marsh
On TB every waking moment
Footage from within a U.S funded bio lab in a recently liberated city in the Donbas 14:41 min
SettingBrushfires
9 hours ago
SettingBrushfires
9 hours ago
GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread
- Thread starter marsh
- Start date
marsh
On TB every waking moment
I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS | Big Pharma’s Untold Truth Revealed By David Sirota 10:11 min
Russell Brand
9 hours ago
Russell Brand
9 hours ago
I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS | Big Pharma’s Untold Truth Revealed By David Sirota
Here is my discussion with writer & journalist David Sirota. We talked about where big pharma invest their money & biased media coverage of current affairs.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Dr. Malhotra Wants Pharma Bankrupt for the Greatest Miscarriage of Medical Science In Our Lifetime 5:02 min
Red Voice Media
1 day ago
"We need to create a system, Laura, where the fines need to be so large that these companies risks going bankrupt — and that senior executives could potentially face jail sentences."
Red Voice Media
1 day ago
Dr. Malhotra Wants Pharma Bankrupt for the Greatest Miscarriage of Medical Science In Our Lifetime
"We're dealing with one of the poorest-efficacious pharmacological interventions with the worst safety profile, which has become the most profitable in the history of medicine.""We need to create a system, Laura, where the fines need to be so large that these companies risks going bankrupt — and that senior executives could potentially face jail sentences."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Greater Reset IV: Co-Creation
We invite you to join us for 5 days of discussion about the diverse opportunities available for those who seek to live in harmony with humanity and the planet, while respecting our innate freedom.
thegreaterreset.org
The Greater Reset IV: Co-Creation - Day 5 pt 1 - Building Free & Conscious Communities
2:43:31 min
The Greater Reset IV: Co-Creation - Day 5 pt 1 - Building Free & Conscious Communities
January 22nd, 20231,469 views^^^^
https://player.odycdn.com/api/v4/st...13b77f59cfe393943c9c0bd449dd10f541eecb/074955
3:09:44 min
The Greater Reset IV: Co-Creation - Day 5 pt 2 - Building Free & Conscious Communities
January 22nd, 2023401 views
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Declassified Documents and Ukraine - The Media Is Telling A Story, Not THE Story - Follow The Money 8:43 min
Red Voice Media
12 hours ago
Red Voice Media
12 hours ago
Declassified Documents and Ukraine - The Media Is Telling A Story, Not THE Story - Follow The Money
"The leftist freakout to this segment is going to be something to watch because it's based on facts. " - Dan Bongino
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Ep. 2978a - Trump Sends Warning, Playbook Known, Countermeasures Being Applied 21:19 min (starts at 1:46 min)
X22 Report
44 minutes ago
^^^^^^
Ep. 2978b - Nobody Playing The Game Gets A Free Pass, Shot Heard Around The World, Flood Is Coming 54:11 min (starts at 1:24 min)
X22 Report
1 hour ago
X22 Report
44 minutes ago
Ep. 2978a - Trump Sends Warning, Playbook Known, Countermeasures Being Applied
The GND (Green New Deal) has failed, using logical and math everything the [CB]/[WEF] is pushing doesn't add up and the people are seeing this for themselves. Trump sends a message and warns the D's don't cut SS and Medicare, he has a solution to fix it and to Make America Great Again.^^^^^^
Ep. 2978b - Nobody Playing The Game Gets A Free Pass, Shot Heard Around The World, Flood Is Coming 54:11 min (starts at 1:24 min)
X22 Report
1 hour ago
Ep. 2978b - Nobody Playing The Game Gets A Free Pass, Shot Heard Around The World, Flood Is Coming
The [DS] is now turning on Biden, it's time to remove him, the fake news is on board and they are pushing the agenda. The [DS] is now moving towards a change of batter. Trump and the patriots know the playbook, the sting operation is in place and this is the drip of information, the flood is coming. Nobody playing the game gets a free pass, the shot heard around the world is coming. The Trump card is prepped and ready, the people will handle the rest.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Is the World Economic Forum using MOB RULE to coerce us all? 13:16 min
Glenn Beck
1 hour ago
Those at the World Economic Forum say that misinformation is one of the largest threats left to tackle and that critics of the organization are ‘agents’ of spreading lies. In this clip, Glenn is joined by author Michael Shellenberger, who recently wrote about how the World Economic Forum is a 'cult' bidding for 'global domination.' He explains why the World Economic Forum is so dangerous to personal freedom, why it represents a kind of ‘thuggery,’ and how its leaders — like WEF Chairperson Klaus Schwab — is using ‘mob rule’ to push forward their plans…
Glenn Beck
1 hour ago
Is the World Economic Forum using MOB RULE to coerce us all?
Those at the World Economic Forum say that misinformation is one of the largest threats left to tackle and that critics of the organization are ‘agents’ of spreading lies. In this clip, Glenn is joined by author Michael Shellenberger, who recently wrote about how the World Economic Forum is a 'cult' bidding for 'global domination.' He explains why the World Economic Forum is so dangerous to personal freedom, why it represents a kind of ‘thuggery,’ and how its leaders — like WEF Chairperson Klaus Schwab — is using ‘mob rule’ to push forward their plans…
marsh
On TB every waking moment
What’s Happening at the WEF’s Annual Meeting of Globalist Elites 1:05:17 min
Right2Freedom
1 day ago
Year of Polycrisis biggest inflation: absolutely no awareness that their war on energy has permeated all through the economy and caused the inflation crisis. They are causing these crisis. John Kerry: does he really believe in climate change or is he using it as a power/influence grab. WEF using climate agenda to hoover up power for themselves and friends. Manipulating economies and political systems, In process, greatly damaged humanity.
AG's pushing back on ESG with boycotts with $billions in pensions. Blackrock $3 trillion short (It has about $8 trillion now.) No evidence ESG reducing emissions. If emissions were really the issue, we would be driving to build nuclear plants.
Movie - The Shadow State Epoch Cinema - Movies/TV Series/Documentaries - in US politicians and business separate. That is changing with a movement to unite corporations, governments and global institutions - ESG
Right2Freedom
1 day ago
What’s Happening at the WEF’s Annual Meeting of Globalist Elites (Kevin Stocklin, Jordan Schachtel)
(No summary given. Have not watched. 2022 was the year of Push Back. Agenda is exposed. They are dealing with this at this year's meeting. Political leaders are not showing up, but still corporate. 2023 will be clash between WEF Agenda/ESG and Conservatives. May be a House anti-trust suit. The primary opposition to the WEF Agenda is from the US. If only you would surrender your liberties to them and be compliant, they would make humanity fourish.Year of Polycrisis biggest inflation: absolutely no awareness that their war on energy has permeated all through the economy and caused the inflation crisis. They are causing these crisis. John Kerry: does he really believe in climate change or is he using it as a power/influence grab. WEF using climate agenda to hoover up power for themselves and friends. Manipulating economies and political systems, In process, greatly damaged humanity.
AG's pushing back on ESG with boycotts with $billions in pensions. Blackrock $3 trillion short (It has about $8 trillion now.) No evidence ESG reducing emissions. If emissions were really the issue, we would be driving to build nuclear plants.
Movie - The Shadow State Epoch Cinema - Movies/TV Series/Documentaries - in US politicians and business separate. That is changing with a movement to unite corporations, governments and global institutions - ESG
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
"Such Demographic Decline Has Never Happened Across Major Global Economies"
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 04:30 PMBy Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management
“How long to dispose of a body before it smells,” Brian Walshe asked Google. “What is the rate of decomposition of a body found in a plastic bag compared to on a surface in the woods,” was another query that law enforcement retrieved from some faceless server, a virtual witness to his horrific crime.
He did not ask, but should have, “Are Google queries retrievable by the FBI.” Instead, he typed 20 questions you definitely should not Google if you want to get away with murder [see here].
On China’s Baidu, queries for baby strollers fell 17% last year and are -41% since 2018. Searches for baby bottles are down by one-third since 2018. But queries for elderly care homes surged 800% last year, faceless servers bearing witness to China’s profound demographic challenge.
China’s population surged from 540mm in 1949 to 969mm in 1980 when the One Child policy was introduced. And still, the population climbed inexorably to over 1.41bln in 2021. But in 2022, deaths exceeded births by 850k. UN demographers see China’s population contracting by 100mm by 2050.
You could imagine Xi secretly typing, “What is the rate of decline of a nation that shrinks and ages before becoming wealthy.”
Japan hit “peak people” in 2011 at 127.4mm. Demographers see it shrinking to 97mm by 2050. Russia is in utter demographic collapse. And you could imagine Putin secretly typing, “How long can a nation remain intact without enough young men to fight.”
Europe is on the ageing, shrinking path too, but unlike China, Russia and Japan, immigration still tempers its demographic decline. It’s easy to imagine countless European leaders typing, “How to assimilate the waves of refugees needed to sustain the economy while retaining your culture.”
Such demographic decline has never happened across the major global economies. How this impacts geopolitics, economies, and markets remains uncertain.
There is no back-test for this. The US continues to be the outlier, growing, albeit slowly. And let’s hope Biden is typing, “How to reverse the opioid/fentanyl/diabetes public health catastrophe that has lowered US life expectancy.”
And in India, Google searches for baby bottles jumped 22% last year, while queries for cribs surged 500%.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Two Democrats Call For Investigation Into Biden Classified Documents Case | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Two Democrats Call For Investigation Into Biden Classified Documents Case
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 02:30 PMAuthored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
At least two Democratic senators have called for a full investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials after several batches of documents were found at an office and his home in Delaware.
“The reports about President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents are extremely irresponsible and disturbing,” Manchin (D-W. Va.) told Fox News on Jan. 20.
“These allegations should be investigated fully.”
he development “raises serious questions, and the appointment of an unbiased special prosecutor to investigate the matter is the right step,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told Fox.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who recently confirmed she wouldn’t be running for re-election in 2024, told NBC News last week that the reports of handling classified documents is a bad look for the White House.
“Well, it’s certainly embarrassing. Right?” Stabenow stated.
“I mean, it’s embarrassing that you would find a small number of documents, certainly not on purpose. They don’t think it’s the right thing and they’ve been moving to correct it, working with the Department of Justice, working with everyone involved, with the [National] Archives, and so from my perspective, you know, it’s one of those moments that obviously they wish hadn’t happened.”
Their comments came just hours before Biden’s lawyer confirmed the Department of Justice (DOJ) searched his home, while an FBI spokesperson confirmed the search to Fox News on Saturday. The search of his Delaware residence reportedly lasted hours, the FBI said.
“DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President,” Bob Bauer, his attorney, said.
“DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Fitzpatrick confirmed Saturday that the FBI had executed “a planned, consensual search” of the president’s residence in Wilmington. The president and first lady Jill Biden were not at the home when it was searched. They were spending the weekend at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Speaking to reporters during a trip to California on Thursday, Biden said he was “fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.”
“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden said.
“We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.”
The Biden investigation has also complicated the Justice Department’s probe into Trump’s retention of classified documents and official records after he left office. The Justice Department says former President Donald Trump took hundreds of records marked classified with him upon leaving the White House in early 2021, and that it had to obtain a search warrant to retrieve them.
After the initial discovery of Biden’s documents, Trump has asserted that the DOJ is treating the president differently.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump asked in a social media post earlier in January.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed former Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate any potential wrongdoing surrounding the Biden documents. Hur is set to take over from the Trump-appointed Illinois U.S. Attorney John Lausch in overseeing the probe.
“Since the beginning, the President has been committed to handling this responsibly because he takes this seriously,” White House lawyer Richard Sauber said Saturday. “The President’s lawyers and White House Counsel’s Office will continue to cooperate with DOJ and the Special Counsel to help ensure this process is conducted swiftly and efficiently.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Climate Alarmists Panic That Twitter Under Musk Allows More Dissenting Views On Global Warming | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Climate Alarmists Panic That Twitter Under Musk Allows More Dissenting Views On Global Warming
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 01:30 PMAuthored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times,
An organization that says it is a coalition of “climate and anti-disinformation organisations” says Twitter under CEO Elon Musk is allowing more dissenting views on climate change.
Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), released a Jan. 19 study (pdf), accusing Musk of allowing misinformation about the climate crisis to spread on the social media platform.
The study accused Twitter of boosting the hashtag “#ClimateScam” to users when searching the word “climate,” as its top search result.
The hashtag has suddenly spiked on Twitter search results since July 2022, with its appearance increasing ever since, according to CAAD.
The report said that “in 2022, denialist content made a stark comeback on Twitter in particular.”
Twitter Search
CAAD alleged that at least 91,000 Twitter users reported the #ClimateScam hashtag more than 362,000 times by December.“The source of its virality is entirely unclear, and re-emphasises the need for transparency on how and why platforms surface content to users,” said the study’s authors.
They said that term appeared to be trending despite “data that shows more activity and engagement on other hashtags such as #ClimateCrisis and #ClimateEmergency.”
The research team claimed that the rise of the term in search results could not be explained by user personalization, the volume of content, or popularity.
“A basic search for ‘climate’ on Facebook did not autofill with overtly sceptic or denialist terms; searching explicitly for #ClimateScam only showed 1.5k users mentioning the term, versus 72k for #ClimateEmergency and 160k for #ClimateCrisis.”
CAAD complained that the source of the #ClimateScam hashtag was unclear and that there was a need for transparency on how the search result came up.
“Equally, TikTok returned no search results for #ClimateScam, but instead suggested the phrase ‘may be associated with behaviour or content that violates our guidelines.’”
Interest Groups
The authors said that not enough of the content was labeled as misinformation by Twitter’s new management and claimed that it could not find a comparable trend or uptick in “#ClimateScam” on other platforms.CAAD is partially funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank, which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The ISD said it is working with social media platforms to explore radicalization online, to minimize the impact of extremist recruitment by groups in Europe and North America.
Since buying Twitter in October, Elon Musk has reduced the social media team’s staff by 50 percent and cut down its content moderation team to protect freedom of expression.
Musk has been a critic of Twitter’s past relationship with federal authorities and the intelligence services, and has released several batches of the so-called “Twitter Files” since late last year.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Past Is A Great Darkness, And Filled With Eccles | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
The Past Is A Great Darkness, And Filled With Eccles
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 11:30 AMBy Peter Tchir of Academy Securities
The Past is a Great Darkness, and Filled with Eccles
In this report, I will try to find a way to highlight the sense that the Fed is not only battling difficult to interpret economic data, but they are also battling “demons and echoes” of the past.
The majority of the people in leadership positions at the Fed (including the Chair) were in those leadership roles when they seemed to miss the fact that inflation wasn’t “transitory”.
- Not only did they miss it, but they seemed to add fuel to the fire by continuing QE (albeit at a reduced scale) into early 2022. Disciplined traders use stop losses for a reason and the knowledge that getting something wrong tends to lead to poor decisions going forward is an integral part of even the simplest day trader’s strategy. However, it is odd that it would happen at the national central bank policy level.
- The Fed also seems to be worrying about historical precedent. The mistakes their predecessors made in their battles against inflation are haunting their thought process. Long gone are the days of the “Greenspan Put”. The Fed is fixated on Volcker and Burns and what they did right or wrong in their respective fights against inflation (however, those were very different times compared to today).
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes”.
That statement captures the essence of what the Fed is dealing with and encapsulates the “darkness and echoes” of past mistakes.
Today’s report is a natural progression of last weekend’s For the Record.
Where Would we be Without the “Demons” or “Echoes”?
At this point, that seems obvious - we’d be ending the hiking talk.
Much of this week’s data was skewed to the negative. The “positive” news included rising inventories. However, this is not actually a positive because inventories are already too large and consumer spending seems to be waning!
Without these demons or echoes, the Fed would be focused on whether or not they had done too much. They would also be highlighting the dramatic improvements in the fight against inflation and talking about how ridiculous the rent component is relative to reality. The bond market wouldn’t be fighting the Fed’s rhetoric or anticipating rate cuts later this year because the Fed would be much less hawkish.
There would be a “wait and see” element to every single Fed statement. They would be admonishing those screaming that inflation hasn’t been fully beaten down because they know that monetary policy takes time.
Governor Brainard recently said something that the T-Report wholeheartedly agrees with! She said that there was little evidence of a 1970s style wage-price spiral. We agree because the “Rise and Fall of Inflation Factors” piece explains inflation’s rise, fall, and the coming deflation much better than “traditional” models do.
If it wasn’t for those past demons, the people meeting in the Eccles building “might” be able to steer us towards a “softish” or “squishy” landing.
But the “Demons” are Real
The Fed can look to the distant past as a guide and can maybe even glean some useful information about the mistakes that were made. However, the recent “mistakes” (I can’t really think of anything else to call it) are more difficult to ignore. Speech after speech, the overall message was that inflation was transitory/under control/easy to deal with and that we still needed accommodation because liquidity concerns remained. How do you ignore all of that when trying to move forward?
On the bright side, in the grand scheme of things, missing inflation was a minor mistake compared to asserting that the sub-prime crisis was contained (though Bernanke did go on to win a Nobel prize for fixing a mistake that he was part of creating/missing, so maybe it wasn’t really a mistake).
Traders use stop losses for a reason. It is human nature to compound mistakes. Once a mistake has been made (such as buying a stock at $100 and watching it drop to $90) it tends to cloud your judgement. Hence, even the most rudimentary risk management systems use some form of stop loss. Effectively, this means that “you got it wrong so we are going to close the position and give you time to think about it”. Maybe that is important for the average day trader (let alone hedge fund), but not for those setting monetary policy (arguably) for the free world. Any corporation that missed one of their two targets by miles would have shaken up their decision making process, but again, maybe this isn’t applicable on the monetary policy side. The recent “big changes” seemed more related to personal trading than anything having to do with prior monetary policy decisions, but I guess that it makes sense because there is virtually never any dissent on policy making decisions.
In any case, given all the demons that this Fed is dealing with, they will likely be fighting the inflation demons long after they’ve been exorcised. While the bond market can (and should) fight it, it will be more difficult on the risk asset side because policy errors will hurt the economy and ultimately corporate earnings and stock prices.
Have they Already Done Too Much?
Even if the Fed behaves as they should without the demons, have they already set too much future pain in motion? Did their demons get the better of them in meetings late last year? Should they have dialed back their tough talk and started the “wait and see” process?
I suspect that the answer to that will be yes, but only time will tell. Hopefully the data in the coming weeks will provide some clarity so we can determine if my pessimism has been justified because I believe that the path to a deeper and longer recession has already been paved.
A Special Shout-out to Waller
Governor Waller said something that makes some sense, but may also prove to be bearish for risk assets. He is onboard with a 25 bps rate increase in February and seemed to indicate that he was leaning towards the “wait and see” camp. He also said that not only would he keep QT, he would encourage QT even if we needed to do rate cuts.
I think that makes sense. What made less sense (to me) is that he tried to equate some amount of QT to some amount of rate hikes.
I don’t think shifting Fed funds up and down behaves anything like growing or shrinking the balance sheet (Rates vs Balance Sheet). I like salt and pepper, but they don’t serve the same purpose and so far, I haven’t had a doctor tell me to monitor my pepper intake! Both salt and pepper shift the taste of food, but they are not the same at all. I think QE and QT act more directly (and in a much timelier manner) on asset prices than rate changes do.
One Caveat is that Political Winds are Changing
One thing to keep in mind is the report that we did a week or so ago on The Shifting “Politics” of Inflation. In that report we identified a shift in political and media talking points and predicted that it could pave the way for a series of Fed speakers to come out and downplay the inflation risk.
Bottom Line
The Fed might capitulate to the “wait and see” argument, but they are likely to still err on the side of being too hawkish.
The Fed should have gone to “wait and see” mode months ago, but they are likely being haunted and already went too far.
Even after they realize that they’ve gone too far, rate cuts are a long way off and they will continue to run with QT (which will weigh on asset prices).
Equities.
- I am mildly bearish because the need to respect the “soft landing” is a narrative that is gaining momentum. Fortunately, as a mild bear, I don’t think that positioning is heavily bearish and I’m in the camp that believes the market is more or less balanced.
- If you are an issuer, issue bonds now. Treasury yields, especially out on the curve, are reasonably low as are spreads. The all-in combination seems attractive as I see scenarios where all in credit yields struggle regardless of the direction that the economy heads. I believe that spreads will blow out fast as Treasury yields go lower in a “recession” trade and Treasury yields will go higher faster than spreads can tighten in a “soft landing” scenario. Also, investors had “dry powder” for what was expected to be a huge new issue calendar at the start of 2023. That hasn’t materialized, so take advantage of the overall yield environment AND the dry powder.
- For asset managers, resist the urge to put the dry powder to work!
Debt Ceiling 2023 is starting to look, feel, and even smell different than prior debt ceiling deadlines. I think that because it is far enough off (as a market moving issue) I don’t need to address it today, but I will have to remedy that soon, as it is pinging all over my radar since the vote for Speaker turned out so “interesting”.
Good luck preparing for the data, the Fed, and the narratives and my sympathies go out to all of us as the debt ceiling seems destined to become a household conversation!
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Where Did All The Workers Go?
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 11:00 AMAuthored by Bret Swanson via The Brownstone Institute,
In a November 30, 2022, speech on “Inflation and the Labor Market,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the US labor force on premature retirements.
He also blamed a large portion – between 280,000 and 680,000 – on “long Covid.”
Play Video
In a footnote, however, Powell acknowledged a far more somber factor: an estimated 400,000 unexpected deaths among working age people.
It’s easy to blame these deaths on Covid-19. The virus is of course one significant cause. But it’s not nearly the only cause, especially among young and middle-age workers.
We need better government data transparency to make a full assessment. Until then, we can proceed with others who track mortality for a living – life insurance companies.
The Great Divide – 2020 vs. 2021
In 2020, Covid-19 took many lives, even among select groups of middle-age people, specifically those with comorbidities such as diabetes. In 2020, Covid did not take very many lives of healthy young and middle-age people – for example, the types of people who are employed at large and mid-size companies and who have group life insurance. As you can see in the chart below, group life insurance benefit payments in 2020 were barely higher than in 2018.
In 2021, however, group life payments exploded by 20.7 percent over the five year average and by 15 percent over the acute pandemic year of 2020. Why would healthy young and middle-age people suddenly begin dying in large numbers in 2021 when they’d navigated 2020 with relative success?
Especially when we consider that in 2021, the US administered 520 million Covid-19 vaccine doses. Shouldn’t healthy people employed in good jobs with good benefits, now protected with vaccines, have fared better in 2021 than in 2020? Surely, overdoses and suicides have risen in recent years. But those causes of death are less prominent among the group life cohorts in general, and the latest data confirm these were not drivers of the group life surge. Curiously, two of the largest spikes in 2021 came from deadly automobile accidents and non-automobile accidents.
Millennial Mortality
Let’s look at a few of these young adult age groups in more detail. In the charts below, we’ve broken out total all-cause deaths into three groups – 30-34, 35-39, and 40-44. Eyeballing the age group charts alone shows that factors other than Covid-19 itself must have driven large portions of the mortality spike in young and middle-age workers. (We are using official statistics, which likely overstate Covid mortality and understate non-Covid mortality. It’s the best we’ve got for now.)- The most important overall point is that 2021 was far worse for young and middle-age people than 2020.
- Another key point is that 2022 was also worse than 2020, though not as bad as 2021.
- Mortality rates in 2022 were still dramatically higher than the pre-pandemic baseline.
In the three charts above, we estimate 2022* total deaths because November and December are still provisional and subject to upward revisions. We’ve made what we believe are reasonable projections. The % change figures are relative to the 2018-19 average. These are absolute numbers not adjusted for population growth or cohort size.
Covid-19 hit hard in 2020, especially for the old, vulnerable, and comorbid. In other words, Covid-19 took many of the most unhealthy from us in 2020. In principle, therefore, a smaller number unhealthy people might have been susceptible to Covid-19 in 2021 and 2022. High mortality years are often followed by low mortality years. After two successive high mortality years, the third year is even more likely to be low-mortality. For 2022 to be as bad, or somewhat worse, than 2020, is thus a big surprise. Last year’s milder Omicron variants make 2022’s stubbornly high mortality rate even more baffling.
All-cause mortality is crucial to understand whether public health policies are working. All-cause numbers can also help expose faulty reasoning when overly narrow, overly complicated, or overly clever analyses miss or hide important signals. For example, an analysis which purported to show lockdowns reduced Covid deaths but which neglected to show other deaths rose even more, would not reflect the totality of the policy’s effects. Likewise, a chemotherapy which shrinks tumors but kills patients may be successful in its narrow task yet fail the larger mission. Most analysts and health authorities studiously ignored all-cause over the last three years. The all-cause figures above show our Covid policies were far from successful.
For other purposes, however, it’s helpful and even necessary to drill down on specific causes. Important signals can also be lost in large groupings – Simpson’s paradox, for example, is a common statistical illusion. (Few have dug deeper, with as much specificity, as John Beaudoin, an engineer from Massachusetts who gained access to his state’s digital death records for the last eight years. He shows that specific causes of death spike and fall at important moments and periods. CDC data is not organized with such granularity. More on Beaudoin’s analysis in coming weeks…)
We know that recent years saw an upswing in drug overdoses and suicides, which accelerated with the pandemic lockdowns. Although these troubling trends cannot explain the enormous and unprecedented all-cause mortality seen above, we should attempt to account for them. Likewise, although Covid-19 did not cause all these record deaths, it was a significant factor.
Employment Aberration
So we dig deeper. If we remove both Covid-19 and unnatural deaths (homicide, suicide, overdose, etc.), we see a dramatic spike of natural, non-Covid-19 deaths among working age people beginning in the spring and summer of 2021. The CDC then stopped publishing the detailed data breaking out these particular categories.
But we know this trend continued. In fact, it got much worse. The life insurance companies told us so. On a December 30, 2021, videoconference with the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, OneAmerica CEO Scott Davison reported with shock:
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic.”
“40% is just unheard of.”
“It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
Several months later, Lincoln National reported its 2021 payouts were $1.4 billion, versus $548 million in 2020, a 164 percent rise.
As you will remember seeing in our three all-cause charts, August, September, and October of 2021 showed a gigantic upward bubble – the worst ever period of concentrated young and middle-age deaths, at least in modern times.
Heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, accidents, and many seemingly-inexplicable sudden deaths, which continued into 2022, and now in 2023. Here is the Society of Actuaries November 2022 update, which goes through June 2022.
Source: Society of Actuaries, Group Life Covid-19 Mortality Survey Report, November 2022.
It’s true that the late summer and fall period of 2021 coincided with the Delta wave in the US, which was more infectious and appeared to be more pathogenic than previous variants. (We’ve suggested the mass vaccination programs may have, by exerting extreme evolutionary pressure, driven convergence onto more infectious, vaccine-evading variants. Brand new research just published in the New England Journal of Medicine continues to bolster our escape variant thesis: Substantial Neutralization Escape by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variants BQ.1.1 and XBB.1.)
Federal officials and the medical establishment, you will recall, argued in 2021 that it was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Even the Society of Actuaries attempts to explain away its alarming findings by implying the deaths are due to lack of vaccination. It does so with crude regressions of excess mortality and bulk statewide vaccination totals as of June 30, 2021.
But remember those 520 million vaccine doses. How can you generate far more deaths in 2021 – ascribing them to unvaccination – with a dramatically smaller number of unvaccinated people? In 2021, perhaps 20-40 percent of these group life insureds were unvaccinated. In 2020, 100 percent of them were unvaccinated, yet mortality barely rose. The math doesn’t come close to working.
The 40-44 age group, for example, suffered 21.5 percent more total deaths in 2021 than 2020. This terrible outcome occurred with less than half the so-called susceptible population due to their unvaccinated status. It’s difficult to assert robust vaccine effectiveness when both doses-delivered and deaths are skyrocketing.
On the other hand, the group life insurance data show vaccinated groups may have suffered the worse outcomes. By August, most large and mid-size companies and organizations across the country had vaccine mandates, and most employees complied. Yet these workers suffered extraordinary – indeed, totally unprecedented death rates – in 2021, especially the second half of 2021.
Source: Society of Actuaries, Group Life Covid-19 Mortality Survey Report, November 2022.
Ed Dowd, a former BlackRock portfolio manager, points to a crucial peculiarity in his book Cause Unknown. Employed people with group life insurance policies are far healthier than their overall population cohort. They typically die at a significantly lower rate, just 30-40 percent of the overall population. This is an iron actuarial law. In 2021, however, as you can see in the chart directly above, these employed Americans died at excess rates far higher than their larger pool of less healthy peers.
We could also point to fast-rising disability as a key factor in the worker shortage. Fed chair Powell blames it on long Covid. Once again, however, the timing doesn’t fit that story very well.
To overgeneralize:
In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.
These patterns are repeating across the high-income developed world – Germany, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia.
marsh
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WSJ Shreds Vaccine Makers, Biden Admin Over "Deceptive" Booster Campaign | ZeroHedge
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WSJ Shreds Vaccine Makers, Biden Admin Over "Deceptive" Booster Campaign
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 05:00 PM
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley has taken a flamethrower to vaccine makers over their "deceptive" campaign for bivalent Covid boosters, and slams several federal agencies for taking "the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy."
You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.
This is deceptive advertising. But the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. -WSJ
The narrative behind the campaign was simple; mRNA Covid shots could simply be 'tweaked' to to target new variants - in this case, the jabs were claimed to confer protection against BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants, along with the original Wuhan strain.
To call this wishful thinking would be extremely generous.
As Finley writes, three scientific problems have arisen.
- The virus is mutating much faster than vaccines can be updated.
- Vaccines have 'hard wired' our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, "so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralize variants targeted by updated vaccines."
- Antibody protection wanes after just a few months.
Two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine this month showed that bivalent boosters increase neutralizing antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, but not significantly more than the original boosters. In one study, antibody levels after the bivalent boosters were 11 times as high against the Wuhan variant as BA.5.
The authors posit that immune imprinting “may pose a greater challenge than is currently appreciated for inducing robust immunity against SARS-CoV-2 variants.” This isn’t unique to Covid or mRNA vaccines, though boosters may amplify the effect. Our first exposure as children to the flu—whether by infection or vaccination—affects our future response to different strains. -WSJ
Here's what happened
For those who took (or were forced to take) the original vaccine, our memory B-cells were trained to produce antibodies against the original Wuhan strain. And as a New England Journal of Medicine article notes, people who have taken said original vaccine were "primed" to respond to the Wuhan strain, and 'mounted an inferior antibody response to other variants.'
The studies directly contradict marketing information from Pfizer and Moderna, which asserted that the bivalent boosters produced a response to the new strains (BA.4 and BA.5) that's 4-6x that of the original boosters - which the WSJ says is "misleading."
For starters, neither Pfizer or Moderna conducted a randomized trial.
They tested the original boosters last winter, long before the BA.5 surge and 4½ to months after trial participants had received their third shots. The bivalents, by contrast, were tested after BA.5 began to surge, 9½ to 11 months after recipients had received their third shots. -WSJ
Here's the moneyshot: "The vaccine makers designed their studies to get the results they wanted. Public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow, but why would they? They have a vested interest in promoting the bivalents."
In June, the FDA ordered vaccine makers to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5, and rushed the companies to push them out before clinical data was available. Meanwhile, Biden's CDC recommended the bivalents for all adults without evidence that they were effective or necessary.
Finley further notes that vaccine makers could have performed small, randomized trials last summer and early fall on the bivalents - with results available by the end of September. But the Biden administration didn't want to wait (and now we know why).
The CDC published a study in November that estimated the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave—their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to zero.
Another CDC study, in December, reported that seniors who received bivalents were 84% less likely to be hospitalized than the unvaccinated, and 73% less likely than those who had received two or more doses of the original vaccine. But neither study controlled for important confounding factors—for one, that the small minority who got bivalents were probably also more likely than those who hadn’t to follow other Covid precautions or seek out treatments such as Paxlovid. -WSJ
We're amazed the Journal even put this out there... Kudos to them.
Fortunately for big pharma and the Biden administration, information overload is the new Soma, and Rachel Maddow et al. have everything under control.
5:18 min
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Election Integrity Watchdog Finds California Lost 10.9 Million Mail-In Ballots in 2022 Midterms | ZeroHedge
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Election Integrity Watchdog Finds California Lost 10.9 Million Mail-In Ballots in 2022 Midterms
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 12:30 PMAuthored by Rita Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
An election integrity group said 10.9 million out of a total 22.1 million ballots that had been mailed out to registered voters during the 2022 midterm elections went “unaccounted for,” according to a Jan. 18 report.
“Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap,” the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) said on Monday. “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”
The watchdog released the two-page report (pdf) detailing what it called “the failures” of California’s first mass-mail balloting election following the passage of Assembly Bill 37 (AB 37), which requires that ballots automatically be mailed to all active registered voters statewide. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2021, makes vote-by-mail ballots, a practice implemented in the 2020 general election in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, permanent for all elections.
California has more registered voters than any other state. Yet its vote-by-mail policies—among the nation’s most expansive—have resulted in large numbers of ballots “disappearing at poll closing time,” PILF’s data show.
“After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them,” reads the Wednesday report.
“It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass-mail elections, we can only assume what happened,” it continued.
Besides the almost half unaccounted-for mail ballots, data show that 9.8 million were accepted, over 120,000 were rejected, and 1.4 million were counted from in-person voting centers.
The Golden State, which has been a Democratic stronghold for over two decades, mailed out more than 22.1 million ballots to its registered voters—nearly 47 percent Democrats and 24 percent Republicans—during the 2022 elections. A GOP victory in California on Nov. 16 granted the party slim control of the U.S. House.
Mail-In Ballot Rejects
PILF, after finding that election officials in California had rejected 226,250 mail-in ballots during the 2022 primary and general elections, argued that the switch to mail balloting has taken away voters’ rights.According to the report, the state would reject mail ballots primarily for nine reasons, including mismatched or missing signatures, and double voting when a registrant casts a vote both in-person and by-mail, which took place 813 times in the past midterms.
The most common reason, which researchers said is “endemic to mail voting,” turned out to be late-arriving ballots—taking up 48 percent of all rejects during the 2022 elections, finding show.
Every registered voter in California should receive a ballot in the mail a month prior to Election Day. All ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by Nov. 8 to be counted, and received within seven days by county election officials, who would then verify the signatures on the return envelopes and process ballots through their vote tallying system.
“In the November contests, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after November 15, setting them up for rejection,” PILF stated.
“The official datasets do not differentiate between ballots postmarked too late or delivered too late. The U.S. Postal Service also touts its 2022 performance by claiming that 99 percent of mail ballots were delivered nationally within 3 days to officials for counting once in their custody,” the repost reads, noting that the Post Office sets the success rate at 94 percent for timely delivery of political mail.
Read more here...
marsh
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Twitter Files Prove America Headed For "Totalitarian State Territory", Expert Warns
SATURDAY, JAN 21, 2023 - 08:30 PM
Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times,
Thanks to the revelations in the Twitter Files, there’s evidence that the FBI and other agencies worked to suppress “lawful speech,” and if this type of action is allowed to continue, the United States is headed for “totalitarian state territory,” Matthew Peterson, the cofounder of New Founding, said in an interview with Epoch Times–NTD collaborative program “Newsmakers.”
New Founding helps people and organizations position themselves to avoid threats from Big Tech and “woke capital,” and Peterson has two decades of experience in digital media and political consulting.
When asked what will happen if the country’s current trajectory continues for three to five years, Peterson said, “We’ll be in totalitarian state territory, there’s no question about it.”
“I mean, remember, this went so far as the government saying, ‘You need to find evidence that there are Russians influencing the election on Twitter.’ And Twitter saying, ‘No, that’s not happening.’
“And then [Twitter had] to be quiet about it and not even defend themselves when they knew that there wasn’t Russian interference that they could find,” he added.
Peterson further explained that the U.S. government drove a narrative that it knew wasn’t true and was the “antithesis” of America’s founding principles.
“[The government’s actions are] the antithesis of America. The American founding is basically contradicted by what’s happening here, over and over again. And if we don’t do something about that, we will not have free speech in this country,” Peterson warned.
FBI and Fake News
Peterson pointed out that one of the biggest revelations in the Twitter Files—a collection of internal emails and communications made public by the company’s CEO, Elon Musk—was that the intelligence community’s influence on Twitter was more significant than anyone imagined.
“What you first have to realize is that a lot of people from the intelligence community were already embedded in Twitter. So much so that they had their own Slack channel chat for people who are from the FBI,” Peterson said.
“And so, what you see with the censorship is not just a selective, ‘we don’t like this guy, we don’t like this guy.’ It’s promoting large-scale narratives, both pro and con repeatedly, again and again and again and again.”
And, Peterson said, the U.S. government didn’t limit itself to shadow-banning and censorship.
In reply to the question about the Twitter Files revelation, the Department of Defense used a back channel with Twitter to create fake accounts to push a specific narrative in the Arab world. Peterson stated such actions show a direct line between the government and social media.
“So, what we see is, again, direct channels from the U.S. government—both really creating fake news and deleting anything they don’t like. And people have to realize … what you see is a direct line again,” Peterson said.
Additionally, Peterson said before the Twitter Files, the U.S. government and Twitter were essentially gaslighting Americans.
“We should make clear that everyone claimed that this wasn’t happening, right? So, the whole world was being gaslit by Twitter and friends saying, ‘Oh, no. We’re not shadow-banning anyone. You know this is all crazy, right-wing talk.’
“And what the Twitter Files have done is give conclusive, definitive proof of what was actually going on. And what was going on was shocking.
“I think it was worse than a lot of regular people—and even experts—thought it was. I mean, Big Pharma having a direct line to censor people when it came to their thoughts and opinions about what was going on with the vaccine and COVID? Of course, famously, [there’s] the Hunter Biden laptop controversy in which news organizations were just outright censored, in violation of Twitter’s own rules.
“And what we see is a direct line between the government and other powerful organizations, and a media outfit, over and over again, censoring people, essentially, at the whim of the powerful.”
Peterson said such government and complicit media actions aren’t on the decline. Instead, he said, it’s “increasing every day.”
He said action is necessary to combat that and return America to its guiding principles of free speech and limited government. “What we need to see is increasing resistance with law, and other powerful forces, fighting against this. And that starts with exposing what Elon Musk has already exposed but is now being hidden from the American public in these Twitter files.”
The Twitter Files
Since taking over Twitter, Musk has consistently vocalized the need for transparency regarding what happened behind the scenes at the tech company. To that end, he, via a chosen few journalists, has released secret emails and discussions about shadow-banning or removing accounts that didn’t toe the party line.
In response to the allegations of collusion between the FBI and Twitter, the FBI said in a statement to Fox News, “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.
“As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”
The FBI National Press Office responded similarly to The Epoch Times’ request for comment: “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.
“It is not based on the content of any particular message or narrative. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”
marsh
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The Dangerous Fantasy Of Scotland's Net-Zero Energy Transition | ZeroHedge
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The Dangerous Fantasy Of Scotland's Net-Zero Energy Transition
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 04:35 AM
Authored by Richard Lyon via DailySceptic.org,
Suppose that Scotland’s CO2 emissions fell tomorrow to zero, i.e., that, at midnight, the country ceased to exist.
Then according to the “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change” (MAGICC), based on the latest IPCC climate models, the reduction in the Earth’s temperature in 2100 would be…undetectable.
Motivated by the moral necessity and urgency of this goal, the Scottish Government is proposing a novel energy policy – its “Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan”.
This article reviews its major themes and their implications, and considers briefly the probability of success of the Scottish Government implementing it.
In 2022, due to an insufficient quantity of wind and sun, Scotland’s current collection of wind and solar energy-scavenging devices failed to generate about 70% of their nameplate capacity. Recent exhaustive statistical and econometric analysis of wind generation in Scotland by Edinburgh University shows that it is uneconomic and destined for taxpayer bailout. Under the Scottish Government’s novel energy strategy, wind and solar energy-scavenging devices are to be greatly expanded.
Hydrogen, an energy carrier that squanders in waste-heat a gigawatt of power generation for every gigawatt it carries, is elevated in the Scottish Government’s understanding of energy to the category of a fuel, and also greatly expanded.
Hydrocarbon and nuclear – actual fuels – provide the energy to manufacture and endlessly replace wind turbines and solar panels.
They also, in Scotland, provide the power sources that run under all conditions to ensure continuity of energy supply during Scotland’s frequent sunless and windless conditions. These are to be discontinued.
Like all advanced economies, Scotland cannot tolerate even a small measure of power supply fluctuation. Without firm dispatchable thermal standby generation capacity to smooth supply fluctuation, the eventual daily around 40GW amplitude power fluctuation resulting from the proposed expansion of weather-dependent electrical generation must be adapted for use in some other way. This will be provided by some form of 180-plus day, grid-scale electricity storage – a technical challenge for which no precedent exists, and therefore no cost estimate is available.
Grid scale battery storage technology doesn’t exist. The Scottish Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan imagines that it will be developed.
Converting surplus energy to hydrogen for storage and use at grid scale is unprecedented, and fraught with risk.
Fifty per cent of the proposed new intermittent generation capacity, installed at a capital cost of around £26 billion, is to be wasted in the conversion process.
Hydrogen embrittles pipework, renders conventional valves ineffective and, unlike domestic gas, self-ignites under catastrophic decompression. Quantifying the risks of transporting it in bulk on Scottish roads and deploying it as a substitute for domestic gas in Scotland’s densely populated housing estates might be an exciting 10-year research project at the U.K. Government’s Spadeadam industrial hazard testing facility (“the remoteness of the area is key to their operations” – Wikipedia).
But, informed by what the Scottish Government claims is the need for “the fastest possible” transition, it prefers to bypass thorough safety testing, and to impose live hydrogen trials on Scotland’s citizens. Hydrocarbon gas is to be phased out of Scottish homes from 2030.
Energy densities in energy storage sites located next to Scotland’s towns and cities required by the Scottish Government’s reckless abandonment of thermal standby generation capacity will be measured in millions of tonnes of TNT – a risk for which 12-foot thick reinforced concrete containment domes are installed around nuclear facilities to manage. These risks are entirely unrecognised by Scotland’s current planning processes (or citizens).
The cost of adaptive storage, the cost of the new transmission and distribution infrastructure required by dramatically increased electrification of Scotland’s relatively sparsely populated areas, and the cost of Carbon Capture, are not factored into current estimates of Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE). These are vast. Grid-scale battery storage, for example, has an implied cost measured in trillions of pounds, and drives LCOE from £50/MWh to over £600/MWh.
Apparently unaware of the role of nuclear and gas in maintaining continuity of supply, and the prohibitive cost of electricity storage as a substitute, the Scottish Government confidently demands that the U.K. Government “break the link between the price of electricity and the cost of gas to help realise the benefits of the low costs [sic] of renewable electricity”.
The policy proposal cites a number of other benefits that it thinks will accrue in addition to the negligible reduction in the Earth’s temperature.
Electric vehicles can’t plough snow or fields, harvest corn, empty buckets, excavate ore, raise wind-turbine masts, or perform any other economic task for which ‘grunt’ is required. Notwithstanding, from 2030, diesel and petrol engines will be prohibited. Car kilometers are to be “reduced” – possibly by fining us if we travel from our home more than a permitted distance.
The Scottish Government will impose catastrophic environmental damage on the non-OECD countries where millions of tonnes of toxic water and ores are processed to manufacture the EV batteries it is mandating. It will overlook the human rights violations endemic to China’s ‘clean energy industry’. These will have the benefit of promoting what it calls “A Just Transition” – supposedly, a socialist framework for ensuring “a fairer, greener future for all”.
Our security of supply is to be further enhanced by transferring energy generation from domestically produced oil and gas to mechanically unreliable, weather-dependent energy-scavenging devices containing millions of points of failure that are contingent on the supply of rare resources controlled by China – which the U.S. states it will declare war on if it invades Taiwan.
These weather-dependent energy-scavenging devices require oil for, amongst many other things, the manufacture of their exotic advanced materials. A leading energy consultancy records the collapse in 2020 to an 80-year low of replacement oil discovery volumes, and estimates that Western oil firms now have around 15 years of remaining economic oil reserves. It is under these circumstances that the Scottish Government is further enhancing the security of Scotland’s energy supply by discontinuing onshore and offshore conventional and unconventional oil and gas exploration.
To reinforce this enhancement, noting “the damage done by the deindustrialisation of central belt communities in the 1980s”, the Scottish Government is irreversibly disbanding the North East’s oil and gas industry communities and, with them, their 50 years of institutional knowledge of oil and gas operations.
These will be replaced with communities based on livelihoods sustained by a “clean energy industry”. The growth of this imaginary industry has been funded with the imaginary capital (a.k.a. “quantitative easing”) excreted in the response – ironically – to the energy contraction that triggered the ongoing 2008 Great Financial Crash. During this time, U.K. national debt has risen from 60% to over 100% of Gross Domestic Product, exceeded only by the public sector pension deficit (a proxy for the replacement of real industries in the global economy by imaginary ones), which has risen to more than £2 trillion.
As evidence of the sustainability of the policy of funding imaginary industries through the indefinite expansion of imaginary capital (for which, like much of this policy, no precedent exists in human history), the Scottish Government informs us that it has already allocated £5 billion of its record budget deficit to what it refers to as “the Net Zero Economy”.
Winter excess death in the UK’s cold Northern European climate is already around 25,000 a year. Any prolonged interruption of winter energy supply created by the failure of this policy, or further escalation of cost, will plausibly result in the deaths of thousands more of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. The magnitude and uncertainty of the implied costs, coupled to the scale of the energy contraction that this policy deliberately seeks to accelerate, could trigger the collapse of our financial system.
Irreversible impairment of either our energy or financial systems would have a catastrophic impact on the welfare of Scotland’s citizens. Yet few have expressed any desire, much less informed consent, for risk on the scale proposed for such little benefit.
Yet the project, representing a scope of unprecedented scale, cost, pace and technical uncertainty, will be overseen by a Government that is currently struggling to procure two relatively modest ferries for less than the cost that other governments can procure 34 ferries – again, ironically due in large part to cost overruns associated with the attempt to employ novel technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. As evidence of the extent to which the Scottish Government and its advisers have become unmoored from physical reality by the climate catastrophe hypothesis, it’s a document that is fascinating to read, and alarming to contemplate.
After reflecting on it, you may care to offer your feedback, either to the department that compiled it, or your political representative, or on social media.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Nord Stream Pipeline Could Be Repaired Within A Year | ZeroHedge
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The Nord Stream Pipeline Could Be Repaired Within A Year
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 05:45 AM
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,
The Nord Stream pipeline can be repaired within a year, but it’s unclear whether Germany would want to receive Russian natural gas at all, said Klaus-Dieter Maubach, the outgoing CEO at German energy giant Uniper, which was Russia’s top gas customer before Moscow cut off supply via Nord Stream.
“The first question that needs answering: what’s the political will on a European level and in Berlin to bring Russian gas to Germany?” Maubach said at the annual Handelsblatt Energy summit on Tuesday, as carried by Reuters.
Last summer, the German government bailed out Uniper as losses at the German company continued to mount after Russia slashed gas deliveries via Nord Stream in June, before cutting off supply in early September.
At the end of December, it was Uniper, the operator of the Wilhelmshaven import terminal, that welcomed the first tanker carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) at the newly opened LNG terminal, with the cargo arriving from the Calcasieu Pass export facility in the United States.
Meanwhile, the investigation into the Nord Stream explosions at the end of September continues amid accusations from Russia that some Western intelligence services are “hiding something.”
Sweden’s refusal to share information about the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines is “puzzling,” and withholding the results of the investigation means that “Swedish authorities are hiding something,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last week.
Traces of explosives were found near the sites of the explosions at the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, Sweden said in November, noting that the incident is “gross sabotage.”
Nord Stream 2 was never put into operation after Germany axed the certification process following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia, for its part, shut down Nord Stream 1 indefinitely in early September, claiming an inability to repair gas turbines because of the Western sanctions.
marsh
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Going Cashless: Norway's Digital Currency Project Raises Privacy Questions
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 06:55 AM
Authored by David Attlee via CoinTelegraph.com,
At this point, the test network for the Norwegian CBDC uses not the public Ethereum ecosystem, but a private version of the enterprise blockchain Hyperledger Besu...
The small Nordic country of Norway may not be particularly notable on the global crypto map. With its 22 blockchain solution providers, the nation doesn’t stand out even at the regional level.
However, as the race to test and implement central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) accelerates every day, the Scandinavian nation is taking an active stance on its own national digital currency. In fact, it was among the first countries to begin the work on a CBDC back in 2016.
Dropping cash
In recent years, amid a rise in cashless payment methods and concern over cash-enabled illicit transactions, some Norwegian banks have moved to remove cash options altogether.
In 2016, Trond Bentestuen, then an executive at major Norwegian bank DNB, proposed to stop using cash as a means of payment in the country:
“Today, there is approximately 50 billion kroner in circulation and [the country’s central bank] Norges Bank can only account for 40 percent of its use. That means that 60 percent of money usage is outside of any control.”
A year before that, another large Norwegian bank, Nordea, also refused to accept cash, leaving only one branch in Oslo Central Station to continue handling cash.This sentiment came in parallel with Bitcoin enthusiasm, as DNB enabled its customers to buy BTC via its mobile app, local courts demanded that convicted drug dealers pay their fines in crypto, and local newspapers widely discussed investments in digital assets.
Last year Torbjørn Hægeland, executive director for financial stability at Norway’s central bank, Norges Bank, outlined to the project’s goal of replacing cash use in the country:
"With this background, the decline in cash use and other structural changes in the payment system are key drivers for the project."
The experimental phase of the Norwegian CBDC will last until June 2023 and end with recommendations from the central bank on whether the implementation of a prototype is necessary.Ethereum is the key
In September 2022, Norges Bank released the open-source code for the Ethereum-backed digital currency sandbox. Available on GitHub, the sandbox is designed to offer an interface for interacting with the test network, enabling functions like minting, burning and transferring ERC-20 tokens.
However, the second part of the source code, announced to go public by mid-September, has yet to be revealed. As specified in a blog post, the initial use of open-source code was not a “signal that the technology will be based on open-source code,” but a “good starting point for learning as much as possible in collaboration with developers and alliance partners.”
Earlier, the bank revealed its principal partner in building the infrastructure for the project — Nahmii, a Norway-based developer of a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum of the same name. The company has been working on this scaling technology for Ethereum for several years and has its own network and tokens. At this point, the test network for the Norwegian CBDC uses not the public Ethereum ecosystem, but a private version of the enterprise blockchain Hyperledger Besu.
In late 2022, Norway became part of Project Icebreaker, a joint exploration with the central banks of Israel, Norway and Sweden on how CBDCs can be used for cross-border payments. Within its framework, the three central banks will connect their domestic proof-of-concept CBDC systems. The final report for the project is scheduled for the first quarter of 2023.
Local specifics, universal problems
In terms of hopes and fears, what defines the Norwegian CBDC project among others is the national regulatory context. Like its geographical neighbors, Norway is known for its cautious approach to the digital assets market, with high taxes and the relatively small scale of its domestic crypto ecosystem — a recent study by EU Blockchain Observatory estimated its total equity funding at a modest $26.9 million.
Norwegian serial entrepreneur Sander Andersen, who has recently moved his fintech company to Switzerland, doubts that the upcoming project will co-exist peacefully with the crypto industry. There are already more than enough problems for tech entrepreneurs in the country, he said in a chat with Cointelegraph:
“Despite the country's strong infrastructure for entrepreneurs in other industries, such as low energy costs and free education, these benefits do not extend to the digital realm. The tax burden faced by digital companies makes it nearly impossible to compete with businesses based in more business-friendly jurisdictions.”
As central bank digital currencies have the potential to compete with private cryptocurrencies, and the goal of any government is to control financial transactions as tightly as possible, Andersen doesn’t see Norway among the exceptions:
“The Norwegian central bank's CBDC project can also pose a threat to the legal status of private stablecoins in the country. The introduction of a CBDC may prompt increased regulation and oversight of private stablecoins, making it harder for these companies to operate.”
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Michael Lewellen, head of solutions architecture at OpenZeppelin, a company contributing its contracts library to the Norges Bank project, doesn’t sound so pessimistic. From a technical perspective, he emphasized, there is nothing stopping private stablecoins from trading and operating alongside CBDCs on both public and private Ethereum networks, especially if they use common, compatible token standards such as ERC-20.
However, from a policy perspective, there’s nothing that can stop central banks from performing financial gatekeeping and enforcing the Know Your Customer (KYC) standards, and this is where the CBDC looks like a natural development. Banks will not sit idly by as the blockchain ecosystem grows, as there is a lot of shadow-banking activity happening on-chain, Lewellen specified, adding:
“CBDCs offer central banks the ability to better perform gatekeeping and enforce KYC rules on CBDC holders, whereas enforcing the same standards against entities using non-governmental stablecoins is far more challenging.”
Could Norway’s CBDC offer anything reassuring in terms of users’ privacy? It’s hardly possible from both technological and strategic points of view, Lewellen said. Today, a mature solution doesn’t exist that would allow privacy in a compliant manner regarding the use of CBDCs.
Any national digital currency would almost certainly require every address to be linked to an identity, using KYC and other means we see in banks today. In fact, if done on the private ledger, like the one that Norges Bank is testing right now, the CBDC will offer not only less privacy for a single customer, but at the same time less public transparency with regard to blockchains.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Don't Call It Capitalism: The Fed's $8 Trillion Hoard Of Financial Assets | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Don't Call It Capitalism: The Fed's $8 Trillion Hoard Of Financial Assets
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 08:00 AM
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
It’s a sure bet that as the economy worsens, unemployment surges, foreclosures rise, defaults climb, and economic misery ensues, we’ll be told it’s all capitalism’s fault. The question one must ask, however, is, “What capitalism?”
The claim that “too much” capitalism drives every economic calamity is standard among anti-capitalists on both the left and the right. They have many bullet points claiming government programs and government spending are everywhere retreating while free-market capitalism is experiencing a resurgence. This can be easily shown to be empirically false. Evidence can be found in everything from the continual flood of government regulations to rising per capita taxation and spending to the growing army of government employees. That’s all in the United States, mind you, the supposed headquarters of “free-market capitalism.” We might also point to how the US welfare state, including the immense amounts of government spending on healthcare and pensions, is on a par with European welfare states in terms of size. The supposed lack of social benefits programs in the US has long been a myth. The trend in spending, taxation, and regulation is unambiguously upward.
In recent years, though, one additional indicator of just how little capitalism is actually going on has surfaced: central banks around the world are buying up huge amounts of financial assets in order to subsidize certain industries, inflate prices, and generally manipulate the economy.
This is certainly true of the American central bank, the Federal Reserve.
How the Federal Reserve Came to Dominate Financial Asset Markets
While the Fed has long bought government debt in its so-called open-market operations to manipulate the interest rate, wholesale buying of financial assets began in 2008. This included both US government Treasurys and—in a new development—private-sector mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). This was done to prop up banks and other firms that had bet on the lie that “home prices always go up.” The value of mortgage-backed securities was falling fast, so beginning in 2008, the Fed bought up MBSs to the tune of $1.7 trillion. That was all before covid.
Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) (“Balance Sheet: Total Assets: Securities: U.S. Treasury Securities” [QBPBSTASSCUSTRSC], Federal Deposit Insurance Commission [FDIC], last modified December 2, 2022; and “Assets: Securities Held Outright: Mortgage-Backed Securities: Wednesday Level” [WSHOMCB], Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, last modified January 12, 2023).
The Fed attempted to begin selling off its portfolio in 2019, but by then the market was already so addicted to Fed money that the economy began to slow and a liquidity crisis in repos ensued. The covid panic was what prevented a full-blown recession in 2020: the federal government began a spree of deficit spending, and the Federal Reserve hoarded even larger amounts of assets, bringing totals to new record-breaking highs.
The MBS portfolio climbed to $2.7 trillion.
These sorts of volumes of assets are not an insignificant part of the overall market, either. Since 2020, the Fed’s MBS stockpile has equaled at least 20 percent of all the household mortgage debt in the United States. In early 2022, Fed-held MBS assets peaked at 24 percent of all US mortgage debt, but they still made up over 20 percent of the market as of late 2022.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York Research and Statistics Group, Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, 2022:Q3 (Center for Microeconomic Data, November 2022); and FRED (“Assets: Securities Held Outright: Mortgage-Backed Securities: Wednesday Level” [WSHOMCB], Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, last modified January 12, 2023).
One can only speculate as to the full extent to which markets are distorted by the central bank holding one-fifth of mortgage debt, but one thing is for sure: one cannot say that this is any sort of “capitalism” at work.
The story is similar with Treasury debt, and the timeline is largely the same as with the MBS assets. The Fed bought up about $2.5 trillion in US government bonds from 2008 to 2015. An attempt at scaling this back was aborted when the economy proved to be too fragile in late 2019. Then, the Fed gorged on Treasury debt in 2020 and 2021, bringing its government bonds total to nearly $6 trillion.
As a percentage, the Fed’s share of all Treasury debt has totaled more than 15 percent since 2020. It peaked at 19 percent in 2021. All foreign holders combined hold 33 percent of Treasury debt. This makes the Fed, by far, the largest domestic holder of US government debt: the Fed holds nearly 40 percent of all domestically held Treasury debt, putting it far ahead of entire sectors, such as mutual funds, which hold “only” around 22 percent of this debt.
Source: FRED (“Balance Sheet: Total Assets: Securities: U.S. Treasury Securities” [QBPBSTASSCUSTRSC], Federal Deposit Insurance Commission [FDIC], last modified December 2, 2022).
It’s also helpful to keep in mind that US Treasurys are a huge portion of the debt markets overall. For example, corporate debt in the US totals around $11 trillion. Even if we add this to the US Treasury debt, we still find that the Fed holds more than 10 percent of debt assets.
Of course, it would be absurd to call this situation anything resembling even “mostly” laissez-faire, let alone a free market. Imagine if a federal government agency—which is all the Fed is—owned 10 percent of all supermarkets or 10 percent of all Wal-Marts or 10 percent of all stocks. We would say that the agency in question possessed an enormous amount of power to move and manipulate markets as it willed.
That is where we are with these debt markets, and it’s become increasingly so since 2008.
Fannie and Freddie Do It Too
Nor is the Fed the only federal agency involved. We might also point to how the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) have come to dominate the secondary markets in mortgages. For example, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae have been going on annual mortgage debt shopping sprees:
From 2009 to 2020, Fannie and Freddie’s annual share of the total MBS market averaged 70 percent. If we include Ginnie Mae securities, those that are backed by FHA [Federal Housing Administration] mortgages, the federal share of the MBS market averaged 92 percent per year.
Much of these MBSs, naturally, have ended up in the hands of the Fed.
So, now would be a great time to stop pretending that the financial sectors are “free market” or that price inflation and cost-of-living surges are somehow all the fault of “capitalism.” Federal agencies are the biggest players here, and their role is to manipulate markets to achieve centrally planned government goals. Private markets are growing more irrelevant every day.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Unions Faltering: Nationwide Membership Rate Hits Record Low
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 08:30 AM
The proportion of wage and salary workers who are members of unions has dropped to a record low, according to a Thursday data release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The union membership rate dropped from 10.3% in 2021 to 10.1% in 2022, the lowest mark in a data series that goes back to 1983. Of course, you'd have to go back much farther than 40 years to find a lower rate: University research puts membership in 1964 near 30%.
The new low comes despite a major surge in union-organizing efforts that started during the Covid-19 pandemic. As we reported in July, the number of workplaces filing union petitions hit a six-year high over the first six-months of the year.
Biden addressed the AFL-CIO convention in June (via WHYY)
Those organizing efforts have included headline-making campaigns to organize Starbucks outlets, Amazon warehouses and Home Depot stores. Those efforts have been hit-and-miss, with successful efforts commanding far more media attention than the failures. In November, employees of a Philadelphia Home Depot overwhelmingly shot down a union proposal by a 165-to-51 vote.
“The BLS numbers are another reminder that headlines from cheerleading reporters and influence in the halls of power in DC are no substitute for actual support among hardworking rank-and-file American workers,” said National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Patrick Semmens.
The lackluster unionization rate also came at a time when Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. It's not for lack of trying: Most recently, the National Labor Relations Board changed rules to allow smaller groups of employees to form "micro-unions" within a given employer. Imagine the pay, work-rule and benefit complications an employer would face if the mailroom has a union and the rest of the company doesn't.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler blamed the poor 2022 showing on "illegal opposition" from employers. "The wave of organizing will continue to gather steam in 2023 and beyond despite broken labor laws that rig the system against workers,” she said.
The membership rate among government employees more than quintuples that of private sector workers -- 33.1% for so-called "public servants" compared to just 6.0% for those who pay the the public employees' salaries. Just for starters, the National Education Association (NEA) public teacher union has 3 million members and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has 1.4 million.
Some other interesting data points from the release:
- Blacks employees (11.6%) are more likely to be be union members than whites (10.0%), Hispanics (8.8%) or Asians (8.3%).
- The two states with the highest union rate are Hawaii (21.9%) and New York (20.7%). The lowest are South Carolina (1.7%) and North Carolina (2.8%)
- The most unionized occupations are public safety (34.6%) and education (33.7%). The lowest are sales (3.0%) and computer and math jobs (3.3%).
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Allies Angry At German 'Indecision' On Tanks For Ukraine Amid Russian Gains In East & South | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Allies Angry At German 'Indecision' On Tanks For Ukraine Amid Russian Gains In East & South
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 07:30 AMSome European allies are not happy with the way things went during the meeting of NATO defense ministers at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday, given it became obvious that the allies would not be transferring heavy tanks to the Ukrainian battlefield anytime soon.
Latvia’s foreign minister Edgars Rinkēvičs, announced the morning after officials failed to reach an agreement that his country alongide Estonia "call on Germany to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine now. This is needed to stop Russian aggression, help Ukraine and restore peace in Europe quickly. Germany as the leading European power has special responsibility in this regard."
AFP via Getty ImagesSeveral NATO countries have been on standby after expressing willingness to send the highly sophisticated German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine, namely, Poland, Denmark and Finland - but Berlin has to sign off on it first.
Neither Washington nor Berlin are ready to take the lead on this, with Germany's new defense minister Boris Pistorius having stressed following the meeting that "we have to be careful because we have a duty to look carefully and intensively at what might be the consequences for anybody in that conflict."
Poland too is said to be waiting impatiently. "Poland's Defense Ministry did not immediately confirm Reznikov's assertion, but Polish officials have been among the most vociferous voices urging Germany to clear the way for Leopards," according to one US media report.
"The Polish government has said it stands ready to send some of its own, though legally it needs Germany to sign off on any such move."
The reference was to Ukrainian defense minister Oleksii Reznikov's earlier assertion "Countries that already have Leopard tanks can begin training missions for our tank crews" inside Poland. "We will start with that, and we will go from there." But the Polish government didn't confirm this plan.
President Zelensky's office has been scathing in its critique of Germany and US slowness to move on the issue, with presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak saying "indecision is killing more of our people."
"You'll help Ukraine with the necessary weapons anyway and realize that there is no other option to end the war," he said on Twitter, adding: "Every day of delay is the death of Ukrainians. Think faster."
Zelensky in a weekend address said: "We will still have to fight for the supply of modern tanks, but every day we make it more obvious there is no alternative to making the decision on tanks." He then said, "The only thing worth emphasizing is the time, the delivery time. Each agreement must be implemented as quickly as possible."
Russia, meanwhile, continues to make gains in the east and south of Ukraine. Referencing the Zaporizhzhia region, the defense ministry cited "advantageous positions" in a Saturday statement."As a result of offensive operations, units of the Eastern Military District took more advantageous lines and positions," it said.
According to a summary of recent advances in Newsweek, "The reported ramped up fighting in Zaporizhzhia came as Russian and Wagner Group forces claim to be making gains in Eastern Donetsk, where Russia has been conducting a monthslong and grinding fight to capture the Ukrainian-controlled city of Bakhmut."
And further, "The Wagner Group's chief, Russian President Vladimir Putin's ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced Thursday on Telegram that his forces had taken full control of the village of Klishchiivka just south of Bakhmut."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Inflation Assets Are Leading The Recovery. That's Not Normal | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Inflation Assets Are Leading The Recovery. That's Not Normal
SUNDAY, JAN 22, 2023 - 06:30 PM
By Marcel Kasumovich, Head of Research for One River Asset Management
It’s normal, sort of. Digital asset markets are following a commodity boom, bust, recovery cycle. Investors are focused on the bust. The decline in inflation, bond yields, and the US dollar makes the downturn shallower. And inflation assets are leading the recovery. That’s not normal.
Inflation Assets Leading the Not-Normal
“If you want two cups of coffee, save money and order both at the same time,” a student at the University of Freiburg famously quipped during Germany’s hyperinflation. That’s the inflation we worry about – pernicious, invisible tax. The recent surge in inflation is an inconvenience by historical standards. Periods of inflation lead people to shed currency for almost any real asset – even pianos were a hedge for Germans in the 1920s. That’s not now. But it’s also not never.
The pandemic brought a warning shot, a reminder that the saying “too much money chasing too few goods” still applies. Global inflation surged to 9% last year as bottlenecks emerged in all supply chains. Assets believed to hedge inflation performed dismally. Real assets – bitcoin, gold, lumber, land – crashed as inflation rose. Those assets didn’t “fail” in their roles. Real interest rates shot higher. And that’s the real driving force behind inflation assets.
The evidence is obvious in investor behavior. There was a dash for cash as inflation rose, not real assets. Last quarter, Global Fund Managers reported the highest cash holding since 2001! The inflation tax was an afterthought. All other assets were rapidly deflating in response to the surge in rates. That is not an inflationary mindset. It’s conviction that policy will kill inflation, leaving real rates higher for a stretch of time. And it’s self-reinforcing.
Market expectations call for a cratering of inflation this year, to 2.33%. It’s also expected to stay there for a very long time, 2.19% in 2024 and an average of 2.29% in the next ten years.
The consensus is centered on the idea that a recession will bring everything back to “normal.” And it is exactly how investors are positioned – long bonds, short equities, and long US dollar (Figure 1). Our own Macro Pulse confirms the consensus – it’s in recessionary territory.
But change is afoot. Downturns don’t last long, even brutal ones. They are usually fast, severe fractures. This one is slow and shallow. Our Macro Pulse has been in recessionary territory three of the past four months; the longest recessionary signal was nine months in the Great Financial Crisis. Market stabilizers are also emerging. Declines in inflation, bond yields and the US dollar are cushioning the downturn with mortgage and business surveys bottoming.
Commodity markets provide the simplest connection to the cyclicality of digital assets. Doug Wilson, One River Digital PM, likens the downturn in digital infrastructure to a boom, bust, recovery cycle of energy markets. It’s a terrific benchmark. Bitcoin is a unit of energy. The boom saw Bitcoin trade miles above its marginal cost of production. That boom led to excess investment. The bust that followed is like an over-supplied commodity cycle.
What does the recovery look like? Let’s benchmark the boom-bust-recovery cycle through the macro lens of recessions. Figure 2 shows median oil prices in the past 4 economic cycles. The most interesting observation – oil prices aren’t anywhere close to the downturns of the past. This is the “too few goods” side of the inflation equation. A long period of commodity underinvestment means that inflation assets don’t decline to the same degree in recession.
It also means inflationary assets can lead in the recovery, counter to the consensus of a return to “normal.” But inflation assets are supposed to lag, not lead. It takes an extended period of strong demand to absorb excess capacity built in this expansion. Those are the assets soonest to bump up against capacity constraints and be demonstrated as short in supply. Cyclical forces are pulling down inflation, structural pressures may be less benign.
Digital asset markets are recoupling to macro forces. Inflation assets are leading this year and digital assets are rising with that tide. The differentiation within the digital ecosystem is telling. Base layers and scaling solutions are leading – Bitcoin and Ethereum are back to pre-FTX levels, Optimism scaling protocol has risen well above pre-FTX highs. DeFi protocols are lagging, most notably MakerDAO, as it wrestles with its strategic future pathway.
Market leadership is in the boring basics. We should pay attention. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Lightning, Optimism – base layers with scaling solutions for usable applications. We know that digital asset valuations are all about network effects. But investing in railways is pointless with no demand to ride them. Tokenization has been wildly successful in bridging traditional and digital worlds. That’s one trajectory of turning the boring into beautiful.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
4:02 min
"You Pick The Losers"
Tony Heller
Jan 22, 2023
"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable." - H. L. Mencken
^^^^
1:11 min
Carl Sagan On The Importance Of Free Speech And Skepticism
Tony Heller
Jan 22, 2023
"If we can't be skeptical of those in authority, we are up for grabs by the next charlatan that comes along"
Last edited:
marsh
On TB every waking moment
9:58 min
The Elites Just Flipped On You
The Economic Ninja
Jan 22, 2023
The economic ninja talks about how the elites are now realizing that the green movement is not producing enough energy so they are now ranking nuclear power as green energy.
^^^^
Uranium - Converging Threats And Opportunities
Demand has reemerged for nuclear energy as a non-carbon replacement for fossil fuels. Read here for an investment potential for uranium mining and enrichment.
seekingalpha.com
Uranium - Converging Threats And Opportunities
Jan. 16, 2023 7:00 AM
Henry Miles
Who would have thought that even a year ago Japan, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States would all be reconsidering nuclear energy. But that is precisely what has happened.
Having reflected upon the severe lessons of Fukushima, in the context of hydrocarbon prices / availability and the mandate to address climate change / global warming, our friends across the Pacific have recently announced that they will build up their nuclear energy capabilities.
So too on the other side of the Atlantic where the U.K. is pursuing non-carbon energy in the form of “small modular reactors” (SMR’s) and Germany is backing away from its stance to decommission nukes in the wake of fuel supply concerns following Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Even absent those concerns,
Here in the United States, work is also underway both on full-scale reactors as well as on SMR’s including by the Buffett / Gates venture, TerraPower (private) as well as by NuScale Power (SMR), not to forget BWX Advanced Technologies (BWXT) that has carved out a niche in nuclear energy for naval vessels. BUT concerns exist within the system related to our lack of uranium ore as well as the enriched metal.
Trouble in the Supply-Chain
Indeed, a few weeks ago, TerraPower, that is building a Natrium Nuclear power plant in Wyoming, announced that the project will be delayed at least two years. In a released statement, the company said, “the delay is related to the unavailability of the nuclear fuel HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium). … The delay pushes the project completion date to 2030, instead of the previously planned 2028. According to the statement, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the only commercial source of HALEU fuel to no longer be a viable part of the supply chain for TerraPower, as well as others in the industry.” In response to the announcement, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) remarked,“…the announcement underscores what I’ve been saying for years: America must reestablish itself as the global leader in nuclear energy. Instead of relying on our adversaries like Russia for uranium, the United State must produce its own supply of advanced nuclear fuel.” In his statement Barrasso said he has introduced legislation to “make this a reality and I’ve repeatedly called on the department of Energy (DOE) to accelerate and expand its efforts.”
Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon added that, “The delay TerraPower is experiencing demonstrates how critical it is that our nation has domestic sources of uranium – it makes no sense to depend on Russia anymore.”
This is a remarkable situation and not unlike others we are witnessing with other strategic metals where the United States “outsourced” our production to adversarial countries and their primary trading partners. In the case of uranium ore, former USSR member Kazakhstan accounts for 45 percent of global supply with Russia's tentacles extending elsewhere including into Canada and even here in the US.
Three Pure-Play Companies
Enter Uranium Energy (UEC) and Energy Fuels (UUUU) the US’s two leading producers of uranium, with primary operations in Texas, Wyoming, and Utah – all red states that are more welcoming of miners. Add to them, Centrus Energy (LEU), an enricher of uranium ore in the form of HALEU, defined by the Department of Energy as…”“… enriched between 5% and 20% … for most U.S. advanced reactors to achieve smaller designs that get more power per unit of volume. HALEU will also allow developers to optimize their systems for longer life cores, increased efficiencies, and better fuel utilization.
The World Nuclear Association and Forbes have argued that globally we have more than enough HALEU to meet current needs. At the same time, they acknowledge that 57% of worldwide supply emanates from Russia and China with almost none refined in the United States. Thus, the Energy Act of 2020 established the Advanced Nuclear Fuel Availability Program in the US Department of Energy (DOE) that is, “intended to stimulate the domestic development of a commercial HALEU supply chain, particularly uranium enrichment capacity.”
Then, in 2021, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed Centrus as our first HALEU production firm while DOE began funding for such a demonstration facility in Ohio. The DOE’s fiscal 2022 budget request included a record $1.8 billion for the Office of Nuclear Energy – its highest ask ever – to scale up commercial deployment of smaller and more flexible advanced reactor designs requiring HALEU for longer life cores, increased efficiencies, and better fuel utilization. Global tensions have reinforced the imperative to move forward swiftly.
So, there you have it – the United States is attempting to reestablish our position as a miner and enricher of uranium with Uranium Energy, Energy Fuels, and Centrus Energy being the public companies involved. At this point, theirs are more strategic stories than financial ones. These companies are not the steadiest financially and most investors should avoid them. Still, they are showing potential that may fully emerge with continued supply-push help of the feds, and demand-pull by nuclear reactor capitalists.
- Uranium Energy recently benefited from a multi-million-dollar contract awarded by the Energy National Nuclear Security Administration of DOE. The company’s financial condition is otherwise marginal through its P&L and over to cash flow notwithstanding a strong balance sheet.
- Energy Fuels also received a large DOE contract, $18.5 million. The company has experienced uneven progress with revenues that they have not yet been able to bring through to their bottom line and further. Their solid balance sheet should give them time to become consistently profitable.
- Centrus Energy, as noted above, is benefiting its own cost-sharing contract with DOE. Its revenues are see-sawing and, in any given quarter, find their way down their P&L and over to operating cash flow. Here though, the company is running with negative equity although the trend line indicates some progress.
"We're seeing governments and companies return to nuclear with an appetite that I'm not sure I've ever seen in my four decades in this business," Tim Gitzel, Cameco (CCJ) president and CEO, said on an Oct. 27 earnings call. Indeed, to fulfill its own orders, Cameco, Canada’s largest uranium miner and one of the largest in the world, has taken to buying product from China.
The federal government now is serving in the role of catalyst to open up our US supply-chain for uranium ore and metal. To believe in our miners / refiners as worthy investments starts with believing that we must produce more uranium ourselves: a) as demand increases by many countries for non-carbon energy, and/or b) as wariness grows over the reliability of geopolitical adversaries as suppliers of fuel. For me, both going-in assumptions seem reasonable.
^^^^
marsh
On TB every waking moment
24:23 min
The Revolt Against ESG IS NOW, Woke Corporations Are Starting To Crumble
Timcast IRL
8 hours ago
Jan 22, 2023
(No summary given. Have not watched.)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
46:08 min
Transforming Medicine, Redefining Life | Davos 2023 | World Economic Forum
World Economic Forum
Jan 22, 2023 DAVOS
From clinical advances in neuroscience to proven solutions for HIV prevention and treatment, what are the radical new approaches needed to transform medicine and reimagine life as we live longer? Speakers: Pranjal Sharma, Megan Palmer, Nita A. Farahany, Kuldeep Singh Rajput
^^^^^
44:54 min
Beyond the Rainbow: Advancing LGBTQI+ Rights | Davos 2023 | World Economic Forum
World Economic Forum
Jan 22, 2023 DAVOS
Recent changes in law and the expansion of LGBTQI rights in a number of countries mark positive progress. What lessons from these success stories can be applied in other contexts? Speakers: Ben Fajzullin, Sarah Kate Ellis, Sharon Marcil, Tirana Hassan, Fahd Jamaleddine
marsh
On TB every waking moment
How They Plan To Shut Us Up by American Renaissance 12:42 min
HOW THEY PLAN TO SHUT US UP BY AMERICAN RENAISSANCE
marsh
On TB every waking moment
(Caution. I am unfamiliar with the soure.)
All Wars Are Bankers' Wars 45:44 min
All Wars Are Bankers' Wars 45:44 min
ALL WARS ARE BANKERS' WARS
(No summary given. Did not watch.)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Whats in these tunnels? .50 min
^^^^^
www.springfieldunderground.com
Located in the heart of the country, Springfield Underground has been solving our customers’ problems with unique spaces for over 50 years.
Fast facts
WHATS IN THESE TUNNELS?
These tunnels are more extensive than most people know. We might start hearing about them at the end of this year.^^^^^
Springfield Underground
Located in the heart of the country, Springfield Underground has been solving our customers’ problems with unique spaces for over 50 years.
www.springfieldunderground.com
Located in the heart of the country, Springfield Underground has been solving our customers’ problems with unique spaces for over 50 years.
Fast facts
- Springfield Underground contains 3.2 million square feet of leasable space free from exposure to the outdoor elements
- Buildings range in size from 50,000 - 400,000 square feet
- The ambient temperature of the former limestone mine is a constant 62 degrees
- Springfield Underground’s on-site refrigeration maintenance crew manage the temperature of refrigerated buildings ranging from -20F to 55F
- 224 dock doors
- Over 3 miles of lit roadway
- Over 3 miles of rail siding
- Clear ceiling height of up to 30 feet
- Immediate accessibility to I-44 and US-65
- Rail served
- Protected by fire sprinklers
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - How "The Power Of Trusted Authorities" Was Used To Subvert America 10:59 min
Sunfellow On COVID-19
3 hours ago
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - How "The Power Of Trusted Authorities" Was Used To Subvert America
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. describes how The Milgram Experiment paved the way for using "the power of trusted authorities" to subvert American democracy during the COVID pandemic.
The Milgram Experiment
Milgram experiment - Wikipedia
The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
The experiments began on August 7, 1961 (after the grant proposal was approved in July), in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to explain the psychology of genocide and answer the popular contemporary question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.
Kennedy's comments are excerpted from:
"The COVID Cartel" (Featuring Kennedy, Johnson, Stockton, Singleton, Faber, Mauer, Kaplan...)
"The COVID Cartel" (Featuring Kennedy, Johnson, Stockton, Singleton, Faber, Mauer, Kaplan...)
Sunfellow On COVID-19
3 hours ago
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - How "The Power Of Trusted Authorities" Was Used To Subvert America
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. describes how The Milgram Experiment paved the way for using "the power of trusted authorities" to subvert American democracy during the COVID pandemic.
The Milgram Experiment
Milgram experiment - Wikipedia
The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
The experiments began on August 7, 1961 (after the grant proposal was approved in July), in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to explain the psychology of genocide and answer the popular contemporary question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.
Kennedy's comments are excerpted from:
"The COVID Cartel" (Featuring Kennedy, Johnson, Stockton, Singleton, Faber, Mauer, Kaplan...)
"The COVID Cartel" (Featuring Kennedy, Johnson, Stockton, Singleton, Faber, Mauer, Kaplan...)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The So-Called "Global Elite" See Humans as a Cancer and an Impediment to Their Precious Resources 3:00 min
The Vigilant Fox
1 hour ago
^^^^
WEF: "100 Days to Outrace the Next Pandemic"
2:13 min
The Vigilant Fox
2 hours ago
^^^^
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why there is a push for transhumanism from globalists 3:07 min
The Post Millennial Live
3 hours ago
"We are basically merely cattle ... We have to serve what it is they need in their lives, and so in order to keep us subservient they want us to live in the Metaverse."
^^^^^
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why she believes the WEF's agenda can still be stopped 1:21 min
The Post Millennial Live
3 hours ago
The Vigilant Fox
1 hour ago
The So-Called "Global Elite" See Humans as a Cancer and an Impediment to Their Precious Resources
Noor Bin Ladin: "(To them), we are basically merely cattle ... cogs in the machine ... and we have to serve what it is they need in their lives."^^^^
WEF: "100 Days to Outrace the Next Pandemic"
2:13 min
The Vigilant Fox
2 hours ago
WEF: "100 Days to Outrace the Next Pandemic"
Noor Bin Ladin: "So this is very much still a justification for the implementation of digital IDs and other means of tracing the population. Everything is about tracking us and restricting our movements in every way possible."^^^^
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why there is a push for transhumanism from globalists 3:07 min
The Post Millennial Live
3 hours ago
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why there is a push for transhumanism from globalists
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why there is a push for transhumanism from globalists:"We are basically merely cattle ... We have to serve what it is they need in their lives, and so in order to keep us subservient they want us to live in the Metaverse."
^^^^^
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why she believes the WEF's agenda can still be stopped 1:21 min
The Post Millennial Live
3 hours ago
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why she believes the WEF's agenda can still be stopped
Noor Bin Ladin tells Jack Posobiec why she believes the WEF's agenda can still be stopped: "They cannot quell the human spirit."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
SUNDAY SPECIAL w/ Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Chip Roy, Dan Horowitz and John Solomon 1:02:39 min
The Dan Bongino Show
14 hours ago
The Dan Bongino Show
14 hours ago
SUNDAY SPECIAL w/ Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Chip Roy, Dan Horowitz and John Solomon
Please enjoy this weekly compilation of the best interviews from The Dan Bongino Show on Radio that you may have missed but are definitely worth your time. This week we present you: Donald Trump Jr., TX Representative Chip Roy, Just the News' John Solomon and author and podcaster Dan Horowitz.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Climate Cult Wants Every Person’s Carbon Dioxide Emissions to Be Regulated – No More Breathing… for the Planet!
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a leading German scientist from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), believes that in order to save
noqreport.com
Climate Cult Wants Every Person’s Carbon Dioxide Emissions to Be Regulated – No More Breathing… for the Planet!
by Ethan HuffJanuary 22, 2023
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a leading German scientist from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), believes that in order to save the planet from “climate change,” every person’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be capped and regulated by the government.
Calling the concept a “planetary guardrail,” Schellnhuber contends that every person should have a three-ton CO2 emissions limit per year applied to their daily life. Those who exceed that amount should be forced to pay a fine, he says.
Since every breath a person takes results in CO2 being breathed out in exchange for oxygen, breathing would also have to be regulated. Those who wish to remain under the three-ton cap may need to take fewer breaths, likely resulting in much less exercise and physical exertion in order to keep heart rate low.
Only the rich, based on Schellnhuber’s idea, would be allowed to live normally. The poor would have to really cut back on everything, including breathing, in order to not be fined into oblivion.
(Related: According to NBC News and other globalist media outlets, CO2 is a “pollutant” that must be eradicated in order to save the planet from “global warming.”)
Alibaba developing “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor people’s CO2 emissions
In order to “have an environment worth living [in],” according to Schellnhuber, CO2 emissions must be kept at a minimum – unless you have the cash to purchase access to a better quality of life.“Every person gets three tons of CO2 per year, but if you need more, you just have to buy it,” this climate fanatic is quoted as saying.
Currently, the average German is emitting far more than three tons of CO2 per year. A normal person emits about 10 tons of CO2 per year, while some millionaires and billionaires emit upwards of 100 tons of CO2 per year.
A very select few of the very-rich, according to data from the Paris World Inequality Lab, emit more than 2,000 tons of CO2 per year. These folks would easily be able to pay the necessary fines to continue flying around in their private jets and powering their many lavish estates dotting the world landscape.
Only the poor would suffer from Schellnhuber’s envisioned dystopia, which is what we have been saying all along about the climate change scam. It is a paradigm in which the rich get to do everything they want while the poor are imprisoned in a CO2-less misery existence.
China-based Alibaba, we are told, is currently working on an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to keep tabs on the average person’s CO2 emissions. If commercialized, this is how Schellnhuber’s plan could come to fruition in the near future.
A prototype of that device was unveiled last year in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2022 annual meeting, hosted by kingpin globalist Klaus Schwab. Alibaba Group President J. Michael Evans announced that China is well on its way to making that tracker a global reality.
“We are developing through technology the ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint … where are they travelling, how are they travelling, what are they eating, what are they consuming on the platform,” the former Goldman Sachs banker rambled.
The goal, Evans concluded, is to “incentivize” average folks to “do the right thing, even if they were provided the opportunity to do the wrong thing.”
Meanwhile, the globalists in attendance at this year’s WEF gathering are living it up in luxury while the rest of the world is crushed under crippling inflation, which is yet another adverse effect of globalist control over the money supply.
The latest climate-related news can be found at Climate.news.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
2023, The Year of The Great DC UniParty Getting Exposed - Example Coming with Biden and McConnell Making Deal on Debt Ceiling - The Last Refuge
CTH has predicted the most significant political revelation in 2023 will be the exposure of the Washington DC UniParty, and one of the largest moments for this sunlight is going to come with the “debt ceiling” extension. The background to understand this level of sunlight, comes specifically...
theconservativetreehouse.com
2023, The Year of The Great DC UniParty Getting Exposed – Example Coming with Biden and McConnell Making Deal on Debt Ceiling
January 22, 2023 | Sundance | 164 Comments
CTH has predicted the most significant political revelation in 2023 will be the exposure of the Washington DC UniParty, and one of the largest moments for this sunlight is going to come with the “debt ceiling” extension.
The background to understand this level of sunlight, comes specifically because 20 House Republicans have taken a stand with bold contrast. Whenever there is a bold contrast situation, the UniParty is exposed because the lavender hues where red and blue overlay is not possible. The House20 have created a situation where Speaker Kevin McCarthy cannot hide, and there are enough MAGA Republicans to expose how the conniving UniParty apparatus really works.
Within the CBS political discussion, Robert Costa puts the upcoming ‘debt ceiling’ discussion into context while revealing how the White House is approaching the issue. Costa is a vested weasel, but what he says in this segment is accurate. Joe Biden will work with Mitch McConnell in the Senate to subvert the House of Representatives, because the House -as structured by the MAGA coalition- is now viewed as the enemy to both the White House and Senate republicans.
OMG, guys, like how lucky are we right now?
You don’t have to guess if Costa is correct on this, because the evidence is already in place. What Costa is describing is exactly how and why the 2023 Omnibus spending bill was put together by the White House, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer before the Republican control of the House took place. Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, are structurally aligned with Democrats against the House Republicans.
The CBS panel is essentially having a conversation saying, ‘How lucky are we’ that Mitch McConnell is a Democrat right now? And this is the truest nature of the UniParty in action.
[Transcript, video at 02:21] – MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, I’m glad you bring that up, because the other thing that the departure of the chief of staff raises questions about is this looming policy and political conversation about the debt ceiling.
Who runs point on that? Obviously, the Treasury secretary has a huge role. But in terms of talking to the Hill and the negotiations, who’s doing that if the chief of staff is leaving?
ROBERT COSTA: What I’m told from people inside the West Wing is that President Biden himself has a relationship with Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, of course, with Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader.
They are in some ways going to try to cut out Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans. There’s not an appetite among Democrats to put spending cuts on the table at all. They would like to see a clean debt limit extension. And Jim Clyburn, one of the top Democrats in the House, recently told me he could see a scenario where centrist House Republicans band together with House Democrats for a clean debt limit extension.
[…] ROBERT COSTA: Privately, I’m told President Biden and Senator McConnell have chuckled behind the scenes with longtime friends about how at this stage in divided government, it’s these two men who have long been friends who are being counted upon to perhaps cut a deal.
I remember, when I first started covering Congress a decade ago, I would remember Vice President Biden was the one…
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes.
ROBERT COSTA: … who came to the Capitol to meet with Senator McConnell to cut a deal on that so-called fiscal cliff way back then.
So, they have that history, and they were recently in Kentucky together, showing at least, not political solidarity, but in terms of a personal relationship, there’s a real rapport.”
6:41 min
marsh
On TB every waking moment
It Looks Like Biden's Classified Documents Scandal Is About To Explode
Joe Biden takes classified documents very seriously, so he says, but even after the search for classified documents has allegedly ended a couple of times now, it’s not yet over....
pjmedia.com
It Looks Like Biden's Classified Documents Scandal Is About To Explode
BY MATT MARGOLIS 2:48 PM ON JANUARY 22, 2023Joe Biden takes classified documents very seriously, so he says, but even after the search for classified documents has allegedly ended a couple of times now, it’s not yet over.
In the wake of more documents being discovered at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del., the Department of Justice is now considering expanding its search for classified documents Biden may have absconded with, according to a report from CBS News.
“Justice Department officials are also considering the possibility of conducting other consensual searches at locations linked to Mr. Biden, said the source familiar with the investigation,” the report says.
So far, somewhere between 25 and 30 classified documents, some of which are marked top secret, have been discovered in Biden’s possession—either at his home in Wilmington or at his private office at the Penn Biden Center.
The decision to search more places for documents is a troubling development for Joe Biden and the White House team, who have clearly been caught off-guard by a scandal they had hoped to keep under wraps before it was leaked to the media a couple of weeks ago. But what exactly does it mean? Is this merely a precaution, or is the National Archives suddenly aware of missing documents that have yet to be accounted for?
Let’s not forget the National Archives knew what documents Trump had at Mar-a-Lago. So it stands to reason that the National Archives, which was reportedly unaware of the missing documents when Biden’s lawyers first discovered them, has since attempted to determine what else might be missing from Biden’s years as vice president and now believes there’s more out there to be discovered that they cannot account for. Where are these documents? Who knows? What are they about?
Don’t count on us finding out anytime soon. But they might just be sensitive enough that the DOJ, which is run by Biden wingman Merrick Garland, feels the need to conduct more “consensual” searches of locations linked to Joe Biden.
It sure looks like Biden’s classified documents scandal is about to explode.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Issue: January 22, 2023
Ukraine exports its digital ID technology
Starting with Estonia.By Cindy Harper
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov confirmed that the team behind Diia had shared the app’s code with Estonia.
Video on website 1:01 min
“One of the most digital countries in the world is adopting Ukrainian technologies and experience,” Fedorov said. “With a unified national mobile platform, Estonia will be able to save on development costs in the future.”
Diia, which was launched in 2020, enables Ukrainian residents to digitally access government services and store digitized versions of their identification documents including, driver’s licenses and passports.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the application was updated to allow Ukrainians to change their address, access aid, get social support, and other important services. The country secured agreements with neighboring countries to accept digital identification in place of physical documents to help refugees who might have misplaced their documents during evacuations.
According to Ukraine’s ministry of digital transformation, about 50% of the country’s population, 18.5 million, use the app.
In Estonia, 99% of government services can be accessed online. However, most of these services are only accessible via a computer or laptop. mRiik might solve that problem.
The trial phase of Estonia’s new digital tool will allow users to store identification documents and access some government services.
Moldova has also expressed interest in replicating Diia, and USAID has allocated $650,000 to help other countries develop digital services platforms similar to Diia.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Border Crisis Is So Bad Corporate Media Is Acknowledging It . . . Then Blaming it on Climate Change ⋆ The Liberty Daily
If you love the news, check out The Liberty Daily's homepage. Climate change is the reason behind EVERYTHING BAD IN THE WORLD TODAY! At least that’s what corporate media wants you to think, along with radical leftists, the Biden-Harris regime, and all of the members of the climate change cult...
thelibertydaily.com
The Border Crisis Is So Bad Corporate Media Is Acknowledging It . . . Then Blaming it on Climate Change
By J.D. Rucker • Jan. 22, 2023Climate change is the reason behind EVERYTHING BAD IN THE WORLD TODAY! At least that’s what corporate media wants you to think, along with radical leftists, the Biden-Harris regime, and all of the members of the climate change cult.
The latest round of “blame it on climate change” has hit the border crisis. Corporate media is acknowledging that there’s a problem at the border. This is good news. The bad news is that they clown themselves with their excuses. Case-in-point: CBS Austin. Here are some snippets from their ludicrous article:
CBP seeing huge increases in migrants at southern border due to violence, climate disaster
The coming (fiscal) year may see even greater numbers arriving at the border, as CBP has already reported 863,929 enforcement actions since the start of the 2023 fiscal year in October 2022.
Republicans have been quick to drop the blame for these sorts of numbers at the feet of the Biden administration, which have pursued significantly less hard-liner policies than his predecessor – the Associated Press said in 2020 that “The Trump administration was more hostile to immigration and immigrants than any administration in decades.”
However, the case it not so clear cut.
…
Furthermore, a mix of environmental and political issues continue to impact those coming from areas like Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti. “What we are seeing at the border is a consequence of a confluence of factors,” Juliette Levy, associate professor of history at University of California – Riverside, told the university’s news platform. While she admits that the Biden administration’s “more welcoming” and less hard-liner policies are indeed a factor driving such high traffic to the border, it is not the main motivator.
“The fact is that in both Guatemala and Honduras, poverty is a main driver of migration, in concert with gang violence and paramilitary violence,” she explained. “And two hurricanes in 2020 laid waste to both countries — especially in the poorer areas of the country. Add to that the economic fall out of the pandemic and you have a powder keg of circumstances.”
We often link to local corporate media sources in our pursuit of the news. But sometimes I have a hard time linking to them because invariably they find some way to add leftist idiocy into every story they publish.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Here’s How Long It Will Take To Replenish US Weapons Stocks Sent To Ukraine |
dailycallernewsfoundation.org
Here’s How Long It Will Take To Replenish US Weapons Stocks Sent To Ukraine
Micaela Burrow on January 22, 2023- The U.S. will not be able to restock inventories of critical munitions sent to Ukraine for years, even as some stockpiles have become nearly depleted, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found.
- The U.S. has provided 1.1 million rounds of 155mm ammunition to Ukraine as of Thursday, according to the Pentagon.
- “Fortunately, in this year’s NDAA, the Armed Services Committees included critical audit provisions for this funding, including one that will provide quarterly reports on the production of the US munitions industrial base,” Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The U.S. has sent millions of rounds of ammunition of various kinds to Ukraine, according to a Thursday fact sheet from the Department of Defense (DOD), which has resulted in severe deficits in some cases. Only one of the six weapons where stockpiles have fallen dangerously low is projected to reach normal levels within five years, assuming no further deliveries to Ukraine, leaving the U.S. scrambling for alternatives, Mark Cancian, a former artillery officer and Pentagon acquisition official, found in a report published in CSIS.
“Longer term, there will be some competition between Taiwan’s needs and rebuilding US stockpiles,” Cancian told the Daily Caller News Foundation, as the U.S. pledges to help the island fend off Chinese aggression. “That’s why increased munitions production is so important.”
“Most inventories, though not all, will take many years to replace. For most items, there are workarounds, but there may be a crisis brewing over artillery ammunition,” Cancian wrote.
For example, the U.S. has provided 1.1 million rounds of 155mm ammunition, a widely-used explosive shell, to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the fact sheet shows.
At the regular production rate of 93,000 rounds annually, the industrial base would never be able to replenish 155mm projectiles because of the number consumed in standard military training and maintenance operations, the CSIS report said. The base can surge to a rate of 240,000 rounds each year, but even then it would take five years before inventories of 155mm would be fully rebuilt.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged in May that DOD will not allow domestic inventories of “critical” munitions to fall below minimum levels needed for national security, according to Defense News. Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh repeated that promise on Thursday.
Army acquisition czar Doug Bush said in September the service planned to triple 155mm production over the next “couple” of years with support from Congress, Task and Purpose reported. The Army held an “Industry Day” on Tuesday to provide arms manufacturing companies with an overview of the army’s requirements for accelerating production of 155mm projectiles and the need to expand production capacity, a notice shows.
The U.S. has pulled hundreds of thousands of the 155mm shells from stockpiles operated by U.S. military units in Israel and routed them to Ukraine. Additional equipment of an unspecified nature may be transferred out of U.S. forces in Korea, Reuters reported Thursday.
“The Ukrainians will never run out of ammunition,” Cancian told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Supply for lighter weapons, like rifles and machine guns, could continue indefinitely, but “artillery ammunition,” the foundation of ground warfare, “has been the most difficult,” he added.
To make up for shortages, the U.S. has begun substituting some weapons that may be slightly less appropriate to the type of warfare Ukraine is conducting and buying artillery from other countries, Cancian explained to the DCNF.
GPS-guided 155 mm munitions are also at risk, according to the analysis. Recent production rates of 1,000 per year mean it could take seven years to refill U.S. inventories, or four years at an accelerated production rate.
At the recent rate of production, it will take eight years to replenish U.S. stocks of Javelins; surge production rates could shorten the timeline to five and one-half years, according to the CSIS analysis. Javelin stocks have become so strained that DOD suspended further deliveries to Ukraine to avoid undercutting plans for dealing with possible conflicts elsewhere.
Stinger missiles could take even longer, up to 18 years, corresponding with decreasing demand within DOD for the munition.
Cancian predicted the inventory of High Mobility Artillery Rockets System (HIMARS) could be restocked within three years. However, part of the reason for the more comfortable production margin is that the U.S. has donated so few — just 20 as of Jan. 6 — relative to Ukraine’s needs, Cancian wrote.
Thursday’s defense package did not include any additional HIMARS, Stingers or Javelins, according to a release.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is firing artillery at a rate of roughly 90,000 rounds per month, officials told The New York Times in November.
Russia’s industrial base, while dwarfed by that of the collective West, has already shifted to wartime footing, The Wall Street Journal reported. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that “we should not underestimate Russia” as Moscow works to build up its own munitions stores and appears to be planning a mass mobilization.
Congress granted DOD the authority to streamline the purchasing process by allowing the Pentagon to make contracts that extend for multiple years and eliminating some restrictions in the defense bill for 2023, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
“Fortunately, in this year’s NDAA, the Armed Services Committees included critical audit provisions for this funding, including one that will provide quarterly reports on the production of the US munitions industrial base,” Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher told the DCNF.
A trilateral inspector general (IG) body, composed of the IGs from DOD, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, released a full strategy to monitor the United States’ Ukraine response, including how it balances between supporting Ukraine and maintaining supplies for its own needs, on Wednesday.
What the IGs cannot evaluate, however, is the way Ukraine determines worthwhile targets and positions weapons to launch, Cancian told the DCNF. The more ammunition Ukrainian forces have access to at any one time, the more fires they can launch at targets that become “progressively lower priority.”
DOD did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
^^^
I can't help but think the "Resident" and associated Compromised politicians, officials and Generals have intentionally weakened the ability for the US to defend itself from attack.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Uncovered Email Names Joe Biden in Oil Deal with China - Then Later in 2022 Biden Sold National Oil Reserves to Hunter Connected Chinese Company
10% for the Big Guy In 2020 Hunter Biden’s laptop hit the news and emails were uncovered involving Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and Joe Biden. These emails and text messages showed multiple pay-for-play schemes involving the Bidens and major players around the world, including officials in China...
www.thegatewaypundit.com
Uncovered Email Names Joe Biden in Oil Deal with China – Then Later in 2022 Biden Sold National Oil Reserves to Hunter Connected Chinese Company
By Joe Hoft
Published January 22, 2023 at 10:50am
10% for the Big Guy
In 2020 Hunter Biden’s laptop hit the news and emails were uncovered involving Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and Joe Biden. These emails and text messages showed multiple pay-for-play schemes involving the Bidens and major players around the world, including officials in China.
One email was located showing 10% to the big guy – the big guy was Joe Biden.
Sources Tell Fox News That ‘The Big Guy’ in Hunter Biden’s Emails in Proposed Equity Split is Reference to Joe Biden
The Bidens were involved in multiple deals with China involving hundreds of millions of dollars.
This week the Daily Mail uncovered another email found on Hunter’s laptop that included Joe Biden in a 2017 email discussing a multi-million dollar gas deal with CHINA.
Joe Biden was named in an email found on Hunter Biden‘s laptop discussing a 25 million-ton gas deal with China, DailyMail.com can reveal exclusively.
In October 2017, Hunter and his uncle –Joe’s brother Jim Biden – were brokering a multi-million dollar deal to supply gas from Louisiana to the country on behalf of their business partners, Chinese energy giant CEFC.
At the time Joe Biden had finished his term as vice president and had yet to announce any plans to run for president in 2020.
A Louisiana-based lawyer on the other side of the deal wrote in an October 27, 2017 email that he had arranged ‘a call from Joe Biden and Hunter Biden on Monday morning to discuss the purchase of the 5 million tons of gas.’
We don’t know how much money Hunter and Joe Biden made in this deal with China.
After Biden stepped into the White House after stealing the uncertifiable 2020 Election, Biden killed President Trump’s energy policy that made America energy independent.
Then Biden began taking from the US oil reserves that President Trump had replenished during his time in office. Biden drained these reserves to help China.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Biden lied to the American people and took oil from the US oil reserves not to help Americans at the pump, but to help China.
Power the Future founder Daniel Turner admonished Biden for selling “raw materials to the Communist Chinese for them to use as they want.”
“We were assured Biden was releasing this oil to America so it could be refined for gasoline to drive down prices at the pump. So right off the bat, they’re just lying to the American people,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “What they’re saying they did and what they did are not remotely related.”
Turner also said the decision highlights the Biden family’s “relationship with China.” Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is tied to Sinopec. In 2015, a private equity firm he cofounded bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.
Biden sold a million barrels of oil from US reserves to the same company connected with Hunter.
Joe Biden Sold a Million Barrels of Oil from US Reserves to China Company Connected to Hunter Biden
Were Biden’s recent moves connected to deals with China in the past? How much money went to the “Big Guy” in these deals?
It’s clear the Biden family operates like a mafia family. That is who occupies this White House.