Today’s News 7th October 2023

• Some Embalmers Say White, Fibrous Clots Showing Up; Others Say It's A Conspiracy Theory
  Some Embalmers Say White, Fibrous Clots Showing Up; Others Say It’s A Conspiracy Theory

  Authored by Allan Stein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Embalming a body involves replacing the blood with chemical solutions to preserve it and slow decomposition.

  

  Some embalmers say that starting in 2021, they suddenly began seeing an “anomaly” during that process—a phenomenon of long, rubbery, white masses inside the blood vessels.

  Others say they have seen nothing new.

  The Epoch Times contacted embalmers and funeral directors from around the world to understand the disparity.

  An Oklahoma mortician responded, saying, “Yes, the embalmers at this funeral location have all encountered this phenomenon, each multiple times during embalming in the last two years.” A funeral director in Pennsylvania told The Epoch Times: “We’ve seen this stuff—absolutely. We’ve seen it enough to discuss it within the company.”

  The mortician said his company thought the white, fibrous clots were just an anomaly.

  “What do I attribute it to? I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it previously,” he said.

  “As far as numbers, it’s hard to say. When we first started noticing it in 2021, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, I wonder if their cholesterol was off the charts.’

  On the other hand, many of the respondents to The Epoch Times’ survey said that not only had they not seen the fibrous masses in the bodies they embalmed, but they considered the reports from other embalmers and funeral directors to be “nonsense.”

  

  “It’s all nonsense, COVID vaccine conspiracy-theory [expletive],” a Canadian embalmer told The Epoch Times in an email. “We embalm over 400 bodies yearly and have never seen [this].“

  Several respondents from Canada, Australia, and the UK said they haven’t seen any of the white, fibrous clots, with one calling it “ridiculous claptrap.”

  However, responses from 11 embalmers in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand tell a similar story of white fibrin masses clogging the circulatory systems of the newly deceased since 2021.

  Some speculate that the obstructions have something to do with COVID-19 or the COVID-19 vaccines, although no research exists to substantiate such a connection.

  Dr. Ryan Cole, an Idaho pathologist who said he’s conducted “a lot” of autopsies in his career, said normal post-mortem blood clots are red and jelly-like.

  “They’re not white and rubbery,” he said in a 2022 interview on “American Thought Leaders.”

  Dr. Cole attributes the absence of public dialogue within the medical community regarding the clots to “institutional fear.”

  Grassroots Survey

  When retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Thomas Haviland began hearing about the strange phenomenon in various media, he conducted his own international email survey this year of funeral homes.

  Mr. Haviland sent questionnaires via Survey Monkey to funeral homes in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Of the 179 active embalmers who responded to the survey, 119 confirmed having seen the clots.

  Mr. Haviland said that he designed the survey to be as unbiased as possible. Nowhere in the survey instructions nor in the survey questions are the words “Covid” or “Covid vaccines” ever mentioned.

  Mr. Haviland said he only asked the embalmers if they saw the white fibrous clots, when they saw them, where on the body, and in what percentage of the bodies they embalmed.

  Despite the fact that the survey never mentions the COVID vaccines, many of the 42 U.S. embalmers and 12 Canadian embalmers who responded to an optional “Comments” box at the end of the survey either implicated the COVID vaccines as the cause of the white fibrous clots, or they defended the vaccines while denying the existence of these unusual clots.

  “The main consensus of embalmers is that these white, fibrous clots first appeared in the year 2021 and continue still to date. Embalmers see these clots in a significant percentage of corpses—up to 50 percent or more in some cases,” Mr. Haviland said.

  The Epoch Times independently contacted the 1,700 embalmers and funeral directors surveyed by Mr. Haviland to corroborate the findings. Nine responded, saying they’ve encountered the white, fibrous masses, and five responded saying they haven’t.

  Embalmers Responses

  Canadian embalmer Laura Jeffrey thought it bizarre to be pulling long, rubbery, white masses from the veins and arteries of the deceased at the beginning of 2021.

  “I knew from the get-go something was wrong,” Mrs. Jeffrey said.

  In one case, she found a white, stringy mass literally “hanging out” of a deceased woman’s artery—”like eight inches long—all branched,” she told The Epoch Times.

  “You could see the pathologist’s cut in it. So you can’t tell me it wasn’t there when they did the autopsy. I had to pull it out as the embalmer.”

  Mrs. Jeffrey said her job became increasingly tricky trying to work around the obstructions. She decided to consult with her colleagues, but came up against an inexplicable “code of silence.”

  

  More than 8,000 miles away from Mrs. Jeffrey’s home in Ontario, a New Zealand embalmer confirmed similar findings.

  “For obvious reasons, I am most reluctant for my colleagues to know I am responding,” the embalmer said, on condition of anonymity, in an email to The Epoch Times.

  “My workplace feels this is a conspiracy theory and is unwilling to engage in conversation. To say I was shut down when I tried to bring it up is an understatement.“

  A funeral director in Colorado told The Epoch Times: “We are finding these white, fibrous blood clots in decedents of all ages.

  “For example, one case was autopsied in their late 20s. The death was not related to clots (no family history), and this person was healthy and took care of themselves. I found two large white clumps in their lower arteries. These should not have been there, especially with the manner of death.”

  The funeral director said before the embalming process, they’ve begun asking if the person had been vaccinated and boosted.

  

  “Depending on the case, we are not finding these clots in non-vaccinated decedents, just normal blood clots and good drainage,” the director said.

  “For the vaccinated ones, we are finding larger clots that are changing the consistency of the blood itself. We have never seen so much stringy blood before that really disrupts the drainage.”

  The embalmer at New Zealand funeral home who was among the survey recipients and who reached out to The Epoch Times described how six months into his training, he saw his first “fibrin clot.”

  The supervisor he had at the time said she “didn’t know what it was.”

  “She has been an embalmer for about 20 years. I then asked my manager, who is also an embalmer, and he said he had seen them prior to COVID, and there was no link,” the embalmer said. Since the first discovery, he says he still sees the strange white masses “fairly regularly—in various sizes, with and without the fatty clots, and normal red blood clots.”

  

  “I am not privy to the vaccination status of the deceased or their recent health issues beyond [the] cause of death, so I cannot say if there is a link between a recent COVID infection or vaccination,” the embalmer said.

  He said he tried to discuss his findings with other colleagues—not to “stir up trouble,” but to learn what they were looking at.

  However, “just like with any other unusual presentation on my table … there is a definable ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ feeling around the topic,” he said.

  A funeral director at a high-volume mortuary in Texas said she has seen the clots in several embalming cases but needs to know more about them before commenting further.

  Reads more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 10/07/2023 – 00:00

• "They Took My Sushi": Lawmakers Sleeping In US Capitol Due To 'Very Dangerous' Crime Wave
  “They Took My Sushi”: Lawmakers Sleeping In US Capitol Due To ‘Very Dangerous’ Crime Wave

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A Republican House lawmaker on Wednesday said that some lawmakers have been sleeping inside the U.S. Capitol due to fears of crime in the District of Columbia.

  

  Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said that he and other unnamed lawmakers have slept in their offices at the Capitol because Washington, D.C., is “very dangerous” at night. He did not elaborate.

  “I don’t want to walk back and forth from an apartment in D.C. at night or in the morning—early morning—to get to work,” Mr. Burlison told Todd Starnes on his radio program. “It’s not a safe environment.”

  He made reference to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) having recently been carjacked in the district just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. The Democratic lawmaker was unharmed but his car was stolen by three armed assailants, police said.

  “It’s insane to even own a car in D.C. because wherever you park, it is going to cost you a fortune and it’s likely to get broken into and you’re likely to get carjacked,” Mr. Burlison said.

  As for Mr. Cuellar, he was back at work in the Capitol on Tuesday morning. Recalling the incident on Sunday night, he said that the assailants appeared from “out of nowhere” and “pointed guns at me.”

  “I looked at one with a gun, another with a gun, and I felt one behind me,” Mr. Cuellar said. “They said they wanted my car, and I said, ‘Sure.’ You got to keep calm under those situations, and they took off.”

  The congressman was approached by three young black males in black clothing and black masks, according to a statement Mr. Cuellar gave to Capitol officials.

  “According to the victim’s statements, the suspects ‘swarmed [the victim’s] vehicle, pointed firearms in his face and demanded the keys to the car.’ Thankfully there were not any injuries,” the U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement. “A witness told investigators three males in knit caps and ski masks were involved. The witness reported that the suspects were 5’10” black males who may have been around the age of 16 due to their build.”

  

  Mr. Cuellar’s chief of staff Jacob Hochberg released a statement Monday night saying: “As Congressman Cuellar was parking his car this evening, 3 armed assailants approached the Congressman and stole his vehicle. Luckily, he was not harmed and is working with local law enforcement.”

  Monday’s carjacking was the second assault on a member of Congress in the District of Columbia this year. In February, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) was assaulted in her apartment building, suffering bruises while escaping serious injury. Her chief of staff said the attack did not appear to be politically motivated.

  Mr. Cuellar thanked the U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department for their work, saying the “message is very simple: You’ve got to support law enforcement.”

  He said the attackers were masked, but he could still see that they were young. “They recovered the car, they recovered everything, but what really got me upset is they took my sushi,” he joked.

  White House press secretary Karine-Jean Pierre called the carjacking “unacceptable” and said President Joe Biden spoke to the congressman today.

  “We will always continue to speak out against any sort of violence. We’ve been consistent here in this administration,” she said. “We are certainly grateful and relieved that the congressman is unharmed, and we are thankful to law enforcement for having reacted so quickly.”

  The 68-year-old Texas Democrat’s car was recovered about two miles away in the Anacostia neighborhood, according to a report from a local NBC affiliate station.

  

  Crime on the Rise

  Homicides in Washington, D.C., are likely going to reach highs not seen in decades, with officials reporting 215 murders so far this year. In comparison, there were 157 homicides in all of 2022, police data show.

  In late September, the capital city hit the 200 murder mark, according to officials, which drew a response from the D.C. Police Union on social media.

  “We are still short 100s of cops and the responsible policing that used to address this has been prohibited by misguided legislation,” the union wrote on X, formerly Twitter, more than a week ago.

  Earlier this year, Republicans criticized the leaders of Washington, D.C., during a House hearing, portraying the capital as a Democrat-run city that has long been mismanaged and fallen into a state of disarray due to left-wing bail reform rules. In May, they passed a measure that would overturn a so-called police reform package that was passed by the D.C. Council amid the nationwide riots and protests in 2020.

  The Associated Press contributed to this report.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 23:30

• US Cellphone Radiation Tests Are 'Rigged,' Ignoring Long-Term Health Effects: Expert
  US Cellphone Radiation Tests Are ‘Rigged,’ Ignoring Long-Term Health Effects: Expert

  Authored by George Citroner via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)

  France’s recent ban on sales of the iPhone 12 due to radiation concerns has sparked apprehension throughout Europe about the health risks of cellphone radiation exposure. While U.S. tests focus narrowly on whether phones heat tissue, some experts argue they fail to show the whole picture.

  “The way they’re tested is to see whether or not they heat you up, and not for the chronic long-term effects that have been demonstrated,” Devra Davis, a cancer epidemiologist who holds a doctorate in science studies and a master’s in public health in epidemiology, told The Epoch Times. “Particularly the effects on sperm and lower testosterone, among others.”

  

  Cellphone Radiation Tests Are ‘Rigged’: Expert

  According to Ms. Davis, the biggest problem with U.S. testing is that it’s not conducted with the phone against the body. She compared it to the “Dieselgate” scandal involving Volkswagen, where the company rigged its tests to show lower exhaust emissions than the vehicle actually produced.

  “The same thing is happening here,” she added, noting that the tests were initially set up with spacers, as if phones were in holsters or holders.

  When the French government tests cellphones as they are actually used, “like in your hand [or] next to your body,” Ms. Davis said, the phones exceed European Union (EU) radiation limits. France has pulled or required software updates for 42 other cellphone models that emit excessive radiation since 2017, The Telegraph reported.

  The United States lacks this oversight, according to Ms. Davis.

  The telecommunications industry has almost complete control of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), according to a report published by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (pdf). A telecom lobbying group executive boasted its lobbyists meet FCC officials 500 times annually, the report stated.

  “We don’t have any programs to test phones after they’ve been approved,” Ms. Davis said. “And the approval process is self-regulated because of this revolving door that takes place between the FCC and the telecom industry.”

  Ms. Davis said if phones underwent drug testing, they’d be illegal. She warned of the danger cellphones pose, similar to certain drugs found to cause cancer and other health problems, in her 2010 book, “Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family,” and still stands by it today.

  The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to comment on this story, but they have not yet replied.

  17 Minutes of Daily Cellphone Use Increased Cancer Risk

  Heavy cellphone use has a “possible” association with increased brain cancer incidence, especially in research not funded by telecoms, according to a review of 23 case-control studies in 2009 published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

  “Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s,” study author Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health and Community Health at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, said in a press statement in July 2021. “Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer,” Mr. Moskowitz wrote.

  The 2009 review was updated in 2020 to include 46 studies with similar findings.

  Cancer Linked to Living Near Cell Towers

  The International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields warned in 2022 (pdf) that radiofrequency radiation (RFR) exposure limits established in the 1990s don’t adequately protect the public, especially from novel 5G technology lacking health studies.

  Several bills pending in Congress give the telecom industry “free range” to put their towers wherever they want them, including “right by your bedroom window” if you’re living in an apartment building, according to Ms. Davis.

  A review of scientific studies published in 2022 found that most of the research found increased rates of cancer and radiofrequency sickness in people living within close proximity to mobile phone base stations. A recent study from Brazil found cancer mortality rose with population exposure to radio base station frequencies.

  “I think 5G belongs in the medical and military places, wired in [Ethernet], but not in homes,” Ms. Davis said. “The real problem is that in order for 5G to work, we need one million new antennas.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 23:00

• Syria, Russia Pound Idlib After Terror Attack Killed 80 People At Homs Military College
  Syria, Russia Pound Idlib After Terror Attack Killed 80 People At Homs Military College

  Overnight and into Friday the Syrian Army pummeled Idlib province with artillery and missiles, in retaliation for a Thursday drone attack conducted by the region’s al-Qaeda groups which scored a direct hit on a crowded military graduation ceremony at Homs military college.

  Syria’s health ministry in the immediate aftermath said the drone attack killed 80 people and wounded 240 more. Al Jazeera and other regional sources have cited over 100 dead, which included military officers and their family members. At least six children were among the deceased, in what may be the single deadliest terror attack inside Syria in years.

  

  Multiple videos later circulated of major counterattacks by Syrian forces on al-Qaeda occupied Idlib, in a rare large assault.

  Various hardline jihadist groups have held Idlib since 2015, at which time they were helped in the takeover by the United States and its allies, in an operation directed out of southern Turkey.

  A Syrian military statement alluded to insurgents having received help from “international forces” in the past:

  Syria’s military said in an earlier statement that drones laden with explosives targeted the ceremony packed with young officers and their families as it was wrapping up. Without naming any particular group, the military accused insurgents “backed by known international forces” of the attack and said “it will respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations, wherever they exist.”

  NATO member Turkey continues to be a main backer of the jihadist insurgents who hold Idlib province. 

  More than 100 people were killed in a drone attack on the Syrian government military college in the western city of Homs on Thursday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor pic.twitter.com/W1Lbqr63xz

  — Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 6, 2023

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

  Regional sources have said Syrian had help from Russia allied forces in pounding Idlib, which is ongoing into Friday. “Airstrikes pounded the positions of the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) and the Emigrants Brigade, foreign extremist militias consisting of Chinese Uyghur and Chechen militants,” wrote The Cradle.

  “Syrian fighter jets, in coordination with the Russian air force, targeted the Al-Ghab plain and the town of Areeha in the Idlib governorate, as well as the city of Jisr al-Shughour – which fell to US-backed extremist groups in 2015,” the publication added.

  BREAKING 🚨

  The Syrian Army retaliated strongly on the positions of the Al-Qaeda terrorists in southern Idlib, from which the UAV attack that murdered over 60 cadets and civilians came. pic.twitter.com/RnTWJk5nP6

  — Kevork Almassian🇸🇾🇦🇲 (@KevorkAlmassian) October 5, 2023

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

  It is believed that the TIP and Emigrants Brigade “are the two armed groups that have the technological capabilities to conduct drone attacks”; however, Damascus didn’t name a specific group as being behind the devastating drone attack. In prior years whenever Syrian and Russian forces prepared to retake Idlib province from the armed insurgents, the the United States and its allies have threatened military intervention.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 22:30

• DC's Revolving Door Is Swinging Briskly For The Eco-Green Eyeshade People
  DC’s Revolving Door Is Swinging Briskly For The Eco-Green Eyeshade People

  Authored by Kevin Mooney via RealClear Wire,

  Washington’s revolving door is getting a fresh green paint job: Federal architects of a controversial new rule requiring businesses to measure their carbon footprints throughout their supply chains have joined a start-up company poised to reap millions by performing those calculations.

  

  At least three ranking Securities and Exchange Commission officials have joined Persefoni, a company formed in 2020 for the purpose of measuring such footprints of large business enterprises. 

  Documents show that the SEC relied on input from the for-profit company to draft the proposed rule. Some critics argue that the estimates from Persefoni low-balled the price tags unrealistically for such accounting to make them more politically palatable.

  Persefoni, billing itself as “The Platform for Carbon Accounting – Built For Climate Disclosure,” and similar outfits are emerging as their own service industry as they stand to profit from the new rule, since most companies do not have the staff or expertise to calculate their carbon footprints.

  While environmentalists have hailed the rule as an important step in forcing companies to grapple with their impact on the climate by exposing it to the public, critics argue that it goes far beyond the SEC’s core mission of protecting investors. In voting against a draft of the proposal, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, a Trump appointee, said it “forces investors to view companies through the eyes of a vocal set of stakeholders” – as opposed to traditional shareholders – “for whom a company’s climate reputation is of equal or greater importance than a company’s financial performance.”

  The SEC and Persefoni each declined to comment for this article.

  Persefoni appears to have had great influence over the proposed rule. Public records from the SEC show the commission held six meetings with representatives from Persefoni and Ceres – a prominent investor advocacy group that supports such climate disclosure – from September 2021 to June 2022. These include:

  • Meetings on Sept. 14, Nov. 23, and Nov. 30 between Persefoni and the SEC office of the chair, Gary Gensler;
  • Meetings on March 28 and April 5 between Ceres and the Office of Commissioner Allison Herren Lee;
  • And one joint meeting involving Persefoni, Ceres, and ERM with the SEC’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis, the Division of Corporation Finance, and the Office of the Chief Accountant.

  Lee, a Democrat who joined the SEC as a staff attorney in 2005, was appointed by President Trump as one of the SEC’s five commissioners in 2019 – filling a Democratic vacancy on the commission, which was structured to be nonpartisan. President Biden named her as acting chair in 2021, and she took charge of the public comment period for the proposed rule.

  Lee stepped down on March 15, 2022, just six days before the commission unveiled its proposed climate rule. In May 2023, she joined Persefoni as a member of the firm’s “sustainability advisory board.”

  At Persefoni, she reunited with Kristina Wyatt, who joined the company’s board in March 2022. Previously, Wyatt had served the SEC as senior counsel for climate and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). In this capacity, she worked directly on developing the proposed rule. Wyatt was also listed as the direct contact when the commission circulated a request for information from the public regarding climate-change disclosures.

  In December 2022, Persefoni hired another SEC alum, Emily Pierce, to serve as associate general counsel and vice president of global regulatory climate disclosure.

  By all accounts, the SEC leaned heavily on Persefoni’s cost-benefit analysis of the pending rule, which essentially establishes a parallel disclosure regime for the SEC – all in the name of mitigating climate change.

  The SEC proposal has many parts, but the most controversial and cumbersome involves the requirement that larger companies must provide soup-to-nuts calculations of their carbon emissions, including those from thousands of their suppliers operating across hundreds of countries.

  As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, to come up with numbers for Cocoa Puffs cereal, General Mills might have to calculate the emissions from “cocoa farms in Africa, corn fields in the U.S., or sugar plantations in Latin America. Then thousands of processors, transporters, packagers, distributors, office workers, and retailers join the supply chain before a kid in Minnesota, where General Mills is based, pours the cereal into a bowl.”

  Since most of the emissions that must be measured are not directly generated by the companies, the calculations amount to a herculean task. This is where an outfit like Persefoni comes in.

  When the commission first published its proposal in March 2022, it provided corporate compliance cost estimates that ranged from $460,000 to $640,000 during the first year. Accurate estimates are crucial for companies to determine if they are equipped to comply. But there is considerable doubt on that front.

  Persefoni stands out as the only source that provides any estimate anywhere close to the SEC’s $640,000 figure, for which the commission does not provide any citations or methodologies to show how it arrived at its estimates. Persefoni is cited within the proposal nine times, but the firm is not cited in connection with the SEC’s stated ranges for compliance costs on page 373. In fact, no source is cited or linked as a resource for the SEC’s figures.

  Rupert Darwall, an author and energy policy analyst affiliated with the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the RealClearFoundation, has been critical of what he views as a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of the SEC, which gives cover to outside partners that stand to gain once the rule takes effect.

  “Persefoni has a glaring conflict of interest in low-balling cost of compliance estimates to the SEC, which the SEC should have disclosed and been mindful of. Instead, the SEC put undue weight on these implausibly low estimates,” Darwall said. Estimates of indirect emissions across supply chains “are especially risky for filers as there’s no limiting principle and, contrary to longstanding accounting principles, multiple companies account for the same emission.” Darwall also makes the point that Persefoni’s low-cost estimates are “at odds of what it’s been telling investors about the revenues it projects from the rule.”

  In early 2022, the carbon accounting firm partnered with the environmental activist group Ceres to commission from consulting firm ERM a compliance cost study, which was published in May 2022. This is where Persefoni produced estimates in line with the SEC’s $640,000 figure. That same month, Persefoni submitted a comment letter in response to the SEC proposal, which included its joint study with Ceres.

  Although the letter is dated May 20, 2022, the SEC did not publish it until the final week of the comment period ending June 17, 2022, curtailing the period for public scrutiny of the Persefoni estimates.

  With Persefoni’s letter intermixed with roughly 1,140 other comments, some saw this as an effort to bury the firm’s relationship with the SEC.

  One critic is Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

  “The collusion between the SEC and a select group of outside parties gives new meaning to the term climate cartel,” Cohen said in an interview. “Not only is there a hand-in-glove relationship between the SEC and outfits like Persefoni, Ceres, and ERM that stand to benefit financially from the climate disclosure rule the agency is set to release. They also appear to have had a hand in drafting that rule. The SEC and its cronies are so closely entangled that they are effectively acting as one.”

  Knowing Which Way the Windfall Blows

  While the SEC and Persefoni would not comment for this article, Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, told RCI that there is not any conflict of interest at work. He pointed out that Ceres has been advocating for a climate disclosure rule with the SEC for the past two decades.

  “The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission received 15,000 public comments around this rule,” Rothstein said in an email. “Among the most comments than any in the SEC’s 90-year history. Everyone has a vested interest in the future of their investments and retirement savings. The comments will make the final rule stronger and more robust. The investment community is overwhelmingly supportive of more climate information as a way to reduce material financial risk.”

  Persefoni executives have not been reticent to discuss the windfall they expect to experience if the rule is finalized. Speaking to CNBC in March 2022, Kentaro Kawamori, the firm’s CEO, discussed the advantages that would likely accrue from having a software platform that enables companies to analyze, manage, and account for their carbon footprint. Kawamori draws a comparison with Salesforce, the cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco.

  “You’re going to have a Salesforce-type of success,” he said. “Just like Salesforce created the system of record for the customer record, companies like us – you will have one or two big winners – will create a system of record for the carbon accounting piece.”

  Persefoni’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Tim Mohin, went even further, telling Politico that larger companies will almost certainly need outside help to comply. “Really they have a very short runway to get their act together,” he said. “We’ve gotten lots of calls from these large companies saying, ‘Tell us about what you do and how we can work with you.’”

  Mohin went on to describe Persefoni as the “TurboTax of greenhouse gas reporting.”

  As it stands, Persefoni is already doing pretty well. On Oct. 28, 2021, Persefoni announced a $101 million raise in its Series B financing round with its long-time investor, NGP Energy Technology Partners, returning to participate. But the oversized influence Persefoni apparently has been exerting within the SEC is beginning to attract congressional interest.

  In June, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-K.Y.) and Senate Banking Committee ranking member Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) sent a joint letter to the SEC requesting documents and information, including “all nonpublic records referring or relating to the climate consultancy, climate accounting, or sustainability-related organizations Persefoni, Ceres, ERM, or South Pole since January 20, 2021.”

  As for the rule itself, Cohen, the policy analyst with the National Center, sees “an effort by the SEC and its climate-cartel cronies to fashion a climate accounting standard to fit the inherently amorphous notion of a carbon footprint.”

  He continued: “Companies will have to disclose their ‘climate impacts’ in accordance with the SEC’s purely arbitrary requirements. The arrangement will put more power into the hands of the SEC, enrich the likes of Persefoni, and condemn regulated businesses to climate serfdom.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 22:00

• Alan Dershowitz & Elon Musk On Free Speech & Anti-Semitism
  Alan Dershowitz & Elon Musk On Free Speech & Anti-Semitism

  Via The Gatestone Institute,

  • No country in history has ever really tested free speech: has seen whether the marketplace of ideas works or whether we can really have a society without censorship; where every idea is tested only on its merits, rather than for political benefit. This cannot be a right-left issue. — Alan Dershowitz.

  • You [Elon] are trying, for the first time, a great experiment to see whether we can survive with a marketplace of ideas, without censorship, where all thoughts and all ideas are treated equally. — Dershowitz

  • What we need is to create a circle in which things that are illegal, such as abusing children, are outside the circle, but anything else has to be inside the circle. So if something is permitted for one idea or “-ism,” it has to be permitted for the others. This is exactly what universities are failing to do. They are creating a line on which favored groups fall on one side and disfavored groups fall on the other side. — Dershowitz.

  • People will always want to censor but not be censored. — Dershowitz.

  • I am in favor of no prior censorship except things that are overtly illegal. Let the marketplace decide and make sure that there is an opportunity for everyone to answer. One cannot draw a line on hate speech. One person’s hate speech is another person’s love speech. It is important to open up the marketplace of ideas. — Dershowitz.

  • [Y]ou can post anything on the platform [“X”] even if it is hateful, provided that it is lawful. But then there is a separate question of what is promoted or not promoted…. Our current approach is to say, okay, you can say things that are hateful but legal on the platform, but we are not going to recommend them to others. — Elon Musk.

  • Advertisers, certainly, have a right to say what content they will appear next to because that’s their right too, but not to dictate what can be said on the platform. — Musk.

  • Today the greatest danger to free speech comes from the left…. At the moment, it is the left that is educating our future leaders, so the left poses a far greater danger of censoring free speech and of skewing the marketplace of ideas. “X” has to be perceived as equally open to both sides. — Dershowitz.

  • That is our aspiration, that is our goal. Now the reality of it for anyone who is paying attention — and I’m sure you saw this — was that prior to the acquisition, Twitter was very left and getting even more left. They had a massive thumb on the scale on elections. Frankly, worldwide on the side of left, and would suppress Republican voices at a rate, sometimes perhaps an order of magnitude greater than Democrats. There was a tremendous amount of bias. Now we are moving from a system where there was a massive electoring bias to a system that is now more inclusive, where at least, say, 80% of America — perhaps the world — could be on the platform and feel that it is finally a level playing field, fair to people with a wide range of views. That is our goal and that is what we are doing now. — Musk.

  • If you start on the left and you move to the center, you are necessarily moving right. Our goal is not to move to the right; it is that we are moving right in order to get to the center. — Musk.

  • [Y]our historic neutrality might be destroyed if “X” is not perceived as being from the center. So everything you do needs to be designed to create a neutral space… where the only answer to false speech is true speech, and where the marketplace determines how many people listen to it… We have to have more confidence in our ability to answer bad speech. I do not want to censor my enemies. — Dershowitz.

  • [W]e actually have massively broadened what can be said on the platform… but we have tried to guide our or algorithm to promote things that are positive more than things that are negative; frankly, to have a love bias, if you will. This is not in terms of what can be said, but in terms of what is promoted to others. If somebody wants to accuse me of saying it is wrong to have a slight bias towards love and positivity, then I am rightly accused of that. — Musk.

  • As I have said, I think the overarching goal is how do how do we make this platform serve as a positive force for humanity. I think the free exchange of ideas does result in a positive force for humanity — if somebody feels that even if their ideas are wrong, they are not being squashed or censored. I think being squashed and censored breeds hatred and resentment and simply sends people to “hate echo chambers” that are outside of the mainstream. I think where you get the sort of people who go kill and do mass shooting, is because they are in some sort of “hate echo chamber.” — Musk.

  • I believe one is always wrong to some degree; we simply aspire to be a little less wrong over time and eventually we can get to a really good place. The idea is how do we make “X” a positive force for humanity where we can increase the sum of human knowledge. It’s a place where I hope people would know that if their ideas are based on false premises, especially hateful ideas, that perhaps we can point out that the reason that they have this hatred is because of things that are not true. It is like actually you are hating this or that group for things that are not true, or perhaps, in some cases, things that happened a long time ago for which it was a great-great-grandfather or something, that that did the bad thing. — Musk.

  • I think there is a lot of wisdom in forgiveness and turning the other cheek… I think it is actually a sign of strength. By the same token if you turn the other cheek and you’re just getting slapped all day, at a certain point you stop turning the cheek, but the general notion of forgiveness is incredibly important. Do not hold some grudge for you know a long time, in some cases centuries. Let it go and, to take another take a quote from the New Testament, the truth shall set you free, as John said. — Musk.

  

  Elon Musk and Alan Dershowitz. (Photos by Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images and Mario Tama/Getty Images)

  Alan Dershowitz: Let me start with a statement that many will disagree with. No country in history has ever really tested free speech: has seen whether the marketplace of ideas works or whether we can really have a society without censorship; where every idea is tested only on its merits, rather than for political benefit. This cannot be a right-left issue. Elon, you may be the first person who has really tried. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln all compromised. You are trying, for the first time, a great experiment to see whether we can survive with a marketplace of ideas, without censorship, where all thoughts and all ideas are treated equally. For instance, where there are judgments on the basis of whether something is pro-right, pro-life, anti-Jewish, pro-Christian, anti-Christian. What we need is to create a circle in which things that are illegal, such as abusing children, are outside the circle, but anything else has to be inside the circle. So if something is permitted for one idea or “-ism,” it has to be permitted for the others. This is exactly what universities are failing to do. They are creating a line on which favored groups fall on one side and disfavored groups fall on the other side.

  Can one define the kind of speech that must be permitted — the legal kind — without focusing on the content of the speech itself? Can one do that without focusing on whether it is right or left or politically correct or anything of that kind? One has to create a framework that is absolutely neutral. Then maybe fewer people will want to censor because they will realize that they will not be able to have “free speech for me but not for thee.” People will always want to censor but not be censored.

  No idea should be censored. Oliver Wendell Holmes put it well. He said every idea is an incitement. There should be no lines between advocacy and incitement. We fail every time we have tried to do that — most recently, with former President Trump’s ill-advised, but in my view, but constitutionally protected “January 6 speech”. We also failed during McCarthyism as well as in trying to distinguish between lawful advocacy of revolution and unlawful incitement of violence.

  Do not listen to special pleaders on behalf of minorities. Do not listen to the people who are self-serving and want, say, to serve the Jewish community, or serve Israel or the Palestinians. I am in favor of no prior censorship except things that are overtly illegal. Let the marketplace decide and make sure that there is an opportunity for everyone to answer. One cannot draw a line on hate speech. One person’s hate speech is another person’s love speech. It is important to open up the marketplace of ideas. If everyone is allowed to express ideas openly, no one is going to censor the “enemy” when they know that next, he or she will be the one being censored.

  Elon Musk: We are experimenting with this idea of freedom of speech, but not reach. Meaning that you can post anything on the platform even if it is hateful, provided that it is lawful. But then there is a separate question of what is promoted or not promoted, what enters into our recommendation engine, and if so, with what promise? Our current approach is to say, okay, you can say things that are hateful but legal on the platform, but we are not going to recommend them to others. This is the current approach that we have.

  Alan Dershowitz: That can be abused and become a form of censorship too.

  Elon Musk: I agree. Advertisers, certainly, have a right to say what content they will appear next to because that’s their right too, but not to dictate what can be said on the platform.

  Alan Dershowitz: I would agree with that. There is one other danger: of “X” being perceived as a right-wing reaction to left-wing censorship. I am — and identify — more with the left than the right, but I oppose strongly efforts by both the left and the right to censor. It would be a very serious mistake if “X” or you were perceived as some way implicitly favoring the right over the left. Perhaps you might have a small group of advisors, who represent different perspectives. Today the greatest danger to free speech comes from the left.

  Elon Musk: Yes, agree.

  Alan Dershowitz: Violence comes from both sides. The right-wing attack abortion clinics and kill Jews in synagogues. The 2020 “summer of love” came from the left: they burned down parts of cities, tore down statues, vandalized buildings; according to reports, numerous Americans were killed, including retired police Captain Daniel Dorn; thousands of police officers were assaulted, many sustaining injuries.

  At the moment, it is the left that is educating our future leaders, so the left poses a far greater danger of censoring free speech and of skewing the marketplace of ideas. “X” has to be perceived as equally open to both sides.

  Elon Musk: That is our aspiration, that is our goal. Now the reality of it for anyone who is paying attention — and I’m sure you saw this — was that prior to the acquisition, Twitter was very left and getting even more left. They had a massive thumb on the scale on elections. Frankly, worldwide on the side of left, and would suppress Republican voices at a rate, sometimes perhaps an order of magnitude greater than Democrats. There was a tremendous amount of bias. Now we are moving from a system where there was a massive electoring bias to a system that is now more inclusive, where at least, say, 80% of America — perhaps the world — could be on the platform and feel that it is finally a level playing field, fair to people with a wide range of views. That is our goal and that is what we are doing now.

  Given that it started so far off the left, it is accurate to say that it is moving right because it is moving to the center. So technically it is true that it is moving right. Not that it is suddenly popped over and instantaneously became, you know, from a left-wing propaganda arm to a right-wing propaganda arm but necessarily if it was pretty damn far on the left, it is going to have to move to the right in order to get to the center, and that is that is our goal.

  As Einstein would say, all motion is relative. If you start on the left and you move to the center, you are necessarily moving right. Our goal is not to move to the right; it is that we are moving right in order to get to the center.

  Alan Dershowitz: But some people perceive this as a movement to right. You might want to make it absolutely clear that you are the only platform in the world that does not take a “left -right” position — that yours is the platform that is pro-free speech, and that you are the first person in history ever to try to create a true marketplace of ideas. John Stuart Mill advocated it, Jefferson advocated it. But nobody ever achieved it. You are in a position where you can achieve it. I am just concerned that your historic neutrality might be destroyed if “X” is not perceived as being from the center. So everything you do needs to be designed to create a neutral space — a marketplace of ideas where the only answer to false speech is true speech, and where the marketplace determines how many people listen to it.

  We have to have more confidence in our ability to answer bad speech. I do not want to censor my enemies.

  Elon Musk: Absolutely, and to be clear we actually have massively broadened what can be said on the platform. But we have — and perhaps you disagree with this — but we have tried to guide our or algorithm to promote things that are positive more than things that are negative; frankly, to have a love bias, if you will. This is not in terms of what can be said, but in terms of what is promoted to others. If somebody wants to accuse me of saying it is wrong to have a slight bias towards love and positivity, then I am rightly accused of that.

  I think our overlap in agreement is very high so I would certainly value your opinion in the future because this is something that we should debate frequently. As I have said, I think the overarching goal is how do how do we make this platform serve as a positive force for humanity. I think the free exchange of ideas does result in a positive force for humanity — if somebody feels that even if their ideas are wrong, they are not being squashed or censored. I think being squashed and censored breeds hatred and resentment and simply sends people to “hate echo chambers” that are outside of the mainstream. I think where you get the sort of people who go kill and do mass shooting, is because they are in some sort of “hate echo chamber.”

  Alan Dershowitz: I think we all should sacrifice our own parochial interests, even on issues like anti-Semitism, to a far greater humanitarian interest in promoting open and complete dialogue. Complete free speech in the marketplace of ideas: only you can do that.

  Elon Musk: Well, thank you. I’ll do my best here and your sort of advice would certainly be very much appreciated. I believe one is always wrong to some degree; we simply aspire to be a little less wrong over time and eventually we can get to a really good place. The idea is how do we make “X” a positive force for humanity where we can increase the sum of human knowledge. It’s a place where I hope people would know that if their ideas are based on false premises, especially hateful ideas, that perhaps we can point out that the reason that they have this hatred is because of things that are not true. It is like actually you are hating this or that group for things that are not true, or perhaps, in some cases, things that happened a long time ago for which it was a great-great-grandfather or something, that that did the bad thing.

  I think there is a lot of wisdom in forgiveness and turning the other cheek. When I was younger, I actually thought turning the other cheek was not a sign of weakness. Now, I think it is actually a sign of strength. By the same token if you turn the other cheek and you’re just getting slapped all day, at a certain point you stop turning the cheek, but the general notion of forgiveness is incredibly important. Do not hold some grudge for you know a long time, in some cases centuries. Let it go and, to take another take a quote from the New Testament, the truth shall set you free, as John said. I am a big believer in that the road to morality is truth and curiosity. And if you care about truth and you are curious, I think this is a natural outflowing from that.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 21:30

• The Problem Isn't Book "Banners", It's Public Schools…
  The Problem Isn’t Book “Banners”, It’s Public Schools…

  Authored by Neal McCluskey via RealClear Wire,

  This week is Banned Books Week. Supported by several groups, including the American Library Association and the National Book Foundation, the week is intended to alert the public to threats to what Americans read, especially in public schools. Long a rather quiet affair, over the last few years “banning” has become a major issue, with one group often portrayed as the culprit: conservatives.

  

  But it is not conservatives, or “banners” of any political stripe, that are the problem. It is public schooling itself.

  You are probably familiar with the typical battle: parents at school board meetings calling for the removal of books from libraries, recommended reading lists, or class assignments. Members of Moms for Liberty, founded by three mothers and former school board members, might be the best known activists fighting to restrict books such as Gender Queer: A Memoir, about author Maia Kobabe’s journey of sexual discovery.

  The many battles that have been fought over Gender Queer, which free expression watchdog PEN America reports was the fifth most challenged book in the last school year, are classic culture war: a clash of irreconcilable values.

  Supporters of stocking the book argue that kids of all genders need to see people like themselves in schools, and other students need to understand that people of all genders are full parts of society. Supporters are driven by values – tolerance and inclusivity.

  Opponents argue that the book, which includes illustrated depictions of sexual activity, is inappropriate for children too young to thoughtfully grapple with it, and pornographic. They too are driven by values – the desire to protect children’s innocence, and a belief that some sexual activity is inherently immoral.

  But why must groups such as Moms for Liberty attack such books in public schools?

  Because conservative families, just like liberal, must pay for public schools – government schools – which are inherently politically controlled. To get what they think is right – schools where children cannot peruse, or be taught from, books with immoral content – they must keep liberals from getting what they think right: inclusive collections.

  Liberals have also sought to sideline books, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird which include the “N-word” and some say promote white saviorism. In 2020, the Burbank school district in heavily blue California told English teachers that they could not teach those books and several others. In 2022, the Mukilteo district in solidly Democratic Snohomish County, Washington, ended required reading of Mockingbird.

  Conflict over literature in public schools is not one-sided. It also is not new.

  Founding-generation luminaries Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster, in promoting the idea of public schooling, disagreed whether reading the Bible in schools should be encouraged because religion was essential, or discouraged because using scripture as a pedagogical tool cheapened it. A few decades later, as public schooling started to grow, Roman Catholics and Protestants got into heated, sometimes even bloody, conflicts over whose version of the Bible would be allowed..

  And books are just one of numerous public schooling culture war battlegrounds.

  Teaching the origins of life is arguably the quintessential conflict, immortalized in the play Inherit the Wind about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. These fights—either an intelligent being created life or not—pit religious conservatives against many liberals., and while they have subsided somewhat, in the mid-2000s the town of Dover, Pennsylvania was wrenched apart by a dispute over whether students should be told that evolution is a “theory,” not a “fact.” In February of this year, a bill was introduced in West Virginia to let teachers discuss Intelligent Design.

  Today we see constant culture war in public schools. The Cato Institute’s Public Schooling Battle Map contains more than 3,700 fights, including recent throwdowns in Florida over Advanced Placement African American Studies and the state’s African American history standards, the latter of which includes an item saying that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” They are fights not just over facts, but whether the country is inherently good or bad.

  Of course, there’s sex education. New Jersey, for instance, created new standards in 2020, including on gender identity, and numerous districts have been embroiled in conflicts over adopting them. Then there are battles over prayer, pitting religious devotion against secularism, which we have seen in districts from North Carolina to California.

  Book “banning” in public schools does not spring from some conservative cabal. As battles fought all over the county attest, such actions are inevitable when people with opposing values – any values – must all pay for government schools.

  Neal McCluskey directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and is the author of The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal, and Harmonious Society

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 21:00

• Why Do People Start Businesses In Every US State?
  Why Do People Start Businesses In Every US State?

  People have various motivations for starting their businesses.

  Some seek higher income. Others are looking for a balance between family life and career. In some situations, entrepreneurship may be the only way to fight unemployment.

  In this infographic from Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, OnDeck uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 Annual Business Survey to highlight the most unique reasons for why people start businesses in each U.S. state.

  

  Editor’s note: The map tracks the most popular unique reasons to start a business. In this case, “unique” is defined by how much a particular reason stands out from the U.S. average across all states. For example, in Delaware, more respondents said they started businesses because they “couldn’t find jobs” (11.6%) than in any other state (U.S. average: 7.3%). So, even though it’s not numerically the most popular reason overall, it is the unique reason that stands out the most for that state.

  The Most Popular Unique Reasons to Start a Business

  According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, entrepreneurship rates in the U.S. have been trending upward over the past two decades.

  In fact, despite multi-billion dollar companies getting the spotlight, 99.9% of businesses across the U.S. are small businesses, employing over 60 million people.

  Wanting to make more income is the biggest unique factor in starting a business in 14 states, including some of the states with the highest unemployment rates, like New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Alabama.

  

  In Utah, a higher percentage (65.4%) of entrepreneurs start businesses to achieve a work-life balance than in any other state. Notably, Utah is known for having the largest average family size, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, and has a strong religious presence.

  On the other hand, in Florida, more business founders (69.2%) start their businesses to become their own bosses than anywhere else.

  New York and California are states where entrepreneurs mentioned that they couldn’t find a job as a key unique reason to start a business. In fact, both states lead as the worst for job seekers, as shown in another Visual Capitalist graphic.

  Small Businesses to Remain Vital

  Despite all the different reasons to start a business, the fact is that entrepreneurship is still crucial for the U.S. economy.

  Over the last 25 years, small businesses have added over 12.9 million jobs. For perspective, that’s about two-thirds of the jobs added to the economy.

  In 2021, a record-breaking 5.4 million new business applications were filed in the U.S.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 20:30

• Biden Defends Use Of Pre-Allocated Funds For Extending Texas Border Wall
  Biden Defends Use Of Pre-Allocated Funds For Extending Texas Border Wall

  Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  President Joe Biden defended his administration’s decision to waive federal statutes in South Texas to allow for the construction of 20 miles of U.S.-Mexico border wall, stating on Oct. 5 he had no choice but to use previously approved federal funds for the project.

  

  President Biden said that he had tried to “redirect” the money from the border wall project—allocation under the Trump administration.

  “The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate, to redirect that money,” President Biden said in his address. “They didn’t. They wouldn’t. In the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated for. I can’t stop that,” he said.

  When the president was asked a follow-up question about whether he thought the border wall was effective, he replied with a firm “no.”

  Similarly, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered a clear answer to reporters about the administration’s stance during an Oct. 5 press briefing, saying: “We believe there are better, effective ways to secure the border.

  “We asked Congress to reappropriate the fund, but they refused to do it. We need better technology, not a wall.”

  When asked repeatedly about the issue, the press secretary seemed frustrated, insisting that the president has been consistent in his approach to border security.

  White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt later said in a post on X, formerly Twitter: “The funds for 20 miles of border reinforcements were appropriated in 2019 before [Biden] took office.

  “He called on Congress to reappropriate the funds for smarter, more effective enforcement uses. Congress failed to do so,” LeBolt added.

  “Rule of law requires the project be completed in 2023.”

  Announced Changes

  The Biden administration announced on Oct. 5 that 26 federal laws were waved in South Texas to allow border wall construction, signaling the administration’s first use of broad executive power to pave the way for building more border barriers.

  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted the announcement on the U.S. Federal Registry with few specifics regarding the construction in Starr County, Texas, which is part of a Border Patrol sector with “high illegal entry.”

  DHS has waived a number of federal rules—including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—in order to begin construction using 2019 appropriations from Congress to build a wall along the southern border.

  Environmental law violations that could otherwise be reviewed and possibly litigated are waived.

  The announcement did not include any maps, but one that was made public during the comment period showed that the construction might extend the current border barrier system by as much as 20 miles.

  About 450 miles of barriers were constructed along the southwest border between 2017 and January 2021, all under the Trump administration.

  After the Biden administration temporarily halted them at the beginning of his presidency, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott revived them as part of his immigration crackdown at the state level.

  The DHS’s decision on Oct. 4 stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric of the administration, which declared a stop to construction on Jan. 20, 2021, arguing that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.”

  Border Insecurity

  A recent report by El Paso’s Mayor Oscar Leeser indicates that the border city is “at a breaking point” amid a massive increase in illegal immigration.

  The dramatic increase has brought them to a point where more than 2,000 people a day are seeking asylum, exceeding shelter capacity and straining resources, according to Mr. Leeser’s comments at a news conference in late September.

  The influx of primarily Venezuelan asylum seekers is part of a larger influx of illegal immigrants who traveled perilous bus and freight railroad routes to Mexican border towns near San Diego, California, and the Texas cities of El Paso and Eagle Pass.

  Mr. Lesser stated that El Paso intends to open a new shelter and chartered five buses on Oct. 7 to transport illegal immigrants to New York, Chicago, and Denver.

  Similarly, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has declared an “invasion” at the southern border due to the surge in illegal immigration, pointing at President Biden’s policies and ordering the National Guard and law enforcement to assist with the crisis.

  “I officially declared an invasion at our border because of Biden’s policies,” Mr. Abbott wrote in a post on X, on Sept. 20.

  “We deployed the Texas National Guard, DPS, and local law enforcement. We are building a border wall, razor wire, and marine barriers. We are also repelling migrants.”

  The governor’s office has also deployed more buses to ship illegal migrants to sanctuary cities, such as New York and Chicago, saying the state is “at capacity.”

  The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 20:05

• First Peru, Now Ecuador: US Southern Command Escalates Its "War On Drugs" In South America
  First Peru, Now Ecuador: US Southern Command Escalates Its “War On Drugs” In South America

  Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

  In 2009, Ecuadorians voted in a referendum to remove all US military presence from the country. Now, thanks to an agreement signed in the dying days of Guillermo Lasso’s corruption-tainted government, US troops are coming back. 

  

  Just ten days ago, I reported in my post, “Back to Business As Usual: The US Is Once Again Vigorously Stirring the Pot in Its Own ‘Backyard‘”, that the US is seeking to escalate its war on drugs in Latin America, as a pretext for trying to regain strategic dominance of the region. It is doing so one country at a time, with the apparent ultimate endgame being direct, overt military  intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels — on Mexican soil.

  In mid-September, the head of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), Army Gen. Laura Richardson, visited Peru, a country that is in the grip of arguably its worst political crisis of this still-fledgling century. A few days later, the Peruvian government, which has virtually zero democratic legitimacy and is under investigation for human rights violations, signed an agreement with US Homeland Security Investigations to collaborate in transnational criminal investigations through the establishment of a Transnational Criminal Investigation Unit (TCIU).

  Now, less than a month later, Peru’s Andean neighbour, Ecuador, is on exactly the same path. Last Friday (Sept 29), the country’s outgoing President (and former senior banker) Guillermo Lasso held a closed-door meeting with senior officials of the US Coast Guard and Department of Defense in Washington. The outcome of that meeting was two status agreements, one that will allow the deployment of US naval forces along Ecuador’s coastline while the other will permit the disembarking of US land forces on Ecuador’ soil, albeit only at the request of Ecuador’s government.

  All with the ostensible aim of combatting drug trafficking organizations.

  Obviously, that is not what this is really about. If Washington were serious about tackling the violence generated by the drug cartels, the first thing it could do is pass legislation to stem the southward flow of US-produced guns and other weapons. But that would hurt the profits of arms manufacturers. And if it were remotely serious about tackling the major cause of the drug problem — the rampant consumption of narcotics within its own borders — it would never have let Big Pharma unleash the opium epidemic. And once it had, it would never have let the perps walk free with the daintiest of financial slaps on the wrists.

  The primary goal of this latest escalation in the US’ decades-old war on drugs, as with all previous escalations, is to achieve or maintain geostrategic dominance in key, normally resource-rich regions of the world while keeping the restive populace at home in line — or in prison, generating big bucks for the prison industrial complex.

  Radio Silence

  From what I can tell, this latest escalation has so far received little media coverage in Ecuador and almost zero coverage in the English-language press, apart from one solitary article in the Washington Examiner:

  The State Department has not publicized the agreements in any of the more than 30 press releases issued since Wednesday, but a State spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Friday that it had signed status of forces agreements and maritime law enforcement agreements. Senior representatives from the Department of Homeland Security’s military branch, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Defense Department attended the signing.

  The maritime agreement allows U.S. military vessels to be present in the waters off the northwestern coast of South America, which Colombian drug cartels use to move cocaine. The ability to move military vessels into the area will “strengthen cooperative law enforcement activities and build mutual capacity to prevent and combat illicit transnational maritime activity,” according to State.

  The second agreement was a less common one, according to Adam Isacson, who heads defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America and has worked on Latin American issues since 1994.

  Status of forces agreements outline the terms by which members of a foreign military, in this case the Defense Department, can operate or are expected to conduct themselves while in another country.

  “That doesn’t mean we’re doing it, but it means we can and it means that they’re making a very clear signal to us that they want us more involved,” Crenshaw said.

  History Repeating

  Presumably, the reason why this story is getting such little attention, not even affording a press release by the State Department, has a lot to do with recent Ecuadorian history. You see, Ecuador is one of the few countries in the world to actually successfully close down all US military bases on its territory and force all US soldiers to withdraw. In 2009, when the US Air Force’s 10-year lease on the Manta base on Ecuador’s Pacific coast came up for renewal, Rafael Correa’s government held a referendum on the issue. The people overwhelmingly voted for the base to be closed.

  According to article in the Washington Examiner, the US withdrew all of its forces from Ecuador. In reality, they were evicted. From Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus:

  The last personnel left the base on 18 September, and the facilities used for a decade by the American military were all returned to Ecuador.

  At a ceremony marking the American withdrawal, Foreign Minister Fander Falconí made the following strong statement: “The withdrawal of the American military is a victory for sovereignty and peace. Never again foreign bases on Ecuadorian territory, never again a sale of the flag.”1

  Meanwhile, a relieved Defense Minister Javier Ponce commented: “I am glad that President Correa has fulfilled his election pledge and preserved the constitution.”

  On the same day in the capital Quito, the citizens’ group Anti-Bases Coalition Ecuador held a concert of celebration. In exuberant Latin style about 200 people celebrated the American military withdrawal with singing and salsa dancing at an amphitheater. Messages of congratulation were read out from anti-base movements across the globe, starting with Japan, and each was greeted by loud applause.

  At the closing ceremony, Martha Youth, a spokeswoman for the US Embassy in Quito, announced that together with other Forward Operating Locations in Central and South America, a total of 700 tons of drugs with a value of 35.1 billion USD had been seized. “We’ve done good work in cooperation with the Ecuadorian authorities”, she said.

  However, Pablo Lucio Paredes, head of CONADE (Comisión Nacional de Control Antidopaje del Ecuador) begged to differ.

  “Our country has received no benefits from American operations out of the Manta base these ten years. From the outset, the base’s real purpose was linked to the American geopolitical strategy to involve our country in the civil war in neighboring Colombia.”

  “Plan Ecuador”

  Ecuador’s prior eviction of US forces is now being quietly undone. President Lasso has been requesting US help in creating a “Plan Ecuador” to combat the rising lawlessness in the country for over a year. The plan, he said, would be modelled on Plan Colombia, the disastrous drug-eradication program that burnt through $15 billion of US “aid” funds during more than two decades, worsened the violence in Colombia, bathed more than a million hectares of farmland in a rich brew of toxic chemicals, including Monsanto’s “probably” carcinogenic weedkiller glyphosate, exacerbated illegal mining while overseeing a significant upsurge in coca production.

  From the first moment it was unveiled, at the 2022 Summit for the Americas in Los Angeles, the plan was hugely controversial, as I reported in May:

  Plan Colombia was such a costly debacle that it become effectively unexportable to other parts of Latin America and beyond, says Adam Isacson, lead investigator of the Washington Office on Latin America’s Defense Oversight program, which monitors U.S. cooperation with Latin America’s security forces: “The US looked at the Plan Colombia experience and hoped that it had found something it could apply in Afghanistan, or in Mexico, or Central America, and found out that it didn’t work there.”

  But nobody seems to have told this to Lassa, who said in LA last summer:

  The background is the same. We could probably call it something else, but in effect, Ecuador wants to present a Plan Ecuador to the United States.

  Even Voice of America reported that Lasso’s comments had stoked controversy at the Summit as well as among many lawmakers back home. Ecuador’s former Foreign Minister María Isabel Salvador said the proposal “betrayed a lack of understanding and comprehension of what Plan Colombia meant in practice for that country.”

  If the idea was controversial last year, it is far more so today given that Lasso is in the process of withdrawing from political life following a raft of corruption, tax evasion and money laundering allegations that almost led to his impeachment. To ward off that threat, he dissolved parliament in May and called new elections in which neither he nor his party would participate. Lasso’s popularity, like that of Peru’s current President Dina Boluarte, had already hit rock (16% in April) and he has effectively been ruling Peru by decree since May.

  One of the allegations Lasso faces is that his presidential campaign was partly financed by the Albanian mafia, which controls the cocaine routes between South America and Europe. As revealed in the “Gran Padrino” (Great Godfather) investigation by independent news outlet La Posta, Lasso’s brother-in-law, Danilo Carrera, a well-connected banker, was not only running key government departments but was also doing business with Ruben Cherres, a notorious businessman with ties to the Albanian mafia who had been caught on tape boasting about removing and replacing members of the government at will in exchange for money and favours.

  In March, Cherres was found dead alongside the bodies of his girlfriend, a friend and his security guard at a house on the Punta Blanca coast, just a few hundred yards from Lasso’s holiday home. Days later, a number of international intelligence agencies alerted journalists at La Posta that members of the Albanian mafia had entered Ecuador with the intention of taking revenge for the dismantling of the corruption network installed within the Lasso’s government. One of the organisation’s co-founders and a senior journalist left the country after receiving death threats.

  In other words, the US has just signed an agreement to wage war on the drug cartels with a government that appears to be in league with at least one of those cartels. Luis Eduardo Vivanco, another co-founder of La Posta, recently told El Economista: “the line dividing the mafia from the government has become increasingly blurred” during the Lasso government. Following La Posta’s revelations of rampant corruption in the Lasso government, five US congressmen wrote a letter urging the Biden administration to reconsider the US government’s relationship with Ecuador. A couple of paragraphs (though the letter itself is well worth a full read):

  Ecuador is now in the midst of a political and social crisis that is driven, in large part, by credible allegations of corruption at the highest levels of government. Investigative journalists have uncovered what appears to be a web of corruption that ties key associates of Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso to organized crime figures. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that one of these individuals – Danilo Carrera – as well as President Lasso himself have been using U.S. jurisdictions to hide assets and avoid taxes, in violation of Ecuadorian law…

  Corruption and criminal activity appear to have deeply penetrated Ecuador’s security apparatus, prompting the U.S. ambassador in Quito to denounce the country’s “narco-generals.” The general security situation has plummeted since Lasso took office with the country’s homicide rate nearly doubling.

  Predictably, the Biden administration appears to have taken no notice of the letter. Rather than reconsidering relations with Ecuador, it is intensifying them.

  Lasso himself only has ten days left in government and is currently visiting New York for personal reasons. The second round of Ecuador’s presidential elections will take place on October 15 and most opinion polls are predicting a close race between Lisa González, the leader of former President Rafael Correa’s left-leaning Citizen Revolution Movement party, and Daniel Noboa, the Miami-born 35-year old son of Álvaro Fernando Noboa Pontón, Ecuador’s richest man, banana plantation owner and former presidential candidate.

  Unsurprisingly for a country that saw the number of violent crimes almost double last year and recently witnessed the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, the most important electoral issue is security. But whether Lasso’s “Plan Ecuador” plays any part in the next government’s national security agenda will depend on who wins the election, with González likely to rip it up in her first few days while Noboa will probably do the opposite. But that’s just an educated guess.

  With Ecuador’s national assembly currently dissolved by Lasso, his plan must also be submitted for approval to Ecuador’s Supreme Court. In the meantime, the US will be scoping Latin America for other governments with whom to strike up similar military partnerships, with Uruguay and oil-rich Guyana seemingly high up the list.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 19:40

• Let's Examine Some Real Crimes Committed By Presidents
  Let’s Examine Some Real Crimes Committed By Presidents

  Authored by Connor O’Keeffe via the Mises Institute,

  Former president Donald Trump is facing ninety-one criminal charges as he seeks to win back the White House in 2024. The indictments are the latest battle in a roughly six-year crusade against Trump that first sought to remove him from power through the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, then with espionage charges and impeachments, and that now aims to block him from becoming president again. The mantra we hear from those in politics and media who support these efforts is that nobody is above the law.

  

  But there’s an entire class of people above the law. Or who at least act like they’re above the law—the political class. The hypocrisies of their effort to convict Trump and block him from holding office again reveal that the motivations are purely political—not born of some commitment to a higher moral or legal principle.

  Two broad schools of thought make up Western legal philosophy. They are natural law theory and legal positivism. Natural law theory says that law exists regardless of the dictates of states. That justice is derived from nature and common to all humans. Simply put, natural law theorists argue that a crime is a crime regardless of what the state says. That makes killing another human with malice aforethought murder, for example, even when it’s done with the blessings of government officials.

  Many libertarians, such as Murray Rothbard, ground their moral opposition to state power in appeals to natural law. There is no special status that someone can attain that allows them to commit crimes.

  The idea that nobody, not even the president, is above the law is right in line with this view. But, taken to its logical Rothbardian conclusion, equality under the law is a denial of political authority. So, it’s bizarre to hear the political class use this slogan as a rallying cry when all their wealth, power, and status is built on political privilege. And they can’t rightfully go after Trump for how he used his political authority because that’s not unique to Trump.

  The political class prefers legal positivism, which separates law from morality. According to legal positivists, law is what the sovereign political authority says it is. There may be just laws and unjust laws. But they are all valid laws in this view. Legal positivism enshrines the political class’s privileged legal status above the rest of us.

  Therefore, the way to get Trump is not to show he did anything immoral or wrong but to prove he technically broke some rule made up by members of an earlier political class. That way he can be driven out of public life without threatening the regime’s authority. But the problem hasn’t been finding crimes committed by Trump but finding crimes unique to Trump. Because all recent presidents have broken the law.

  President George H. W. Bush launched a war on Iraq without congressional authorization. That is illegal according to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, the set of rules Bush swore an oath to uphold. President Bill Clinton did the same, overseeing illegal military operations in Somalia, Serbia, and Iraq.

  President George W. Bush conducted warrantless surveillance on American citizens, which is illegal according to the Fourth Amendment, and committed torture, which is prohibited by Section 2340A of Title 18 of the United States Code. His administration also launched undeclared, and therefore illegal, wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq.

  President Barack Obama conducted more illegal wars in Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Mali, and Yemen. In many of those wars, Obama expanded George W. Bush’s policy of giving support to al-Qaeda, which is treason according to Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution. Obama also ordered the assassination of an American citizen in Yemen who had not been tried or even convicted of a crime. The Sixth Amendment makes that illegal.

  Combined, these illegal wars have killed millions of people. They are appalling crimes of which Trump is also guilty. His administration continued the wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen despite his running on a more isolationist foreign policy. Yet he’s not being charged for any of that. The crimes he’s facing charges for are far less serious, but they are more unique to Trump.

  In New York, Trump is charged with mislabeling some business expenses during the 2016 election. In Georgia, he’s charged with conspiring to overturn an election prosecutors claim he knew he’d lost. Federally, he’s charged with claiming to have won an election he allegedly knew he’d lost, which prosecutors say incited the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He’s also charged with keeping classified documents after leaving office and conducting a “scheme to conceal” them from the federal government.

  By refusing to bring charges against Trump that could also be brought against the presidents they like, the political class has shown that its aims are political. If they were committed to the rules that they swore an oath to uphold, they’d have to indict many of their own. And if they genuinely believed that nobody exists above the law, they’d have to give up a whole lot more.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 19:15

• Watch: Left-Wing College Kids Demand More War Funding Even As Polls Confirm 'Ukraine Fatigue'
  Watch: Left-Wing College Kids Demand More War Funding Even As Polls Confirm ‘Ukraine Fatigue’

  It’s been no secret that support among the American public for funding and arming Ukraine has been steadily slipping, particularly after over the summer it became clear that the counteroffensive was a failure.

  Reuters introduced the latest findings of a new poll this week by calling it a “warning sign for Kyiv”. The publication wrote: “Support is falling among Americans of both major political parties for supplying Ukraine with weapons, a warning sign for Kyiv, which relies heavily on U.S. arms to fight against a Russian invasion, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.”

  

  The new poll found only 41% believe the US government should continue sending arms to Ukraine, at a moment the Biden White House is trying to pass its $24 billion aid package to keep it flowing through next year. 

  Support is fading compared to prior polling from last spring, says Reuters:

  The two-day poll, which closed on Wednesday, showed only 41% of respondents agreed with a statement that Washington “should provide weapons to Ukraine,” compared to 35% who disagreed and the rest unsure.

  Support for U.S. weapon shipments is down from May, when a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed 46% of Americans backed sending arms, while 29% were opposed and the rest unsure.

  We previously cited a member of the Ukrainian Parliament as saying, “We are freaking out. For us it is a disaster.” This is because the shift in public sentiment in the West is clearly translating to more hesitancy for supporting Kiev from political leaders.

  Lately, hawkish Congressional leaders and pundits who want to ‘confront Russia’ in Ukraine have shifted their argument. Increasingly we hear that Washington must support Ukraine as a ‘message’ to China or other autocrats in the world. Another argument has been that it all benefits American companies, particularly the arms industry. Democrats as well as Republican hawks have been making these arguments, but which have nothing to do with America’s actual defense, security, and prosperity. 

  Watch: the antiwar left has all but disappeared, but instead we are left with pathetic scenes of college kids demanding more weapons to be sent to fuel yet another ‘forever war’ – such as in the below encounter with presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy…

  Wild to see left-wing college kids demanding more war pic.twitter.com/l9xgsIN5rM

  — Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) October 5, 2023

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

  One recent ad put out by the “Republicans for Ukraine” has even asserted the “war is good” because it ultimately hurts China and weakens Russia. 

  “The more Ukraine weakens Russia, the more it also weakens Russia’s closest ally China. America needs to stand strong against our enemies, that’s why Republicans in Congress must continue to support Ukraine,” the ad says.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 18:50

• Reaping What You Sow: The American Regime In Chaos
  Reaping What You Sow: The American Regime In Chaos

  Authored by Tho Bishop via The Mises Institute,

  The word “chaos” has been the buzzword this week in Washington, largely directed toward Rep. Matt Gaetz’s successful coup against former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and the resulting void in Republican leadership. In an era where most outcomes in Washington are predictable, best illustrated by yet another kick-the-can-down-the-road continuing resolution on spending passed the preceding weekend, the first successful use of a motion to vacate the speakership in American history greatly shocked the system.

  

  In hindsight, it should not have been. For more than a decade, there has been a constant tension between Republican voters and the priorities of its leadership. McCarthy similarly saw his previous two Republican predecessors resign from their positions after it was clear they lost the support of their conferences. Even Donald Trump, who maintains a strong hold on the Republican electorate, oversaw a government culpable for most of Red America’s frustrations with Washington: runaway spending, the devastation of covid tyranny, systemic corruption, and general impotency from the federal government in acting on conservative concerns from border security to the administrative state and the progressive capture of all levels of education.

  Ironically, it was The CARES Act signed by Trump that provided $400 million in funding to help “fortify” the 2020 election.

  In contrast, the Democratic Party has been the dominant federal force in achieving major policy wins. Obamacare was passed and then found to be unmovable. Enormous subsidies have been created to enrich loyal areas of support, including green energy sectors, Big Pharma companies, teachers’ unions, and a rainbow of various “minority empowerment” initiatives around the country. Even the military-industrial complex, once a reliable source of support for the GOP, has become a patron class of the American Left. A recent analysis of political donations from major sectors of the American economy illustrates the degree to which the most powerful interests in the United States view the Democratic Party as a better bet to forward their self-interests.

  For those familiar with Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the Progressive Era, this would not be a surprise. As he illustrates, the success of progressive ideology resulted in the rise of cartelized trusts that benefited from the protection and support of state privileges. Protections on trade emboldened attempts to monopolize industries like sugar. The push for central banking was driven by large financial interests. The progressive capture of both American political parties led Rothbard to suggest that late nineteenth and early twentieth-century politics could best be understood as a clash between rival oligarch factions led by the Morgans and Rockefellers.

  Yet, given the massive institutional advantages and relative unity enjoyed by the political left, the Democratic Party finds itself engulfed in chaos of its own, largely resulting from the consequences of its own political victories.

  Violent crime is on the rise in deep-blue cities, highlighted this past week by the brutal killing of two left-wing activists in Philadelphia and New York who advocated for “criminal justice” reform that resulted in more criminals with violent records being released on the streets. In response, progressive advocacy groups have sought to further undermine private reactions to this loss of public safety, attacking attempts at private security solutions under their familiar complaints of “racism.”

  Immigration, counted on as a powerful tool to ensure future political dominance for the Democratic Party, has also become a festering issue for Democrat politicians. As Republican state leaders responded to historic waves of border crossings with relocation programs to progressive “sanctuary cities,” areas like Chicago and New York are facing severe strains of public resources and growing hostility from residents. Meanwhile, left-wing cultural crusades have increasingly alienated nonwhite communities, resulting in situations like a Muslim-majority Michigan city council banning the transgender pride flag from government buildings.

  In a remarkable pivot this week, the Biden administration this week expedited the construction of border walls in Texas, but the greatest threat to the regime’s stability, of course, is the economic system that has enriched the progressive political class at the expense of the productive sectors of the economy. The failure of the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement to capture enough political will to alter the trajectory of Washington spending has made a fiscal crisis inevitable, and that moment is quickly approaching. America’s debt clock currently rests at north of $33 trillion dollars and is due to pass the $34 trillion mark by the end of the month without factoring in the additional future costs of unfunded liabilities.

  The greatest short-term threat to the regime’s stability is a threat few in Washington have yet to notice, the consequences of the Federal Reserve’s pivot away from its long role as a dutiful enabler of the Fed’s fiscal hedonism. As the recklessness of DC’s economic response to covid created an inflation shock even the carefully trained government statisticians couldn’t mask, the Fed has been forced to push interest rates well beyond its most aggressive projections. The true impacts of the hikes are just now starting to bear fruit. As the interest rates rise and rates for new debt insurances increase, the value of older bonds is being devastated.

  This week US bond markets are hitting historic losses of over 40 percent. Total losses on the value of bonds are estimated to stand at over $1.6 trillion and growing. Similar dynamics fueled the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank this March and threatened more banks in the future. Moody’s recently downgraded 10 regional banks in August, with more expected.

  The meltdown of US bonds threatens systemic insecurity in the financial system, threatening the balance sheets of insurance companies, pensions, and other nonbank institutions that sought security in the form of US bonds. The end of the era of low interest rates means that assumptions that guided the investment strategies of most of the world’s largest financial institutions were made with bad information. The size of the systemic risks to the system is currently unknowable, but the policy response to the great recession has sowed the seeds for the next financial crisis to be far larger.

  Despite these seismic shocks happening in financial markets, the political class seems characteristically clueless. A few weeks ago, a Republican presidential debate featured no mention of the growing credit crisis. The Federal Reserve was not mentioned until the last twenty minutes and only superficially touched on by Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis.

  It would, however, be a mistake for Americans to confuse the cracks in the stability of the regime as a catalyst for its retreat. Weak regimes are particularly dangerous.

  Just this week, it was released that the FBI had made explicit what was long implicit, now categorizing supporters of Donald Trump as a unique category for potential “extremism.”

  The modern regime successfully used the cover of the War on Terror to arm itself with powerful tools and weaponize nominally private client actors. As its own policy victories have planted the seeds of social unrest, it should be expected that it will unveil new tools of harsh power. Already, the governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe have escalated attacks on alternative media platforms that give average citizens the ability to out their crimes.

  The political class may be more concerned about delayed Ukraine funding than the financial crisis brewing at home, but the regime is prepared to do what it does best: violently preserve itself at the expense of everyone else.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 18:25

• The Dangers Of Investigating Big Pharma
  The Dangers Of Investigating Big Pharma

  Commentary by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  My family is from Texas (since 1830), so I have a focused interest in the well-being of that state. But I quickly got lost in the strange thicket of confusion when Attorney General Ken Paxton was impeached by the Texas House.

  

  In a series of wild allegations, they accused him of misconduct, including bribery, obstruction of justice, and misappropriation of public resources.

  In an instant and with no warning about what was coming, Paxton had to pack up his things, was blocked from doing his duties, and was forced to step aside from the office that the people had three times elected him to hold.

  Last week, he was exonerated of all charges and his name was fully cleared. Hardly anyone can even explain what the charges were. From a distance, it sure looked like a big political takedown attempt, but why?

  Paxton just sat for an extended interview with Tucker Carlson, who now runs the planet’s most-watched show, which appears on X, formerly Twitter, and has no advertisers at all. In one portion of the interview, Mr. Paxton explained that three weeks before the impeachment, he had initiated an investigation against the COVID-19 vaccine makers for engaging in deceptive trade practices under the laws of Texas.

  I recall being very excited about this at the time as a hugely important step. At the national level, the vaccine manufacturers are completely indemnified against liability from harms, which are plenty and also well-documented. Millions were forced to have this product injected into their bodies, and when something goes wrong, there’s no one to sue. It isn’t the way we are supposed to do business in America.

  Paxton was all over the case and ready to start a serious inquiry.

  “As soon as I did that,” he told Mr. Carlson, “that blew up my world. I became a target of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and obviously the Biden administration.”

  Mr. Carlson then asked him why that would be the case.

  “Big Pharma gives a lot of money. … I was doing it because the federal government has this immunity for them. This is wrong,” Paxton said. “They didn’t test this thing. They didn’t tell us about the side effects. They had an obligation to test it, even if they weren’t liable.

  “They had an obligation to tell my people there are some risks here. You should decide but here are the risks. Instead, they said everything is good, it prevents it, you won’t spread it. None of that was true. That’s a deceptive trade practice. If they did that …”

  Mr. Carlson interrupts and says, “It seems like they did that.”

  Then. Mr. Paxton says he will know more in the coming weeks and months, because he’s picking up the case again. He should watch his back.

  We need to be clear on what might be going on here. A state attorney general merely decided to apply existing law to the vaccine makers who provide most of the revenue to the drug approval side of the Food and Drug Administration. They fund 75 percent of television advertising and have moles embedded at all the commanding heights.

  They are so powerful that they manage to get Congress and the president to grant them full freedom from liability for any of the effects of a vaccine. That only incentivized the firms to call gene therapy a vaccine even though it didn’t work like any vaccine in history.

  How can it be possible that such tax-funded corporate agents, which own the patents to their drugs, and can even force their product on unwilling customers, can unseat a duly elected official in a state? It’s amazing … and terrifying.

  But that might be only the start of it. Mr. Carlson’s show on Fox was canceled just after he started asking hard questions about the vaccine, while Russell Brand was smeared the world over as he started to raise questions. It’s happened to many public figures.

  Look at the unseating of the founder of Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe, which occurred after he exposed a Pfizer employee bragging about how much money the company would make by creating new strains of viruses against which they can vaccinate. It was easily the most spectacular exposé of the institution’s history—and then, boom, he was fired.

  Now, Mr. O’Keefe runs his own outfit that continues to chase down pharma executives.

  As for Project Veritas, it just pulled the plug and fired all but a few employees. It has ceased operations, which isn’t surprising. When you get rid of the highest-performing person, the fumes you are left with don’t last long.

  Think about it: This awesome operation was wrecked because some powerful people got squeamish about exposing the vaccine makers.

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the biggest and most learned critic of Big Pharma on the planet, faced what might have been an assassination attempt last week. It didn’t even make the newspapers (The Epoch Times excepted). Meanwhile, he’s still being denied Secret Service protection even though he’s a serious candidate and faces non-stop threats on his life.

  As president of Brownstone Institute, I see examples several times a day of what happens to doctors, professors, statisticians, or anyone who asks questions about this industry, which somehow has emerged as among the most powerful in U.S. politics. The dirty dealings of the industry in canceling critics are legion. Any study that questions the effectiveness, safety, or necessity of their products is nearly always rejected by the mainstream journals. Even letters to the editor that expose statistical errors end up in the dustbin.

  As for Big Tech, they too are fully beholden. We have ironclad proof that Facebook and Twitter blocked any posts critical of vaccines. They went so far as to block “true information” about vaccine side effects that might contribute to an environment of “vaccine hesitancy.”

  We must ask again: How did Big Pharma buy control of so many governments?

  At this point, this problem has become a genuine threat to democracy and freedom. No industry has greater power to extract tax funding of its operations, retain intellectual property control over the results, enjoy indemnity from harms, and then even force its products on consumers. This is indefensible.

  Any warrior who dares stand up to this deserves the support of everyone who believes in what was the American system.

  Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 17:40

• McCarthy Denies Plan To Resign Before End Of Term
  McCarthy Denies Plan To Resign Before End Of Term

  Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has denied a report that he’ll resign before the end of his term, after Politico reported that he would do so after the next Speaker election.

  

  “No, I’m not resigning. I’m staying, so don’t worry,” McCarthy told reporters on Friday, adding “We’re going to keep the majority, I’m going to help the people I got here and we’re going to expand it.”

  Earlier, Politico reported that McCarthy told GOP members in a closed-door meeting: “I’m going to spend time with my family,” adding “I might have been given a bad break, but I’m still the luckiest man alive.”

  At the same time, some Republicans are reviving his name as a speaker candidate, even as it remains unclear whether he’d accept it.

  They argue no one else could get the 218 Republican votes needed to be speaker, they argue, as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise enter next week’s race as frontrunners that still might not be able to get over the top.

  The “only workable outcome is to restore Kevin McCarthy as Speaker under party rules that respect and enforce the right of the majority party to elect him,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said in a statement on Thursday. “This depends entirely on several of the dissidents to disenthrall themselves from their decision and to repair the damage before it is too late. I appeal to them to act while there is still time.” -Politico

  “I’ll do anything I can to help almost all of you. Don’t worry, I’ve raised a helluva lot of money in the last hour,” McCarthy told his members during a Tuesday closed-door conference meeting.

  Looks like Kevin’s sticking around.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 17:20

• Portland Residents Told Not To Call Police For Help
  Portland Residents Told Not To Call Police For Help

  Authored by Michael Letts via American Thinker,

  Portland officials were proud of themselves in 2020 when they defunded the Police Bureau by $15 million instead of increasing it by $3 million as planned. One commissioner was even upset that the council didn’t remove more from the budget.

  “Please take a moment to celebrate this victory, and let it fuel your fire, because we’re not done,” Commissioner Chloe Eudaly said at the time.

  

  Along with the $15 million, another $12 million was cut because of pandemic-caused economic shortfalls. “As a result, school resource officers, transit police and a gun violence reduction team — which was found to disproportionately target Black Portland residents during traffic stops, according to an audit in March 2018 — were disbanded,” PBS reported.

  A year later, the council was trying to add funding and retain the city’s police officers. “The added police spending is occurring amid a year of a record number of homicides, the city’s greatest police staffing shortage in decades and reform recommendations made by the U.S. Department of Justice,” PBS reported.

  It was too little, too late. The damage was done, and the city has yet to recover. In fact, the city government is telling residents not to call police unless their lives are at risk. Given how dangerous Portland has become, it might not affect the volume of calls to police because more residents’ lives are at risk from criminal activity than ever before.

  Commissioner Rene Gonzalez told residents that the city’s 911 system is overwhelmed with people calling about addicts on the streets suffering fentanyl overdoses. This is not a Portland-only problem. The state of Oregon decriminalized drug use three years ago. Gonzalez urged people on X (formerly Twitter), “Our 911 system is getting hammered this morning with a multiple person incident — multiple overdoses in northwest park blocks. Please do not call 911 except in event of life/death emergency or crime in progress (or change of apprehending suspect).”

  Over the past year, the city has experienced 104 homicides and 529 arrests were made for drug offenses, according to Portland Police. The city’s homeless population has also grown by 50 percent since 2019, topping more than 5,000 people.

  “Portland’s neighborhoods have been overrun with crime, homelessness, and drugs since the pandemic — and despite pouring funds into relief initiatives, little change is occurring on the streets of the city,” the Daily Mail reported.

  The people of Portland are understandably upset that crime is out of control, leaving their property and lives at risk. I really want to feel sorry for those residents being forced to live under those conditions. However, this is what those people voted for.

  They continue to elect the same types of progressive politicians who believe the same failed policies will somehow work if they try them enough. They are the same people who, even if they didn’t participate in the 2020 riots, supported them.

  If they truly want things to change for the better for the city, they need to vote for change and change their way of thinking. Change will bring change.

  Michael A. Letts is the CEO and Founder of In-VestUSA, a national grassroots non-profit organization helping hundreds of communities provide thousands of bulletproof vests for their police forces through educational, public relations, sponsorship, and fundraising programs. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 17:00

• Bank Loan Volumes Tumble Despite Surge In Deposits, Money-Markets Funds Hit New Record High
  Bank Loan Volumes Tumble Despite Surge In Deposits, Money-Markets Funds Hit New Record High

  After two weeks of relatively quiet flows, last week saw a massive $64BN inflow into money-market funds – the biggest inflows since the SVB crisis – to a new record high…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Both retail and institutional funds saw massive inflows last week…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The Fed’s balance sheet continued to contract, down $46BN last week to its lowest since June 2021…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  But banks’ usage of The Fed’s emergency funding facility remains at its record high around $108BN…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  So with banks balance sheets being plugged – and after last week’s crazy divergence between SA and NSA deposit flows – we wait with baited breath for what The Fed has in store for us this week…

  On a seasonally-adjusted basis, total deposits jumped $40BN last week (following the prior week’s $48BN SA inflow), back to its highest since the SVB crisis…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  For once, non-seasonally-adjusted deposits went in the same direction, with a $52BN inflow – after last week’s $85BN outflow…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And removing foreign bank flows, domestic banks saw inflows on both an SA and NSA basis…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The gap between SA and NSA deposit outflows since SVB remain high (around $116BN)…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  On the other side of the ledger, despite the big deposit inflows, both large and small banks saw loan volumes decline…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The key warning sign continues to trend lower (Small Banks’ reserve constraint), supported above the critical level by The Fed’s emergency funds (for now)…

  

  After an ugly week (for bonds), following an ugly month and even uglier quarter…

  

  …we sure hope these banks are making plans to fill the $108BN hole in their balance sheets they are filling with expensive Fed loans.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 16:40

• Kunstler: It'll Be Hard To Gaslight The Nation Anymore When This Happens
  Kunstler: It’ll Be Hard To Gaslight The Nation Anymore When This Happens

  Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

  Comes The Dancing Skeleton

  “We’ve conflated politics and bad mental health until they are indistinguishable.”

  – Scott Adams

  By some hidden working of unseen forces, legions of ghouls and demons are bursting out of the ground in every other front yard of small-town America. Supposedly hard-up working-class people go all-out constructing Halloween shrines to the totem figures of decay and death, as in some depraved cargo cult competition aimed at hastening our country’s descent into chaos. The end can’t come soon enough, seems to be the message. Something in the zeitgeist is prompting us to do this.

  Year to year, these morbid displays of slavering werewolves, hooded skeletons, grinning mummies, pirate corpses, horned devils, giant spiders, flapping crows, and glowing skulls far surpass in scale the once-exuberant displays of Christmas time — as if to say the celebration of horror and terror has way more meaning in America these days than the message of peace-on-earth, angels-on-high, the boundless generosity of Santa Claus, and the humble birth of a loving god. Kind of reminds you of what Mr. Dylan said more than a half-century ago: “…he not busy being born is busy dying.

  This Halloween month, America looks super-busy preparing for the death of something, maybe itself. Surely many now live in terror of the malevolent blob that the US government has become, led by a very paragon of ghouls, “Joe Biden.” This week, the blob declared in a “leak” to Newsweek magazine, that supporters of Donald Trump, the Golden Golem of Greatness, are now officially deemed to be enemies of the state. So, the blob that has lately subsumed the state, explicitly targets Trumpists (the MAGA crowd) for wholesale persecution, cancellation, de-personing, and incarceration. That is, opponents of the blob regime organizing for the coming election will be systematically neutralized and / or liquidated, taken off the game-board one way or another, by any means necessary.

  The blobistas would do well to take heed of those Halloween lawn displays. A stupendous, howling rage is building across this land in revolt against the blob’s monumental insults to a once proud and productive people. Soon, that plastic totem army of stock mythological monsters cavorting in the front yards will be superseded by real flesh-and-blood Americans aiming to shred the blob and scatter its quivering tatters to the four winds — as John F. Kennedy once remarked of the CIA in 1962, before it killed him in retaliation.

  Coincidentally, a scion of the JFK generation now running for president on an as-yet-to-be-specified independent party seeks to do exactly what his uncle promised to do. As you gaze on this developing battlefield, you will now see two sizable armies marshaling against the unholy hosts of blobbery — Mr. Trump’s MAGAs and Bobby Kennedy’s emerging division representing the old stoic virtues betrayed by vicious blob tyrants. The plausible outcomes on this battlefield are in flux thirteen months before the election. But it looks a little like the blob is outflanked; hence, its growing desperation.

  The psychodrama in the House of Representatives this week looked like a possible inflection point in the blob’s war against the American people. Mr. Gaetz evicted the quisling Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a rather brave gambit, opening up the possibility of unifying his party against the programmatic wickedness of the post-Covid-19 era — the suicidal spending, the insane and unnecessary Ukraine proxy war, traitorous refusal to control the southern border, the official DOJ lawfare waged against half the citizenry, the disgusting official censorship campaign, and the ongoing criminal conspiracy between the pharma companies, the US public health officialdom, and shadowy globalist forces embedded in the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, and scores of sinister multinational organizations ranging from George Soros’s Atlantic Council to the Sinaloa Cartel.

  In the background of all that — a true-life horror — lies the crumbling bond market, the foundation of the money-and-banking system that is supposed to support the on-the-ground economy that produces things of value like food and roofing shingles.

  The bond market is wobbling badly. As rates rise, banks’ collateral melts away and they go bust, liquidation moves to stock markets, derivatives implode, and the vast reservoirs of capital vanish. There’s your stealth true Halloween psychodrama sneaking up on the scene. Gradually, then all at once, the quarreling nation finds itself stone broke, and even the blob shrinks from the scene in horror.

  

  It will be hard to gaslight the country anymore when that happens. That will be the sobering moment when all the preposterous, mendacious, criminally insane propositions of recent years stand nakedly exposed. That’s when “Joe Biden” begins to be seen as a dancing skeleton.

  *  *  *

  Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 16:20

• Big Squeeze Saves Stocks From Bond Bloodbath
  Big Squeeze Saves Stocks From Bond Bloodbath

  ‘Hard’ data collapsed further this week with ‘soft’ data staying near cycle highs as today’s jobs data offered something for everyone with stalling wage growth (yay, we beat inflation), a jump in job gains (yay, growth and a soft landing), but a scratch or two below the surface of the 6-signa headline beat and things are not so pretty after all…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Financial Conditions continued to tighten aggressively this week, having turned after the July FOMC and now near the tightest it has been during this cycle…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Today saw a hawkish shift in rate-change expectations but on the week, 2023’s curve moved higher (slightly higher chances of more hikes) and 2024’s curve was flat to slightly lower (modest chance of more cuts)…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  US stocks were bolstered in morning trading by the largest buy imbalance since mid-July and short cover. Momentum can beget more upside momentum in stocks.

  Around 1140ET a massive buy program hit and smashed stocks higher…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  At the same time, the ‘most shorted’ stocks basket also went vertical…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  By the end of the week, thanks to today’s meltup, Nasdaq ended significantly higher on the week (along with the S&P). The Dow ended the week marginally lower while Small Caps lagged 2% in the red…

  

  Tech and Healthcare were the only sectors green on the week with Energy the ugliest horse in the glue factory…

  

  Healthcare was helped by the GLP-1 Analogs going bid…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  VIX didn’t even make it to 20 this morning as payrolls hit and stocks and bonds dumped. And then it just collapsed down to bear 17 the figure….

  

  One big options trader potentially had a bad day. Chatter was a large VIX Call buyer stepped in early this morning ahead of the payrolls print, betting on a blowout number…

  

  They got the blowout number, and for a split second things looked good, then everything reversed lower

  

  And the aggressive positioning and reversal can be seen in SpotGamma’s HIRO indicator as the trader was forced to unwind his calls at a loss…

  

  Still, at least he wasn’t long bonds this week!

  Bonds were clubbed like a baby seal this week, most notably the long-end, but today’s chaotic reversal put a little lipstick on the bond pig…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  It all had a very technical feel with yields spiking on the payrolls print and running stops from earlier in the week before collapsing back lower…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The yield curve (2s30s) bear steepened most of the week, surging back up to a key level… next stop ‘un-inverted’

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The dollar ended higher on the week, even with today’s pump-and-dump…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Bitcoin was its usual chaotic self this week, but ended higher (Friday to Friday), back above 28k…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Gold (spot) ended lower on the week, despite today’s bounce…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Ugly week for the energy complex with WTI puking down to a $81 handle intraday – 6-week lows…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Finally, Goldman notes that The 60bp increase in 10-year Treasury yields this year is starting to have an impact on stock valuations as the S&P 500 is now down about 7% from the 2023 high it hit back in late July. But higher rates don’t just impact how much you pay for a company. Higher rates can also weigh on the amount of money a company earns…

  

  …and as the chart above shows , this year, S&P 500 companies are staring down the biggest increase in borrowing costs since 2006.

  Making 5%-plus lending money to the US government certainly raises the bar for the level of corporate performance needed to attract investors…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  …TINA’s not back yet.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 10/06/2023 – 16:00

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