- China Holds War Drills Around Taiwan "Directed" At US Senator's Visit To Island
China Holds War Drills Around Taiwan “Directed” At US Senator’s Visit To Island
China is again conducting major military exercises in waters around Taiwan, according to state media reports, which further decried US support to Taiwan separatist forces as “futile”.
China’s Defense Ministry was cited in Reuters as describing the drills as a warning aimed at the visit of a US senator. It said “China firmly opposes the visit by a US senator to Taiwan which severely damages the relationship of the two countries and two militaries, while it added that the drill near Taiwan is directed at US and Taiwan provocation.”
US Senator Rick Scott of Florida arrived in Taiwan on Thursday afternoon for a two-day visit. Importantly, his visit marks no less than the seventh US senator to visit the democratic-run island this year alone. This after a group of six senators made an unannounced visit in April led by chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez, which Beijing also vehemently denounced.
Sen. Scott visited Taiwanese envoy to Lithuania in April. Image: Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania “Scott is scheduled to meet with President Tsai Ying-wen and Premier Su Tseng-chang during his visit, the ministry said, adding that Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu was to host a banquet to welcome him,” regional sources detailed of his trip.
Meanwhile a top China official who overseas cross-strait affairs on Thursday declared that “reunification” of the island remains at the center of national rejuvenation plans.
According to The South China Post:
In an article published in People’s Daily on Thursday, Liu Jieyi, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office, said one focus of the strategy would be preventing and resolving major risks and hidden dangers in the Taiwan Strait, creating a “favorable environment” for national rejuvenation.
“Our growing comprehensive strength and significant institutional advantages continue to be transformed into efficiency in work related to Taiwan issues and push forward the process of national reunification,” Liu said.
The concept of “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan has been pushed by Beijing for decades; however, Liu in his op-ed reiterated that China has never ruled out the option of using force.
Top Beijing officials have also recently gone on record to say that US stoking “independence forces” remains a bright red line which could result in war. But in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine over the last more than four months, the Biden administration has been wary that President Xi could borrow from Putin’s playbook and stage a ‘shock’ blitz of the island.
Prior PLA exercise, via Chinamil.com.cn Taiwan has condemned the fresh PLA military drills as a “provocation” and has put its forces on high alert, as China sends fighter jets across the strait as part of its typical messaging. Taiwan’s air force in turn scrambled fighters to intercept and warn off the Chinese aircraft.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 23:20 - Russia Abandons The Construction Of A Natural Gas Pipeline To India And Japan
Russia Abandons The Construction Of A Natural Gas Pipeline To India And Japan
By Seetao,
Russian media recently reported that Alexander Perov, the head of the Russian Energy Security Fund, said that Gazprom had given up on the construction of pipelines in India and Japan considering politics and cost factors.
Gazprom Vice President Yelena Bulmistrova announced at a press conference that the construction of the natural gas pipeline from Russia to India has been postponed, calling it “a route that is too capital-intensive.”
According to the report, Perov said in response to the statement made by the Gazprom representative: “Negotiating on natural gas pipelines began as early as 2017, and India supports the implementation of such projects. However, it was clear from the beginning that the project has many geographies. Political risk. The main problem is related to the area through which the pipeline needs to pass. Therefore, it is foreseeable that Gazprom, as one of the project participants, will have such a position as it is today. After properly assessing the difficulties, Russia is unwilling to accept this. Program.”
Iran first proposed the idea of laying a pipeline from Pakistan to India in 1996. At that time, the country planned to spend 7 billion U.S. dollars to build a 2,775-kilometer-long natural gas pipeline, with the South Pars producing area as the gas source. The report also said that the geopolitical differences between countries and the opposition of the United States have caused the project to be repeatedly postponed. In 2008, Washington imposed sanctions on Iran because of its dissatisfaction with Iran’s nuclear program, which further deteriorated the situation.
According to the report, many quarrels have prompted India to change its vision, terminate cooperation with Iran, and begin to develop alternative pipelines from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Perov pointed out that if all the ideas of India are implemented, Russia will face many challenges, because the pipeline will pass through the mountains in Afghanistan, and the latter is the focus of the United States. The report quoted the expert as emphasizing: “All of this will bring high financial costs. This factor proves the correctness of the current position of the Russian multinational energy company.”
Bulmistrova also announced that the company would not consider laying the natural gas pipeline from Russia to Japan proposed in 2017. According to the report, according to the vision of both parties, the 15,000-kilometer pipeline will connect Hokkaido and Sakhalin Island at a cost of 6.7 billion U.S. dollars.
Perov pointed out that under the current decision, Russia will have a gas source problem: Russia’s gas field is difficult to support such a large-scale bilateral project. The report also said that experts believe that in order to make up for the possible losses caused by the unfulfilled plan, Gazprom needs to consider developing LNG projects in the Far East. Editor/Xu Shengpeng
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 23:00 - Justin Trudeau Offers Canadians Incentives To Distract Them From Inflation Caused By Carbon Taxes
Justin Trudeau Offers Canadians Incentives To Distract Them From Inflation Caused By Carbon Taxes
With stagflation becoming a rising concern not just for Americans but also Canadians, the pious pontificating from climate alarmists on the virtues of carbon controls is taking a back seat to more legitimate economic fears. No one cares about carbon “pollution” when they can barely feed and house their families.
Across the board, calls for cheaper energy alternatives are growing. Every western nation is pushing for more coal power and more nuclear power as oil prices inflate. At the same time, food and other necessities are witnessing a price explosion unlike anything we have seen in the past 40 years.
Not surprisingly, though, many environmentalists and political elites are heralding inflation as a perfect opportunity to enforce a new Green Agenda much like the Green New Deal. With prices climbing higher, carbon taxes on various industries and families can be introduced and the public won’t know what percentage of inflation is being caused by currency devaluation, supply chain problems or by artificially instituted carbon costs.
If prices are already high, then maybe the population will get used to the lower standard of living that will inevitably be associated with carbon controls?
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is implementing a not-so-novel solution to potential public resistance by introducing carbon tax credits or carbon checks, which certain families will receive four times a year. Lower income families with two children will receive up to $745 a year depending on the province in which they live. The measure appears to be very similar to “inflation checks” offered by California’s governor Gavin Newsom in the wake of crushing price increases.
Of course, these tax incentives are paltry when compared to the overall cost of carbon controls and the affects they will have on people’s pocket books. $745 in a year is nowhere near enough to make up for higher food costs, let alone the rising prices in other necessities.
Will Canadians be conned by scraps from the government’s vast tax table? Hopefully not. The Canadian government says the incentive payments mean 80% of families will be better off financially compared to what they pay in carbon taxes. However, the parliamentary budget officer says when the total impact of Trudeau’s carbon tax on the economy is considered, 60% of families are left worse off. This is probably still generous.
Keep in mind that carbon taxes are being pursued in the name of stopping global warming, which even the NOAA admits has only resulted in a 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures in the past century. This May, the NOAA indicated that global temps were only 0.77C above average. The average is derived from an incredibly short temperature record which officially starts in the 1880s. Yet, the public is supposed to entertain visions of environmental catastrophe and clamor for taxation on the air we breath?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 22:40 - Tackling Middlemen Should Be A Priority To Lower Prescription Prices
Tackling Middlemen Should Be A Priority To Lower Prescription Prices
Authored by Tom Price via RealClear Policy (emphasis ours),
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently voted unanimously to turn up the heat on the middlemen of the drug supply chain. The agency is opening up an investigation into Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs) for their role in “raising the price that consumers pay for medicine,” among other questionable behaviors.
(AP Photos/Stefanie Dazio) For years, PBMs have used their position as gatekeepers to the consumer market to enrich themselves and insurance companies — conduct that has attracted the attention of regulators, policymakers, and the public as consumer drug costs balloon. Since the year 2000, spending in the U.S. on pharmaceuticals has nearly tripled.
How is the extra cost making its way to consumers? You see, drug makers typically provide discounts in the form of rebates alongside their products, which in a perfect world would translate to more affordable medicine. But under the current middlemen scheme, those savings never make it to the patient at the pharmacy counter. The money is instead sucked-up by PBMs.
A snapshot of the past four years provides a good illustration of what’s happening. Since 2018, the net price of brand name drugs (meaning the sticker price with the discounts applied) has actually declined every year. But the average consumer wouldn’t know that. The price they pay — after the medicine passes through PBMs — has actually gone up. In other words, the drug makers aren’t driving consumer price increases — middlemen are.
That’s why a Democratic proposal to apply government price controls on prescription drugs without a strategy to rein in PBMs is full of hot air. Government price setting might temporarily treat the symptoms but not the root cause of why medicine costs are rising. And in the long run, the approach will suppress the innovation required to develop new lifesaving treatments, therapies, and vaccines.
Democrats have a pattern of advocating for healthcare reform that is long on style, but short on effectiveness. Obamacare is a good example.
During debate over the 2010 healthcare overhaul, the White House continually pushed the idea that the reform would save the average family $2,500 annually. But the “cost saving” elements of Obamacare are sleight of hand. Healthcare costs are still going up, but those increases are hidden by government subsidies. If the government handout were to disappear, monthly premiums would jump dramatically.
It’s far from a hypothetical scenario. Enhanced Obamacare subsidies that were included in the Biden administration’s $2 trillion pandemic-era spending bill are set to expire come 2023. When that happens, average monthly health insurance bills will more than double for the roughly 13 million Americans who receive subsidies on Obamacare exchanges. The only way to stop it is for Congress to squeeze taxpayers even tighter to cover the difference.
Rather than attempting to manipulate prices via the heavy hand of government, lawmakers should look to the free market for help. Injecting price transparency, providing patients with more healthcare choices, and cutting bureaucracy from the patient-doctor relationship will lower prices while also improving the quality of care.
When it comes to healthcare reform, policies that come out of Congress are often shortsighted and ineffective at addressing the root problem. Pushing a plan to address rising medicine prices without a component to tackle PBM middlemen is the latest example. Hopefully, the FTC investigation helps some policymakers see the light.
Tom Price, a former secretary of Health and Human Services and a former member of Congress, is a senior healthcare policy fellow at the Job Creators Network.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 22:20 - Vegas Mulls Curfew For Under-21s After Recent Shootings
Vegas Mulls Curfew For Under-21s After Recent Shootings
Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD), and casino bosses are mulling over a possible curfew for anyone under 21 years old after a string of recent shootings and violence in Sin City’s downtown district, according to local news Fox 5.
One of the most recent shootings was outside the Fremont Street Experience in downtown Vegas on July 4. Footage of the incident posted on Twitter shows a group of young adults fighting, and then gunshots rang out.
Video footage of the fight and subsequent shooting on Fremont Street last night. (Warning: violent content) pic.twitter.com/tGA278GwEv
— Las Vegas Locally 🌴 (@LasVegasLocally) July 4, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Following the shocking incident, Goodman tweeted that her administration, LVMPD, and property owners on the Vegas Strip all concluded they would “not tolerate violence/crime.”
She said LVMPD and city marshals boosted the number of patrols in the downtown area and added, “Our City Attorney will prosecute violators to the fullest, and we’re exploring a curfew for those under 21.”
Goodman’s announcement also comes after a June 19 shooting on Fremont left a 23-year-old dead. According to authorities, several people got into a fight inside a casino that escalated into gunfire on the street. A 16-year-old suspect was arrested in connection to the shooting.
Vegas is a playground and Disneyland for adults, and its economy heavily depends on tourism. The one thing the city and casino bosses cannot afford is the glitzy stretch of downtown Vegas plagued with violent crime because vacationers and convention planners could begin to steer clear of the town.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 22:00 - US State Department Offers $10 Million Reward for Info On Foreign Election Interference
US State Department Offers $10 Million Reward for Info On Foreign Election Interference
Authored by Nicole Hao via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The U.S. Department of State has recently rolled out an incentive to reward individuals up to $10 million for providing any information on foreign inference in U.S. elections.
The seal of the U.S. Department of State in Washington on May 11, 2018. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) In the past five decades, foreign election interference has been reported in the United States, such as in the 1968 presidential election. In the past seven years, it has become one of the hottest topics in the country, particularly about alleged Russian and Chinese interference in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections.
The Department of State announced on June 30 that its Rewards for Justice program “seeks information leading to the identification or location of any foreign person or entity who knowingly engaged or is engaging in foreign election interference.”
Furthermore, the reward offer “seeks information leading to the prevention, frustration, or favorable resolution of an act of foreign election interference, including by dismantling, in whole or significant part, an organization engaged in such activity,” according to its website.
China’s Interference in US Elections
The Chinese regime’s interference in the U.S. elections has been publicly acknowledged by its own economist.
In his July 2016 speech on “Sino-U.S. Strategic Philosophy,” Jin Canrong, a professor and associate dean of the School of International Studies at Beijing’s Renmin University of China, explained how the regime interferes in U.S. elections to bring pro-Beijing candidates to power.
“The Chinese government wants to arrange Chinese investments in every single congressional district to control thousands of voters in each district,” Jin said.
He claimed that with the U.S. population standing at about 312 million across 435 congressional districts at the time, there were roughly 750,000 residents living in each district.
“The voting rate in the United States is about 30 percent, which means around 200,000 residents in each congressional district vote for the representative in that district,” Jin said. “Normally, the difference of votes between two candidates is 10,000 or less. If China has thousands of votes on hand, China will be the boss of the candidates.”
Jin said Beijing’s ambition is to control at least the House.
Jin Canrong, professor and deputy director of the Studies Center of the U.S. at Renmin University, comments on the U.S.-China talks in Beijing, China, on March 19, 2021. (Screenshot/Jin Canrong’s channel/YouTube) “The best scenario is China can buy the United States and change the U.S. House of Representatives into the second Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress,” he said, referring to the committee that oversees the CCP’s rubber-stamp legislature.
In recent years, Beijing did more than Jin mentioned to interfere in the U.S. elections.
To influence U.S. public opinion against Republicans during the 2018 midterm elections, Chinese state media China Daily ran a four-page advertorial in the Des Moines Register—one of Iowa’s top newspapers—with content about the Sino-U.S. trade war impacting the exporting of soybeans to China. Iowa was a swing state, with multiple state and federal political offices up for election. Soybeans have been Beijing’s main weapon in the trade dispute.
In 2020, the CCP made clear through its state-run media that it favored a presidency under then-Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden because he would be “smoother” to deal with than Trump.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 21:40 - Biden Comms Staffer Lies About Extremely 'Senior Moment' With Teleprompter – Then White House Lies Too
Biden Comms Staffer Lies About Extremely ‘Senior Moment’ With Teleprompter – Then White House Lies Too
For those who paid attention to President Biden’s attempt at giving a speech on Friday, you may have noticed that the 79-year-old president has gone full Ron Burgandy – reading literally whatever is on the teleprompter, including “end of quote” and “repeat the line” – which were obviously cues for Biden’s ‘inside voice’ and not to be read.
In case you missed Biden’s incredibly incoherent speech just now, here’s a quick 21 second recap. pic.twitter.com/GlF0srePda
— Kyle Martinsen (@KyleMartinsen_) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThe flubs led to mass ridicule over Biden’s senior moments…
Whoever controls the teleprompter is the real President! pic.twitter.com/1rcqmwLe9S
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 8, 2022
Enter Emilie Simons, Biden’s assistant press secretary (and former Adam Schiff comms director) – who straight-up lies, claiming Biden ackshually said: “let me repeat the line.”
No. He said, “let me repeat that line.”
— Emilie Simons (@EmilieSimons46) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Which earned Simons a nice ratio…
And then she doubled down…
Self retweeting the ratio is a whole new level of misuse of the internet pic.twitter.com/JlqpB7zVFh
— Matt (@MRickG_) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In response, digital strategist Greg Price slows down the clip to emphasize her lie.
It’s even funnier when you realize Biden literally did not say what his comms staffer is telling you he said.pic.twitter.com/PFC6wTY4n5 https://t.co/9FzzuXcQYY
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 8, 2022
Oh wow you were Adam Schiff’s comms director before this?!?! You literally get paid to lie for a living.
Is the Russian collusion still hiding in plain sight?
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 8, 2022
The White House also repeated Simons’ lie!
White House transcript of Biden remarks is now incorrectly aligned with what this WH assistant press secretary falsely claimed on Twitter, despite the video showing Biden clearly stating “End of quote. Repeat the line.” & *not* “Let me repeat the line.”https://t.co/fJrzgfdbEy https://t.co/GX3zftIEtB pic.twitter.com/snrRHnHRIr
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) July 8, 2022
The White House is falsifying an official Biden speech transcript to try to win a Twitter fight.
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Even if he did say “let me repeat that line” (which he didn’t), he did not go on to repeat the line.
— jujubea (@jujubea10) July 8, 2022
Stay classy, America pic.twitter.com/AO9wWEiMoL
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 8, 2022
Remember when the media tried to gaslight us into believing Biden was totally, completely, absolutely supposed to say “end of quote” out loud? https://t.co/EDr6FCFXGz
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Great job making this go even more viral, Emilie…
Then there was this gem:
Joe Biden claims that the assassination of Former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe is “is the first use of a weapon to murder someone in in Japan.” pic.twitter.com/YOHWTv90K0
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsMeanwhile, today’s press briefing was a hot mess:
JUST NOW: Fight erupts between WH Staff and Reporter at the White House Press Briefing
Jean-Pierre: “Sir you’re being rude”
Reporter: “I’m gonna stand up here and ask my questions” pic.twitter.com/cKlDgEHIQc
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsUpdate: Ratio intensifies…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 21:34 - US Embassy Warns Americans To Avoid Tijuana Amid Cartel War Threats
US Embassy Warns Americans To Avoid Tijuana Amid Cartel War Threats
Americans might want to reconsider their travel plans to Mexico’s Baja California peninsula after the U.S. Embassy issued a startling new travel warning about cartel clashes with government security forces and elevated risk of kidnappings and possibly even death.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City issued the notice on July 4, warning Americans about traveling to Tijuana and Rosarito, Baja California, following the arrest “of a prominent cartel leader” and the rising probabilities “for confrontations between criminal organizations and Mexican security forces.”
“U.S. citizens should expect to encounter increased Mexican law enforcement presence in those areas. Criminal organization assassinations and territorial disputes can result in bystanders being injured or killed,” the travel advisory stated.
The Department of State’s Travel Advisory for Baja California has been raised to Level 3, indicating that U.S. tourists are at risk of being injured, killed, or even kidnapped.
The good news for those visiting Cabo San Lucas, San Jose del Cabo, and La Paz, located on the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, is that there are no travel warnings, even for U.S. government employees. However, the Department of State does say, “exercise increased caution due to crime.”
Meanwhile, other popular tourist regions, including Cancun, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum, have become chaotic as violent crime on beaches and even inside resort compounds (read: Shooting Erupts At Popular Mexican Beach Resort Again As Cartel Turf-War Escalates) has exploded.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 21:20 - Comedian Refuses Woke Streamer's Demand To Censor Abortion Jokes; Buys Own Special Back For $1 Million
Comedian Refuses Woke Streamer’s Demand To Censor Abortion Jokes; Buys Own Special Back For $1 Million
Comic Andrew Schulz has used his life savings to buy his upcoming comedy special, “Infamous,” back from a previously-unnamed streaming service, which “freaked out” and wanted him to edit or cut entire jokes deemed too “wild.”
A well-placed industry insider tells ZeroHedge that while Schulz has worked with Netflix in the past, Amazon is the streaming service in question, and Schulz spent $1 million to buy it back for self-release at his website, theandrewschulz.com.
“Some of you probably know this about me, I’m a very stubborn guy, so long story short, I took my f—ing life savings and I bought my special back,” he told his followers on social media, asking them to “spread the word” so that his “gamble” pays off.
Here’s the story about the special.
It’s simple really. I’m not gonna edit my material and cut out jokes bc a network is worried about Twitter backlash. That’s it.
I don’t know if this will work. I hope like hell it does. But that’s up to y’all.
Let’s change the game. pic.twitter.com/cUF6oD7sdt
— Andrew Schulz 👑HEZI (@andrewschulz) July 3, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“I think people like real authentic comedy, and I think that they would prefer that than some watered down corporate boardroom bullshit,” he added, according to The Wrap, noting that his fans “seem to really enjoy these jokes that are ‘too offensive’ or could cause too much backlash.”
Let’s watch what Amazon deemed too “wild,” shall we?
Schulz previously released a four-part Netflix special in 2020 titled “Schulz Saves America.”
Update: ZH reader “Lord Baltimore” sums it up nicely: “It’s perfectly acceptable for Progressives to sponsor drag events for children but abortion jokes are too “wild”. Got it.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 21:15 - Labor Dept. Made $77.2 Billion In Improper Unemployment Insurance Payments In 2021: IG
Labor Dept. Made $77.2 Billion In Improper Unemployment Insurance Payments In 2021: IG
Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
More than $77 billion of the unemployment insurance (UI) program’s total of $413 billion in payments in 2021 were made improperly, according to a report from the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General (IG).
Signage is seen at the U.S. Department of Labor headquarters in Washington on Aug. 29, 2020. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters) The Labor Department (DOL) “published an improper payment rate of 18.71 percent for the UI program, which resulted in an estimated $77.2 billion in reported gross improper payments,” the IG reported. The improper payment rate for the previous year was 9.17 percent, equal to about $37.8 billion.
“Additionally, DOL published an unknown payment rate of 0.21 percent, which resulted in estimated unknown payments of $865 million. These estimates were based on a statistical estimation approach that met a 95 percent confidence level, plus or minus 3 percent,” the report said.
The IG report was prompted by requirements of the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019, which requires federal departments and agencies to establish and report to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) improper payment rates in government benefit programs, as well as annual targets for reducing those rates.
The 18.71 percent rate of improper UI payments in 2021 represents a significant increase for the program, which saw a steadily improving trend during the previous four years of President Donald Trump’s administration.
The rate at the end of the first year of Trump’s tenure was 12.11 percent. The rate increased to 12.63 percent the following year, but then plunged to 10.21 percent in 2019, and to 2020’s 9.17 percent, according to data provided by paymentaccuracy.gov.
Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.), a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, told The Epoch Times on July 6 that he’s co-sponsoring legislation to address examples of wasteful federal spending like that highlighted by the IG report.
“It’s unacceptable that criminals utilized a global health crisis to defraud the United States government’s unemployment programs. Even worse, the misguided Biden administration policies, which discouraged people from going back to work, incentivized scammers to steal more money from the American taxpayer,” he said.
“Congress must now fulfill its oversight duties and help hold these criminals accountable. I am a proud co-sponsor of [Texas Republican] Rep. Kevin Brady’s Chase COVID Unemployment Fraud Act, which would empower the states to recover the money lost to fraud.”
Brady is the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee that oversees unemployment insurance.
Other Republicans on the Ways and Means panel also blasted the improper payments and lauded the measure originally introduced by Brady.
Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) told The Epoch Times that “it is painfully obvious that brazen criminals capitalized on pandemic relief programs and stole billions from hardworking American taxpayers,” and she urged Biden and congressional Democrats “to work with us to take this crisis seriously, expose fraud, and hold criminals accountable. We must send a clear signal that fraud will not be tolerated.”
Similarly, Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) said, “House Democrats refused to hold a single Ways and Means oversight hearing to address the growing problem of unchecked improper payments,” adding that “it shouldn’t surprise folks that a new, big-government program that incentivizes folks to not return to work—and had zero oversight—is ripe for fraud.”
And Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) told The Epoch Times that “the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress have shown no interest in holding these fraudulent actors accountable. That is why I am an original co-sponsor of the Chase COVID Unemployment Fraud Act, a bill to protect taxpayers by clawing back funds and recovering these improper payments. This is a priority for me now, and it will certainly remain a priority when Republicans control the House.”
On the other side of Capitol Hill, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the Senate’s most visible foe of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government, told The Epoch Times, “It’s no surprise that we are seeing a record level of fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars being reported in the wake of wasteful and unsupervised government spending under the guise of COVID,” said Ernst. “The federal government needs to take every step possible to recover fraudulent payment and put safeguards in place to stop future abuses like this from happening again.”
The IG didn’t offer an analysis to account for the doubling of the improper payment rate in only the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration, except to note that DOL included within the UI program expenditures made under the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 21:00 - Sanctions Risk "Catastrophic Energy Prices" That Will Take Long To Correct, Putin Warns
Sanctions Risk “Catastrophic Energy Prices” That Will Take Long To Correct, Putin Warns
Russian President Vladimir Putin told a government meeting on Friday that the domestic energy industry remains stable despite suffering setbacks from Western sanctions in the wake of the Ukraine war. He repeated a recent familiar talking point that sanctions are backfiring on the West: “The so-called economic blitzkrieg that our detractors have planned for us has failed,” Putin stressed in comments translated in state media.
And Bloomberg cited the Russian leader as saying, “Western countries have made mistakes with their energy sanctions that have led to a price rally and will be hard to correct ” – something which he said won’t be “corrected within a couple of days”.
Getty Images “We know that Europeans are trying to replace Russian energy resources, but the result of such actions is predictably an increase in gas prices in on-the-spot markets and an increase in the cost of energy resources for consumers, including households,” Putin said, in reference to recent headlines inundating US and European media detailing widespread consumer angst at the pump.
The situation is already going from bad to worse in Germany, as one recent Fortune headline spelled out, ‘The situation is more than dramatic’: Germany is rationing hot water and turning off the lights to reduce natural gas consumption.
“You can’t fix the mistakes that have already been made in just two days,” Putin explained in the fresh remarks of US-led efforts to get allied producers to boost output. He said further, per Reuters:
“All this once again shows that sanctions restrictions on Russia cause much more damage to those countries that impose them. Further use of sanctions may lead to even more severe – without exaggeration, even catastrophic – consequences on the global energy market.”
Putin also echoed prior warnings of his on how misled the ‘green energy’ obsession was in Europe, and that ultimately his words against energy market related sanctions “fell on deaf ears” with the common population in the West now suffering the consequences.
“Analysts at JPMorgan have warned that oil prices could soar towards $380 a barrel if Moscow slashed exports as “a way to inflict pain on the west”.”
https://t.co/L3kaYfkBEE— Policy Tensor (@policytensor) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The comments appear most directly aimed at EU leaders who are still debating imposition of both a total embargo on Russian oil (at this point its merely ‘partial’ with significant exceptions given to big consumers like Hungary), and a Russian energy price cap.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 20:40 - Biden Eschews Diplomacy, Chooses Path To War With Iran
Biden Eschews Diplomacy, Chooses Path To War With Iran
Authored by Connor Freeman via The Libertarian Institute,
There can now be little doubt—if there ever was any—that Washington’s intransigence is preventing the Iran nuclear deal’s restoration. Even in the face of an unending series of new U.S. sanctions, Israeli bombings in Syria, as well as Tel Aviv’s repeated covert operations, cyberattacks, drone strikes, and murders inside Iran itself, Tehran has remained steadfastly committed to diplomacy. Paying an immense political cost, the so-called hardliners in Tehran, led by President Ebrahim Raisi, even made the unprecedented decision to drop their demands for the elite military unit, the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to be delisted from the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) blacklist.
The Iranians called Biden’s bluff.
In yet another sign that they earnestly wish to conclude the essentially finalized deal, Tehran even purged their negotiating team of hardliners. Whereas the Americans went into last week’s Doha talks with “very low expectations,” and reportedly offered Iran no guarantees of economic benefits. After Doha, it looks as though Biden’s team will only continue to prove they were lying all along about rejoining the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This permanently aggressive policy will surely kill the deal, increase regional tensions, stoke war, and once again soil America’s reputation for future diplomatic endeavors.
Since 2019, the IRGC has been the only state military organization on this FTO blacklist. Former president and ultra-Zionist Donald Trump made the provocative move precisely because it is what the neocons, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Manama wanted. The FTO issue is designed to keep the Democrats from ever returning to the JCPOA. The neocons’ “sanctions wall” plan is working well.
The State Department has cynically pretended it is Tehran that has irrevocably stalled talks, laughably suggesting they want to “bury” the deal because of their refusal to budge on this allegedly “extraneous” issue. Tellingly, the Biden team has yet to acknowledge the massive concession. In fact, it is rare to see any mention of this critical news even in the independent media, let alone the corporate press. Those interested would have to read Middle East Eye, Antiwar.com, or the Libertarian Institute to even know Tehran dropped this understandable demand.
They were certainly not obligated to concede either, for this sweeping sanction against all current and former IRGC members, including many men—including doctors and musicians—who were conscripted often into non-combat roles acts as a de facto travel ban, breaks up families, and causes numerous disruptions. The sanction is an indisputable ancillary of Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” campaign.
The European Union diplomats such as nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora and more recently foreign policy chief Josep Borrel have traveled to Tehran and desperately tried keep negotiations going in the face of Biden’s Maximum Pressure and Israel’s attacks. In May, Mora made the trip, broke a two months long deadlock, announced talks would resume soon, and announced a deal was within sight.
The Israelis answered this positive news with an assassination campaign that has probably killed six Iranians, including a drone strike on a military complex that killed an engineer. Assassination targets are namely IRGC members and scientists working in the aerospace industry, missile, and drone programs. While the Israelis have carried out drones strikes inside Iran for years, currently one of the main focuses in terms of their propaganda vis a vis Iran’s military is their so called “UAV terror.”
Late last year, this was apparently noted by Iran hawks in Congress who have sought the expansion of sanctions to target Tehran’s drone program. These lawmakers attempt to blame Iran for the Houthis’ retaliations against their Saudi enemies. Of course, the missing context is that the U.S.-backed Saudis and Emiratis have waged a seven year genocide against the Houthis and the helpless Yemeni civilian population, bombing virtually all critical civilian infrastructure, killing people by the hundreds of thousands, mostly children under five. During the war, the entire country, the region’s poorest nation, has been blockaded by the Americans and the Saudis, precluding the unproven Iranian drone transfers.
But despite America’s war in Yemen being the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, these legislators, echoing the Israelis, liberally peddle claims of an Iranian air, missile, and drone threat to justify further U.S. entrenchment in the Middle East as well as the main objective of forging an American led, anti-Iran, NATO style alliance. With Biden’s upcoming Middle East trip, he will reportedly may be offering security guarantees to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.
Biden’s goal is to help Tel Aviv build this Middle East mini-NATO including Israel’s fellow Abraham Accords members who are collectively encircling Iran.
As Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com news editor, reports,
Israel has increased military ties with regional countries as a result of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, which saw Israel normalize relations with the UAE and Bahrain. Saudi Arabia has been hesitant to open up relations with Israel, but the two nations have quietly increased military cooperation.
“Part of the purpose is…is to deepen Israel’s integration in the region, which I think we’re going to be able to do and which is good—good for peace and good for Israeli security,” Biden told reporters at the NATO summit in Madrid. “And that’s why Israel leaders have come out so strongly for my going to Saudi,” he added.
Israel has been lobbying Biden to visit Saudi Arabia and reportedly wants the U.S.’s approval to send Riyadh a new laser missile defense system, known as the Iron Laser. The alliance that Israel is working to build in the region is focused on integrated air defense systems, according to Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
It is not difficult to see where this policy is leading us. The U.S. Empire is pivoting to Asia and Europe. This shift away from the Middle East is unacceptable for America’s client states. Seeing the writing on the wall, these states first turned to diplomacy to resolve long held issues among neighboring adversaries, including importantly a series of Baghdad brokered talks between Tehran and Riyadh which may resume soon.
However, Washington and Israel will not allow this rebalancing. Along with China and Russia becoming more involved in the region, these ostensibly positive developments pose a threat to Israel and America’s regional hegemony. Biden’s Maximum Pressure and this burgeoning alliance, are intended to reassure the restive satellites, the policy increases the chances of war with Iran beyond anything we have seen in decades.
America’s brutal myriad wars in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa have claimed millions of lives, shredded our bill of rights, and—including interest—have cost more than ten trillion dollars. The Empire has wrecked our economy for generations. Fighting yet another war against not just one of Iran’s allies like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but as Naftali Bennett says the “head of the octopus” itself, for apartheid Israel and its Gulf dictatorship partners is something Americans simply cannot afford.
The U.S. is broke, more than $30 trillion in debt, oil prices are soaring, inflation is skyrocketing, shortages have been normalized, civil unrest is boiling, and all the while the Blob is playing nuclear chicken with Russia and China.
Veterans still commit suicide at alarming rates over their experiences in prior, illegal, and unconstitutional wars.
As the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow has written,
Alas for the US, it is not only foreigners who suffer, often in prodigious numbers, from Washington’s myriad military misadventures. Americans do too. More than 7000 US personnel and nearly 8000 contractors have died in combat since 9/11. Some 30,000 military personnel and veterans of the “terrorism” wars committed suicide over the last two decades. Another 52,000 were wounded in combat, but the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs contends that the number harmed by their service “is exponentially larger” since Pentagon accounting does not include other injuries in theater as well as conditions diagnosed after personnel return home.
Americans urgently need to thoroughly rebuke the Bush-Clinton foreign policy consensus that dragged us into this devastating and chaotic era.
Barack Obama and Trump promised to be different, respectively to end the mindset that led to the Iraq war and leave the Middle East where we should never have been in the first place. But they lied. Instead both doubled down on the wars in the Middle East and Africa, and picked unnecessary fights with Russia and China. Along with diplomacy eschewing Biden, they made global thermonuclear war a serious possibility.
Hopefully we have finally learned some hard lessons during these last 30 years of mass murder and destruction. We cannot allow Biden—”Israel’s man in Washington,” the man who wrote the Patriot Act and whipped the Senate into supporting the Iraq War—to now start a war with Iran. The JCPOA is key to taking war off the table, and hence why it has practically no support in Washington.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 20:20 - Blinken Tells Lavrov "Let The Grain Out" Of Ukraine As China, India & Brazil Refuse Condemnation
Blinken Tells Lavrov “Let The Grain Out” Of Ukraine As China, India & Brazil Refuse Condemnation
We detailed earlier that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stormed out of a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Bali, Indonesia on Friday, citing that other countries had grown distracted through “fevered” condemnation of Russia for its Ukraine invasion.
The United States’ criticism at the meeting centered on stalled global food supply, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken using the occasion to demand that Russia open up ports and let the grain out of Ukraine. “To our Russian colleagues: Ukraine is not your country. Its grain is not your grain. Why are you blocking the ports? You should let the grain out,” Blinken said before top diplomats in closed-door talks meant as preparatory to the annual G20 heads of state summit which is set for November.
Via Reuters Blinken issued scathing criticism of “unprovoked and unjustifiable war of choice” at the meeting, but a defiant Lavrov said he wouldn’t “go running” after US representatives for the sake of talks. Blinken had vowed alongside French and German top diplomats to find “ways to address the global food security concerns that have resulted from Russia’s deliberate targeting of Ukrainian agriculture.”
Lavrov addressed the complete lack of communication or diplomatic contacts between Moscow and Washington by asserting, “It was not us who abandoned contact, it was the United States.”
Host country Indonesia’s message to both the US and Russia, and to the Ukrainians, was that negotiations must urgently be held to bring the conflict to a close.
Friday’s meeting was the first time Lavrov and Blinken attended the same event. But given the very visible shunning of each other, it’s not looking like there will be bilateral dialogue over the war anytime soon, also as President Vladimir Putin has appeared to ratchet his rhetoric amid steady Russian military gains in the Donbas.
LAVROV WALKS OUT OF G20 MEETING
pic.twitter.com/jmFenIace1— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Meanwhile, Putin on Friday in fresh remarks warned Russia’s energy industry to brace for an oil embargo from Europe. Putin reiterated familiar themes, including that Europe essentially ‘shot itself in the foot’ by years of obsessing over the green agenda.
- PUTIN: TRANSITION TO GREEN ENERGY HAS RESULTED IN INCREASE IN ENERGY PRICES
- PUTIN: RUSSIAN COMPANIES HAVE TO BE PREPARED FOR OIL EMBARGO FROM EUROPE
- PUTIN: CONTINUED USE OF SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA COULD LEAD TO “CATASTROPHIC” CONSEQUENCES FOR GLOBAL MARKET
As for Ukraine’s blocked wheat exports, Russia’s position has remained that port and vessel transit blockages are primarily due to Ukraine’s military mining their own ports, which Kiev says was necessary to thwart the major Russian force invasion.
At the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, of note is that China, India and Brazil were among those refusing to join the chorus of Western condemnation aimed at Moscow:
“The nations in attendance [at the G20] were divided about how to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with major powers like India, China and Brazil unwilling to join in the Western-led sanctions against Moscow….”https://t.co/Cq6UmJCaVS
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“The nations in attendance [at the G20] were divided about how to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with major powers like India, China and Brazil unwilling to join in the Western-led sanctions against Moscow,” The New York Times underscored.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 20:00 - Gaslighting: The Psychology Of Shaping Another's Reality
Gaslighting: The Psychology Of Shaping Another’s Reality
Authored by Cynthia Chung via ‘Through A Glass Darkly’ Substack,
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”– Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
We are living in a world where the degree of disinformation and outright lying has reached such a state of affairs that, possibly for the first time ever, we see the majority of the western world starting to question their own and surrounding level of sanity. The increasing frenzied distrust in everything “authoritative” mixed with the desperate incredulity that “everybody couldn’t possibly be in on it!” is slowly rocking many back and forth into a tighter and tighter straight jacket. “Question everything” has become the new motto, but are we capable of answering those questions?
Presently the answer is a resounding no.
The social behaviourist sick joke of having made everyone obsessed with toilet paper of all things during the start of what was believed to be a time of crisis, is an example of how much control they have over that red button labelled “commence initiation of level 4 mass panic”.
And can the people be blamed? After all, if we are being lied to, how can we possibly rally together and point the finger at the root of this tyranny, aren’t we at the point where it is everywhere?
As Goebbels infamously stated,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State [under fascism].”
And here we find ourselves today, at the brink of fascism. However, we have to first agree to forfeit our civil rights as a collective before fascism can completely dominate. That is, the big lie can only succeed if the majority fails to call it out, for if the majority were to recognise it for what it is, it would truly hold no power.
The Battle for Your Mind
“Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognise that one was “oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”, and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.
If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New World”, would quickly organise the masses and revolution against their “controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”.
However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?
The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index Librorum Prohibitorum[1]. We can read any of the writings that were banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”.
We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas” that were recognised by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a life of slavery. And yet, today, the majority choose not to…
It is recognised, albeit superficially, that who controls the past, controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book “1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there still remains a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about the past.
What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not? [And thus, are free to rewrite it as we choose…]”
Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire, unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted.
In fact, many are probably not fully aware that presently there is a battle waging for who will “control the past” in a manner that is closely resembling a form of “memory wipe”.
* * *
William Sargant was a British psychiatrist and, one could say, effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West, with connections to British Intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which would influence the CIA and American military via the program MK Ultra. Sargant was also an advisor for Ewen Cameron’s LSD “blank slate” work at McGill University, funded by the CIA.
Sargant accounts for his reason in studying and using forms of “mind control” on his patients, which were primarily British soldiers that were sent back from the battlefield during WWII with various forms of “psychosis”, as the only way to rehabilitate extreme forms of PTSD.
The other reason, was because the Soviets had apparently become “experts” in the field, and out of a need for national security, the British would thus in turn have to become experts as well…as a matter of self-defence of course.
The work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, had succeeded in producing some disturbingly interesting insights into four primary forms of nervous systems in dogs, that were combinations of inhibitory and excitatory temperaments; “strong excitatory”, “balanced”, “passive” and “calm imperturbable”. Pavlov found that depending on the category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram behaviour”. The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on anyone.
It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with a simple code word. At least, these were the thriller stories and movies that were pumped into the population. How horrific indeed! That the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred ground to be our own…our very “minds”!
However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that this was not exactly how mind control worked.
For one thing, the issue of “free will” was getting in the way.
No matter the length or degree of electro-shock, insulin “therapy”, tranquilizer cocktails, induced comas, sleep deprivation, starvation etc induced, it was discovered that if the subject had a “strong conviction” and “strong belief” in something, this could not be simply erased, it could not be written over with any arbitrary thing. Rather, the subject would have to have the illusion that their “conditioning” was in fact a “choice”. This was an extremely challenging task, and long term conversions (months to years) were rare.
However, Sargant saw an opening. It was understood that one could not create a new individual from scratch, however, with the right conditioning that was meant to lead to a physical breakdown using abnormal stress (effectively a reboot of the nervous system), one could increase the “suggestibility” markedly in their subjects.
Sargant wrote in his “Battle of the Mind”: “Pavlov’s clinical descriptions of the ‘experimental neuroses’ which he could induce in dogs proved, in fact, to have a close correspondence with those war-neuroses which we were investigating at the time.”
In addition, Sargant found that a falsely implanted memory could help induce abnormal stress leading to emotional exhaustion and physical breakdown to invoke “suggestibility”. That is, one didn’t even need to have a “real stress” but an “imagined stress” would work just as effectively.
Sargant goes on to state in his book:
“It is not surprising that the ordinary person, in general, is much more easily indoctrinated than the abnormal…A person is considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ by the community simply because he accepts most of its social standards and behavioural patterns; which means, in fact, that he is susceptible to suggestion and has been persuaded to go with the majority on most ordinary or extraordinary occasions.”
Sargant then goes over the phenomenon of the London Blitz, which was an eight month period of heavy bombing of London during WWII. During this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, people rapidly became accustomed to the idea that their neighbours could be and were buried alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new “environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to resist it.
Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope and thus continues to be “functional” despite an ever changing environment.
It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense.
Sargant quotes Hecker’s work, who was studying the dancing mania phenomenon that occurred during the Black Death, where Hecker observed that heightened suggestibility had the capability to cause a person to “embrace with equal force, reason and folly, good and evil, diminish the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice.”
And that such a state of mind was likened to the first efforts of the infant mind “this instinct of imitation when it exists in its highest degree, is also united a loss of all power over the will, which occurs as soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established, producing a condition like that of small animals when they are fascinated by the look of a serpent.”
I wonder if Sargant imagined himself the serpent…
Sargant does finally admit:
“This does not mean that all persons can be genuinely indoctrinated by such means. Some will give only temporary submission to the demands made on them, and fight again when strength of body and mind returns. Others are saved by the supervention of madness. Or the will to resist may give way, but not the intellect itself.”
But he comforts himself as a response to this stubborn resistance that “As mentioned in a previous context, the stake, the gallows, the firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for the failures.”
How to Resist the Deconstruction of Your Mind
“He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first of all drive mad.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Masque of Pandora”
For those who have not seen the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight” directed by George Cukor, I would highly recommend you do so since there is an invaluable lesson contained within, that is especially applicable to what I suspect many of us are experiencing nowadays.
The story starts with a 14 year old Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) who is being taken to Italy after her Aunt Alice Alquist, a famous opera singer and caretaker of Paula, is found murdered in her home in London. Paula is the one who found the body, and horror stricken is never her old self again. Her Aunt was the only family Paula had left in her life. The decision is made to send her away from London to Italy to continue her studies to become a world-renowned opera singer like her Aunt Alice.
Years go by, Paula lives a very sheltered life and a heavy somberness is always present within her, she can never seem to feel any kind of happiness. During her singing studies she meets a mysterious man (her piano accompanist during her lessons) and falls deeply in love with him. However, she knows hardly anything about the man named Gregory.
Paula agrees to marry Gregory after a two week romance and is quickly convinced to move back into her Aunt’s house in London that was left abandoned all these years. As soon as she enters the house, the haunting of the night of the murder revisits her and she is consumed with panic and fear. Gregory tries to calm her and talks about the house needing just a little bit of air and sun, and then Paula comes across a letter written to her Aunt from a Sergis Bauer which confirms that he was in contact with Alice just a few days before her murder. At this finding, Gregory becomes bizarrely agitated and grabs the letter from Paula. He quickly tries to justify his anger blaming the letter for upsetting her. Gregory then decides to lock all of her Aunt’s belongings in the attic, to apparently spare Paula any further anguish.
It is at this point that Gregory starts to change his behaviour dramatically. Always under the pretext for “Paula’s sake”, everything that is considered “upsetting” to Paula must be removed from her presence. And thus quickly the house is turned into a form of prison. Paula is told it is for her best not to leave the house unaccompanied, not to have visitors and that self-isolation is the best remedy for her “anxieties” which are getting worst. Paula is never strictly forbidden at the beginning but rather is told that she should obey these restrictions for her own good.
Before a walk, he gives as a gift a beautiful heirloom brooch that belonged to his mother. Because the pin needs replacing, he instructs Paula to keep it in her handbag, and then says rather out of context, “Don’t forget where you put it now Paula, I don’t want you losing it.” Paula remarks thinking the warning absurd, “Of course I won’t forget!” When they return from their walk, Gregory asks for the brooch, Paula searches in her handbag but it is not there.
It continues on like this, with Gregory giving warnings and reminders, seemingly to help Paula with her “forgetfulness” and “anxieties”. Paula starts to question her own judgement and sanity as these events become more and more frequent. She has no one else to talk to but Gregory, who is the only witness to these apparent mishaps. It gets to a point where completely nonsensical behaviour is being attributed to Paula by Gregory. A painting is found missing on the wall one night. Gregory talks to Paula like she is a 5 year child and asks her to put it back. Paula insists she does not know who took it down. After her persistent passionate insistence that it was not her, she walks up the stairs almost like she were in a dream state and pulls the painting from behind a statue. Gregory asks why she lied, but Paula insists that she only thought to look there because that is where it was found the last two times this occurred.
For weeks now, Paula thinks she has been seeing things, the gas lights of the house dimming for no reason, she also hears footsteps above her bedroom. No one else seems to take notice. Paula is also told by Gregory that he found out that her mother, who passed away when she was very young, had actually gone insane and died in an asylum.
Despite Paula being reduced to a condition of an ongoing stupor, she decides one night to make a stand and regain control over her life. Paula is invited, by one of her Aunt Alice’s close friends Lady Dalroy, to attend a high society evening with musical performances. Recall that Paula’s life gravitated around music before her encounter with Gregory. Music was her life. Paula gets magnificently dressed up for the evening and on her way out tells Gregory that she is going to this event. Gregory tries to convince her that she is not well enough to attend such a social gathering, when Paula calmly insists that she is going and that this woman was a dear friend of her Aunt, Gregory answers that he refuses to accompany her (in those days that was a big deal). Paula accepts this and walks with a solid dignity, undeterred towards the horse carriage. In a very telling scene, Gregory is left momentarily by himself and panic stricken, his eyes bulging he snaps his cigar case shut and runs after Paula. He laughingly calls to her, “Paula, you did not think I was serious? I had no idea that this party meant so much to you. Wait, I will get ready.” As he is getting ready in front of the mirror, a devilish smirk appears.
Paula and Gregory show up to Lady Dalroy’s house late, the pianist is in the middle of the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #8 in C minor. They quickly are escorted to two empty seats. Paula is immediately immersed in the piece, and Gregory can see his control is slipping. After only a few minutes, he goes to look at his pocket watch but it is not in his pocket. He whispers into Paula’s ear, “My watch is missing”. Immediately, Paula looks like she is going to be sick. Gregory takes her handbag and Paula looks in horror as he pulls out his pocket watch, insinuating that Paula had put it there. She immediately starts losing control and has a very public emotional breakdown. Gregory takes her away, as he remarks to Lady Dalroy that this is why he didn’t want Paula coming in the first place.
When they arrive home, Paula has by now completely succumbed to the thought that she is indeed completely insane. Gregory says that it would be best if they go away somewhere for an indefinite period of time. We later find out that Gregory is intending on committing her to an asylum. Paula agrees to leave London with Gregory and leaves her fate entirely in his hands.
In the case of Paula it is clear. She has been suspecting that Gregory has something to do with her “situation” but he has very artfully created an environment where Paula herself doubts whether this is a matter of unfathomable villainy or whether she is indeed going mad.
It is rather because she is not mad that she doubts herself, because there is seemingly no reason for why Gregory would put so much time and energy into making it look like she were mad, or at least so it first appears. But what if the purpose to her believing in her madness was simply a matter of who is in control?
Paula almost succeeds in gaining the upper-hand in this power-struggle, the evening she decided to go out on her own no matter what Gregory insisted was in her best interest. If she would have held her ground at Lady Dalroy’s house and simply replied, “I have no idea why your stupid watch ended up in my handbag and I could care less. Now stop interrupting this performance, you are making a scene!” Gregory’s spell would have been broken as simple as that. If he were to complain to others about the situation, they would also respond, “Who cares man, why are you so obsessed about your damn watch?”
We find ourselves today in a very similar situation to Paula. And the voice of Gregory is represented by the narrative of false news and the apocalyptic social behaviourist programming in our forms of entertainment. The things most people voluntarily subject themselves to on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Socially conditioning them, like a pack of salivating Pavlovian dogs, to think it is just a matter of time before the world ends and with a ring of their master’s bell…be at each other’s throats.
Paula ends up being saved in the end by a man named Joseph Cotten (a detective), who took notice and quickly discerned that something was amiss. In the end Gregory is arrested. It is revealed that Gregory is in fact Sergis Bauer. That he killed Alice Alquist and that he has returned to the scene of the crime after all these years in search for the famous jewels of the opera singer. The jewels were in fact rather worthless from the standpoint that they were too famous to be sold, however, Gregory never intended on selling these jewels but rather had become obsessed with the desire to merely possess them.
That is, it is Gregory who has been entirely mad all this time.
A Gregory is absolutely dangerous. He would have been the end of Paula if nothing had intervened. However, the power that Gregory held was conditional to the degree that Paula allowed it to control her. Paula’s extreme deconstruction was thus entirely dependent on her choice to let the voice of Gregory in. That is, a Gregory is only dangerous if we allow ourselves to sleep walk into the nightmare he has constructed for us.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”– Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”
* * *
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation. Please consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 19:40 - Florida Man Charged In $1 Billion Fraud Scheme Of Counterfeit Cisco Devices
Florida Man Charged In $1 Billion Fraud Scheme Of Counterfeit Cisco Devices
A federal grand jury indicted a Florida man for trafficking over $1 billion in counterfeit Cisco networking equipment on Amazon and eBay stores between 2014 and 2022.
According to the Department of Justice (DoJ), Onur Aksoy, aka “Ron Aksoy” and “Dave Durden,” 38, of Miami, operated at least 19 companies formed in New Jersey and Florida that sold counterfeit Cisco networking equipment through 15 Amazon storefronts and ten eBay storefronts and multiple other entities (collectively, the “Pro Network Entities”).
Attorney for the US Vikas Khanna, District of New Jersey, and Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite said Aksoy’s scheme worked by importing network devices from China and Hong Kong that were older models but modified to appear to be authentic versions of new, enhanced, and more expensive ones.
“The fraudulent and counterfeit products sold by the Pro Network Entities suffered from numerous performance, functionality, and safety problems. Often, they would simply fail or otherwise malfunction, causing significant damage to their users’ networks and operations – in some cases, costing users tens of thousands of dollars. Customers of Aksoy’s fraudulent and counterfeit devices included hospitals, schools, government agencies, and the military,” the DoJ wrote in a media release Friday morning.
Aksoy generated over $100 million in revenue after selling more than $1 billion in fake networking equipment. The government alleges the Florida man “received millions of dollars for his personal gain” from the scheme.
DOJ has charged Aksoy with conspiracy to traffic counterfeit goods and mail and wire fraud, and both carry hefty sentencing times and fines.
This indictment sheds light on an entire underground economy devoted to scamming consumers on Amazon and eBay. Terrifyingly, the counterfeit Cisco networking equipment could’ve been installed in critical systems for companies and or even government agencies, making them more vulnerable to a ransomware attack or unexpected performance issues.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 19:20 - North Carolina Governor Signs Order To Continue Enabling Abortion Access
North Carolina Governor Signs Order To Continue Enabling Abortion Access
Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina, signed an executive order on July 6 to continue enabling access to abortion in the state and shield people criminally charged with performing the procedure from being extradited to other states.
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper speaks to the crowd during an election night event in Raleigh, North Carolina, on May 17, 2022. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images) The Democrat noted that the executive order is “not intended to change and does not change North Carolina law, but rather ensures that North Carolinians are afforded the protections and rights provided under North Carolina law.”
His action comes after the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24 struck down Roe v. Wade in a case involving an abortion law in Mississippi. Roe v. Wade had largely enabled abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy across the United States for nearly 50 years. The overturning of Roe returns regulation of the procedure back to the states.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, also signed an executive order similar to Cooper’s on July 6. Other Democratic governors, including for Maine and Rhode Island, on July 5 made similar moves to shield patients and providers of abortions from penalties. Over in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker signed a similar executive order on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned.
In North Carolina, abortions are legal until fetal viability, which typically falls between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy. An abortion can be still performed after that in the case of a medical emergency, to protect the life or health of the mother. Abortions done for the purpose of sex selection are prohibited.
People who opt to have an abortion must receive information designed to dissuade them from moving forward with the procedure and wait 72 hours before the abortion is provided. They also must undergo an ultrasound before the abortion.
Cooper’s executive order (pdf) states that people who provide or receive “reproductive health care services that are legal” in North Carolina will not be imposed civil or criminal penalties by the Cabinet agencies or people under the governor’s office.
“Reproductive health care services” is defined in the document as including abortions.
A pro-life activist holds plastic figurines of unborn babies during a protest on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July, 29, 2010. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images) Protect Against Extraditions
Cooper’s order states that Cabinet agencies shall coordinate to “protect people or entities who are providing, assisting, seeking, or obtaining lawful reproductive health care services in North Carolina.” The order also directs the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to work with law enforcement to prohibit anyone from blocking access to a health care facility, per state law.
Cabinet agencies are also barred from requiring a pregnant state employee to travel to a state “that has imposed restrictions on access to reproductive health care services if those restrictions do not include an exception for the health of the pregnant Cabinet Agency employee satisfactory to that employee.”
It also says that the Cabinet agencies will not help with “any investigation or proceeding that seeks to impose civil or criminal liability or professional sanction upon a person or entity for” providing or receiving reproductive health care services that are legal in North Carolina.
While North Carolina law states that it is the governor’s “duty” to arrest and deliver any person charged in another state “with treason, felony or other crime, who has fled from justice and is found in this state,” Cooper’s executive order says the governor can “exercise his discretion to decline requests” to extradite anyone charged with a criminal violation in another state over carrying out or receiving “reproductive health care services that are lawful in North Carolina.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 19:00 - DHS Agents Spied For China? Charged With Attempts To Suppress Critics Of CCP
DHS Agents Spied For China? Charged With Attempts To Suppress Critics Of CCP
For many it is not surprising to hear that the Chinese government is improving its intel and disinformation tactics within the US. After all, the US contains perhaps the highest concentration of anti-communist and anti-socialist people in the world (living side by side with extreme leftists, of course). The US has also been a relatively safe place for Chinese dissidents to voice their criticisms of the CCP, until recently.
An active DHS agent and a Department of Human Services agent along with at least three other suspects now face official indictments for “acting as Chinese agents” while spying on dissidents and vocal critics of the CCP while living in the US. Agents divulged personal information on activists including passport information on one man’s daughter.
Though the case was first revealed by the Department Of Justice in May, the greater details have only been recently revealed.
The news arrives on the heels of a renewed push by the US government to have Tik Tok removed from Big Tech app stores because of data on American citizens being consistently accessed by the CCP. The sophistication of China’s 4th Generation warfare measures is growing and their interest has been specifically in manipulating public opinion in the west.
The Chinese disinformation campaign to blame the US and Fort Detrick for the Covid-19 virus and the pandemic comes to mind. Many Americans (and likely paid disinfo agents) were spreading the propaganda despite the fact that there was zero evidence of Fort Detrick as the source and extensive evidence that the area near the Wuhan Virology Lab was ground zero. While gain of function research on covid viruses was indeed paid for by US backers including the NIH, the Wuhan lab continues to remain a place of interest in investigations on the cause of the outbreak.
The increase in Chinese information warfare suggests the CCP is seeking a global reach rather than merely remaining isolated from the western world, and one has to question if these actions are a precursor to some other agenda. China’s interest in subsuming Taiwan has only grown stronger the past two years, and Joe Biden has suggested that if Taiwan is invaded the US would respond militarily. Furthermore, an economic war is seething under the surface between China and the US, as China shows full trade support of Russia during their invasion of Ukraine.
The Chinese have been experimenting extensively with “social credit systems” and the use of social media as a weapon to monitor and control its own citizenry. This idea is obviously being tested in the US as well, but there appears to be a growing overlap between US government surveillance and the surveillance of foreign entities on American citizens.
Silencing dissent is the goal, and using American citizens as well as American government officials as a means to suppress activists makes perfect strategic sense. The message is: You are not safe from us, even in the “land of the free.”
The disturbing trend may herald an era of digital hitmen who stalk critics of various governments and who seek to make their lives miserable. It is not so much the reality of the threat as the idea of the threat – Maybe they will try to harm you, maybe they won’t, but the fear is always in the mind of the target.
In the meantime, Americans need to take far more interest in the quality of the people being allowed into bureaucratic positions within our government. Or, maybe we need to question the need for the bureaucracy to exist at all. This latest story reminds us that Americans not only have to worry about corruption from within, but also corruption from without.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 18:40 - NPR Denigrates Slain Shinzo Abe As "Divisive Arch Conservative"
NPR Denigrates Slain Shinzo Abe As “Divisive Arch Conservative”
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
NPR reacted to the shocking assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe by denigrating him as a “divisive arch conservative” and an “ultranationalist.”
FRANCK ROBICHON via Getty Images Abe was shot dead by 41-year-old gunman Yamagami Tetsuya while giving a speech at a campaign rally in the western city of Nara.
Tetsuya used a homemade weapon to shoot Abe twice. The former president died after sustaining two deep neck wounds that damaged an artery.
Government-funded NPR reacted to the news by referring to Abe as a “divisive arch conservative,” a description many found derogatory.
Following the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, @NPR called him a “divisive arch-conservative.” pic.twitter.com/cD2SXpyxri
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 8, 2022
After receiving some backlash on Twitter, NPR deleted their original tweet, before posting a new one that described the Japanese leader as an “ultranationalist.”
NPR deleted its first tweet calling Shinzo Abe a “divisive arch conservative” and then posted this tweet calling him an “ultranationalist.” As if he were Tojo or Itagaki and not the four time elected leader of a modern democracy. May he rest in peace. https://t.co/TtxukySoAr
— David Shafer (@DavidShafer) July 8, 2022
If you are vaguely rightwing the press will just cycle through euphemisms for Nazi when you die
— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Some people compared the media’s treatment of Abe to their glowing eulogy of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who the Washington Post described as an “austere religious scholar” despite him being the head of an international terrorist organization.
— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) July 8, 2022
As Chris Menahan notes, in addition to being a close ally of Donald Trump and strong on immigration and border security, Abe was also a critic of support for prolonging the war in Ukraine.
Abe even dared criticize globalist darling President Zelensky, asserting that the Ukrainian leader should have vowed not to join NATO and given the Donbass region autonomy in order to de-escalate tensions with Russia.
“Had Zelensky listened to Abe rather than Antony Blinken and Anne Applebaum, the war could have been avoided. Russia declared victory over the Donbass republic just days ago after over four months of devastating combat,” writes Menahan.
“The current Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, threw all of Abe’s overtures to Russia out the window after the war in Ukraine broke out and put Japan on war footing by embracing the US and EU’s anti-Russian sanctions and the freezing of Russian assets.”
“Whereas Abe’s “Abenomics” showed moderate success in working to revive Japan’s economy after over a decade of stagflation, Kishida’s economics and support of Western sanctions against Russia has imploded Japan’s economy and triggered record inflation.”
Authorities say they haven’t yet found any evidence that the gunman was motivated by his opposition to Abe’s political beliefs.
This was the moment Shinzo Abe was assassinated. pic.twitter.com/vBpzy6LBE0
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 8, 2022
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 17:40 - Elon Musk Terminates Deal To Buy Twitter; Board To Pursue Legal Action
Elon Musk Terminates Deal To Buy Twitter; Board To Pursue Legal Action
Update (1800ET): Twitter’s Board of Directors said on Friday that they intend to close the transaction with Musk at $54.20 per share, and that they plan to pursue legal action to enforce the agreement, Twitter chairman of the board Bret Taylor tweeted following the news, adding that the board is “confident it will prevail in Delaware Court of Cancery.”
The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Musk’s filing won’t be the end of this, but it does mark the conclusion of high-stakes suspense over whether he would complete the deal, after a public spat with the company over the number of bots on the platform.
In recent weeks the company said that it had been sharing information with Musk in order to consummate the deal as laid out in the merger agreement, and reiterated their intention to close the transaction and enforce the agreement, the Wall Street Journal reports.
There are no guarantees Mr. Musk will be able to walk away from the deal entirely, as Twitter is expected to challenge his legal arguments. Deal clashes often end in negotiated settlements that can include a price cut or one-time payments.
Mr. Musk’s lawyer cited concerns over Twitter’s estimates about how many of its daily users are fake or spam accounts as an issue Mr. Musk raised as a concern about the deal almost three weeks after he signed it.
Discovery should be fun…
“Musk is examining the company’s recent financial performance and revised outlook, and is considering whether the company’s declining business prospects constitute a MAC”
-> “By tweeting about the terrible TWTR deal I have destroyed TWTR, allowing me to walk away from the deal”
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 8, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
* * *
Many were wondering how the Musk-Twitter takeover saga ends, or rather, who will be the first to sue.
Late on Friday, Elon Musk decided to resolve the debate by effectively breaching his contract signed three months ago, and making a Delaware lawsuit inevitable, by announcing in a 13D filing that he is terminating his Twitter merger agreement, and claiming that “Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that Agreement, appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the Merger Agreement, and is likely to suffer a Company Material Adverse Effect.”
Of course, none of that will stick as Elon waived all rights to rework the deal when he signed the purchase agreement on April 25, and now it will be up to either i) a judge to impose the original deal, an outcome which will likely take place after several years of lawsuits or ii) to renegotiate the purchase price lower.
Here is the letter sent from Musk’s law firm, Skadden Arps, to Twitter’s general counsel, Vijaya Gadde.
Twitter, Inc.
1355 Market Street, Suite 900
San Francisco, CA 94103
Attn: Vijaya Gadde, Chief Legal Officer
Dear Ms. Gadde:
We refer to (i) the Agreement and Plan of Merger by and among X Holdings I, Inc., X Holdings II, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. dated as of April 25, 2022 (the “Merger Agreement”) and (ii) our letter to you dated as of June 6, 2022 (the “June 6 Letter”). As further described below, Mr. Musk is terminating the Merger Agreement because Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that Agreement, appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the Merger Agreement, and is likely to suffer a Company Material Adverse Effect (as that term is defined in the Merger Agreement).
While Section 6.4 of the Merger Agreement requires Twitter to provide Mr. Musk and his advisors all data and information that Mr. Musk requests “for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction,” Twitter has not complied with its contractual obligations. For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform” (our letter to you dated May 25, 2022 (the “May 25 Letter”)). This information is fundamental to Twitter’s business and financial performance and is necessary to consummate the transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement because it is needed to ensure Twitter’s satisfaction of the conditions to closing, to facilitate Mr. Musk’s financing and financial planning for the transaction, and to engage in transition planning for the business. Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information. Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.
Mr. Musk and his financial advisors at Morgan Stanley have been requesting critical information from Twitter as far back as May 9, 2022—and repeatedly since then—on the relationship between Twitter’s disclosed mDAU figures and the prevalence of false or spam accounts on the platform. If there were ever any doubt as to the nature of these information requests, the May 25 Letter made clear that Mr. Musk’s goal was to understand how many of Twitter’s claimed mDAUs were, in fact, fake or spam accounts. That letter noted that “Items 1.03 to 1.13 of the diligence request list contain high-priority requests for enterprise data and other information intended to enable Mr. Musk and his advisors to make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform…” The letter then provided Twitter with a detailed list of requests to this effect.
Since then, Mr. Musk has provided numerous additional follow-up requests, all aimed at filling the gaps in the incomplete information that Twitter provided in response to his broad requests for information relating to Twitter’s reported mDAU counts and reported estimates of false and spam accounts.1 For example, in our letter to you dated June 29, 2022 (the “June 29 Letter”), we referenced Mr. Musk’s request in the May 25 Letter for “information that would allow him ‘to make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.’” Because Twitter, by its own admission, provided only incomplete data that was not sufficient to perform such an independent assessment,2 the June 29 Letter “endeavored to be even more specific, and to reduce the burden of the [original] request,” by identifying a specific subset of high priority information, responsive to Mr. Musk’s prior requests, for Twitter to immediately make available.
Notwithstanding these repeated requests over the past two months, Twitter has still failed to provide much of the data and information responsive to Mr. Musk’s repeated requests, including, but not limited to:
- Information related to Twitter’s process for auditing the inclusion of spam and fake accounts in mDAU. Twitter has still not provided much of the information specifically requested by Mr. Musk in Sections 1.01-1.03 of the May 19 diligence request list that is necessary for him to make an assessment of the prevalence of false or spam accounts on its website. As recently as the June 29 Letter, Mr. Musk reiterated this long-standing request for information related to Twitter’s sampling process for detecting fake accounts. The June 29 Letter identified specific data necessary to enable Mr. Musk to independently verify Twitter’s representations regarding the number of mDAU on its platform—including, but not limited to (1) daily global mDAU data since October 1, 2020; (2) information regarding the sampling population for mDAU, including whether the mDAU population used for auditing spam and false accounts is the same mDAU population used for quarterly reporting; (3) outputs of each step of the sampling process for each day during the weeks of January 30, 2022 and June 19, 2022; (4) documentation or other guidance provided to contractor agents used for auditing mDAU samples; (5) information regarding the user interface of Twitter’s ADAP tool and any internal tools used by the contractor agents; and (6) mDAU audit sampling information, including anonymized information identifying the contractor agents and Quality Analyst that reviewed each sampled account, the designation given by each contractor agent and Quality Analyst, and the current status of any accounts labelled “compromised.” A subsequent request along these lines should not have been necessary, as this information should have been provided in response to Mr. Musk’s original diligence request. Yet, to date, Twitter has not provided any of this information.
- Information related to Twitter’s process for identifying and suspending spam and fake accounts. In addition to information regarding Twitter’s mDAU audits, the June 29 Letter also reiterated requests for data specifically identified in Sections 1.04-1.05 of the May 19 diligence request list regarding Twitter’s methodology and performance data relating to identification and suspension of spam and false accounts, including, but not limited to, information regarding account suspensions, including information sufficient to identify daily numbers of account suspensions since October 2020 and numbers of account suspensions for each of Twitter’s internal reasons for suspension. In addition, during the June 30, 2022 call, Twitter’s representatives indicated for the first time that the workflow and processes for detecting spam and false accounts in the mDAU population is different and separate from the workflow and processes for identifying and suspending accounts in violation of Twitter’s policies. On that call, Twitter indicated that it would not be willing to provide information regarding the methodologies employed to identify and suspend such accounts.
- Daily measures of mDAU for the past eight (8) quarters. On June 17, 2022 (the “June 17 Letter”) Mr. Musk reiterated his request for “access to the sample set used and calculations performed, as well as any related reports or analysis, to support Twitter’s representation that fewer than 5% of its mDAUs are false or spam account.” To that end, Mr. Musk requested that Twitter provide “daily measures of mDAU for the previous eight quarters, and through the present.” This information is derivative of the information Mr. Musk first sought in Sections 1.01-1.03 of the May 19 diligence request list. Although Twitter has provided certain summary data regarding the mDAU calculations, Twitter has not provided the complete daily measures as requested.
- Board materials related to Twitter’s mDAU calculations. In the June 17 Letter, Mr. Musk requested a variety of board materials and communications related to Twitter’s mDAU metric, its calculation of the number of spam and false accounts, its disclosure of the mDAU metric, and the company’s disclosure of the number of spam accounts on the platform. Twitter has provided an incomplete data set in response to this request, and has not provided information sufficient to enable Mr. Musk to make an independent assessment of Twitter’s board and management’s understanding of its mDAU metric.
- Materials related to Twitter’s financial condition. Mr. Musk is entitled, under Section 6.4 of the Merger Agreement to “all information concerning the business … of the Company … for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transactions” and under Section 6.11 of the Merger Agreement, to information “reasonably requested” in connection with his efforts to secure the debt financing necessary to consummate the transaction. To that end, Mr. Musk requested on June 17 a variety of board materials, including a working, bottoms-up financial model for 2022, a budget for 2022, an updated draft plan or budget, and a working copy of Goldman Sachs’ valuation model underlying its fairness opinion. Twitter has provided only a pdf copy of Goldman Sachs’ final Board presentation.
In short, Twitter has not provided information that Mr. Musk has requested for nearly two months notwithstanding his repeated, detailed clarifications intended to simplify Twitter’s identification, collection, and disclosure of the most relevant information sought in Mr. Musk’s original requests.
While Twitter has provided some information, that information has come with strings attached, use limitations or other artificial formatting features, which has rendered some of the information minimally useful to Mr. Musk and his advisors. For example, when Twitter finally provided access to the eight developer “APIs” first explicitly requested by Mr. Musk in the May 25 Letter, those APIs contained a rate limit lower than what Twitter provides to its largest enterprise customers. Twitter only offered to provide Mr. Musk with the same level of access as some of its customers after we explained that throttling the rate limit prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from performing the analysis that he wished to conduct in any reasonable period of time.
Additionally, those APIs contained an artificial “cap” on the number of queries that Mr. Musk and his team can run regardless of the rate limit—an issue that initially prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from completing an analysis of the data in any reasonable period of time. Mr. Musk raised this issue as soon as he became aware of it, in the first paragraph of the June 29 Letter: “we have just been informed by our data experts that Twitter has placed an artificial cap on the number of searches our experts can perform with this data, which is now preventing Mr. Musk and his team from doing their analysis.” That cap was not removed until July 6, after Mr. Musk demanded its removal for a second time.
Based on the foregoing refusal to provide information that Mr. Musk has been requesting since May 9, 2022, Twitter is in breach of Sections 6.4 and 6.11 of the Merger Agreement.
Despite public speculation on this point, Mr. Musk did not waive his right to review Twitter’s data and information simply because he chose not to seek this data and information before entering into the Merger Agreement. In fact, he negotiated access and information rights within the Merger Agreement precisely so that he could review data and information that is important to Twitter’s business before financing and completing the transaction.
As Twitter has been on notice of its breach since at least June 6, 2022, any cure period afforded to Twitter under the Merger Agreement has now lapsed. Accordingly, Mr. Musk hereby exercises X Holdings I, Inc.’s right to terminate the Merger Agreement and abandon the transaction contemplated thereby, and this letter constitutes formal notice of X Holding I, Inc.’s termination of the Merger Agreement pursuant to Section 8.1(d)(i) thereof.
In addition to the foregoing, Twitter is in breach of the Merger Agreement because the Merger Agreement appears to contain materially inaccurate representations. Specifically, in the Merger Agreement, Twitter represented that no documents that Twitter filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission since January 1, 2022, included any “untrue statement of a material fact” (Section 4.6(a)). Twitter has repeatedly made statements in such filings regarding the portion of its mDAUs that are false or spam, including statements that: “We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter,” and “After we determine an account is spam, malicious automation, or fake, we stop counting it in our mDAU, or other related metrics.” Mr. Musk relied on this representation in the Merger Agreement (and Twitter’s numerous public statements regarding false and spam accounts in its publicly filed SEC documents) when agreeing to enter into the Merger Agreement. Mr. Musk has the right to seek rescission of the Merger Agreement in the event these material representations are determined to be false.
Although Twitter has not yet provided complete information to Mr. Musk that would enable him to do a complete and comprehensive review of spam and fake accounts on Twitter’s platform, he has been able to partially and preliminarily analyze the accuracy of Twitter’s disclosure regarding its mDAU. While this analysis remains ongoing, all indications suggest that several of Twitter’s public disclosures regarding its mDAUs are either false or materially misleading. First, although Twitter has consistently represented in securities filings that “fewer than 5%” of its mDAU are false or spam accounts, based on the information provided by Twitter to date, it appears that Twitter is dramatically understating the proportion of spam and false accounts represented in its mDAU count. Preliminary analysis by Mr. Musk’s advisors of the information provided by Twitter to date causes Mr. Musk to strongly believe that the proportion of false and spam accounts included in the reported mDAU count is wildly higher than 5%. Second, Twitter’s disclosure that it ceases to count fake or spam users in its mDAU when it determines that those users are fake appears to be false. Instead, we understand, based on Twitter’s representations during a June 30, 2022 call with us, that Twitter includes accounts that have been suspended—and thus are known to be fake or spam—in its quarterly mDAU count even when it is aware that the suspended accounts were included in mDAU for that quarter. Last, Twitter has represented that it is “continually seeking to improve our ability to estimate the total number of spam accounts and eliminate them from the calculation of our mDAU…” But, Twitter’s process for calculating its mDAU, and the percentage of mDAU comprised of non-monetizable spam accounts, appears to be arbitrary and ad hoc. Disclosing that Twitter has a reasoned process for calculating mDAU when the opposite is true would be false and misleading.
Twitter’s representation in the Merger Agreement regarding the accuracy of its SEC disclosures relating to false and spam accounts may have also caused, or is reasonably likely to result in, a Company Material Adverse Effect, which may form an additional basis for terminating the Merger Agreement. While Mr. Musk and his advisors continue to investigate the exact nature and extent of this event, Mr. Musk has reason to believe that the true number of false or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform is substantially higher than the amount of less than 5% represented by Twitter in its SEC filings. Twitter’s true mDAU count is a key component of the company’s business, given that approximately 90% of its revenue comes from advertisements. For this reason, to the extent that Twitter has underrepresented the number of false or spam accounts on its platform, that may constitute a Company Material Adverse Effect under Section 7.2(b)(i) of the Merger Agreement. Mr. Musk is also examining the company’s recent financial performance and revised outlook, and is considering whether the company’s declining business prospects and financial outlook constitute a Company Material Adverse Effect giving Mr. Musk a separate and distinct basis for terminating the Merger Agreement.
Finally, Twitter also did not comply with its obligations under Section 6.1 of the Merger Agreement to seek and obtain consent before deviating from its obligation to conduct its business in the ordinary course and “preserve substantially intact the material components of its current business organization.” Twitter’s conduct in firing two key, high-ranking employees, its Revenue Product Lead and the General Manager of Consumer, as well as announcing on July 7 that it was laying off a third of its talent acquisition team, implicates the ordinary course provision. Twitter has also instituted a general hiring freeze which extends even to reconsideration of outstanding job offers. Moreover, three executives have resigned from Twitter since the Merger Agreement was signed: the Head of Data Science, the Vice President of Twitter Service, and a Vice President of Product Management for Health, Conversation, and Growth. The Company has not received Parent’s consent for changes in the conduct of its business, including for the specific changes listed above. The Company’s actions therefore constitute a material breach of Section 6.1 of the Merger Agreement.
Accordingly, for all of these reasons, Mr. Musk hereby exercises X Holdings I, Inc.’s right to terminate the Merger Agreement and abandon the transaction contemplated thereby, and this letter constitutes formal notice of X Holding I, Inc.’s termination of the Merger Agreement pursuant to Section 8.1(d)(i) thereof.
Sincerely,
/s/ Mike Ringler
Mike Ringler
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP* * *
With all due respect to Elon and his law firm, all of the above is bunk, and all that matters is his signature on the original merger agreement when he waived all rights. And now it is up to the Twitter board to decide how to pursue next steps.
TWTR stock dropped 7% after hours on an outcome that everyone should have priced in by now: the real fun begins now.
Well at least Elon will buyback all those $TSLA shares he sold to help finance the deal, right?
— Diogenes (@WallStCynic) July 8, 2022
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/08/2022 – 17:30
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...
