- American Defense Policy After Twenty Years Of War
American Defense Policy After Twenty Years Of War
Authored by Jim Webb via NationalInterest.org,
America has always been a place where the abrasion of continuous debate eventually produces creative solutions. Let’s agree on those solutions, and make the next twenty years a time of clear purpose and affirmative global leadership.
The American scorecard for foreign policy achievements over the past twenty years is, frankly, pretty dismal. And without talking our way all around the globe, it’s clear that the most dismal score goes to the stupidest mistakes. We fought one war that we never should have fought and another war whose objectives grew so out of control that no amount of battlefield proficiency could overcome the naïve mission creep of the political and military leadership at the top that was defining what our troops were supposed to do. So, let me start with a couple of quotes from two pieces I wrote, one at the beginning of this twenty-year period and the other at the end.
On September 4, 2002, five months before the Bush administration ordered the invasion of Iraq, I wrote the following as part of a larger editorial for the Washington Post, warning that an invasion would be a strategic blunder:
Nations such as China can only view the prospect of an American military consumed for the next generation by the turmoil of the Middle East as a glorious windfall. Indeed, if one gives the Chinese credit for having a long-term strategy — and those who love to quote Sun Tzu might consider his nationality — it lends credence to their insistent cultivation of the Muslim world. An “American war” with the Muslims, occupying the very seat of their civilization, would allow the Chinese to isolate the United States diplomatically as they furthered their own ambitions in South and Southeast Asia.
Almost exactly nineteen years later as the military planners serving the Biden Administration executed a shamefully incompetent final withdrawal from Afghanistan, I wrote the following for The National Interest, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, in a piece entitled “Requiem for an Avoidable Disaster:”
…the war that we began was not the same war that we are finally bringing to an end. When we went into Afghanistan in 2001 our national concern was to eliminate terrorist entities who desired to attack us. The common understanding at the time was that we would operate with maneuver elements capable of attacking and neutralizing terrorist entities. It was never to occupy territory with permanent bases or to attempt to change the societal and governmental structure of the Afghan people. This “mission creep” began after a few years of successful operations and was obvious in 2004 when I was in the country as an embed journalist. The change in mission eventually increased our troop presence tenfold and sent our forces on an impossible political journey that no amount of military success could overcome.
Why did all this happen? And how can we rectify the damage that has been done to the institutions that were involved, and to our international credibility?
There’s an old saying that “success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan.” In this case, there were two entirely different categories of orphans, some of whom were not touched personally or even professionally, and some who gave up lives, limbs, and emotional health.
For the policymakers in Washington, these were wars to be remotely managed inside the guide rails of theoretical national strategy and uncontrolled financial planning. As with so many other drawn-out military commitments with vaguely defined and often changing objectives, America’s diplomatic credibility steadily decreased while the price tag rose through the roof, into trillions of dollars and thousands of combat deaths. There is no way around the reality that these hand-selected policymakers, military and civilian alike, failed the country, even as many of them were being lionized in the media and offered lucrative post-retirement positions in the private sector. Their immediate strategic goals, vague as they were from the outset, were not accomplished. The larger necessity of meeting global challenges, and particularly China’s determined expansion, was put on the back burner as our operational and diplomatic capabilities were diverted into a constantly quarreling region with the deserved reputation of being the “Graveyard of Empires.”
In the context of history, the human cost on the battlefield as viewed by those at the top was manageably small, and carried out by an all-volunteer military. Indeed, despite the length of twenty years of war and many ferocious engagements, the overall casualty numbers were historically low. DOD reports the total number of American military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over twenty years as 7,074, of which 5,474 were killed in action. This twenty-year number was about the same as six months of American casualties during any one of the peak years of fighting in Vietnam.
Emotionally, although there was much sympathy and respect for our soldiers we were not really a nation in a fully engaged war. As the wars continued, life in America went on without disruption. A very small percentage of the country was at human or even family risk. The wars did not interfere on a national scale with the lives of those who chose not to serve. The economy was largely good. In places like my home state of Virginia it absolutely boomed with tens of billions of dollars going to Virginia-based programs in the departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
This societal disconnect gave the policymakers great latitude in the manner in which they ran the wars. It also resulted in very little congressional oversight, either in operational concepts or in much-need scrutiny of DOD and State Department management and budgets. Powerpoint presentations replaced vigorous discussion. Serious introspection by Pentagon staff members gave way to bland reports from Beltway Bandit consultants hired to provide answers to questions asked during committee hearings. An “Overseas Contingency Fund” with billions of unlabeled dollars allowed military leaders to fund programs that were never directly authorized or specifically appropriated by Congress. To be blunt, the Pentagon and the Joint commands were basically making their own rules, and to hell with everybody else.
This was not the Congress in which I had worked as a full committee counsel during the Carter Administration. Nor was it the Pentagon in which I had served as an assistant secretary of defense and Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan.
At the other end of the pipeline, it was different. For those who did serve, and especially for those who served in ground combat units and in special operations, being thrown into the middle of a region where violence and bitter retribution is the norm was often a life-altering experience. Repetitive combat tours pulled them away from home, from family, and from the normal routines of their peers again and again, creating burnout from unresolved personal issues of stress and readjustment to civilian life. So-called “stop loss” programs kept many soldiers on active duty after their initial terms of service were supposed to end, a policy that brought the not-unreal slogan that stop-loss was, in reality, nothing more than a back-door version of the draft: We have you. And we are going to keep you until we no longer need you. The traditional policy of allowing troops a two-to-one ratio of “dwell time” at home between deployments was repeatedly shortened until, for the Army, the ratio was less than one-to-one, requiring soldiers to return to combat for fifteen months with only twelve months at home to recuperate, refurbish, and retrain. Those who left the military after one enlistment rather than choosing a career were largely ignored by commands that provided little post-military guidance and sent battle-weary young soldiers home without much more than a goodbye.
But along the way, as with those who have served our country in uniform in every other war, our young military did the job that they were sent to do, no matter the overall wisdom of the mission itself.
With respect to these capable and dedicated young Americans who stepped forward to serve, I feel fortunate to have been able to play a part in making sure that the public was aware of the contributions they made, and to put into place policies that recognized and properly rewarded their service. And as a writer, journalist and later a Senator I was able to use whatever pulpit was available in order to emphasize that our greatest strategic challenges were not in the places where our elites had decided to invest our people and our national treasure, and to call for the country’s leadership to cease its unfortunate obsession with a region that has never needed a permanent American ground presence as a means of mediating, much less resolving, its centuries-old conflicts. You don’t take out a hornet’s nest by sitting on top of it. We’re smarter than that, and also more capable.
In addition to working on strongly felt issues such as economic fairness and criminal justice reform, once I was elected to the Senate I took a two-pronged approach to resolving the mess that had been made in our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The first involved our larger strategic interests. I immediately gained a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and two years later was named Chairman of the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs. From our immediate office, I designed a staff—and a legislative approach—that would energetically re-emphasize our commitment to relations in East Asia, and recruited good people to carry out that approach. My mission to my staff was that we were going to work to invigorate American relations in East Asia, particularly in South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines, and we were going to open up Burma to the outside world. We did more than talk about this, averaging three intense trips every year where I was able to meet with top leaders in those countries as well as almost every other country in ASEAN.
Barack Obama later announced a similar policy after he was elected two years later, calling it the “Pivot to Asia.” Unfortunately, his administration’s approach skirted the largest issue in the region by avoiding any major confrontations with China. The pivot was largely abandoned at a crucial period in 2012 after China claimed sovereignty over a two million square kilometer area of the South China Sea, and began militarizing numerous contested islands claimed by several other countries. The Obama administration declined to criticize China’s actions, saying that the United States would not take a position on sovereignty issues. Quite obviously, not taking a position in this matter was defaulting to China’s aggressive acts. I responded by introducing a Senate resolution condemning any use of military force in the resolution of sovereignty issues in the South China Sea, which passed with a unanimous vote.
The second involved the day-to-day manner in which our wars were being fought, and the way that our younger military people were being treated by those at the top.
I participated in numerous hearings on all aspects from my seats on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, becoming even more concerned about the lack of serious congressional oversight. During one Foreign Relations Committee hearing on post-invasion reconstruction efforts, an assistant secretary of state testified that the United States had spent 32 billion dollars on different smaller-scale projects. I asked him to provide me and the committee a complete list of every project, as well as the cost. That was in 2007. I’m still waiting for his answer. This was clearly not the way things worked when I was a counsel in the House, where such requests were often answered within a day or two, from information that had already been compiled. In fact, the lack of an answer, despite follow-up calls from my staff, followed a broader pattern that had evolved after 9/11 when vague answers and delayed responses had become the norm, a deliberate and increasingly routine snub of the Congress by higher-level members of the executive branch.
Take your choice. This was either incompetent leadership or deliberate obstruction. If the congressional liaisons from DOD were able to provide specific, complicated data within a day or two in 1977, certainly the computers of 2007 were capable of doing so after thirty years of technological progress.
I responded by co-authoring legislation along with Senator Claire McCaskill that created the Wartime Contracts Commission, modeled after the Truman Commission of World War Two. After three years of investigations, the commission’s final report estimated that due to major failures in our contracting system the United States had squandered up to 60 billion dollars through contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the commission lacked subpoena power or criminal jurisdiction over actions taken in the past, but it certainly got the attention of would-be fraudsters, led to better record-keeping, improved the oversight process, and put a marker down for contracts from that point forward.
Having grown up in the military, and serving as an infantry Marine in Vietnam, and with a son who had left college to enlist in the Marine Corps infantry and fought in Ramadi, Iraq during one of the worst periods in that war, I seized the opportunity – and undertook the obligation – to properly reward the contributions of those who had stepped forward to serve.
Immediately after I won the election to the Senate, and two months before actually being sworn in, I sat down with the Senate legislative counsel and drafted the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Having spent four years as a full committee counsel on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, my legislative model was the GI Bill that had been given to our World War Two veterans, the most generous GI Bill in history up to that time: pay for the veteran’s tuition and fees, buy the books, and provide a monthly living stipend. For every tax dollar that was spent on the World War Two GI bill, our treasury received eight dollars in tax remunerations from veterans who had gone on to successful lives. By contrast, the Vietnam Era GI Bill had provided only a monthly payment that in almost every case was far less than the costs of higher education, beginning in 1966 at a paltry rate of 50 dollars a month and ending in the early 1970s at $340 a month.
I introduced the Post-9/11 GI Bill on my first day as a Senator. I put together a bipartisan leadership team—two Republicans, John Warner and Chuck Hagel; two Democrats, Frank Lautenberg and myself; two of them World War Two veterans, and two of them Vietnam veterans. Sixteen months later in a modern-day Congressional miracle, the bill became law, ironically over the strong opposition of the Bush Administration to the very end. The White House and the Pentagon claimed that such a generous bill would affect retention, causing too many people to leave the military. The obvious but implicit message was, Don’t treat them too good; they’ll leave. This position was taken by general officers who were going to receive a couple of hundred thousand dollars every year in military retirement when they themselves decided to leave. Having spent five years in the Pentagon and being intimately familiar with manpower issues, I held a completely different belief, that the generosity of the new GI Bill would enhance enlistments and help broaden the base of our overall military. In a back-handed compliment, at least in my view, I was not invited to the White House for the ceremony when the President signed the bill. But to date, millions of post-9/11 veterans have used this Bill, which is beyond cavil the most generous GI Bill in history. It has created opportunities and empowered the careers of people who are now making their way into positions of leadership and influence throughout the country.
Shortly after I introduced the GI Bill, I introduced legislation to mandate a proper ratio for dwell time between overseas deployments. The legislation would have required that military members not be returned to combat unless they had been home for at least the amount of time that they had previously been gone. This was not unreasonable. A two-to-one ratio was a simple formula that reflected traditional rotation cycles. With the continuous deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan it had fallen to less than one-to-one, which meant that for years our soldiers would be gone longer than they were at home, and when they were at home they would be spending much of their time getting ready to go back. This reality was clearly affecting not only morale but also the potential for long-term emotional difficulties such as post-traumatic stress.
Predictably, the White House and the Pentagon opposed the legislation. Some claimed that I had designed it with a hidden agenda to slow down the war in Iraq. Others, led by Senator Lindsey Graham, claimed that the legislation was unconstitutional, that Congress could not intervene in the operational tempo of the military since the President was the Commander in Chief. But a precedent was already set. During the Korean War, Congress had ceased the deployment of soldiers who were being sent to the war zone without proper training by mandating that no military members could be deployed overseas unless they had spent 120 days on active duty. If the military leaders weren’t going to take care of their people, it was only right that Congress should set proper boundaries.
The Republicans filibustered the legislation, which then required sixty votes for passage. Although the bill twice received a fifty-six vote majority, with several Republican votes for passage, we did not break the filibuster. But we did put the issue of dwell time firmly before Congress and the public, and the two-to-one deployment cycle eventually became the express goal inside the Department of Defense.
All of that is history. I put it before you as something of a template to show the patterns that evolved and have continued over the past twenty years, as well as evidence that strong and informed leadership in Congress can turn things around. In many ways, this dislocation is between those who make policy—including military leaders—and those who carry it out. It continues due to the group mentality of a foreign policy aristocracy seeking common agreement rather than original thought. And it has exacerbated this ever-growing dislocation by freezing out those who are not, basically, in the club because their thinking does not fit the usual mantra and their ideas threaten the prevailing orthodoxy.
We need these other voices. There are lessons to be learned and unavoidable questions that need to be answered at every level. Some involve the articulation of our national security objectives and how we define national strategy. Some involve when and how we should use the military for operational missions in harm’s way. And some involve the actual makeup of these military missions, from their remote or covert or overt nature, and if deployed in large numbers how large that footprint should be, and what portion should consist of military contractors along the lines of the past twenty years. And for those who want to repair the damage, it challenges us to find clear ways where we can move forward.
Who do we hold accountable for the random and often changing strategic mistakes that have damaged our strength and our reputation? How do we move forward in the way we articulate and implement our national strategy here at home? How do we regain our respect in the international community, both among our friends who need us, and from potential adversaries who pray every day that America will lose its willpower, that we would be so overcome by military failures abroad and turbulence at home that the nation itself will atrophy and descend into the ranks of an also-ran, second-rate power?
We should begin with a vigorous and open discussion about the makeup, power, and influence of America’s massive defense establishment. And here I’m talking about the highest levels of our uniformed military, the civilian government officials, the powerful defense corporations, the numerous think tanks funded heavily by the defense industry, the hugely influential lobbying organizations, and—if not at the bottom, certainly in the bullseye of the efforts of all of these entities—the authorizing and appropriating committees in the Senate and House of Representatives. Couple that with the media of all sorts, particularly the huge growth of the internet and social media, and one can see how complicated the debate over any controversial issue can become.
We were warned about this, sixty years ago, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his well-remembered speech about the “military / industrial complex.” The speech was the president’s carefully placed farewell message to the American people, made just three days before he left office. His words resonate, symbolic in their timing as his final shot across the bow, and coming as they did from this former five-star general who knew the military with a completeness that no other American president could ever match.
After commenting that in the aftermath of World War Two the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” Eisenhower expressed his concern about the “total influence – economic, political, even spiritual” of this new reality “in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.”
The outgoing, immensely popular President then bluntly called out the members of his own professional culture—the military itself—and the bond its top leaders were increasingly forming with America’s defense corporations. “In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military / industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Looking at the decades following his speech and particularly the past twenty years, I believe President Eisenhower would be amazed at how massively this military-industrial complex has grown, how entangled the relationships between the military and the industrial complex have become, and how much it has affected the career paths of civilian “experts,” as well as the positions taken by many senior flag officers facing retirement.
Lucrative civilian careers have been made through the “revolving doors” of serving for a few years in appointed posts in the Departments of Defense and State, or by working on committee staffs in the Congress, then rotating over the space of many years in and out of government into the defense-oriented industry and in the ever more influential think tanks, some of them heavily funded by corporations with major financial interests in defense contracts. The number of people involved in such revolving doors and the amount of money flowing back and forth would have stunned the understanding of people in Eisenhower’s era.
Likewise, many military officers have made similar career moves, taking advantage of skills and relationships that were developed while on active duty. Those in uniform and others who work in the area of national defense regularly comment about the potential for conflicts of interest among the most senior flag officers as they carry out their final active duty positions before retiring and prepare for their next career in the civilian world. Critical issues ranging from the procurement of weapons systems to carrying out politically sensitive military operations often comprise the way in which potential civilian employers decide on the next chapter in their lives. A hand played well can bring large financial benefits. A hand played poorly can result in media stigma or even being relieved of their duties, and a beach house in Tarpon Springs.
As with other areas of public service, it would be useful for Congress to examine the firewalls in place in order to maintain the vitally important separation of the military, on the one side, and the industrial complex on the other, just as President Dwight Eisenhower so prophetically pointed out sixty years ago.
Dwight Eisenhower would have liked General Robert Barrow, the twenty-seventh commandant of the Marine Corps. His leadership example personally inspired me, both during and after my service in the Corps. We had many personal discussions over the years, until he passed away in 2008. He was a great combat leader. He mastered guerrilla warfare while fighting Japanese units alongside Chinese soldiers in World War Two. In the Korean War, he received the Navy Cross, our country’s second-highest award, for extraordinary heroism as a company commander during the historic breakout from the Chosin Reservoir. And in Vietnam, he was known as one of the war’s finest regimental commanders. He knew war, he knew loyalty, and he knew his Marines.
General Barrow was fond of emphasizing that moral courage was often harder, and more exemplary, than physical courage. On matters of principle, he would not bend. During one difficult period when he was dealing with serious issues in the political process, the four-star Commandant calmly pointed out to me that his obligation was to run the Marine Corps “the same way a good company commander runs his rifle company: I’ll do the best job I know how to do, and if you don’t like what I’m doing, then fire me.”
It is rare these days to see such leaders wearing the stars of a general or an admiral. And thinking of President Eisenhower’s prescient warnings about what he termed the “the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals,” I have no doubt that he and General Barrow shared the same concerns. General Barrow held another firm belief. Having served as Commandant of the Marine Corps, he believed it would soil the dignity of that office by trading on its credibility for financial gain through banging on doors in Washington as a lobbyist or serving as a board member giving a defense-related corporation his prized insider’s advice on how to sell their product.
The Japanese have a saying that “life is a generation, but reputation is forever.” And General Barrow’s pristine motivation will forever preserve his honor.
I grew up in the military. I know the price that families must pay when their fathers or now even their mothers are continuously deployed, because I lived it as a very young boy. My father, a pilot who flew B-17s and B-29s in World War Two and cargo planes in the Berlin Airlift, was continually deployed either overseas or on bases with no family housing, at one point for more than three years. I know the demands and yet the honor of leading infantry Marines in combat and then spending years in and out of the hospital after being wounded. I know what it is like to be a father with a son deployed in a very bad place as an enlisted infantry Marine. And most of all I know the pride that comes from being able to say for the rest of my life that when my country called, I was there, and I took care of my people.
My other major point today is that our top leaders in all sectors of national defense need to get going and develop a clearly articulated foreign policy. We have lost twenty years, unfortunately fulfilling the prediction that I made in the Washington Post five months before the invasion of Iraq that “Nations such as China can only view the prospect of an American military consumed for the next generation by the turmoil of the Middle East as a glorious windfall.” And for China, indeed it was.
It’s ironic that we are now hearing frantic warnings from our uniformed leaders about China’s determined expansionism, both military and economic, and particularly about how recent reports of Chinese technological leaps might be something of a new “Sputnik” moment where America has been caught off-guard and now must rush to catch up. Too bad they weren’t following this as these policies and technological improvements were developed by the Chinese over at least the past two decades, while our focus remained intently on the never-ending and never-resolved brawls in the Middle East.
The very people who now are wringing their hands and calling for a full-fledged effort to counter such threats are the same people who should have been warning the nation of their possibility ten or even twenty years ago.
So, ask yourself: If things go wrong, who then shall we blame?
Much of the world is now uneasy with China’s unremitting aggression on its home turf in Asia. Over the past decade, China has been calling its own shots, rejecting international law and public opinion while flexing its muscle to signal its view that it will soon replace the United States as the region’s dominant military, diplomatic and economic power. Beijing has taken down Hong Kong’s democracy movement; started military spats with India; disrupted life for tens of millions by damming the headwaters of the Mekong River; conducted what our government now deems a campaign of genocide against Muslim Uighurs; escalated tensions with Japan over the Senkaku Islands; consolidated its illegal occupation and militarization of islands in the South China Sea; and made repeated bellicose gestures designed to test the international community’s resistance to “unifying” the “renegade province” of Taiwan. China’s military is expanding and modernizing and its Navy is becoming not only technological but global.
While we expended a huge portion of our human capital, emotional energy, and national treasure on two wars, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has had a major economic impact in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and with individual governments on other continents. In Africa, whose population has quadrupled since 1970 and which counts only one of the world’s top thirty countries in Gross National Product, more than forty countries have signed on to China’s BRI.
Let’s get going. We have alliances to enhance, and extensive national security interests to protect. We need to address these issues immediately and with clarity. America has always been a place where the abrasion of continuous debate eventually produces creative solutions. Eventually is now. Let’s agree on those solutions, and make the next twenty years a time of clear purpose and affirmative global leadership.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/09/2021 – 00:00 - Man Soaked In Hand Sanitizer Ignites After Being Tased By Cops
Man Soaked In Hand Sanitizer Ignites After Being Tased By Cops
A 29yo Upstate New York man walked into a police station last week, stripped off his clothing, and, at some point, doused himself with hand sanitizer. Local reports say the man was intoxicated and started a confrontation with officers. The combination of electricity from the taser and the flammable liquid caused the man to ignite into flames.
According to the local news Times-Union, Catskill Village Police Department said Jason Jones, 29, walked into the police station and sparked a “confrontation with officers.” The man stripped his clothing off and doused himself with hand sanitizer. Chief Dave Darling, a former State Police senior investigator, said officers tased Jones to subdue him.
“I think they were afraid he was going to hurt himself, and that’s what started it,” Darling told the Times Union. “There are still details that we’re trying to develop.”
It was at that moment when Jones burst into flames. The local paper said he “is in an intensive care unit at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse. His condition is grave, according to people briefed on the matter.”
Darling described the incident as “horrible” and said Greene County district attorney’s office is investigating what happened on Friday night, Oct. 29.
Jones’ attorney, Kevin Luibrand, told CBS 6, “his client is in a burn unit in Syracuse in a medical situation of the most serious type.” He said the incident was caught on video.
“In a letter to Darling dated Thursday, Luibrand requested that the department preserve all evidence in the case, including audio and video recordings from street cameras and other devices, as well as any computer data from any Tasers that were used during the encounter,” the Times Union wrote.
The lessons learned are three things:
- Please don’t start a confrontation with officers in their police station.
- Know your limits when it comes to alcohol consumption.
- And most importantly, don’t douse yourself with hand sanitizer that contains alcohol because you’ll light up like a Christmas tree upon being tased.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 23:40 - COVID Boosters Likely To Be Annual "For The Foreseeable Future": Aussie Pharmacists Guild
COVID Boosters Likely To Be Annual “For The Foreseeable Future”: Aussie Pharmacists Guild
Australians will need to get COVID booster shots annually “for the foreseeable future” to combat CCP Virus, according to the country’s Pharmacy Guild.
Trent Twomey, the president of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia (PGA), warned that people may need to get booster shots every 6 to 12 months to keep more deadly variants at bay.
“The question is what booster and what interval we need to get that booster, whether it’s every six, nine or 12 months. Those decisions need to be based on evidence and facts and at the moment that is an evolving space,” he told Nine newspapers.
Twomey noted that Australians may need to wait until 2023 to “reach some sort of steady-state vaccination program,” which will be similar to the annual flu shot.”
“In time, we will treat COVID like many other viruses that have been around for decades, and a COVID-19 shot will just be another element of the Australian vaccination program,” he said.
Students wait to receive the Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19 at Qudos Arena in Sydney, Australia, on Aug. 9, 2021. (Dean Lewins-Pool/Getty Images)
From Nov. 8, COVID booster shots will be available for all adult Australians six months after they got their second dose. Around 1.7 million people will be eligible for a booster dose by 2022, a move making Australia the second country in the world after Israel to offer boosters to all ages.
Australia has reached the 80 percent full vaccination rate last week, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison praising it as “another magnificent milestone.”
At the state level, however, only New South Wales, Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory have reached this number.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the country’s medicine and therapeutics regulator have approved Pfizer as a booster dose.
Pfizer booster shots will be given to people even if they had other vaccines for their first two doses. For those who have an allergic or adverse reaction to Pfizer, the AstraZeneca vaccine will be given instead.
While boosters are not required for international travel, states and territories will decide whether to make it mandatory for residents to be fully vaccinated.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews looks on during a press conference in Melbourne, Australia, on Sept. 1, 2021. (Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews suggested last month that booster shots may be needed for those who are fully vaccinated to retain their freedoms.
“A month before your six months is up, then you will get a message and your vaccination certificate, the thing that gets you the green tick. You’ll be prompted to go and book a time to go and have your booster shot,” Andrews said.
“There may be state clinics in that or it might be all done through GPs and pharmacies, that hasn’t been worked through yet. We’re happy to play our part, though. So it’ll be about the maintenance of your vaccination status.”
Meanwhile, South Australia Premier Steven Marshall has announced that eligible residents in the state will be able to get COVID boosters at government vaccination hubs from December.
“Access to a booster dose of the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine is yet another layer of protection available to South Australians,” he said on Friday.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 23:20 - Satellites Capture Fake US Aircraft Carrier In China Desert Used For Target Practice
Satellites Capture Fake US Aircraft Carrier In China Desert Used For Target Practice
China’s military has constructed mock-ups of U.S. warships in a remote desert missile testing range as training targets amid the threat of conflict in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.
U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) said satellite images by Maxar Technologies Inc., a U.S. firm with more than 80 satellites in low Earth orbit, show mock-ups of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers at the test facility in the Ruoqiang area of Xinjiang’s Taklamakan desert.
“This new range shows that China continues to focus on anti-carrier capabilities, with an emphasis on U.S. Navy warships,” USNI said.
One of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers can be seen below.
The facility also has a mock-up of a U.S. aircraft carrier mounted on rails to simulate a moving vessel.
For reference, here’s the mock-up of the carrier versus the real thing—very similar dimensions.
The signs are clear that China is focusing on its anti-ship missile program, managed by the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF).
Here’s an overview of the entire range.
This range is not far from another missile range that was used to test the so-called carrier killer DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles.
There are questions on the types of weapons tested or will be tested at the new facility, including hypersonic weapons.
Even though China-U.S. ties have improved in recent months, both global powers are locked in a great power competition. The Pentagon has raised concern over China’s rapidly expanding nuclear and hypersonic weapons programs.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 23:00 - Victor Davis Hanson: Trickle-Down Bidenism
Victor Davis Hanson: Trickle-Down Bidenism
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,
Can 10 months really make a real difference in America? Not normally.
But weld together a hard-left socialist agenda with the control of the White House and Congress onto the combined forces of progressive woke media, Silicon Valley, the corporate boardrooms, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Wall Street borg – all in the age of instant and intrusive communications—and it’s no wonder a country, even a nation as resilient as the United States, can descend quite quickly in ways that make America almost unrecognizable.
In other words, 40 weeks of relentless Bidenism finally permeates most of the nation.
Fuel Prices, Inflation, and Border Chaos
Out in the California foothills and Central Valley, relatively “cheap” propane now has more than doubled to a rate of $3.91 a gallon.
At about the same time that I got the propane bill, I filled up the truck with diesel fuel. It was $4.87 a gallon with a credit card, up in price almost $2 a gallon from over a year ago. I thought myself lucky since the week prior in Palo Alto it was about $5.29 a gallon.
I spoke not long ago in Bakersfield to an oil man. He described impending California new rules on the horizon concerning almost every aspect of horizontal drilling and fracking—as part of his own larger fears that the entire industry is shrinking even as demands and profits soar, and consumers need more natural gas and gasoline than ever.
Has anyone ever heard of liberal Americans deliberately not pumping oil and gas, but still needing so much more output that they beg the illiberal Saudis and Russians to bail us out? At other times in our history, we have suffered plenty of fossil fuel scarcities due to war, embargoes, and declining reserves. But never has America deliberately created shortages amid a sea of our own gas and oil.
What has been the reaction from those who slashed natural gas and oil production by cancelling new federal leases and pipelines, and oil fields in Alaska, or warned frackers that new regulations and taxes were just the prerequisites to a rapid phase out of their existence altogether—on the pathway to a wind and solar nirvana?
When asked if the United States would at least increase (e.g., restore previous levels of) oil production, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm laughed, “That is hilarious.”
To whom is that comical? The guy with an older model pickup doing daily landscape work for his wealthy clients? The waitress who drives 20 miles to work? The broke student who commutes to campus?
I drove today along a rural avenue next to my farm. Both sides of the street were littered—far more than usually so—with trash. They were not just the usual garbage bags and tires, but washers, dryers, refrigerators, car seats, furniture—and mattresses of all shapes and sizes. It was an intensification of the now old story of rural California as an open dumping ground of refuse.
I stopped to inspect the flotsam and jetsam. The dumpers are careful to glean out their personal addresses. They rarely leave traceable material. But all the magazines, newspapers, and printed material were in Spanish. Note there are no green regulators out here who patrol rural avenues to stop the pollution and desecration of the natural landscape; in the hierarchy of wokeness, illegal immigration trumps the environment.
So, I assumed, as is the case when I find people in the actual act of dumping their garbage and refuse on my property (like last week), that they are likely illegally here (no English). And the current clutter may represent recent spikes in crossings from a nonexistent border and redirects of illegal aliens from Texas. (If 2 million illegal entrants will cross the current fiscal year, and if they are being bused or dispersed by the Biden Administration throughout the United States, then small communities of recent immigrants will likely feel the surge).
The reaction? The Biden Administration is planning to settle “claims” of “wrong” treatment lodged by those who feel that after crossing illegally into the United States, and continuing to reside illegally in America, that they are entitled to $450,000 per family. Otherwise, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas preened of the nonexistent border that it “is no less secure than before.”
“No less secure” means 2 million will cross this year?
When acting White House deputy press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked why the Biden Administration would lavish nearly a half a million dollars on illegal aliens who broke federal law, but not upon legal immigrants who obey America’s laws, she seemed bewildered at any criticism of rewarding only the unlawful: “Why would we be giving people who are coming here the right way money?”
Ms. Jean-Pierre gave a rare unguarded summation of the essence of woke progressivism: If we are going to give free stuff to Americans, those who do things the “right way” deserve nothing; those who do things the wrong way certainly do. Asymmetrical application of the law is the hallmark of wokeism.
I have been looking at new cars at the large regional car dealers. Whereas a year ago there were 200 or so new ones on lots to inspect, now there are not more than 10 or so—mostly subcompacts with prices upon inquiry well over the sticker MSRP figure. Almost overnight the lots have changed from premium new car marts into vast used car dealerships, but with a twist: today’s used cars sell at last year’s new car prices.
Wood is now a bit cheaper than three months ago, but still about triple the price of a year ago. I talked to a Mexican American contractor I know not long ago at Home Depot who was sorting and sifting through a small pile of what was left of overpriced 2’x6’s. “Just the junk left. It’s all junk,” he said.
When pressed about these disruptions in the supply chain, empty shelves, scarce inventories, delayed or cancelled shipments, and soaring prices, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki snarked, “The tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.”
Yes: cars, lumber, food—all the irrelevant treadmill trinkets that people don’t need.
After disappearing in the midst of the crisis due to his paternity leave, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg returned to weigh in with:
I think there have always been two kinds of Christmas shoppers. There is the ones who have all their list completed by Halloween, and then there’s people like me who show up at the mall on Christmas Eve . . . . [I]f you’re in that latter bucket, obviously there’s going to be more challenges.
Yes, that’s it, Pete. The bucket of self-employed handymen who make their living repairing roofs will just have to plan ahead better and quit waiting to fix eaves and gutters on Christmas Eve.
Farmers are not procrastinating but they still aren’t always being paid. Some hear their almond containers are stuck at Asian ports abroad, rotting for lack of longshoreman—and months after shipping the grower is getting nothing for his crop. Other payments freeze because California crops can’t get onto ships to cross the Pacific from Los Angeles or Long Beach. Growers are not whining about late-arriving Pelotons.
I’ve been looking at house prices too, again partly out of curiosity, partly because a family member is looking for a home. Homes in a development in October 2020 that were outrageously priced at $850,000 for a 2,400 square foot home near the central California coast are now listed between $1.3-4 million!
Interest may be about 2-3 percent, and so monthly mortgage costs don’t fully or immediately reflect the burdensome sale prices. Nonetheless, who could afford the $15,000-20,000 minimum property tax, the soaring insurance, the exorbitant cost to landscape the dirt lot in the backyard—and with a price increase on what we used to call a “middle-class home” of some $400,000 plus in just a year? Translated, the house went up over $1,000 a day, from unaffordable to a sick joke.
Medical bills are skyrocketing. A daughter’s health insurance deductible is $5,0000—per person in a five-person family. This year almost every family member’s bill will exceed that deductible. Of such spiraling prices, White House chief of staff Ron Klain reweeted former Obama advisor and Harvard professor Jason Furman’s shrug about the soaring inflation, “Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems.”
Ron and Jason are right: Rent, a ruptured appendix, and mammograms are just the “high class problems” stuff of America.
Retribalizing America
The country is rapidly retribalizing—the most toxic and sickest of all of Joe Biden disastrous gifts to America over the last 10 months. The Biden fixation with race reverberates throughout the intelligence agencies, the bureaucracy, the Pentagon, and the White House, as left-wing furies are unleashed shrieking and searching for mythical “white rage” and “white supremacy.” The Left’s new message is that of Bull Connor and Lester Maddox to the core: you are what you look like. Your race defines you and everyone who looks like you—and as well all those who don’t look like you. Individuals don’t exist; the tribe tolerates no exceptions, no traitors to their racial allegiances.
When I go into local large national discount retail stores, I notice that in the early morning hours one group of Americans shops. And by 10 a.m. they are replaced by quite another. Another strange new development: someone of your own race, a total stranger, will abruptly greet you with enthusiasm, as if some new tie, some previously unrecognized bond, now exists between you at a time when apparently the “color of your skin” fixation is supposedly the new normal.
Critical race theory’s legacy will entail the complete destruction of the message of Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked about the consequences of mandating the teaching of critical race theory racism to “combat” racism in Virginia, and the statewide pushback against Democratic candidates who endorsed such retrograde tribalism, Deputy Press Secretary Jean-Pierre scoffed, “Great countries are honest, right? They have to be honest with themselves about the history, which is good and the bad. And our kids should be proud to be Americans after learning that history.”
Yes, of course, that explains the Democratic implosion in Virginia: Those poor dishonest Virginians who were previously deluding themselves that their country was only half good!
The electoral anger in New Jersey and Virginia, but also throughout the country, reflects not just the chaos of the Biden first year, but the way in which the nearly 10 months of disasters have so rapidly damaged millions of American lives. The Biden team’s smug responses to the messes they made remind us that socialists care little for the millions of broken eggs necessary to cook a vast toxic omelet.
Does the Biden socialist cadre who engineered these self-induced calamities have any clue about the damage they have done to America? Or do they believe the chaos is tolerable collateral destruction to achieve an otherwise unattainable socialist paradise?
Or do they assume that their own wealth, power, and influence will provide them exemption from the baleful, concrete consequences of their own abstract ideologies?
Will trickle-down Bidenism always harm someone else, someone poorer, someone less important, someone culturally repugnant to them—like Joe Biden’s dregs and chumps, Barack Obama’s clingers, and Hillary Clinton’s deplorables and irredeemables?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 22:40 - Used-Car Prices Hit New Record Highs Amid Snarled Supply Chains
Used-Car Prices Hit New Record Highs Amid Snarled Supply Chains
Anyone shopping for a used car has been sticker shocked by soaring prices since the virus pandemic began. There’s a global shortage of semiconductor components which has shuttered auto plants and crimped new car output. Lower inventories at dealerships forced many people onto secondary markets (used car market), searching for the next best option, pushing prices to record highs.
The Manheim U.S. Used Vehicle Value Index jumped 9.2% month-over-month in October. This brought the index to 223.7 (a new record high). From a year ago, the index is up a whopping 38.1% from a year ago.
“Some of the monthly increase is a result of the seasonal adjustment, as October typically sees above-average vehicle depreciation and therefore used price declines,” Manheim wrote in the report.
However, it added, “this October was the first October in the history of the Manheim Index data, which dates to 1997, to see a non-seasonally adjusted price increase in October. The non-adjusted price increase in October was 5.4%.”
The used car market continues to march higher after the index stalled over the summer. Ford’s CFO John Lawler warned earlier this month that supply constraints could continue into 2022 and said, “we’ll be dealing with [supply chain issues] for a while.” This means used car prices might rise even further through year-end.
Manheim data reveals the lag between high-frequency data and traditional data at the BLS. We noted after September’s CPI print that “used cars will turn higher in coming months as Manheim wholesale prices rebounded.”
Ahead of Wednesday’s CPI print, we suspect the used car component of the index will rise due in part to Manheim’s latest data. As we’ve noted before, soaring prices have weighed on consumer sentiment.
There are no immediate indications that would suggest used car prices have reached a peak. However, a top US warehouse operator has just called the peak in the supply chain crisis.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 22:20 - Australian Nurse Charged After Pretending To Administer Vaccine
Australian Nurse Charged After Pretending To Administer Vaccine
By Daniel Khmelev of The Epoch Times,
A nurse in Western Australia (WA) has been charged with the fraudulent recording of vaccine information after she allegedly pretended to administer a dose of a COVID-19 jab before throwing away the still-full syringe.
Nurses are seen drawing up doses from a multi-dose vile of AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine at Claremont Showground on April 28, 2021 in Perth, Australia. The West Australian Government have opened up two new Vaccine Centres including one at Perth Airport. (Photo by Matt Jelonek/Getty Images) WA Police arrested and charged the 51-year-old female registered nurse at her residence on Sunday, Nov. 7. The woman employed at a private medical centre in St James had obtained approval to vaccinate the teenage child of a person known to her.
It is alleged that the nurse made a false record that the teenager had received the vaccine while also recording that another employee had performed the procedure. Standard practice for the procedure involves a second medical practitioner to observe the process, who on this occasion was a doctor.
The investigation commenced after the medical centre reported the incident to the police.
The nurse has been charged with one count of “Gains Benefit by Fraud.” She was refused bail and is due to appear before the court on Nov. 8.
Australia has seen a number of fraudulent vaccine-related incidents. According to The Age, the nation has seen fake digital vaccination certificates, along with bribes of up to $1,500, which have been offered to medical practitioners in Victoria to falsely record that the vaccine had been delivered.
This news of the arrest comes as WA Premier Mark McGowan announced a “Super Vax Weekend” on Nov. 6 and Nov. 7 to encourage West Australians to roll up their sleeves to get the jab.
“I’ve always said the way out of this pandemic is high vaccination rates, and this remains the case as today I outline WA’s Safe Transition Plan out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” McGowan said in a media release.
McGowan had previously stated that WA would maintain its closed border policy until 90 percent of the state’s 12-and-over population were fully vaccinated.
WA is also the nation’s least-vaccinated state—despite public information campaigns from the government—with around 67 percent of West Australians aged 16 being fully vaccinated, and over 80 percent receiving the first dose.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 22:00 - White House Pushes Schools To Vaccinate 28 Million 5-11 Year-Old Students. Should They?
White House Pushes Schools To Vaccinate 28 Million 5-11 Year-Old Students. Should They?
As we noted the other day, parents with young children (between the ages of 5 to 11), who have just been approved to receive the COVID vaccine, are increasingly worried about side effects for children.
Unfortunately, the pressure on those parents is about to be turned up to ’11’…
First lady Jill Biden and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy are set to visit the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia, on Monday to launch a nationwide campaign to promote pediatric vaccinations, per AP.
The school, which is well known as a top public high school in the Greater DC Area, was the first to administer the polio vaccine in 1954. Meanwhile, President Biden is planning to visit more pediatric vaccine sites across the country.
Meanwhile, at the same time, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona are sending a letter to school districts across the country calling on them to organize vaccine clinics for their newly eligible students. The officials are reminding school districts that they can tap billions of dollars in federal coronavirus relief money to support pediatric vaccination efforts.
The Biden administration is providing local school districts with tools to help them partner with pharmacies, or simply administer the shots themselves. And it’s asking schools to share information on the benefits of vaccines and details about the vaccination process with parents, in an effort to combat disinformation surrounding the shots.
The White House is encouraging schools to host community conversations and share resources like vaccine fact sheets. It’s also working with the American Academy of Pediatrics to partner local physicians who can work with schools aiming to share science-based information about the shots.
If there is any possible relief from the pressure-to-jab, Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Dr. Nicole Saphier, an assistant professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College, address the question of whether you should vaccinate your 5-year-old in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
There answer is perhaps reassuring: Be reassured that whatever you do, the risk is extremely low.
Here are the numbers…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 42% of U.S. children 5 to 11 had Covid by June 2021, before the Delta wave – a prevalence that is likely greater than 50% today. Of 28 million children in that age range, 94 have died of Covid since the pandemic began (including deaths before newer treatments), and 562 have been hospitalized with Covid infections.
Serious complications are so uncommon in this age range that of 2,186 children in the Pfizer vaccine study, no child in either the vaccine or placebo group developed severe illness from Covid.
Additionally, Saphier and Makary note that, just as with adults, pediatric COVID deaths and hospitalizations tend to come among those with comorbidities.
Crucially though, Saphier and Makary note that if a child already had Covid, there’s no scientific basis for vaccination.
Deep within the 80-page Pfizer report is this crucial line:
“No cases of COVID-19 were observed in either the vaccine group or the placebo group in participants with evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
That’s consistent with the largest population-based study on the topic, which found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic Covid.
Natural immunity is likely even more robust in children, given their stronger immune systems.
An indiscriminate Covid vaccine mandate may result in unintended harm among children with natural immunity.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 21:40 - Stop Looking At Danchenko, Start Looking At Andrew Weissmann & Robert Mueller
Stop Looking At Danchenko, Start Looking At Andrew Weissmann & Robert Mueller
Authored by ‘Sundance’ via TheConservativeTreehouse.com,
TechnoFog has a good outline on the background of Igor Danchenko and the DOJ/FBI team effort to avoid undermining the Steele Dossier. {SEE HERE} The accurate analysis ends with the following question, also posed by Sergei Millian: “Why was the DOJ/FBI covering for Danchenko“?
To my friends in the truth media, the answer is inside the information previously released {See Here} which we have covered for a long time; and which the righteous media (Mollie Hemmingway, Lee Smith, Kimberley Strassel, etc) are hopefully only a few weeks away from outlining.
The DOJ/FBI coverup, which included being purposefully blind to the 2017 Danchenko revelations, was not done to protect Danchenko. It was done to protect Andrew Weissmann and Robert Mueller.
Yes, the FBI and DOJ knew the primary subsource for Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, disavowed the material in the dossier and undermined it in January of 2017 and again in June 15, 2017, as everyone is noting. Yes, despite that knowledge Mueller/Weissmann applied for a FISA renewal on June 29th. However, there’s a date a year later, all the way into July of 2018, when the DOJ and FBI claimed that Danchenko was speaking truth in their affirmation to the FISA court.
THAT is in 2018.
Why would the same DOJ/FBI officials who knew the dossier was junk in early 2017 lie to the FISA court in 2018?
ANSWER: Because they were not protecting Danchenko, they were protecting Robert Mueller.
Robert Muller was appointed by institutional preservationist Rod Rosenstein in order to cover up the era of government abuse and political weaponization by corrupt and highly political FBI and DOJ officials. Robert Mueller was as much the Special Counsel as Joe Biden is the current presidency; which is to say they are figureheads, avatars, public faces to activity that is really underway by those behind them.
When Mueller appeared before congress, the public got their first-hand look at how disconnected he was from any actual involvement in the investigation that carried his name. He knew virtually nothing about the two year investigation, because he was a title in name only. The real players charged to throw a bag over the corrupt activity preceding their appointment was the team led by Andrew Weissmann.
When Andrew Weissmann and crew entered the DOJ to effectively run the Trump-Russia investigation, their purpose was to: (1) continue what was ongoing; and (2) coverup all that came before. AG Jeff Sessions recused himself, and DAG Rod Rosenstein became the co-dependent enabler for the Weissmann crew’s needs.
During a June 2020 Senate hearing, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein openly admitted to being nothing more than the rubber stamp for every request. Rosenstein approved every request, signed every authorization and agreed to every scope expansion Andrew Weissmann put in front of him. There was nothing Rosenstein ever denied the Weissmann crew.
Team Weissmann, under the authorities of a blank-check special counsel, effectively ran Main Justice top to bottom for two years. When you accept the framework Rosenstein later admitted was in place, then you understand that anything blocked from DOJ/FBI release (see Nunes pleas) was blocked by Weissmann Inc; and everything that ever came out of the DOJ/FBI was released by Weissmann Inc. Reread that as many times as needed until it sinks in.
Back to the question about why the DOJ/FBI were protecting Danchenko by not exposing the lies that John Durham is now making public in his indictments.
To wit, I would reference you THAT specific moment in July of 2018 when Team Weissmann wrote a letter to the FISA Court that was increasingly distrusting of what they were seeing and hearing within the justice system:
Look at how the FISA was used by the Mueller investigation to continue its weaponization throughout 2017 and even into 2018. In July of 2018, long after the source material was debunked, the special counsel office was still telling the FISA court the predication for the FISA application and subsequent renewals was valid.
Drive this point home. This is a key to understanding the scope of how weaponized the Mueller team was.
In July of 2018 the special counsel resistance group was lying to the FISA court in order to protect the cornerstone document that permitted them to weaponize the intelligence apparatus.
This letter was written July 12, 2018. It is NOT accidental that only a week later, July 21st, the special counsel released the FISA application under the guise of FOIA fulfillment.
Aside from the date, the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it. The Mueller team running the DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application still contains “sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause” to approve the application. The resistance unit running the DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still valid.
On page #8 [Source Document Here] when discussing Christopher Steele’s sub-source, Igor Danchenko, the special counsel group notes the FBI found Danchenko to be truthful and cooperative.
This is an incredibly misleading statement to the FISA court, because what the letter doesn’t say is that 18-months earlier Danchenko, also known in the IG report as the “primary sub-source”, disavowed the content and informed the FBI that the material attributed to him in the dossier was essentially junk.
By July 2018, the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the court and said the predicate was still valid. Why?
It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive. In July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.
This letter justifying the application and claiming that current information would still be a valid predicate therein, speaks to the 2018 DOJ needing to retain the validity of the FISA warrant. The the DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller/Weissmann had already extracted from the fraudulently obtained FISA authority. Protect the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’, that’s the motive.
In July 2018, if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were fatally flawed, Robert Mueller/Andrew Weismann may have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a result of its exploitation. The DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller’s poisoned fruit.
If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there’s a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated… and cases were pending. The solution: mislead the court, ie. lie, and claim the predication was still valid.
That’s the bigger issue. Forget Danchenko and go there.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 21:20 - House Version Of Biden's SALT Economic Agenda Set To Predominantly Benefit Wealthy, High Tax States
House Version Of Biden’s SALT Economic Agenda Set To Predominantly Benefit Wealthy, High Tax States
This should rile up “the squad” plenty…
The House version of Joe Biden’s economic agenda may wind up benefitting New Jersey and other high-tax states, a new report from Bloomberg revealed today.
The middle class in these states would benefit from the expansion of the state and local tax deduction, Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, commented on Sunday night while speaking on CNN.
The House’s version of Biden’s agenda increases the cap on the SALT write-off to $80,000, up from a $10,000 limit that was put in place in 2017, Bloomberg reported.
Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey spoke out against the idea, arguing that the tax break should only be for those making under $400,000 per year. Senator Bernie Sanders echoed these sentiments, making the case that the deduction increase shouldn’t benefit the wealthiest Americans.
For those with lower taxes and lower costs of living, Gottheimer says the deduction cap would have less of an effect. “For Bernie Sanders, if you’re in Vermont, it’s a different situation, right?” he commented.
The think tank Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said that high earners stood to benefit the most from the House version of the bill. Middle income households would get, on average about $20 per year in cuts, while wealthy households would get over $23,000 per year in cuts, the Committee said.
House leaders are prepared to pass Biden’s bill this month. The bill would then undergo additional changes in the Senate.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 21:00 - Trump Hints At Biden Rematch: "You Think I Kid, But I'm…Not"
Trump Hints At Biden Rematch: “You Think I Kid, But I’m…Not”
Authored by Phillip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics.com,
The former president made a gaffe, realized his mistake, and then made a joke sure to make the Republican establishment nervous.
It was Friday night, and Donald Trump was telling a crowd at Mar-a-Largo about his last campaign, about how “we were going to go in with a fourth term.” Of course, he was talking about his unsuccessful bid for a second stint in the White House. So, pivoting with a quick quip, Trump said, “It could be; you know we should be entitled to a fourth term too, after what we had to put up with!”
The audience — including some former Cabinet members and sympathetic members of Congress — laughed and cheered. They laughed and cheered again when Trump said he couldn’t use “Keep America Great” as a slogan because, as he explained it, “with all of the things that are happening in this country, I’ll say it, America, right now, is not great; America is under siege.”
The slogan needed an update: “It’s ‘Make America Great Again, Again.’”More laughing and more cheering from the crowd.
But Trump was serious.
“You think I kid,” he warned, “but I’m actually not. I’m actually not.”
The private remarks, shared with RealClearPolitics, are the clearest sign yet that Trump is considering a return to politics. Some close to him believe he’s already decided. Last month, his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told a radio host to lend him “all your money” so he could “bet that [Trump] is running again.”
Trump’s latest remarks came at the end of a policy summit hosted by the America First Policy Institute, the brainchild of his former senior domestic policy adviser, Brooke Rollins. It was a chance to replay all the old hits, introduce new ones at the expense of Joe Biden, and continue the will-he/won’t-he routine that’s aggravated the GOP establishment and titillated the MAGA base since he left office.
The Virginia gubernatorial election was proof that the Trump method works, at least according to the former president. A year after he issued an executive order banning federal training programs that even mention critical race theory, he said it “had become the number one issue in the Virginia governor’s race.”
On the eve of that election, Trump hosted a tele-rally for Glenn Youngkin, who went on to defeat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe by 2.3 percentage points. If he hadn’t called in to the rally and his base didn’t turn out to vote, Trump argued, “you would never ever have even come close to winning that election. Not even close.” Three days later, then, at Mar-a-Largo, Trump was ready to explain what “Glenn’s victory” meant. In his estimation, it was “a complete vindication of the arguments, and that was truly a vindication of our movement and the things we have been talking about for years.”
More such vindication is coming, he predicted, though Trump warned that “once these incompetent radicals are voted out of office … we have our work cut out for us because they are vicious and they are smart and they do stick together.”
But the GOP that will emerge if Trump is right about next November will be “a much different party,” he said, citing the gains his 2020 campaign made with blue-collar voters. “They even call it the party of Trump. And I said, ‘It’s not the party of Trump. This is the party of all of you in this room, and this is going to long outlast Trump.’”
One area where this assessment seems apparent: The proliferation of culture war political arguments. Though Youngkin was hesitant to embrace Trump in Virginia, the Republican candidate was more than eager to lean into the debate over parental rights in education. Pointing to the Virginia victory, and to the salience of the CRT debate, Trump argued, “We did not start the so-called culture war. But we will win it, and we will win it very strongly.”
But while Trump was ready to declare early victories, he also returned to old grievances, reading aloud from a list of Republicans who he believed had wronged him. He griped briefly about Sens. Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Bill Cassidy. His harshest remarks, however, were reserved for the Senate minority leader. Trump called Mitch McConnell “an old, broken-down crow.”
“They don’t fight like they should,” he said of that wing of the party.
“They’re afraid of doing anything without apologizing to the radical left.”
The crowd seemed to enjoy this commentary, but they sounded ecstatic when the 45th president turned his attention to the current occupant of the Oval Office.
According to Trump, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was “the most embarrassing moment in the history.” Rising inflation is ruining the economy, and things are so bad that Jimmy Carter looks “like a brilliant president by comparison.” The surge of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border wasn’t the result of incompetence, he asserted; the uptick was evidence that the Biden White House “wants these people to pour into our country.”
All of it sounded like one his old stump speeches, but Trump rolled out new material for his guests. “You just saw what happened to Joe Biden on his travails in Europe. That wasn’t good,” Trump said of unsubstantiated right-wing rumors that the current president was indisposed during his recent visit to the Vatican. “He went to see the pope. He was, uh … a little late. What the hell happened to him? Does anybody know what happened?”
As Trump was riffing, someone in the crowd started bellowing, “Let’s go, Brandon!”
Another crossover of politics and culture, the chant has become a GOP rallying cry. And Trump was delighted.
“Brandon has become a big star. Nobody ever heard of this guy before. Now he’s one of the biggest stars,” Trump told his supporters. The chant that had started at a NASCAR race, when an Alabama crowd interrupted a live interview of Brandon Brown in the winner’s circle with shouts of “F— Joe Biden” — and the confused interviewer jokingly told the driver that fans were chanting his name — suddenly echoed in the ornate Mar-a-Largo ballroom. Trump was pleased. He enjoyed the original: “I still like the first phrase better somehow. It’s more accurate.”
This new meme has become part of the Trump camp’s marketing machinery. Along with the red MAGA hats and branded plastic straws, there are now the “Let’s Go, Brandon!” T-shirts for sale. Without officially running, the former president has amassed a war chest of more than of $102 million. Along with his grassroots army, that pile of cash makes Trump impossible for the GOP establishment to ignore.
Given that he wins most 2024 nomination straw polls, why wouldn’t he run again? That was the question RCP’s Tom Bevan asked the former president last month. His answer:
“Well, one reason could be your health. You get a call from your doctor and that’s the end of that. … You never know, there are many things can happen; politics is a crazy world. It is a big commitment of you, your children, your wife and your family.”
If Trump has any hesitation now, he didn’t express it Friday night. He talked about Trump World, particularly the America First Policy Institute that hosted the night, as part of a larger “movement,” one that transcended him. Those followers, he told the black-tie crowd, “will prevail.”
“They’re destroying our country,” he said of progressives in summing up his hour-long speech. “We’re gonna make our country greater than ever before.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 20:40 - Farmers Wait Weeks For John Deere Parts As Strikes Paralyze Midwest Factories
Farmers Wait Weeks For John Deere Parts As Strikes Paralyze Midwest Factories
Multiple John Deere dealerships report part delays for tractors and heavy equipment amid an ongoing strike of more than 10,000 members of the United Auto Workers union at 12 of Deere’s Midwest factories and facilities, according to Bloomberg.
Dealerships note that customers face weeks-long delays for tractor and equipment parts that would typically take several days to fulfill. These parts and components are crucial for farmers to keep combine harvesters and other farm equipment humming during harvest season to stay ahead of the wintry season.
Deere’s situation worsened this week when 90% of union workers rejected its offer that would have ended the walkout, which began in mid-October. Workers are encouraged to seek higher pay because of Deere’s strong earnings.
“It seems general membership feels emboldened by this current political moment of labor power. They’re pushing things further than the union leadership apparently wants to go,” Victor Chen, a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies labor, told CBS News. “It’s a gamble, but the economic wind is against their backs, given widespread supply chain problems and the current worker shortage.”
Jon Fisher, a wholesaler of tractors and other machinery in Columbia, South Carolina, said supply chain issues already complicated the picture for procuring parts. Now strikes are a “doubly whammy” where parts are more expensive and harder to find. He said what used to take days now takes three or more weeks.
According to CNN Business, the strike has forced the tractor company to explore whether it can source parts from its 59 foreign factories to satisfy domestic demand while striking continues with no end in sight.
Deere has considered using replacement workers or strikebreakers, a ploy by companies to counteract strikes, but there are few workers in the labor market.
Importing parts from its overseas factories could be the company’s short-term solution to mitigate the disruptions that have forced some farmers to resort to the second-hand market for parts.
The part disruption is problematic for farmers racing to finish corn and soybean harvesting ahead of the winter season. Part delays could begin to prevent fall fieldwork in preparation for spring plantings.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 20:20 - CNN Airs "Town Hall" With Sesame Street Puppets Encouraging Kids To Get Vaccinated
CNN Airs “Town Hall” With Sesame Street Puppets Encouraging Kids To Get Vaccinated
CNN has stooped to a new low in the hysteria to try and get children vaccinated: it is using puppets from the popular kids show Sesame Street to promote the Covid-19 jabs.
CNN aired a program called ‘The ABCs of COVID Vaccines: A CNN/Sesame Street Townhall for Families’ this weekend where the puppets showed up to recommend to kids that they get vaccinated. The ‘town hall’ came just hours after the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5 to 11.
Do you or your little ones have questions about the COVID-19 vaccines? Join your favorite furry friends for a special town hall hosted by @DrSanjayGupta and @EricaRHill, airing this Saturday, 11/6 at 8:30am ET on @CNN. pic.twitter.com/VmDojM8q65
— Sesame Street (@sesamestreet) November 3, 2021
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The show tells kids they can have “playdates” with the vaccine when they weren’t able to beforehand.
Puppets like one named Rosita said things about the vaccine like: “It will help keep me, my friends, my neighbors, my abuela all healthy.”
Dr. Sanjay Gupta says the more people that get vaccinated, “the better we’re going to be able to stop the spread of Covid and keep everyone healthy.”
Even Big Bird Tweeted over the weekend that he got the Covid vaccine – a Tweet which President Biden promptly responded to.
Good on ya, @BigBird. Getting vaccinated is the best way to keep your whole neighborhood safe.
— President Biden (@POTUS) November 8, 2021
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According to Toronto99.com, it marks the 6th time CNN has used the Sesame Street puppets to run a ‘town hall’ about Covid.
One ex-BBC corporate communication trainer summed up what most people online were thinking, calling the script that the show was following “very concerning”.
Ex BBC ITV and corporate comms trainer here. This is very concerning pic.twitter.com/raPiE8OLNi
— Anna Brees (@BreesAnna) November 6, 2021
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 20:00 - David Stockman On The 'GreenMageddon' (And What It Means For You)
David Stockman On The ‘GreenMageddon’ (And What It Means For You)
Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,
With COP26 now underway, it’s not too soon to start clanging the alarm bells – not about climate catastrophe, of course – but about the stupidest act of the assembled nations since Versailles, when the vindictive WWI victors laid the groundwork for the catastrophes of depression, WWII, the Holocaust, Soviet tyranny, the Cold War and Washington’s destructive global hegemony, all of which followed hard upon the next.
Politicians and their allies in the mainstream media, think tanks, lobbies and Big Business (with its cowardly sleep-walking leaders) are fixing to do nothing less than destroy the prosperity of the world and send global life careening into a modern economic Dark Ages. And worse still, it’s being done in the service of a bogus climate crisis narrative that is thoroughly anti-science and wholly inconsistent with the actual climate and CO2 history of the planet.
Cutting to the chase, during the past 600 million years, the earth has rarely been as cool as at present, and almost never has it had as low CO2 concentrations as the 420 ppm level that today’s climate howlers decry.
In fact, according to the careful reconstructions of actual earth scientists who have studied ocean sediments, ice cores and the like, there have been only two periods encompassing about 75 million years (13% of that immensely long 600 million year stretch of time) where temperatures and CO2 concentrations were as low as it present. These were the Late Carboniferous/Early Permian time from 315 to 270 million years ago and the Quaternary Period, which hosted modern man 2.6 million years ago.
You might say, therefore, that the possibility of a warmer, CO2-richer environment is a case of planetary “been there, done that”. And it is most certainly not a reason to wantonly dismantle and destroy the intricate, low-cost energy system that is the root source of today’s unprecedented prosperity and human escape from poverty and want.
But that’s hardly the half of it. What actually lies smack in the center of our warmer past is a 220-million-year interval from 250 million years ago through the re-icing of Antarctica about 33 million years ago that was mainly ice-free.
As shown by the blue line in the chart below, during most of that period (highlighted in the brown panels), temperatures were up to 12C higher than at present, and Mother Earth paid no mind to the fact that she lacked polar ice caps or suitable habitats for yet un-evolved polar bears.
Global Temperature And Atmospheric CO2 Over Geologic Time
As it happened, during what has been designated as the Mesozoic Age, the planet was busy with another great task, namely, salting away the vast deposits of coal, oil and gas that power the modern economy and allow billions of people to have a living standard enjoyed only by kings just a few centuries ago.
There is no mystery as to how this serendipitous gift to present-day man happened. In a world largely bereft of ice and snow, the oceans were at vastly higher levels and flooded much of the landmass, which, in turn, was verdant with plant and animal life owing to warmer temperatures and abundant rainfall.
Stated differently, Mother Nature was harvesting massive amounts of solar energy in the form of carbon-based plant and animal life, which, over the eons of growth and decay, resulted in the build-up of vast sedimentary basins. As the tectonic plates shifted (i.e., the single continent of Pangaea broke up into its modern continental plates) and the climates oscillated, these sedimentary deposits were buried under shallow oceans and, with the passage of time, heat and pressure, were converted into the hydrocarbon deposits that dot the first 50,000 feet (at least) of the earth’s crust.
In the case of coal, the most favorable conditions for its formation occurred 360 million to 290 million years ago during the Carboniferous (“coal-bearing”) Period. However, lesser amounts continued to form in some parts of the Earth during subsequent times, in particular, the Permian (290 million to 250 million years ago) and throughout the Mesozoic Era (250 million to 66 million years ago).
Likewise, the formation of petroleum deposits began in warm shallow oceans, where dead organic matter fell to the ocean floors. These zooplankton (animals) and phytoplankton (plants) mixed with inorganic material that entered the oceans by rivers. It was these sediments on the ocean floors that then formed oil sands while buried during eons of heat and pressure. That is to say, the energy embodied in petroleum initially came from the sunlight, which had become trapped in chemical form in dead plankton.
Moreover, the science behind this isn’t a matter of academic armchair speculation for the simple reason that it has been powerfully validated in the commercial marketplace. That is, trillions of dollars have been deployed in the last century in the search for hydrocarbons, based on immensely complicated petroleum engineering research, theory and geologic models. Oil drillers weren’t throwing darts at a wildcatter’s wall but were coincidentally proving these “facts” of climate history are correct, given that they led to the discovery and extraction of several trillions of BOEs (barrels of oil equivalent).
Consequently, it is solidly estimated by industry experts that today’s petroleum deposits were roughly formed as follows:
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About 70% during the Mesozoic age (brown panels, 252 to 66 million years ago) which was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the oceans;
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20% was formed in the dryer, colder Cenozoic age (last 65 million years);
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10% were formed in the earlier warmer Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).
Indeed, at the end of the day, petroleum engineering is rooted in climate science because it was climate itself that produced those economically valuable deposits.
And a pretty awesome science it is. After all, billions of dollars have been pushed down the wellbores in up to two miles of ocean waters and 40,000 feet below the surface in what amounts to an amazingly calibrated and targeted search for oil-bearing needles in a geologic haystack.
For instance, the Cretaceous Period from 145 million to 66 million years ago, which was especially prolific for oil formation, was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high open sea levels and numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles, ammonites and rudists, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. And it is knowing this science that permits multi-billion barrel hydrocarbon needles to be found in the earth’s vasty deep.
Needless to say, the climate warmed sharply during the Cretaceous, rising by about 8 degrees C, and eventually reached a level 10 degrees C warmer than today’s on the eve of the asteroid-driven Great Extinction Event of 66 million years ago. As shown in the graph below, at that point, there were no ice caps at either pole, and Pangaea was still coming apart at the seams–so there was no circulating ocean conveyor system in the infant Atlantic.
Yet during the Cretaceous, CO2 levels actually went down while temperatures were rising sharply. That’s the very opposite of the Climate Alarmists’ core claim that it is rising CO2 concentrations which are currently forcing global temperatures higher.
Moreover, we are not talking about a marginal reduction in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Levels actually dropped sharply from about 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm during that 80 million year stretch. This was all good for hydrocarbon formation and today’s endowment of nature’s stored work, but it was also something more.
To wit, it was yet another proof that planetary climate dynamics are far more complicated and ridden with crosscurrents than the simple-minded doom loops now being used to model future climate states from the current far lower temperature and CO2 levels.
As it happens, during the periods since the Great Extinction Event 66 million years ago, both vectors have steadily fallen; CO2 levels continued to drop to the 300–400 ppm of modern times, and temperatures dropped another 10 degrees Celsius.
It is surely one of the great ironies of our times that today’s fanatical crusades against fossil fuels are being carried out with not even a nod to the geologic history that contradicts the entire “warming” and CO2 concentration hysteria and made present energy consumption levels and efficiencies possible.
That is to say, the big, warm and wet one (the Mesozoic) got us here. True global warming is not the current and future folly of mankind; it is the historical enabler of present-day economic blessings. Yet, here we are on the eve of COP26, manically focused on reducing emissions to the levels required to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.
Then again, exactly which pre-industrial level might that be?
We will address the more recent evolution, including the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in Part 2, but suffice it to say that the chart below reflects broadly accepted geologic science. Still, we are hard-pressed—even with the aid of a magnifying glass—to see any time in the last 66 million years in which the global temperatures weren’t a lot higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above current levels—even during much of the far-right margin labeled the “Pleistocene Ice Age” of the past 2.6 million years.
If your brain is not addled by the climate change narrative, the very term rings a resoundingly loud bell. That’s because there have been on the order of 20 distinct “ice ages” and interglacial warming periods during the Pleistocene, the latest of which ended about 18,000 years ago and from which we have been digging out ever since.
Of course, the climb away from retreating glaciers in Michigan, New England, northern Europe, etc. to warmer, more hospitable climes has not been continuously smooth, but rather a syncopated sequence of advances and retreats. Thus, it is believed that the world got steadily warmer until about 13,000 years ago, which progress was then interrupted by the Younger Dryas, when the climate became much drier and colder and caused the polar ice caps to re-expand and ocean levels to drop by upwards of 100 feet as more of the earth’s fixed quantity of water was reabsorbed back into the ice packs.
After about 2,000 years of retreat, however, and with no help from the humans who had repaired to cave living during the Younger Dryas, the climate system swiftly regained its warming mojo. About 8,000 years ago, during the subsequent run-up to what the science calls the Holocene Optimum, global temperatures rose by upwards of 3 degrees Celsius on average and up to 10 degrees Celsius in the higher latitudes.
And it happened quite rapidly. One peer-reviewed study showed that in parts of Greenland, temperatures rose 10°C (18°F) in a single decade. Overall, scientists believe that half of the rebound from the “ice age” conditions of the Younger Dryas may have occurred in barely 15 years. Ice sheets melted, sea levels rose, forests expanded, trees replaced grass and grass replaced desert—all with startling alacrity.
In contrast to today’s climate models, Mother Nature clearly did not go off the rails in some kind of linear doomsday loop of ever-increasing temperatures and without any hectoring from Greta, either. Actually, Greenland got all frozen up and thawed several more times thereafter.
Needless to say, the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago is not the “preindustrial” baseline from which the Climate Howlers are pointing their phony hockey sticks. In fact, other studies show that, even in the Arctic, it was no picnic time for the polar bears. Among 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6 °C higher during the optimum than they are today.
Say what? Isn’t that the same +1.6 degrees C above current levels that the COP26 folks are threatening to turn off the lights of prosperity to prevent?
In any event, what did happen was far more beneficent. To wit, the warmer and wetter Holocene Optimum and its aftermath gave rise to the great river civilizations 5,000 years ago, including the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile River civilizations among the most notable.
Stated differently, that +1.6 degrees C was reflective of the climate-based catalyzing forces that actually made today’s world possible. From the abundances of the river civilizations, there followed the long march of agriculture and the economic surpluses and abundance that enabled cities, literacy, trade and specialization, advancement of tools and technology and modern industry—the latter being the ultimate human escape from a life based on the back muscles of man and his domesticated animals alone.
At length, the quest for higher and higher industrial productivity spurred the search for ever-cheaper energy, even as intellectual, scientific and technological advances which flowed from these civilizations led to the rise of a fossil fuel-powered economy based on energy companies harvesting the condensed and stored solar BTUs captured by Mother Nature during the planet’s long warmer and wetter past.
In a word, what powers prosperity is ever more efficient “work,” such as moving a ton of freight by a mile or converting a kilogram of bauxite into alumina or cooking a month’s worth of food. Alas, during the 230 million mainly ice-free years of the Mesozoic, the planet itself accomplished one of the greatest feats of “work” ever known: Namely, the conversion of massive amounts of diffuse solar energy into the high-density BTU packages embodied in coal, oil and gas-based fuels.
As it happens, when one of the previous “preindustrial” warming eras (the Roman Warming) was coming to an end in the late 4th century AD, St. Jerome admonished the faithful “never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Yet that’s exactly what the assembled nation’s will be doing at COP26.
* * *
We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms. But this is just the beginning… Most people don’t realize the terrible things that could come next, including negative interest rates, the abolition of cash, and much more. If you want to know how to survive what the central bankers and the Deep State have planned, then you need to see this newly released report from legendary investor Doug Casey and his team. Click here to download it now.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 19:40 -
- Elliott's "Wolfpack" Plans To Divide Toshiba Into 3 Standalone Companies By 2023
Elliott’s “Wolfpack” Plans To Divide Toshiba Into 3 Standalone Companies By 2023
Japan has been quietly receding as it accepts its place as the world’s third-largest economy roughly a decade after China finally threw off the chains of its “century of humiliation” to reclaim China’s place as Asia’s most powerful economic and military force. But despite two decades of tepid growth and inflation, something even “Abenomics” couldn’t fix, a handful of big-name American investors are buying up some of Japan’s most visible companies seeking “deep value” in the land of the rising sun.
In Aug. 2020, Warren Buffett and Berkshire announced that while Berkshire was quietly dumping its holdings in American banks, Buffett was raising stakes above the 5% reporting threshold in Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi Corp., Mitsui and Sumitomo.
A little more than a month ago, Paul Singer’s Elliott Management joined a “wolfpack” of investors targeting Toshiba with some whispering about the Japanese tech giant being broken up by its new private equity overlords, Elliott and its fellow “wolfpack” members.
According to Nikkei, Toshiba is set to divide itself into three companies to focus on three primary areas: infrastructure, devices, and semiconductor memory, with the division expected to be completed by 2035.
More from Nikkei:
All three are expected to be listed at some point. The move is part of Toshiba’s strategy to strengthen shareholder value by creating independent companies that have different profit structures and growth strategies. Japanese electronics companies, with their wide range of businesses from power stations to home appliances, used to be a growth engine for the country. Toshiba had been a star among those companies and a move like this by such a prominent entity is unprecedented. However, Toshiba has been disadvantaged by a so-called conglomerate discount, as investors tend to value a diversified group of businesses and assets at less than the sum of its parts because of a wider range of risks and a perceived reduction in capital efficiency.
Toshiba says it hopes to unveil it plan during its upcoming shareholder meeting.
Toshiba wants to incorporate the new plan into its mid-term management strategy to be unveiled on Friday.
Toshiba has its fingers in many pies – from the operation of nuclear and thermal power plants to transportation systems, from the manufacture of elevators to the production of air conditioners, hard disc drives and semiconductors.
These businesses earned 200 billion to 800 billion yen annually and brought in total revenue of 3.5 trillion yen ($30.8 billion) in the fiscal year that ended in March.
Under the new plan, Toshiba’s power stations business will be operated by an infrastructure company while hard disc drive business will be run by a device company, for example.
A company owned by Kioxia Holdings, in which Toshiba has a 40% stake, is expected to operate its semiconductor memory business.
However, it is also possible that its semiconductor business could be integrated into the company that oversees devices.
Toshiba shareholders are expected to be allocated shares in the new separate entities.The big question now: how many more major Japanese corporations will be gobbled up as American dealmakers look further abroad for deals. Buffett and Munger both claimed that there’s still plenty of value to be found. So, will Elliott Management lock in some kind of competition against Berkshire Hathaway to help drive up Japanese valuations?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 19:20 - MSNBC Goes Full Clowntard: Gaslights That Inflation Is A "Good Thing", Deletes Tweet After Angry Backlash
MSNBC Goes Full Clowntard: Gaslights That Inflation Is A “Good Thing”, Deletes Tweet After Angry Backlash
While millions of Americans are suffering from runaway, galloping inflation everywhere (to avoid the dreaded “H” word that made Jack Dorsey every lib’s enemy #1) from the gas pump to the grocery store aisle – which of course affects low-income individuals the most, MSNBC has gone up to bat for the Biden administration, deploying their best pretzel-logician to explain why all this inflation is literally – wait for it – good.
First, the now-deleted tweet…
Nevermind that in September, a Kroger executive warned in that grocery prices were about to get nasty, and the company will be “passing along higher cost to the customer where it makes sense to do so.” Or that Nestle CFO Francois-Xavier Roger said blistering inflation would likely continue into next year – telling the crowd at a Barclays consumer staples conference: “If we talk of 2022, it is likely that input cost inflation will be higher next year than this year.”
Or that Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic admitted last month that inflation is not transitory (and even has a swear jar collecting dollar bills for every time some gaslighter utters the word “transitory”).
Or that agricultural input costs from fertilizer to feed have gone through the roof – thanks to soaring natural gas prices of all things.
Or labor shortages throughout the supply chain – including US ports and the trucking industry – including those who refuse to take the Covid-19 vaccine.
Or just read this from Bank of America:
“Meanwhile on Main Street: cost of living rising…wages rising; food (coffee @ 7-year high, wheat @ 13-year high), energy (BofA forecast $120/bbl Brent next 6 months), shelter (US rents up 9% YoY), wages annualizing 6% past 6 months; US core CPI currently 4.0% YoY, likely to be 5-6% spring’22.”
Nope. You see, the inflation we’re seeing today is a good thing, according to MSNBC’s James Surowiecki, whose financial background is a Ph.D. in American history and being a writer at The Motley Fool and The New Yorker.
Their rationale: people spent less and saved more during the pandemic (more disposable income), and the stock market (which most American’s still don’t participate in) went apeshit.
Even though millions of Americans lost their jobs, enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus payments left many of them better off, not worse. And the stock market, after initially falling, boomed.
Which of course is just propaganda, because as Morgan Stanley explained so simply even MSNBC columnists could understand, the “bottom 80%” of the population retained just a third of the $2 trillion in so-called excess savings. And without jobs, most have already burned through whatever money they had saved up. In other words, the bulk of government handouts ended up – you guessed it – in the hands of the ultra rich who never needed it!
Facts be damned, MSNBC’s propaganda continued: “American consumers are, relatively speaking, flush, and it’s that strong demand for goods and services that is sending prices higher.”
BUT (and totally couldn’t be the primary reason, could it?), “it’s taking manufacturers and food producers time to increase supply after cutting back production during the pandemic,” and as a result, “When you have high demand, and relatively low supply, prices go up.”
“The inflation we’re seeing is not, then, some mysterious affliction that’s descended on the economy. It’s the predictable product of the economy’s rapid recovery, and its costs have been offset, to a large degree, by robust wage growth and government policies.”
Except, when adjusted for inflation, real weekly earnings are negative.
We’ve come full circle on inflation pic.twitter.com/0qwqP1XDxA
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 8, 2021
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Meanwhile, even the notorious optimistic Wall Street is starting to tell the truth, with Goldman warning that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Not surprisingly, after getting ratio’ed in a furious backlash, MSNBC did the only thing it could and deleted its tweet, as its latest attempt at mass gaslighting propaganda went terribly wrong.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 19:00 - 'Roads Are Racist' – Buttigieg Debates CNN On Deconstructing America's Bigotted Highway System
‘Roads Are Racist’ – Buttigieg Debates CNN On Deconstructing America’s Bigotted Highway System
Not for the first time, Pete Buttigieg is vowing to do something about America’s “racist” interstate highway system. As absurdly silly as it might be for the Biden-tapped US Transportation Secretary to be prioritizing tackling supposedly racist roads, it was perhaps the question itself from a reporter that reached new asinine depths – made all the more laughable given the “seriousness” of the lengthy exchange related to last week’s bipartisan infrastructure bill which passed through Congress.
This was a real question by CNN (who else?) White House correspondent April Ryan during a Monday press briefing… amid Biden admin plans to “deconstruct the racism” built into America’s infrastructure, she asked: can you give us the construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into roadways?”
Reporter @AprilDRyan to @PeteButtigieg: “Can you give us the construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways? … Can you talk to us about how that could be deconstructed?” pic.twitter.com/FXXEq5tuQL
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 8, 2021
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Buttigieg responded: “I’m still surprised that had some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or that would have been, in New York was designed too low for it to pass by…”
He argued that this makes it “obvious” that “racism” was built into the road system: “…that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” he said. “We have everything to gain by acknowledging” these “racist” choices, he explained. The reference was to an April interview wherein Buttigieg claimed:
“…there is racism physically built into some of our highways.”
At this point CNN’s Ryan pressed him on potential efforts to actually “reconstruct communities that this happened to…” She said these roads were “meant to be racist.” She seemed to define this as basically any and all beltways and roadways erected prior to the Civil Rights Act.
Meanwhile, an actual Bloomberg headline: US Will Use Infrastructure Bill to Address Racist Highway Design…
Pete Buttigieg says the U.S. will use about $1 billion from Biden’s infrastructure bill to remedy racial inequities in U.S. highway design https://t.co/nTHt7e9OoW
— Bloomberg (@business) November 8, 2021
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“Please make our roads thinner and less racist”
This is where our media is today. https://t.co/7T8Hya03Dj
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) November 8, 2021
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That’s when Buttigieg actually seemed to agree that some overpasses and roadway infrastructure “might have to come down” – as in some of the “racist” roadwork will get demolished…
“Sometimes it really is the case that an overpass went in a certain way that is so harmful that it’s gotta come down or maybe be put underground,” the Transportation Secretary said.
As with prior statements from Buttigieg which present America’s vast network of highways as ‘systematically racist’ – immediate and widespread mockery followed the Monday afternoon exchange.
The roads are racist.
We must get rid of roads. https://t.co/nde3mJHn37
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 8, 2021
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For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz wrote in response to the exchange, which it should be noted went on for nearly three minutes: “The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 18:40 - Bitcoin Hits New Record High, Surpasses Tesla's Market Cap; Ether Tops $4800
Bitcoin Hits New Record High, Surpasses Tesla’s Market Cap; Ether Tops $4800
In early Asian trading, Bitcoin just broke out from its October highs, surging up towards $68,000…
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin is now bigger than Tesla…
Not to be outdone, Ethereum also jumped, rallying above $4800 for the first time ever, having traded in a very uniform up-trend channel for 6 weeks…
Today’s market saw gold also rallying and the dollar get dumped. Did Quarles’ resignation, giving Powell potentially four open spots to fill with the most dovish doves in dove-land help support the bid for alternative currencies today?
* * *
As we detailed earlier, cryptocurrency’s combined market cap has tagged $3 trillion for the first time (roughly the size of the entire UK economy), as top altcoins push into all-time highs.
Bitcoin is back above $66,000…
Source: Bloomberg
“Bitcoin feels like it’s gonna have a 7 in front of it soon,” Cameron Winklevoss said on Twitter early Monday.
“Bitcoin flirting with (an) all-time high. Time to go parabolic,” twin Tyler said on Twitter Monday morning.
Despite Bitcoin’s impressive price gains during the past two years, CoinTelegraph reports, BTC’s market dominance has fallen by 42.8% since tagging a top of 70.8% on Sep. 6, 2019.
While Bitcoin still beats out its closest rival by more than double in terms of market share with 40.5% or $1.22 trillion compared to Ether’s 18.6% or $560 billion, the combined capitalization of all other cryptocurrencies is 40.9% or $1.24 trillion — evidencing the increasing plurality of the digital asset sector.
And Ethereum has topped $4700, a new record high…
Source: Bloomberg
“The price of ether is increasing with help from the continuing burning reducing supply and anticipation for eths move to proof of stake in the new year moving ether to a far less energy-intensive system expected to reduce ethereum’s energy usage by 99%,” Freddie Evans, Sales Trader at UK based digital asset broker GlobalBlock said.
But while the media plays up the speculative narrative, UBS details that on-chain activity has been anything but frenzied. BTC transactions are dominated by hoarders: around 77% of coins is held by those who have only ever sold less than 25% of what they accumulated.
With old supply not moving and relatively little short-term interest, ‘liveliness’ is well off its peak. Implied vol is less depressed than it was when prices were last making new highs, indicating less euphoria…
…and options open interest has dropped off post October expiry accordingly. Moreover, skew is relatively undemanding at around par, in stark contrast to ETH, which has a pronounced topside bias, particularly in longer dates.
Relatively little was rolled into November, leaving December as the only contract with significant volume (100k, 120k and 200k strikes are dominant, page 6).
Which, as quant analysts Plan B has noted, crypto assets will see a hyperbolic surge early next year, where it will outperform all other assets.
#bitcoin long term momentum is rising fast pic.twitter.com/5Mp7nE6iVs
— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) November 7, 2021
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“I guess we will be above $100,000, above $135,000 at the end of the year, and then we’ll continue to grow maybe towards to stock-to-flow X (S2FX) model target [at] $288,000 or even above. So I would not be surprised even to see in Q1 in Q2 next year prices of $300,000, $400,000 or $500,000,” says PlanB.
It’s not just bitcoin though, as Bernhard Rzymelka, global markets managing director at Goldman Sachs, anticipates Ether to have hit $8,000 by December 2021 if the token keeps tracking inflation expectations.
Will “Moonvember” start to live up to its name?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 18:26 - Goldman: Inflation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better
Goldman: Inflation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better
It has not been a good year for Goldman’s economists in their dismal attempts to predict what
transitorypersistent inflation will do as the year progressed. As the following summary sheet notes, what started off in April as a forecast for 2.77% year-end inflation has singe ballooned into the realization that Headline CPI will be 6.31%. And judging by the 45bps monthly increase in inflation estimates this number will only get higher.
Amusingly, one month ago when it became pretty clear in which direction Goldman’s premeditated “error” is headed and at what pace we wrote “at the rate, Goldman is constantly wrong to the tune of 0.45% every single month, and so by December core PCE should be about 5.5% and the US will have collapsed into the stagflationary abyss.” We still hold to this prediction.
And sure enough, while overnight Goldman’s economics team tried to salvage some of its credibility, publishing a note from economists Spencer Hill and David Mericle titled “2022 Inflation Outlook: Getting Worse Before It Gets Better” in which they write that inflation “will eventually revert closer to the Fed’s 2% goal”, they too were forced to admit that “prolonged supply-demand imbalances, strong wage growth, and accelerating rents will leave core PCE inflation and especially core CPI quite high for much of 2022.”
No wonder mainstream propaganda is now going full-bore with such garbage as “Why the inflation we’re seeing now is a good thing“. We can only hope that most people can see right through this steaming pile of dogshit.
Why the inflation we’re seeing now is a good thing https://t.co/WwkvaAinEo
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 8, 2021
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Anyway, going back to Goldman, the bank now expects core PCE inflation, after hitting a 30 year high driven mainly by purchases of durable goods..
… to rise further from 3.6% at present to 4.4% at end-2021, but to then decline to 2.3% at end-2022 and 2.1% at end-2023 (and when this benign forecast is wrong too, Goldman will just keep hiking its near-term forecasts, while cutting its longer-term inflation outlook, just because). The bank also discussed its expectations for each of the three key drivers of inflation in the current backdrop below:
- Supply-demand imbalance. The vampy squid expects demand to moderate slightly next year as services spending rebounds and peak fiscal and stay-at-home boosts fade. On the supply side, the bank expects fading headwinds from input shortages (such as semis), labor shortages, and shipping delays to support rebuilding of inventory which should in turn restore competition and bring down elevated prices (for more see “When Will The Supply-Chain Collapse Finally Stabilize: Here Is Goldman’s Take“). Then, as inventory is rebuilt, the goods sector should in theory transition from an unusual environment of scarcity back to an environment of abundance in which competition will bring down elevated prices. Goldman expects this process to start by the second half of next year and to extend into 2023.
- Wage growth. The bank also expect wage growth to slow to just over 4% as labor supply returns, which is stronger than last cycle but after netting out productivity growth, consistent with the Fed’s inflation goal.
- Shelter inflation. This one is troubling: Goldman’s shelter inflation model projects that the further labor market recovery combined with spillover effects from the ongoing boom in house prices will push shelter above 4½% to the highest rate in three decades by end-2022. Farther out in 2023, we expect shelter to moderate to about 4%, still somewhat higher than last cycle (see “Goldman Warns Of “Substantial” Surge In Home Prices, Expects Bigger Housing Bubble Than 2007“).
The bottom line according to Goldman: “prolonged supply-demand imbalances, strong wage growth, and accelerating rents will leave core PCE and especially core CPI quite high for much of next year.” But then, “as supply-constrained categories shift from a transitory inflationary boost to a transitory deflationary drag, we expect core PCE inflation to fall from4.4% at end-2021 to 2.3% at end-2022 and 2.1% at end-2023.”
The bank also warns that “the full set of inflation data will look quite hot on a year-on-year basis around the middle of next year when tapering ends. Core PCE inflation is likely to remain above 3%, core CPI inflation above 4%, and trimmed measures should rise as the shelter category accelerates. This hotter inflation dashboard through the end of the taper process is the main reason that we expect a seamless transition from tapering to rate hikes
As an interesting aside for the CPI vs PCE purists, Goldman notes that “CPI inflation is likely to exceed PCE by more than usual next year, especially in the first half, for three main reasons. First, durable goods have a higher weight in the CPI. Second, shelter inflation also has a much larger weight in the CPI. Third, while the end of pandemic-related support payments is likely to lower government-paid prices included in the PCE health care index, the insurance component that is unique to the CPI health care index is likely to spike over the next year.”
In conclusion, all we can say is that this is the same bank that predicted six months ago that the “transitory” inflation scare would blow over by year-end 2021. Not only did that not happen but Goldman was forced to admit what we said back in April – that this inflation is not transitory but quite persistent and will remain so for a long time, so if anyone is skeptical that any of this will take place as predicted, we certainly understand.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/08/2021 – 18:20
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