Today’s News 8th August 2022

• Sperry: Lies, Damned Lies, & The January 6 Committee
  Sperry: Lies, Damned Lies, & The January 6 Committee

  Authored by Paul Sperry via The Epoch Times,

  The Select Committee to Investigate January 6 has adjourned for a well-deserved summer break. Misleading the public is exhausting work.

  

  A careful review of the official transcripts of its eight long hearings shows the committee repeatedly made connections that weren’t there, took events and quotes out of context, exaggerated the violence of the Capitol rioters, and omitted key exculpatory evidence otherwise absolving former President Donald Trump of guilt. While in some cases it lied by omission, in others it lied outright. It also made a number of unsubstantiated charges based on the secondhand accounts—hearsay testimony—of a young witness with serious credibility problems.

  These weren’t off-the-cuff remarks. Panelists didn’t misspeak. Their statements were tightly scripted and loaded into teleprompters, which they read from verbatim.

  In other words, the committee deliberately chummed out disinformation to millions of viewers of not just cable TV, but also the Big Three TV networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—which agreed to pre-empt regular daytime and even primetime programming to air the Democrat-run hearings. And because Democrats refused to allow dissenting voices on the panel or any cross-examination of witnesses, viewers had no reference points to understand how they, along with the two Trump-hating Republicans they allowed on the committee, shaded the truth.

  This charade of an honest investigation appears to have had the desired effect. Polls show the Jan. 6 hearings hurt Trump, who plans to run again, with Independents. Unaffiliated voters have grown more likely to blame Trump for the Capitol riot and to show support for Democrats in the midterms, according to a new Morning Consult/Politico survey.

  With the November elections fast approaching, Democrats plan to hold another round of hearings next month, hoping voters pay even closer attention. With that in mind, it’s important to examine the false claims and distortions they no doubt will repeat. They are legion. Here’s the fact-checking the viewing public—and electorate—thus far has been denied.

  CLAIM: While committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) excoriated Trump for not calling off the Capitol rioters earlier, he claimed they were “savagely beating and killing law enforcement officers,” according to the transcript of his remarks from the prime-time July 21 hearing, carried live by the networks.

  FACT: No police officer was killed during the riot.

  CLAIM: During the same hearing, committee member Elaine Luria (D-Va.) faulted Trump for his “glaring silence” about the “tragic death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who succumbed to his injuries” suffered during the riot.

  FACT: The D.C. medical examiner ruled Sicknick died of “natural causes,” not injuries, well after the riot. Luria seemed to perpetuate false rumors started by the New York Times that Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, a fable debunked by both the coroner and the Sicknick family.

  CLAIM: Thompson asserted Trump “summoned” a mob that was “heavily armed and angry.”

  FACT: Not a single gun was recovered in the riot. For that matter, the only gun used during the four-hour melee was fired by a Capitol police officer, who killed an unarmed rioter, Ashli Babbitt—whose name was never mentioned in any of the hearings. Despite airing endless footage of rioters breaching the Capitol and fighting police, the committee omitted footage of USCP Lt. Michael Byrd shooting Babbitt from behind a doorway without warning, which was the most violent incident that occurred that day.

  CLAIM: The committee put a former far-right extremist on as a witness to testify that rioters built “a gallows” to allegedly hang then-Vice President Mike Pence.

  FACT:  The witness, Jason Van Tatenhove, was not at the Capitol that day. He had no insider knowledge about the purpose of the flimsy wooden structure erected across from the Capitol. In any case, it was a mock gallows, not a functional one. Even the New York Times recently acknowledged it “was too small to be used.”

  CLAIM: Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) proclaimed in the hearing curtain-raiser—also held in primetime and broadcast live by all three networks—that the panel had evidence Trump said Pence “deserves” to be hanged, a chilling claim if true. “Aware of the rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence,” she asserted, “the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea,’ Mike Pence quote ‘deserves it.’”

  FACT: Her “evidence” turned out to be a secondhand retelling by witness Cassidy Hutchinson, a White House assistant fresh out of college who overheard a paraphrasing of what Trump may have thought about the chants, not a direct Trump quote as Cheney implied. Hutchinson later testified Trump said, “something to the effect of,” Pence “deserves it.”

  CLAIM: Hutchinson also swore she wrote a note dictated by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows suggesting a more forceful White House response to the riot.

  FACT: Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann insisted that he actually wrote the note, not Hutchinson, adding a serious chink in her credibility as the committee’s star witness. “The handwritten note that Cassidy Hutchinson testified was written by her was in fact written by Eric Herschmann on January 6, 2021,” said a spokesperson for Herschmann, who noted that Herschmann told the committee that in his deposition. The panel never informed the public that Hutchinson’s claim was disputed.

  CLAIM: Based on Hutchinson’s testimony, the committee also claimed that former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone said Trump’s plan to march to the Capitol would cause Trump officials to be “charged with every crime imaginable.”

  FACT: Cipollone did not corroborate the claim in his sworn deposition before the committee.

  CLAIM: The committee relied on another second-hand account by Hutchinson to broadcast to the world the alleged bombshell Trump tried to physically commandeer his Secret Service limo to the Capitol. “When the president got in ‘The Beast’ … he thought they were going up to the Capitol,” Hutchinson testified, relaying what she’d heard from a security official who had heard it from another source. But when Trump was told he had to go back to the White House, she continued, Trump got “irate” and said “something to the effect of ‘I’m the [expletive] president, take me to the Capitol now,’” and proceeded to “grab at the steering wheel.” She claimed he even “lunged” at a Secret Service agent inside the vehicle.

  FACT: Trump rode in a different motorcade vehicle than “The Beast” that day (an SUV, not the famous Cadillac limo), and several Secret Service agents have denied any physical altercation took place, casting further doubt on Hutchinson’s reliability as a key witness for the panel (records show she kept working for Trump in his post-presidential office for nine weeks after he left the White House, even though she claimed to be “disgusted” by what happened on Jan. 6, which she said was based on “a lie” peddled by Trump that the election was stolen). After pushback from the Secret Service, the committee leaked to CNN that a D.C. police officer “has corroborated” Hutchinson’s testimony. But when DCPD Sgt. Mark Robinson testified in the final hearing, he failed to corroborate her tale of Trump grabbing the steering wheel or lunging at a member of his security detail. “The only description I received was that the president was upset and was adamant about going to the Capitol and there was a heated discussion about that,” Robinson said.

  CLAIM: Throughout the hearings, the committee cited Trump’s speech at the Ellipse as the spark that ignited the riot. “There can be no doubt that [Trump] commanded a mob, a mob he knew was heavily armed, violent, and angry, to march on the Capitol to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power,” Thompson said in the last hearing. Emphasized Luria: “Donald Trump summoned a violent mob and promised to lead that mob to the Capitol.”

  FACT: While Trump did urge supporters to “walk” with him down to the Capitol after the rally, he specifically asked them to do so “peacefully.” The committee left that key exculpatory phrase out of the hearings. It never aired the footage or transcript of him saying, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” If it had, it would have ruined the carefully crafted narrative that Trump incited violence. The omission was a critical deception.

  CLAIM: In the opening hearing, Cheney read out loud a tweet Trump sent during the riot where he said: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” She claimed Trump was justifying more violence.

  FACT: But Cheney cut off the next line where Trump called for “peace” and told supporters to leave the Capitol. “Go home with love & in peace,” the rest of the tweet said. Cheney blinded millions of viewers watching to the full picture.

  CLAIM: Cheney, who faces a Trump-endorsed challenger in her Aug. 16 primary race, kicked off the hearing with a bold charge: “President Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them illegally to march on the United States Capitol.” She vowed to show “evidence” to back it up. Thompson said they would prove that Trump was “at the center” of a “seditious conspiracy.”

  FACT: Not only did they fail to deliver any hard evidence that Trump ordered rioters to attack the Capitol as part of a conspiracy, they also began to contradict themselves as the hearings progressed. Thompson later said Trump merely “spurred” the mob and “energized” extremists, which is quite different from directing them. In an unintended revelation, one of their witnesses presented a timeline that suggested the instigators of the breaches of the Capitol had already headed to the Capitol before Trump spoke at the Ellipse. Documentarian Nick Quested testified the Proud Boys marched to the Capitol at 10:30 a.m., which meant Trump could not possibly have incited them. “I was confused to a certain extent why we were walking away from the President’s speech,” said Quested, who was embedded with the Proud Boys.

  Despite taking more than 1,000 depositions and subpoenaing more than 140,000 documents, the committee never found a smoking gun proving Trump was involved in a top-down organization of the riot. There was no coordination or conspiracy, which tracks with what the Biden Justice Department has found. Of the 874 criminal cases prosecutors have brought against Trump supporters at the Jan. 6 riot, none of them names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator.

  But don’t take my word for it.

  Former Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a former state attorney general, told ABC News‘s “This Week” that the committee has come up short on proof of conspiracy: “They don’t have a nexus yet [between Trump and the Capitol rioters],” she asserted.

  Senior CNN legal analyst Laura Coates, moreover, said the committee “fell short in trying to establish very clearly that Donald Trump gave a coherent order that then was followed” to storm the Capitol, adding it presented “innuendo” but no proof of “a conspiracy.”

  No one excuses the real crimes committed that day. But the average American deserves to see a fuller picture of what happened, instead of the distorted one lensed by the Jan. 6 Committee, which was charged with presenting all the facts, not just ones that could hurt Republicans or pre-impeach Trump in 2024.

  If the committee really had the goods on Trump, it wouldn’t feel the need to deceive the public to the extent it has with all the embellishments, exaggerations, questionable testimony, omissions, and flat-out lies. Why not just play it straight?

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 23:30

• House Dems Say Gun Company Ads Emphasize Masculinity, Make Veiled References To 'White Supremacist' Groups
  House Dems Say Gun Company Ads Emphasize Masculinity, Make Veiled References To ‘White Supremacist’ Groups

  A new report from the House Oversight Committee says that leading gunmakers use “aggressive marketing tactics” which emphasize masculinity, and make ‘veiled references’ to white supremacist groups “like the Boogaloo Bois” (which isn’t a ‘far-right’ group at all) in order to sell guns. In short, a massive gaslighting campaign.

  “The business practices of these gun manufacturers are deeply disturbing, exploitative, and reckless,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who chairs the committee.

  

  “The [gun] industry is both creating these customers and marketing to them. And therefore, it’s propagating more of this radicalization,” said Ryan Busse, a former firearms executive who has flipped to anti-gun, and testified before the House committee last week about “the dangerous ways that AR-15s are intertwined with political radicalization.”

  According to Busse, the gunmakers are targeting “this angry, young male, politically active, conservative, aggrieved, dreams of using the AR-15 to ‘make things right in the world,” adding “In other words– people who also fall right into domestic terror groups and radicalization and everything else.”

  Yikes.

  About those “Boogaloo Bois…”

  As Insider reports:

  Some gunmakers have also appeared to make references to far-right groups.

  One example of this political targeting is an AK-47-style pistol, produced by Palmetto State Armory, which is adorned with a pattern resembling the signature Hawaiian shirts worn by the Boogaloo Bois far-right extremist group.

  Except, the “Boogaloo Bois” support BLM and don’t like Donald Trump. Swing-and-a-miss, Dems.

  

  “We are out here supporting the local BLM scene” says one of the Boogaloo Boys before marching towards the Ohio Statehouse building to protest pic.twitter.com/i7KQ3HohqD

  — Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) January 17, 2021

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  “We are not a pro-Trump group” says one of the speakers for the Boogaloo Boys in front of the Ohio Statehouse pic.twitter.com/mHTMfSlLtk

  — Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) January 17, 2021

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  “We hope the Proud Boys do not come here, we do not want you here,” armed boogaloo boys protesting outside Ohio Statehouse. Ohio State Highway Patrol and National Guard surround the area pic.twitter.com/99MEtOac3l

  — Lisa Bennatan (@LisaBennatan) January 17, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsMeanwhile, the Democratic committee report knocked gunmakers for ‘preying on masculinity’ by claiming that their firearms will put people “at the top of the testosterone food chain.”

  An example of this is the “Man Card” campaign that AR-15 maker Bushmaster launched in 2010, which marketed its guns to a “Man’s Man” in a “world of rapidly depleting testosterone.”

  Although the campaign ceased after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 where the 20-year-old gunmanwho killed 26, including 20 children aged six and seven, was aremd with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle , its successes set an example for other gunmakers to follow, Busse wrote in The Atlantic. -Insider

  There are around 19.8 million AR-15 style rifles officially in circulation in the US.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 23:00

• The "Unthinkable" In US-China Crisis
  The “Unthinkable” In US-China Crisis

  Authored by Maria Ryan via Consortium News,

  One aspect of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan that has been largely overlooked is her meeting with Mark Lui, chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Pelosi’s trip coincided with U.S. efforts to convince TSMC – the world’s largest chip manufacturer, on which the U.S. is heavily dependent – to establish a manufacturing base in the US and to stop making advanced chips for Chinese companies.

  U.S. support for Taiwan has historically been based on Washington’s opposition to communist rule in Beijing, and Taiwan’s resistance to absorption by China. But in recent years, Taiwan’s autonomy has become a vital geopolitical interest for the U.S, because of the island’s dominance of the semiconductor manufacturing market.

  

  Semiconductors – also known as computer chips or just chips – are integral to all the networked devices that have become embedded into our lives. They also have advanced military applications. Transformational, super-fast 5G internet is enabling a world of connected devices of every kind (the “Internet of Things”) and a new generation of networked weapons. With this in mind, U.S .officials began to realise during the Trump administration that U.S. semiconductor design companies, such as Intel, were heavily dependent on Asian-based supply chains to manufacture their products.

  In particular, Taiwan’s position in the world of semiconductor manufacturing is a bit like Saudi Arabia’s status in OPEC. TSMC has a 53 percent market share of the global foundry market (factories contracted to make chips designed in other countries). Other Taiwan-based manufacturers claim a further 10 percent of the market.

  As a result, the Biden administration’s 100-Day Supply Chain Review Report says, “The United States is heavily dependent on a single company – TSMC – for producing its leading-edge chips.” The fact that only TSMC and Samsung (South Korea) can make the most advanced semiconductors (five nanometres in size) “puts at risk the ability to supply current and future [US] national security and critical infrastructure needs.”

  This means that China’s long-term goal of reunifying with Taiwan is now more threatening to U.S. interests. In the 1971 Shanghai Communique and the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. recognised that people in both mainland China and Taiwan believed that there was “One China” and that they both belonged to it. But for the U.S. it is unthinkable that TSMC could one day be in territory controlled by Beijing.

  ‘Tech War’

  For this reason, the U.S. has been trying to attract TSMC to the U.S. to increase domestic chip production capacity. In 2021, with the support of the Biden administration, the company bought a site in Arizona on which to build a U.S. foundry. This is scheduled to be completed in 2024.

  The U.S. Congress has just passed the Chips and Science Act, which provides $52 billion in subsidies to support semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. But companies will only receive Chips Act funding if they agree not to manufacture advanced semiconductors for Chinese companies.

  

  This means that TSMC and others may well have to choose between doing business in China and in the U.S. because the cost of manufacturing in the U.S. is deemed to be too high without government subsidies. This is all part of a broader “tech war” between the U.S. and China, in which the U.S. is aiming to constrain China’s technological development and prevent it from exercising a global tech leadership role.

  In 2020, the Trump administration imposed crushing sanctions on the Chinese tech giant Huawei that were designed to cut the company off from TSMC, on which it was reliant for the production of high-end semiconductors needed for its 5G infrastructure business. Huawei was the world’s leading supplier of 5G network equipment but the U.S. feared its Chinese origins posed a security risk (though this claim has been questioned). The sanctions are still in place because both Republicans and Democrats want to stop other countries from using Huawei’s 5G equipment.

  The British government had initially decided to use Huawei equipment in certain parts of the U.K.’s 5G network. The Trump administration’s sanctions forced London to reverse that decision. A key U.S. goal appears to be ending its dependency on supply chains in China or Taiwan for “emerging and foundational technologies,” which includes advanced semiconductors needed for 5G systems, but may include other advanced tech in future.

  Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan was about more than just Taiwan’s critical place in the “tech war.” But the dominance of its most important company has given the island a new and critical geopolitical importance that is likely to heighten existing tensions between the U.S. and China over the status of the island. It has also intensified U.S. efforts to “reshore” its semiconductor supply chain.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 22:30

• Here's Where Most Homeowners Are Considered Equity-Rich
  Here’s Where Most Homeowners Are Considered Equity-Rich

  Nearly half of U.S. mortgage payers own at least 50 percent equity, according to ATTOM’s Q2 2022 Home Equity & Underwater Report. This means that the balance of loans taken out against the home is less than half the estimated market value of the property.

  As Statista’s Anna Fleck notes, the share of equity-rich homeowners has been rising continuously for the past nine quarters. While it hit 34.4 percent in Q2 of 2021, it rose to 44.9 percent in Q1 of 2022, and finally to today’s figure of 48.1 percent for Q2 2022.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  According to ATTOM, of the 1,624 counties that had at least 2,500 homes with mortgages in Q2 of 2022, 49 of the top 50 equity-rich locations were in the Northeast, South and West.

  Counties with the highest share of equity-rich properties were Dukes County (Martha’s Vineyard), MA (83.2 percent equity-rich); Chittenden County (Burlington), VT (82.3 percent); Gillespie County, TX (west of Austin) (79.4 percent); Nantucket County, MA (78.6 percent) and Travis County (Austin), TX (78.6 percent).

  Meanwhile, counties with the smallest share of equity-rich homes in Q2 of 2022 included Geary County (Junction City), KS (7 percent equity rich); Vernon Parish, LA (northwest of Lafayette) (9.7 percent); Cumberland County (Fayetteville), NC (12 percent); Acadia Parish, LA (outside Lafayette) (13.2 percent) and Greenup County, KY (14 percent).

  At the same time, just 2.9 percent of mortgaged homes were considered “seriously underwater”, meaning that the balance of loans secured by the property exceeded its market value by at least 25 percent. This is down from 3.2 percent in Q1 of this year.

  Rick Sharga, executive vice president of market intelligence at Attom, said in a statement:

  “After 124 consecutive months of home price increases, it’s no surprise that the percentage of equity rich homes is the highest we’ve ever seen, and that the percentage of seriously underwater loans is the lowest. While home price appreciation appears to be slowing down due to higher interest rates on mortgage loans, it seems likely that homeowners will continue to build on the record amount of equity they have for the rest of 2022.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 22:00

• 'Inflation Reduction Act' Would Make IRS Among The Largest Govt Agencies
  ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ Would Make IRS Among The Largest Govt Agencies

  Authored by Jazz Shaw via HotAir (emphasis ours),

  Tucked away in the hilariously-named “Inflation Reduction Act” that Joe Manchin has been working on with Chuck Schumer is one significant bit of spending that has been mostly flying under the radar. The measure would fund a massive expansion of the Internal Revenue Service to the tune of eighty billion dollars. And we’re not using the word “massive” in a hyperbolic fashion here. This money would go toward hiring an additional 87,000 employees for the detested agency, more than doubling the size of its workforce.

  

  As the Free Beacon points out this week, that would make the IRS larger (in terms of manpower) than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI and the Border Patrol combined. And what do they plan to do with that many people? Do you really need us to tell you?

  If Democrats have their way, one of the most detested federal agencies—the Internal Revenue Service—will employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

  Under the Inflation Reduction Act negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), the agency would receive $80 billion in funding to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The increase would more than double the size of the IRS workforce, which currently has 78,661 full-time staffers, according to federal data.

  The additional IRS funding is integral to the Democrats’ reconciliation package. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found the hiring of new IRS agents would result in more than $200 billion in additional revenue for the federal government over the next decade. More than half of that funding is specifically earmarked for “enforcement,” meaning tax audits and other responsibilities such as “digital asset monitoring.”

  So this expansion would turn the IRS into an even larger beast than it already is. And we know that it’s also one of the most heavily armed agencies in the federal government. So what do they need all of those people for, not to mention all of the guns and ammo?

  Democrats always talk about the need to go after “the top one percent” and make them “pay their fair share.” It’s true that we have quite a few wealthy people in this country, but we don’t have so many that you need more than 150,000 agents to keep an eye on them. No, according to one recent study cited in the linked report, this move is being sought to generate more revenue for the federal government. And the vast majority of that new revenue will come from families earning less than $200K per year. In other words, the middle to upper-middle class. Trust us, the IRS already goes over Elon Musk’s taxes with one hundred fine-toothed combs.

  But that’s how they will be getting more revenue. By examining working class people’s tax returns under a microscope, looking for even the slightest error and then slapping them with fines and late-payment charges. And if you don’t pay up quickly enough, the IRS now has more law enforcement officers than the FBI and over five million rounds of ammunition on hand. They’ll get their money.

  So what does all of this have to do with “inflation reduction?” Don’t ask me. But the names of new laws in the country stopped meaning anything recognizable long ago, and most of them seem to actually mean the opposite of what the law is intended to do. The devil is always in the details.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 21:30

• Signs Of Ukraine Export Stability As 4 More Grain Ships Leave Ports
  Signs Of Ukraine Export Stability As 4 More Grain Ships Leave Ports

  This weekend saw four more ships carrying grain and sunflower oil depart Ukraine ports through the UN-brokered safe maritime corridor in the Black Sea, overseen by a joint coordination center in Istanbul staffed by Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish and UN officials.

  This as the Razoni cargo ship which was the first to depart Odesa carrying 27,000 tonnes of corn last week, is making its way to the Lebanese port of Tripoli, though not on time. The latest series of ships departed the ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk on Sunday, and their sailing has given rise to greater hopes of export stability, BBC reports, as millions in Ukraine-grain dependent countries are facing famine conditions. 

  

  Two of the vessels are reportedly bound for Italy, while the other pair are going to China, after they are expected to dock in Turkey for international inspections under the terms of the UN safety corridor deal. In total they’ve been estimated to be laden with 160,000 tons of corn and other foodstuffs.

  The BBC writes, “Ukrainian authorities say there are good signs that the grain exports are safe, and have urged companies to return to the country’s ports.” And further: “The hope is that the exports will help ease the global food crisis while bringing in much needed foreign currency.”

  And according to further details in NBC, referring to the Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul, “The JCC said late on Saturday it had authorized the departure of a total of five new vessels through the Black Sea corridor: four vessels outbound from Chornomorsk and Odesa carrying 161,084 metric tons of produce, and one inbound.”

  Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Odessa port to oversee the departure of the first grain ship under the UN deal, though he suggested Russia could be trying to sabotage the agreed upon export mechanisms. 

  Four more ships loaded with grain set off from Ukrainian ports, as Moscow and Kyiv blamed each other for a new strike at a Russian-occupied nuclear plant https://t.co/tspKONHI57

  — AFP News Agency (@AFP) August 7, 2022

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  “It is important for us that Ukraine remains the guarantor of global food security,” he had said at the time, given a recent Russian missile strike on Odessa.

  The question of the safety of shipping crews also remains a concern, given the ships must navigate waters which have for months seen explosive mines placed off Ukraine’s coast. The Razoni’s safe passage through the Black Sea days ago was a big milestone showing the UN safety mechanisms can work.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 21:00

• 'Peak Berkeley': Protesters Halt Low-Income Housing Project
  ‘Peak Berkeley’: Protesters Halt Low-Income Housing Project

  Authored by Ed Morrissey via HotAir (emphasis ours),

  … come on, you can guess, right? Why would protesters in Berkeley halt construction for low-income and student housing?

  

  Reason’s Emma Camp reports that the demonstrators declaring that “Housing is a human right!” also demanded that new construction cease displacing the homeless that have occupied the construction area.

  No, really, and apparently they made that point violently:

  On Wednesday, protesters flooded People’s Park in Berkeley, California, chanting, “Housing is a human right, fight, fight, fight!” The reason the crowd was protesting? The University of California, Berkeley, was set to begin construction on a student housing project, which would not only house 1,100 Berkeley students at below-market rates, but also provide subsidized apartments for 125 homeless people. And the protesters want to stop this project.

  According to the Associated Press, protesters threw rocks, bottles, and glass at construction workers. They also removed several sections of the chain-link fence surrounding the park. On Wednesday, the university announced that it would pause construction of the park, citing protester violence.

  “All construction personnel were withdrawn out of concern for their safety,” Dan Mogulof, UC’s assistant vice chancellor, said in a statement to NBC News. “The campus will, in the days ahead, assess the situation in order to determine how best to proceed with construction of this urgently needed student housing project.”

  It wasn’t just slogan chanting and drum circles, either. The university shut down the construction after the crowd began assaulting the workers, the Associated Press reported — although readers have to get near the end of the report to find that out:

  After the fences were put up again early Wednesday morning, about 100 police officers, some in riot gear, were at the park as the crew began cutting down trees to the derision of onlookers who were mostly kept outside barricades.

  The police looked stoically at the onlookers amid period chants of “Power to the people!” before the majority of the protesters marched away in unison after the university stopped construction. UC Berkeley police said in a statement that protesters threw rocks, bottles, and glass at crews working at the park, which is considered aggravated assault. The department didn’t say if anyone was arrested.

  It’s not as if UC Berkeley hasn’t tried to put that “human right” ethos into action. Camp reports that the school has tried for five years to add enough student housing to alleviate a shortage so profound that some of their students have to sleep in their cars.

  After reviewing a dozen sites, UC Berkeley chose what’s been known for decades as “People’s Park,” the scene of a riot that left one dead and dozens injured from the police response. The park has become a haven for the homeless, which the school newspaper defended as a “cultural and historical landmark” the day after this protest. Rather than build 125 units for the homeless to live in safety and better comfort — let alone the 1100 fellow students that can’t afford housing in and around the very expensive area of Berkeley — the paper wants to continue to leave the grounds undisturbed as part of the argument for, um … more housing.

  And the best part of this? UC Berkeley offered to find shelter for the 50 or so homeless people in the construction zone — and nearly all of them accepted it. This protest was literally over three people who refused to leave this public space:

  Two or three homeless people who were still at the park Wednesday were offered shelter, transportation, and storage for their belongings. The university didn’t say whether they accepted the offer. Another 46 homeless people who used to live at the park previously accepted offers for shelter at a motel that is being paid for by the city of Berkeley, the university said.

  So UC Berkeley wants to provide housing to students and the homeless. The city of Berkeley is providing shelter for the homeless. And yet demonstrators violently blocked efforts to create permanent solutions to this housing crisis by declaring it a human right so precious that any construction workers helping to solve it should be terrorized. There’s only one way to explain that, as Berkeley Law professor Orin Kerr reminded me last night:

  Berkeley.

  — Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) August 6, 2022

  Well put. 

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 20:30

• Which States Have The Death Penalty?
  Which States Have The Death Penalty?

  According to the Death Penalty Information Center, capital punishment is on the books in 27 states but several don’t actually carry it out.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, in seven states, governors or courts have officially halted executions. While governor-imposed moratoriums are in place in Oregon, California and Pennsylvania, judges have halted executions in Nevada, Montana, Tennessee and South Carolina, mostly in response to controversy around new drugs used in executions by injection. In the case of South Carolina, the state even reauthorized the use of the electric chair and the firing squad in response to growing scrutiny by pharmaceutical companies and the public around how execution drugs are sourced and used. The change has now being challenged in court while executions are on hold.

  Since 2011, the EU has severely restricted exports of the key component of U.S. drug cocktails for executions. In 2016, Pfizer was the last FDA-approved pharmaceutical company to stop selling its drugs for use in the death penalty. As a result, states started to use alternative drugs and sources. Botched executions – for example in Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona using the drug midazolam – received scrutiny and led to court cases.

  Execution halts were recently lifted in Kentucky, which passed a new law excluding the severely mentally ill from the death penalty, and Indiana, where a court case concluded that the state has to release data on its use of lethal drugs. While this technically allows Indiana executions to resume, it makes sourcing new drugs for executions almost impossible for the state. Many other states face the same problem in carrying out the death penalty by injection.

  Out of the remaining 20 states, another eight have not carried out an execution in at least ten years, either because of a lack of death row inmates, a lack of suitable drugs are a combination of the two. Alabama, Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas have all executed prisoners in 2022, while the last execution in Mississippi took place in 2021.

  Colorado in 2020 was the latest state that abolished capital punishment, following New Hampshire, which axed its law in 2019.

  States carry out most executions in the United States, even though their numbers have fallen recently from a high of 98 in 1999 to just 11 in 2021. Federal executions remain exceptionally rare despite several that were carried out in the twilight of the Trump presidency.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 20:00

• Pro-Tax-Hike Dem Continues To Fail To Pay His Own Taxes
  Pro-Tax-Hike Dem Continues To Fail To Pay His Own Taxes

  Authored by Jazz Shaw via HotAir (emphasis ours),

  

  The very wealthy Leona Helmsley was once famously quoted as allegedly saying, ‘We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.’ Now we have a repeat offender in Congress who may have studied Helmsley’s philosophy at some point. The Free Beacon has discovered that Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman Matthew Cartwright is once again in trouble for being delinquent on his property taxes. Cartwright and his wife share a condo in Washington and tax records indicate that they owed penalties and interest from 2021 due to being late in paying their taxes. As a Democrat who has repeatedly voted in favor of tax increases, that probably sends a rather poor message to the working-class voters of his district who have to avoid the wrath of a constantly growing army of IRS agents. With the midterms only a few months away and the country in the middle of a recession and skyrocketing prices for just about everything, people may have taxes on their minds when they go to the polls.

  Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D., Pa.) was hit with tax penalties for late condo payments in 2021, just three years after facing media scrutiny for repeated tax delinquency.

  Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest, stemming from the late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo he shares with his wife, according to D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

  The news could be a problem for the congressman, who is locked in a competitive race against Republican challenger Jim Bognet.

  Granted, we’re not talking about a huge sum of money here. Less than 500 dollars in penalties suggests that the Cartwright family probably paid most of their real estate taxes. But when you’re talking about the IRS, “most” isn’t good enough.

  Also, this isn’t the first time that Cartwright has been in trouble with the Tax Man over his Washington condo. Back in 2018, he was in somewhat deeper hot water with the city. At that point he had run up a tab of nearly $4,000 in penalties and fees over a five-year period. His opponent in that year’s election ran campaign ads highlighting the situation and nearly unseated him.

  Cartwright told reporters at that time that his tax delinquency was simply an “oversight.” He said that being in Congress is “a very busy job that I have and I’m working really hard at it.” That may be true, but do any of you think that the IRS would accept that excuse from you if you fell behind on your taxes? Color me dubious.

  Again, this isn’t a huge sum of money we’re talking about and it’s not hard to see how someone might miss a payment here or there. (Doesn’t the congressman make enough money to pay someone to handle his taxes and keep up with these details, though?) But that’s not really the point. If you are one of the people charged with creating and modifying the tax laws that everyone else in the country has to follow, you are obviously going to be under scrutiny to ensure that you follow those laws yourself. A failure to do so produces some of the worst political optics imaginable.

  And those optics may be on the congressman’s mind at the moment. He is currently in a tight race to keep his seat in November and it’s one that analysts are rating as a “tossup.” The GOP would dearly love to claw that seat back as they try to retake the majority in the house. And Cartwright’s tax headaches are the last thing his party needs to see right about now.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 19:30

• Visualizing The Top 25 US Newspapers By Daily Circulation
  Visualizing The Top 25 US Newspapers By Daily Circulation

  A few years ago, you would have unfolded your newspaper and read opinion and analysis like this.

  

  Those days are gone.

  As Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop details below, most people today – more than 8 in 10 Americans – get their news via digital devices, doing their reading on apps, listening to podcasts, or scrolling through social media feeds.

  It’s no surprise then that over the last year, only one U.S. newspaper of the top 25 most popular in the country saw positive growth in their daily print circulations.

  Based on data from Press Gazette, this visual stacks up the amount of daily newspapers different U.S. publications dole out and how that’s changed year-over-year.

  Extra, Extra – Read All About It

  The most widely circulated physical newspaper is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by a long shot – sending out almost 700,000 copies a day. But it is important to note that this number is an 11% decrease since 2021.

  

  These papers, although experiencing negative growth when it comes to print, are still extremely popular and widely-read publications digitally—not only in the U.S., but worldwide. For example, the New York Times reported having reached 9 million subscribers globally earlier this year.

  The one paper with increased print circulation was The Villages Daily Sun, which operates out of a retirement community in Florida. Elderly people tend to be the most avid readers of print papers. Another Florida newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, was the worst performer at -26%.

  In total, 2,500 U.S. newspapers have shut down since 2005. One-third of American newspapers are expected to be shuttered by 2025. This particularly impacts small communities and leaves many across America in ‘news deserts.’

  The decline is relentless. Print papers are losing one out of eight subscribers every year. Their daily circulation, over 63 million at its peak in the 1980s, is now about one-third that size. Over 25% of all American newspapers have died in the past 15 years.

  As Charles Lipson observes at RealClearPolitics.com, some observers, especially conservative ones, have cast a skeptical eye on this contemporary media landscape and blamed the decline of print publications on “woke” newsrooms. They are mistaking the cart for the horse. It’s true that most newsrooms are woke, woke, woke. So are elite law firms, consulting firms, social media giants, entertainment companies, advertising firms, university faculty, and so on. Their employees, having completed their ideological training at places like Harvard, Brown, and Oberlin, tell us their pronouns in every email and wonder if Bernie Sanders might be too moderate. They dominate today’s journalism, and their dominance is reflected in their papers’ content.

  In a country that is evenly split between left and right, that tilt leaves a lot of readers unhappy, and some have undoubtedly dropped their subscriptions. Some papers also died during the pandemic, though most were already facing bleak futures. But the coronavirus and ideological bias are not the main reasons why print papers are on the road to oblivion. They are on that road because technological innovation devastated their old business model.

  This technological shift actually encourages newsroom bias. Why? Because, as online sites proliferate, readers can easily gravitate to those that reflect their views. This self-selection reinforces the sites’ incentives to tailor their content to keep those users and attract more like-minded ones.

  In this segmented market, with lots of different niches, news organizations pick their target audience. For MSNBC, that audience is progressive. The channel wants to attract more of them, not challenge their views or garner a few conservatives. By contrast, PJ Media is trying to reach more conservatives, not futilely chasing progressives. That’s Marketing 101. The problem for journalism is that this “niche” logic has distorted general-interest papers, like the Los Angeles Times. It gives free rein to ideological bias among reporters and editors, muddling their editorial perspective with “hard news” coverage.

  The logic behind this bias is powerful. All of us are attracted to sites that confirm our views and buttress them with friendly content. Social scientists call it “confirmation bias.” Now that we have so many alternative news sources, that bias drives our choices, from CNN to Fox News. And it drives those outlets to produce content their viewers find ideologically appealing, not challenging. There are some exceptions, of course, like RealClearPolitics, which aggregates and produces opinion pieces from left, right, and center and hires reporters to write the news of day straight. But this even-handedness is rare. Most outlets have slipped into comfortable ideological niches.

  The result is landscape littered with “news silos,” each appealing to its chosen market segment. The social and political effects are far-reaching. As news consumers, we have more options than ever (good), but we are increasingly insulated from opposing views (bad). The days of general-interest local papers like the Memphis Commercial-Appeal are gone. Those of big-city papers like the Chicago Tribune are fading fast. We are hunkering down in our silos, where never is heard a discouraging word, at least not about “our side.” This insularity is bound to deepen our country’s ideological divide. That’s very bad news indeed.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 19:00

• Former VP Dick Cheney Attacks Trump In Ad For Daughter’s Reelection Campaign
  Former VP Dick Cheney Attacks Trump In Ad For Daughter’s Reelection Campaign

  Authored by Matthrew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Former Vice President Dick Cheney has cut an ad for his daughter’s congressional campaign in Wyoming in which he lashed out at fellow Republicans and called former President Donald Trump a “coward” and a “threat” to the nation.

  

  The 60-second campaign ad for the embattled reelection campaign of U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was posted on YouTube Aug 4. As of press time, it had just over 259,000 views.

  “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney, 81, says while wearing a white cowboy hat in a close-up camera shot. Cheney served as vice president alongside Republican President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009.

  “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” Dick Cheney said.

  “He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election and he lost big. I know it, he knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know it.”

  Cheney said he was “so proud of Liz for standing up for the truth, doing what’s right, honoring her oath to the Constitution when so many in our party are too scared to do so.”

  “There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office and she will succeed,” he said. His daughter appears at the end of the ad to say she approves of the message.

  Liz Cheney has become a lightning rod for criticism in Republican Party circles for her attacks on Trump while serving as vice-chair of the U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 security breach at the U.S. Capitol. The breach delayed the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election by several hours and has been characterized by Trump critics as an insurrection and a coup attempt, a charge Trump and his supporters adamantly deny. Trump supporters have compared the committee’s actions to a witch hunt and a Soviet-era show trial.

  Although she traditionally has had a conservative voting record in Congress, Liz Cheney has antagonized Republicans in her home state, where Trump remains popular. She voted to impeach Trump after the security breach and is regularly in the national media spotlight denouncing the former president. The Wyoming Republican Party censured her after the impeachment vote and last fall declared she was no longer a member of the party.

  Read more here…

  Meanwhile, as the Babylon Bee puts it:

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 18:30

• Entertainment Companies Start Dumping Woke Content As Viewership Tumbles
  Entertainment Companies Start Dumping Woke Content As Viewership Tumbles

  They’ll never admit to it openly, but getting woke makes companies broke.  Hollywood has been overtly progressive for decades, but this is nothing compared to the social justice invasion since 2016.  After around five years of an unprecedented leftist onslaught on the entertainment industry we are finally starting to see the rampage lose oxygen.  There’s a weakness within woke productions that the alternative media has been pointing out for a long time – They don’t make a profit because they are designed to appease a minority of leftist zennials that don’t have any money.  This is the wrong crowd to rely on for cash flow.     

  It is fair to say that the entertainment industry was partially conned.  First, there are those tantalizing ESG loans that can be easily had as long a company loudly declares their fealty to the social justice agenda.  Then, of course, there is the fact that many corporate CEOs and marketing people track Twitter trends with the ignorant assumption that Twitter is actually a reflection of the real world.  The woke mob on Twitter is amplified by the company itself, while most contrary voices are stifled and buried.  Anyone using the Twitter echo chamber as a marketing gauge would be led to believe that leftist ideology is the prevailing ideology of the nation.  It’s not even close.

  Some companies are finally realizing this fact and are taking action to reduce their exposure to woke content, or otherwise perish from loss of viewership.  Here’s the thing – Leftists could take over every platform for media distribution (they almost have), but they still can’t force the public to consume woke content.  Eventually, the loss of viewers and profits is going to hurt their bottom line.  

  Warner Media (now owned by Discovery) seems to be on the forefront of the purge of leftist content.  Under chief executive David Zaslav, Discovery is aggressively dissecting Warner to understand why a company with so many iconic brands and franchises is continually failing at the box office and on streaming.  Zaslav is now dumping far left content like the poison it is.  

  Most notably, Zaslav was behind the torching of news service CNN+ after less than a month of operation when it utterly failed to pull in subscribers.  Now, he has shelved the $100 million ‘Batgirl’ movie, a woke travesty with woke directors which test audiences hated.  He is also reportedly cutting the impending Supergirl movie, which rumors indicate was designed to replace the beloved Superman franchise with a female version played by a race swapped actress of Colombian descent (the original Supergirl is supposed to be white and blonde).      

  Another event that shocked leftists was Netflix taking an ax to “First Kill,” a lesbian vampire series that no one asked for and apparently no one watched. 

  This was after Netflix canceled a host of woke programming in the past couple of months, including a show called “Anti-Racist Baby” written by well known Critical Race Theory propagandist Ibram X. Kendi, and another animated show called “Q-Force” (Queer Force).

  

  HBO Max recently canceled their “Gordita Chronicles” after only one season; the show based on a Dominican immigrant family heavily pushed leftist narratives of victim group status and depicted America as a racist and oppressive nation.  No mention of the fact that millions of non-white people try to sneak into the US every year even though it is supposedly “bigoted.”

  The examples of purged woke programming go on and on.  This is a smart move by the entertainment media as audiences make it clear with their dollars and their viewership that they don’t want to watch leftist garbage.  However, is it too little too late?  

  Some companies like Disney have chosen to foolishly double down on woke content (after numerous box office failures) and others like Warner have lost a lot of good will from their customers.  Corporations and marketing people have long sought to entice customers by researching what audiences want.  But, the new model is to simply TELL customers what to buy, and shame audiences into compliance with a product if they don’t like it. Since 2016 the strategy of media has been to ATTACK customers in response to criticism rather than listening and learning.  This hasn’t gone over well.  Today these businesses are paying the price for their trespasses against the free market.  

  It is unlikely that they will be able to win back audiences anytime soon, if ever.  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 18:00

• Dem Congressman's Aide Caught Impersonating FBI Agent, Violating Gun Law: Court Documents
  Dem Congressman’s Aide Caught Impersonating FBI Agent, Violating Gun Law: Court Documents

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  An aide to a congressman impersonated an FBI agent and openly carried a gun, violating the law in Washington, according to court documents.

  Sterling Carter, who worked for Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) at the time, was spotted on Nov. 14, 2020, wearing a black shirt with “Federal Agent” emblazoned across the front and back, and equipped with a full police duty belt that contained handcuffs, a pistol, two magazines, and a radio with an earpiece, according to an affidavit filed by U.S. authorities in District of Columbia court.

  When officers approached Carter to figure out his identity, he pointed to a badge on his belt and said that he was with the FBI. When asked for his credentials, Carter said he did not have them on him, and hopped in his vehicle and sped away despite being ordered to stop.

  The officers were unable to chase the man down.

  Officers and agents with the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI, and the Metropolitan Police Department launched a joint effort to figure out the identity of the man, and eventually confirmed him as Carter through contact with the seller of the t-shirt and the company from which he obtained a custom license plate.

  The owner of the property at which Carter resided and neighbors told agents that Carter was seen dressing as a member of law enforcement. However, officers found out that Carter was a staffer for a member of Congress. They also learned he did not have a concealed weapons permit or any other firearm registration certificates.

  A search of the residence turned up a Glock 19 semi-automatic firearm, magazines, a holster, cleaning gear, a receipt for siren installation, and an invoice for the shirt.

  Carter was given the option to resign or be fired, and he chose to resign, according to the affidavit. According to other documents, he started with the office in August 2019 and stepped down in January 2021.

  Carter was arrested on Jan. 29, 2021, and charged with false impersonation of a police officer and carrying a pistol without a license.

  In exchange for pleading guilty to the latter charge, the former was dropped.

  Carter was held in jail for 81 days during the case.

  A Washington judge in July 2021 sentenced him to probation and a suspended jail sentence.

  The case was first reported by the Daily Beast.

  Schneider’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

  2nd Case

  A federal case was opened in February after the FBI found Carter had forged Schneider’s signature and given himself temporary raises that yielded him approximately $80,000.

  According to an FBI agent’s affidavit, Carter, as director of operations for the congressman, would fill out payroll forms when an employee was given a raise or bonus.

  Only Schneider and his chief of staff had the authority to authorize a bonus or a raise.

  Carter would fill out one form that reflected a temporary salary increase proportionate to the bonus that was being given, and a second form that returned the employee’s salary to the original level so the bonus wouldn’t turn into a permanent pay raise.

  But Carter gave himself an unauthorized bonus and an unauthorized pay increase.

  He concealed what he had done by presenting to the chief of staff a spreadsheet containing inaccurate data.

  Carter pleaded guilty to the charge, theft of public funds, and faced up to 10 years in prison.

  Jail Time

  Prosecutors recommended a sentence of 12 to 18 months, saying the offense “constituted a serious breach of the public trust” and such a sentence “can be a warning knell for all those public officials who consider using their position in the government to steal taxpayer dollars from the United States Congress.”

  Lawyers for Carter noted his only prior conviction was for carrying a pistol without a license and argued the lack of criminal history outside of that “weighs in favor of a more modest sentence than recommended by the advisory guideline range.”

  “It is a property offense. The offense does not involve any violent acts. There is no evidence that any firearms or weapons were employed to accomplish the offense. No physical injuries were sustained by anyone. While these undeniable factors do not absolve Mr. Carter from criminal liability the nature of the offense again favors a modest sentence,” they added.

  The defendant moved for a sentence of home confinement.

  U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced Carter in July to nine months in prison followed by 36 months of supervised release. Carter was also ordered to pay $80,491 in restitution.

  “We believe the sentence was harsher than necessary,” Robert Jenkins Jr., an attorney representing Carter, told The Epoch Times in an email, adding that Carter’s “conduct warranted punishment his sentence was more severe than many similar defendants in white collar fraud cases.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 17:30

• North Korea Willing To Send Russia 100,000 Troops For Ukraine War: Report
  North Korea Willing To Send Russia 100,000 Troops For Ukraine War: Report

  During six months of war in Ukraine there have been some instances of Russian satellite states providing “volunteer” forces – with Chechens being a foremost reported group of foreign fighters said to be in Ukraine. But Russian state media recently presented the biggest offer of foreign troops yet, reportedly from an unlikely “pariah” nation also long at odds with the United States.

  North Korea has said it is willing to send 100,000 “volunteer” troops to help Vladimir Putin execute the ongoing war in Ukraine, Business Insider has reported, citing Channel One Russia. Russian military pundit Igor Korotchenko made the claim to the state broadcaster, saying further that the DPRK military could provide a “wealth of experience with counter-battery warfare.”

  

  “If North Korea expresses a desire to meet its international duty to fight against Ukrainian fascism, we should let them,” Korotchenko was also quoted in New York Post as saying.

  This comes amid unverified Western media claims that Russia has suffered huge and unexpected numbers of casualties, to the point of being “desperate” – and reportedly being forced to provide abbreviated and ineffective training to new recruits.

  For example, this is how The Daily Mail presented the supposed Moscow-Pyongyang deal making for additional troops: 

  A desperate Vladimir Putin is considering turning to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un for help in his invasion of Ukraine, and is willing to offer energy and grain in return for 100,000 soldiers, according to reports in Russia.

  North Korea has made it clear through ‘diplomatic channels’ that as well as providing builders to repair war damage, it is ready to supply a vast fighting force in an attempt to tip the balance in Moscow’s favor, reported Regnum news agency.

  They would be deployed to the forces of the separatist pro-Putin Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] and Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR], both of which Kim has recently recognised as independent countries.

  …In return, grain and energy would be supplied to Kim’s stricken economy.

  The far-fetched sounding reports don’t appear to be sourced at all to North Korean state media itself, however, and the logistical challenge of North Korea actually transporting that many troops to Donbas would make it very unlikely. The “offer” may have been based on mere speculation by the prominent Russian pundit.

  Some Russian media claim North Korea has offered Moscow to dispatch up to 100,000 of its troops to fight in Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. Almost certainly this one is fake. Still, it is not impossible. /1 https://t.co/v7QvqHlBxo

  — Artyom Lukin (@ArtyomLukin) August 6, 2022

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

  The additional challenge to such an immense logistical task – which would also without doubt result in greater ratcheting of sanctions on both countries by the West – would include integrating that many foreign troops within Russian strategy and alongside its units in the middle of an active war, with no prior planning and coordination. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 17:00

• The Big Green Lie Almost Everyone Claims To Believe
  The Big Green Lie Almost Everyone Claims To Believe

  Authored by Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon via The Epoch Times,

  Almost every member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, pays homage to the Big Green Lie. So do all the past and remaining Conservative candidates vying to be prime minister of the UK and every candidate currently vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. So does virtually all of the mainstream press. The Big Green Lie—that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—is so pervasive that even those considered skeptics—including right-wing NGOs and pundits—generally adhere to the orthodoxy, differing not in their stated belief that CO2 is a pollutant but only in how calamitous a pollutant it is.

  

  Because everyone now participates in the CO2-emissions-are-bad lie, the debate over climate policy hasn’t been over whether a CO2 problem exists but over how urgently CO2 needs to be addressed, and how it should be addressed. Do we have eight years left before Armageddon becomes inevitable or decades? Do we get off fossil fuels by building nuclear plants or wind turbines? Should we change our lifestyles to need less of everything? Or should we mitigate this evil—the view of those deemed climate minimalists—by shielding our continents from a rising of the oceans by enclosing them behind sea walls?

  With almost everyone across the political spectrum publicly agreeing that curbing CO2 is a good thing, the debate has been between those who want to do good quickly by reaching Net Zero in 2040 and sticks in the mud who want to slow down the doing of a good thing. With discourse careening down rabbit holes, almost everyone gets lost pursuing solutions to Alice-in-Wonderland delusions—and wasting trillions of dollars in the process.

  Until the 2000s, when climate change was still called global warming and the mainstream media still noticed that none of the myriad predictions of a climate catastrophe were being borne out—the polar caps weren’t melting, Manhattan wasn’t about to be submerged, malaria wasn’t infecting the northern hemisphere—many exposed man-made climate change as a hoax. The leaked Climategate emails revealed how scientists had conspired to “hide the decline” in temperatures that didn’t conform to their models. The claim that 97 percent of scientists supported the global warming theory was exposed as a fraud, as was the claim that the 4,000 scientists associated with the IPCC endorsed its report—those 4,000 hadn’t endorsed it, and most hadn’t even read it but had merely reviewed parts of the report and often disagreed with what they read.

  The claim that the “science was settled” on climate change never withstood scrutiny. Scientists around the world signed a series of petitions to dispute that claim. The 2008 Oregon Petition, spearheaded by a former president of the National Academy of Science and championed by Freeman Dyson, Albert Einstein’s successor at Princeton and one of the world’s most preeminent scientists, was signed by more than 31,000 scientists and experts who agreed that “the proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. … Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

  

  COP26 President Alok Sharma (C) speaks during the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 13, 2021. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

  What is settled is the abject failure of the three-decade-long attempt by the bureaucracies of the 195 countries of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to convince anyone other than themselves, a credulous media, and a relatively few gullible people that climate change represents an existential threat. Poll after poll over the decades show the public gives climate change short shrift when asked to rank its importance.

  A Gallup Poll released this week, which asked Americans, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” found that climate change didn’t meet its criteria of the many issues worth listing. As Gallup noted, “Many parts of the nation have suffered record heat in recent weeks, and other regions have received record flooding. But a low 3% of Americans mention the weather, the environment or climate change as the nation’s top problem.” So, too, last month, where “just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country …. Even among voters under 30, the group thought to be most energized by the issue, that figure was 3 percent.”

  Although most elites continue to pay lip service to the urgency of curbing carbon dioxide, their actions belie their words, whether judged by their penchant for private jet travel or their disingenuous commitment to climate-related policies. According to an International Energy Agency (IEA) announcement last week, coal is once again king: Global coal demand this year will “match the annual record set in 2013, and coal demand is likely to increase further next year to a new all-time high.” The IEA’s assessment comports with a worldwide embrace of coal that includes the European Union, until recently the world’s most zealous climate scold. The EU is now walking back its Net Zero commitments.

  In some countries, governments are not so much walking back climate policies as unabashedly kicking them out. Calling wind turbines “fans” that harm the environment and cause “visual pollution” without providing much energy, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the government will end the subsidies and stop issuing permits for new wind projects. Israel is also set to pull the plug on the country’s wind industry, its environmental protection minister arguing that wind provides a “negligible contribution” to the country’s power system “compared to the potential for harm to nature, which is high.”

  Recognizing renewables as economic and environmental boondoggles, as Mexico and Israel have done, is a step toward puncturing the lie that a fuel that emits carbon dioxide can be sensibly replaced. The other shoe to drop is the lie that carbon dioxide-emitting fuels should be replaced.

  The fantastical claim that CO2 is a pollutant was cut out of whole cloth. The 2008 statement by the 31,000 experts—that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate” is as true today as it was then, and as it always has been. No scientist anywhere at any time has shown that manmade CO2 emissions—aka nature’s fertilizer—do any harm to anything.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 16:30

• Goldman Warns Oil Is 'Down But Not Out': The Good, Bad, & Ugly In The Energy Complex
  Goldman Warns Oil Is ‘Down But Not Out’: The Good, Bad, & Ugly In The Energy Complex

  Oil prices have tumbled 25% since early June, driven by low trading liquidity and a mounting wall of worries: recession, China’s zero-COVID policy and real estate sector collapse, the US SPR release, and Russian production recovering well above expectations.

  

  However, Goldman’s Damien Courvalin believes that the case for higher oil prices remains strong, even assuming all these negative shocks play out, with the market remaining in a larger deficit than we expected in recent months.

  The bullish thesis does though require addressing the huge divergence between Brent prices, which averaged $110/bbl in June-July, and the $160/bbl Brent-equivalent global retail fuel price.

  Conceptually, two prices matter for modeling the oil market:

  (1) the retail price of fuels paid by consumers as it drives demand elasticity and

  (2) the crude price received by producers as it drives supply elasticity.

  Up until 2021, retail prices followed a stable relationship to Brent prices but this is no longer the case due to significant distortions to each of the steps required to transform crude oil coming out of the ground into fuels consumed by producers.

  

  Goldman sees three main takeaways from this:

  • The good: retail prices – while not tradable – came in close to our forecasts despite all the current macro uncertainties.

  • The bad: the disconnect between retail and Brent financial prices was much wider than expected, keeping Brent futures well below our forecast.

  • The ugly: our retail price forecast – which proved broadly accurate – did not result in enough demand destruction to end the current, unsustainable deficit.

  The much wider than expected gap between Brent physical prices (i.e. Dated Brent, not ICE Brent futures) and global retail fuel prices in Brent-equivalent terms (c.$45/bbl on average in June-July vs. our c.$25/bbl assumption) can be linked to the Russian energy and EU gas crises.

  Goldman states that growing lack of financial participation in the commodity futures market helps explain this record wide premium as well as the recent new collapse in Brent prices as well as the current extreme level of crude backwardation.

  Market liquidity plumbing new depths…

  

  Courvalin and his team continue to expect that the oil market will remain in unsustainable deficits at current prices.

  Balancing the oil market therefore still requires oil demand destruction on top of the ongoing economic slowdown, where we are more cautious than consensus.

  This requires a sharp rebound in retail fuel prices – the binding constraint to balancing the oil market – back to $150/bbl Brent equivalent prices, equivalent to US retail gasoline and diesel prices reaching $4.35 and $5.45/gal by 4Q22.

  As Goldman concludes, the unprecedented discount of Brent prices, even wider than we expected, can be explained by the worsening Russian energy crisis, as it boosts the costs of transforming crude out of the ground (Brent) into retail pump prices around the world through surging EU gas prices, freight rates, USD and global refining utilization.

  While they assume that the exceptional wedge between retail fuel and Brent futures prices will remain wider than previously expected, Goldman still expects that Brent prices will need to rally well above market forwards, with their 3Q-4Q22 forecasts now $110-125/bbl vs. $140-130/bbl previously (with their $125/bbl 2023 forecast unchanged).

  Concerns about their bullish view are warranted though – as recession risks are rising – but as Courvalin notes, reported oil demand has held up surprisingly well

  Data for our monthly reported demand sample (covering c.81% of global demand for May and 55% for June) shows demand tracking above our expectations following downward revisions in April.

  

  The demand recovery has been led by jet fuel (+1mb/d YoY for the sub-sample), with the expected weakness in gasoline demand (-0.5 mb/d, given higher price elasticity) offset by strength in industrial products potentially being pulled into the power stack.

  The prevalence of retail government interventions such as price freezes/controls (such as those in China and India, versus tax holidays in the OECD) continues to shield oil demand more than expected.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 16:00

• Senate Passes $740 Billion Tax, Climate Package — Will Go To House Next
  Senate Passes $740 Billion Tax, Climate Package — Will Go To House Next

  Update (1532ET): After much wrangling, the Democrats finally passed their sweeping economic package through the Senate on Sunday.

  

  The estimated $740 billion “Inflation Reduction Act” – far less ambitious than their original $3.5 trillion vision – next heads to the House, where its passage is a foregone conclusion. According to Axios, a vote could come as early as Friday before it heads to President Biden’s desk.

  The package includes provisions to address climate change, pharmaceutical costs, and a supercharged IRS.

  “It’s been a long, tough and winding road, but at last, at last we have arrived,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “The Senate is making history. I am confident the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining legislative measures of the 21st century.“

  WATCH: Kamala Harris and Senate Democrats cheer as they pass a bill to raise taxes on the middle class. pic.twitter.com/NPpPMGV7Wj

  — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 7, 2022

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

  As the Washington Post notes, “Senators engaged in a round-the-clock marathon of voting that began Saturday and stretched late into Sunday afternoon. Democrats swatted down some three dozen Republican amendments designed to torpedo the legislation. Confronting unanimous GOP opposition, Democratic unity in the 50-50 chamber held, keeping the party on track for a morale-boosting victory three months from elections when congressional control is at stake.”

  And as Axios reports,

  The Senate returned to the Capitol Saturday afternoon, and began voting late Saturday night and into Sunday on a series of amendments — part of the process known as “vote-a-rama.”

  • Senate Republicans offered dozens of amendments aimed at minimizing the bill, including stripping out funding for the Internal Revenue Service and eliminating COVID-19-related school mandates.
  • Democrats held firm in their unity, with the help of Harris, of preserving the core elements of the package and voting down each GOP amendment.

  .  .  .

  The bill includes:

  • $370 billion for climate change – the largest investment in clean energy and emissions cuts the Senate has ever passed.
  • Allows the federal health secretary to negotiate the prices of certain expensive drugs for Medicare.
  • Three-year extension on healthcare subsidies in the Affordable Care Act.
  • 15% minimum tax on corporations making $1 billion or more in income. The provision offers more than $300 billion in revenue.
  • IRS tax enforcement.
  • 1% excise tax on stock buybacks.

  Drilling down on the climate portion – Axios’ Andrew Freedman writes:

  • This includes tax incentives to manufacture and purchase electric vehicles, generate more wind and solar electricity and support fledgling technology such as direct air capture and hydrogen production. 
  • Independent analyses show the bill, combined with other ongoing emissions reductions, would cut as much as 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, short of the White House’s 50% reduction target. However, if enacted into law, it would reestablish U.S. credibility in international climate talks, which had been flagging due in part to congressional gridlock. 
  • As part of Democrats’ concessions to Sen. Manchin, the bill also contains provisions calling for offshore oil lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, and a commitment to take up a separate measure to ease the permitting of new energy projects. 

  *  *  *

  Senate Democrats late on Aug. 6 advanced a mammoth spending bill on climate and energy, health care, and taxes, after overcoming unanimous Republican opposition in the evenly divided chamber.

  

  The procedural vote to advance the Democratic bill – which authorizes over $400 billion in new spending – was 51–50 after Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the Capitol to cast a vote, breaking the deadlock in the Senate over the measure that Democrats say would reform the tax code, lower the cost of prescription drugs, invest in energy and climate change programs, all while lowering the federal deficit.

  The vote means that senators will have 20 hours to debate on the measure, followed by a vote-a-rama, a marathon open-ended series of amendment votes that has no time limit. After that, the bill will head to a final vote. The measure is anticipated to pass the chamber as early as this weekend.

  The House, where Democrats have a majority, could give the legislation final approval on Aug. 12, when lawmakers are scheduled to return to Washington.

  The vote came after the Senate parliamentarian – the chamber’s nonpartisan rules arbiter – gave a thumbs-up to most of the Democrats’ revised 755-page bill.

  But Democrats had to drop a significant part of their plan for lowering prescription drug prices, Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough said.

  The provision would have essentially forced companies not to raise prices higher than inflation. MacDonough said Democrats violated Senate budget rules with language in the bill imposing hefty penalties on drugmakers who raise their prices beyond inflation in the private insurance market.

  As Mimi Nguyen Ly details at The Epoch Times, while the bill’s final costs are still being determined, it includes about $370 billion on energy and climate programs over the next 10 years, and about $64 billion to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act program for federal subsidies of health insurance for three years through 2025.

  It also seeks generate about $700 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years, which would leave roughly $300 billion in deficit reduction over the coming decade, which would represent just a tiny proportion of the next 10 year’s projected $16 trillion in budget shortfalls.

  A large portion of the $700 billion—an estimated $313 billion—is expected to be generated by increasing the corporate minimum tax to 15 percent, while the remaining amounts include $288 billion in prescription drug pricing reform and $124 billion in Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement.

  According to the current version of the bill, the new 15 percent minimum tax would be imposed on some corporations that earn over $1 billion annually but pay far less than the current 21 percent corporate tax. Companies buying back their own stock would be taxed 1 percent for those transactions, swapped in after Sinema refused to support higher taxes on private equity firm executives and hedge fund managers. The IRS budget would be increased to strengthen its tax collections.

  The White House said in a statement of administrative policy on Aug. 6 that it “strongly supports passage” of the bill.

  “This legislation would lower health care, prescription drug, and energy costs, invest in energy security, and make our tax code fairer—all while fighting inflation and reducing the deficit,” the statement reads.

  “This historic legislation would help tackle today’s most pressing economic challenges, make our economy stronger for decades to come, and position the United States to be the world’s leader in clean energy.”

  Republicans say the legislation is simply an alternate, dwindled version to the Democrat’s earlier Build Back Better bill—a multitrillion-dollar social spending package that was a major agenda of President Joe Biden—that Democrats have now dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Democrats “are misreading the American people’s outrage as a mandate for yet another reckless taxing and spending spree.” He said Democrats “have already robbed American families once through inflation and now their solution is to rob American families yet a second time.”

  “There is no working family in America whose top priorities are doubling the size of the IRS and giving rich people money to buy $80,000 electric cars,” McConnell said in a separate statement on Twitter.

  “Americans want Washington to address inflation, crime, and the border—not another reckless liberal taxing and spending spree.”

  Democrats have said the measure would “address record inflation by paying down our national debt, lowering energy costs, and lowering healthcare costs,” but Republicans have criticized the measure as having no potential other than to make matters worse, nicknaming the legislation “Build Back Broke,” in part because the bill would fulfill many parts of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

  “The time is now to move forward with a big, bold package for the American people,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

  “This historic bill will reduce inflation, lower costs, fight climate change. It’s time to move this nation forward.”

  But not every Democrat is buying what Chuck is selling…

  

  As John Solomon reports at JustTheNews.com, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the former presidential candidate and proud socialist, on Saturday attacked President Joe Biden‘s Inflation Reduction Act for failing to live up to its name, after the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office declared it would have a minimal impact on surging prices.

  “I want to take a moment to say a few words about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that we are debating this evening,” Sanders said just after voting with Democrats to advance the bill to debate on the Senate floor.

  “I say so-called because according to the CBO and other economic organizations that have studied this bill, it will in fact have a minimal impact on inflation.“

  CBO declared this week that the $740 billion piece of legislation would only affect inflation by 0.1% in either direction.

  “I don’t find myself saying this very often. But on that point, I agree with Bernie,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told Insider.

  Overall, economic analysts are divided on the measure, with some having predicted that the bill will worsen inflation and lead to stagnation in growth.

  As Will Cain explained in an excellent monologue reality check, “look at the name of the bill, whatever it is, you can be sure the legislation will do the opposite.”

  Finally, as Goldman details in a new notes, the net fiscal impact of these policies continues to look very modest, likely less than 0.1% of GDP for the next several years…

  

  While the final outcome may still yet differ in details, the fiscal impact is likely to be similar.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 15:32

• Economic Slowdown Now, Recession Coming In 2023
  Economic Slowdown Now, Recession Coming In 2023

  Authored by Lance Roberts via The Epoch Times,

  Economic slowdown but no recession! That message comes from the latest employment report, service sector data, and Federal Reserve.

  “We’re not in a recession right now. We do have these two-quarters of negative GDP growth. To some extent, a recession is in the eyes of the beholder. With all the job growth in the first half of the year, it’s hard to say there’s a recession. With a flat unemployment rate at 3.6 percent, it’s hard to say there’s a recession,” stated James Bullard, St. Louis Federal Reserve president.

  Such a statement certainly belies much of the economic consensus that two-quarters of negative economic growth constitutes a recession. As shown, the latest GDP report indeed met that measure.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  However, as stated, some indicators suggest the economy is in a slowdown but not yet in a recession. For example, our composite Institute of Supply Management (ISM) survey is still in expansionary territory. Since services make up about 80 percent of the economy today, there is currently support for economic growth. However, the data trend is negative and suggests the view of an economic slowdown.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  Employment also remains extremely strong. With the unemployment rate near historic lows, it suggests there is currently not a recession underway. However, historically low unemployment rates are pre-recessionary and reverse quickly as a recession takes hold.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  While neither measure suggests the economy has entered a recession yet, it does not preclude one from occurring. Many indicators suggest individuals “feel” like the economy is in a recession, such as our composite consumer sentiment index. Historically, a recessionary environment was present when consumer confidence and expectations declined below 80.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  Notably, given short-term economic dynamics, we could see a bump in economic growth owing to back-to-school spending in Q3 and holiday shopping in Q4.

  However, I suspect that as the Fed continues its aggressive mission to combat inflationary pressures, a recession in 2023 is likely.

  The Fed’s Dilemma

  While James Bullard and others currently direct the monetary policy regime, suggesting they can quell inflation with only an economic slowdown, history suggests otherwise. The Fed makes its policy decisions based on lagging economic data.

  For example, as noted previously, the Fed is currently basing its ability to continue hiking based on solid employment rates. However, history is clear that as the Federal Reserve hikes rates, there is a point where “something breaks” and low unemployment rates soar higher.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  That breaking point occurs because as the Federal Reserve hikes rates, the real-time economy adjusts to monetary policy changes. However, data such as employment and, importantly, inflation is comprised of data that can take several months to catch up to the actual economy.

  Notably, more than 40 percent of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is Home Owners Equivalent Rent. It takes roughly three months for pricing changes to be accurately reflected in the data. As the Fed continues to hike rates to combat inflation, the actual impact on consumers and economic activity is not reflected in CPI on a timely basis. It creates the possibility of the Fed over-tightening monetary policy, turning an economic slowdown into a more severe economic contraction.

  Of course, this is precisely what history tells us will happen.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  Monetary supply also tells us the Fed is likely making a mistake with its current aggressive stance on inflation. As discussed recently, inflation is the consequence of restricted supply owing to the economic shutdown and increased demand from “stimulus” checks. The massive surge in M2 money supply has reversed and has about a nine-month lead on inflation.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  While the Fed is hiking rates to quell inflation, the contraction of the money supply is doing the job for them.

  Driving With the Rearview Mirror

  There is little doubt we are currently amidst an economic slowdown. With the Federal Reserve focused on combating inflationary pressures by tightening monetary policy, thereby slowing economic demand, logic suggests that current economic data trends will continue to decline. Of course, the only difference between an economic slowdown and a recession is whether the readings can remain above zero.

  As the Fed continues to hike rates, each hike takes roughly nine months to work its way through the economic system. Therefore, the rate hikes from March 2020 won’t show up in the economic data until December. Likewise, the Fed’s subsequent and more aggressive rate hikes won’t be fully reflected in the economic data until early- to mid-2023. As the Fed hikes at subsequent meetings, those hikes will continue to compound their effect on a highly leveraged consumer with little savings through higher living costs. We have shown previously that the consumer is exceptionally unprepared for such an outcome.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  Given the Fed manages monetary policy in the “rear view” mirror, more real-time economic data suggest the economy is rapidly moving from economic slowdown toward recession. The signals are becoming clearer from inverted yield curves to the six-month rate of change of the Leading Economic Index.

  

  Source: St Louis Federal Reserve, Refinitiv Chart: RealInvestmentAdvice.com

  The media and the White House will likely proclaim victory by stating the first two quarters of 2022 were not a recession but only an economic slowdown. However, given the lag effect of changes to the money supply and higher interest rates, indicators are pretty clear recession risk is very probable in 2023.

  From an investment standpoint, it suggests the current market rally is not the beginning of a new bull market. Instead, investors are likely being lured into the clutches of a bear market rally that will probably have rather disappointing outcomes.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 15:30

• World Food Prices Crash The Most Since 2008
  World Food Prices Crash The Most Since 2008

  Central banks and mainstream economists were entirely wrong about the narrative that inflation is “transitory,” but after more than a year of raging inflation to four-decade highs, there are signs that current price spikes are waning. 

  One of those price declines is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) index of world food declined by 8.6% to 140.9 points in July, marking the fourth consecutive month of declines since hitting an all-time high in March. However, the international price of a basket of commonly-traded food commodities is still 13.1% higher than in July 2021. 

  As shown below, the UN food index recorded the largest monthly decline since the summer of 2008. 

  

  “The decline in food commodity prices from very high levels is welcome, especially when seen from a food access viewpoint; however, many uncertainties remain, including high fertilizer prices that can impact future production prospects and farmers’ livelihoods, a bleak global economic outlook, and currency movements, all of which pose serious strains for global food security,” said FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero.

  Besides slumping food prices, inflation expectations alongside commodity prices (fuel prices) have recently eased and come as recession risks across G10 markets are pulled forward (the US has fallen into a technical recession) as central banks raise interest rates aggressively to fight the inflation storm. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 08/07/2022 – 15:00

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