Today’s News 8th February 2023

• America Sleepwalks Into War With Russia
  America Sleepwalks Into War With Russia

  Authored by Francis P. Sempa via RealClear Wire,

  The United States and its NATO allies are slowly drifting into a war against Russia. The Biden administration and some of our NATO allies, while feigning caution and prudence, have gradually increased their involvement in Ukraine’s war effort. Some Western strategists talk of defeating Russia and forcing Vladimir Putin from power, even trying him as a war criminal. Victory, they say, is just around the corner as along as we continue to arm Ukraine.

  

  I’m reminded of a memorable scene in the movie Nicholas and Alexandra. Russia’s generals and politicians are confidently planning the mobilization of millions of troops against Germany on a huge table-size map. Against the advice of elder statesman Count Sergei Witte (brilliantly played by Sir Laurence Olivier), Tsar Nicholas II orders a general mobilization. Witte, old and gray, slumps in his chair and softly repeats the word “madness.”

  Witte had convinced the Tsar in 1905 to negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese War that was driving Russia to revolution. If Russia mobilized in late July 1914, Germany, France and England would mobilize, too. “Nobody will be able to stop,” warned Witte. And when Witte senses that the Tsar and his generals are not listening to him, he prophetically warns: “None of you will be here when this war ends. Everything we fought for will be lost. Everything we love will be broken […] Tradition, virtue, restraint—they all go […] And the world will be full of fanatics and trivial fools.”

  Historians still debate the causes and origins of World War I. George Kennan traced the origins of what an earlier generation called the “Great War” to the end of German Chancellor Bismarck’s European order and the “fateful alliance” between Russia and France. Robert Massie pointed to Germany’s naval challenge to Great Britain. Still others, such as German historian Fritz Fischer, blamed Germany’s hegemonic ambitions. More recently, British historian Christopher Clark argued that Europe’s statesmen “sleepwalked” into the war.

  This topic has assumed relevance today as the United States and NATO get closer and closer to co-belligerent status with Ukraine. Newsweek reports that 12 NATO countries, including the United States and Germany, have agreed to supply more tanks to Ukraine. The Biden administration will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks, while Germany is sending 14 of its Leopard 2 tanks. Ukraine’s ambassador to France said that Western countries have agreed to supply Ukraine with 321 tanks. Russia called this latest move a “blatant provocation” and more evidence of “direct involvement” in the war by Western powers.

  Despite the seriousness of these decisions, some Western observers are acting like Russia’s generals in the lead-up to World War I. The Guardian columnist Martin Kettle claims that the new tanks will give Ukraine “a military advantage” that could transform the war to Ukraine’s favor. The new weapons, he asserts, have the potential to “put Kyiv in a position to dictate ceasefire and peace terms to Moscow.” The Economist opines that sending Ukraine tanks and long-range missiles will enable it to “withstand the next Russian offensive and to take back the territory that is theirs.” American war hawk Max Boot is confident that the supply of tanks will enable Ukraine to mount a “successful offensive” and to take back its territory. Boot asserts that the tanks along with long-range rockets and advanced fighter planes supplied by the West will “determine the course of the war.” Jeffrey Cimmino and Shelby Magid of the Atlantic Council urge NATO to speed-up production and delivery of even more weapons systems to help Ukraine defeat Russia and integrate Ukraine in Western institutions.

  Which leads me to ask: Where are the American Count Witte’s? There don’t seem to be any in the Biden administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are all in for co-belligerency in order to preserve the “rules-based international order.” It was Kennan who warned in 1997 that NATO expansion would revive the worst aspects of Russian nationalist and imperialist traditions. That same year, in an open letter to then-President Bill Clinton, a large group of elder statesmen, including Paul Nitze, Fred Ikle, Robert Bowie, Arthur Hartman, Gordon Humphrey, Stansfield Turner, Edward Luttwak, Richard Pipes, and Sam Nunn, voiced opposition to NATO expansion. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock agreed with this sentiment and has urged the U.S. to press for a ceasefire in the war. International relations scholar John Mearsheimer has provided Witte-like warnings about the risks of catastrophic escalation in the Ukraine war. The American Conservative’s Douglas Macgregor and the CATO Institute’s Doug Bandow have written eloquently about the dangers of escalation and the need to avoid greater U.S. and Western involvement in the war.

  But these modern-day Witte’s are all outsiders. They are not even on the fringes of power like elder-statesman Witte was in 1914. And Witte failed. Are there any Democratic Party elder statesmen who will rise to this challenge? If not, it may soon be too late.

  Bismarck, who waged brief wars to unify Germany between 1864 and 1871, and worked thereafter to establish a structure of peace in Europe, lamented that some damn fool thing in the Balkans would ignite the next big war. And once his steady hand was removed from the scene in 1890, the structure of European peace gradually but inexorably fell apart. The result was the cataclysmic First World War that set into motion the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia and the spread of communism, the rise of Hitler in Germany, the Second World War and the Cold War. That sequence of events made the 20^th century history’s bloodiest.

  Afghanistan and Iraq should have taught us that wars sometimes generate their own momentum. The prognostications of the proponents of war usually fall apart once the fighting starts. Clausewitz called it “friction.” Edward Luttwak calls it the “paradoxical logic of strategy.” The statesmen of Europe who sent their countries to war in the summer of 1914 thought the fighting would be over by Christmas. Four years later, both sides had used poison gas, more than 10 million were dead, three empires collapsed, and as Count Witte predicted, tradition, virtue and restraint went away. The United States and its NATO allies are risking a wider European war involving nuclear powers for Ukraine to take back two eastern provinces and the Crimea.  

  John Quincy Adams, our greatest Secretary of State, once said America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Sentiment and emotion on behalf of the Ukrainian people are no substitutes for hardheaded geopolitics. 

  Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 23:10

• The US Has The Most Expensive Healthcare In The World
  The US Has The Most Expensive Healthcare In The World

  How much more expensive is the U.S. healthcare system compared to other developed countries?

  There are many ways of approaching that question, but when comparing per-capita healthcare spending in different OECD nations, the answer is: a lot more expensive.

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz illustrates in the chart below, U.S. per-capita healthcare spending (including public and private as well as compulsory and voluntary spending) is higher than anywhere else in the world, with second-placed Germany trailing quite far behind.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  On average, healthcare costs in the U.S. amounted up to $12,318 per person in 2021. In Germany that number stood at $7,383 – 40 percent lower. Yet, the U.S. lags behind other nations in several aspects such as life expectancy and health insurance coverage.

  High costs for healthcare are the norm in German-speaking countries, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. Costs are a bit lower – aroud $5,000 per capita, in France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan. Among developed nations, per-capita health care costs were the lowest in Eastern Europe.

  During the coronavirus pandemic, healthcare costs started to rise more steeply in OECD countries. The chart therefore includes only 2021 numbers for better comparability.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 22:50

• Koch Network Criticizes GOP For Nominating 'Bad Candidates,' Potentially Turning Against Trump 2024 Bid
  Koch Network Criticizes GOP For Nominating ‘Bad Candidates,’ Potentially Turning Against Trump 2024 Bid

  Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A libertarian conservative group funded by billionaire Charles Koch has suggested that the next president should herald a “new chapter” for the United States while at the same time criticizing the Republican Party for nominating “bad candidates,” suggesting an opposition to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

  “The Republican Party is nominating bad candidates who are advocating for things that go against core American principles,” said Emily Seidel, chief executive of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), in a memo (pdf) to staff and activists. “And the American people are rejecting them. The Democratic Party increasingly sees this as a political opportunity. And they’re responding with more and more extreme policies—policies that also go against our core American principles.”

  

  As a result, the country is in a “downward spiral,” with both political parties “reinforcing the bad behavior.”

  “To write a new chapter for our country, we need to turn the page on the past. So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” the Feb. 5th memo states. The memo does not directly mention Trump by name.

  As Trump is the only declared Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race, the AFP memo could be referring to the ex-president as the GOP’s “bad” candidate. However, some analysts view the latest disapproval to be advantageous to Trump.

  “Today’s announcement that the ‘Koch Network’ and the now very #woke Americans for Prosperity will oppose Trump helps him,” conservative pollster and media consultant Rick Shaftan said in a tweet on Feb. 5.

  The “AFP does nothing but waste money on weak mailers and outsiders as door-knockers. I sure hope they don’t back DeSantis. This announcement is a PLUS for Trump,” Shaftan wrote.

  AFP and Trump

  AFP, founded by businessmen David and Charles Koch in 2004, has been one of the best-funded political organizations in the United States. AFP Action, a super PAC that supports conservative organizations, spent $79.8 million in the 2022 election cycle, according to data from research group OpenSecrets.

  Trump has been critical of the Kochs, branding them “globalist” in 2018.

  “The globalist Koch brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” Trump stated in a tweet on July 31, 2018.

  In January 2021, the AFP said that future support for lawmakers would depend on their actions before and during the Capitol breach on Jan. 6., 2021.

  “With that standard in mind, lawmakers’ actions leading up to and during last week’s insurrection will weigh heavy in our evaluation of future support. And we will continue to look for ways to support those policymakers who reject the politics of division and work together to move our country forward,” Seide said in a statement at the time.

  With more than $69 billion in assets, Charles Koch is the fourteenth richest man in the world. He had written about his regrets about spending only on conservative causes while his network donated money to several Democratic candidates in 2020.

  Trump has been the most targeted lawmaker related to the incident. The former president was also impeached for his alleged role in the Capitol breach, but was later acquitted by the Senate.

  GOP Candidates

  Apart from Trump, no other Republican member has put themselves forward as a presidential candidate for the 2024 race. However, a few names have been circulating, such as former vice president Mike Pence and current Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 22:30

• Is Russia The 'Greenest' Country In The World?
  Is Russia The ‘Greenest’ Country In The World?

  According to the United Nations (UN), forests cover 31% of the world’s land surface. They absorb roughly 15.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) every year.

  

  As Visual Capitalist’s Freny Fernandes details below, more than half of this green cover is spread across the boreal forests of Russia and Canada, the Amazon in South America, and China’s coniferous and broad-leaved forests. These carbon-sequestering forests purify the air, filter water, prevent soil erosion, and act as an important buffer against climate change.

  

  This series of maps by Adam Symington uses data sourced from images collected aboard the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite to reflect the ratio of the world’s surface covered with tree canopy to non-green areas.

  To explore the entire high resolution forest map, click the image above. Below we’ll take a closer look at some of the world’s green zones.

  Asia

  Home to the boreal forests of Russia, China’s broad-leaved forests, the mangrove forests of Indonesia, and the green belt along the mighty Himalayas, Asia boasts some of the richest and most biodiverse green canopies of the world.

  

  Russia holds more than one-fifth of the world’s trees across 815 million hectares—larger than the Amazon’s canopy. Like the country’s geography, most of Russia’s forests are situated in Asia, but spread into Europe as well.

  To the southeast and with a forest cover of almost 220 million hectares, China is the fifth greenest country in the world. However, this was not always the case.

  In 1990, China’s forests stretched across only 157 million hectares, covering 16.7% of its land. By the end of 2020, this forest cover reached 23.4%, thanks to decades of greening efforts.

  On the other hand, the continent’s third most biodiverse country—Indonesia—is losing its green canopy. With a 92 million hectare-wide forest canopy, the country is home to between 10 and 15% of the world’s known plants, mammals, and birds. Unfortunately, over the past 50 years, 74 million hectares of the country’s rainforest have been logged, burned, or degraded.

  Meanwhile, the 72 million hectares of Indian forest cover can be followed closely with the eye. From the rainforests along the Himalayas in the northeast, to montane rainforests of the South Western Ghats, and finally to the coastal mangrove forests.

  The Amazon and Congolian Rainforests

  In South America, Brazil has the second-largest green cover in the world.

  

  Most of its 497 million hectare-wide forest cover falls within “the lungs of the planet”—the Amazon rainforest.

  One of the most biodiverse places on the planet, the Amazon rainforest is said to house about 10% of the world’s biodiversity, including over three million wildlife species and over 2,500 tree species.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, extending along the Congo River basin and its many tributaries, are the Congolian rainforests.

  

  Spread across nine countries in Central Africa, this collection of tropical moist broadleaf forests is one of the remaining regions in the world that absorbs more carbon than it emits.

  With 126 million hectares of the world’s green cover, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) contains the largest part of this rainforest, equal to about 60% of Central Africa’s lowland forest cover.

  North American Forests

  Canada, the United States, and Mexico combine for 723 million hectares of the world’s forests. The vast stretches of pine and fir trees in the Great White North, coupled with the United States’ mixed variety of forests, make the continent one of the largest carbon sinks in the world.

  

  With over 347 million hectares of forests, Canada ranks third in the list of greenest countries. Approximately 40% of its landmass is tree-covered, representing 9% of the global forest cover.

  Its boreal forests store twice as much carbon per unit as tropical forests and help regulate the global carbon footprint.

  The United States, on the other hand, holds about 8% of the world’s forests. Spread across 310 million hectares of land, these diverse forests range from the boreal forests of Alaska to pine plantations in the South, and the deciduous forests in the Eastern United States to the dry coniferous forests in the West. The country is also home to temperate rainforests along its West Coast and tropical rainforests in Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

  The World’s Lost Forests

  While China and a few select countries have proven that there is hope for building out the world’s forests, the story is different in other places around the world. This map by Adam Symington uses data from the University of Maryland to track the changes in the world’s forest cover from 2000 to 2021.

  

  Since 2000, the world lost over 104 million hectares of pristine and intact forest landscapes. In 2020 alone, over 10 thousand square kilometers of the Amazon were destroyed for the development of roads.

  Deforestation and fragmentation are caused by a range of human development activities. But they are also exacerbated by climate change, with increasing forest fires, hurricanes, droughts, and other extreme weather events, as well as invasive species and insect outbreaks upsetting forest ecosystems.

  At the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) held in Montréal, nations across the world committed to the 30X30 plan, which called for the conservation of the world’s land and marine ecosystems by 2030. Alongside other commitments to end deforestation and grow the world’s canopies, there is still hope for the world’s forests.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 22:10

• Does The FBI Have Spies In Congress?
  Does The FBI Have Spies In Congress?

  Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

  House Republicans vow to pull no punches when investigating the FBI this session of Congress. The bureau may be monitoring them in return.

  

  This is according to attorney Jesse Trentadue, who about a decade ago uncovered the FBI’s “sensitive informant program.” He said the bureau uses it to embed informants in the media, congressional offices, churches, defense teams and other “sensitive” institutions.

  Trentadue never found direct evidence of FBI informants operating in Congress—but that’s because a federal court struck down his lawsuit seeking records about such activity in 2015.

  Nearly eight years later, Trentadue told Headline USA that he hopes the newly formed House select subcommittee to investigate the weaponization of the federal government will resume what his lawsuit started. Doing so would be in Congress’s best interest, he said.

  Trentadue first caught wind of the sensitive informant program in 2011, while prepping for a separate lawsuit. His friend and fellow investigator, Roger Charles, had discovered an FBI memo showing that a journalist at ABC News was also doubling as a federal informant.

  “The journalist, whose name is not disclosed in the document labeled ‘secret,’ not only cooperated but provided the identity of a confidential source, according to the FBI memo—a possible breach of journalistic ethics if he or she did not have the source’s permission,” the Center for Public Integrity wrote in April 2011 about the finding.

  While the story moved through the news cycle quickly with little impact, it prompted Trentadue to file records requests with the FBI to see if the bureau had other informants in the media, as well as places such as congressional offices, courts, churches, other government agencies and even the White House.

  “I thought they’d come back and say, ‘We would never do that because that would be illegal and unconstitutional,’” he said. “Instead, they came back and said, ‘Yeah, we do that. We have manuals on that, but you can’t have them because of national security.’”

  Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over the matter in 2012, seeking unredacted copies of the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the FBI Confidential Human Source Validation Standards Manual, the FBI Confidential Human Source Policy Manual and the FBI Confidential Human Source Policy Implementation Guide.

  After about two years of litigation, the FBI moved for a summary judgment in April 2014, arguing that it should be allowed to exercise FOIA’s national security exemptions to keep the manuals secret.

  Included with the FBI’s motion was a sworn declaration from Eric Velez–Villar, the assistant director of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence at the time, who told the court that Trentadue’s lawsuit threatened to “disclose critical tools utilized by the FBI in its investigations and intelligence gathering efforts.”

  The head of the CIA’s litigation support unit, Martha Lutz, also submitted a sworn statement, telling the court that disclosing the FBI manuals could compromise CIA sources.

  Trentadue opposed the FBI’s motion for summary judgment and the two parties argued at a November 2014 hearing. But after reviewing the unredacted manuals in private, Judge Kimball said the FBI could keep the manuals secret.

  Kimball noted that government agencies are “entitled to considerable deference” when they exercise national security or law enforcement exemptions—unless there’s evidence of bad faith by government actors. Then, he said, the courts have no power to make government agencies disclose secret information.

  Kimball ordered the case closed on June 9, 2015.

  While some might defend the FBI’s sensitive informant program as necessary for national security, Trentadue said the records he’s uncovered—such as the FBI memo revealing its informant at ABC News—show that the bureau has far overstepped its boundaries.

  With recent disclosures like the Twitter Files having shed more light on the agency’s role in partisan censorship campaigns and election-meddling, others might agree.

  “This isn’t the case of the FBI investigating corruption,” Trentadue said. “The bureau is recruiting spies in an effort to infiltrate and influence.”

  Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 21:50

• Number Of Foreign Workers In Japan Reaches Record High
  Number Of Foreign Workers In Japan Reaches Record High

  The number of foreigners working in Japan has reached a new high of almost 1.7 million.

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, after years of slow growth in the number of foreign workers admitted into the country, Japan has increased its efforts to attract them in the past couple of years.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Since the Japanese population is aging rapidly, the Japanese government is feeling the need to bring in talent from abroad.

  Immigrants, mainly from developing Asian countries, but also from the West, are now coming to Japan in larger numbers. Since 2014, the number of foreigners working in Japan has more than doubled, according to data by MHLW Japan (link in Japanese). The Japanese government revised immigration and refugee recognition laws in early 2019 with the aim of accepting an additional 340,000 workers to the country. Some special provisions were also taken to attract nurses, restaurant workers and laborers. In December of 2019, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe und his cabinet had already adopted measures to foster the coexistence of Japanese and foreign nationals that came at a price tag of US$55.3 million.

  In the light of all this, it appears the country is indeed serious about a more multicultural future. Still, this new vision of Japanese society might be a hard sell: The measures adopted have drawn some controversy and have even led to kerfuffles during parliamentary debates. Right-wing politicians slammed the reform saying it would bring in crime and destroy the homogenous Japanese society.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 21:30

• Sky Lanterns, Fu-Go Wind Ships, Drones, Balloon Bombs, & The Markets
  Sky Lanterns, Fu-Go Wind Ships, Drones, Balloon Bombs, & The Markets

  Authored by Dr. Pippa Malmgren via Substack,

  The Chinese balloons over the US reveal many things.

  1. We are already at war. But the US authorities don’t want to say this because social media will create hysteria. China knows this. The purpose of the balloons may not be spying or payload delivery but about the kind of spectacle that creates doubt amongst Americans about their own Government. This is a live staged Tik Tok event.

  2. It reveals that the American leadership had thought they could be at war without the public needing to know about it. Biden and Xi can shake hands and declare a truce, but under the surface, the two nations are all out in confrontation. New economic measures are coming that will confirm this.

  3. The destruction of the Chinese craft gives China an excuse to retaliate. This amounts to the “go ahead and hit me” taunting strategy that Russia has long been engaged in.

  4. This technology reveals that China intends to avoid fighting the US nose to nose, ship to ship, and person to person. Instead, they understand leverage ratios. Just as the terrorists used $5 box cutters to take down aircraft over the US and destroy significant buildings on 9/11, China can create havoc with cheap balloons, toy drones, and other small aerial devices, including in space. In Taiwan, the Chinese might do flyovers with fighter jets to create an atmosphere of tension and to keep everybody on edge. In the US, that would invite an overwhelming response. Balloons seem so innocuous. This “Sky Lantern” strategy creates confusion, a sense of helplessness, and a realization that “big” Western military tech may be useless against “small” Chinese military tech.

  Across Asia there is an ancient tradition of letting paper lanterns with tea candles loose into the sky or across bodies of water.

  

  This “Sky Lantern” tradition spills over into the realm of strategic security too.

  Americans have forgotten that the Japanese once launched some 9000 “wind-ships” called Fu-Go Bombs into the US from Honshu Island. It was 1944. Since all the Japanese men were at war, young Japanese schoolgirls were assigned to construct these 33 feet wide balloons, which were made of a kind of paper-mâché using fibers from mulberry trees and potato flour glue.  Each carried “either a 32-pound anti-personnel device or two 24-pound thermite incendiary bombs,” and all were painted with Japan’s Signature Rising Sun image.  Most disappeared over the Pacific, but a few hit their mark. They seemed innocuous at first. They were found unexploded in 26 states, including Kalispell, Montana, and California at Saticoy in the Santa Clara River and Oxnard and in Milton, Saskatchewan, Estacada, Oregon, Tacoma, and South Hill. Washington, Bigelow Kansas, Laurens Iowa, Nebraska, near Detroit, Dorr Michigan, Desdemona and Woodson, Texas, and Timnath, Colorado. In 2014 one was found in Lumby, British Columbia, and another in Attu in the Aleutian Islands. One blew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and another in South Hill, Washington.  

  But, one downed balloon in a tree in Bly, Oregon, killed a party of school children led by a Reverend and his pregnant wife. This is said to be the only attack by a foreign nation to kill Americans on American soil. The story was totally suppressed. In an amazingly lucky strike, another Fu-Go balloon bomb took out the main power line that supplied the very nuclear reactor that happened to generate the plutonium that would later be used in the Nagasaki nuclear bomb. Perhaps this was nothing more than an eerie coincidence. The Japanese did not know what had happened because the US Military had instituted a virtual press blackout and told all the witnesses to stay schtum. The military had good reason to suppress these stories. At that time paranoia was running high. The US authorities still had not solved the mystery of the 1942 arson attack on the second-largest ship in America’s Atlantic Fleet. The SS Normandie was the world’s largest ocean liner at the time and was moored at Pier 88 in NYC when a fire broke out that sank the ship. This was just after it had been commandeered by the US Navy, which intended to convert it into a carrier for troops. So, the possibility of foreign sabotage and attacks had a visceral reality to it at the time.

  Fast forward to today. Multiple Chinese government balloons have been spotted over America, including Wyoming, Montana, (apparently) Texas, Hawaii, and elsewhere and then one was shot down over the Atlantic off South Carolina. There are rumors that one exploded over Billings, Montana. Americans may not remember this earlier Japanese Fu-Go episode. But they are avid watchers of Yellowstone on Netflix. The whole point of going to Montana and Wyoming is to get away from government authorities. The zeitgeist of these Western states is one of militant and armed independence from the outside world. This is the part of America that kicked Liz Cheyney out of office for being too soft a Republican. The folks in Wyoming and Montana don’t want to depend on Washington to defend them. They certainly don’t take kindly to having a foreign power hovering over their land.

  

  The initial questions are why did the Chinese mark the balloons so it would be crystal clear it was them? If they want to surveil America, why not rely on their satellites or pay private commercial operators like MAXAR? They’ve been very effective in Ukraine.

  Ah, one of the balloons was found near the Malmstrom Airbase, which is one of the three locations of America’s Minuteman nuclear missile silos. According to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, “The current ICBM force consists of 400 Minuteman III missiles located at the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren AFB, Wyoming”. So, it looks like the Chinese balloons got two out of three of these valuable targets this time.

  So, the thought process naturally turns darker. You can’t pay private firms for that data, and the US has ways to make it impossible for satellites to see what’s happening there. Just to remind everybody, we remain in a Cuban Missile Crisis-type environment where all the superpowers are on an extraordinarily high level of alert. North Korea alone has not only been engaged in a record number of ballistic missile tests over the last year but is now accusing Washington of pushing tensions to an “extreme red line”. In response, they threaten to use “overwhelming nuclear force.”

  Meanwhile, the START talks between Russia and the US have completely broken down. The US says Moscow is blocking inspections, but Russia accuses the US of operating in violation of all the remaining nuclear weapons agreements.  Now the war in Ukraine is escalating as the Western nations start supplying more powerful and advanced equipment to the Ukrainian side. President Putin went to Volgograd on the 80th Anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad and obliquely threatened nuclear again. To add drama to all this, the Daily Mail and Telegram are reporting that four UFOs pitched up at his speech and buzzed the Russian President. I am really hoping a higher intelligence will prevent anybody from engaging in nuclear strikes myself. But in all seriousness, we already see press reports of the threat of a Russian response in the form of a “low yield/tactical nuclear weapon” in Europe, possibly even over Europe.  In other words, there was already concern about an EMP device being delivered without a missile even before these Chinese balloons showed up.

  So, perhaps these balloons were not intended for surveillance. Perhaps they are delivering payloads just as they did in the 1940s. Already the net is overwhelmed by conspiracy theories about payload possibilities from bioweapons to EMP devices. The Former Head of the Pentagon’s EMP Task Force and chairman of the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg has been writing about the possibility of EMP devices on balloons since 2015. The aim would not be to drop a nuclear weapon but rather to explode one at a high-altitude which would fry all electronics on the ground. The point is that, like in the 1940s, we are already at such an advanced stage of confrontation amongst the superpowers that the job of the military is not so much to respond to the balloons as it is to prevent public panic.

  It seems similar events have obviously been suppressed in recent years. The New York Times has just confirmed the following: “ Since 2021, the Pentagon has examined 366 incidents that were initially unexplained and said 163 were balloons. A handful of those incidents involved advanced surveillance balloons, according to a U.S. official, but none were conducting persistent reconnaissance of the U.S. military bases. In a formal press release, the Pentagon also confirmed that these balloons entered the US at least three times under the previous administration, although Former President Trump is denying this.

  The story of the seemingly innocuous balloons is also taking place against the backdrop of substantial military positioning in the Pacific between the US and China. I flew over the Pacific twice this week from LA to Hawaii, Hawaii to San Fran and San Fran to Seoul. It seems to calm and peaceful, but the reality is that there is a massive build-up of military power underway by China and by the US.

  The US has two major island footholds in the Pacific – Hawaii and Guam. Hawaii now has 14 military bases, including supporting facilities such as the Maui Space Force Surveillance Complex on Mount Haleakala and the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Observatory.  This is the location of PACOM, Pacific Command, for all the branches of the US military. Just last week, the former chief of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Philip Davidson, suggested that China may attack Taiwan by 2027. The Head of the CIA, William Burns, also just announced that this threat should not be underestimated. It is as if the Western military establishment learned a great lesson from having underestimated President Putin’s threat to invade Ukraine.  The assumption then was, “he’ll never dare, and it’s a bluff.” The assumption now is to fully prepare in order to avoid the threat, whether it’s a bluff or not. But Burns made the possibility much starker by saying that the US now knows, “as a matter of intelligence,” that Xi has ordered the Chinese military to be ready for this attack by 2027. The US and NATO have been tracking China’s training efforts and changing NATO doctrine to contend with the possibility of a direct confrontation. See The Rise of China and NATO’s New Strategic Concept.

  So, what is being done to strengthen The US Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM)? A lot! It matters. Note the Wikipedia entry: is responsible for military operations in an area that encompasses more than 100 million square miles (260,000,000 km2), or roughly 52% of the Earth’s surface, stretching from the waters of the West Coast of the United States to the east coast maritime borderline waters of Pakistan at the meridian 66° longitude east of Greenwich and from the Arctic to the Antarctic.”

  

  Bashi Channel

  Guam has long been referred to as America’s “Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier”. It’s being shored up now as the US begins expanding further into the Marianas Island Chain. Tinian Island looks set to be a new, more modernized military base. A new deal has just been concluded with the Philippines that gives the US four new military bases there.  Other locations, such as Palawan, are under discussion. The focus seems to be The Bashi Channel which is the stretch between the Philippines and Taiwan that China feels so hemmed in by. Guam is also expanding to accommodate the 5000 Marines that will no longer be stationed in Okinawa. Instead, they’ll be based at the new 4000-acre Camp Blaz in Guam, which was “reactivated” on January 26th, 2023, and is currently under construction. The US has also apparently doubled the size of the Pacific Submarine fleet based in Guam. Remember that Guam is where the USS Connecticut, one of three Seawolf-class attack submarines, went when it was damaged after a still-unexplained accident in The South China Sea.

  The US may be downgrading its presence in Okinawa, but Japan is still hosting the US in new locations. Japan has just started building a new base twenty off of Kyushu. The new $1.6b Magashima base will “host aircraft carrier landing practices.” The US is also adding to its naval capabilities in Japan, especially near the Taiwan Straights.

  Meanwhile, China’s efforts to establish a greater presence in the South China Sea used to be seen as a simple territorial grab. But, they’ve converted these islands into “unsinkable aircraft carriers” themselves. Perhaps it was a military strategy more than the West realized.

  Let’s not forget that a Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet had a near miss of less than 3 meters with a US RC-135 spy plane only a few weeks ago over the South China Sea.

  Perhaps the most worrying thing is that the US military has shifted from holding exercises to engaging in mission rehearsals. This is a dramatic change. Exercises keep militaries limbered up. Mission rehearsals serve to find out how actual warfighting will occur. You could say exercises are held to increase confidence in high star Generals. Mission rehearsals are to increase confidence in the twenty-year-olds who will be actually conducting warfighting. Gen Z and Gen Y, you need to read The Fourth Turning now.

  The Chinese Sky Lantern Strategy has resulted in one nearly impossible outcome. It has totally united the Democrats and Republicans. The only other issue that has generated a completely unified stance between the left and the right is the UFO/UAP/Anomalous phenomena issue. Now we can see that the two are related. As Senator Gillibrand has said, “We don’t know what it is” is no longer an acceptable answer, especially with all this going on. It strikes me that the two are closely related, given the uptick in reporting of UAPs against the backdrop of escalating confrontation via new small aerial devices, whether balloons or drones of tiny satellites. This is about robots on robots at altitude.

  On drones, Western militaries still have not understood the true power of the tiny toy drones that are made in China. It’s not the drone that matters, although all that data is available to Beijing. That’s useful from a reconnaissance perspective. The bigger deal is running AI, facial recognition, and the now-banned SenseTime over the data. This allows easy assessment of the mental state of the troops or of a person. A balloon goes up, and the emotional responses of the personnel on the ground are even more valuable than data feed from the aircraft itself. It’s not the video that matters. It’s the assessment of the video where the strategic advantage lies. It’s not that balloons are a threat. It’s that they create chaos in the decision-making apparatus, and that’s very valuable. They also can be used to create diplomatic incidents, which also have value in wartime. Head fakes are part of the negotiation process.

  

  So, we can expect the US to lash back. My father, Amb. Harald Malmgren @HalsRethink and Nick Glinsman @nglinsman have recently written an important piece called Decoupling of Global Commerce will be a Painful Divorce. It explains the reverse CIFIUS, meaning mandated constraints on US investment into China. Can the West keep cutting off China and expect no response? Can China keep taunting the US and expect no response? The markets won’t like all this.

  This is The Invisible War that we occasionally get brief glimpses of. China’s Sky Lanterns illuminated this fact.

  *  *  *

  Subscribe to stay informed on new developments as they bubble up.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 21:10

• Trump Urges "End To The Destruction Of Our Country" After Biden Heckled, Booed By Republicans During SOTU
  Trump Urges “End To The Destruction Of Our Country” After Biden Heckled, Booed By Republicans During SOTU

  Update (1045ET): 72 minutes later and it’s over…

  Bond King Jeff Gundlach perfectly summarized the speech for Americans:

  Biden tonight: “Let’s spend more money.”

  — Jeffrey Gundlach (@TruthGundlach) February 8, 2023

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  And our take…

  Well, yeah… even the CBO has given up https://t.co/N3dwBEBf3H pic.twitter.com/kZuFOSTDSt

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 8, 2023

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  But, before we get into the details, first things first, there was this…

  Did Jill Biden just kiss Kamala’s husband on the LIPS?! pic.twitter.com/KvrUxSI8Lu

  — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2023

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  Biden, at 80, is the oldest president to give a State of the Union address… and it showed.

  While discussing law enforcement and the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Biden referred to him as “Tyler.” Biden called Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer the Senate “minority” leader

  In a somewhat stunning statement, President Biden claimed he’s succeeded in driving illegal migration “down” during his State of the Union Tuesday night.

  As Biden called on Congress to pass a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants along with resources for border security, Republicans heckled him once again, prompting Democrats to yell “order!”

  As The Daily Caller reports, the president’s statement follows a record surge in illegal immigration in fiscal year 2022, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded more than 2.3 million migrant encounters and in December, when the agency recorded more than 250,000 migrant encounters, marking the highest month on record.

  Republicans roared with boos and condemnation as President Biden accused them of wanting to ruin Social Security and Medicare.

  “Some of my Republican friends want to take the economy hostage, I get it, unless I agree to their economic plans,” Biden said.

  “All of you at home should know what their plans are. Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority…”

  WATCH: Republicans erupt at Biden for claiming they want to ‘take the economy hostage.’ pic.twitter.com/lwyh2ifUR9

  — Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 8, 2023

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  Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene yelled out, calling Biden a “liar.”

  

  Joe Biden is lying to the American People.

  — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) February 8, 2023

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  Interesting exchange between Pres Biden and House GOP members after Pres Biden said some Republicans want to “sunset” Social Security and Medicare benefits.

  Marjorie Taylor Greene stood up and called him a liar. Speaker McCarthy shushed his caucus from the podium. #sotu2023 pic.twitter.com/A3py7v5ahR

  — Norah O’Donnell 🇺🇸 (@NorahODonnell) February 8, 2023

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  President Biden slammed SCOTUS for overturning Roe vs Wade (as the Justices responsible for the decision sat un-partisanly in front of him).

  When Biden mentioned U.S. relations with China, one Republican shouted “China spied on us!”

  On the issue of fentanyl, Republicans once again erupted, shouting “Your fault!” before standing in ovation to applaud Biden’s calls to “launch a major surge” to stop production, sale and trafficking of the drug.

  Biden also took a moment to make an aside about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach near the beginning of the speech, calling it “the greatest threat [to democracy] since the Civil War.

  Finally, in a response of his own, President Trump said: “I am running for president to end the destruction of our country and to complete the unfinished business of making America great again. We will make our country better than ever before, and we will always put America first,”

  The REAL State of the Union #sotu2023 #sotu https://t.co/asiE4yXJSI

  — 🍊 🍊 🍊 🍊 MrsLibertyBelle pronouns: bad/bitch (@MrsLibertyBell1) February 8, 2023

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  *  *  *

  President Biden will read a carefully prepared State of the Union Speech on Tuesday night in front of a newly divided Congress, where he’s likely to tout last week’s jobs report, and use it as a soft launch for his 2024 reelection campaign despite the fact that a majority of Democrats who don’t want him to run again.

  

  If you are too tired to listen, here’s our un-educated guess at the Tl;dr:

  Bad things: billionaires (tax them, shouldn’t exist), buybacks (tax ’em too), balloons (Chinese ones!), big-oil (making too much money), big-tech (slam them unless they censor ‘the other’), white men (where do we start?), guns (kill people), police (kill people), and Putin (well durr, he’s Hitler).

  Good things: inflation (coming down, right?), gas prices (coming down, right?), jobs (allowing people to work is good for employment), climate (The IRA will spend taxpayer money to save the world), COVID (crushed it… or was it just a bad cold?), immigration (not a crisis… and how else can we get so much fentanyl to calm the masses into the country), non-white men (or those that identify as non-white men), Zelensky (heroic spending of US taxpayer money), and Putin (‘war is a racket’ after all eh ‘big guy’?)

  Looking to pass the time, here’s SOTU Bingo (best of luck)!

  

  And this might be even more useful (but please imbibe responsibly)…(via Distractify.com)

  

  Based on NPR‘s estimated list of key topics that President Biden will address, here is our recommended drinking game.

  Take one drink when:

  • Biden mentions job growth

  • Low unemployment rate is mentioned

  • Ukraine is mentioned

  • Any mention of the Chinese spy balloon

  Take two drinks when:

  • Mention of the Inflation Reduction Act

  • Climate change is brought up, especially in connection to electric vehicles

  • COVID and/or coronavirus-related funding is mentioned

  • Federal student debt is mentioned

  Take three drinks when:

  • Biden says, “Come on, man!”

  • Biden says “Here’s the deal”

  • Any mention of Donald Trump

  • Biden mentions Vladimir Putin

  • Biden mentions Vice President Harris

  Finish your drink if:

  • Someone walks out in protest

  • Biden says “God Bless America”

  • The Democrats give Biden a standing ovation while members of the GOP remain seated

  So, sit back and enjoy watching the State of The Union Speech live here (due to start at):

  House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that he won’t tear up President Biden’s State of the Union speech, referencing former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s famous action following former President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address.

  “I don’t believe in the theatrics of tearing up speeches,” McCarthy said in a video.

  “I respect the other side, I can disagree on policy. But I want to make sure this country is stronger, economically sound, energy independent, secure and accountable.”

  A lot of people have been asking if I’m planning on ripping up President Biden’s speech tonight. Here’s my answer: pic.twitter.com/WRlAlYgCbs

  — Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) February 7, 2023

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  Republicans have tapped Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former President Trump’s White House press secretary and someone seen as a reliable ally of the former President, to deliver the party’s official response to the speech.

  Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna McDaniel issued a statement Tuesday, ahead of President Biden’s address.

  “The state of the union is weaker and American families are suffering because of Joe Biden. There is a reason Republicans took back the House, and that’s because of speeches like tonight where Biden will ignore and deflect blame for inflation, rising crime, and a border crisis he created. Americans deserve solutions, but all they’ll hear from Biden are excuses.”

  Watch live here…

  While Republican leadership has pointed to Sanders’ speech as a platform for the GOP’s “optimistic” vision, we note that Former President Trump will also respond to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, according to a person familiar with Trump’s plans, offering a rebuttal that is separate from the official GOP response.

  As we detailed earlier, President Biden will read a carefully prepared State of the Union Speech on Tuesday night in front of a newly divided Congress, where he’s likely to tout last week’s jobs report, and use it as a soft launch for his 2024 reelection campaign despite the fact that a majority of Democrats who don’t want him to run again.

  Biden will likely argue that Americans are doing better on average than when he took office, and falsely claim that inflation isn’t his fault.

  BIDEN SAYS HE TAKES NO BLAME FOR INFLATION

  BIDEN SAYS INFLATION WAS THERE WHEN HE ARRIVED

  Green light to raising inflation target: it was Trump’s fault

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 3, 2023

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  “Do I take any blame for inflation? No,” Biden said Friday. “Because it was already there when I got here, man. … Jobs were hemorrhaging, inflation was rising, we weren’t manufacturing a damn thing here, we were in real economic difficultly, that’s why I don’t.”

  Except… inflation was 1.4% when Biden took office.

  

  Even The Hill notes that “there are signs that even a productive past year that featured major investments in the economy and declining concerns about a recession may not be enough for Biden to excite even some in his own party about a 2024 bid.“

  “I think this is an impossible speech to give because it’s a speech that requires him to speak both about the state of the union as it is and the direction he hopes to lead it, which is about playing the role of statesman. But it also is going to lay the groundwork for most likely his own run for office in 2024, which will call for him to be decidedly political and to cover all kinds of ground,” said William Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

  What else will Biden say?

  Biden will likely call on Congress to raise the debt limit without conditions, challenging Republicans to send him a ‘clean’ bill, while warning against cuts to Social Security and Medicare – cuts which House Speaker Kevin McCarthy already said were off the table.

  He will undoubtedly mention the war in Ukraine, framing it as a broader fight against Russian aggression. Some foreign policy experts have suggested Biden may use the speech to lay out a possible roadmap to ending US involvement in Ukraine, The Hill reports.

  Biden may also call for police reform following the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police – which was widely framed as an issue of white supremacy, despite involving only black officers, working for a black Chief of Police, and a black suspect. Nichols, 29, died in a hospital on Jan. 10, three days after he was beaten by the five officers – who have all been hit with several charges.

  He may also encourage lawmakers to strike a bipartisan immigration deal after his administration spent the last two years encouraging unchecked illegal migration into the United States.

  What won’t Biden mention?

  Unless his doctors failed to dial in his cocktail, Biden probably won’t touch on his classified document scandal, the Hunter Biden investigations, or the removal of several Democrats – including Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, and Ilhan Omar, from prominent Congressional committees.

  We also don’t imagine he’ll mention the embarrassing Chinese spy balloon he let traverse the entire United States before shooting down.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 20:50

• Gun Control Laws Backfiring In California
  Gun Control Laws Backfiring In California

  Authored by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClear Wire,

  After the three public shootings over the last two weekends in California, Democrats are again clamoring for even more gun control laws. To California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the solution is to ban more places where people can carry permitted concealed handguns. Unfortunately, the proposal has nothing to do with stopping these attacks, and more gun-free zones only encourage these attacks. Other heavily Democratic states such as New York, New Jersey, and Maryland are making similar pushes.

  

  Concealed handgun permit holders didn’t commit those or other mass public shootings. Permit holders are also extremely law-abiding, being convicted of firearms-related violations at 1/12th the rate of police officers.

  With the country’s strictest gun control laws, California probably shouldn’t hold itself out as a model for the rest of the country to follow. The periods after 2000, 2010, or 2020 show a consistent pattern: The per capita rate of mass public shootings in California is always greater than the rate for the rest of the country. The rate is also much higher than for Texas, which gun control groups give an “F” grade for its gun control laws. Since 2010, California’s mass public shooting rate per capita is 43% higher than for Texas and 29% higher than for the rest of the U.S. From 2020 on, California’s rate was 276% higher than Texas’ and 100% higher than the rest of the country.

  But while California is moving to create more gun-free zones, the problem is that it has already been virtually impossible to get concealed handgun permits in the parts of California where the attacks occurred. In Los Angeles Country, where two of the attacks occurred, there is only one permit for every 5,660 adults. In San Mateo County, where the other attack occurred, there is one permit per every 24,630 adults. By comparison, there is one permit holder for every nine people in the 43 right-to-carry states.

  Unsurprisingly, concealed handgun permit holders don’t stop mass public shootings in California. But they do make a difference in the 43 states where there are a lot of permit holders. Indeed, people legally carrying guns stopped at least 31 mass public shootings since 2020. And when Americans are allowed to legally carry concealed handguns, they stop about half the active shooting attacks in the US.

  It is hard to ignore that these mass public shooters purposefully pick targets where they know their victims cannot protect themselves. Yet, the media refuses to discuss that these mass murderers often discuss in their diaries and manifestos how they pick their targets. For example, the Buffalo mass murderer last year wrote in his manifesto explaining why he chose the target that he did: “Areas where CCW are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack” and “Areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack.”

  That is a common theme among mass murderers. These killers may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. Their goal is to get media coverage, and they know that the more people they kill, the more media attention they will receive. And if they go to a place where their victims are defenseless, they will be able to kill more people.

  Even if an officer is in the right place at the right time, a single uniformed police officer has an almost impossible job in stopping mass public shootings. An officer’s uniform is a neon sign saying, “Shoot me first.” Once the murderer kills the officer, the attacker has free rein to go after others. But where concealed carry is allowed, the attacker will have to worry that someone behind him is also armed.

  Take school shootings: Twenty states, with thousands of schools, have armed teachers and staff. There has not been one attack at any of these schools during school hours since at least 2000 where anyone has been killed or wounded. All the attacks where people have been killed or wounded occurred in schools where teachers and staff can’t have guns.

  Newsom’s approach contrasts sharply with another country that faces constant terrorist attacks. After a Jan. 27 mass public shooting in Israel left seven people dead, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Firearm licensing will be expedited and expanded in order to enable thousands of additional citizens to carry weapons.”

  Unfortunately, California’s strict gun control laws create fertile ground for successful mass public shootings. But the new push in some states for more gun-free zones is guaranteed to give mass murderers and other criminals even more hunting grounds.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 20:40

• Union Membership Reaches New Low, Big Labor To Blame
  Union Membership Reaches New Low, Big Labor To Blame

  Authored by Marco Rubio via RealClearPolitics.com,

  During last year’s rail industry fiasco, liberal reporters’ jaws dropped when I sided with workers and “Scranton Joe” sided with Wall Street.

  “I definitely didn’t have Marco Rubio being more pro-worker than Joe Biden on my 2022 bingo card,” tweeted one account.

  While Democrats becoming the party of the rich and powerful is certainly news, so too is the fact that railway union bosses sold out their members.

  As I said at the time:

  “It reveals the out-of-date and out-of-touch nature of our current collective bargaining system.”

  

  New Bureau of Labor statistics make that clear. In 2022 the share of U.S. union membership reached a record low. That happened despite the idea of organized labor being more popular than it has ever been since the 1960s, according to Gallup. No doubt this mismatch is partially the result of anti-union action by Amazon and other companies that have no respect for their workers’ dignity. But a trend that’s continued largely unbroken for seven decades can’t be chalked up to current economic conditions. Rather, it reflects the failures of union leadership and the brokenness of a system that hasn’t been revised since the Great Depression.

  Don’t take my word for it – take the word of Jon Hiatt, the former general counsel at the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), who says that union organizers are “blowing [their] opportunity” to capitalize on the growing needs and wants of workers. Or take the word of Director Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, who readily states that “the labor movement [is] organizing the same way they always have” in an economy desperate for change.

  Most telling of all, however, is what workers say themselves. Though they are hungry for greater representation, only 35% of potential union members would vote yes to organizing, while a roughly equal 32% would confidently vote no. When pollsters asked those opposed to union formation the reason for their preference, very few respondents cited retaliation by management. Instead, they cited issues like union corruption, member dues, and – above all – politics. That shouldn’t come as a surprise when not a single political issue that the AFL-CIO is involved in receives a majority of workers’ interest.

  To me as a policymaker, the conclusion is obvious. We need to break the stagnant monopoly of Big Labor and create new mechanisms for workers to negotiate with management in the workplace. That’s why U.S. Representative Jim Banks and I introduced the “Teamwork for Employees and Managers (TEAM) Act,” a bill that would update the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and grant American workers the right to organize outside of the official union framework. It would also guarantee a legally protected representative on large corporate boards. This proposal could inject new life into an economy long stifled by the dead hand of the past.

  Left-wing pundits, of course, have come out swinging against the bill, rehashing Big Labor’s argument that permitting non-union organizing would mean the death of workers’ rights. Their false assumption is that Big Labor protects workers’ rights in the first place. If that were true, why has Big Labor endorsed mass amnesty for illegal workers? Why did union bosses coordinate with the rail industry to have Congress deny paid sick days to its members? And why has union membership declined steadily since the 1950s, despite the fact that the popularity of organized labor is at a 57-year high?

  The answer is something I’ve been saying for the past few years. The Ivy League consultants, white-collar professionals, and increasingly woke activists running America’s major unions have become little more than extensions of the Democratic Party – and the Democratic Party, which in Joe Biden’s Senate days cast itself as the “people’s party,” has become the mouthpiece of white, college-educated elites. Workers deserve better, and the TEAM Act would give it to them.

  Republicans are already building a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition to represent America’s working class. Now it is time to deliver for working families by putting them above the special interests that dominate today’s Democratic Party.

  *  *  *

  Marco Rubio, a Republican and senior U.S. senator from Florida, is chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 20:20

• Doctor Warns Against 'Gas Station Heroin' That Mimics Opioid Effects
  Doctor Warns Against ‘Gas Station Heroin’ That Mimics Opioid Effects

  Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  An antidepressant from the 1950s is now being marketed as an over-the-counter dietary supplement to treat depression, anxiety, and opiate withdrawal, which is causing concern among health care workers and lawmakers.

  

  The drug, tianeptine, is sometimes called “gas station heroin” because of its opiate effects, difficulty to quit without withdrawal, and availability in gas stations.

  Legislation is being considered in Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida to criminalize tianeptine, and it’s been banned for over-the-counter sale in other states such as Indiana, Alabama, and Tennessee, though it can still be ordered online.

  Dr. Melissa Thompson with the Ivy Creek Detox Program at Elmore Community Hospital in Wetumpka, Alabama, said it can take up to a month for someone to become mentally stable again after detoxing from tianeptine.

  “It’s very powerful, and it gets a hold of your mind,” Thompson told The Epoch Times.

  Antidepressant Drugs

  Tianeptine is classified as a tricyclic antidepressant. It was used in the 1950s before selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) became available in the 1980s with the introduction of Prozac, the brand name for fluoxetine.

  Tricyclic antidepressants have immediate effects, unlike SSRIs, which can take several weeks to take effect.

  Tianeptine is still used as an antidepressant in France and other European countries but is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States.

  “You don’t have to take it for very long before you get physically dependent on it,” Thompson said. “Before you know it, you have to keep using it to keep from withdrawing. And when you do withdraw off it, it’s like you are withdrawing off two to three drugs at one time.”

  Among the symptoms of withdrawal are involuntary muscle movements, nausea, anxiety, and a feeling of doom, Thompson said.

  “It’s a very complicated, incapacitating withdrawal,” she said. “You won’t die from it, but you’ll want to.” opiate receptors in the brain.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 20:00

• Maduro Extracts His Pound Of Fat Leonard Flesh
  Maduro Extracts His Pound Of Fat Leonard Flesh

  By Tom Wright, published originally on the Whale Hunting newsletter,

  High-level political brokers are looking to trade Leonard Glenn Francis, a.k.a. Fat Leonard, for a notorious figure in U.S. custody…

  

  Back in September, Leonard Francis, the corrupt U.S. military contractor known as “Fat Leonard,” went on the run from justice. Leonard’s escape from home detention in San Diego came only days ahead of his sentencing in a shocking, decades-long Navy scandal involving cash bribes, orgies and top-secret documents.

  The whole sordid story, including the under-appreciated national security failure, is told in our new book, “Fat Leonard: The Man Who Corrupted the U.S. Navy,” also available as an audiobook and podcast.

  Leonard cut off his monitoring bracelet, avoided armed guards on his home, and jumped the border to Mexico. Only 16 days later, he was apprehended in Venezuela while trying to board a flight to Russia.

  We reported exclusively in Whale Hunting that Leonard had fled to Venezuela, even before the police arrested him.

  Now, Whale Hunting brings you another exclusive. And it explains why, four months after his detention in Venezuela, we’ve heard nothing about Leonard’s extradition to face sentencing in the U.S.

  Before it gives up Leonard, the Maduro government wants to extract its pound of flesh from the U.S. It’s got a very specific request in mind…and it’s going to be controversial.

  Enter a connected London-based lobbyist who is working to make it happen.

  First, a little background.

  Back in October 2021, the Biden administration extradited a Colombian man called Alex Saab from Cape Verde to stand trial in the U.S. for money laundering. Saab is a financial fixer for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and he’s in jail in Florida on charges that he helped siphon $350 million from Venezuelan state programs.

  Now, Saab sees his chance to get out of jail. He’s hired Maryna Pogibko, a lobbyist based in London, to push a potential deal around Washington: If the Biden administration wants Leonard Francis to be sent back from Venezuela, it’s going to have to let Alex Saab walk free. To sweeten the deal, he’s hoping Venezeula will also throw in some of the American citizens detained in the disastrous 2020 coup attempt.

  In recent weeks, Pogibko, a Ukrainian who runs Amadeus Consultancy, has been contacting people in Washington, D.C., with political connections to help broker a deal with U.S. government, our sources say.

  Pogibko didn’t return a request for comment.

  What are the odds on such a deal? A few months ago, perhaps slim.

  The U.S. doesn’t recognize Maduro’s authoritarian regime and it has indicted him, along with other members of his government, on narco-trafficking charges. The imprisonment of Saab in 2021 led to swift retaliation by Venezuela, which re-arrested six oil executives, including five American citizens.

  Since then, however, relations have warmed. In October, Venezuela freed the U.S. oil executives, and two other Americans, in exchange for two family members of Maduro who’d been in jail in the U.S. on drug convictions since 2015. The following month, the Biden administration eased oil sanctions on Venezuela.

  When Leonard went on the run, he must have carefully chosen Venezuela. With no diplomatic relations, Leonard likely thought the nation was a safe harbor. Now, it’s looking increasingly likely Saab will get what he desires.

  Maduro doesn’t want one of his most important bag men hanging out in a Florida jail, or worse, potentially cooperating with U.S. authorities. A Fat Leonard-for-Saab trade makes a lot of sense.

  For the U.S., the trade also is increasingly attractive. The government has already freed convicted Maduro family narco-traffickers because, as oil prices rise, the U.S. needs access to Venezuelan crude. Saab is just an annoying obstacle to better relations.

  Whether the Justice Department wants Leonard back to face sentencing, that’s another matter. The Navy, for sure, would probably rather Leonard didn’t reenter the public glare ever again.

  The whole debacle – from Leonard’s arrest in 2013; the obvious failure to indict top-ranking admirals; Leonard’s decision to give us an interview; to his escape and rearrest in an enemy state – has been so much egg on the face of the DOJ and Navy.

  But the U.S. government can’t very well do nothing to get back a criminal who spent decades conspiring with corrupt Navy officers.

  For 30 years, Leonard was a military contractor serving ships in the Pacific. In 2015, he admitted to stealing $35 million from the U.S. Navy with the connivance of senior officers over a quarter of a century.

  The Justice Department indicted over 30 former and current Navy officers, as well as Leonard and his staff in the scheme. But top Navy admirals got only administrative punishments , despite sleeping with prostitutes (arranged by Leonard), enjoying Michelin-starred dinners, and ensuring Leonard won lucrative contracts to supply food, fuel, and security to the Navy in Asia.

  Worse, Leonard filmed orgies and got hold of top-secret ballistic missile defense documents, all of which ended up in the hands of China. (When the NCIS finally started investigating Leonard, he moved all his files onto Chinese servers.)

  We smuggled a microphone to Leonard in home detention in 2021 and recorded over 25 hours of audio for our Fat Leonard podcast, the first time he’d spoken.

  Leonard admitted to me that he inflated bills and paid cash bribes, but he says many in the Navy knew what was going on. The Navy protected its admirals, he claimed.

  If he’s extradited, Leonard could face many more years in jail. And the Navy will once again have to reckon with the most disturbing corruption scandal in its history.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 19:40

• Metaverse: The Land Of Opportunity?
  Metaverse: The Land Of Opportunity?

  If changing the name of his company from Facebook to Meta wasn’t a big enough sign for how seriously Mark Zuckerberg is taking the potential of the metaverse, the company’s recent financial statements – revealing the billions of dollars sunk into the project so far – certainly should be.

  But what exactly is Meta betting on?

  Is there really so much potential in the metaverse to justify such massive investment?

  As Martin Armstrong highlights, forecasts by Statista for its Advertising & Media Markets Insights show, even looking at the conservative addressable market scenario (where 15 percent of the digital economy shifts to the metaverse), Zuckerberg is seemingly shooting for a slice of a large and lucrative pie.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  According to the analysis, the largest segments in terms of revenue in 2030 will be gaming ($163 billion) and e-commerce ($201 billion).

  By the end of the decade, the metaverse’s reach is projected to be 700 million people, worldwide, with the highest penetration rate forecast for South Korea.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 19:20

• Denialism: A Woke Way To Stifle Dissent
  Denialism: A Woke Way To Stifle Dissent

  Authored by Thomas Buckley via The Brownstone Institute,

  As with misinformation, labeling someone who disagrees with the current standardthink as a “denier” has become, pardon the term, endemic amongst the woke.

  

  Covid denier, climate denier, election denier, science denier – are all bandied about to immediately end debate,  tar any difference of opinion as literally insane, and depict anyone who ever disagrees with you as stupid and evil. 

  This epithet is now even being used pre-emptively to makes sure that no matter what anyone who now or ever questions the move to ban gas stoves will not be doing so based on facts or logic but because of their “gas stove denialism.”

  Like so much woke terminology, the initial meaning of the term is far removed from its current usage, though it has the distinct advantage of being generally familiar, allowing it to be “Trojan Horsed” (admittedly, some arise sui generis) into public discourse.

  Common usage of the term “in denial” (besides the joke about the river in Egypt) seemed to come to the fore mostly in regards to an inability to face up to an obvious, almost always, personal truth.

  In denial about your drinking, in denial about the fact that your kids are actually monsters, in denial about your sexuality (nothing to do with today’s genderpalooza) and on and on.

  But, like in almost every case in which the woke have stolen a term from the self-help/therapy movements the term has been utterly bastardized.  For example, trigger and safe space are now used in the opposite way of their initial intent – see here. 

  All of these terms started as ways to focus on personal responsibilities and actions and not in any way, shape, or form carried societal baggage and/or implications.

  And then, in the 1980s, there was a shift, though a rather understandable one.  There are those who, sadly and stupidly, deny that the Holocaust happened, that Hitler didn’t kill millions of Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and the disabled and political opponents and, well, it’s a very long and terrible list.  

  Hence the term “Holocaust denier,” an accurate and correct description of someone who, despite the overwhelming physical evidence of the event, denies its occurrence, almost always because of their personal political ideology.

  It is crucial to emphasize that denying the Holocaust happened is extremely different from the current crop of dissent-crushing “denials.”  The former involves a very specific proven fact; the latter – climate, election, etc. – all involve differences of opinions and reasonable and appropriate debates over whether something did, or is going to, happen.

  But the appropriately fetid stench attached to “Holocaust denier” intentionally and destructively is made to come along with all of the current “denials.”  In other words, if you are an election denier or climate denier you are just as terrible as a Holocaust denier even though nothing could be further from the truth.

  If used in its initial meaning, a climate denier would be one who claims the climate doesn’t exist, an election denier would a person who said the 2020 election never happened.

  And no – that’s not what is being claimed.

  The debate over climate change is one that should be taken seriously and done impartially; the discussion around the glaring voting security issues that appeared in 2020 should be considered similarly.  The science denier epithet attached to anyone who wondered about the risk and efficacy of the COVID vaccines is especially egregious because “science” cannot, by definition, be believed or denied – while technically a noun it is in fact a verb, it is a process and one cannot “follow the science,” just as one cannot follow a car one is driving.

  Climate denier/denialism implies ostrich-like stupidity – how can a person possibly disagree with the fact that we’re all either going to drown or burn or freeze or dehydrate or starve or flood or desert or disease or war ourselves to death in the next few decades unless we do something NOW?  Never mind that doing most of the things proposed NOW are unnecessary, contradictory, contra-indicated, and could end modern civilization as we know it and that, considering the utterly scientifically shoddy if not outright fraudulent actions many in the climate brigade have taken,  should not even be included in any rational discussion of the topic.

  The same is true with election denier.  The 2020 election was quite possibly the most unusual election in the nation’s history.  Barriers put in place years ago to try to ensure secure and accurate voting were obliterated, massive numbers of ballot were mailed out practically willy-nilly, the unconscionable practice of ballot harvesting was normalized in many states, counts were stopped and started and dragged on for days and on and on.  Just these undisputed facts alone are enough for intelligent reasonable involved citizens to legitimately wonder if the election was truly fair and honest.

  And it should be noted that in all three cases – climate, election, and science – that those who toss the “denier” term about are also those same people who ignore, denigrate, and outright block any attempt to actually figure out what exactly happened.  Remember: If you can evade any impartial investigation, you can declare with confidence that no investigation has ever found fault with your claims of the final and definitive and certain truth of your position.

  There are people who benefit from advertising “denialism.”  From last week’s private jet and meat and booze and hooker and billionaire-fueled Davos event to legacy media desperate to keeps its subscribers terrified and therefore more likely to continue to subscribe to the  tastefully decorated hallways and board rooms of massive financial institutions and international foundations and agencies and organizations to academics desperate to secure grant funding and make a name for themselves to tech giants who wish everyone lived by their algorithms because that would make selling ads so much easier to people who yearn for the psychological comfort of social acceptance and the feeling of being right all the time – these are the people that benefit every time someone outside their circle is called a denier.

  In the end, for the truth to prevail, “denialism” must be denied its power to stifle dissent, obfuscate facts, and intellectually segregate those with other opinions, those with legitimate questions, those who are not in denial of reality.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 19:00

• NYC Suburbs Buck Trend As Open Houses Packed And Offers Over Ask
  NYC Suburbs Buck Trend As Open Houses Packed And Offers Over Ask

  US housing market pain could be ahead, but some affluent New York suburbs are bucking the trend early this year as open houses are packed. 

  Falling mortgage rates might be stoking demand in a suburb about 20 miles north of Manhattan known as Scarsdale. Or rather, it could be the lack of inventory. Whatever is driving the housing market in the wealthy suburbs of New York has led to homes still selling over ask. 

  

  “Demand is very high in all price ranges,” Laura Miller, the listing agent with Houlihan Lawrence, told Bloomberg. She said:

  “There are tons of buyers and not enough inventory.”

  Even with the 30-year home loan rate doubling, demand for homes just outside of the city is high. Realtor.com data shows New York’s Westchester County, which includes Scarsdale and Bronxville, and New Jersey’s suburbs in Essex and Bergen counties, are still seeing homes sold for more than 10% over the listing price. 

  With the spring real estate market underway, there will be a lot of housing markets nationwide that will experience unevenness: 

  “This is going to be a spring season characterized by big differences between markets.” 

   “In some places new listings will lead to a line of people out the door and in others, crickets,” said Benjamin Keys, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

  No matter a boom or bust in the economy, a group of buyers still need homes. Many of them are finding out that inventory in the suburbs around NYC is shrinking. Realtor.com data also confirmed this and said Westchester had one of the steepest drops in active listing in the US last month, falling 15% from a year earlier. Fewer homes mean prospective homebuyers are chasing less supply which can spark bidding wars.

  

  Meanwhile, the rest of the country’s housing markets are frozen (besides Florida and a few other states) due to an affordability crisis. The good news is that home prices have yet to spiral lower because of limited inventory. However, some economists are warning about a 10-15% slide in overall home prices over the next couple of years. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 18:40

• Miami Black Leaders Apologize To Gov. DeSantis After Member Called Him Racist
  Miami Black Leaders Apologize To Gov. DeSantis After Member Called Him Racist

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

  The Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board apologized to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the weekend after one of its members described him a racist.

  

  Pierre Rutledge, the head of the Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board, issued a statement on behalf of the organization and apologized to the Republican governor after a member said last week that DeSantis is a racist.

  “We take it to heart when someone uses the term racist,” Rutledge said, reported Fox News and the Miami Herald, which reported that he made that comment at a Feb. 3 press conference. “Words matter. And so as chair, I must start by saying we want to pull that back. There’s nothing wrong with saying ‘we’re sorry.’ That’s not what we intended to say or be depicted by anyone. And that’s not the feeling of this board.”

  Another official, Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam, said that he also “can’t call the governor racist. I don’t know him personally. I don’t know his heart,” reported WSVN. However, he claimed that DeSantis’ policies “always [seem] to attack black people and people of color,” without elaborating.

  DeSantis’s administration has not responded to a request for comment.

  Rutledge, who is also a local school administrator, did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment. The Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board also did not respond to a request for comment.

  Rutledge’s comment came after Miami lawyer Stephen Hunter Johnson said last week that “our governor is racist” during a Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board meeting about DeSantis having blocked an African-American studies course, according to the Herald. After the comment, the board members unanimously voted to draft a letter to DeSantis to object against his rejection of the course.

  During Friday’s news conference, Rutledge made the apology while also simultaneously saying that the board released the letter to DeSantis to criticize his decision.

  “Politics has no place in determining school curriculum,” Rutledge said, according to WSVN. “If we rely on elected officials to tell our children what they can and cannot learn about, that is the epitome of political indoctrination.”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 18:20

• Disney Bows To Beijing, Removes 'Forced Labor Camps' Episode From Hong Kong
  Disney Bows To Beijing, Removes ‘Forced Labor Camps’ Episode From Hong Kong

  Disney has nixed an episode of “The Simpsons” from their streaming service in Hong Kong which references “forced labor camps” in China.

  

  The episode, “One Angry Lisa,” which originally aired in Ocober, was inaccessible from the Disney+ platform in Hong Kong, according to the Financial Times.

  In the episode, Marge Simpson is taking a virtual bike class with the Great Wall of China in the background. Her instructor says “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labor camps where children make smartphones.“

  Disney+ removed an episode of Simpson (again) in Hong Kong due to reference of China’s forced labor camp. This is what you’ve missed. pic.twitter.com/zdEihr4LuR

  — Asian American Conservative (@FactcheckingCon) February 7, 2023

  The removal comes after the CCP imposed a controversial national security law in Hong Kong in 2020, under which offenses defined by the regime as ‘secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces’ can result in a lifetime of imprisonment.

  This isn’t the first time Disney has bowed to Beijing. In 2021, the company pulled a 2005 episode referencing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. 

  Simpsons episode with Tiananmen Square sign saying ‘on this site, in 1989, nothing happened’ is missing from Disney+ https://t.co/K0LCP4csgw

  — Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 29, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThe decision to censor in China’s favor is probably “to do with the company’s ties, current and future, in mainland China,” said Kenny Ng, associate professor at the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University in a statement to FT, adding “It could be strategic to eliminate any China-offending episodes.”

  More via the Epoch Times:

  The pulled episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pan,” features the Simpsons’ visit to Tiananmen Square, where they see a joke placard that reads, “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

  In 1989 a student-led pro-democracy movement broke out in China. Protesters called for democratic reforms in the Chinese government and staged mass protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On June 4, the CCP sent troops to quash the protests, resulting in the deaths of thousands, according to rights groups’ estimates.

  In the episode, the family also visits the embalmed body of former CCP leader Mao Zedong, whom Homer Simpson calls “a little angel that killed 50 million people.”

  Under Mao’s leadership, historians have estimated that millions died during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) movement.

  In 2020, the company came under fire for partly filming the live-action movie “Mulan” in the Xinjiang region, where Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are being detained in internment camps.

  The movie features in its credits a “special thanks” to CCP agencies that are accused of participating in human rights violations against Uyghurs in the region, prompting calls for a boycott of the film.

  According to a 2020 report by PEN America, a New York-based nonprofit group focused on defending free speech, U.S. studios’ investment in theme parks in China serves as a form of business pressure, given that companies would stand to lose billions of dollars if Beijing decided to punish them.

  “Disney, for example, has a 47 percent stake in the Shanghai Disneyland Park, which opened in 2016 and which cost over $5.5 billion to build,” the report reads.

  Forced Labor in China

  The CCP has been accused of committing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The United Nations released a report in August 2022 detailing abuses committed by the regime.

  The U.N. report found that the scale and brutality of the detentions, framed by the CCP as compulsory reeducation camps or “vocational skills education centers,” likely qualified as a crime against humanity.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 18:00

• Powell Post-Mortem: "Volcker Has Left The Building" And "We're Not In Wyoming Anymore"
  Powell Post-Mortem: “Volcker Has Left The Building” And “We’re Not In Wyoming Anymore”

  One week ago, when summarizing Powell’s unexpectedly dovish post-FOMC press conference, we retorted to the Fed’s WSJ mouthpiece Nick Timiraos that the “Keyest takeaway: Burns 2.0 just steamrolled Volcker 2.0.“

  Keyest takeaway: Burns 2.0 just steamrolled Volcker 2.0 https://t.co/OQixemDItY

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 1, 2023

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

  Wall Street, where bearish sentiment continues to dominate…

  

  … did not like this assessment, instead arguing that the bulls only heard what they wanted to hear, that Powell was much more hawkish, etc, etc, and that the real Powell would be revealed today during his interview with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club in Washington, where he would shock the world with his unabashed hawkishness, or something. That did not happen, instead here are the highlights.

  • Disinflation has begun but has begun in the goods sector, about 25% of the economy. Long way to go and it will not be smooth, it will be bumpy move lower.
  • Labor market is extraordinarily strong. It’s good that inflation is coming down as we have not seen this before with a strong labor market.
  • Powell says that he sometimes gets the data the night before but only him with no clarification on which types of data that he receives.
  • On rate cuts by year-end, are markets wrong to remove those cuts? He had a data dependency type of response.
  • Not considering changing the 2% target
  • The shortage of workers feels more structural than cyclical, which is a problem.
  • Says labor market is “at least at maximum employment” which he defines as when a person wants a job, they can get a job. Says we may be beyond max employment. As JPM explains, this is the fear factor that full employment triggers inflation. If last Friday’s print is true, it seemingly disproves the hypothesis.
  • QT is passive not active and will take a couple years to get to a comfortable level. MBS sales are not on the list of active discussions.

  Some more from JPM chief economist Michael Feroli:

  Powell’s remarks today at the Economic Club of Washington were pretty similar to what he said after last Wednesday’s FOMC meeting: disinflation has begun, it has a long way to go, and further interest rate increases are likely needed. While he gave no sense that he was aiming to “set the record straight” after the perceived dovishness of last week’s presser, he did warn that the peak in the funds rate could be higher, particularly if the labor market remained strong. In short, this was a message of data dependency. 

  Anyway, Powell’s speech has come and gone, and just as we warned last night, not only did he not flip his post-FOMC dovishness (instead beat the data-dependency drum), but with positioning so bearish ahead of his speech today, stocks suffered a blistering delta squeeze (this is how JPM’s desk framed it: “For bullish Equity investors, Powell’s speech was a welcome outcome: assuming the majority of the balance of Fedspeaks this week is in the Bostic camp (2x more hikes, avoid a recession, etc) Powell’s speech today could help balance the view.” More amusingly, it was what we said last week after the first Powell appearance, that prompted BofA’s chief economist Michael Gapen to title his Fed Watch post-mortem note today “Volcker has left the building: Hoping for painless disinflation.” At least he didn’t say Volcker was steamrolled by Burns…

  Here’s why the chief economist at BofA agrees with what we said one week ago:

  Volker has left the building: Hoping for painless disinflation

  In remarks today at The Economic Club of Washington, DC, Chair Powell said that the stellar January employment report did not fundamentally change his view about the outlook for monetary policy, though it did “underscore” his belief that reducing inflation to the 2% target would likely “take time” and involve “ongoing rate hikes.” He added that continued strong employment gains could mean a peak policy rate above where markets are currently pricing (circa 5.0-5.25% based on federal funds futures contracts).

  As he did during the press conference following the February FOMC meeting, Powell clearly stated that he believes the disinflation process has begun. That said, he emphasized that it is only clear in goods prices, which are only 25% of core CPI, while the process has yet to show through in services inflation. He said he continues to expect that housing services inflation will slow “in the second half of this year” and nonshelter services inflation will cool when wage growth cools. In addition, he said non-shelter services inflation is his “biggest worry” when it comes to the outlook for inflation.

  It is what Gapen says next that goes on to explain the market’s eventual meltup, and close at session highs: i.e., “We’re not in Wyoming anymore“

  As we noted following the February FOMC meeting, Chair Powell appears to have embraced recent disinflationary trends and expressed optimism that it will continue. In our view, Chair Powell is placing more weight on an “immaculate disinflation” scenario, where inflation pressures subside without some softening in labor market conditions, including higher unemployment. This stands in contrast to the Powell from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last August, who leaned strongly into doing whatever it takes to bring inflation down and emphasized that inflation was unlikely to subside without some “pain” in labor markets. To be fair, Powell did say the Fed’ s baseline includes a softening in labor markets, but it took forty minutes of continued questioning to get to this answer.

  A slightly different way of saying the same comes from JPM’s Feroli who writes:

  Late last year Powell and other Fed speakers seemed intent on managing market expectations. More recently, they appear content conveying that they will respond to the data and letting the market take that as fair warning. This is sensible. While Powell has recently questioned the market’s more benign inflation forecast, he hasn’t protested it too strongly—after all doing so would be asserting with vigor that the Fed will miss its inflation target. Nor has he committed to maintaining restrictive rates for a certain amount of time. Instead, he’s emphasizing what conditions require more or less restraint. Last year the Fed guided the market for many steps of the way, which was easier when the goal line was far away. This year, the market shouldn’t expect the same degree of hand holding.

  Incidentally, BofA’s Gapen is less sanguine about a favorable, “immaculate” outcome: “In terms of our outlook for monetary policy, we cannot fully rule out “immaculate disinflation” outcomes. We, too, are optimistic about being past peak inflation and have inflation falling back to the Fed’s 2% by then end of 2024. That said, we would be surprised to see inflation fall all the way back to 2% without a reconciling of the imbalance between labor demand and labor supply. The labor market remains exceptionally hot, labor demand far exceeds labor supply, and, although wage growth has moderated , it continues to run at rates above what the Fed believes is needed to achieve its inflation mandate.” 

  It’s unclear how the market interpreted that last bit, but judging by the double reversal in stocks and final surge in risk (as well as yields) to close the day, traders were confident enough that “Volcker leaving the building” is good enough to push spoos back to 4300 which appears to be the market’s next destination, at least until such time as bears like Marko and Wilson capitulate.

  More in the full note available to pro subs.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 17:40

• Transurrection? Protestors Storm State Legislators Over Ban On Child 'Gender Transition' Surgery
  Transurrection? Protestors Storm State Legislators Over Ban On Child ‘Gender Transition’ Surgery

  Currently, at least twenty-one states in the US are in the process of passing legislation to ban “gender affirming care” within their borders while a handful of states are debating future steps. Under specific scrutiny are transition surgeries and drugs for children. In response, far-left institutions like the ACLU are seeking to intervene and trans protest organizations are raging.

  States presenting legislation or debating legislation against gender reassignment for children include:  Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Florida, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Indiana, Wyoming, West Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, Mississippi, Kansas, Oregon, Hawaii, Virginia and South Carolina.  

  It’s likely that any such legislation will fail in Democrat controlled states, but red states will probably succeed.  This has created anger among LGBT groups, many of them busing activists into state capitols to protest.  

  All these people are in the Oklahoma capitol building protesting a bill that will prohibit the sterilization & mutilation of KIDS.

  Regardless of their screams, the children must be protected. And that is what will happen, little by little, state by state. pic.twitter.com/B6PwjNkx9G

  — Gays Against Groomers (@againstgrmrs) February 6, 2023

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

  Part of what many refer to as the “trans trenders” movement, clinics offering gender affirmation procedures have exploded, going from 1 clinic in 2007 to over 100 clinics today.  Corporate sanctioned trans propaganda has also skyrocketed in the past five years.  With kids being exposed daily to trans ideology, the number of minors identifying as trans has jumped from less than 1% to around 5% in five years.   

  

  The notion of “gender identity” was created by researcher John Money and the Kinsey Institute in the 1960s.  It has been repackaged and rebranded in the past five-to-ten years as a “human rights” issue with trans activists declaring themselves an oppressed minority deserving of special treatment.

  Part of John Money’s experiments in gender identity included the involuntary gender reassignment of a child named David Reimer, who was born a biological male but suffered irreparable damage to his genitalia as an infant.  David was treated as a girl for his entire childhood and not told of his condition. 

  Despite his upbringing, Reimer rejected the female identity as a young teenager and began living as a male. He suffered severe depression throughout his life, which culminated in his suicide at thirty-eight years old.  (John Money was also later exposed for experiments involving pedophile-like behaviors).  The majority of today’s gender fluid ideology is rooted in John Money’s failed and in some cases criminal projects involving children, so, it’s not surprising that trans activists would be so insistent that gender bending surgeries and chemical therapies be legal for young kids.

  To this day, gender identity remains a subjective concept, making victim group status for trans people an exercise in existentialism rather than constitutional law.   

  With little to no science backing the notion of “gender” or gender fluidity other than studies into a rare mental illness called Gender Dysphoria, ethical questions are rising.  Should states sanction or enable the proliferation of a mental illness?  Should states allow the potentially permanent mutilation or chemical castration of kids who have not even fully developed their brains or emotional maturity?  Should states look the other way simply because parents want to virtue-brag about having a “trans child?”  Is there any proof that trans children even exist, or are they simply indoctrinated and brainwashed victims?  

  These are the issues that governments and communities are wrestling with.  While certain globalist groups such as the Ford Foundation pour millions of dollars into the trans agenda, and the imposition of gender affirmation procedures is hyper-accelerating, there has been little time for Americans to analyze and digest what is happening.  All we are told is, if we don’t accept the trans trend at face value and if we don’t support gender procedures for kids, we are bigots.

  In terms of constitutional protections, laws regarding children are not as clear cut.  The law generally recognizes that children are not competent enough to manage their own medical decisions.  By extension, the law also recognizes that some parents are abusive and should not be allowed to expose their children to certain adult situations and conditions.  

  The same restrictions are at times applied to mentally ill people as well.  Not everyone has the right to do everything they want to do in the moment – Some people have to be protected from themselves and others until they are of sound mind.  In the case of children, this should be a given, but for whatever reason the political left has chosen the transitioning of kids as the hill to die on.   

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/07/2023 – 17:20

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