and get the chips in them and get them out. I just think it’s going to last.”
So the main driver in next week’s inflation report will most likely be surging used car prices, and the red hot numbers may cause the Fed to start tapering or at least continue to communicate a future wind-down of its emergency pandemic policies this summer.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 22:00 - Unthinkable Thoughts…
Unthinkable Thoughts…
This essay is inspired by Dr Mercola’s announcement last week that [May] (reading between the lines) his life and his family’s have been threatened if he doesn’t remove from his web site a peer-reviewed study demonstrating the benefits of vitamin D and zinc in prevention of the worst COVID outcomes. In the present Orwellian era, where propaganda and deception are ubiquitous, one of the signposts of truth that I have learned to respect is that the most important truths are the most heavily censored.
This is not what I enjoy writing about, but as I find dark thoughts creeping into my consciousness, perhaps it is better to put them on paper with supporting logic and invite my readers to help me clarify the reasoning and, perhaps, to point a way out of the darkness.
Already in January, 2020, two ideas about COVID were emerging.
One is that there were people and institutions who seemed to have anticipated the event, and were planning for it for a long time. Gates, Fauci, the World Economic Forum, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine were among the prescient. (I credit the (now deleted) videos of Spiro Skouras.)
Second was the genetic evidence suggesting that COVID had a laboratory origin. Funders of the scientific establishment have lost their bid to ridicule this idea, and it has now leaked into the mainstream, where it is fused with the classical yellow peril propaganda: “China did it!”. I have cited evidence that America is likely equally culpable.
The confluence of these two themes suggests the dark logic that I take for my topic today: Those who knew in advance, not only that there would be a pandemic but that it would be a Coronavirus, were actually responsible for engineering this pandemic.
Immediately, I think: How could people capable of such sociopathic enormities be occupying the most powerful circles of the world’s elite? And what would be their motivation? I don’t have answers to these questions, and I will leave speculation to others. But there’s one attractive answer that I find less compelling: that it’s a money-maker for the large and criminal pharmaceutical industry. The new mRNA vaccines are already the most profitable drugs in history, but I think that shutdown of world economies, assassinations of world leaders, deep corruption of science, and full-spectrum control of the mainstream narrative imply a larger power base than can plausibly be commanded by the pharma industry.
Instead, I’ll try to follow the scientific and medical implications of the hypothesis that COVID is a bioweapon.
The Spike Protein
The spike protein is the part of the virus structure that interfaces with the host cell. SARS 1 and SARS 2 viruses both have spike proteins that bind to a human cell receptor called ACE-2, common in lung cells but also present in other parts of the body. Binding to the cell’s ACE-2 receptor is like the wolf knocking at the door of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. “Hello, grandmama. I’m your granddaughter. Please let me in.” The virus is a wolf wearing a red cape and hood, pretends to be an ACE-2 enzyme molecule seeking entrance to the cell.
In order to enter the cell, the virus must break off from the spike protein and leave it at the doorstep, so to speak. This is an important and difficult step, as it turns out. Unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a trick for making the separation. Just at the edge of the protein is a furin cleavage site. Furin is an enzyme that snips protein molecules, and it is common in our bodies, with legitimate metabolic uses. A furin cleavage site is a string of 4 particular amino acids that calls to furin, “hey — come over here. I’m a protein that needs snipping.”
The most compelling evidence for a laboratory origin of COVID is that coronaviruses don’t have furin cleavage sites, and until last year, this trick has never evolved naturally.
How we think about natural disease
The classical understanding of a viral or bacterial disease is this: A parasite is an organism that uses the host’s resources for its own reproduction. It is evolved to reproduce efficiently. If it has co-evolved with the host, it may be evolved to spare the host’s health, or even to promote it, because this is the optimal long-term strategy for any predator or parasite. But newly-emerged parasites can do well for awhile even if they disable or kill their hosts, and this is the kind of disease that is most damaging to us. The damage is done because the (young) virus’s strategy is to reproduce rapidly and disperse itself into the environment where it can find new hosts. The virus has no interest in harming the host, and was not evolved to this end, but this is a side-effect of commandeering the body’s resources for its own reproduction.
How engineered diseases can be different
A bioweapon virus is designed to cause a certain kind of harm.
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What kind of harm? It depends on the projected use for the weapon.
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Doesn’t the virus have to reproduce? Probably, for most weapon applications; but a bioweapon is not necessarily designed for rapid reproduction. A bioweapon can be designed as a “sleeper” to remain dormant for months or years, or to cause incremental disability over a long period.
If COVID had evolved naturally, we would expect that its spike protein would be adapted to mate well with the human ACE-2 receptor. There’s no reason to suspect it being otherwise biologically active. But if COVID is engineered, it may be that the spike protein itself has been designed to make us sick.
One reason this is significant is that the vaccines have all been designed around the spike protein, assuming that the spike protein were metabolically neutral. If the virus had been naturally evolved, this is a reasonable assumption. But if it came from a laboratory (whether it leaked or was deliberately released) the spike protein might be actually be the agent of damage. There are several reasons to suspect that this is the case.
The Spike Protein as an Active Pathogen
Back in February, 2020, this article noted that the spike protein was not perfectly optimized to bind to human ACE-2 and put this forward as an proof that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus.” But if someone were designing the virus to cause harm, the spike protein would be a convenient locus for the damage vector, so the spike might have been designed with twin purposes in mind, binding and toxicity. The spike protein appears in many copies around the “crown” of the coronavirus. Since each copy has a furin cleavage site at its base, many spike proteins will break off into the bloodstream. We now have several reports and hypotheses concerning the spike protein as an active agent of damage. The spike protein is suspected of causing blood clots, of inducing long-lasting neurological damage, and of causing infertility. Many anecdotes describe injuries to un-vaccinated people who have been in close proximity to vaccinated, prompting speculation about “shedding” the spike protein.
“Individuals with COVID-19 experience a vast number of neurological symptoms, such as headaches, ataxia, impaired consciousness, hallucinations, stroke and cerebral hemorrhage. But autopsy studies have yet to find clear evidence of destructive viral invasion into patients’ brains, pushing researchers to consider alternative explanations of how SARS-CoV-2 causes neurological symptoms….
If not viral infection, what else could be causing injury to distant organs associated with COVID-19? The most likely culprit that has been identified is the COVID-19 spike protein released from the outer shell of the virus into circulation. Research cited below* has documented that the viral spike protein is able to initiate a cascade of events that triggers damage to distant organs in COVID-19 patients.
Worryingly, several studies have found that the spike proteins alone have the capacity to cause widespread injury throughout the body, without any evidence of virus.
What makes this finding so disturbing is that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer and currently being administered throughout the U.S. program our cells to manufacture this same coronavirus spike protein as a way to trigger our bodies to produce antibodies to the virus.”
Note: the Astra-Zeneca and J&J vaccines are also based on the spike protein, and cause the spike protein to be created in the vaccinated person.
“Research cited below” refers to this study in Nature which reports that the spike protein, injected into mice, crosses into the brain, where it causes neurological damage.
Bigger news came just this week from a study in which researchers from California’s Salk Institute collaborated with Chinese virologists. They have found that the bare spike protein without the virus (injected in mice) can cause damaged arteries of the kind that lead to heart disease and strokes in humans. The original paper was published in Circulation Research, and the Salk Institute issued a news report describing the research.
One of the most credible dangers of the spike protein involves fertility. None of the vaccines were tested in pregnant women, and yet many government and other authorities are recommending it as safe for pregnant women. VAERS has reported 174 miscarriages to date after COVID vaccination. VAERS is notoriously underreported. I find the anecdotes less concerning than the fact that no one is taking this seriously, and research is being actively discouraged in the best-respected science journals.
There is a credible mechanism, in that the spike protein is partially homologous to syncytin. Syncytin, in fact, was originally a retroviral protein, inserted into the mammalian genome many aeons ago, and evolved over the ages to play an essential role in reproduction, binding the placenta to the fetus. An immune response that attacks syncytin might be expected to be impose a danger of spontaneous abortion. In any ordinary times, this would be a subject that medical researchers would jump on, with animal tests and field surveys to assess the danger. But these are no ordinary times, and the risk is being dismissed on theoretical grounds without investigation. This is especially suspicious in the context of history: a Gates Foundation vaccination program in 1995 was allegedly promoted to young women, causing infertility. (Yes, I know there are many fact-checkers eager to “debunk” this story, but I don’t find them convincing, and some of these fact-checkers are compromised by Gates funding.)
Even doing what the spike protein is supposed to do — tying up ACE2 — can be a problem for our lungs and arteries, which are routinely protected by ACE2.
The most dangerous possibility, suspected but not verified, is that the spike protein causes a prion cascade. Prions are paradoxical pathogens, in that they are misfolded proteins that cause misfolded proteins. Their evolutionary etiology is utterly mysterious, so much so that it took Stanley Prusiner a decade after describing the biology of prions before the scientific community would take prion biochemistry seriously. But prions make potent bioweapons, which laboratories can design outside of natural evolutionary dynamics. The possibility of prion-like structures in the spike protein was noted very early in the pandemic based on a computational study. This recent review combines theoretical, laboratory, and observational evidence to make a case for caution. Once again, I find it disturbing that this possibility is being dismissed on theoretical grounds rather than investigated in the lab and the field.
Where did the idea come from that all vaccines are automatically safe? Why do so many journalists dismiss the suggestion that vaccines should be placebo-tested individually, like all other drugs? Why has it become routine to ridicule and denigrate scientists who ask questions about vaccine safety as politically-motivated luddites, or “anti-vaxxers”? How did we get to a situation where the “precautionary principle” means pressuring young people who are at almost no risk for serious COVID to accept a vaccine which has not been fully tested or approved? I don’t have answers, but I do know who benefits from this culture.
Putting together all the evidence
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Knowledge beforehand
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Suppression of treatments and cures
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Toxicity of the spike protein which, if it had been made by nature, should have been benign
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Inclusion of the spike protein
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Heavy promotion of scantily-tested vaccines and
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Censorship of scientists and doctors who question the vaccines’ safety
… putting together all this evidence, it is difficult to escape the inference that powerful people and organizations have engineered this pandemic with deadly intent.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 21:30 -
- Mach 30 Wind Tunnel Propels China Decades Ahead In Global Hypersonic Race
Mach 30 Wind Tunnel Propels China Decades Ahead In Global Hypersonic Race
Following conflicts over trade, technology, and capital markets, the US and China are locked in a great power competition, as some describe it as Thucydides Trap. We believe the battleground for global supremacy is heating up on the hypersonic front.
According to South China Morning Post (SCMP), researcher Han Guilai, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said a new wind tunnel in Beijing will “soon be unveiled” and put China decades ahead of the West in hypersonic technology.
Guilai told an online lecture in late May that the JF-22 wind tunnel, in Beijing’s Huairou district, was capable of simulating flights at 30 times the speed of sound. He said this would put China “about 20 to 30 years ahead” of the West.
Such technology could propel China’s aerospace sector to test and quickly develop, sometime in this decade, hypersonic aircraft and weapons that could fly anywhere in the world in two hours or less. This would be an essential technology for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force to embrace because it would allow President Xi Jinping to challenge the US in the Indo-Pacific region.
Already, China has the DF-17 “carrier killer” missile that can travel at Mach 10 and sink a US aircraft carrier, while traditional missile defense systems would be utterly useless in defending against a weapon that is extremely fast and maneuverable.
Guilai explained how the new hypersonic wind tunnel operates. He said instead of using mechanical compressors, Beijing uses chemical explosions to produce high-speed airflow.
At America’s most advanced wind tunnel, named the LENS II, simulated flights are conducted only between Mach 3 and 9.
He said hypersonic technology tested in the JF-22 would be more advanced than the West’s, and “this determines our leading position in the world.”
Guilai did not provide any information on when the JF-22 will begin testing hypersonic technologies.
He added: “There is a Chinese saying, it takes 10 years to sharpen a sword. “We have spent 60 years sharpening two swords. And they are the best.”
China is coming for the US – they’re quickly modernizing their military for an Indo-Pacific fight with the US. We’ve learned nothing from history, and the US and China are falling into Thucydides Trap.
Our take, if a future conflict breaks out, fifth-generation fight jets and bombers, along with hypersonic weapons, would dominate the modern battlefield on either side. China is quickly gaining on the US in terms of military might.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 21:00 - Top Pennsylvania Senator Says He Supports Election Audit
Top Pennsylvania Senator Says He Supports Election Audit
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
A top senator in Pennsylvania said Saturday that he supports an audit of the 2020 presidential election.
“I support the call for an election audit, in order to answer any lingering questions that still remain about the fairness of the 2020 elections in Pennsylvania. This is the best path forward to address the legitimate concerns of the large majority of my constituents who voted to reelect President [Donald] Trump, as well as all Pennsylvanians,” state Sen. David Argall, a Republican who chairs the Pennsylvania Senate’s State Government Committee, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
“This is just one of many election reform efforts which I hope to see approved here in the next few weeks,” he added.
Argall had earlier said he was reviewing the pros and cons of a potential audit.
A spokesman for the senator declined to say whether he had spoken with state Sens. Doug Mastriano or Cris Dush, who recently returned from touring the forensic audit taking place in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Both Mastriano and Dush support an audit in Pennsylvania.
The Arizona audit started after an Arizona Senate panel issued subpoenas for election equipment and ballots.
Because Republicans control the Pennsylvania Legislature, the state Senate’s State Government Committee has seven Republicans and four Democrats. Mastriano and Dush are two of the GOP members.
“This was the most impressive audit I’ve ever seen. This level of voter integrity here, of forensically analyzing ballots, it’s all science, it’s not subjective at all. It’s going through every ballot and seeing if ballots were thrown on the copy machine and they could tell that forensically,” Mastriano told supporters in a Facebook Live video this week.
“The people overwhelmingly want an audit. I think just a county or two would do. My preference would be a Democrat and a Republican County, and let the chips fall where they may,” he added.
Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 General Election are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 6, 2021. (Matt York/Pool/AP Photo)
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives in November 2020 approved a resolution that called for the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee, a bipartisan committee, to conduct an audit or contract with an outside firm to carry one out.
The resolution said that there were “a litany of inconsistencies” in the election stemming from orders and guidance, such as some counties not segregating ballots that were received after Election Day.
After the resolution was approved, the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee voted 2-1 against performing an audit.
State Rep. Jake Wheatley, who joined state Sen. Jim Brewster in voting against conducting an audit, told a meeting before the vote that an audit would be a waste of time, considering the Pennsylvania Department of State planned to do an election review.
“I’m at a loss as to what the purpose of the resolution is and why it’s even necessary, if the work’s going to be done,” added Brewster.
Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Mensch, a Republican, voted yes. Pennsylvania Rep. Stephen Barrar, a Republican who later retired, missed the vote. A tie vote would have failed.
Pennsylvania House State Government Chairman Seth Grove, a Republican, mentioned the vote this week before adding:
“The PA House of Representatives will not be authorizing any further audits on any previous election. We are focused on fixing our broken election law to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
Mensch in April introduced legislation that would require Pennsylvania’s auditor general to perform an audit of ballots cast in the 2020 election. Argall referenced the bill while speaking to The Associated Press.
“There’s an enormous amount of election-related bills pending for the month of June, and this is one of them,” Argall said.
The Pennsylvania Department of State later carried out what was described as a statewide risk-limiting audit pilot, which featured a review of over 45,000 randomly-selected ballots. Pennsylvania’s former Secretary of State, Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, said in February that the audit showed “strong evidence” that the ballot count was correct.
An election assessment was recently completed in Fulton County, Pennsylvania. Wake Technology Services Inc., a firm involved in the Maricopa County audit, performed the assessment, which found errors in ballot scanning and four other issues.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf was among the Democrats this week condemning efforts to do another audit.
“What they’re calling for isn’t an ‘audit.’ It’s a taxpayer-funded disinformation campaign and a disgrace to democracy,” Wolf said in a Twitter post. “Pennsylvania had a free and secure election. That’s a fact. Pennsylvanians deserve better from their elected officials.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 20:30 - Yellen Admits Inflation Is About To Surge, Says It Will Be A "Plus For Society"
Yellen Admits Inflation Is About To Surge, Says It Will Be A “Plus For Society”
Last week, when Biden released his $6 trillion budget, we asked if it was a joke that the BIden budget saw just 2.1% inflation in 2021 and 2022.
Is this a joke: the BIden budget sees 2.1% CPI in 2021 and 2022
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 28, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Fast forward to this weekend, when Fed Chair Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen addressed our rhetorical concern, and following the G7 finmin meeting in London where the world’s most advanced nations agreed to impose a 15% minimum corporate tax rate (with zero enforcement provisions), said that contrary to the Biden Budget, inflation could climb as high as 3% this year in what the WaPo said was “the first time the Biden administration projected what inflation could be through 2021″, which by the way is dead wrong since Biden’s budget just last week predicted only 2.1% CPI in 2021.
What the pathologically misleading Bezos Post meant to say is that this was the first time the Biden administration actually told the truth about how high the galloping US inflation will rise. And the only reason it did so is that in a time when home prices – and pretty much all other prices – are soaring at the fastest pace in US history, adhering to the laughable 2.1% CPI forecast would crush the credibility of everyone in this progressive administration.
Of course, the admission that inflation is about to turn red hot led to many other unpleasant questions that need to be answered, such as what will this to the economy, to purchasing intentions (which as we reported at the end of May just crashed the most on record), and last but not least, to the market, where the tiniest hint of inflation leads to immediate selloffs.
So, scrambling to preempt the barrage of questions come Monday, on Sunday Janet Yellen said that even though inflation is now at the highest level since Paul Volcker hiked rates to 20% and the US is about to issue another $3 trillion or so in debt just to fund existing stimulus programs, Joe Biden should push forward with his $4 trillion spending plans even if they trigger inflation that persists into next year and higher interest rates.
Why? Because soaring inflation is good for you.
“If we ended up with a slightly higher interest rate environment it would actually be a plus for society’s point of view and the Fed’s point of view,” Yellen said in an interview with Bloomberg. And yes, she really said that.
It wasn’t immediately clear why rising rates, hence inflation and a drop in one’s purchasing power is “a plus for society’s point of view” but needless to say, this is the kind of idiotic drivel that Rudy von Havenstein and his cronies said some time in 1921, just around the time Weimer hyperinflation kicked in.
The debate around inflation has intensified in recent months, between those who, like Yellen, argue that current price increases are being driven by transitory anomalies created by the pandemic — such as supply-chain bottlenecks and a surge in spending as economies reopen — and critics who say trillions in government aid will fuel a lasting spike in costs.
Just to make sure there was no doubt which side of the argument Yellen is on, she said the recent rise in prices will subside and the U.S. labor market still has a ways to go before returning to pre-pandemic strength.
“We’re seeing some inflation but I don’t believe it’s permanent,” Yellen said at a press conference Saturday after the G-7 finance meeting in London. “We at least on a year-over-year basis will continue, I believe, through the rest of the year to see higher inflation rates — maybe around 3%.”
Yet even Yellen admitted that she could be wrong (narrator: “she is”) and that officials are still watching price increases closely. “I don’t want to say this is mind absolutely made up and closed. We’ll watch this very carefully, keep an eye on it and try to address issues that arise if it turns out to be necessary,” she said, although again she added that personally she believes “this represents transitory factors,” and that “policy should look past such factors.”
Yellen also made it clear that even though the world is now more indebted than at any time since World War II, it is about to take on even more debt, because you see, it’s contained: “There is a concern among some about fiscal sustainability and an evident desire to begin to withdraw accommodation when things are back on track,” Yellen said, eyeing her former democrat buddy Larry Summers who has emerged as one of the biggest critics of “Biden’s trillions.” Yellen dismissed his concerns simply by saying that “we think that most countries have fiscal space.”
“I will not give up on the next packages,” Yellen said. “They’re not meant as stimulus, they’re meant as investments to address long-standing needs of our economy.”
Yes, she really said that, and yes she better be right about the “transitory” inflation part because we are about to get a whole lot more of it. Biden’s packages would add up to roughly $400 billion in spending per year, Yellen said, contending that’s not enough to cause an inflation over-run. Any “spurt” in prices resulting from the rescue package will fade away next year. And, if she is wrong, well… it will be someone else’ problem to mop it up.
And speaking of what’s coming, keep in mind that last month we learned that headline CPI rose 4.2%, but it is the May print that could be an “absolute shocker”, as discussed last week.
Yet despite surging prices, and despite soaring wages, the Fed has committed to only begin scaling back the $120 billion monthly pace of its asset purchases after there’s “substantial further progress” on inflation and employment. It is unclear how much higher inflation should rise for the Fed to be happy, but one thing is clear: we are now at a point where the government’s welfare handouts and weekly unemployment benefits are distorting the picture dramatically, and the job market is growing far below expectations precisely because of Biden’s ruinous fiscal policies, policies that keep the Fed’s QE in play even longer and assure that not only is the wealth divide the widest it has ever been, but that when inflation really hits, it will truly be an “AAAAAAH!!!” moment.
But none of that is a concern to the phlegmatic 74-year-old: Yellen said that monetary policy makers can handle any potential rise in inflation if it sticks. “I know that world – they’re very good,” Yellen said in the interview. “I don’t believe they’re going to screw it up.”
This is the same clueless hack who in 2017 said she doesn’t expect another financial crisis in “our lifetimes.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 20:00 - More Than One-Third Of Small Businesses "In Jeopardy" Of Closing This Summer
More Than One-Third Of Small Businesses “In Jeopardy” Of Closing This Summer
As small businesses complain that it has never been harder for them to hire workers according to a recent NFIB survey, many are facing growing pressure to survive. As the American economy continues to reopen, some fear it might not happen soon enough to save thousands of small businesses. Data from Alignable’s June Revenue Poll shows that 35% of all small business owners are still at risk of closing permanently by the end of the summer.
Among the 3,772 small business owners in the 10 days ended June 1, Alignable’s June Revenue Poll showed a myriad of factors – including the remaining closures and restrictions, growing inflationary pressures on prices, rising gas and transportation prices and labor shortages – are creating problems that affect small businesses more intensely than their corporate partners.
The biggest increase in the survey was trouble finding employees, which was identified as a potential closure risk by 55% of respondents, up from just 5% the prior month.
For the record, Alignable calculates the percentage of small business owners who believe their businesses are in jeopardy by combining the answers to two of its questions: what percentage of last summer’s revenue will these businesses make this summer? And what percentage of last year’s revenue do they need to earn to ensure their business stays afloat. If the first is smaller than the second, then businesses are deemed to be in jeopardy.
Beyond this, several respondents complained about the lingering impact of not being able to fully reopen. Some say they’ve had to take a second job to keep their small business afloat long enough to see if it actually has a chance to recover after COVID subsides.
Based on the answers to the first question, only 22% of small business owners said they expected to make as much or more than they earned last summer. Considering that 40-50% of small businesses weren’t even fully open last summer, this figure alone is cause for alarm.
Retailers and restaurant owners were also feeling slightly better about their prospects, but many are still concerned about their prospects. Some expressed worries about whether to impose mandatory masking policies and other precautions since a significant slice of the population remains unvaxxed.
Amid these frustrating insights, there is an important silver lining: 33% of business owners said they had fully recovered to their pre-COVID monthly revenue numbers, adding more support for the “two recoveries” narrative that’s also encapsulated by the recent winnings of “meme stock” traders who have come into sudden financial windfalls by betting on hot stocks like AMC, which soared past $70 a share last night.
For many small business owners, watching millions of Americans collect “enhanced” unemployment checks, while others make thousands of dollars betting on stocks, feels like salt in their wounds.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 19:30 - Goldman's Clients Are Asking How Various Inflation Regimes Affect Stocks: Here Is The Answer
Goldman’s Clients Are Asking How Various Inflation Regimes Affect Stocks: Here Is The Answer
Picking up on a joke we made earlier this week when we called Joe Biden the Six Trillion Dollar Man (in homage to a very deflationary Lee Majors) in response to the 12 zeroes contained in his budget, in his latest Weekly Kickstart note Goldman’s David Kostin writes that…
by at least one measure, inflation has been rampant during the past 50 years, noting that in 1973, Steve Austin was the most powerful man in the world, with super strength in his right arm, a bionic eye, and artificial legs that could run 60 mph. It cost the federal government $6 million to re-build the NASA astronaut into the bionic man, played by Lee Majors in the hit TV series, “The Six Million Dollar Man.”
Fast forward to today, often sporting his trademark 1970s-style aviator sunglasses, President Joe Biden is the most powerful man in the world.Biden is the $6 trillion man when his three 2021 fiscal spending plans are combined: the $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan that was passed in March, the $2.0 trillion American infrastructure plan proposed in April, and the $1.8 trillion American families plan proposed in May. If all three proposals are passed by Congress, it would represent an unprecedented level of peacetime spending in relation to the size of the underlying economy. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the latter two plans pass Congress.
And while it increasingly looks like Biden’s original $6 trillion proposal will be substantially reduced – and may even collapse should it not gather the required support from centrist democrats – Goldman’s economists did not wait to find out what happens and recently raised their near-term inflation forecasts even as they maintained their expectation that inflation will begin to abate later in the year. In April, both core PCE (+3.1% y/y) and core CPI (+3.0% y/y) exceeded expectations and notched highs not seen in more than two decades. In turn, Goldman’s economists expect that core PCE will register 2.5% at the end of 2021 and decline to 2.1% during 2022.
To be sure, after initially freaking out about a deluge of inflation, the growing likelihood that Biden’s stimulus package will be materially diluted is why equity market performance has already shown a recent unwinding of inflation concerns. As Goldman notes, In March, amidst fears about rising inflation, stocks with high pricing power
… began to outperform those with low pricing power, reversing 5 months of low pricing power outperformance as the economy recovered. However, during the past few weeks, low pricing power stocks have outperformed again (7% vs. 3%). At the same time, the interest rate 10-year inflation breakevens has declined by 14 bps to 2.4%, suggesting inflation fears priced by both equity and debt markets are easing.
Not surprisingly, this whiplash has prompted most of Goldman’s recent client discussions to focus on inflation and its implications for equities.And, as Kostin explains, investors ask just one thing: “how does inflation affect corporate earnings and stock valuations?”
Answering this recurring question, Goldman’s Kostin notes that while inflation has mixed implications for earnings, it is generally a positive (as long as it is not hyperinflation in which case all bets are off of course). Kostin then reveals that in the bank’s top-down sector-level earnings models, inflation consistently has positive coefficients for sales and negative coefficients for margins. On net, however, Goldman argues that “the boost to nominal sales growth through rising prices typically more than offsets inflation-driven margin compression.” While one can debate this, it is certainly the case that companies with revenues tied to commodities, like Energy, or interest rates, such as Financials, are the largest beneficiaries from strong inflation regimes.
That said, inflation becomes a headwind to valuations if it leads to expectations of Fed tightening and thus higher real interest rates. And as Morgan Stanley has argued as part of its mid-cycle transition thesis, S&P 500 returns have been consistently positively correlated with breakeven inflation but valuations have typically contracted alongside sharp increases in real interest rates (as a reminder, MS expects PE multiples to shrink 15% in the next 6 months).
On the other hand, and adding to the complexity, the Fed has indicated it will not tighten the funds rate before seeing prolonged labor market improvement resulting in broad wage gains, particularly at the lower end of the income spectrum. In the past, the S&P 500 P/E multiple has typically expanded during periods of falling inflation and interest rates.
For the record, Goldman’s economists forecast the yield curve will steepen in 2021 and 2022, with the funds rate unchanged while the 10-year yield rises from 1.6% today to 1.9% and 2.1% at year-end 2021 and 2022.
Here Kostin makes another valiant attempt to ease worries about runaway inflation, claiming that although inflation is generally a negative impulse for valuation multiples, “recent popular investor focus on earnings yield less the inflation rate is misplaced” and here’s why:
Investors concerned by this metric note that it has fallen to its lowest point since the peak of the Tech Bubble in 2000 and suggests the return from owning equities is erased by inflation. We disagree with this interpretation. First, equity earnings and the prices tied to them are nominal and typically rise with inflation. Second, even inflation hawks agree that the most recent prints are biased by base effects and reopening dynamics. In contrast to the gap between the earnings yield and inflation, the EPS yield gap versus the 10-year US Treasury yield, which is commonly used as a proxy for equity risk premium, actually remains above its long-term average. See Exhibit 1.
Kostin’s spin aside, it is undisputable that overall, stocks perform better during periods of low inflation than when inflation is high. Goldman categorizes periods since 1962 into those of high and low inflation by comparing year/year core CPI to the Fed’s estimate of consensus long-term inflation expectations. Exhibit 2 clearly shows two inflationary regimes during the past 60 years: The first 20 years (1962-1980) and the past 40 years.
During the first period – which culminated with Volcker hiking rates to 20% – core CPI averaged 5.3% and registered above the long-term estimate 69% of the time.
Since 1962, both pre-and post-1980, the median monthly US equity market real return during high inflation environments has been an annualized 9% vs. 15% during periods of low inflation. As shown in the chart below, periods of high inflation have corresponded with the outperformance of Health Care, Energy, Real Estate, and Consumer Staples sectors, while Materials and Technology stocks have fared the worst in high inflation environments. Surprisingly, Value and Size factors have not performed very differently in periods of high versus low inflation.
Finally, drilling down a little deeper, equity performance has differed greatly in periods where inflation was high and rising versus high and falling.The median monthly market real return has been 2% annualized in phases where inflation was high and rising vs. 15% when inflation was high and falling. At the factor level, Value has generally fared better when inflation was high and rising than when it was high and falling. Among sectors, although Energy and Health Care have outperformed in periods of high inflation, they have performed much better when inflation was rising than falling.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 19:00 - Building Your Dream Home Has Never Been More Expensive
Building Your Dream Home Has Never Been More Expensive
Surging construction costs to build a new home is not sustainable and is becoming a pain in the arse for homebuilders and prospective homebuyers. From concrete to lumber to copper pipes to paint and even appliances, costs have surged over the past year.
Source: Bloomberg The housing boom sparked by the Federal Reserve during the virus pandemic was built on historically low mortgage rates (thanks to Powell) and accelerated by a combination of record-low inventory as city-dwellers moved to rural areas amid the remote-work phenomenon.
According to Zillow Group Inc, the past year has been the hottest real estate market since 2007. Economist Robert Shiller, the co-founder of the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller home price index, recently told CNBC that “in real terms, home prices have never been so high. My data goes back over 100 years, so this is something.”
Making matters worse is a shortage of materials as there is just too much demand from builders and not enough supplies due to supply chain disruptions. There’s also the issue of not enough buildable land. All of this has manifested into dangerous inflationary pressures vibrating not just through the housing market but the entire economy that may force Federal Reserve to announce tapering at Jackson Hole. It wouldn’t be surprising if MBS purchases from the Fed would be some of the first to be reduced.
Bloomberg provides an example of surging housing costs in one of the hottest housing markets in the country: Boise, Idaho.
Steve Martinez, the operator of Tradewinds General Contracting Inc., said his company had to raise costs on some of its new builds to offset high raw material and labor costs.
Martinez said the sale price of a 3,000 sqft, which excludes the lot but includes costs, labor, and profit, was $746,671 this spring. He said that’s 58% higher than two years ago in 2019. These costs are primarily the reason why home prices are surging.
Source: Bloomberg Foundation costs for the builder jumped 104% since 2019.
Source: Bloomberg Lumber costs are one of the most significant issues for the builder. Prices have nearly surged 262% since 2019.
Source: Bloomberg Timber roof trusses to frame a structure to support the roof have more than doubled since pre-pandemic levels.
Source: Bloomberg Meanwhile, drywall, used for interior walls and ceilings, has only risen 26% since 2019.
Source: Bloomberg With plastic and base metal prices soaring, plumbing, HVAC, and electrical costs are up 49% since 2019.
Source: Bloomberg Interior and exterior paint have risen 68% since 2019.
Source: Bloomberg Custom millwork, such as trim around doors, paneling, and cabinetry, has surged 68% since 2019.
Source: Bloomberg Appliances are up 65% from 2019 levels due to increasing demand and not enough supply.
Source: Bloomberg Factor this all together, the Boise homebuyer purchasing a 3,000 sqft home from the builder is forking over $950,000, up 61% from 2019.
… and here’s the final product.
Source: Bloomberg The cost of building a home has rocketed higher in a post-pandemic world that could soon be an industry killer as housing affordability becomes a significant issue. This is why the Fed needs to get a hold of inflationary pressures by unleashing tapering.
“This could be industry killing if things continue going the way they’re going,” said Martinez, who has had to tack on price increases during construction of anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000, primarily due to rising lumber costs. “We’re putting projects off. We’ve got clients that are hitting their price ceiling.”
Record-high housing prices have already begun to dent homebuyer confidence as prices become unaffordable.
It’s time for the Fed to end their grand experiment in juicing the economy and let the price of everything normalize.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 18:30 - Georgia GOP Approves Resolution Censuring Secretary Of State Brad Raffensperger
Georgia GOP Approves Resolution Censuring Secretary Of State Brad Raffensperger
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
The Georgia Republican Party on Saturday approved a resolution censuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, local media reported.
The Georgia GOP during a convention approved a resolution that says Raffensperger, a Republican, failed to perform his duties in “accordance with the laws of the Constitution of the State of Georgia,” WSB-TV reported.
The document says the failure stemmed from Raffensperger entering into a settlement agreement with the Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The agreement saw Raffensperger agree to promote and enforce regulations regarding prompt notification if a mail-in ballot was rejected and regarding county clerks’ signature reviews of absentee ballot envelopes and ballots.
Georgia Republicans accused Raffensperger of “undermining the security of our elections by allowing mass mailings of absentee applications by his office and third parties which created opportunities for fraud and overwhelmed election offices; rendering accurate signature matching nearly impossible; allowing ballot drop boxes without proper chain of custody; and ignoring sworn affidavits and disregarding evidence of voter fraud.”
“It’s obvious that there was fraud,” Michael Ovitz, an attendee at the convention, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“A civilized society depends upon truths and facts, not deception and deceit.”
The Georgia Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment.
Raffensperger has said there is no evidence of widespread fraud occurring in the 2020 election. The State Election Board, which he chairs, has sent dozens of election fraud cases to prosecutors in the wake of the election, including allegations that voters failed to register and vote or registered to vote while living outside the state.
Raffensperger’s office told WSB-TV: “The secretary of state’s office, county election directors, and the tens of thousands of poll workers across the state worked to ensure that democracy was upheld. It is the job of counties to run elections and the secretary of state’s office’s job to report those election results—it is the job of the political parties to deliver wins for their candidates. Let’s not confuse the two.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 18:00 - Outrage After FBI Subpoenas IP Addresses Of All Individuals Who Accessed USA Today Child Porn Article
Outrage After FBI Subpoenas IP Addresses Of All Individuals Who Accessed USA Today Child Porn Article
In the latest surreal and brazen example of federal government overreach, the FBI is demanding that USA Today turn over the IP addresses of all individuals who accessed a public online article during a specific time period.
The subpoena was issued in April but is only in recent days being made public after the newspaper’s parent company Gannett sought to fight it in court. It’s being widely condemned as an outrageous instance of abuse not only of press freedom, but of the public’s right to access information and media as well as breach of both the 1st and 4th Amendments. Underscoring this, WikiLeaks was among the first to highlight the case which seeks to sweep up info on all individuals who accessed the article in question during a 35-minute window on February 2nd, 2021.
FBI Demands identifying Info including IP addresses and telephone numbers of readers of a USA Today articlehttps://t.co/WVDlA8PnIo pic.twitter.com/VUgYeczcuV
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 4, 2021
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A statement given from USA Today to The Verge said, “We were surprised to receive this subpoena particularly in light of President Biden’s recent statements in support of press freedom. The subpoena is also contrary to the Justice Department’s own guidelines concerning the narrow circumstances in which subpoenas can be issued to the news media.”
USA Today’s legal team is further seeking to fight the subpoena in order to “protect the important relationship and trust between USA TODAY’s readers and our journalists.”
According to the details known about what the FBI is asking and who it could impact, The Verge report details that “The article in question was one published on February 2nd, 2021, about a shootout that occurred when FBI agents tried to execute a search warrant in a child pornography case, resulting in the deaths of two FBI agents and the suspect.”
But strangely the suspect written about in the article was already literally dead (reportedly by self-inflicted gunshot wound) significantly before the USA Today article was published.
Text from the subpoena Here’s a snippet of the article in question:
Two FBI agents were killed and three were wounded in a shooting early Tuesday while agents were serving a warrant in a child exploitation case in Florida, according to the FBI. The suspect died of an apparent self-inflicted gun shot wound, a person familiar with the matter said.
Authorities are investigating whether the suspect had cameras rigged at the apartment to provide an outside view of people who might be approaching at the time of the incident, said the source, who is not authorized to comment publicly.
The FBI is essentially asking for a large data dump covering that entire time frame the article was live and the public was accessing it.
In response to the FBI’s demand for info that could identify readers of a USA Today story, @rcfp Exec. Director Bruce Brown is calling on DOJ & FBI to explain how officials applied policies that limit when the government can seek records from news outlets. https://t.co/vFEbktBk4K
— Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (@rcfp) June 5, 2021
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The government has since kept mum on just why it needs the data. There remains the possibility that the FBI is potentially eyeing an accomplice to the crime, or a broader conspiracy, and has knowledge that another suspect or suspects had accessed that particular article.
One of USA Today’s attorney’s confirmed that the government refused to answer reasonable questions over just why it’s essential to be given everyone’s IP address who read the article. “Despite these attempts, we never received any substantive reply nor any meaningful explanation of the asserted basis for the subpoena,” Washington Post quoted the lawyer as saying.
Later over the weekend USA Today announced the following: “The FBI has withdrawn a subpoena demanding records from USA TODAY that would identify readers of a February story about a southern Florida shootout that killed two agents and wounded three others.”
But it remains that the FBI’s request is somewhat unprecedented and a huge threat to press as well as individual freedom, given that if granted it would mean all citizens could at any time unwittingly be treated as suspects merely for reading an online news article.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 17:30 - California County COVID-19 Death Toll Lowered By 25% After Counting Method Change
California County COVID-19 Death Toll Lowered By 25% After Counting Method Change
Authored by Alex Wu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)
Healthcare professionals screen people entering the emergency room at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif., on March 26, 2020. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) The number of COVID-19 deaths in Alameda County, California, fell by about 25 percent after health officials changed their methodology for total mortality count, removing those that were not a “direct result” of the disease, or “in whom death caused by COVID-19 could not be ruled out.”
The county’s COVID-19 dashboard, following an update on June 4 to reflect the total number of COVID-19 deaths using the state’s death reporting definition, shows 1,223 deaths were caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, 411 fewer than what it previously reported.
“Alameda County previously included any person who died while infected with the virus in the total COVID-19 deaths for the County,” the county’s public health department said in a press release (pdf). For example, someone who tested positive for the virus before dying in a car accident would still have been counted toward the COVID-19 death toll .
“Aligning with the State’s definition will require Alameda County to report as COVID-19 deaths only those people who died as a direct result of COVID-19, with COVID-19 as a contributing cause of death, or in whom death caused by COVID-19 could not be ruled out,” the health officials said, noting that their system of reporting COVID-19 deaths on the dashboard and to the state was implemented early in the pandemic, before the state established guidelines for how deaths should be classified.
Alameda County Health Officer Dr. Nicholas Moss told the Mercury News that his department was aware of the inconsistency between the county and state’s numbers, but they had to put off the change because of a major surge in infections during the winter.
“We just weren’t able to move as quickly on this as we would’ve liked, but we felt it was important and sometimes better late than never,” he said.
Moss also admitted that some people may use the revision to argue that the pandemic isn’t as severe as it’s made out to be, and he strongly disputes that idea.
“There are going to be people who make hay out of it and use it to question things about the pandemic, but it’s irrefutable, the severity of the pandemic,” he told Mercury News. “I think anyone who would use this to make the argument that this is somehow overblown is really turning a blind eye to some of the simple truths of the pandemic.”
As of June 6, California has 3,689,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19, resulting in 62,470 deaths, according to the state’s health department. In the United States, more than 33 million cases have been confirmed and there have been more than 600,000 reported deaths.
* * *
The overcounting fed the panic that produced the lockdowns, school closings and other regrettable decisions. https://t.co/he5rYLlAy1
— Brit Hume (@brithume) June 6, 2021
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 17:11 - After Capitol Riot "Pause", Arms Companies Are Showering Money On Both Sides Of Aisle Again
After Capitol Riot “Pause”, Arms Companies Are Showering Money On Both Sides Of Aisle Again
Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,
Political rancor and tensions surround the 2020 election had many US companies trying to distance themselves from the process by halting political donations. This included one of the biggest sectors for buying influence, the arms industry.
After a few months to reexamine things, the arms companies are back to throwing money around, donating in large quantities to members of both parties involved in military spending, and trying to ensure that they stay on good terms with everyone responsible for their business’ contracts.
Via Bloomberg While it isn’t shocking that the post-election pause didn’t last, it is noteworthy that some of the biggest donations are going to some in Congress who were big proponents of the “stolen election” narrative, despite that supposedly driving those companies to hold off in the first place.
Recall what BAE systems previously pledged:
“In response to the deeply disturbing violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, our U.S. political action committee has suspended all donations while we assess the path forward,” BAE Systems spokeswoman Tammy Thorp said in a statement at the time.
In reality, it seems that the Biden Administration and Congress have been signaling that the massive military spending part of the status quo will remain more or less untouched, and that seems to be all the companies needed to hear to start the spigot on their donations again.
One Third of Biden’s Pentagon Transition Team Hails From Organizations Financed by the Weapons Industry @inthesetimesmag https://t.co/ts518OkxAg
— Rachel Pirani (@Liberty5380) November 12, 2020
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Military analysis site Defense News details that “Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Leidos and BAE are all giving again, while Honeywell, General Electric, Raytheon and Booz Allen Hamilton are not giving, according to their most recent filings.”
And further: “Honeywell and GE had said they would suspend donations to the 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying Biden’s win.” In terms of these latter companies, we’ll see just how long that actually lasts.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 17:00 - Virologist Who Told Fauci SARS-CoV-2 'Potentially Engineered' Just Nuked His Twitter Account
Virologist Who Told Fauci SARS-CoV-2 ‘Potentially Engineered’ Just Nuked His Twitter Account
Update (1650ET):
Aaaand, it’s gone:
Well, well, well.. h/t @PrometheusAM pic.twitter.com/2uhQrRmh32
— Lab leak (@lab_leak) June 6, 2021
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At least he won’t have to keep blocking pesky questions from inquiring minds…
Dear Kristian Andersen @K_G_Andersen what exactly in our question prompted you to block us? https://t.co/dKM5aTmHzc pic.twitter.com/cs9OEn2Oas
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 2, 2021
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* * *
A California virologist who told Anthony Fauci that COVID-19 looks ‘potentially engineered’ and ‘inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory’ – only to later reverse course and publish a ‘natural origin’ paper 8 weeks later (before receiving a multi million-dollar NIH grant) has deleted more than 5,000 tweets.
Kristian G. Anderson who runs the Andersen Lab in La Jolla, CA, wrote in a Feb. 1 email to Fauci “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome, less than 0.1 percent, so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” adding that he and his team found “the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Anderson was responding to an article sent to him by Fauci exploring the origins of the virus. The next day, Fauci sent an urgent email to his deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, with the subject “IMPORTANT,” writing “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this a.m. Keep your cell phone on. … Read this paper as well as the email that I will forward. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
The document attached was titled “Baric, Shi, et al – Nature medicine – SARS gain of function.pdf.”
So right after one of Fauci’s trusted scientific advisers suggests COVID-19 could be man-made (while Fauci and associates publicly dismissed the possibility as a conspiracy theory), he shot a research paper concerning gain of function research – which Fauci was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – to his deputy.
And now Anderson has deleted more than half of his tweets.
That little shit Andersen has just deleted 5000 Tweets
says @lab_leak and @vid_colin saw he deleted all his tweets before 07th March 2021 and suggests saving them via Google Cache (see 3rd image below)What’s the Natural Origin Pope trying to hide? https://t.co/wk1JPOVwAF pic.twitter.com/vbocJN5pp3
— Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 🆓 (@BillyBostickson) June 6, 2021
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Anderson claims that his old tweets are ‘auto deleted’ – which would suggest a rolling, automated process – not the sudden disappearance of over 5,000 tweets preceding March 7, 2021.
This is a lie, because all tweets preceding March 7th, 2021 are deleted. This isn’t some tool to auto-delete tweets after n time elapses… pic.twitter.com/JMS9PcFLiw
— CHT (@PrometheusAM) June 6, 2021
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The deleted tweets come as internet sleuths begin to unravel Anderson’s involvement with Fauci and the NIH.
2 months later he reverses course and publishes his “Proximal Origin” paper, helping shield NIH/NIAID from potential probes into its GOF funding.
5 months after that, he gets $1.88 million in CREID funding, along with Daszak who gets $1.54 million more.https://t.co/PFPIMxZd7o pic.twitter.com/7JmapgRNTm
— Radical Centrist, wrathful tantric deity (@RadCentrism) June 2, 2021
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Supes weird that Kristian deleted his anti-lab-leak reply here after he saw my thread above. 🧐 🤔 🤨 🤔 pic.twitter.com/zdMA3pRF03
— Radical Centrist, wrathful tantric deity (@RadCentrism) June 6, 2021
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Yeah, like of a sudden 5000 of your tweets go *poof* because they were auto-deletes? Wouldn’t *auto*-deletes be deleted on a rolling bases? Or did you just change 5000 of your old tweets to be auto-deleted today?
Maybe you should auto-delete your Proximal Origins paper? 🤣 pic.twitter.com/YvPIy37ylI
— Yuri Deigin (@ydeigin) June 6, 2021
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Maybe Kristian was advised by his lawyer to do this? Given the “pending investigation” redactions in the Fauci emails. 🤔 https://t.co/bWKVb7TdBT
— Yuri Deigin (@ydeigin) June 6, 2021
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Meanwhile, Fauci has denied funding gain of function research in Wuhan, yet…
Subcontract awards from the NIAID -> Wuhan Institute of Virology from 2014 – 2019. pic.twitter.com/fxi23krqYg
— L 🤺 (@LHatesYouALot) June 6, 2021
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 16:50 - NASA's Mars Helicopter Prepares For 7th Flight On Sunday
NASA’s Mars Helicopter Prepares For 7th Flight On Sunday
Liftoff of NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity will occur no later than today if all goes to plan, according to a NASA press release.
Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter weighing no more than 4 pounds, is preparing for its seventh flight today. The mission is to fly Ingenuity 350 feet south from its current location on the floor of Jezero Crater.
“This will mark the second time the helicopter will land at an airfield that it did not survey from the air during a previous flight,” NASA wrote. “Instead, the Ingenuity team is relying on imagery collected by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that suggests this new base of operations is relatively flat and has few surface obstructions.”
On May 22, Ingenuity flew its sixth mission that did not go so well. The solar-powered helicopter experienced glitches that interrupted internal systems. There was no mention of what caused the glitches; the craft was able to land safely.
Ingenuity has marvelously performed five flights and beamed incredible images from Mars back to Earth.
NASA also has the Perseverance rover conducting land-based missions in the search for life.
In the last couple of months, the Red Planet has become a hotspot for the US and China, with China landing a rover of its own on the planet.
Sudden interest in Mars between both countries is because the planet allegedly has an abundance of rare metals that will power tomorrow’s economy.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/06/2021 – 16:30
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