Mar 07

Today’s News 7th March 2024

  • Escobar: The Global South Converges To Multipolar Moscow
    Escobar: The Global South Converges To Multipolar Moscow

    Authored by Pepe Escobar,

    Here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.

    These have been frantic multipolar days at the capital of the multipolar world. I had the honor to personally tell Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that virtually the whole Global South seemed to be represented in an auditorium of the Lomonosov innovation cluster on a Monday afternoon – a sort of informal UN and in several aspects way more effective when it comes to respecting the UN charter. His eyes gleamed. Lavrov, more than most, understands the true power of the Global Majority.

    Moscow hosted a back-to-back multipolar conference plus the second meeting of the International Russophiles Movement (MIR, in its French acronym, which means “world” in Russian). Taken together, the discussions and networking have offered auspicious hints on the building of a truly representative international order – away from the agenda-imposed doom and gloom of single unipolar culture and Forever Wars.

    The opening plenary session in the first day fell under the star power of Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – whose main message was crystal clear: “There can’t be freedom without free will”, which could easily become the new collective Global South motto. “Civilization-states” set the tone of the overall discussion – as they are meticulously designing the blueprints of economic, technological and cultural development in the post-Western hegemonic world.

    Professor of International Relations Zhang Weiwei at Fudan University’s China Institute in Shanghai summarized the four crucial points when it comes to Beijing propelling its role as a “new independent pole.” That reads like a concise marker of where we are now:

    1. 1.Under the unipolar order, everything from dollars to computer chips can be weaponized. Wars and color revolutions are the norm.

    2. China has become the largest economy in the world by PPP; the largest trade and industrial economy; and it is currently at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

    3. China proposes a model of “Unite and Prosper” instead of a Western model of “Divide and Rule”.

    4. The West tried to isolate Russia, but the Global Majority sympathizes with Russia. Thus, the Collective West has been isolated by the Global Rest.

    Fighting the “theo-political war”

    “Global Rest”, incidentally, is a misnomer: Global Majority is the name of the game. The same applies to “golden billion”; those that profit from the unipolar moment, mostly across the collective West and as comprador elites in the satraps, are at best 200 million or so.

    Monday afternoon in Moscow featured three parallel sessions: on China and the multipolar world, where the star was Professor Weiwei; on the post-hegemony West, under the title “Is it possible to save the European civilization?” – attended by several dissident Europeans, academics, think tankers, activists; and the main treat – featuring the frontline actors of multipolarity.

    I had the honor to moderate the awesome Global South session, which ran for over three hours – it could have been the whole day, actually – and featured several stunning presentations by a stellar cast of Africans, Latin Americans and Asians, from Palestine to Venezuela, including Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla.

    That was the multipolar Global South in full flight – as my imperative was to open the floor to as many people as possible. Were the organizers to release a Greatest Hits of the presentations, that could easily become a global hit.

    Mandla Mandela emphasized how it’s about time to move away from the unipolar system dominated by the Hegemon, “which continues to support Israel”.

    That complemented Benin’s charismatic activist Kemi Seba – who brilliantly personifies the African leadership of the future. In the plenary session, Seba introduced a key concept – which begs to be developed around the world: we are living under a “theo-political war”.

    That neatly summarizes the Western simultaneous Hybrid War on Islam, Shi’ism, Christian Orthodoxy, in fact every religion, apart from the Woke Cult.

    The next day, the second congress of the International Russophiles movement offered three debate sessions: the most relevant was on – what else – “Informational and Hybrid Warfare”.

    I had the honor to share the stage with Maria Zakharova – and after my free jazz-style presentation, focused on over 40 years of practicing journalism across the planet and watching first-hand the utter degradation of the industry, we carried a hopefully useful dialogue on media and soft power.

    My suggestion not only to the Russian Foreign Ministry but to everyone all across the Global South was straightforward: forget about oligarchy-controlled legacy/mainstream media, it is already dead. They have nothing relevant to say. The present and the future rely on social media; “alternative” – which is not alternative anymore, on the contrary; and citizen media, to all of which, of course, the highest standards of journalism should be applied.

    In the evening, before everyone got down to party hard, a few of us were invited for an open, frank and enlightening working dinner with Foreign Minister Lavrov in one of the magnificent frescoed rooms of the Metropol Hotel, one the grand hotels of Europe since 1905.

    A legend with a wicked sense of humor

    Lavrov was relaxed, among friends; after an initial, stunning diplomatic tour de force which covered quite a few highlights of the recent decades all the way to the current gloom and doom, he opened the table to our questions, taking notes and answering each one of them in detail.

    What’s so striking when you are face to face with the most legendary diplomat in the world for quite some time, in a relaxed setting, is his genuine sadness when faced with the rage, intolerance and total absence of critical thought exhibited especially by the Europeans. That was much more relevant throughout our conversation than the fact that U.S.-Russia relations are at an all-time low.

    Lavrov though remains highly driven because of the Global South/Global Majority – and the Russian presidency of the BRICS this year. He hugely praised Indian FM Jaishankar, and the comprehensive relations with China. He suggested the Russophiles Movement should take a global role, playfully suggesting we should all be part of a “Normal-o-philes” movement.

    Well, Lavrov The Legend is also known for his wicked sense of humor. And humor is most effective when it is deadly serious. So here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 23:40

  • 10% Of Biden 2020 Voters Say They're Switching To Trump
    10% Of Biden 2020 Voters Say They’re Switching To Trump

    Last weekend, newly-based, former Democrat darling pollster Nate Silver (who recently vanquished a lying leftist academic for spreading misinformation) penned a Saturday blog post in which he noted that President Biden has a huge problem with swing voters.

    US President Joe Biden speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Hagerstown, Maryland, on March 5, 2024. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

    While Silver acknowledges that there are “relatively few swing voters” in the US, there are some – “and with the country divided roughly 50/50, they usually determine who wins.”

    What’s more, the composition of the electorate has shifted – with a dropoff in those IDing as Democrats loosely corresponding to a rise in those claiming to be independent voters, according to Gallup.

    Silver’s point? “something has changed over the past decade or so. The Democratic Party brand no longer has an edge on the Republican brand; voters don’t like either one very much.”

    Biden loses 10%

    Silver then brings our attention to a tweet from pundit Matt Yglesias – who highlights a NY Times poll that reveals 10% of 2020 Biden voters are now saying they back Trump.

    While Yglesias frames it as “insanely banal swing voter stuff,” Silver sees it as far more serious for Democrats.

    Via natesilver.net:

    I’m a big Yglesias fan, but I’m not sure this take is so boring or so obvious. Here’s a slightly spicy argument, in fact: I suspect that some of the reason that pundits don’t like this take is because the media has become considerably more partisan. In contrast a couple of decades ago, punditry was dominated by newspaper columnists who were milquetoast centrists and TV panelists who were scrupulously nonpartisan. Now, people who comment about politics on blogs and social media tend to be loyal, reliable partisans, aligning with either Democrats or Republicans on nearly every issue. That sort of consistent partisanship is much less common among the broader electorate, although it’s becoming more so.

    My theory is that this more partisan species of pundit often implicitly or explicitly advocates for focusing on base turnout because it suits their ideological interests.. These pundits tend to be strong progressives (or conservatives) themselves, and the base-turnout theory implies there’s no trade-off between ideologically-charged policy goals and electoral ones. Read progressive media, for instance, and you’ll often hear that Biden was wise to cancel student loan repayments1 because it would excite young voters, even though student loan relief polls questionably with the electorate overall. I’m not sure I want to get too far into the weeds on Biden’s stance toward the Middle East, but you’ll often hear this argument on Gaza, too. It’s often just assumed (despite poor results for the “uncommitted” protest vote in the Michigan primary on Tuesday) that it would be electorally advantageous for Biden to move to the left by becoming more hawkish toward Bibi Netanyahu, even though Americans overall are still more sympathetic to Israel than Palestine.

    The Times/Siena poll that Yglesias alluded to speaks to the potential dangers for Democrats of the base-turnout focus. The poll asked voters who they voted for in 2020 as well as who they plan to vote for in November. This produced a big gap; Biden actually led by 12 points in the recalled 2020 vote, but he trails Trump by 5 points in 2024 voter preferences:

    • 2020 recalled vote (excluding nonvoters): Biden 53%, Trump 41%

    • 2024 vote (including learners): Trump 48%, Biden 43%

    Now, this is a weird result – Biden actually won in 2020 by 4.5 percentage points, not 12. It may reflect the fact that voters sometimes incorrectly recall their previous votes and there can be a bias toward the candidate who won the prior election (in this case, Biden). Nevertheless, this is a bad data point for White House. In the poll, only 83 percent of voters who say they chose Biden in 2020 plan to vote for him this year, whereas 97 percent who voted for Trump plan to vote for Trump again.

    These are swing voters, in other words — people who are explicitly stating to pollsters that they are switching their vote from 2020. There are a substantial number of them.

    *  *  *

    Not everyone, including Fast Company contributor James Surowiecki, can accept reality:

    Of course, the 2024 election will ultimately come down to whether Trump voters can overcome “the Democrats fraudulent voting scheme,” according to the former president.

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 23:20

  • Alarm Bells For The US Food Supply
    Alarm Bells For The US Food Supply

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

    How much more are you spending on food each month compared to two or three years ago?  In recent years, our leaders have been flooding the system with money at the same time that global supplies of food have been getting tighter and tighter.  On the other side of the world, hundreds of millions of people do not have enough food to eat on a regular basis and children are literally dropping dead from starvation.  Here in the United States, nobody is dropping dead from starvation, but demand at food banks is absolutely exploding as U.S. households struggle to deal with how oppressively expensive groceries have become.  Unfortunately, things are about to get even worse.

    Right now, the largest fire in the entire history of Texas continues to rage out of control…

    The biggest inferno in Texas history is being fueled by winds and high temperatures as it rages Sunday, threatening to incinerate more buildings, cattle and livelihoods across the Texas Panhandle while residents sift through ashes of what used to be homes.

    Critical fire weather conditions were expected to continue Sunday in the area, with strengthening winds gusting to 50 mph and dry conditions combining to set the stage for rapid wildfire spread, the National Weather Service warned.

    The Smokehouse Creek Fire has been burning for nearly a week and has torched more than 1 million acres in Texas alone, making it the largest fire on record in the state – and it is only 15% contained.

    With each passing hour, even more cattle are being engulfed by the fires.

    Nobody knows for sure how many have been killed so far.

    Most news reports that I have seen say that it is “thousands”…

    The largest wildfire in Texas history has devastated the state’s agriculture, blazing through more than 1 million acres of land in the Panhandle, killing thousands of livestock, destroying crops and gutting infrastructure.

    The agriculture industry, a big driver of the state’s economy, was already facing pressures from prolonged and widespread drought that forced ranchers to manage smaller herds, contributing to a decrease in beef production nationally. The series of wildfires in the Panhandle this week is another blow as many ranchers tried to rebuild their herds and operations during the cooler months of the year.

    What will the final death toll be?

    According to Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, there are more than 10 million head of livestock in the region…

    State Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told The New York Times that the Panhandle is home to roughly 85% of Texas’s cattle herds.

    The region supports over 10 million head of livestock. Most of the cattle are kept in feedlots and dairy farms as farmers and ranchers attempt to shield their herds from the wildfires, Miller said.

    “There are millions of cattle out there, with some towns comprising more cattle than people,” Miller told The Wall Street Journal.

    Even before this disaster erupted, supplies of beef were really tight.

    At this point, the size of the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest since 1951, and the size of the Canadian cattle herd is the smallest in 30 years…

    Canada is the next nation to report a multi-decade low cattle herd.

    At the beginning of the year, the USDA reported the lowest total U.S. head since 1951 at a little more than 87 million.

    Now, Statistics Canada is reporting the Canadian cattle herd is at its lowest level in more than 30 years, totaling just 11 million cattle and calves on farms.

    And even without the tragedy in Texas, we were already being warned that the U.S. cattle herd would get even smaller this year because we are looking at the “smallest beef calf crop since 1948”…

    But that supply of feeder cattle will likely tighten during the rest of this year. The smallest beef calf crop since 1948, brought on by drought and high feed prices and the contraction of the beef cow herd, along with a significant decrease in replacement beef heifers, means that there won’t be as many cattle to put in feedlots to replace those going out.

    Beef is now considered to be a “luxury meat”, and prices are only going to go higher throughout the remainder of 2024.

    So if you enjoy beef, I would stock up now.

    Of course it isn’t just beef that is going to become more expensive.

    All over the western world, “green policies” are making things extremely challenging for farmers and ranchers.

    During a recent appearance on Fox News, one industry insider warned that more U.S. farmers are going out of business “every day”…

    While nationwide organizations like the FFA are going strong and statewide affairs like the annual Pennsylvania Farm Show and Iowa State Fair continue to draw exhibitors and guests alike, beneath the surface are troubling signs, two guests on “The Ingraham Angle” warned this week.

    Globalist “green” policies as well as inflation and rising costs have led to thinner herds, and in some instances, foreclosure or shuttering of farms altogether, bringing with them a potential domestic food crisis, they said.

    “Farmers are going out of business every day,” said John Boyd Jr., founder of the Black Farmers of America.

    We have already seen farmers engage in wild protests all over Europe, and it is probably just a matter of time before we see similar protests here in the United States.

    But even if government control freaks left our farmers alone, they would still have to deal with weather patterns that have gone completely nuts.

    For example, this weekend an absolutely massive blizzard dumped up to 12 feet of snow on some parts of California, and wind gusts in some areas actually reached 190 miles per hour…

    Hundreds of miles of California highways remained shut down Sunday as a powerful blizzard pounded parts of the Golden State and Mountain West with snow totals that could reach 12 feet amid howling winds with gusts that hit 190 mph − well above the 157 mph threshold for a Category 5 hurricane.

    National Weather Service meteorologist William Churchill warned of “life-threatening concern” for residents near Lake Tahoe, calling the storm, now in its third day, an “extreme blizzard.” Areas of Nevada, Utah and Colorado were also affected.

    “Moderate to heavy snow has persisted overnight across the northern Sierra Nevada,” the National Weather Service in Sacramento said in a social media post Sunday. “Wind gusts … are continuing to result in blizzard conditions.”

    As I sit here, I am having a hard time even imagining what a blizzard with 190 mph winds would look like.

    I cannot remember anything like this ever happening before.

    But the truth is that weird storms like this will be the new normal.

    Weather patterns all over the globe are breaking records, and that is making it really difficult for farmers and ranchers to do their jobs.

    We have entered a time when a confluence of factors is creating a “perfect storm” for global food production, and global hunger has been steadily on the rise since 2015.

    Sadly, the outlook for the years ahead is exceedingly bleak.  The amount of food that will be produced won’t even be close to what is needed to feed everyone on the planet, and so there will be a mad scramble for whatever is available.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 23:00

  • Snow Roaches? US State-Sponsored News Exec On Paid Leave Over Anti-White Social Media Posts
    Snow Roaches? US State-Sponsored News Exec On Paid Leave Over Anti-White Social Media Posts

    The United States Agency for Global Media – a state sponsored news operation, has placed a top executive on leave after he referred to white people as “snow roaches” on social media.

    James “J.R.” Reeves, who serves as the USAGM Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Director of IT Operations, was busted after a conservative X account End Wokeness dropped receipts showing Reeves’ racism. The USAGM, which includes Voice of America among six state-owned entities, quickly addressed the post – saying it “does not condone intolerance in any form,” and would investigate the claims – and placed Reeves was on paid administrative leave.

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    According to the report, Reeves recently wrote: “Cry about it, snow roaches” in support of a meme which stated “Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Racists.”

    The account also responded to several other messages by calling a user a “snow roach” and suggesting they are uneducated or racist.

    “Last time I checked it’s the snow roaches that are mad about immigrants,” Reeves’ alleged account wrote on Feb. 12, while another message posted the same day read, “Like the other snow roaches, resort to racist tropes when you can’t construct a logical argument. Clearly uneducated. Stat triggered.”

    Another post from the account said, “You believe all the talking points from the ‘Republicans.’ Plus you’re a racist t–t. Immigrants to not have more rights. But just to help I’ve taken in multiple immigrant families to help! Now stay triggered! #snowroach.” 

    The account also wrote, “By 2045 Snow roaches will be a minority. That scares you… #welfarequeens,” according to End Wokeness, with a snapshot of a Pew Research Center finding about the White population in the U.S. shrinking in the last decade. –Fox News

    The account believed to belong to Reeves, @devast8nSigma, was locked following the End Wokeness post went viral.

    According to End Wokeness, “Reeves posted pictures of himself on this account multiple times throughout the years,” and “used this account to demonize White people, label them snow roaches, and celebrate their demographic decline.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 22:40

  • Alteration Of Gut Microbiota Affects The Severity And Complications Of COVID-19
    Alteration Of Gut Microbiota Affects The Severity And Complications Of COVID-19

    Authored by Elllen Wan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Increasing evidence suggests that alterations in the gut microbiota are associated with the development, severity, and sequelae of COVID-19 infection.

    In the adult digestive tract, there are approximately 100 trillion microbes, 10 times the number of human cells, and they weigh about 4.41 pounds. These organisms are immune system guardians and can help remove viruses.

    (Alpha Tauri 3D Graphics/Shutterstock)

    Certain Gut Bacteria Can Inactivate COVID-19 Virus

    In a new study published in Cell Host & Microbe, researchers evaluated the impact of gut microbiota composition on respiratory viral infections through animal experiments. The results showed that segmented filamentous bacteria (SFB) in the gut could protect mice from viral influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and the COVID-19 virus.

    Studies have indicated that SFB, whether naturally present or acquired, can combat viral infections with the help of alveolar macrophages in the lungs.

    Alveolar macrophages serve as the first line of defense against respiratory pathogens.

    In mice that don’t have SFB, these immune cells were rapidly depleted as infection progressed. Conversely, in mice with SFB in the gut, these immune cells underwent alterations to resist the inflammatory signaling induced by the influenza virus. Moreover, alveolar macrophages directly disabled the influenza virus.

    Gut-Lung Axis

    While the functions of the gut and lungs are different, they share common structural features, as they both develop from the same embryonic tissue. Both the gut and lungs are covered with mucous membranes. These membranes secrete mucin and collectively form a mucosal immune system that defends against pathogens.

    As research on COVID-19 progresses, some researchers have noted the bidirectional and complex relationship of the gut-lung axis. Microbiota-derived metabolic pathways can function distally and play a vital role in anti-inflammatory responses in the airways.

    The SFB are unlikely to be the only kind of gut microbe capable of affecting the immune cells in the lungs, said Dr. Andrew Gewirtz, a co-senior study author, in a press release.

    Dr. Richard Plemper, a co-senior author of the paper, said that among the thousands of microbial species inhabiting the mouse gut, a common commensal microbe significantly impacted respiratory virus infections. He further stated that if these findings apply to human infections, they could have substantial implications for the risk assessment of disease progression in patients.

    Research has shown that alterations in the gut microbiota, including changes in specific microbiota species and microbial-derived metabolites, play an important role in regulating the severity and progression of COVID-19 infection and post-recovery complications.

    Viral Respiratory Tract Infection Affects the Gut Microbiota

    An analysis of fecal samples from 102 patients with severe COVID-19 infection following ICU admission found that decreased concentrations of gut microbiome metabolite—secondary bile acids and desaminotyrosine—were associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure and mortality.

    Another study revealed that patients infected with COVID-19 showed a decrease or depletion of bacteria with immune-regulating capabilities in the body, such as Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, as well as some bacteria from the Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium families.

    Additionally, respiratory virus infections are often observed in patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Microbiota analysis of these patients showed that those with reduced levels of commensal bacterial species producing butyrate had a fivefold increase in the progression of viral respiratory tract infections.

    Enhancing Gut Health to Build Robust Immunity

    The intestinal tract, the largest immune organ in the human body, plays a crucial role in establishing and maintaining a robust immune system, and gut immunity is closely linked to our diet.

    Probiotics are beneficial bacteria for the gut and are relatively safe health supplements. A retrospective cohort study showed that COVID-19 patients treated with probiotics had a shorter time to clinical improvement, including reduced fever, hospital stays, and viral shedding. Another study also indicated that probiotic treatment significantly shortened the duration of diarrhea in critically ill COVID-19 patients.

    BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health published a study in 2021 analyzing the effects of dietary habits on COVID-19 infection, severity of symptoms, and duration of the illness.

    The study covered 2,884 frontline health care workers from six different countries, investigating their dietary habits and the severity of COVID-19 infection. The results showed that participants who followed either a plant-based or pescatarian diet (where a person doesn’t eat meat but eats fish) had a 59 percent lower odds of developing moderate to severe COVID-19 than those who did not.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 22:20

  • Mapping Out America's Cannabis Dispensaries
    Mapping Out America’s Cannabis Dispensaries

    American think-tank Pew Research released a new analysis that shows although marijuana is illegal at the federal level, many Americans live in states where cannabis is legal for medical or recreational use. 

    The new report on the status of marijuana in the US reveals that 74% of Americans reside in states that have legalized marijuana for either recreational or medical purposes, with 54% living in states where pot is only permitted for recreational use.  

    Since Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, 24 other states, along with the District of Columbia, have also embraced legalization. Moreover, 14 states have approved the use of marijuana for medical purposes only. The remaining 12 states have restricted access to marijuana products with low levels of THC or none at all. 

    A map of America’s 15,000 cannabis dispensaries reveals pot shop clusters up and down the West and East Coasts but also cluster in interior states like Colorado, Oklahoma, and Michigan. 

    This latest analysis, coupled with a recent Gallup poll, is an indication that an increasing number of Americans now believe marijuana should be legal. 

    Meanwhile, health officials are recommending easing restrictions on marijuana, a move that sets the stage for potentially expanding the cannabis market.

    A top official at the Department of Health and Human Services wrote Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Anne Milgram called for marijuana to be reclassified as a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act, according to a letter dated Aug. 29, 2023, obtained by Bloomberg and reported last year. 

    Should the DEA reclassify marijuana, it would mark a critical shift away from its status as a Schedule I substance, which includes drugs with high abuse risk, like heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 22:00

  • The Institutional Insanity Complex
    The Institutional Insanity Complex

    Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic,

    “Nobody does. The crowd never thinks. People are only comfortable in a pack, and they’re most comfortable in one that’s racing off a cliff.”

    – Deacon Bainbridge to Daniel Durand, The Golden Pinnacle, Robert Gore, (2013)

    The pack is racing off a cliff. There is a vast complex telling them that they are not, and that they won’t be hurt when they smash on the rocks below.

    How does the human mind deal with the contradictory? One way is through discovering facts and rational analysis to resolve the contradiction. A vaccine is presented as safe and effective. However, its legal status shields its makers from legal liability for any vaccine-induced injuries. Why would legal immunity be necessary if the vaccine is safe and effective? The rational person questions the premise of safety and effectiveness, and either foregoes the vaccine until further data confirms the premise, or foregoes it permanently if it doesn’t.

    The other way to deal with contradiction is to evade it. If the crowd—the government, the pharmaceutical companies, the media, the academics, the corporations, the celebrities, your employer, your friends, and your family—is telling you the vaccines are safe and effective, they must be so. Unfortunately, the rocks below hurt; they may even kill. And it’s no consolation that the comforting crowd shares your fate. Perhaps, if there’s an afterlife, you can commiserate with fellow unfortunates there.

    The Institutional Insanity Complex (IIC) wants to separate you from your mind. Now it talks openly of doing just that, inserting microchips and wiring in your brain, so that you can be reprogrammed to run with the crowd and never question it. Destroy the mind and you destroy humanity, but the IIC is more insane than those it would reprogram. It, too, shall be destroyed.

    Debt must be repaid in a medium of exchange creditors trust, even when the debtor is a government. When debt increases, interest payments increase and the debt service burden compounds. The interest rate necessary to secure credit often increases, adding to the burden. This is all happening in real time with Western governments and China. The global economy floats on an ocean of debt, but unlike a real ocean, debt can shrink into a puddle almost instantaneously. When it can either not be repaid or repaid in a debased medium that creditors no longer trust, debtors and creditors alike go bankrupt, and multiple and conflicting claims are made on income streams and real assets.

    Anyone who insists that present debt trends will lead to disaster is derided as reactionary, enslaved to outmoded ways of thinking. At least it’s thinking; obliviousness is not, Consequences have begun their inevitable cascade as interest rates rise and debt implodes.

    Interest-rate sensitive industries like commercial real estate and banking have been the first to register the tremors from what will be an unprecedented financial earthquake. Individuals, businesses, governments, and financial and derivative markets will tumble into an expanding fissure of global insolvency, illiquidity, and bankruptcy. Derivatives, the sum of which (measured in the quadrillions), is a double-digit multiple of global GDP, will live up to Warren Buffett’s appellation as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

    Obliviousness is one thing; taking actions that make the threats you’re ignoring even worse is insanity. Yet the IIC is spending money it doesn’t have on two wars—both of which could expand—and lobbying for a third (Iran) and fourth (Taiwan). There are no plans for negotiations for what would, among other salutary outcomes, staunch the financial bleed from the first two.

    At home, the IIC ups the ante on the welfare state, inviting the whole world to partake in its already unaffordable benefits. Parts of the U.S., particularly in Democratic and gang-controlled (a redundancy) cities, are third-world enclaves that will continue to expand as third-world invitees flood in. The U.S. is fast becoming a third-world nation. Much of Europe is confronted with the same insanity, as its rulers have also put out the welcome mat for unaffordable migrants.

    Personal morality is regarded as a quaint anachronism, a liability that hinders one’s pursuit of power and payola. By now, many realize that there’s a sub rosa explanation for much of what transpires in the political realm. The shorthand phrase: bribes, blackmail, and bullets.

    Look again at the U.S.’s two wars. Ukraine is a cesspool of corruption, and the Clintons and the Bidens have rancid ties to its oligarchic power structure. These ties are so sensitive that President Trump was impeached for asking Ukrainian president Zelensky about Hunter and Joe Biden, and Ukrainian energy company Burisma. There are also Ukraine’s under-reported and under-investigated bioweapons research facilities.

    It’s certainly not a stretch to hypothesize that Ukraine has lined a lot of powerful Americans’ pockets; that many of them, particularly the Bidens, are vulnerable to blackmail, and that nobody involved in these sordid affairs would be too squeamish about bullets, if necessary. That accounts for the desperate efforts to obtain huge funding packages for Ukraine to prolong the war. The money that hasn’t disappeared has been squandered on ineffectual military strategies that haven’t prevented Russian victory; yet, Biden has pulled out all the stops to secure another big appropriation. Throwing good money after bad on a lost cause is almost the definition of insanity.

    You have to be hopelessly naïve to believe that the political class’s unshakeable fealty to Israel doesn’t stem from the three Bs. Bribery? Nobody spreads more money around Washington than the Jewish lobby. Blackmail? We have the late Jeffrey Epstein’s honey-trap operation and his and Ghislaine Maxwell’s well-documented ties to Israeli intelligence. If the investigative reporting of Whitney Webb is to be believed, Epstein is just the tip of a massive iceberg of corruption and criminality that’s operated for decades. Bullets? There’s no shortage of Mossad-linked disappearances and murders.

    Whatever keeps Washington’s Corruptocracy in line, it’s leading to disaster as the U.S. IIC supports Israel’s campaign to expel the Palestinians from what was once their homeland (then known as Palestine). The Israelis don’t have any justification for their slaughter, just a few recitations endlessly repeated and amplified in the Western mainstream media, and epithets of “anti-Semitism” thrown at those who question, criticize, or protest against the government’s barbaric campaign. Nobody in the Biden administration will do anything about it, even if means the death or displacement of two million Gaza Palestinians. The campaign may well extend to Israel’s five million Palestinians living outside Gaza, and that, too, will receive IIC acquiescence.

    Even if moral considerations never enter into their bloodthirsty calculations, aiding and abetting this Nakba is not just a crime, but an epic mistake. The danger that it leads to a conflagration that engulfs the entire Middle East and perhaps the world is clear. Hamas has received the support of Yemen’s Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, various Syrian and Iraqi insurgent groups, and Iran. That support has been calibrated—the only sanity on display in the region so far—but they will match Israeli escalation with their own.

    U.S. neocons have been promoting a war against Iran for over two decades. In a world with even a smidgeon of justice they would, best case, be straitjacketed and involuntarily committed, worst case, spend the rest of their lives in the kind of super secure solitary to which they want to confine Julian Assange.

    Whatever respect the U.S. government once received as “leader of the free world” is gone, replaced by contempt and antipathy from the 7 billion outside the West’s golden billion. First Ukraine and now Gaza have coalesced the multipolarity movement led by Russia and China. Strengthening one’s adversaries and needlessly creating new ones are the opposite of rational.

    What else can be expected from people who believe in a double-digit number of genders, all interchangeable? The federal government, academia, corporate America, and Hollywood are ruthlessly promoting doctrines whose essence is that people’s gender, sexual proclivities, race, and ethnicity are their most important attributes, not their ability, competence, ingenuity, productivity, judgment, or character.

    Nasty old capitalism that rewarded the latter has been replaced by crony socialism that rewards the former. Hierarchies are filled with people who can’t even be said to have reached their level of incompetence. They were incompetent to begin with, but secured their positions because they ticked the right DEI boxes, mouthed the prevailing platitudes, and slithered their way up the ladder. Anyone who points this out is smeared and cancelled. Truth must be discarded if it hurts the wrong feelings and exposes the wrong agendas.

    Pretend is the order of the day. So, Washington pretends: that it can have an empire when its military hasn’t won a war since 1945; that it can jump into two major wars and potentially two more and it will win them all; that the unrelenting immigrant flow and crumbling, dangerous cities aren’t hallmarks of the U.S.’s regression into the third world; that the death-trap medical system promotes health; that the debts it cannot pay and commitments it cannot meet can just keep piling up, and that the corrupt ruling class, riddled with incompetents with no real world experience or useful skills, heads stuffed with nonsense, is entitled to rule by virtue of its hypocritical preening and ineptitude. Meanwhile, the mainstream media peddles the official propaganda and pretends all is well.

    How does one preserve one’s sanity amidst this pervasive lunacy?

    You can act like a man (or woman, the only other gender), cherish what you are, and take responsibility for your own life. You can refuse to turn away from an insane world, seeing it for what it is, but holding to your own sanity with all your strength. You can refuse to pretend. To preserve your mind is to preserve your immortal soul; abandon either one and you abandon the other.

    In The Gray Radiance, the main character, Nick Wozniak, contemplates soul, mind, God, and the insanity in which he finds himself. He’s in Saigon in 1968.

    He felt a savage satisfaction in what he’d said. Franklins did their best to insulate themselves from such encounters. They lived in bubbles, and how often did you get a chance to pop one? God, how could you live like Franklin?

    God. A concept that might be more than a concept. He was a twice-a-year—at most—Catholic and had never considered himself devout or faithful. God was an abstraction before whom you genuflected, prayed, sang, took communion, and put an offering on the plate. He got as much out of church as he would watching Indian tribal dances or voodoo rituals, and he put them all in the same category.

    Yet, he couldn’t account for that strange feeling as he carried Quang in My Tho, the certainty that the boy would make it. Nor could he account for the conviction that he would find the truth about his father, that he had to do so. Both were the kind of things that God presumably would want to encourage. You’d think with God that actions spoke louder than genuflecting and the other folderol. You worshipped God by doing the right things, not just showing up at church. He couldn’t conceive of an insecure God, one who needed the folderol.

    And you think he’d help you do the right things, if you asked him. Truth and wisdom—distilled truth—came to those who sought them. That was reasonable, and God would be reasonable. Humans had logic and reason and were created in God’s image. That would make God logical and reasonable, although not in ways that people would always understand. He had heard someone say—someone smart, but he couldn’t remember who—that man created God in his own image. A quick and easy dismissal for those who wanted it. Man had undoubtedly created a conception of God, as Nick was doing that morning. It didn’t logically follow that God didn’t exist, or that he hadn’t created man.

    If God was logic, he was also justice. That the two went together seemed beyond argument; the books would balance. Even if there was no God, there was at least some justice because actions have consequences. Drink yourself stupid, and you throw up in the middle of the night. Your head aches the next morning. You could have been beaten, robbed, or worse after you passed out on the street. You were saved by a guardian angel, who would kill you if you didn’t play the devil’s game with Hendricks.

    A collision with consequences was coming for the cohort running the United States government. They were drunk with power and corruption. Like all drunks, they kept drinking. You don’t murder the natives, destroy their country, prop up your gang of thieves, spew endless hypocrisy, then walk out of the bar to your cozy bed scot-free. You weaved down uncertain streets and dark alleys and were a sitting duck for all the enemies you had made. Sooner or later, they would get you.

    There would come a time when Franklin and his ilk couldn’t just move on to a new set of lies. When retribution came, it would be Old Testament merciless. Nothing created hate like arrogance asserting its control but exempting itself from its own rules. Throw in pious crap about moral superiority, and you’ve got hate that’s passed down generation to generation, that neither forgets nor forgives. God knows crap when he sees it, and he doesn’t forget or forgive. He wouldn’t bless his children subjugating his children. This love of power was the root of evil. He’d bless the Golden Rule: his children treating his children as they themselves wanted to be treated.

    Yes, indeed, Old Testament merciless.

    There were different conceptions of God, but they all had one thing in common: God the creator. Humanity destroyed but it had also created every step of its own progress—life depended on it. To see something where there was nothing, to discover that which had been hidden, to plan and to build, to make your conception a reality; that was the spark of the divine, communion with God.

    He finished his coffee, got up from the couch, went into the kitchen, and rinsed his cup. There was a bottle of Jack, almost full, by the sink. He poured it down the drain. He threw a bag of marijuana in the garbage.

    His headache was gone. It was time to write—to create—his story of My Tho, Minh, and Quang. He’d write for a few hours and then go to the hospital to see Quang. He wasn’t sure how, but his path with Quang led to creation—to God—as well.

    The Gray Radiance, Robert Gore, 2023

    The battle against insanity is moral and spiritual. A snippet here and a snippet there of what you know to be true are lifelines; the mountains of lies are death. Two plus two will always equal four. The unremitting search for truth leads to its distilled essence: wisdom.

    A collision with consequences is no longer coming for the cohort running the United States government; it’s arrived. Their frantic efforts to censor and suppress, their vicious cancellations, and their high-tech totalitarianism are to keep that reality—not so much from the populace they claim to rule—but from themselves. They cannot escape the misery and death they are imposing on everyone else.

    The ultimate insanity is pretending that ignoring reality will change it. The ultimate wisdom is dealing with it. If you plod along the straight line path of facts and logic, holding to your sanity and what you know to be true, you won’t win the race, but that’s a race over the cliff. You will preserve your mind . . . and your soul. And you may be around to help start things fresh after the insanity extinguishes itself.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 21:40

  • Terror Threat? NYC Mobilizing 1,000 National Guard Troops In Subways 
    Terror Threat? NYC Mobilizing 1,000 National Guard Troops In Subways 

    New York Governor Kathy Hochul is mobilizing 1,000 National Guard troops and State Police officers across New York City’s subway system in a show of force meant as a warning to criminals who have been terrorizing passengers. 

    Gov. Hochul announced earlier today that 750 guardsmen and 250 law enforcement officers would be deployed across “the city’s busiest transit stations” amid out-of-control violent crime. 

    “These brazen heinous attacks on our subway system will not be tolerated,” the governor said, adding the Guardsmen are part of a new five-point plan to crack down on the city’s crime wave. 

    She continued: “No one heading to their job or to visit family or go to a doctor appointment should worry that the person sitting next to them possesses a deadly weapon. They shouldn’t worry about whether someone’s going to brandish a knife or gun. That’s what we’re going to do with these checkpoints.” 

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

    What’s puzzling – is if the only threats were violent criminals and migrants, why deploy the National Guard? The NYPD is fully capable of increasing its presence and flooding subway stations with officers. This raises the possibility that the threat is more significant than just migrants, potentially hinting at terrorism-related concerns.

    It was only days ago when the Federal Bureau of Investigation released new information about a rogue Iranian intelligence officer planning assassination attempts on former and current US government officials.

    Calling in the National Guard for civil disturbance doesn’t make sense. This also suggests that whatever threat has spooked NY and NYC officials could be much greater than what the NYPD can handle.

    The threat could be related to Iran and a possible upsurge in attack vectors during the US presidential election. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 21:20

  • Why China's Strong Commodity Imports Defy Weak Economic Data
    Why China’s Strong Commodity Imports Defy Weak Economic Data

    By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

    Despite continued weak economic performance, China’s imports of major commodities in the first two months of 2024 held strong and exceeded last year’s levels.

    Imports of crude oil, LNG, coal, and iron ore were all higher at the start of the year compared to the same period of 2023, although China’s economic data still shows a weak recovery, problems in several key sectors, and low consumer confidence.

    There’s a reason behind the robust commodity imports, and it’s not Chinese economic growth. Rather, it is the market dynamics for each major commodity, Reuters columnist Clyde Russell notes.

    Strong Commodity Imports

    Crude oil imports into China, the world’s top crude importer, increased to 11.73 million barrels per day (bpd) in February, higher than the 11.31 million bpd imports in January, per LSEG data cited by Russell.

    China’s customs office doesn’t report separate data for January and February to avoid distortion due to the Lunar New Year holiday, which typically begins at the end of January or early February.

    According to LSEG estimates, China imported 11.51 million bpd of crude for January and February on average, up by more than 1 million bpd compared to the official Chinese data for January-February crude oil imports last year.

    Despite possible distortion due to the Lunar New Year holiday period, which this year was in February, a large part of the rise in crude imports was due to higher demand compared to January 2023, when China was reopening from the COVID lockdowns, and because of lower commodity prices at the time the orders were placed in the fourth quarter of 2023.

    Oil prices declined in the last quarter of last year after hitting a 2023 high of over $95 per barrel in September.

    Considering the time lag of around two months between crude purchases and nominations and the arrival of the crude in China, it could be concluded that Chinese refiners have continued to buy more oil when prices were falling.

    In January 2024, China’s crude oil imports held up at a robust rate of 11.31 million bpd, per estimates from LSEG Oil Research. Low oil prices in November and December 2023 have been driving higher Chinese crude imports early this year.

    China also allocated in January a massive batch of crude oil import quotas to refiners, raising the allowances from early last year by around 60% and allocating full-year quotas to some. The early allocation of a large volume of import allowances will help refiners better plan their crude purchases in 2024, according to analysts.

    Despite weak manufacturing and the ongoing property crisis, crude oil imports are estimated to have held strong at much higher levels compared to the first two months of 2023.

    That’s also because China took advantage of the slide in oil prices, which began in October, to ramp up its stockpiling of cheaper crude in December and January. 

    In the liquefied natural gas market, China imported in February a record volume of LNG for the month, as buyers took advantage of plummeting spot prices in Asia amid ample inventories and tepid demand.  

    Chinese LNG imports last month – the highest-ever for February – topped 5.5 million tons, rising by 15% compared to February last year, ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg showed last week.

    In February 2024, Chinese LNG importers were on the lookout for cheaper supply of liquefied natural gas on the spot market as prices in North Asia halved from October levels and slid to a nearly three-year low by the middle of the month. 

    Last week, the average LNG price for April delivery into north-east Asia was unchanged from the previous week, at $8.30 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), which was the lowest level since April 2021.

    China’s coal imports were also robust in early 2024 amid high power demand and low hydropower output.

    Despite the property sector crisis, Chinese imports of iron ore were also strong at the start of 2024.

    Steel mills have increased inventories of iron ore in recent weeks, which could be in anticipation of authorities rolling out measures to boost the sector and the overall economy, Reuters’ Russell notes.

    Underwhelming Economy

    Chinese imports of major commodities defy the weak economic performance, which has plagued the world’s second-largest economy since the reopening from the Covid restrictions early last year.

    Manufacturing activity remains in contraction territory, shrinking for a fifth consecutive month in February.

    Consumer prices are falling, and deflationary pressure risks becoming an entrenched behavior of lower spending among consumers, some analysts warned last month.  

    Despite China touting record travel during the Lunar New Year holiday in February, consumer spending was lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to CNN estimates, amid weak consumer confidence in a deflationary environment.

    On Tuesday, China set a target of around 5% economic growth for 2024, which is in line with expectations. Premier Li Qiang told the National People’s Congress that China would be looking to “transform” the economic growth model and implement measures to reduce industrial overcapacity and defuse property sector and debt risks.

    Restoring confidence will likely take some time, and the process will likely be uneven, Lynn Song, Chief Economist, Greater China, at ING said, commenting on China’s economic growth targets. The policies that will be announced in the coming weeks and months will play a large role in whether or not consumer and business sentiment will bottom out this year, the economist added.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 21:00

  • "Notable Milestone": American FICO Credit Scores Decline First Time In Decade
    “Notable Milestone”: American FICO Credit Scores Decline First Time In Decade

    Although the Biden administration claims that the American consumer is humming on all cylinders, the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book in March painted a much different story in the report released on Wednesday. It showed consumers are cutting back on spending and becoming more cost-conscious due to the increasing pressures of elevated inflation.

    A new report by Fair Isaac Corp., the Montana-based creator of the FICO credit score, shows consumers missing more credit card payments and taking on more debt. This has led to the average consumer credit score reversing for the first time in a decade.

    Blomberg first reported that the average FICO credit score for Americans fell by one point in October to 717 from 718 in July. Despite being a minor change, this marks the first decline in a decade.

    Source: Bloomberg

    “It’s a notable milestone that we’ve seen the average score decrease,” said Ethan Dornhelm, vice president of scores and predictive analytics at FICO, adding, “This isn’t a blinking red light, but it certainly is a yellow light.”

    According to Bloomberg, the 30-day-or-more delinquency rate increased to 18% of the population – up about 4% since April – and comes in an environment of rising delinquencies for credit cards, auto loans, and mortgages. Credit card utilization also rose higher in October, up to 35% from 34% in April, while the average credit card balance in October jumped 5.9% to $7,306. 

    A separate report showed how non-revolving credit growth stumbled under high interest rates in early February.

    The average rate across all commercial banks on all credit card amounts hit a new record high of 21.47% in the fourth quarter of 2023.

    Meanwhile, the personal savings rate has collapsed. 

    Another concerning piece of consumer data comes from Credit Managers’ survey that shows the rate of rejections for credit applications and the number of accounts moved to ‘collections’ is surging back to near GFC levels.

    … and about that ‘strong consumer’ narrative the Biden administration keeps pushing in corporate media. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 20:40

  • RSV Vaccines May Increase Risk Of Rare Neurological Condition
    RSV Vaccines May Increase Risk Of Rare Neurological Condition

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

    (MargJohnsonVA/Shutterstock)

    Recently approved vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for older adults may be linked to a rare nervous system disorder that causes the body’s immune system to attack its own nerves.

    In a Feb. 29 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, health officials presented data that appears to show a slightly elevated rate of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) among people who received RSV vaccines by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

    A data mining alert on Jan. 19 for disproportional reporting was detected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Pfizer’s Abrysvo RSV vaccine and GBS but has not been reported to date for GSK’s RSV vaccine Arexvy, according to Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of the CDC’s influenza division and former director of the CDC’s immunization safety office.

    The FDA uses data mining to identify statistical associations between products and events in their respective safety databases. If there is disproportionate reporting of an event for a particular product, this could suggest a statistical association between the adverse event and the product.

    According to data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) presented by Dr. Shimabukuro, data show 35 reports of GBS with 18 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, Abrysvo, 16 cases attributed to GSK’s Arexvy, and one case that was not reported under either brand name.

    The CDC verified 23 cases of GBS reported to VAERS as of Feb. 16—all occurring within 22 days of RSV vaccination. Of the 23 cases, 15 were attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine and eight to GSK’s vaccine. Fourteen males experienced the condition compared with nine females. There was one death reported in a 70-year-old man who developed GBS after receiving Arexvy.

    “Certainly 23 cases of GBS within 22 [days] of RSV vaccination is not a ‘small signal’ given the woeful underreporting in VAERS,” Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, who holds a doctorate in biochemical engineering, told The Epoch Times in an email.

    “What is always missing with VAERS is a good denominator. Given that these vaccines have been distributed for less than a year (since May 31, 2023), I would expect the uptake to still be fairly low,” he added.

    According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), underreporting is one of the main limitations of a passive surveillance system like VAERS. “The term, underreporting refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small fraction of actual adverse events,” HHS states on its website. A November 2020 article published in Vaccine showed sensitivity for capturing GBS after three different vaccines ranged from 12 to 64 percent, suggesting more cases of GBS are occurring than are being captured.

    Vaccine Safety Database Suggests ‘Potential’ for Increased Rate of GBS

    The CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) suggests the “potential for an increased rate of GBS” following vaccination with GSK’s Arexvy RSV vaccine, but the agency said additional analyses are needed. There were insufficient doses of Pfizer’s Abrysvo used in the VSD to determine the risk of GBS following vaccination.

    It is estimated that 10 people will experience GBS for every 1 million doses of Arexvy administered, compared with 25 cases of Abrysvo, the CDC’s vaccine advisors said during the meeting.

    Due to the small number of GBS cases and the size of the prelicensure studies, Dr. Shimabukuro said it’s not known at this time whether the reported GBS cases or other neuroinflammatory events are random chance or whether RSV vaccination might increase the risk of these events. However, GBS is already included as an adverse event on both companies’ vaccine labels.

    In prelicensure studies of Prizer’s RSV vaccine in adults 60 and older, two reported cases of GBS among 20,255 vaccine recipients were observed within 42 days of vaccination compared with one case during GSK’s study of 18,304 vaccine recipients.

    “We’re still in the early uptake phase of these new RSV vaccines,” Dr. Shimabukuro told STAT in an interview after the meeting. “Some of these data and findings are based on small numbers of cases and relatively small numbers of doses administered,” he added. Due to “uncertainties and limitations” of early data, Dr. Shimabukuro said the agency can’t establish whether there’s an increased risk for GBS in individuals 60 and older following RSV vaccination, but better risk estimates would be forthcoming in the future.

    During the meeting, Pfizer vice president Reema Mehta said the company believes its vaccine is safe but is committed to continuous monitoring and evaluation of Abrysvo’s safety to assess the possibility of vaccine-related GBS.

    In an email to STAT, a spokesperson for GSK said the CDC analysis did not indicate an elevated rate of GBS among people who had received their company’s RSV vaccine, but it is designing a study to evaluate the risk of GBS after vaccination with Arexvy.

    Mr. Hooker said what’s more shocking to him is the 34 deaths reported from RSV vaccine in a short period of time. The deaths were included in Dr. Shimabukuro’s presentation during the ACIP meeting.

    “The swine flu vaccine was taken off of the market for fewer deaths,” Mr. Hooker told The Epoch Times. “It seems that with the advent of the horrific result of the COVID-19 vaccine, the bar has been severely lowered in terms of overall safety.”

    The CDC said during the meeting that its risk-benefit analysis continues to support the use of both RSV vaccines in people over 60 due to the burden of RSV in that population.

    GBS Reported After Other Vaccines

    The FDA, in May 2023, licensed Pfizer and GSK’s RSV vaccines for adults 60 and older. The CDC signed off on a recommendation made by its advisory panel shortly thereafter recommending the vaccine for people 60 and older only if a healthcare provider thinks vaccination would be beneficial versus making it an annual vaccine. Some vaccine advisors proposed making a universal recommendation for RSV and requested more data at the upcoming meeting scheduled in June.

    According to the CDC, RSV is a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. Although most people recover in a week or two, it can be serious and is more commonly diagnosed in infants.

    GBS is a rare neurological disorder that occurs when a person’s immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system—a network of nerves that carry signals from the brain and spinal cord to other areas of the body. The condition begins suddenly with weakness and tingling in the hands and feet and eventually spreads throughout the body, resulting in paralysis that can leave a person unable to breathe independently.

    Although most people recover from GBS, some cases are severe and can be fatal. Recovery can take several years, and it may take six months or longer after symptoms start for an individual with GBS to walk again.

    Miller Fisher syndrome (MFS) and Bickerstaff brainstem encephalitis (BBE) are two variants of GBS. MFS is a nerve disease that usually involves the lower cranial and facial nerves, and BBE involves altered consciousness, problems with muscle coordination, and impaired eye movements.

    Other vaccines have also been linked to GBS, including COVID-19, recombinant zoster, and influenza vaccines. CDC studies based on data from the VSD and VAERS found an increased risk of GBS among adults 18 and older following COVID-19 vaccination with the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) shot manufactured by Janssen. The FDA, in July 2021, announced revisions to the product fact sheets for J&J to include a warning related to the increased risk of GBS observed following vaccination.

    Although the agency said it has not observed a similar signal with mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, cases of GBS and its variants have been reported following vaccination with both vaccines to VAERS and by the scientific community.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 20:20

  • What Could Go Wrong? 'Basel III Endgame' Stress Sparks Rebirth Of "Synthetic Credit Risk Sharing"
    What Could Go Wrong? ‘Basel III Endgame’ Stress Sparks Rebirth Of “Synthetic Credit Risk Sharing”

    Ironically, on a day when Fed Chair Powell spent a large portion of his time discussing the new regulatory threats from Basel Endgame rules – that force banks to hold more capital, less risk – BlackRock has published a report that is forecasting rapid growth for transactions that allow banks to shed risk in their loan portfolios.

    The freshly re-branded Synthetic Risk Transfer (SRT) deals, are simply credit-linked notes (which have been relatively uncommon since the great financial crisis) offering high (mid-double-digit) yields for borrowers willing to accept the implied credit default swap (that effectively transfers the credit risk tied to a pool of loans – such as CREs).

    Specifically, in SRT transactions, a bank earmarks a pool of assets on its balance sheet and buys credit default protection on the first 5% to 15% of the losses of that pool, so if losses materialize, the holders of the SRTs absorb the hit, according to BlackRock.

    The renaissance of these vehicles is driven by a combination of higher rates (which are among the main factors that have crushed CRE loan values) and forthcoming Basel III regulations that will force banks to hold more capital to cover potential losses.

    “With volatile interest rates and origination volumes, combined with increasing regulatory requirements, synthetic transactions are making more sense and are expected to pick up meaningfully in the near future,” said Chris Hentemann, chief investment officer and founder of hedge fund 400 Capital Management.

    Bloomberg reports that last year banks around the world sold $25 billion of SRTs partially offloading the risk of $300 billion of loans, according to an estimate by Pemberton Asset Management.

    While European banks have been the biggest users of such transactions in previous years, the big rise in SRT volumes will come from large Wall Street banks under pressure to boost their regulatory capital requirements, according to William Im, a director in BlackRock’s global opportunistic credit team.

    “Given greater acceptance of this as a tool and ongoing Basel III endgame regulatory pressures, there is a real world in which this market has a potential to grow at 30-to-40% each year for the next two years,” Im said.

    The growth trajectory Im envisions “sounds like a stark number, but if you compare investor demand as well as bank demand that well may be the case,” he said.

    In its paper, BlackRock cited the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and other regional banks as a factor driving growth in the market for regulatory capital securities.

    Rising rates and increased risk weightings mean “it’s not easy to be a bank CEO right now,” Joel Holsinger, co-head of alternative credit at Ares, said.

    “It is a truly transformational moment.”

    However, it is notably that Chair Powell’s comments today on the Basel III endgame likely signal there’s little chance a rule is finalized this year. Bloomberg Intelligence senior government analyst Nathan Dean notes that with the elections coming closer and closer, it’s more likely the Fed hits the brakes on the proposal or re-proposes the rule. We currently ascertain a 60% chance of a re-proposal.

    But, given the wave of marketing for SRTs, we suspect, the inevitability of higher capital requirements will do nothing to slow the growth of this trade.

    We have seen this movie before though: of course, the quants have their models, perfectly calibrated to ‘synthetically transfer’ that risk at a premium that pays big bonuses, but after scraping away the copulas and the codependencies, this is nothing more than a game of hot-potato (who can hold the potato long enough to earn a decent yield before it permanently scars your ‘hand’).

    Of course, there is always the embedded option of The Fed Put. Should the fecal matter truly strike the rotating object, let history be a lesson, Federal-Reserve-Backed SPVs will come to the rescue to re-collateralize the new TBTF market participants.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 20:00

  • The Great Election Fraud: Manufactured Choices Make A Mockery Of Our Republic
    The Great Election Fraud: Manufactured Choices Make A Mockery Of Our Republic

    Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.”

    – Gene Sharp, political science professor

    The U.S. Supreme Court was right to keep President Trump’s name on the ballot.

    The high court’s decree that the power to remove a federal candidate from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” rests with Congress, not the states, underscores the fact that in a representative democracy, the citizenry—not the courts, not the corporations, and not the contrived electoral colleges—should be the ones to elect their representatives.

    Unfortunately, what is being staged is not an election. It is a mockery of an election.

    This year’s presidential election, much like every other election in recent years, is what historian Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “pseudo-event”: manufactured, contrived, confected and devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.

    For the next eight months, Americans will be dope-fed billions of dollars’ worth of political propaganda aimed at persuading them that:

    1) their votes count,

    2) the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president, and

    3) electing the right candidate will fix everything that is wrong with this country. 

    Incredible, isn’t it, that in a country of more than 330 million people, we are given only two choices for president?

    The system is rigged, of course.

    Forcing the citizenry to choose between two candidates who are equally unfit for office does not in any way translate to having some say in how the government is run.

    Indeed, no matter what names are on the presidential ballot, once you step away from the cult of personality politics, you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

    The candidate who wins the White House has already made a Faustian bargain to keep the police state in power.

    We’ve been down this road before.

    Barack Obama campaigned on a message of hope, change and transparency, and promised an end to war and surveillance. Yet under Obama, government whistleblowers were routinely prosecuted, U.S. arms sales skyrocketed, police militarization accelerated, and surveillance became widespread.

    Donald Trump swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

    We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.

    Joe Biden has been no different. If his job was to keep the Deep State in power, he’s been a resounding success.

    Follow the money.  It always points the way.

    With each new president, we’ve been subjected to more government surveillance, more police abuse, more SWAT team raids, more roadside strip searches, more censorship, more prison time, more egregious laws, more endless wars, more invasive technology, more militarization, more injustice, more corruption, more cronyism, more graft, more lies, and more of everything that has turned the American dream into the American nightmare.

    What we’re not getting more of: elected officials who actually represent us.

    No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people if all we’re prepared to do is vote.

    After all, there is more to citizenship than the act of casting a ballot for someone who, once elected, will march in lockstep with the dictates of the powers-that-be.

    Yet as long as Americans are content to let politicians, war hawks and Corporate America run the country, the police state will prevail.

    “Total continuity” is how Chris Hedges refers to the manner in which the government’s agenda remains unchanged no matter who occupies the Executive Branch. “Continuity of government” (COG) is the phrase policy wonks use to refer to the unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”

    You can also refer to it as a shadow government, or the Deep State, which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who actually call the shots behind the scenes.

    Whatever term you use, the upshot remains the same: on the national level, we’re up against an immoveable, intractable, entrenched force that is greater than any one politician or party, whose tentacles reach deep into every sector imaginable, from Wall Street, the military and the courts to the technology giants, entertainment, healthcare and the media.

    This is no Goliath to be felled by a simple stone.

    This is a Leviathan disguised as a political savior.

    So, what is the solution to this blatant display of imperial elitism disguising itself as a populist exercise in representative government?

    Stop playing the game. Stop supporting the system. Stop defending the insanity. Just stop.

    Washington thrives on money, so stop giving them your money. Stop throwing your hard-earned dollars away on politicians and Super PACs who view you as nothing more than a means to an end. There are countless worthy grassroots organizations and nonprofits—groups like The Rutherford Institute—working to address real needs like injustice, poverty, homelessness, etc. Support them and you’ll see change you really can believe in in your own backyard.

    Politicians depend on votes, so stop giving them your vote unless they have a proven track record of listening to their constituents, abiding by their wishes and working hard to earn and keep their trust.

    It’s comforting to believe that your vote matters, but presidents are selected, not elected. Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda that is peddled by the media, a presidential election is not a populist election for a representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the nation’s archaic electoral college system. In other words, your vote doesn’t elect a president. Despite the fact that there are 218 million eligible voters in this country (only half of whom actually vote), it is the electoral college, made up of 538 individuals handpicked by the candidates’ respective parties, that actually selects the next president.

    The only thing you’re accomplishing by taking part in the “reassurance ritual” of voting is sustaining the illusion that we have a democratic republic.

    In actuality, we are suffering from what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately term an “economic élite domination” in which the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dominate and dictate national policy.

    No surprise there.

    As an in-depth Princeton University study confirms, democracy has been replaced by oligarchy, a system of government in which elected officials represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen.

    As such, presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

    So how do we prevail against the tyrant who says all the right things and does none of them? How do we overcome the despot whose promises fade with the spotlights? How do we conquer the dictator whose benevolence is all for show?

    We get organized. We get educated. We get active.

    Whether you vote or don’t vote doesn’t really matter. What matters is what else you’re doing to push back against government incompetence, abuse, corruption, graft, fraud and cronyism.

    Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only road to reform is through the ballot box.

    If you feel led to vote, fine, but if all you do is vote, “we the people” are going to lose.

    If you abstain from voting and still do nothing, “we the people” are going to lose.

    If you give your proxy to some third-party individual or group to fix what’s wrong with the country and that’s all you do, then “we the people” are going to lose.

    If, however, you’re prepared to turn off the television, tune out the talking heads, untether yourself from whatever piece of technology you’re affixed to, wean yourself off the teat of the nanny state, and start flexing those unused civic muscles, then there might be hope for us all.

    • For starters, know your rights and then put that knowledge into action. What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

    • Second, think nationally but act locally. Understand how your local government is structured. Who serves on your city council and school boards? What recourse does the community have to voice concerns about local problems or disagree with decisions by government officials? Are your locally elected officials accessible and open to what you have to say? Are your police chiefs being appointed from within your community? Who runs your local media? Does your newspaper report on local events? Who are your judges?

    • Third, don’t stop doing the hard work of holding your government accountable. Don’t let personal politics and party allegiances blind you to government misconduct and power grabs. This will mean holding all three branches of government accountable to the Constitution (i.e., vote them out of office if they abuse their powers). And it will mean making the president play by the rules of the Constitution.

    • Finally, don’t remain silent in the face of government injustice, corruption, or ineptitude. Speak truth to power.

    A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved. It also takes a citizenry willing to do more than grouse and complain.

    We must act—and act responsibly.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, any hope of restoring our freedoms and regaining control over our runaway government must start from the bottom up. And that will mean re-learning step by painful step what it actually means to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 19:40

  • Flood Of Migrant Children To Put Estimated $2 Billion Strain On Public School System
    Flood Of Migrant Children To Put Estimated $2 Billion Strain On Public School System

    Last month, CBO Director Phill Swagel claimed that the influx of illegal immigrants into the United States will boost 2023-2034 GDP by “about 7 Trillion.”

    Yet while we wait for those unicorn farts to percolate, the Heritage Foundation estimates in a new report that the influx of migrants is costing American taxpayers billions of dollars, as most of the 470,000 unaccompanied migrant children who have entered the country since Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration have been enrolled in public schools.

    In FY2023 alone, CBP encountered 145,474 accompanied and unaccompanied minors nationwide – which, based on the national average of $16,345 spent per student, would increase national education spending by more than $2 billion for one year, according to the Heritage report’s fact sheet.

    The report looked at instances in California, New York, Texas and Arizona where unaccompanied minors were sent to sponsors, according to data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a government agency under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

    For example, in California, 11,121 unaccompanied migrant children were sent to sponsors. If all those children enrolled in public school, at the state average spending of $16,975 per pupil, that equates to an additional cost of about $189 million for one year.

    The report similarly found that in New York, 8,477 unaccompanied migrant children were sent to sponsors. The state spends $28,261 on each pupil per year, making the total additional cost to taxpayers close to $240 million for one year. –Fox News

    “Parents should not also have to worry about their kids going to the back of the line in terms of school resources, teacher attention, and academic rigor due to sudden and large influxes of illegal aliens into their schools and classrooms,” Heritage scholars and two of the report’s authors, Lindsey Burke and Lora Ries, told Fox News Digital.

    The report also highlights the misuse of school property, classroom mismanagement and limited English proficiency, which is holding other students back.

    As an example, Fox News cites the case of New York City parents who were furious with city officials after Brooklyn Hight School students were forced to stay home for virtual lessons so that migrants could pile into the school gymnasium. Other reports suggest that NY Public Schools have struggled to educate some 20,000 new migrant students

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 19:20

  • To Revive U.S. Steel, Allow Its Transfer To Better Hands
    To Revive U.S. Steel, Allow Its Transfer To Better Hands

    Authored by James Glassman via RealClear Wire,

    Remember U.S. Steel? It isn’t what it used to be. Founded in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, the company was the symbol of American industrial power. But employment peaked 80 years ago at 340,000; it’s now 23,000. Once the largest corporation of any kind in the world, U.S. Steel now ranks 27th among global steel producers — and dropping. “It’s done nothing for decades,” according to steel industry analyst Charles Bradford. 

    Stagnation in steel is hardly inevitable. In 1969, another American steelmaker, Nucor, pioneered the electric arc mini mill, which recycles scrap metal, but U.S. Steel is still devoted to less efficient blast furnaces that produce three times the CO2 emissions. Nucor is now the number-one steelmaker in the country by far, its stock rising by a factor of 12 in the last two decades.

    The obvious solution to U.S. Steel’s problem was to find a deep-pocketed purchaser — and that’s what it did. The company in December accepted an offer by Nippon Steel Corp., the world’s fourth-largest steel producer. Nippon agreed to pay $14.9 billion for the company, a surprisingly large all-cash sum – a 142% premium to the price of the stock on Aug. 11. That’s when Cleveland-Cliffs, a blast-furnace producer about the same size as U.S. Steel, made the original attempt to buy the company. In the end, Nippon outbid Cleveland-Cliffs, which wanted to pay with cash plus shares of a stock that’s been lackluster.  

    U.S. Steel also worried that a combination of the second- and third-largest American steelmakers would draw opposition from aggressive Biden antitrust regulators. Still, despite its defeat, Cleveland-Cliffs mobilized legislators to try to kill the Nippon acquisition. Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman called the purchase “absolutely outrageous.” Donald Trump is also opposed: “I think it’s a horrible thing.” 

    Customers gathered recently at the Tampa Steel Conference disagree. Along with most U.S. Steel workers, they are thrilled with the deal. The head of the United Steelworkers of America called the sale “shortsighted,” but the union is probably just trying to gain negotiating leverage. Actual U.S. Steel employees were more worried about their company continuing to wither away and about potential layoffs with a Cleveland-Cliffs acquisition.

    Sure, we can shed a brief tear over a Japanese company buying an American icon, but what U.S. Steel needs is not nostalgia but capital and up-to-date technology.  Nippon has a shot at providing both and thus reviving an American icon.

    U.S. Steel is not alone in its distress. Much of the American steel industry is fragmented and starved for investment. A wave of buyouts and consolidations is the sector’s best hope. “We don’t need one or two deals,” said Waldo Best, an industry analyst with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. “We need 10 or 20.”

    If a foreign company offers a route to success that will benefit American investors, consumers and workers, is there really a problem? Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) seems to think so. He argues that “the foreign ownership of assets of such national importance could jeopardize our security.” But “foreign” in this case refers to Japan. As the State Department puts it, “The U.S.-Japan Alliance is the cornerstone of U.S. security interests in Asia and is fundamental to regional stability and prosperity.”

    Japan is a bulwark against the real foreign threat to the U.S. economy and security, which is China. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Community Party in December recommended that Japan be added to the “white list” of foreign states – now just the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – that are exempt from various requirements of CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which must approve deals with a possible effect on national security.

    China produces more than 10 times as much steel as the United States, and eight Chinese companies rank among the world’s top dozen steel producers. If we’re really worried about steel for national security reasons, we should be enhancing the position of our closest allies like Japan and welcoming them when they want to put billions into U.S. manufacturing.

    The best antidote to the Chinese challenge – and the best chance of reviving an American icon — is not to block investment but to encourage it. And the higher the price someone is willing to pay for U.S. assets, the better.

    James K. Glassman, formerly a senior fellow in economics and technology at the American Enterprise Institute, served as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and as a member of the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 19:00

  • Debate: Sen. Ron Johnson And Fmr Congressman Joe Walsh Debate The War In Ukraine
    Debate: Sen. Ron Johnson And Fmr Congressman Joe Walsh Debate The War In Ukraine

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

    ZeroHedge presents the latest debate in our series aimed at bringing live, long-form discussions on controversial topics back into the ideologically-siloed and echo-chambered media landscape.

    We hope you enjoy this debate which pits two (one current, one former) members of Congress against each other — Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and former Congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois — for an in-depth discussion on the war in Ukraine and the role America should play now and in the future. X Spaces influencer Mario Nawfal will moderate the debate in-person, which will stream live on ZeroHedge, Rumble and X.

    They will try to answer the question: Should the U.S. continue to fund and provide operational support to Ukraine?

    To illustrate their divide: Walsh, the former Illinoisan Rep, has hailed Biden’s Ukraine policy as “one of the greatest defenses of freedom… ever put on the world’s stage” while the Wisconsinite Senator believes Ukraine “can’t win” and that it and the U.S. must pursue a negotiated settlement.

    Healthy debate is sorely lacking on Capitol Hill, where it’s most needed. For bucking this trend, we have tremendous respect for both Johnson and Walsh and are looking forward to a civil exchange of ideas. We urge more elected officials to follow the Walsh-Johnson example.

    As usual, our moderator will take questions submitted by Premium and Pro subscribers in the comment section (sign up here for the opportunity to have your question answered by a member of Congress).

    We also wish to thank our primary sponsor, Birch Gold, for supporting free speech and open debate.  

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 18:36

  • Discrimination Is Good: Without It Civilization Would Collapse
    Discrimination Is Good: Without It Civilization Would Collapse

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

    When we hear the word “discrimination” we often associate it with the concept of racial prejudice, the act of hate based purely on skin color or ethnicity. Multiple generations of westerners have been conditioned over the years to treat discrimination as an anathema to civilization – A net negative. But is all discrimination “unjust,” or is it sometimes necessary to keep civilization safe and intact?

    Every person on Earth discriminates in one way or another because it’s a survival imperative, but let me clarify what I mean when I use the term. I argue that discrimination is simply the act of refusing to associate with another person or group, and this is often NOT based merely on skin color or differences in appearance. In reality, most discrimination is rooted in personal safety and cultural security.

    Human beings are tribal, there’s no way around this biological imperative and it will never change. Tribalism is based on physical safety, but also ideological safety. Human beings form tribes and kingdoms and nations and borders because they have a particular set of values, religious beliefs and cultural norms that they want to maintain and protect. They have found a system that works for them and that keeps their society from imploding, and they want to ensure that there is no sabotage of that system from within.

    Hence, the need for suspicion and discrimination when a tribe is faced with outsiders that champion a hostile or contrary ideal. The threat of being subsumed and destroyed by another tribe’s culture has been a motivator for discrimination since human history began.

    Another factor is the discrimination of certain behaviors. Human tribes learned long ago that destructive people are sometimes born and no amount of social pressure can make them different. Psychopaths, some sociopaths, narcopaths, the severely mentally ill, etc. cannot be allowed to thrive within a tribe or they will eventually cause great harm. The tribe could even break apart and die out.

    It’s not a white person thing, it’s not a western thing, it’s a reality for every group of humans on the planet.  We don’t all need to agree on one homogeneous civilization that embraces every person and all behaviors.  It’s okay for us to separate from each other and live differently (at least to a point). It’s okay to not want to associate with mentally unhinged or evil persons that create chaos within society, and it’s okay to reject the imposition of incompatible and alien philosophies.

    Leftists and globalists, on the other hand, assert that ANY separation and lack of association between groups is unacceptable. There can be only one tribe and that tribe MUST follow progressive/socialist mandates. It’s the Tower of Babel all over again and the leftist ideal is decidedly intolerant of anyone that does not conform to centralization. A key part of this globalist philosophy is the demonization of discrimination.

    Moral Decay Feeds Authoritarian Subterfuge

    The woke religion relies on the leftist fallacy that all discrimination is a “social negative.” There are a few reasons why they push this narrative. Without discrimination there can be no moral judgment. Without the application of morals and standards of behavior, society cannot survive and it will eventually collapse. This is exactly what leftists want.

    Once a society collapses it can be rebuilt with a certain authoritarian flexibility and in the image leftists prefer.  They will assert their own rules, their own taboos, their own mandates and their own vision. Specifically, they want to tear down western civilization and replace it with something rooted in moral relativism. In a morally relative world, all evil becomes permissible as long as the group doing evil controls the application of law.

    We see this most distinctly in the spread of the trans movement and the invasion of woke politics in public schools. The blatant sexualization of children is happening right now across the west and it is supported by corporate interests, state governments and the current federal government.  This agenda includes the rationalization of some pretty heinous behaviors, like pedophilia.

    Conservatives were once called “conspiracy theorists” for arguing that this was the end game for woke activism, and yet, here we are, fighting to keep pornography out of elementary school and middle-school libraries as academics argue that pedophiles should be treated as a protected sexual orientation.

    There are even leftist politicians today openly admonishing discrimination of pedophiles as a brand of “hate speech” and laws are being passed in states like California to reduce punishments for such criminals. There is a clear program in motion to make something evil into something protected or even celebrated.

    Cultural Sabotage Through Mass Immigration And Forced Association

    Beyond the issue of necessary moral discrimination, there is the problem of cultural invasion. In Europe the danger is becoming existential, with at least 20 million migrants flooding into the EU in the past several years and more arriving everyday. Many of these migrants are from Islamic fundamentalist nations and they have no intention of assimilating into a western structure. Rather, they plan to change or deconstruct the west from within through something called “soft jihad.”

    The bottom line? Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia Law are utterly incompatible with western principles and the two groups CANNOT exist peacefully in the same society. It is impossible. The rising calls by Europeans for the removal of migrants is not based in racism, it is driven by a cultural survival mechanism. Europeans can see the writing on the wall – In 10 to 20 years time their culture will no longer exist and they are acting to protect it.

    In the US, the invasion is more political. Millions of migrants are being allowed to sneak into the US as Democrats continue to interfere with border security measures enforced by states like Texas. At the same time they are creating incentives for migrants to come here by offering welfare and subsidies, not to mention the potential for a general amnesty that would give them easy citizenship.

    Most of these illegals come from socialist leaning countries and they have no concept whatsoever of what a Constitutional Republic is or what constitutional rights are. These migrants are a weapon being used by leftists to saturate the US. It is a strategy to erase conservative principles through attrition.

    The Value Of Separation

    Western civilization, western science, and free markets are perhaps the most profound accomplishments in the history of mankind, resulting in an extreme reduction in overall global poverty when compared to centuries past. In 1820, 94% of the global population was living in extreme poverty.  By 2015, that number dropped to 9.6% and the world’s population is vastly larger.

    The moral foundations of the west, while not always adhered to as we might prefer, are still the bedrock for some of the most free and most prosperous people of any era. There are good reasons to protect the west from alien cultures that want to undermine it.

    There also good reasons to discriminate against and expel leftists/globalists who grew up here but who are obsessed with deconstructing all remnants of the system because they think they know better. At no point have I ever heard a leftist group say: “Hey, we should all move to another place together and start a fresh new socialist experiment away from interference.”

    No, they do not believe in separation. They want OUR culture. They want to stand on the ruins of our accomplishments and force everyone to accept their system, their beliefs and their moral relativism. Infestation, oppression and possession are the building blocks of their ideology.  The only solution is unapologetic and uncompromising discrimination against their kind. It’s okay to not invite cancer into your body.  It’s okay to not invite a vampire into your home.  It’s okay to not invite evil into your society. It’s good to discriminate.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 18:20

  • Lilly CFO Warns Obesity Drug Demand Might Outstrip Supply
    Lilly CFO Warns Obesity Drug Demand Might Outstrip Supply

    US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. is racing to expand the manufacturing capacity of its lucrative new class of diabetes and weight-loss drug Zepbound. This comes as rival Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster appetite suppressant Wegovy drug is being rolled out across the West to capitalize on the obesity crisis. 

    In November, Zepbound, featuring the active ingredient tirzepatide, also used in diabetes drug Mounjaro, was approved for weight-loss use in the US in Novemeber, making it the first drug to compete against Wegovy.

    Since the rollout, the Indianapolis-based company has signed multiple deals with US government-backed manufacturer National Resilience and Italian producer BSP to expand manufacturing capacity, according to the Financial Times. 

    “There was a lot of investment in high-speed, large-capacity fill lines during Covid and there were questions about how that capacity is going to be used going forward, and then the GLP-1s came along and now the problem is almost the opposite,” said Jim Miller, a consultant who advises drugmakers on manufacturing strategy.

    Even as Zepbound production is set to increase and sales are projected to be in the billions of dollars this year, according to projections by research group GlobalData, there is growing concern that demand won’t be met. 

    On Wednesday, Lilly CFO Anat Ashkenazi warned investors at the TD Cowen annual healthcare conference that it might be unable to keep up with demand through 2025. 

    Ashkenazi said that Lilly is undertaking the most ambitious expansion agenda in its history but that production capacity will be strained for some time. 

    Last month, Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen warned: “There’ll be a demand that outgrows what can be produced by us, and probably also competition.”

    Lilly’s and Novo’s shares have surged several hundred percent since 2021. 

    The shift in investor euphoria around GLP-1s began around the first half of 2023. This was noticeable in the Goldman Sachs Global HLC GLP Risk Index versus Goldman’s GLP-1 Obesity drug basket to capitalize on slimming down Americans. 

    Besides slimming down the West, investors piled into big tech, artificial intelligence, and crypto. 

    Instead of overweight Americans rushing to weight loss drugs, why not change diets and go outside and exercise? Or better yet, demand change from the food-industrial complex that continues pushing unhealthy crap on consumers. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 18:00

  • Trumpenstein And The Death Of Politics
    Trumpenstein And The Death Of Politics

    Authored by Donald Jeffries via “I Protest,”

    I’m the guy who coined the term The Trumpenstein Project. My good friend John Barbour came up with Trump Agnostic to describe how we felt about the former Reality TV star. Trump, I mean, not John Barbour, who has been described as the Godfather of Reality Television.

    I may very well be the last Trump Agnostic standing. It’s not only the smallest minority group in the world, but I’m not even sure who any other members are at this point. My Trumpenstein thesis is that the elite recruited the most bombastic and obnoxious personality they could, and inserted him into the presidential campaign. They assigned him the role of populist outsider, and wrote some alluring rhetoric for him, which was often revolutionary. He wooed millions, including me. Millions of others instantly hated him. That’s how programming works. I didn’t think he could possibly be sincere, but I couldn’t completely discount the notion that a billionaire could theoretically become fed up with what he’d witnessed behind the scenes. At any rate, once Trump selected his cabinet, the psyop became obvious.

    Choosing Mike Pence as his running mate gained him nothing politically. Were the evangelicals going to vote for Hillary without Pence on the ticket? He also lost how ever many gay votes he was going to get. For whatever reason, gays hate Pence like no other politician. Trump redeemed himself a bit with his inaugural address, which was the best since JFK’s in my opinion. But as he announced the choices for his cabinet, each one brought an additional shake of the head, and an additional dose of disillusionment. Nikki Haley had been one of the loudest Never Trumpers. Trump, nevertheless, first offered her the prestigious position of Secretary of State, and she ultimately became his U.N. ambassador.

    Jeff Sessions seemed like a decent choice as Attorney General, given his strong stance on immigration. But his lust for our militarized police forces came through loud and clear. He actually wanted to bolster the odious asset forfeiture laws, which are the foundation of the corrupt policing for profit system. He also inexplicably recused himself from any potential prosecution of Hillary Clinton. You know, Crooked Hillary, “Lock her up!” and all that. But Trump let his supporters know there was going to be no prosecution of his old friend, when he began complimenting her during his speech declaring victory. He declared she was “good people,” and didn’t want to prosecute her. Which he promised to do countless times during his 2016 campaign. His second Attorney General, William Barr, was even worse, prosecuting only Trump supporters.

    We now know that Hillary was scheming to orchestrate the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” psyop before the 2016 election. This was revealed not by some lowly Thought Criminal like me, but by beloved former CIA director John Brennan. They don’t come any more reliable than CIA officials, as our “free press” regularly reminds us. So, yes, along with the ridiculous Steele Dossier, Trump was indeed under attack by the Swamp he vowed to drain, during his entire four years in office. This is invariably the excuse given by his adoring fans. But they never explain why, as he was under such an unprecedented assault, he never attempted to fight back. Never used the considerable powers of his office. Instead, he produced a steady stream of often juvenile tweets.

    FBI Director Christopher Wray was appointed to his position by Trump. That’s right, this maverick outsider chose an undisguised Never Trumper to head the Bureau that would have been instrumental in an investigation of Hillary or any other villain from the Swamp. So naturally Wray concentrated, from the very beginning of his tenure in office, on following the deluded “Russiagate” fantasies, instead of focusing on those who were attacking Trump unfairly. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller was chosen not to investigate Hillary’s destruction of emails and a laptop, or her scheme to tie Trump to Russian “collusion,” but Donald Trump himself. Mueller and William Barr, Trump’s second Attorney General, just happened to be best friends. No one said the Trumpenstein Project had to be believable.

    Trump wasn’t playing “4D chess.” He wasn’t following the old adage of “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” And I don’t believe he’s actually as stupid as he usually sounds. “Covfefe” and “hamberders” weren’t some mystical code that mere mortals couldn’t fathom. But I do think they were part of the act. Covfefe, by the way, is now an accepted word. It has its own Wikipedia page. Which some of us don’t. The absurd misspellings and grammatical errors, the repeating of the same word or phrase ad nauseum, all just exacerbated the hatred that millions felt for him. And endeared him to millions of others. Some inferred that Trump didn’t know how to read, that he was illiterate. Like all those athletes we are supposed to believe are college graduates. Maybe Trump was just a One Percent version of an Affirmative Action project.

    QAnon was a necessary invention of some intelligence agency. There had to be a way to explain to the MAGA faithful why Trump was surrounding himself with Never Trumpers and not even attempting to fulfill any of his many campaign promises. So millions became disciples of “Q drops,” and never blinked when the continuous predictions never came true. They actually believed the military- exemplified by Trump hater General Mark Milley (who was, naturally, appointed by Trump)- was in charge behind the scenes. They claimed child sex traffickers were being rounded up. There were secret trials of Hillary and other Deep State criminals being held at Guantanamo Bay. I read recently where Oprah Winfrey is secretly on trial now. These “White Hats” behave as inconspicuously as the “White Supremacists” do.

    At any rate, Trump never kept any of his promises. To American citizens. He was so loyal to Israel that they named streets for him there. He didn’t try to end birthright citizenship. Or the foreign visa worker programs. Or sanctuary cities. Or DACA. He somehow managed to deport fewer illegals than Barack Obama. That couldn’t have been easy, so give him some credit. He let statues be torn down, cities burn and looters run wild during the summer of 2020. He did tweet a lot. Never sent the National Guard in. Like the Republican governor of Massachusetts did when Ron DeSantis shipped a handful of migrants to the entitled community of Martha’s Vineyard.

    If Trump had been a real outsider, you would have seen people like Ron and/or Rand Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, Pat Buchanan, Dinesh D’Souza, maybe even Alex Jones, named to key positions in his administration. I know the response to that is, “He had to name those insiders. They would never have approved those others.” Well, Trump should have at least tried. Historically, some nominees have been rejected by Congress. For instance, Jimmy Carter, in his best attempted move, tried to get JFK’s speechwriter Ted Sorenson approved as CIA director. I don’t think Trump had a single nominee rejected. And considering how much he was despised by both parties, that ought to really tell you something. Trump selected nothing but Swamp creatures.

    But despite Trump rescuing a Black rapper from Sweden, and engineering the release of an unfairly convicted Black woman from prison, at the behest of Kim Kardashian no less, millions declared that he was a “racist.” Period. In all reality, those moves on behalf of Black citizens were two of the few actions Trump was responsible for in his entire presidential term. The closest he came to being a “racist” was very reasonably saying there were “good people” on both sides during the Charlottesville protests. He never mentioned the word “White” in reference to Caucasians in four years as president. He certainly never uttered the words “Great Replacement.” He did brag incessantly about how low Black unemployment was, though. Actually, he called it African-American unemployment. It’s a White cuck thing, you wouldn’t understand.

    But enough about how different Trump’s rhetoric was from his record. He definitely had, and still has, the right enemies. All the worst people in the world, the modern doorkeepers of Satan, hate him with a fervor that even Adolph Hitler couldn’t match. Of course, “Russiagate” was a joke. And it was documented to have been the illegitimate brainchild of Hillary Clinton. Who not only wasn’t prosecuted (by the Trump justice department), but continues to rant about how the 2016 election was stolen from her. Almost like Trump does about the 2020 election. Only Trump is being prosecuted for complaining about his election. Some allegations of electoral fraud are more equal than others.

    Trump was the subject of more obscene and distasteful public comments and media ridicule than any other American in history. More than Huey Long. More than Richard Nixon. More than Jim Garrison. There was a play running for months in New York, that celebrated the mock assassination of Donald Trump. Upstanding America 2.0 celebrity Snoop Dogg also depicted the assassination of Trump in a video. Trump would repay the venerable Snoop by pardoning his friend, the president of Death Row Records, and not Julian Assange, as he left office. Trump was certainly a strange sort of “racist.” Kind of like all those “White Supremacists,” who remain in the shadows, overseeing the Great Replacement.

    Celebrities showed absolute disdain for Trump in their intellectual offerings on Twitter. So did virtually every “journalist” in our state controlled media. Indeed, Trump’s one enduring legacy may be to have popularized the phrase “fake news,” and inadvertently exposed just how bad our “free press” really is. No matter how many Black rappers he rescued, or how few illegal immigrants he actually deported, the constant refrain was that Trump was a hopeless “racist.” In fact, he came to define the term. And, of course, everyone who supported him were “racists” too. Trump actually instituting the unconstitutional lockdown (proving that he could do something after all), and claiming credit for, and praising the dangerous “warp speed” vaccine didn’t matter. He was still a “racist.” And responsible for all the incorrigible anti-vaxxers.

    Trump’s three nominees to the Supreme Court were attacked viciously by the usual suspects. And his loyalists, when confronted with the stark evidence of his inactivity as president, invariably point to them as his greatest accomplishment. Except that one of them, Amy Coney Barrett, votes against him every time. Brett Kavanaugh is hit or miss. Only Neil Gorsuch has been pretty decent. And yet, those with Trump Derangement syndrome (and it is a very real mental disorder) continue to portray them as right-wing extremists. White Supremacists. Perhaps “insurrectionists.” Like Trump, they are guilty of Thought Crimes they never committed. We’ll see how they rule on his politicized prosecutions and remaining electoral disputes. So far, their track record doesn’t give much hope to MAGA loyalists.

    So let’s look at these Trump show trials. I don’t know what the Soviet legal process really was like, before they sent dissidents off to Siberia, but how much more corrupt could it have been? Trump was convicted, and forced to pay millions, to a certifiable lunatic, who paints her trees blue and named her cat vagina. For sexually assaulting her in a crowded department store dressing room, at some point in the 1990s. She couldn’t recall the exact year. Seriously. And she is on the record having joked about having sex with Donald Trump on social media. She is the poster child for uncredible witnesses. But a jury, and one of the endless biased judges assigned to Trump’s cases, ruled in her favor. As the “Woke” White women say, “I believe her!”

    Trump just lost again (he always loses, this is part of the Trumpenstein Project), in a ridiculous case where he “defrauded” well…not sure who, exactly, but his “crime” was exaggerating the value of his assets. You know, something pretty much everyone has done. Those who loaned him the money said he paid them back properly. In other words, they were witnesses for him. But Judge Nosferatu (and there is really no more appropriate name for him) ruled against him anyway and ordered him to pay an Alex Jones-like $400 million. Since there was no party claiming to have been injured or defrauded, it’s unclear where that money is going. But the millions who hate him are overjoyed. Well, not exactly. They won’t be satisfied until he’s hung in Times Square. Do it on New Year’s Eve and have him swing along with the giant ball.

    In Georgia, Trump is being prosecuted for trying to “overturn” an election. By “overturn,” the “Woke” authoritarians mean legally attempting to get the courts to act on what Trump and his team believe is clear electoral fraud. In the same state, the lovely Stacy Abrams continues to insist she was robbed in her race for governor. Somehow, this is not an attempt to “overturn” an election. I’m sure Rachel Maddow could explain the distinction. And the even more lovely Fani Willis is large and in charge here. If Trump really is a racist, he must be feeling like unreconstructed southerners felt in the late 1860s, on being “represented” in Congress by illiterate former slaves. If he ever were to utter a racial epithet, now would be the time.

    TDS has claimed millions of victims. It’s nonfatal in physical terms, but it is absolutely lethal to the intellect. I’ve seen many a friend fall victim to it. It causes one to lose all sense of perspective. The victim begins to believe that the intelligence agencies, the military industrial complex, and the mainstream media are all fine and worthwhile institutions. They actually believe that Trumpenstein opposes these forces, which represent the Deep State he talked about. The Swamp he vowed to drain. And so George W. Bush is now a hero. He opposed Trump! Demonic Dick Cheney’s vile offspring Liz is now the sexiest thing since Michelle Obama. Forget about the dead intern in Joe Scarborough’s old congressional office. He hates Trump!

    To those with TDS, all politics is viewed through the prism of Trumpenstein. Because Trump spoke out against the “senseless wars,” those who hate him have to be in favor of war. See “I stand with Ukraine.” Because Trump criticized our Third World infrastructure, those who hate him want the roads, bridges, and power grids to remain in their present laughable state. Except for getting rid of any “racist” roads. And rest assured that the saintly Joe Biden will see to that. He’ll be on it like it was a little girl with the fresh scent of No More Tangles in her hair. Since Trump often hinted at conspiratorial thinking, those with TDS can no longer believe in any conspiracies. Well, except “Russiagate.” And the Trump-directed January 6 “insurrection.”

    The only issue where they face a real dilemma is the COVID vaccine. Despite 90+ percent of his supporters being skeptical about it, Trump continues to tirelessly promote it. And yet, while all those with TDS enthusiastically embrace the vaccine, they curiously manage to ignore the fact that their sworn enemy claims credit for it. While Trump threw the January 6 protesters under the bus by not marching with them as he promised, didn’t pardon them before leaving office, and rarely mentions them in his circus barker rallies, he is still blasted for orchestrating the entire thing. His speech proves he didn’t “incite” anyone (he told them to march “peacefully and patriotically”), yet the media, and all those with TDS, insist he did. To them, the worst overreaction to a protest in history becomes “an attempt to overthrow democracy.”

    We have seen several states take another unprecedented step, in voting to bar Donald Trump, a former president and current frontrunner in the polls, from their ballots. To their credit, the Supreme Court just voted 9-0 in Trump’s favor on this question. But the attempt illustrates the role of this scripted spectacle. All’s fair in the Trumpenstein Project. Politicized prosecutions. Efforts to prevent him from running again. The leadership of the Republicucks- his own supposed party- continues to be repelled by even the possibility of Making American Great Again, let alone emphasizing America First. Yes, Trump never says “America First” any longer. But it’s still an ominous prospect for those suffering with TDS. Can you imagine the horror of putting your own country’s interests first?

    People in Donald Trump’s social and financial class, even if they aren’t ex-presidents of the United States, don’t get prosecuted. They are unequivocally above the law. The courts are primarily for convicting poor and working-class defendants who are often innocent. You can scour the huge prison system in this country, and you won’t find any former One Percenters incarcerated there. The system is designed to protect them, in the extremely rare instances where they are actually charged with a crime. Those with Trump’s resources should have a “Dream Team” of legal representatives that puts O.J.’s lawyers to shame. Instead, Trump’s lawyers have all been laughingstocks, the kind a ghetto denizen might get assigned to him. And unlike every wealthy man before him, Trump cannot seem to win in any courtroom.

    This should give the Trumpenstein Project away. It’s designed for Trump to lose consistently. While he and his supporters continue to nonsensically claim he’s “winning.” The script calls for the Giant Orange Man- representing the last gasp of White alpha masculinity- to be defeated over and over again, usually at the hands of arrogant, ignorant Affirmative Action hires like Fani Willis and company. Like the Stupid Party he represents, Trump is basically the Washington Generals, being defeated in every game, by the lovable all-Black Harlem Globetrotters. Who openly cheat, and always have the referees on their side. It’s somewhat of an allegory for life in America 2.0, as far as average White Americans are concerned.

    Trumpenstein has destroyed traditional American politics. The childish, cafeteria food fights on social media. The immature nicknames. Trump’s penis size even made it into a 2016 presidential debate, when he insisted he didn’t have small hands, and that “trust me,” the other thing wasn’t small, either. The more extreme TDS patients call him “micro-penis.” If things devolve logically, perhaps Trump will just whip it out at the next presidential debate. You can bet his fans would cheer it on. If it looks big, expect his millions of haters to call it “fake news.” Despite the term originating with Trump, everyone uses it now, to dismiss something they don’t like. They even denigrated the looks of Melania Trump, the most beautiful First Lady in history.

    The Trumpenstein Project was designed to tap into the widespread populist sentiment in the country, and control it with this larger than life contrived personality. The political show trials are symbolic prosecutions of any real potential dissent. The independent political movement was destroyed by Trump. RFK, Jr. claims to still be polling at over twenty percent. If so, by their own debate rules, they have to let him participate. I just don’t see them allowing that. Any halfway competent individual would expose Joe Biden’s dementia in a debate. But not Trumpenstein. He can be counted on to bluster and bully, and make the helpless old codger-in-chief look sympathetic. That’s the Trumpenstein Project.

    Thanks to this giant psyop, there will never be a viable Third Party movement in this country. Not that there was much of a chance before, but now virtually all Americans, having been subjected to this intensive programming, are back mired in the two disastrous “choices” or Democrat or Republican. Evil vs. stupid. The millions afflicted with TDS must vote for the putrid Democrats, regardless of wars, censorship, and massive inflation. Because Trump. The millions who cling naively to Trump will vote Republican Because Trump as well. Both parties “care about the children.” Both insist on a “strong defense.” Support the troops. Respect the police. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Unless you’re a billionaire or an illegal immigrant. “Hate Speech” isn’t free speech. Say “African-American” three times and click your heels.

    In the days before Trump, things were awful. There was never any one worth voting for. Thus, the popularity of choosing “the lesser of two evils.” It was accepted by all that two evils would always be the choice. To be fair, Trump has at least made politics more exciting. When he’s attacking the unspeakably evil Democrats, or their insufferable mouthpieces in the media, it’s hard not to applaud. Or at least laugh. I am rooting for Trump to be selected as president again this year. Not because I think he’ll do anything good. But for the sheer entertainment value. CNN and MSNBC would become must-watch TV. It’s surely a sad commentary on the “world’s greatest democracy” that this is the best we can hope for.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/06/2024 – 17:40

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