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Debt Rattle June 29 2024

Jun 292024
 
 June 29, 2024  Posted by at 9:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  87 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky The Galata tower by moonlight 1845

 

• Biden Won’t Drop Out Of Presidential Race – Campaign Official (RT)
• Robert Hur Emerges as the Clear Winner in the Presidential Debate (Turley)
• Biden’s Team Offers Excuse For Debate Performance – Axios (RT)
• The New York Times Editorial Board Urges Biden To Quit The 2024 Race (RT)
• Kamala to Be ‘Leapfrogged’ in Quest to Find Biden Replacement (Sp.)
• Debate Debacle: Democrats Need to Find New Candidate ASAP (Sp.)
• Joe Biden Catches Cold (Kunstler)
• Ukraine: US Starts Conflict And Tasks Europe With Fueling It (Dionísio)
• Zelensky Preparing ‘Plan To End War’ (RT)
• Putin – Behind the Shoji (Patrick Lawrence)
• SCOTUS Overturns ‘Chevron Deference’ In Massive Blow To ‘Administrative State’ (ZH)
• Supreme Court Casts Doubt On Hundreds Of Jan 6 Cases (BBC)
• Supreme Court Rejects Bannon Bid To Avoid Monday Prison Deadline (ZH)
• Assange Agreed to Destroy Unpublished Classified Material (Lauria)
• Inquisition Redux at the Vatican (Karganovic)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1806525328036073626

 

 

 

 

Macgregor

 

 

 

 

“..he is “the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump. He will do it again.”

• Biden Won’t Drop Out Of Presidential Race – Campaign Official (RT)

US President Joe Biden will not drop out of the 2024 election race despite his poor performance during Thursday’s first presidential debate with Donald Trump, campaign spokesperson Seth Schuster has announced. Following the debate, in which Biden was largely panned, even by fellow Democrats, many in the party suggested that the president should be replaced on the November 5 ballot. In a text message seen by The Hill, Schuster is apparently attempting to reassure the president’s supporters that he will continue his efforts to be reelected. “Of course he’s not dropping out,” the campaign spokesperson wrote. Another member of the president’s team told Politico that Biden will stay in the race because he is “the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump. He will do it again.”

Biden himself has also dismissed the notion that he should bow out of the race, explaining to reporters at a Waffle House following Thursday’s event that “it’s hard to debate a liar.”Meanwhile, according to Politico, the Democratic Party is reportedly “panicked” by Biden’s “faltering” display against Trump and is actively discussing the possibility of replacing him with another candidate. “No one expected this nosedive,” one senior Democratic adviser told the outlet. Biden “was bad on message, bad on substance, bad on counter-punching, bad on presentation, bad on non-verbals. There was no bright spot in this debate for him.” Concerns over Biden’s performance have also been expressed by a number of major Democratic donors, with one telling Politico that the president had delivered “the worst performance in history” during the debate and “needs to drop out.”

Biden’s team, however, has been scrambling to explain the president’s poor display. One person close to his election campaign claimed that the 81-year-old was “over-prepared and relying on minutiae when all that mattered was vigor and energy.” They prepared him for the wrong debate. He was over-prepared when what he needed was rest. It’s confounding,” the person said. US media outlets have also suggested that Biden’s shaky performance was due to a cold, which they claim has been confirmed by a doctor who examined the president ahead of the debate.

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“..the question is whether a man who was too diminished to be a criminal defendant can still be a president for four more years..”

• Robert Hur Emerges as the Clear Winner in the Presidential Debate (Turley)

The presidential debate last night was chilling to watch as President Joe Biden clearly struggled to retain his focus and, at points, seemed hopelessly confused. The winner was clear: Special Counsel Robert Hur. For months, Democrats in Congress and the media have attacked Hur for his report that the president came across as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur concluded that prosecuting Biden would be difficult because a jury would view him as a sympathetic figure of a man with declining mental capabilities. That was evident last night and the question is whether a man who was too diminished to be a criminal defendant can still be a president for four more years.

Hur laid out evidence that President Biden had unlawfully retained and mishandled classified evidence for decades. However, he also concluded that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He found that “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” What has followed is the usual pile-on in the media with legal analysts, press, and pundits denouncing Hur for his findings. Hur likely does not anticipate any apologies even as commentators on CNN and MSNBC admit that there are now unavoidable questions of Biden’s ability to be the nominee. Democrats have repeatedly insisted that Hur did not find Biden diminished and that he actually was impressed by his memory and mental acuity. Hur contradicted that in his own testimony before Congress.

Indeed, the denial campaign took on a bizarre character, particularly when Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) insisted that Hur “exonerated” Biden. Hur pushed back: “I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, ‘exoneration.’ That is not a word that is used in my report and that is not a part of my task as a prosecutor.” Jayapal shot back, “You exonerated him.” Hur responded, “I did not exonerate him. That word does not appear in the report.” The debate also further undermines the ridiculous effort of the Biden Administration to continue to withhold the audiotape of the Hur interview as privileged (despite saying that the transcript is not privileged). The debate showed not only what Hur saw but why the Justice Department is making a clearly laughable privilege claim to delay any release of the audiotape until after the election.

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“They prepared him for the wrong debate. He was over-prepared..”

• Biden’s Team Offers Excuse For Debate Performance – Axios (RT)

Joe Biden’s team claims the US president’s poor performance during Thursday’s debate with Donald Trump was the result of him being “over-prepared” for the event and not getting enough rest, according to Axios news outlet. The first presidential debate ahead of November’s election, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, has overwhelmingly been described as a low point in Biden’s bid for a second term. The 81-year-old sounded hoarse, lost his train of thought several times, and struggled to get his points across. According to Axios, which claims to have spoken to a person close to Biden, the president’s poor performance was due to him being prepared for “the wrong debate.” “He was over-prepared and relying on minutiae when all that mattered was vigor and energy,” the source said. “They prepared him for the wrong debate. He was over-prepared when what he needed was rest. It’s confounding.”

The outlet also spoke to a former White House official, who argued that people on Biden’s team needed to be fired for the blunder. He noted, however, that this probably wouldn’t happen because “Biden rarely dismisses people.” Meanwhile, Politico has reported that the Democratic Party is now actively discussing the possibility of replacing Joe Biden on the November 5 ballot following his “faltering” display on Thursday. “No one expected this nosedive,” a senior Democratic adviser told the outlet, noting that Biden “was bad on message, bad on substance, bad on counter punching, bad on presentation, bad on non-verbals. There was no bright spot in this debate for him.” A number of major Democratic donors have also expressed bewilderment at Biden’s performance, with some insisting that the president needs to drop out of the race.

“Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or dies. Otherwise we are f**king dead,” an adviser to Democratic donors told Politico. Despite the blunder, Biden’s team has indicated that the US president does not plan to drop out of the race, with one campaign official telling Politico that he is “the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump” and will “do it again.” According to a CNN flash poll after the debate, 67% of registered voters who watched the contest felt that Trump had outperformed Biden.

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“I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back [up],” Biden said.

• The New York Times Editorial Board Urges Biden To Quit The 2024 Race (RT)

Democrats must admit that US President Joe Biden is no longer capable of resoundingly defeating Donald Trump on Election Day in November and that is why they must find a more suitable candidate to replace him, The New York Times editorial board wrote on Friday. The appeal came a day after Biden delivered what many described as a disastrous performance against Trump during the live presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia. Observers noted that Biden appeared frail and confused, struggling to finish his sentences and mixing up words when speaking. In a piece published on Friday, the Times cast doubt on the certainty that Biden would repeat his 2020 win over Trump. “That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year,” the editorial board wrote. “Voters… cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.”

The board further argued that Biden appeared on the debate stage “as the shadow of a great public,” who “struggled” to articulate his own policy position and ultimately failed to adequately counter Trump. “There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency,” the board wrote. “It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.” The editorial board concluded that Democrats have a better chance of defeating Trump if they “acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place.” While the board did not propose any alternatives, the US media and pundits have suggested that several prominent Democrats could potentially replace Biden as candidate, including Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Multiple leading liberal journalists and public figures have acknowledged that Biden performed badly on Thursday night. A flash poll conducted by CNN revealed that 67% of registered voters who watched the debate felt that Trump had won. Several outlets cited unnamed Biden staffers who tried to justify the president’s performance by saying that he has been suffering from a cold and was “over-prepared and relying on minutiae.” Biden appeared to acknowledge his flaws shortly after the debate. “I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he told a crowd of supporters during a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday. “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to.” Nevertheless, he vowed to continue the campaign and insisted that he is best qualified for the presidency. “I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back [up],” Biden said.

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“You need someone who is a known commodity that is already recognized by every single person, whether good, bad or ugly, and who has the ability to fundraise, you know, the half billion dollars they’re going to need to fundraise for the course of the next several months. And the only person who fits that bill will be Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, and Michelle ain’t doing it.”

• Kamala to Be ‘Leapfrogged’ in Quest to Find Biden Replacement (Sp.)

US Vice President Kamala Harris will be skipped over if her running mate President Joe Biden decides to drop out of the race, attorney and civil rights organizer Robert Patillo II speculated on Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Friday. “President Biden had a very bad night. The worst part was that he reinforced the narrative about him, of being kind of this doddering old man who didn’t know where he was, couldn’t complete a sentence, kind of got lost midway through sentences, those sorts of things.” The post-debate analysis, even on left-leaning MSNBC, focused heavily on finding a potential replacement for Biden, with the choices of Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom being floated on the air. Patillo described Biden’s performance as “Just an old man dying in front of us,” saying that “It got uncomfortable for people watching.” In what appeared to be an attempt at damage control, Harris appeared on both MSNBC and CNN defending Biden’s performance and vehemently declining to call for him to step down. She may have been the only one.

CNN analyst Van Jones called Biden’s performance “personally painful for a lot of people,” and openly noted that the Democrats could make a switch before the convention. NBC analyst Chuck Todd said Democratic leaders are in “a full-on panic about this performance.” Almost 48 million viewers watched the debate, many more likely saw clips of Biden’s worst moments after they were posted online. However, the Democrats may have difficulty finding a replacement for Biden because they all but shut down the party’s primary this cycle, making Harris the only potential candidate with a reasonable claim to the nomination as Biden’s running mate. Unfortunately for Democrats, Harris is unpopular with the voting public, According to poll aggregator 538, only 39% of Americans view her favorably, leading commentators to speculate that another candidate may be chosen by party leadership. That causes its own set of problems, however, because Harris is the first woman vice president and the first Black vice president. Whoever is the eventual Democratic nominee will need support from both voting blocs if they hope to defeat Donald Trump in November.

“The problem then becomes you can’t hop over the first Black female vice president and put Gavin Newsom, let’s say, in the catbird seat,” explained Patillo. “Every once and a while the Democratic Black folks know exactly what their place is in the party and it’s pretty clear that the white feminists don’t hold Kamala Harris in the same regard that they held Hillary Clinton, for example,” he added later. According to Sportsbook Review, Biden’s odds went from +137 on May 31, to +400 after the debate. That means a $100 bet placed on May 31 would have returned $237 ($137 profit) if Biden won the presidency. Now, a $100 bet will net you $500 ($400 profit) if Biden wins. By comparison, Trump’s odds are -185, which means a $100 bet will net you $185 ($85 profit). Even more interesting is how the odds of the other candidates not named Trump or Biden fared following the debate. Nearly every potential candidate– except Biden and Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.– saw their odds improve, indicating that betters and sportsbooks are expecting a change at the top of the Democratic ticket.

The biggest jump was for Gavin Newsom, who saw his odds go from +5000 to as low as +500 on some sites. By comparison, Harris’ odds went from +6600 to +1400, a large jump but not nearly as large as Newsom’s. The Democratic nominee for the 2016 Presidential election also jumped up the boards: Hillary Clinton’s odds are now +4000, in May, a bet on Clinton would have gotten gamblers +15000. Patillo thinks she may be a dark horse candidate for the nomination. “The reason is you have, what? Four months that you have to get 100% name recognition around the country. You don’t have time to introduce the country to Gavin Newsom. You don’t have time to introduce the country to Kamala Harris, quite frankly,” he explained. “You need someone who is a known commodity that is already recognized by every single person, whether good, bad or ugly, and who has the ability to fundraise, you know, the half billion dollars they’re going to need to fundraise for the course of the next several months. And the only person who fits that bill will be Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, and Michelle ain’t doing it.”

While Clinton lost to Trump in 2016 and has polled unfavorably with the American public, she can at least appear competent on the debate stage, unlike Biden’s performance on Thursday. “[Biden] was barely able to form a sentence last night and that is why it’s a situation that’s apocalyptic for Democrats because regardless of how much money you raise, regardless of how you try to paint Trump, if people think you’re running essentially against ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ it’s not going to really matter,” argued Patillo. “And that is why that Hillary train is going to be picking up over the course of the next several weeks.” “How many times have you heard people say this is no time to panic?” constitutional historian Dan Lazare asked while speaking to Sputnik. “Well, if ever there was a time for Democrats to panic, this is it.”

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“..turned out to be worse for the Democratic Party than the botched Afghanistan withdrawal..”

• Debate Debacle: Democrats Need to Find New Candidate ASAP (Sp.)

The first debate between incumbent President Joe Biden and Republican front-runner Donald Trump turned out to be worse for the Democratic Party than the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, according to Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel. “Debate night was a fiasco for Team Biden and for the conspirators in media and elsewhere who have ceaselessly sold Biden disasters on many fronts as ‘successes’,” Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik. With just a few months until Election Day, the Democratic leadership must now “push Biden and Harris both out and try to find a more credible team to fight the already well-funded and fiercely energized Trump juggernaut,” the analyst said. “This is a very heavy lift as the Democrat bench is light and marginalized by primary cycles of 2020 and 2024 that installed a serial liar and diminished clod into the White House where he fails on all fronts,” Ortel said.

“Whether it is the demolished pier in Gaza, the wreckage across the Middle East and Afghanistan, the horrific meat grinder in Ukraine, or the lawlessness and failures in Democrat run states and cities, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stand revealed as incompetent losers.” A week ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh called attention to growing concerns among top Democrats and their wealthy donors about Biden’s ability to overcome Trump in the November election. After saying that Biden’s debate performance would be “a major touchstone,” Hersh quoted political insiders as suggesting that if the first showdown with Trump goes badly for the incumbent president, the Democratic convention in Chicago would replace Joe with another, more dynamic candidate in August.

That scenario seems likely after the debate, according to Ortel. “One theoretical approach might be to field an all-female historic ticket, seeking to exploit perceived weaknesses for Republicans over stances on abortion and gender insensitivity. Here, a Michelle Obama ticket with, perhaps, Hillary Clinton might gel. But who gets the top billing and who is second?” the Wall Street analyst remarked. “Thursday’s nightmare will look even worse on Friday morning for Democrats. The Biden and Harris ‘brands’ are unsaleable,” Ortel concluded.

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“All Mr. Trump would have to do is broadcast the scene from a San Francisco street-cam on “X” (Twitter) 24/7.”

• Joe Biden Catches Cold (Kunstler)

It’s obvious that the ruling blob now has to deep-six “Joe Biden.” The problem is they must induce him to renounce the nomination of his own will. The party’s nominating process is so bizarrely complex that it would very difficult to just shove him out. Another problem is that the party had to peremptorily declare “JB” their legal nominee before the August convention in order to keep him on the ballot in Ohio with its 17 electoral votes (due to some arcane machinery in the state’s election laws). As per above, the debate fiasco calls into serious question whether “Joe Biden” is competent to even serve out this term. He (or shadowy figures pulling strings behind him) are making profoundly hazardous decisions right now, such as last week’s missile attack that killed and wounded civilians on the beach in Crimea. Are you seeing how easily “Joe Biden” might start World War Three?

All of which is to say that pressure will soon rise to use the 25th amendment to relieve him of duty, leaving you-know-who in the oval office. If Joe Biden actually has to resign as president, he also loses the ability to pardon his son, Hunter, and peremptorily his other family members who shared bribery money received from China, Ukraine, and elsewhere. If he won’t resign, and the party can’t force him off the ticket, the blob could have no choice except to bump him off. I imagine they would get it done humanely, say late at night sometime, in bed, using the same method as for putting down an old dog who has peed on the carpet one too many times. Or, if that can’t be managed and he clings to his position, maybe the party could cobble up some new nominating rules impromptu. And then, who could they slot in from the bench?

The usual suspects are like the cast of a freak show, each one displaying one grotesque deformity after another. Gavin Newsom we understand: the party’s base of batshit-crazy women may all want to bear his child, but that limbic instinct to mate with a six-foot-three haircut-in-search-of-a-brain might not work with any other voter demographic — and Newsom has the failed state of California hanging around his neck. All Mr. Trump would have to do is broadcast the scene from a San Francisco street-cam on “X” (Twitter) 24/7.

Hillary has been stealthily flapping her leathery wings overhead for weeks as this debacle approached. She may still own the actual machinery of the Democratic Party — having purchased it through the Clinton Foundation some years back when the party was broke and needed a bailout. She could just command the nomination by screeching “Caw Caw” from the convention rostrum. Whatever happens, it will look terrible. Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan? An inveterate and notorious intel blob tool, Whitmer has allowed herself to be used repeatedly by the FBI to frame and persecute conservatives in her state as well as using her state AG Dana Nessel to go after political enemies there, especially poll workers who cried fraud in the sketchiest Michigan voting districts.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Like Dreamboat Newsom in California, Mr. Pritzker is busily running Illinois (and especially Chicago) into bankruptcy and chaos. Looks aren’t everything, but if Dreamboat gives the vapors to Karens across the land, the Illinois governor will get them shrieking in terror as from the sight of King Kong on Skull Island. Who else is there? Michelle O, of course, who will be instantly branded as a catspaw for her husband seeking a fifth term — as Barack himself has averred in so many words: just hanging out in the background, managing things in his jogging suit. That would be the ultimate Banana Republic set-up for us and I don’t think the voters will go for it. It all boils down to the Party of Chaos being thrust into chaos. Can it even survive “Joe Biden?”

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EU will pay.

• Ukraine: US Starts Conflict And Tasks Europe With Fueling It (Dionísio)

The USA, in Europe, behaved like true arsonists. Like any arsonist, they studied the terrain, identifying the main points conducive to propagation and combustion, finally, they caused the ignition and, today, like a painter, in the perspective and security that only distance can provide, they enjoy their destructive work. Satiated with their incendiary thirst, they turn away and leave the victims in charge of fueling the fire they so calculatedly created. The last approval process for the 61 billion dollars, with its difficulties, advances and setbacks, was already the result of this internal tension. The anxiety of exploiting another hotbed of tension in the Pacific that “contains China”, as well as the need to turn to Israel and its pyromaniac on duty, Netanyahu, led to an internal struggle that was responsible for a sharp drop in supplies to Kiev.

If between April 2022 and September 2023, every quarter, the USA sent at least 7.8 billion dollars in “aid”, even reaching 14.7 billion between July and September 2022, already in the period October 2023 As of March 2024, Kiev has only received $1.7 billion. Data from Kiel Institute, Ukraine Support Tracker. Although the amounts have, in the meantime, risen again, at least until we see it, the truth is that, contrary to what has been said so much in the mainstream media, it is the European Union and its member states that owes the largest share of “help”. Until April 2024, the European Union and its member states have committed 177.8 billion euros, while the USA only contributes 98.7 billion euros.

But this number alone tells us a lot about who is really paying the cost of fueling the fire spreading across the USA. While the USA and the EU member states, bilaterally, essentially send weapons, equipment that must be paid for, in the case of EU institutions, what is sent is essentially money. Either outright or in the form of loans in which Ukraine receives the money and the European Commission pays the interest and provides guarantees that future payments are made. The path things take tells us who will bear this payment. Furthermore, these figures do not include expenditure on refugees which, between Germany and Poland alone, exceeds 50 billion euros in subsidies, housing and other types of support.

Even in terms of armament, although the USA, when it comes to some types (howitzers and MLRS) takes the largest share, when we go to tanks, air defense and infantry vehicles, it is the Europeans who send the most, many of these systems supplied despite the lack of protection of its own defenses, which, as we know, does not happen with the USA. Europe helps to defend Ukraine, without needing to defend itself. This is the level of commitment reached. If these data alone already show us who is bearing the Ukrainian burden on their shoulders, the numerous statements by government officials in Washington, who urge Europe (read the European Union) to take greater responsibility on the issue Ukrainian, there are other signs that point to the fact that the U.S. is about to assume a commanding stance, entering when necessary and only if, strategically, this is justified.

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“These are two parallel things – to be strong on the battlefield and to develop a plan, a clear plan, a detailed plan. And it will be ready this year..”

• Zelensky Preparing ‘Plan To End War’ (RT)

Ukraine is preparing a “comprehensive plan” for ending the conflict with Russia that should be ready by the end of the year, Vladimir Zelensky has said. Zelensky made the comments at a press conference in Kiev, after meeting Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar on Friday. “We will also work out all other points of the Peace Formula and prepare a comprehensive plan that will be on the table before our partners,” Zelensky said. “It is very important for us to show a plan to end the war that will be supported by the majority of the world. This is the diplomatic path we are working on.” The so-called peace formula is a ten-point document Zelensky unveiled in November 2022, which envisions Russia ceding all formerly Ukrainian territory, withdrawing all of its troops, paying reparations and submitting to war crimes tribunals, among other things.

Moscow has dismissed it as unrealistic and “detached from reality”. Ukraine “must be strong on the battlefield,” Zelensky added, because Russia only respects strength. “These are two parallel things – to be strong on the battlefield and to develop a plan, a clear plan, a detailed plan. And it will be ready this year,” he told reporters. Zelensky’s comment came after he signed a long-term security pact with the EU on Thursday, obligating the bloc to years of military and financial aid. The US and several of its allies have signed separate aid pacts with Kiev, also pledging to prop up Kiev “for the long haul.” Western diplomats have openly said that the purpose of such treaties was to protect the Ukraine policy in case Donald Trump wins the November US presidential election.

Speaking in Brussels, Zelensky had argued that Ukraine “does not want to prolong the war” and does not want the conflict to last “for years.” “We have many wounded and killed on the battlefield. We must put a settlement plan on the table within a few months,” he said, without offering details. Kiev has been coy about Ukrainian casualty figures, insisting instead that it has inflicted massive losses on Russian forces. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Ukraine lost 35,000 troops in May alone and has lost close to 500,000 since the start of the conflict.

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“It is translucent, so one can see the movements of those on the other side, but there is no making out what they are doing.”

• Putin – Behind the Shoji (Patrick Lawrence)

It is never a good idea to turn to corporate media for an understanding of Vladimir Putin — his thoughts, his intentions, what he does and the outcome of what he does. Whenever the Russian president is the topic, you are always going to get reports so distorted as to obscure vastly more than they reveal. This pervasively Western–centric work makes it impossible, for anyone who relies solely on it, to see either the Russian leader or the nation he represents with any clarity, just as they are. One is invited to think Putin never acts but for the damage his chosen course will inflict on the U.S., the rest of the Atlantic world, and by extension the non–Western allies of this world. The net effect of this unceasing exercise in misrepresentation is to place a nation of 144 million people, and most of all its leader, behind a screen similar to a Japanese shoji: It is translucent, so one can see the movements of those on the other side, but there is no making out what they are doing.

They are reduced to shadows. The consequence of this induced blindness is easily legible in the dangerous shambles the policy cliques in Washington and most of the European capitals have made of their relations with Moscow since, I would say, the winter of 2007. It was in February of that year Putin gave his famously frank speech at the Munich Security Conference, wherein he attacked the West’s “almost uncontained hyper use of force — military force, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.” Too honest. It was inevitable that the shoji would immediately be put in place such that the man and all he did and said could thereafter be rendered illegible — grist for the propagandists. Last week the Russian leader spent two days in Pyongyang, his first visit to North Korea since he assumed the presidency two dozen years ago. Putin then proceeded to Hanoi for his fifth journey to the Republic of Vietnam.

Both visits involved nations with relations of long duration — histories dating to the decades when they stood on the same side, the anti-imperialist side, during the Cold War. These were consequential occasions of state, let there be no question. But there is simply no way to understand what Putin and his counterparts got done, and why, via the West’s corporate and state-supported media. To them Putin’s intent was all about overcoming the isolation Russia suffers except that it doesn’t, destabilizing East Asia, and — a curious phrase from The New York Times coverage — “leaving behind a redrawn map of risk in Asia.” I would ask where corporate journalists get this stuff, but the answer is perfectly clear when one considers the lockstep uniformity of the coverage: This is what reporters in Washington and correspondents abroad are fed by unnamed briefers from Langley, embassies in East Asia, and elsewhere in the national-security state’s sprawling propaganda apparatus.

Putin’s talks with Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang resulted in all sorts of agreements covering the economic, technology, trade, investment and cultural spheres. But the main event was the conclusion of a “comprehensive partnership agreement” — Putin’s description — that amounts to a mutual defense treaty. Curiously, the formal name of this document is the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty. Unclear why Putin omitted so significant a term, as a strategic partnership is a half-step shy of an alliance. Accords of this kind between Moscow and Pyongyang have a long history, true. But to mark this down as a reflexive Cold War revival, as Western media have done, is a misreading one must mark down as intentional. The immediate antecedent is the Treaty of Friendship Putin signed with Jong-un’s pop, Jong-il, in 2000, just as he, Putin, was replacing Boris Yeltsin in in the Kremlin.

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“..judges previously had to defer to agencies in cases where the law is ambiguous. Now, judges will substitute their own best interpretation of the law, instead of deferring to the agencies..”

• SCOTUS Overturns ‘Chevron Deference’ In Massive Blow To ‘Administrative State’ (ZH)

The Supreme Court has ruled to overturn the so-called ‘Chevron Deference’ dealing a huge blow to the so-called ‘administrative state’ that have enjoyed In an 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upended the 40-year administrative law precedent that gave agencies across the federal government leeway to interpret ambiguous laws through rulemaking. Conservatives and Republican policymakers have long been critical of the doctrine, saying it has contributed to the dramatic growth of government and gives unelected regulators far too much power to make policy by going beyond what Congress intended when it approved various laws. The authority of regulatory agencies has been increasingly questioned by the Supreme Court in recent years. Those on the other side say the Chevron doctrine empowers an activist federal government to serve the public interest in an increasingly complicated world without having to seek specific congressional authorization for everything that needs to be done.

As The Hill report, judges previously had to defer to agencies in cases where the law is ambiguous. Now, judges will substitute their own best interpretation of the law, instead of deferring to the agencies – effectively making it easier to overturn regulations that govern wide-ranging aspects of American life. This includes rules governing toxic chemicals, drugs and medicine, climate change, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and more. The move hands a major victory to conservative and anti-regulatory interests that have looked to eliminate the precedent as part of a broader attack on the growing size of the “administrative state.” The Biden administration defended the precedent before the high court. As Mark Joseph Stern writes on X: “Today’s ruling is a massive blow to the ‘administrative state’, the collection of federal agencies that enforce laws involving the environment, food and drug safety, workers’ rights, education, civil liberties, energy policy—the list is nearly endless.”

“The Supreme Court’s reversal of Chevron constitutes a major transfer of power from the executive branch to the judiciary, stripping federal agencies of significant discretion to interpret and enforce ambiguous regulations.” Chief Justice Roberts, writing the opinion of the court, argued Chevron “defies the command of” the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs federal administrative agencies. He said it “requires a court to ignore, not follow, ‘the reading the court would have reached had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA.'” Further, he said it “is misguided” because “agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”The liberals on the court are not happy: “In dissent, Justice Kagan says the conservative supermajority “disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” making “a laughingstock” of stare decisis and producing “large-scale disruption” throughout the entire government. She is both furious and terrified.”

As Stern concludes: “Hard to overstate the impact of this seismic shift.”
Simply put, a massive win for the constitution…

“Wow, this is a big deal for addressing overreaching regulation!” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2024

Read more …

“..in a 6-3 opinion which cut across the Supreme Court’s usual ideological lines, the court ruled that the law should be interpreted relatively narrowly – and used only against defendants who tampered with documents..”

• Supreme Court Casts Doubt On Hundreds Of Jan 6 Cases (BBC)

Federal prosecutors overreached when using an obstruction law to charge hundreds of January 6 rioters, the Supreme Court has ruled in an opinion that could also affect a case against Donald Trump. The justices ruled that obstruction charges must include proof that defendants tried to tamper with or destroy documents. More than 350 people have been charged with obstructing Congress’ business – the certification of the 2020 presidential election. The law that prosecutors used was passed in 2002, after the Enron scandal, to stop corporate misconduct. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act outlines criminal penalties for anyone who “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object”, and another clause includes anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding”.

Justice department prosecutors argued for a broad interpretation of the law to include those who broke into the Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an attempt to keep Trump in the White House. But in a 6-3 opinion which cut across the Supreme Court’s usual ideological lines, the court ruled that the law should be interpreted relatively narrowly – and used only against defendants who tampered with documents. The ruling has cheered supporters of Donald Trump. While the court introduced another wrinkle into the special prosecution of the former president – and the Supreme Court could rule in a separate case expected next week that he has immunity for his actions – it is unclear whether the decision will halt one of the charges against him.

“For Trump, I think there will be litigation,” said Aziz Huq, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “But the charges against him involve falsifying or altering ‘records, documents, or objects’. So I think it likely doesn’t undermine those charges.” In addition, Special Counsel Jack Smith has also charged Trump with other crimes in connection with his attempts to overturn the 2020 result: Conspiring to defraud the US and conspiring against the rights of citizens. Those charges will go ahead regardless of the outcome of the obstruction case. The special prosecutor faces an obvious deadline. If Trump wins the November election, he will be able to remove Mr Smith from his post and end the federal legal case.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was one of a number of laws used against those who stormed the Capitol in January 2021. About 25% of Capitol riot defendants were prosecuted under the law, and according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, all of those faced additional charges. “The vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on January 6 will not be affected by this decision,” Mr Garland said in a statement issued after the decision in which he also noted he was disappointed with the ruling. The case was brought to the Supreme Court by Joseph Fischer, a former police officer from Pennsylvania who attended Trump’s rally in Washington on 6 January 2021, then briefly went inside the Capitol. He was seen arguing with police on video before leaving the building.

Lower courts will now decide whether the obstruction charge against him can continue. However, Mr Fischer also faces trial on a number of other charges including civil disorder, disorderly conduct and assaulting, resisting or impeding a police officer. More than 1,400 people have been charged with crimes related to the riot. According to justice department figures, more than 500 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, including more than 130 who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to a police officer. And more than 1,300 people have been charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds. More than 100 of those have been charged with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon.

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As such, this court should conclude that the entire prosecutorial process against the applicant was tainted and must be dismissed as a matter of law.”

• Supreme Court Rejects Bannon Bid To Avoid Monday Prison Deadline (ZH)

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has until Monday to report to prison after the Supreme Court rejected his 11th hour bid to remain free while he pursues an appeal of his conviction for two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. US District Judge Carl Nichols had previously put Bannon’s sentence on hold as he pursued his appeal, saying that Bannon had presented a “substantial question of law or fact likely to result in reversal” of the conviction. That, however, was rejected by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in May – leaving him only the Supreme Court to help him avoid time behind bars. Bannon has argued that he was acting on the advice of counsel when he refused to comply with the subpoenas. He must report to prison on July 1.

As the Epoch Times notes further, Bannon through his lawyers asked the Supreme Court to intervene. In the application, lawyers said it would be unfair for Mr. Bannon to start serving his sentence before the full appeals court and justices consider overturning the recent appeal rejection. “If Mr. Bannon is denied release, he will be forced to serve his prison sentence before this court has a chance to consider a petition for a writ of certiorari, given the court’s upcoming summer recess,” the lawyers wrote. Department of Justice attorneys, on the other hand, urged the Supreme Court to reject the application. They said Mr. Bannon “cannot make the demanding showing necessary to override the normal requirement that a convicted defendant begin serving his sentence.”

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, told the court in a brief that the panel that subpoenaed Mr. Bannon produced flawed subpoenas because it failed to comply with House regulations, as it did not have a ranking member appointed by the Republican minority. “Notwithstanding the applicant’s indictment and sentencing, the select committee’s enforcement of the subpoena and the prosecution of Mr. Bannon for failing to participate in a deposition was factually and procedurally invalid,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote. “As such, this court should conclude that the entire prosecutorial process against the applicant was tainted and must be dismissed as a matter of law.” Peter Navarro, another former adviser to President Trump, is already serving a sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress after also declining to cooperate with subpoenas from the same committee.

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“..the United States court in Saipan yesterday conceded, and the judge found that there is no evidence that any harm has befallen any individual anywhere in the world as a result of Mr. Assange’s publications..”

• Assange Agreed to Destroy Unpublished Classified Material (Lauria)

The 23-page plea deal between Julian Assange and the United States government that freed Assange this week contains a provision that he agree to return or destroy all unpublished U.S. material still in WikiLeaks‘ possession. The agreement says on Page 29: “Before his plea is entered in Court, the Defendant shall take all action within his control to cause the return to the United States or the destruction of any such unpublished information in his possession, custody, or control, or that of WikiLeaks or any affiliate of WikiLeaks. The Defendant further agrees that, if the forgoing obligation requires him to instruct the editor(s) of WikiLeaks to destroy any such information or otherwise cause it to be destroyed, he shall provide the United States (or cause to be provided to the United States) a sworn affidavit confirming the instruction he provided and that, he will, in good faith, seek to facilitate compliance with that instruction prior to sentencing.”

Asked about it at a press conference in Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday, Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S. lawyer who negotiated the plea deal, dismissed the significance of the agreement to destroy the materials. He said: “You’d have to ask the United States government why they insisted on including that clause. The materials we are talking about are now more than a decade old. I don’t know to what extent any still existed or what possible value they might have, certainly no national security value. In fact, the United States court in Saipan yesterday conceded, and the judge found that there is no evidence that any harm has befallen any individual anywhere in the world as a result of Mr. Assange’s publications. That being said, they did insist that he issue an instruction to the editor of WikiLeaks to destroy any materials they might have that were not published and Julian has complied with that provision and issued that instruction.”

Having had most of this material for more than a decade, and the time to review its enormous archive of documents, it unlikely, but not certain, that what remained unpublished is of great significance to the public. This part of the plea deal had only been vaguely referred to in a handful of press reports leading to speculation that it could mean the deletion of parts or all of WikiLeaks already published material, which the agreement makes clear, remains safe.

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“He has mandated the use of experimental gene serums, which caused very serious damage, death and sterility, calling them ‘an act of love,’ in exchange for funding from pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic foundations. His total alignment with the Davos religion is scandalous”.

• Inquisition Redux at the Vatican (Karganovic)

The initiation by the Vatican of canonical proceedings against gadfly Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano marks a significant new development in the deepening crisis within the Roman Catholic church. Archbishop Vigano was recently summoned to answer accusations of committing three canonical offences: fomenting schism, questioning the legitimacy of the current Pope, and rejecting the second Vatican council of the Roman Catholic church which was held sixty years ago and whose controversial reforms have been agitating traditionalist Catholics ever since. It is a delicious irony which will not be lost upon the students of Vatican affairs that the church organ now prosecuting Vigano, the innocuous sounding Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, historically is the direct successor to the Holy Office, the very agency that used to direct the Inquisition.

The Archbishop has declined to present himself before his accusers at the initial hearing held on 20 June. He has also refused to dignify the proceedings with, as he put it, “a predetermined outcome,” by sending an advocate to plead his cause. Since retiring as apostolic nuncio in the United States in 2016, Vigano has become a powerful voice denouncing moral lapses in the ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy. With increasing stridency, he has been taking the Vatican to task for failure to adequately address its in-house scandals. Over time, the scope of Vigano’s public denunciations has continued to expand. Besides calling attention to the sordid moral atmosphere pervading the Roman Catholic church, Vigano has also been a persistent personal critic of current Pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio, specifically his failure to discipline the wrongdoers. Vigano’s contrarian stance concerning the Covid emergency enlisted him even more enemies.

Whilst Bergoglio publicly urged strict adherence to the Covid regime as practically a religious duty, Vigano used his bully pulpit to massively disseminate evidence to the contrary, echoing assertions by Prof. M. Chossudovsky that the “official ‘corona narrative’ is predicated on a ‘Big Lie’ endorsed by corrupt politicians”. Does Vigano have a case to answer with regard to the Roman Curia’s vaguely formulated accusations against him? We should perhaps delay our response to that question until the trial, when presumably the evidence in support of the Vatican’s charges shall be made public. There is little doubt, however, that Vigano and those who adhere to the traditional teaching of the Roman Catholic faith do have a coherent case for the current Pope and his entourage to answer. Without mincing words, in his response to the Curia’s indictment Vigano has charged that it is the current pontiff who in his preaching and actions appears to be guided by quite another doctrine:

“Globalism calls for ethnic substitution: Bergoglio (Pope Francis) promotes uncontrolled immigration and calls for the integration of cultures and religions. Globalism supports LGBTQ+ ideology: Bergoglio authorizes the blessing of same-sex couples and imposes on the faithful the acceptance of homosexualism, while covering up the scandals of his protégés and promoting them to the highest positions of responsibility. Globalism imposes the green agenda: Bergoglio worships the idol of the Pachamama, writes delirious encyclicals about the environment, supports the Agenda 2030, and attacks those who question the theory of man-made global warming. He goes beyond his role in matters that strictly pertain to science, but always and only in one direction: a direction that is diametrically opposed to what the Church has always taught. He has mandated the use of experimental gene serums, which caused very serious damage, death and sterility, calling them ‘an act of love,’ in exchange for funding from pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic foundations. His total alignment with the Davos religion is scandalous”.

Compared to the gravity of those objections, the best indictment that the Curia was able to muster against Vigano does appear rather contrived and frivolous.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Reagan

 

 

Garland

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle April 23 2023

Apr 232023
 
 April 23, 2023  Posted by at 9:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  32 Responses »


Banksy

 

• Western ‘Experts’ Failed To Destroy Russia’s Economy (Strelnikov)
• G7 Allies Consider Outright Ban Of All Trade With Russia (ZH)
• Feds Have No Data on How Regulations Reduce Emissions: Audit (ET)
• German Tanks Pose Logistical Problems For Ukraine – Foreign Policy (RT)
• Berlin To Expel Russian Diplomats En Masse, Moscow To Mirror That Decision (TASS)
• Vatican Refuses To Commit ‘Grave Sin’ – Media (RT)
• Trump Lays Out Timeline To End Ukraine Conflict (RT)
• Biden Impeachment? (ZH)
• Hunter Biden’s Lawyers To Meet With Feds – CNN (RT)
• Bragg Caved. Jim Jordan Won (ET)
• Airman’s Leaks Started Just 48 Hours After Russia Invaded Ukraine (ZH)
• China Questions Sovereignty Of Ex-Soviet States (RT)
• Macron Is ‘Bunkered,’ Le Pen Says (RT)
• French Cops Confiscate Cookware (RT)
• French Police Cleared To Use Drones For Crowd Monitoring (R.)
• US Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Arrest (RT)

 

 

 

 

Funeral director
https://twitter.com/i/status/1649745506187239424

 

 

 

 

Beck

 

 

RFK jr

 

 

Makis

 

 

 

 

Very good from Kirill Strelnikov at RIA Novosti

“..a petrol station with matryoshka dolls couldn’t possibly stand up to the combined economic might of the enlightened West..”

It’s all about faulty modelling. A bunch of economists looking at nominal GDP only.

• Western ‘Experts’ Failed To Destroy Russia’s Economy (Strelnikov)

As is often the case in the Western media, the most embarrassing facts are only covered when they can no longer be hidden, but even then unpleasant admissions are made with numerous caveats and excuses. This week, the International Monetary Fund published a report, which drew the long overdue conclusion that the economic hegemony of the leading Western countries, represented by the G7, is shrinking as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) surge. Its conclusions were, of course, ‘polished’ by all the leading Western media outlets, but one thing became clear: Any triumphant Western predictions about the BRICS in general, and Russia in particular, can be safely tossed into the rubbish bin. In 2007, Western experts published a reassuring report stating that the total contribution of the BRICS to the world economy would not be comparable to that of the G7 until 2032.

But once again Western economic projections have failed, and the fact is that the BRICS countries caught up with the G7 in terms of their contribution to world economic growth as early as 2020, and at the moment the figures, even creatively manipulated by pundits, stubbornly show that by 2028 the BRICS will account for at least 35% (some sources say as much as 40%) of world GDP (compared with 27.8% for the G7). Western analysts, who are in fact echoing the wishes of the global deep state, have fallen into a similar trap in their assessment of Russia’s prospects and impact on the global economy. As we recall, since the beginning of last year, more sanctions have been imposed on Russia than on any other country in history, and the main talking heads in the West have reported with anticipation that the Russian economy will soon be reduced to dust.

Such was their confidence (after all, a petrol station with matryoshka dolls couldn’t possibly stand up to the combined economic might of the enlightened West) that analysts didn’t even bother with figures. The prediction was simple: Russia would be quickly and irrevocably destroyed – first its economy and then its social cohesion. A common trope for a number of years has been a comparison between the economies of Russia and Italy, with spurious claims that the economy of the world’s largest country is no bigger than that of the home of pizza and pasta, all based on simplistic measurements which fail to take into account currency differences, and overvalue the debt-fueled services sector. But something went wrong, and to the astonishment of the prognosticators, not only did Russia not kneel, it did not even bend to their will. The country’s position as a global energy superpower has been reaffirmed, and the title of global food superpower has been added. Other such titles will come in time. The forecasters began to compare their calculations and came to the conclusion that they had been counting wrongly.

As a result, a respected US publication, The National Interest, has published an ashen article whose main conclusion is that the comparison of the economies of Russia and Italy betrays the blatant incompetence of Western experts. In short, the roots of the comparison lie in the methodology of comparing economies by nominal GDP – the total value of all goods and services produced or sold in a country over a given period. Indeed, according to the World Bank, Russia’s nominal GDP in 2013 was about $2.29 trillion and Italy’s was about $2.14 trillion. But according to the authors of the article, the approach itself was fundamentally flawed: neither the exchange rate nor purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted for living standards and labour productivity, per capita wealth and, most importantly, the availability of crucial material resources and goods, as opposed to nice “paper” assets like the value of global brands, copyrights and so on, were taken into account in the calculations.

With this correction alone, Russia’s real GDP is quite comparable to that of Germany (one of the ten most economically developed countries in the world): $4.81 trillion for Russia versus $4.85 trillion for Germany in 2021. But even such sophisticated calculations do not reflect the real situation. In times of crisis, the production of physical goods comes first, and here the Russian economy is not only stronger than the German economy, but more than twice as strong as France. Add to this Russia’s key role in supplying the world with energy, vital natural resources and food (not to mention its impact on global security) and we don’t need the conclusions of the world’s smartest analysts to understand our country’s real place in the world. Not so long ago, the IMF forecast 0.3% economic growth for Russia in 2023. Perhaps we should thank the “experts” and send this forecast to the same place as the others. Meanwhile, it’s better that we win in the real world, not on paper.

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Trying to sink Europe…

• G7 Allies Consider Outright Ban Of All Trade With Russia (ZH)

Washington is in discussion with several Western partners about outright ending trade with Russia. The debate is occurring as the US-led economic war on Russia has failed to stop Moscow’s war machine in Ukraine. According to Bloomberg News, members of the Group of 7 (G7) are considering banning exports to Russia. The debate is occurring among member states – the US, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the European Union – ahead of an international summit in May. Members of the G7 have maintained significant exports to Russia since Washington declared it would isolate Moscow using sanctions. According to Trade Data Monitor, $66 billion in goods have flowed to Russia from member states. The proposed ban will essentially switch the way Washington outlaws trade with Russia.

Currently, the US and its allies are blacklisting Russian products, companies and individuals. If adopted, the export ban will prohibit all trade with Moscow that is not explicitly exempted from Western sanctions. The Miami Herald reports that food and medicine will likely be on the exemption list. However, international aid organizations argue that exemptions are ineffective and sanctions largely stomp out the trade of civilian goods. The proposed export ban faces serious obstacles to overcome before the May G7 summit. All EU member states will have to agree to the ban for the bloc to sign on. Additionally, the export ban could threaten the grain export deal that Turkey and the UN brokered with Russia and Ukraine last year. According to the EU, since the agreement was implemented, 23 million tonnes of food products have left Kiev’s Black Sea ports.

After Russia invaded Ukraine 14 months ago, the White House unleashed a series of sanctions targeting Moscow that it believed was acting as an economic nuclear weapon. While the Joe Biden administration hoped that the entire globe would join in on the Kremlin’s isolation, after a year, only close Western partners have followed Washington’s lead. This has allowed Moscow to weather the West’s sanctions by turning to other trading partners – including China and India.

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More disaster modelling. Canada commits $200 billion to an empty model.

• Feds Have No Data on How Regulations Reduce Emissions: Audit (ET)

The federal government does not know the extent that regulations are reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, despite committing $200 billion towards the issue. An April 20 report released by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Jerry DeMarco, indicates that Environment and Climate Change Canada does not attribute emission results to specific regulations. The federal department does not measure, or report on, the contributions of each regulation toward meeting the set target for 2030. An audit by the commissioner concluded that Environment Canada “used modelling approaches to estimate greenhouse gas emission reductions.” The federal government does not know if regulations to limit methane emissions are achieving their target, said the report. The audit found that large sources of methane emissions were unaccounted for in inventories and not covered by any existing regulations.

The audit considered five regulations with the stated intent to reduce emissions from vehicles on the road, power plants, and oil and gas production. DeMarco concluded, “Without comprehensive impact information, the federal government does not know whether it is using the right tools to sufficiently reduce emissions to meet its target.” The audit suggested some regulations, targeted at reducing emissions from power generation, achieved the targeted level, while regulations intended to reduce vehicle emissions failed to meet their target. “Although greenhouse gas emissions from passenger cars decreased, this was offset by even larger increases in emissions for light trucks and heavy-duty vehicles, such as school and transit buses and freight, delivery, garbage, and dump trucks,” said the report.

The audit also said the government took “too long to develop regulations given the urgency of the climate crisis.” The report was critical that it took more than five years to develop the Clean Fuel Regulations, which was double the initial plan. The Liberals first promised to plant 2 billion trees by 2031 on the campaign trail in 2019, and said the country would cut emissions from 42 to 45 percent lower than 2005 levels. The country only cut 8.4 percent of emissions between 2005 and 2021, according to the most recent national greenhouse gas inventory report.

The audit found the country isn’t on track to plant even one-tenth of the promised trees by the deadline, despite a $3.2 billion allocation in the 2020 fall economic statement. “There is no solution to climate change and terrestrial biodiversity loss that does not include forests,” DeMarco’s report said. “It is unlikely that the two billion trees program will meet its objectives unless significant changes are made.” On the emissions front, the audit indicates the federal government committed to eliminating 2 million tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions yearly, by 2030. Now the Liberal government said it will not start reducing emissions until 2031, at the earliest.

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Most of these tanks will never be in action.

• German Tanks Pose Logistical Problems For Ukraine – Foreign Policy (RT)

Ukraine will likely have to procure a range of different munitions, rather than a single type, for German-made Leopard tanks, Foreign Policy has reported. In a report on Thursday, the media outlet stated that the vehicles provided to Kiev by eight countries are not uniform in terms of the shells they fire. The article also highlights the supposed inadequacy of air defences that have already been supplied. Foreign Policy wrote that the “Leopard tanks arriving from eight different countries fire different rounds, meaning that Ukrainians can’t buy munitions for their newly tricked-out ground forces in bulk.” As for Abrams tanks which the US has pledged to donate, these will likely take months to actually arrive on the battlefield, the outlet noted.

According to the article, Ukraine is also facing severe shortages of modern air defense systems. The country reportedly has enough to cover just a few cities. To make matters worse, the Hawk missile systems provided by Washington have been shipped without radars, Foreign Policy claimed. The setbacks are supposedly holding up Kiev’s planned spring counteroffensive, and causing discontent among the Ukrainian leadership. The media outlet cited President Vladimir Zelensky’s calls on the West to step up its military support for Ukraine late last month. Echoing that sentiment, Aleksey Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, lamented to the Associated Press earlier this week that some of Ukraine’s backers “promise one thing and do a completely different one.” The official also made it clear that “nobody will start unprepared,” referring to the planned counteroffensive.

A Ukrainian MP quoted by Foreign Policy claimed that the push had originally been planned for April, but had to be postponed indefinitely due to the lack of weapons necessary to pull it off. On Friday, the New York Times published a report saying that as of late February Kiev had only 200 of the 253 tanks that US military officials deemed sufficient for a successful counteroffensive. The paper, citing leaked Pentagon documents, noted that the majority of hardware was of Soviet design. The NYT also claimed that the US and its allies were having difficulty keeping up with Ukraine’s demand for artillery shells.

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Yeah, don’t let’s talk.

• Berlin To Expel Russian Diplomats En Masse, Moscow To Mirror That Decision (TASS)

The German authorities have decided to massively expel Russian diplomats, thus Berlin is pursuing a course to destroy the entire range of Russia-Germany relations, the Russian Foreign Ministry told TASS on Saturday. “The authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany have decided on another mass expulsion of members of the Russian diplomatic missions in Germany. We strongly condemn these actions of Berlin, which continues to demonstratively destroy the entire range of Russia-Germany relations, including in their diplomatic dimension,” the ministry pointed out. The diplomats promised to give a mirror response to Berlin’s decision.

“As a response to Berlin’s hostile actions, the Russian side has decided to mirror the decision and expel German diplomats from Russia, as well as to significantly limit the maximum number of employees of German diplomatic missions in our country. On April 5, 2023, the Russian Foreign Ministry officially notified German Ambassador to Russia Geza Andreas von Geyr of this decision,” the diplomats said. They also pointed out that Berlin, in violation of its assurances, has put the media on notice of another mass expulsion of Russian diplomatic staff. “It is indicative that the German side, despite its repeated assurances of unwillingness to make the story public, violated them by making representatives of the media regularly used to organize ‘controlled leaks and information’ issues aware of its plot,” the ministry said.

On March 25, the Focus media outlet said, citing sources in the foreign ministry, that German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock planned to declare more than 30 accredited Russian diplomats personae non gratae. According to the Focus, German security agencies claim that these diplomats use their diplomatic status to illegally obtain political, economic, military, and scientific information for subsequent use in acts of sabotage and dissemination of disinformation. Commenting on these reports, a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Russia would give a tough response to such steps.

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Conveniently hiding behind papal secrecy.

• Vatican Refuses To Commit ‘Grave Sin’ – Media (RT)

A representative of the Vatican has said in a court filing that it would be a “grave sin” for the church to be forced to disclose communications between an archbishop and a cardinal in a UK trial related to a disputed real estate deal, according to a report by Bloomberg. “The violation of the pontifical secret is deemed a grave sin,”Carlos Ferando Diaz Paniagua, a Roman Catholic priest and lawyer, declared in documents filed with a London court in March. The pontifical secret, also referred to as papal secrecy, refers to an oath taken by members of the church designed to protect the distribution of sensitive information. It stands, Diaz Paniagua added to the court, “regardless of any grave or urgent considerations or the need to protect the common good.”

The legal request for various emails and text messages stems from a 2018 claim by the Vatican that it was defrauded by financier Raffaele Mincione and his companies in the $383 million sale of a former Harrods warehouse in London’s high-end Chelsea district. Ten people – including an Italian cardinal – have been accused by Vatican prosecutors in relation to various fraud and embezzlement charges amid allegations that the property had been sold at an inflated price. The Vatican has claimed it could lose as much as $186 million in its purchase of the site, which was intended to be developed into luxury apartments, and that it was improperly advised throughout the proceedings. Mincione, who is a defendant in the Vatican case, has in turn sued the church in the aforementioned London civil trial. He claims that his reputation has been damaged by the Vatican’s accusations against him.

In 2020, he petitioned the London court for a declaration that he had acted in good faith throughout his role in the real estate deal – a ruling his legal team believes would assist him in the separate trial brought by the Vatican. As part of the civil case, Mincione’s lawyers sought a trove of digital communications between high-ranking church officials Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra. Diaz Paniagua claimed in response that emails and text messages between the pair are irrelevant to the case, while the Vatican has said messages protected by pontifical secret are akin to state secrets Lawyers representing Mincione have declined to comment. The Vatican has until April 28 to decide if it intends to maintain pontifical secret as its reason for refusal to comply with a court request.

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“..you don’t need bullets, you don’t need tanks, you don’t need weapons of any kind, you just need some common sense.”

• Trump Lays Out Timeline To End Ukraine Conflict (RT)

Former US president Donald Trump has promised to put a swift end to the bloodshed in Ukraine should he be elected again in 2024. The Republican also trashed the incumbent Joe Biden’s foreign policy, claiming it has made the world a more dangerous place. Speaking to his supporters in Fort Myers, Florida, on Friday, Trump said: “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after we win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I’ll get it settled very quickly.” He explained that he “know[s] both” Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky. Trump, who served as president from 2017 until 2021, claimed that he “got along” with the Russian head of state, and that Putin would not have launched his military campaign against Ukraine had Trump been in office.

“It’s still pretty easy for me to do,” the Republican insisted, referring to ending the conflict that has gone on for more than a year. He went on to allege that other countries’ leaders have lost respect for the US under Biden’s leadership because of his allegedly poor handling of America’s foreign policy. To regain it, Trump argued, “you don’t need bullets, you don’t need tanks, you don’t need weapons of any kind, you just need some common sense.” The former US president described himself as the “only candidate” who could promise to prevent the US from getting involved in World War III. If “these incompetent people” remain in office, however, there “will be a war like no other” with belligerent parties using nuclear weapons, Trump warned.

Last month, the Republican hopeful publicly asserted on at least two occasions that it would take him 24 hours to get Russia and Ukraine to end the fighting and negotiate if he were to be reelected. Talks between Kiev and Moscow were suspended last April by the Ukrainian leadership. Kiev accused the retreating Russian military of committing atrocities in several Kiev suburbs, a claim Moscow has denied.In October of last year, President Zelensky signed a decree, ruling out talks with his Russian counterpart. That order was given after Russia absorbed four Ukrainian regions following referendums. The Kremlin maintains that it is open to peace negotiations in principle as long as Kiev relinquishes its claim to the territories and agrees to Russia’s terms. Ukraine, in turn, says it is determined to resolve the issue by winning the conflict on the battlefield.

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“I cannot imagine how the Justice Department allowed this to go on, if not for corruption at the highest level. And they are in some serious trouble right now. I think they know it..”

• Biden Impeachment? (ZH)

A Republican member of the House Oversight Committee thinks a flurry of recent corruption scandals could lead to the impeachment of President Joe Biden. Between the revelation that the ‘Hunter laptop letter hoax’ signed by 51 current and former intelligence officials was created at the best of Antony Blinken during the 2020 US election, the obvious implications of CCP leverage over the Biden family, and information presented by an IRS whistleblower regarding the Hunter Biden probe, things may get interesting according to Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN). When asked about China’s influence over the Biden family, Burchett told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Friday: “We know of at least eight Biden family members who have profited from dealings overseas,” adding “I think if you delve into it deep enough, there’s prostitution rings involved in this, human trafficking has been rumored to be part of some of this. These so-called companies that have allowed the Biden family to profit. It is gross, and it is disgusting.”

“If I was those 51 people, I’d be lawyering up right now because they’re going to be asked in public at some point what they knew and if they knew that all this other stuff was going on, because it is very damning Maria. This is just the very tip of the iceberg,” he continued. “This very brave IRS agent coming forward, I think, will just start it,” Burchett said, referring to the senior agent in charge of the Hunter Biden investigation who came forward earlier this week in a letter to lawmakers, accusing the DOJ of ‘mishandling’ the Hunter Biden case, and that his client had information that would contradict sworn testimony from a senior political appointee. When asked if that might lead to an impeachment, Burchett said: “If this coverup shows what’s going on, what we assume is going on, and that the 51 folks were basically lied to and showed false documentation, how can you not…”

“The lawyer for the whistleblower joined “Special Report with Bret Baier” Thursday night claiming his client is “not a political person” and does not have a “political agenda,” but does have documents to support his allegations that he hopes to bring to both congressional Democrats and Republicans. “If you delve into it deep enough, there’s prostitution rings involved in this. Human trafficking has been rumored to be a part of some of these so-called companies that have allowed the Biden family to profit. It is gross and it is disgusting about what has been allowed to go on,” Burchett said.” -Fox News “I cannot imagine how the Justice Department allowed this to go on, if not for corruption at the highest level. And they are in some serious trouble right now. I think they know it,” Burchett continued.

Read more …

“..failure to file taxes, felony tax evasion and falsely stating on a federal form for a gun purchase..”

That is all.

• Hunter Biden’s Lawyers To Meet With Feds – CNN (RT)

Lawyers representing Hunter Biden have reportedly set up a meeting with US Department of Justice (DOJ) officials to discuss the status of a criminal investigation into President Joe Biden’s son. The meeting will take place next week and include a senior DOJ official, as well as US Attorney David Weiss, the Delaware prosecutor who has led the probe on Hunter Biden since 2018, CNN reported on Friday, citing unidentified sources familiar with the matter. Fox News, which confirmed the report, said Biden’s lawyers requested the meeting weeks ago, and it’s unrelated to allegations made this week about the investigation by an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower.

CNN said prosecutors have narrowed the scope of the probe to include possible charges for failure to file taxes, felony tax evasion and falsely stating on a federal form for a gun purchase that he had not used illegal drugs. Weiss is reportedly also considering related charges involving money laundering and unregistered foreign lobbying. The tax case relates at least partly to Biden’s income from ventures in Ukraine and China. The IRS whistleblower, who has not been identified and has sought permission to give testimony to Congress, supervised the agency’s investigation into the younger Biden’s alleged tax violations. The whistleblower reportedly claims that the probe has been undermined by “political considerations” and that Attorney General Merrick Garland misled Congress about how the case is being handled.

There is no indication that the scheduling of next week’s DOJ meeting with Biden’s lawyer suggests that prosecutors are prepared to make a decision soon on whether to file charges, Fox said, citing a source. There is “growing frustration” in the FBI because the bulk of the investigative work concerning the Biden allegations was completed last year, NBC News reported on Thursday. The IRS finished its part of the investigation more than a year ago, the report adds. A bombshell New York Post report on alleged foreign influence-peddling by the Biden family surfaced in October 2020, just three weeks before the presidential election. The report was based on correspondence contained on a laptop computer that Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop.

Former CIA Director Mike Morell recently admitted in congressional testimony that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign played a role in the creation of an open letter – signed by 51 former intelligence officials – claiming that the Hunter Biden allegations had “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Morell, who acknowledged that he wanted to help Joe Biden get elected, said the letter was prompted by Biden campaign staffer Antony Blinken, now US secretary of state. Media outlets and the Biden campaign used the letter to discredit the Post report, which was censored by Facebook based on an FBI misinformation warning.

Read more …

“..Mr. Pomerantz’s deposition will go forward on May 12, and we look forward to his appearance,”

• Bragg Caved. Jim Jordan Won (ET)

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has dropped his effort to quash a congressional subpoena to a former prosecutor who worked in his office, a congressional aide told The Epoch Times in a statement on Friday. “This evening, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office withdrew its appeal in Bragg v. Jordan. Mr. Pomerantz’s deposition will go forward on May 12, and we look forward to his appearance,” Russel Dye, spokesperson for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to The Epoch Times in a statement. “Bragg caved. Jim Jordan won,” the House Judiciary Committee wrote in a statement on Twitter Friday.

The development wrapped up a legal clash between Bragg and House Judiciary Republicans, whereby Bragg had attempted to stop the lawmakers from requesting testimony from Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who investigated former President Donald Trump’s finances. Pomerantz left Bragg’s office in February 2022 in protest of Bragg’s initial unwillingness to bring an indictment against Trump. A grand jury, encouraged by Bragg, brought an indictment against Trump in late March, prompting Jordan to initiate a probe into what he calls a “politically motivated” prosecution against a former president. Jordan subpoenaed Pomerantz to seek his testimony as a part of that probe.

In response, Bragg sued the House Judiciary Committee and Pomerantz to prevent Pomerantz from testifying. That lawsuit led to a hearing on Wednesday in the Southern District Court of New York, and a subsequent decision by District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, ordered that the congressional panel has the authority to become involved in the investigation of Trump and declined Bragg’s request for a court injunction on the congressional subpoena.

Read more …

Went on for well over a year…

• Airman’s Leaks Started Just 48 Hours After Russia Invaded Ukraine (ZH)

The Pentagon’s humiliation just grew deeper, as it turns out National Guard Airman Jack Teixeira’s leaks of classified documents started far earlier than has previously been reported. Tipped off about a second, 600-member Discord chat group where Teixeira also posted, the New York Times found the Massachusetts Air National Guard information technology specialist started sharing information about the war in Ukraine within 48 hours of Russia’s February 2022 invasion. In contrast to the previously reported chat group, this one was far larger and was publicly listed on a YouTube channel. This development makes the intelligence community’s failure to discover the posts all the more embarrassing: The document used to criminally charge Teixeira says he started posting in December 2022, but it turns out his stream of leaks spanned 13 months.

The Times matched Teixeira to the account in the newly-publicized chat room by a variety of means, including the user name, photos he posted that match known photos of his family home’s interior, a reference to his birthday, and, not least, the user’s declaration that he worked in an Air Force intelligence unit. The posts reviewed by the Times were detailed descriptions of classified documents, with the user believed to have also posted photos of documents that have since been deleted. Teixeira jumped into leak mode just two days after the Russian invasion, posting, “Saw a pentagon report saying that 1/3rd of the force is being used to invade.” When others in the chat room questioned his information, he wrote, “I have a little more than open source info. Perks of being in a USAF intel unit.”

In a March 27, 2022 post in which he said he was citing “an NSA site,” Teixeira told the group Russian forces were about to pull back from Kiev: “Some ‘big’ news. There may be a planned withdrawal of the troops west of Kiev, as in all of them.” Two days later, Russia announced it was doing just that. “The job I have lets me get privilege’s above most intel guys,” he boasted with imperfect punctuation. When another chat participant cautioned him not to abuse those privileges, Teixeira fittingly replied, “Too late.”

Read more …

“There are enduring problems, aren’t there, about their conflict, their problem? It’s so easy to say in one word. If you have any problems, you can talk about it together.”

• China Questions Sovereignty Of Ex-Soviet States (RT)

China’s ambassador to France has called into question the sovereignty of Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, suggesting that their hazy status under international law makes it difficult to resolve conflicts over disputed territories such as Crimea. “Even these countries of the former Soviet Union don’t have effective status in international law because there is no international agreement to make their status as a sovereign country concrete,” Ambassador Lu Shaye said on Saturday in an interview with French broadcaster LCI. Asked by Swiss journalist Darius Rochebin whether Crimea is Ukrainian territory, Lu said, “It depends on how you perceive the problem . . . . It’s not that simple.” Rochebin tried to correct his guest, saying, “Sorry, according to international law, you know it’s Ukraine. Under international law, you can argue it, you can dispute it, but this is Ukraine.”

Lu replied, “Crimea was originally part of Russia, wasn’t it? It was [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev who gave Crimea to Ukraine in the Soviet Union.” Pressed again on the peninsula’s status, the Chinese diplomat said, “Now, we must not quarrel about this kind of problem again. Now, the most urgent thing is to stop, to cease fire, to stop.” Chinese officials have tried to maintain a neutral stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, resisting pressure from the US and other Western powers to join in condemning Moscow and imposing sanctions. Beijing, which proposed a 12-point peace plan in February, has emphasized the need to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine and work toward a diplomatic solution that accounts for the security concerns of all parties involved.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has vowed to recapture all of his country’s territory, including Crimea – a goal that most of Kiev’s Western backers don’t see as realistic. Residents of the peninsula voted overwhelmingly for Crimea to become part of Russia in 2014, following a US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. Asked about the importance of territorial integrity from Kiev’s point of view, Lu again pointed to the historical complexity of the issue, saying, “There are enduring problems, aren’t there, about their conflict, their problem? It’s so easy to say in one word. If you have any problems, you can talk about it together.”

Read more …

“France’s next presidential election is scheduled for 2027, when Macron won’t be able to run again because of term limits.”

• Macron Is ‘Bunkered,’ Le Pen Says (RT)

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to push through pension reforms – in defiance of public opinion on the issue – has created a “total rupture” between the French president and his country’s people, opposition party leader Marine Le Pen has claimed. “The problem is that Emmanuel Macron is completely bunkered,” Le Pen said on Saturday in an interview with France’s BFM TV. “He can no longer leave the Elysée [presidential palace] without arousing the ire of a people he refuses to listen to and whose will he refuses to respect.” Macron was booed by crowds in eastern France on Wednesday, when he made his first public appearances since he signed into law an unpopular pension law earlier this month. Union workers claimed credit for cutting off the electricity at a woodworking factory in Muttersholtz just before the president arrived, leaving him partially in the dark during his visit.

The pension reforms, which included raising France’s retirement age to 64 from 62, sparked mass protests and civil unrest across the country. “He generated anger, and it is he who is at the origin of the disorder, the chaos,” Le Pen said. “I believe that today, there is a total rupture between Emmanuel Macron and the French people.” Le Pen accused the president of refusing to listen to public outcry on the pension law, reflecting a “failing democracy.” She added, “When the people say no, it’s no. We will have to tell him that democracy is doing what we said we were going to do. Democracy is respecting the will of the people.”

An Ifop Group poll released on Wednesday showed that Le Pen has overtaken Macron in public popularity. Asked which of the two personalities they prefer, respondents favored Le Pen over the president by a 47%-42% margin. Macron defeated Le Pen in last year’s presidential election by more than 17 percentage points. He beat her even more handily in 2017, winning 66.1% of the votes. France’s next presidential election is scheduled for 2027, when Macron won’t be able to run again because of term limits. Le Pen, leader of France’s National Rally party, plans to run for president for the fourth time. Even before Macron signed the pension bill last week, a poll showed that he would lose to Le Pen by a 55%-45% margin if they were to face off again.

Read more …

Other words for pots and pans… “..a regulation banning “portable sound devices”.. “..the brand-new edict forbidding “entertainment devices.“.. “any sound device that is portable or emanating from a vehicle that has not been duly authorized..”

• French Cops Confiscate Cookware (RT)

French police in the village of Ganges confiscated saucepans and other metallic cookware from protesters on Thursday after hurriedly adopting a regulation banning “portable sound devices” ahead of a visit from President Emmanuel Macron. The French leader is currently touring the nation to defend his unpopular pension reforms. Video posted to social media shows police officers opening backpacks and ordering protesters to ditch their cookware. When one complains such restrictions are illegal, the officer retrieves a piece of paper from his car, presumably bearing the brand-new edict forbidding “entertainment devices.” Demonstrators were also reportedly forbidden from bringing small flutes anywhere near the school where Macron was to speak.

The Herault prefecture rushed to impose the ban on “any sound device that is portable or emanating from a vehicle that has not been duly authorized” within the security perimeter of the areas to be visited by Macron just hours before his visit on Thursday, hoping to protect the head of state from the chorus of metallic banging he faced during his first event in Alsace. While authorities insisted the snap edict was a “common police measure” meant to target amplifiers and speakers, experts questioned the legality of confiscating pots and pans, noting that the hastily adopted decree banned the use of the devices, not their possession. Macron’s political opponents seized on the pan ban’s overreach. “Is it possible to get out of a democratic crisis by banning saucepans?” Green Party MP Sandrine Rousseau asked. Communist Party spokesman Ian Brossat said he was “impatiently awaiting the bill which will prohibit the sale of saucepans.”

Asked whether he would face the demonstrators, Macron responded that he would do so only “if people are ready to talk.” “Where I’m from, eggs and pans, these are for cooking,” the president quipped. Macron later attempted to further marginalize the protesters, declaring, “it is not saucepans that will move France forward.” “The person who is preventing France from moving forward is [Macron],” Chloe Bourguignon, the secretary general of regional union UNSA Grand-Est, told FranceInfo. “It shows great contempt to say such a thing, particularly after all the messages of provocation that he has sent in the last few weeks.” After the pension reform package became law this week, Macron ordered his government to “restore peace” over the next 100 days, vowing not to back down on raising the retirement age by two years even though the legislation is opposed by more than two-thirds of the French population.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1649824727542779987

Read more …

Get their pots and pans and bring out the high tech…

• French Police Cleared To Use Drones For Crowd Monitoring (R.)

French police is allowed from Friday to use drones equipped with cameras for a wide range of tasks including crowd monitoring and border control, following the publication of a decree in the Official Journal on Thursday.
This comes just over a year before the Paris 2024 Olympics and at a time when opposition to President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform has triggered huge protests that at times turned violent. The decree allows police, customs or military to use drones to prevent attacks on people or property, ensure the security of gatherings in public places as well as maintain or restore public order when these gatherings are likely to severely disrupt public order.


The drones can also be used for the prevention of terrorist acts, the regulation of transport flows, border surveillance, and rescuing people, the decree said. The decree details and implements in practice a security law voted by parliament last year. France’s CNIL data privacy watchdog had in March demanded that a detailed policy of use be published, including on the information of the public concerned by the use of drones.

Read more …

Taibbi and Elon Musk have had some sort of falling-out I see.

Taibbi: “You people are shockingly dishonest. This is referencing my refusal to leave Substack and move to Twitter subscriptions. The full quote is: “This whole business of me maybe moving to Twitter or using this new subscription service – I was trying to protect Elon in this situation… I was trying to communicate this to him: the Twitter Files wouldn’t be taken seriously if there was even a theoretical financial relationship between the two of us.”

• US Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Arrest (RT)

Democratic congresswoman Stacey Plaskett has threatened Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi with prosecution for perjury, journalist Lee Fang revealed on Thursday. Plaskett reportedly accused the independent journalist of deliberately misrepresenting the partnership between the social media giant and various US government agencies during his testimony before Congress last month. Fang, who obtained and published a copy of the letter from the Virgin Islands representative, pointed out that Plaskett based her allegations largely on claims made by MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan during a recent confrontational interview between Hassan and Taibbi – accusations Fang had already debunked in a recent piece published on his Substack blog.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1649833430228631553

Plaskett’s claim that Taibbi had deliberately mixed up CISA (the Homeland Security subsidiary, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) and CIS (the Center for Internet Security) in order to falsely depict an unconstitutionally cozy relationship between the Department of Homeland Security and Twitter was based on a single tweet, which Taibbi had deleted upon realizing his error and which was unrelated to his March 9 testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. As Taibbi pointed out to GrayZone journalist Aaron Maté on Friday, that comment referred to just one of many well-documented connections between DHS, its contractors (like CIS and the Election Integrity Partnership), and Twitter, and the Twitter Files ultimately revealed the platform was working with both CIS and CISA in the same manner.


Plaskett, who denounced Taibbi as a “so-called journalist” during the subcommittee hearing and accused him of posing a threat to people who disagreed with him, rounded out her letter with seven questions, demanding answers by this past Friday on the penalty of prosecution for perjury, which carries a five-year prison sentence. However, Taibbi claimed he did not even receive the message until the deadline had already arrived. Analyzing the document, Fang revealed it was co-written by staffers for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler. Taibbi was the first journalist hand-picked by Twitter CEO Elon Musk to report on internal communications confirming the depth of the collusion between a dozen US government agencies and the major social media platforms to squelch dissent and promote narratives desirable to Washington. While he was in Washington testifying before Congress, a tax agent visited his home, leaving a note in what Republican lawmakers have denounced as an intimidation tactic from their political foes.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Macleod

 

 

 

 

Daly

 

 


Photographer Axel Bocker took a glorious damselfly close-up in Germany and earned a spot as a finalist in the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

 

 

 

 

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Galileo vs the Vatican

Dec 182022
 
 December 18, 2022  Posted by at 12:25 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  20 Responses »


Edgar Degas In front of the mirror 1889

 

 

This piece came to me in an unusual way. A British friend sent it, after his wife sent it to him. He said: “Well written piece! Pulled from Jean‘s friend on Facebook!”. All I really know is the author’s name is Janet Daley, and she’s in all likelihood British. I like how she points out the correlation between what the church allowed people to think and know and express in the Middle Ages+, and what we are allowed by government and media and industry to think and know and express today.

And then makes the link between the past 3 years of covid info, and climate change “science”. Going forward, you will find out how much Fauci declaring himself “The Science” has hurt the entire climate campaign. And maybe that’s not so bad. Let’s talk about these things. There doesn’t appear to be much sense in “saving the Planet” if the only way to do that is to kill your economy and society.

It would have been better is she had included the same “conglomerate”‘s control over the Ukraine issue, but we can’t have everything. Hey, I would include the Trump “RussiaRussiaRussia” campaign, but that might be a step too far for many. Maybe we need to explain this one step, one topic, at a time. For the Automatic Earth, it all has meant censorship, and lots of lost ad revenue, but also more readers, and their donations, because, luckily, there are still people left who, in Janet’s words: Argue. Question. Disagree. This light ain’t dying.

 

 

Janet Daley:

Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying


We have returned to the world of Galileo vs the Vatican. Scientific dissidents are again silenced and ostracised for their opinions

 

As the year in which life officially returned to normal comes to an end, we must ask an uncomfortable question. What on earth just happened? We have lived through a period of what would once have been the unthinkable suspension of basic freedoms: interventions by the state into personal life that even most totalitarian governments would not have dared to impose. And we, along with most (not all) of the democratic societies of the West, accepted it. Before that era slips into the fog of convenient forgetfulness, it is absolutely imperative that we – the country as a whole – hold a thorough post hoc examination, because our governing classes have certainly learnt something they will remember.

The critical lesson that has been indelibly absorbed by people in power, and those who advise them, is that fear works. There is, it turns out, almost nothing that a population (even one as brave and insouciant as Britain’s) will not give up if they are systematically, relentlessly frightened.

The Covid phenomenon has provided an invaluable training session in public mind-control techniques: the formula was refined – with the assistance of sophisticated advertising and opinion-forming advice – to an astonishingly successful blend of mass anxiety (your life is in danger) and moral coercion (you are putting other people’s lives in danger). But it was not just the endless repetition of that message that accomplished the almost universal, and quite unexpected, compliance. It was the comprehensive suppression of dissent even when it came from expert sources – and the prohibition on argument even when it was accompanied by counter-evidence – that really did the trick. Now the prescription is readily available for any governing elite hoping to initiate a policy likely to meet with strong public resistance. First tell people that they, or their children and grandchildren, will die if they do not comply. Then prohibit any mitigating argument or critique of this prediction.

If the laws of the land do not permit you to stamp out all such deviant opinions, you can simply orchestrate an avalanche of opprobrium and disrepute on those who express them so that their professional reputations are undermined. But that is yesterday’s battle. Covid – as a historic event – is over. Let’s talk about how the Fear programme, now an accepted part of the armoury of democratic politics, is likely to work in the present and future. As it happens, there is what looks like a remarkably similar model of anxiety-plus-moral-blackmail being applied to the matter of climate change. Note: these observations have no bearing on whether or not there is a true “climate crisis”. What I want to consider is how the policies that are being formulated to address it are being framed.

We find ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict authority

Words are terribly important here. There seems to be an alarming similarity between the language in which the climate campaign is being conducted and the one used to sell the authoritarian Covid lockdowns. There is, for example, a curious anthropomorphising of the threat in both cases. The virus was depicted regularly by both politicians and their medical officials as a sentient adversary with an “agenda” (that word was, believe it or not, actually used) to destroy human lives. It was likened to a wartime enemy – except that it was more sinister because it was “invisible”. This was not strictly true, of course: it was an organism clearly visible under a microscope as was demonstrated repeatedly in scary images widely reproduced in the media. Now, the Planet (the word is usually capitalised as if it were a proper name) is being described as if it too was a conscious being whose innocent life was being threatened by the thoughtless rapaciousness of human beings. So we – and our inclinations – are once again the potential danger.

None of this nonsense has anything to do with science. It is the language of horror movies or particularly gruesome fairy tales designed to frighten children into good behaviour. The great offence that is being committed by these machinations, in fact, is against scientific endeavour itself, which relies on disagreement and open debate to progress. Somehow, we have found ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict the inviolable truth of authority. Who would have thought that, centuries after the Enlightenment, we would return to Galileo vs the Vatican? This is not intended to imply that religious belief is always the enemy of scientific rationality. I personally believe that human intelligence is the greatest of God’s gifts and that the traducing of it is truly sinful as well as utterly irresponsible. As it happened, there was one more affirmation of the irreplaceable importance of intellect and inventiveness just last week with the successful experiment in nuclear fusion, which may, literally, save the future of all those who inhabit the earth (if, in fact, it is genuinely in danger).

What intelligence and innovation rely on above all is criticism and disputation. That is the nature of the thing. It should be what education is for. We cannot, must not, stop fighting for the right to disagree. It is appalling that it has become necessary to legislate to enforce this freedom on academic institutions that were once dedicated to free discussion. The imperatives that must be taught to the young have not changed since Plato’s day. Argue. Question. Disagree. Expose received ideas to rigorous interrogation. Express doubt when you are unpersuaded. Seek truth through endless dialogue. Certainly some mistakes will be made in the name of liberty, but they can only be corrected if we do not, literally, lose our minds in the name of safety. The lines by Dylan Thomas, which were intended to be about physical death, could just as easily be applied to the death of Reason:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 16 2022

Dec 162022
 
 December 16, 2022  Posted by at 9:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  84 Responses »


Paul Gauguin When are you getting married? 1892

 

• Twitter Nukes Liberal Pundits From Platform (ZH)
• Matt Taibbi Discusses Ongoing ‘Big Picture’ Review of Twitter Files (CTH)
• EU Allows US To Wipe Its Feet On The Bloc – Putin (RT)
• Kiev Seizes Assets of Russian Orthodox Clerics (LI)
• Vatican Apologizes For Pope’s Remarks – Moscow (RT)
• European Parliament’s ‘Qatar Scandal’ Tip Of A Corruption Iceberg (Marsden)
• Germany Resorts To Record Borrowing (RT)
• Germany Spends $500 Billion To ‘Keep The Lights On’ – Reuters (RT)
• China Downgrades Omicron Risks To Seasonal Cold (ZH)
• Thousands Of Unedited Government JFK Assassination Files Released (BBC)
• “Effective Altruism”: Could SBF’s Parents Be the Key to a Plea? (Turley)
• Don’t Fall For It (Denninger)
• Arctic Summer Sea Ice Stopped Declining a Decade Ago (DS)
• Flying Insect Numbers Plunge 64% Since 2004 – UK Survey (G.)

 

 

 

 

Mr. Wonderful

 

 

 

 

Biden 2006

 

 

 

 

Pie

 

 

 

 

Xfiles
https://twitter.com/i/status/1603512101485805569

 

 

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
– Dostoevsky

 

 

 

 

Open season has been declared on Musk. He and his family are fair game. They paint a target on him and when he wipes it off, they say: see, he doesn’t really advocate free speech!

• Twitter Nukes Liberal Pundits From Platform (ZH)

Twitter on Thursday evening began purging reporters from major media outlets, just one day after new owner Elon Musk changed the platform’s “anti-doxxing” policy in response to a “crazy stalker” who climbed on the hood of a car carrying his two-year-old son. Those kicked off the platform include: Keith Olbermann of MSNBC • Ryan Mac of the NY Times • Anthony Webster of Bellingcat • Donnie O’Sullivan of CNN • Micah F. Lee of The Intercept • Matt Binder of Mashable • Drew Harwell of the Washington Post • Aaron Rupar of his mom’s basement. Also booted was the official account for Twitter competitor Mastadon, which earlier in the day posted a link to track Musk’s private jet. It was unclear what prompted the suspensions, though it appears they are related to doxxing – current or in the past.

“Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else,” Musk said on Thursday evening, adding “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.” “They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service,” Musk said in a subsequent tweet. [..] Aaron Rupar said in a statement to CNN’s Oliver Darcy: “I never posted anything Elon Jet related or that could violate the policy about disclosing locations. Unless the policy is that you criticize Elon and you get banned.” Except…

Corporate media has framed this as Twitter suspending journalists “who have been covering Elon Musk and the company.” A spokesperson for the NY Times said that the suspensions were ‘questionable and unfortunate,’ and said that no explanation was provided. “We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action,” said Charlie Stadtlander, communications director for the Times.

Read more …

“..Taibbi notes the current data set does not include access to the inbound requests and instructions from government officials..”

• Matt Taibbi Discusses Ongoing ‘Big Picture’ Review of Twitter Files (CTH)

During a podcast Matt Taibbi describes the big picture takeaway of the data they have been permitted to review so far. Interestingly, Taibbi notes the silo effect within Twitter as the division in charge of taking action on requests is not necessarily the division that receives the requests. There is an inflection point between two silos. Taibbi notes the current data set does not include access to the inbound requests and instructions from government officials, they are limited to only seeing what happens after the request is received.


They are also limited in only seeing the activity that is taken within the action division where the accounts are restricted. The division within Twitter that was in the process of amplifying or boosting accounts, is a different silo. Additionally, as Taibbi also notes, if the scale of what they are seeing in Twitter is representative of outside contacts to other social media platforms, then he is sure Facebook, YouTube, Google, Microsoft, Instagram, Apple etc. also have a process to receive and act upon these inbound DHS/FBI instructions.

Read more …

Doormat.

• EU Allows US To Wipe Its Feet On The Bloc – Putin (RT)

The current economic troubles in the EU, and the unfriendly attitude displayed by the US towards Europe, are a direct consequence of the weakness shown by the union’s leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. He made the remarks during a meeting of Russia’s council for strategic development and national projects. “Today, the EU authorities themselves say the policy of their main partner, the US, is leading directly to the de-industrialization of Europe. They are even trying to complain about that to their American overlord. Sometimes there are even words of resentment: ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ I want to ask: ‘What did you expect?’ What else happens to those who allow feet to be wiped on them?” Putin said.

Earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sounded the alarm over US economic policies, urging the EU to “take action” if it wanted to be able to compete with the US government-subsidized green industry. Von der Leyen blasted the tax breaks for consumers who buy American products, introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by President Joe Biden in August. She warned that such initiatives could “lead to unfair competition, could close markets, and thus fragment critical supply chains.” Other top EU officials have repeatedly voiced concern about an impending recession and potential decades-long deindustrialization. Early in October, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said that unless Brussels were to somehow fix the situation with soaring energy prices, it was “risking massive deindustrialization of the European continent and the long-term consequences that might actually be very deep.”

The economic crisis in the EU largely stems from the bloc’s own actions, targeting Russia with a multitude of sanctions over the Ukraine conflict, Putin noted. “What exactly has Europe itself achieved by imposing the restrictions? First of all, there has been an unprecedented, as economists say, jump in inflation in their own home, the eurozone. In November, it amounted to 10% in the eurozone as a whole, with some countries showing extreme figures of more than 20%, even 25%,” Putin noted. At the same time, the collective West, unlike Russia, continues its efforts to grab any resources for itself, the Russian president stated. “Unlike Western countries, which shamelessly pull all of the blankets for themselves, Russia helps the poorest states in Africa, Asia and other regions, delivering food and other goods,” he said.

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Dangerous to go after (1,000 years of) religion.

• Kiev Seizes Assets of Russian Orthodox Clerics (LI)

Ukraine has ratcheted up its campaign against a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church with ties to Russia. On the order of President Volodymyr Zelensky, seven senior clerics from the Russian Orthodox church will have their assets seized and face bans on a range of economic and legal activities. During his nightly video address on Sunday, the Ukrainian president said “by decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, sanctions were applied against seven people,” adding that his administration is “doing everything to ensure that the aggressor state does not have a single string of Ukrainian society to pull.”

According to Reuters, the new penalties mean that the seven clerics will have “their assets seized and are subject to a ban on a range of economic and legal activities as well as a de facto travel ban.” The vast majority of Ukrainians belong to Eastern Orthodox churches, with many worshiping in parishes that take direction from the Moscow Patriarchate. On December 1, Zelensky announced that Kiev would attempt to expel all religious institutions with ties to Russia, arguing the move would make “it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.”

The president went on the claim that the Russian Orthodox Church poses a threat to Ukrainian culture, saying “we will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul.” He additionally denounced Ukrainians who continue to attend the allegedly Russia-controlled parishes as succumbing to “the temptation of evil.” Kiev has conducted a series of raids on Russian Orthodox parishes and claims to have uncovered clerics attempting to subvert the Ukrainian government, though has provided little evidence to support its assertions. Nonetheless, Kiev sanctioned 10 top clerics of the church last week, suggesting they threatened ”the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

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“This is no longer Russophobia, it’s a perversion on a level I can’t even name..”

• Vatican Apologizes For Pope’s Remarks – Moscow (RT)

The Vatican has issued a formal apology to Russia for derogatory remarks made by Pope Francis last month about some ethnic groups in the country, according to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. The ministry received the message on Thursday from Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. It expressed the Holy See’s respect for “all peoples of Russia, their dignity, faith and culture, just like all other nations and peoples of the world,” Zakharova told a press briefing. “The capacity to recognize one’s mistakes is becoming more rare in international relations today. This situation shows that, behind the Vatican’s calls for dialogue, there is a knack for having such a dialogue and hearing the other side,” the Russian diplomat noted. She added that Moscow considered the incident to be over.


Pope Francis made a negative generalized assessment of the character of Buryats and Chechens, two of the many ethnic groups living in Russia, in an interview published in late November. He described them as “of Russia but… not of the Russian tradition” and claimed that such people were “the cruelest” of the Russian troops in Ukraine. Moscow responded by issuing a formal note of protest to the Vatican, while many Russian officials, including Zakharova, expressed outrage about the remarks. “This is no longer Russophobia, it’s a perversion on a level I can’t even name,” the spokeswoman said at the time. The Vatican and Pope Francis personally offered mediation in the conflict in Ukraine. The pontiff previously angered Kiev by publicly recognizing that NATO’s expansion in Europe was a contributing factor in the conflict, which is part of Moscow’s position on the origin of the violent standoff with Kiev and its foreign backers.

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The EU has so far pretended there is no corruption at all.

• European Parliament’s ‘Qatar Scandal’ Tip Of A Corruption Iceberg (Marsden)

In a corruption scandal that strikes at the heart of European Union governance, a vice-president of the European Parliament, Eva Kaili, of Greece, has been stripped of her responsibilities by the EU Parliament, had her assets frozen, and has been charged after police alleged to have found “bags of cash” at her residence. There also was a raid on the home of a Belgian MEP, Marc Tarabella, the vice-chair of the EU’s delegation for relations with the Arab peninsula. Belgian authorities paid another no-knock visit to the home of an assistant to yet another MEP. Earlier this week, authorities searched the EU Parliament offices like it was a common crime scene, reportedly seizing data.

So far, €1.5 million has been seized from private homes, with the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office accusing the four people arrested and charged with “participation in a criminal organization, money laundering and corruption.” It turns out that the officials alleged to have been involved are accused of also lobbying for visa-free EU-Qatar travel and whitewashing Qatar’s labor rights record. For an institution like the European Union, which constantly preaches to other countries about how to clean up their act, you’d think they’d have some strong guardrails in place to prevent the kind of things that these charges allege. That isn’t the case. “The allegations are of utmost concern, very serious,” said an uncharacteristically measured European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She proposed an independent ethics body to set rules for EU institutions “where there are very clear rules,” adding that it “would be a big step forward.” You mean that didn’t already exist? Why not?

Those who believe that Western democratic institutions practice what they constantly preach might be surprised to learn that the lack of checks and balances to prevent corruption at home is actually pretty staggering. Earlier this year, for example, three US congressional representatives introduced bipartisan legislation to close loopholes allowing foreign funding of think tanks, government officials, and elections. “Right now, foreign governments are able to secretly fund think tanks to push their own agendas, hire former public officials and military officers to lobby for their interests, and have their agents raise millions of dollars for political campaigns,” explained bill sponsor, Congressman Jared Golden. It’s almost like systemic corruption is just an open secret that benefits from an omertà as very few officials actually seem to want to acknowledge or address the issue.

When von der Leyen had the opportunity to address the matter with the Brussels press corps on Monday, she stonewalled journalists – much to their frustration, which they weren’t shy about expressing on Twitter. According to Politico, one journalist even shouted at von der Leyen as she was leaving, “You didn’t answer a single one of the questions.” It’s not exactly the kind of behavior you might expect from someone who routinely speaks of holding others accountable for corruption, a lack of transparency, and other undemocratic practices.

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“..the German government has set out a €200 billion “defensive shield” to protect households and businesses from soaring prices..”

• Germany Resorts To Record Borrowing (RT)

Germany’s federal government intends to issue a record volume of debt next year to fund costs associated with the energy crisis, the German Finance Agency has revealed. According to the plan released on Wednesday, debt issuance will balloon to about €539 billion ($573 billion) in 2023 from €449 billion this year. The previous record was in 2021, when the government was attempting to offset the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. Borrowing next year will reportedly include federal bonds worth €274 billion and a further €242 billion to be sold on the money market. In addition, between €15 billion and €17 billion will be raised via green federal securities and between €6 billion and €8 billion via inflation-linked federal securities, the agency said.

The plan is “dramatic,” according to Elmar Voelker, a senior fixed-income analyst at LBBW Research in Stuttgart. He told Bloomberg that “on the one hand, yields on longer-dated [bonds] could come under additional upward pressure as investors demand compensation for taking up the additional supply. On the other, the structural shortage of [bonds] could ease a good deal as a result of the additional supply.” According to Reuters, the country’s spending is expected to exceed revenues in the coming year, when the federal government will also have to repay securities worth more than €325 billion to investors.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has been struggling to cope with skyrocketing gas and electricity costs. The nation, which relies mainly on natural gas to power its industry, has vowed to replace imports from its major supplier Russia by as early as mid-2024. However, the attempts to diversify gas supplies have contributed to the current energy crunch. EU sanctions pressure, maintenance issues, as well as the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, have further exacerbated the problem. In response to the energy crisis, the German government has set out a €200 billion “defensive shield” to protect households and businesses from soaring prices.

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“Where does the German economy stand? If we look at price inflation, it has a high fever.”

• Germany Spends $500 Billion To ‘Keep The Lights On’ – Reuters (RT)

Germany has reportedly allocated nearly $500 billion to shore up its energy supplies and “keep the lights on” since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began last February, but the spending binge might not be enough to weather the crisis. The estimated total shows the “cumulative scale” so far of energy bailouts and other schemes that Berlin has employed amid surging oil and natural gas prices and the loss of imports from Russia, Reuters reported on Thursday. The media outlet called the various outlays an “energy bazooka” – equating to $5,400 per resident in Germany, 12% of GDP and an estimated $1.6 billion per day since the conflict in Eastern Europe started – and it added that still more spending may be needed.

“How severe the crisis will be and how long it will last greatly depends on how the energy crisis will develop,” Michael Gromling, head of macroeconomic research at the German Economic Institute, told Reuters. The economic effects of the conflict stem largely from anti-Russia sanctions imposed by the US, Germany and other NATO members. Despite Western efforts to punish and isolate Moscow, Russian government revenue from oil and gas exports has more than doubled from a year earlier to 10 trillion rubles, about $160 billion, in 2022’s first 11 months. Over the same period, rising energy earnings helped push the government budget surplus to 557 billion rubles.

However, as Reuters noted, Europe’s biggest economy now finds itself “at the mercy” of the weather. “Energy rationing is a risk in the event of a long cold spell this winter, Germany’s first in half a century without Russian gas,” the outlet pointed out. Stefan Kooths, vice president at Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy, said uncertain energy supplies have pushed the country’s economy to a “very critical phase.” He added, “Where does the German economy stand? If we look at price inflation, it has a high fever.” Reuters based its calculation of Germany’s spending on bailout packages for energy companies, LNG import infrastructure and funding to help utilities and traders buy gas and coal. “Despite these efforts, there is little certainty over how the country can replace Russia,” the outlet said.

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From sealing people into their apartments to ‘it’s just a cold’ in no time flat. Something must have spooked Xi.

• China Downgrades Omicron Risks To Seasonal Cold (ZH)

Although easing zero Covid restrictions in China will be met with reopening hardships as infections soar, earlier this week, one of the top medical advisers in the country said that the omicron variant of the virus is no worse than the flu. Now some Chinese cities are downgrading Covid even further, saying it’s the same as the seasonal cold, and there is no need to panic. We pointed out earlier this week that China’s renowned respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan downplayed the risks of the omicron subvariant of Covid-19. He said the death rate from omicron is .1%, equivalent to the common flu, and the infection doesn’t reach the lungs, adding most healthy people recover in less than ten days.

Zhong’s comments come as Beijing pivots from zero Covid to reopen the economy and prevent further economic deceleration. Officials are now telling people they must learn to live with Covid — a similar move that worked in Western countries. According to Shanghai Morning Post, Guangzhou health authorities have assured the public that Covid is less severe than the flu and no more serious than a seasonal cold: s”The virulence of the new coronavirus [Omicron] has now evolved to the level of the seasonal flu, and some are even less virulent than the flu, so you really don’t need to panic,” said Tang Xiaoping, director of the No 8 People’s Hospital in Guangzhou and head of the national key clinical department of infectious diseases.

China downplaying the severity of Covid from flu to cold is the latest sign Beijing is attempting to calm fears and quickly reopen the economy. And why would they be doing that? Well, check out overnight economic data: Overnight, a slew of economic data led to a decline in business activity in November. Retail sales fell 5.9% last month from a year earlier — the biggest decline in consumer spending since May — caused mainly by lockdowns. The unemployment situation also worsened to 5.7% last month, the highest level in six months. And industrial production only rose to 2.2%, about half of October’s figures.

Stones

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Coming clean? Tucker Carlson has far more interesting info than the MSM.

• Thousands Of Unedited Government JFK Assassination Files Released (BBC)

The White House has ordered the release of thousands of documents on the murder of US President John F Kennedy in full for the first time.With the publication of some 13,173 files online, the White House said more than 97% of records in the collection were now publicly available. No huge revelations are expected from the papers, but historians hope to learn more about the alleged assassin. Kennedy was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. A 1992 law required the government to release all documents on the assassination by October 2017. On Thursday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order authorising the latest disclosure. But he said some files would be kept under wraps until June 2023 to protect against possible “identifiable harm”. The US National Archives said that 515 documents would remain withheld in full, and another 2,545 documents would be partly withheld.


A 1964 US inquiry, the Warren Commission, found that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a US citizen who had previously lived in the Soviet Union, and that he acted alone. He was killed in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days after his arrest. JFK’s death spawned decades of conspiracy theories, but on Thursday the CIA said the US spy agency had “never engaged” Oswald, and did not withhold information about him from US investigators. Long-time JFK academics and theorists have hoped the latest release would reveal more information about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, where he met a Soviet KGB officer in October 1963. In its latest statement, the CIA said that all information held by the agency relating to his trip to Mexico City had previously been released, adding: “There is no new information on this topic in the 2022 release.”

Tucker JFK

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“The parents have the misfortune of looking like the type of low-hanging fruit prosecutors find irresistible..”

• “Effective Altruism”: Could SBF’s Parents Be the Key to a Plea? (Turley)

As Sam Bankman-Fried faces an eight-count indictment for his alleged massive crypto-fraud, his case could take a sudden turn toward resolution. The prosecutors may have the ultimate inducement for a plea to dangle over Bankman-Fried — actually two: Bankman and Fried. SBF, as he’s known, is not the only person at risk here, particularly with prosecutors making repeated references to unnamed “co-conspirators.” Two at risk could prove his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried. While there’s no proof of criminal acts on their part, Bankman-Fried surprisingly involved his parents in aspects of his alleged fraudulent operation. If so, the case could bring new meaning to the doctrine of in loco parentis, when people act “in place of a parent” or “instead of a parent.”

Federal prosecutors are notorious for targeting family members as a quarry’s vulnerability; do they see such an opening in Bankman-Fried’s parents’ role in litigating this massive alleged fraud? Both parents of SBF and his close associate and ex-girlfriend, Alameda Research head Caroline Ellison, 28, are professors at leading universities. Ellison’s parents are Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors; Bankman-Fried’s parents are Stanford Law professors. Both children are obviously bright, precocious “fac brats” who spoke of using investments for good deeds. Ellison has said she had only one job before moving over to Alameda and finding herself making huge decisions. Ellison is an obvious target for a cooperation agreement, and her counsel may be moving quickly to get her a chair before the music stops on the next round of indictments.

The more intriguing prospect, however, is using SBF’s parents as his most vulnerable pressure point. The Justice Department has previously targeted family members, as in the Michael Flynn case, to muscle defendants into pleas. While we’ve seen Justice give targets sharply different treatment in past cases, there’s ample reason for the parents to be concerned. Joseph Bankman, a longtime Stanford Law School tax professor, was a paid employee of his son and helped promote the company. He spent considerable time in the Bahamas with Sam during the critical periods of alleged fraud. He and his wife may have benefited from some of the lavish expenditures the Justice Department cited in its indictment, including staying in a $16.4 million house in Old Fort Bay, a gated community in Nassau.

Stanford Law prof Barbara Fried didn’t appear to work for the company but reportedly used money from her son in her Democratic political-advocacy network. Fried, 71, resigned last month as board chairwoman of a political-donor network, Mind the Gap, which she’d helped start to support Democratic campaigns and causes. Fried, who retired this year from Stanford, is an expert on the intersection of law and philosophy. She has notably written about effective altruism, the charitable movement her son and Ellison embraced. SBF pursued effective-altruism models while studying at MIT and later co-founded Alameda. The left heralded Bankman-Fried as showing that effective altruism had “real and growing political power, and an increasing ability to noticeably change the world.”

[..] The parents have the misfortune of looking like the type of low-hanging fruit prosecutors find irresistible. In an ordinary case, they would be on top of the targets list. Reports the parents are concerned they could be financially ruined by legal costs may only increase the interest in using them to pressure their son.

SBF

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“..even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used..”

• Don’t Fall For It (Denninger)

Breathlessly, I tell you, breathlessly, over-unity fusion has been achieved! Don’t buy that bullshit; they’re lying. Specifically its crap until you can show me all of the following: A sustainable reaction that continues for hours, not microseconds. I can’t make power out of a single microsecond event. I can make power out of a reaction that continues for hours and evolves energy while doing so. Until you can do the latter you have nothing and nothing in the current results, assuming they’re real, nor anything in prior results suggests progress toward that. The over-parity ratio of energy output to input is exponentially (that is, by at least 10x) high. A conventional nuclear fission plant requires about 10% of the output nameplate rating in input power just to operate.

This is why you can’t black-start such a plant [..] and this also, to a large degree, applies to other conventional energy such as coal. The scrubbers, conveyors, grinding apparatus for the input fuel and similar all require a lot of energy input, so you have to get a lot back out to make it worth it. Coal, natural gas, nuclear fission and oil all do. Until fusion can produce 10x as much energy on the output side as you put in to cause the fusion its a laboratory curiosity piece, not a source of commercial power. Exactly zero progress has been made toward that in the last 50+ years. The energy produced has to be able to be captured and converted into usable power of some form, either chemical, mechanical or electrical, and thus the above point must be measured after said conversion.

Gamma rays are energy but they’re not usable thus until and unless you can transform them into one of those forms they don’t count. Yes, on a physics level energy is energy but in terms of practical use that is not true and it is fraudulent to represent that which is not the case to others. You must be able to source the reactants with the product energy and have enough left over to be operationally viable as a business. This is non-trivial as well because the fusion we have achieved thus far requires deuterium and/or tritium. Both are exceedingly rare hydrogen isotopes (about ~150 per million for deuterium) and because they are chemically the same as ordinary hydrogen separating them is a five-alarm pain in the neck that requires a great deal of energy itself. In addition tritium is atomically unstable (that is, it decays) so you can’t store it permanently either (deuterium is atomically stable, on the other hand, so with deuterium you can.) Let me know when there’s a viable engineering pathway to the above.

Until then keep they breathless exclamations to yourself; you’re making a fool of yourself promoting and cheering on crap, beyond continuing work on possibly reaching those above points — at some far, far into the future and only after someone pulls a “Scotty” in terms of a breakthrough that today we have no engineering path that places it within reach. And incidentally, if you think they actually got back more than they put in, even leaving the externalities above aside, you were conned on that too. Here’s the salient statement from the article itself: But that changed in the dead of night on Dec. 5. At 1 AM local time, researchers used laser beams to zap a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. The lasers produced 2.05 megajoules of energy, and the pellet released roughly 3.15 megajoules.

Sounds great, right? Uh, no…. “It is a big scientific step,” says Ryan McBride, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. But, McBride adds, that does not mean that NIF itself is producing power. For one thing, he says, the lasers require more than 300 megajoules worth of electricity to produce around 2 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light. In other words, even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used.

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“What they are doing is not science but propaganda..”

• Arctic Summer Sea Ice Stopped Declining a Decade Ago (DS)

Arctic summer sea ice stopped declining a decade ago, but green activists have spared no effort to continue promoting the poster scare that humans will cause it all to disappear within a few years. In his recent BBC Frozen Planet II agitprop, Sir David Attenborough claimed it might all be gone by 2035. In an excellent piece of investigative reporting titled Lies, Damned Lies and Arctic Graphs, the climate writer Tony Heller recently lifted the lid on many of the tactics used to keep the scare in the headlines. “They bury all the oWhat they are doing is not science but propaganda,”lder data and pretend they don’t notice sea ice is increasing again. he charges. he Daily Sceptic has written a number of articles of late noting that summer sea ice extent in the Arctic is recovering. In Greenland, I recently reported, the ice sheet may have increased in the year to August 2022. Invariably, social media commentators reply by publishing the sea ice graph below, compiled by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

This is reproduced from Heller’s YouTube work and shows a linear decrease in September (the lowest point of annual sea ice) from 1979. There is something wrong with this graph, notes Heller, since the minimum is actually higher now than 10 and 15 years ago, but the crude straight black ‘trend’ line tricks the eye into missing this. He plots the data as a moving average to show the real trend more clearly. We see here the end of the decline in summer sea ice started a decade ago. The low point on which most fanciful forecasts of a North Pole passage are based is 2012. Heller notes that sea ice changes are cyclical, not linear. And he is right. Drawing a straight line down from a 1979 high point to a lower point tells us nothing about current trends.

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Poison.

• Flying Insect Numbers Plunge 64% Since 2004 – UK Survey (G.)

The number of insects splattered on vehicle number plates in Britain fell by 64% between 2004 and 2022, according to a survey. Each summer citizen scientists record the number of insect splats on their number plates on an app after a journey. The latest Bugs Matter report, produced by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife, found another drop in 2022 compared with 2021, with the long-term decrease jumping by five percentage points. The survey supports other scientific studies showing major and ongoing declines in flying insects in western Europe this century that potentially imperil food chains, plant and crop pollination and ultimately life on Earth. Andrew Whitehouse of Buglife said: “For the second year running, Bugs Matter has shown potentially catastrophic declines in the abundance of flying insects.

Urgent action is required to address the loss of the diversity and abundance of insect life. We will look to our leaders at Cop15 for decisive action to restore nature at scale – both for wildlife and for the health and wellbeing of future generations.” The study found continued declines from 2021 to 2022 in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, but this summer appears to have been a better season for flying insects in Scotland. The decline since 2004 in Scotland was 48.5% in 2021 but just 40.3% in 2022. The Bugs Matter survey data is collected when people download a free app and record the insects splattered on their number plates during car journeys over the summer. Nearly 7,000 volunteers have signed up and 4,140 journeys were analysed in 2022’s data. Short journeys and trips in the rain are excluded.

The project is keen to recruit more participants for the 2023 recording, which starts on 1 June next year. Evan Bowen-Jones, the chief executive of Kent Wildlife Trust, said: “Thanks to citizen scientists across the country, we are building a better picture of the health of our insect populations and already we are seeing some concerning patterns in the data. “However, we need more citizen scientists to take part in the Bugs Matter survey next year and into the future, to understand whether we are seeing actual long-term trends or the impact of the extreme temperatures we faced in 2022.”

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Edward Dowd


In 1992, around 29,000 rubber ducks fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean. This is where they made landfall.

 

 

Ice deer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1603334418705567744

 

 


An aurochs from a cave in Calabria, made between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago. The wild ancestor of domesticated cattle. The last aurochs died in 1627, one of the first recorded cases of an extinction.

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 12 2019

Dec 122019
 
 December 12, 2019  Posted by at 10:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Harris&Ewing President Hoover lights Nation’s Capital community Xmas tree Dec 24 1929

 

• Why Is Jeremy Corbyn Seen As So Unelectable (Abc.au)
• Ideology or Popularity: How Will Britain Vote? (CP)
• The Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke (Taibbi)
• The Hidden Hand (Faddis)
• The Global Auto Market Collapse (ZH)
• EU Lauds New Green Deal As Europe’s ‘Man On Moon Moment’ (DW)
• “Afghanistan Papers” May Be A Game Changer For Tulsi Gabbard (IDS)
• Vatican Caught Using Charity Donations To Cover Budget Shortfalls (ZH)
• ‘She Was So Dangerous’: Where In The World Is The Ghislaine Maxwell? (G.)
• Assange’s Father Hopeful Of Son’s Release (9News)

 

 

Because of articles like this?! Because of how the BBC reports on the election?

• Why Is Jeremy Corbyn Seen As So Unelectable (Abc.au)

Jeremy Corbyn is railing against “cuts, closures and poverty”. He’s campaigning to build more homes, and to fight fewer wars. He’s condemning the Tories for creating a “divided and unequal society”. But these are snippets not from his 2019 bid for Downing Street. They were his slogans in 1983, when he first ran for Parliament.The simple fact is the Labour leader has never changed his views. In the late 1970s and 1980s he and his staunch left-wing colleague John McDonnell, now the shadow chancellor, promised a revolution to upend the Western capitalist order. And yet, in 2015, as he was fighting to take over the leadership of the party, he was pledging the same: “Capitalism is in its death throes!”


It’s not mere sloganeering. His policy agenda over the past year has been: renationalise British utilities and trains, cap all wages, and force large companies to transfer 10 per cent of their equity to their employees. It says something about the depths of the austerity cuts in Britain that Mr Corbyn was not only backed into the Labour leadership, but went on to gain the largest increase in the party’s share of the vote in the 2017 election since World War II. And in the torrid political climate that followed, many would have expected Labour to romp home this time around. Over the past three years, the Conservative Party has imploded, with grave wounds struck to much of its credibility. Once Theresa May was torn down and replaced by Boris Johnson, a man with a public reputation as a liar, perhaps in any other generation of politics Labour would have been a shoo-in. But this time around, Mr Corbyn has been found deeply unelectable.

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The antisemite slur has worked miracles. Ley me repost the graph that shows 0.08% of Labour members are.

• Ideology or Popularity: How Will Britain Vote? (CP)

It’s not news that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a popular figure. It’s also not news that Jeremy Corbyn’s policies are hugely popular with the British public. Why should the first of these appear to matter more than the second? [..] The secret to the Tories’ possible success seems to be to focus less on the issues, and not at all on their own leader (who can’t be bothered to turn up for an interview or a debate). Instead, they are focusing on Labour’s unpopular leader. And the odd thing is that it seems to be working. The muckraking includes calling Corbyn an anti-semite, but it doesn’t stop there. (Somehow the fact that Boris Johnson has a habit of making racist comments is irrelevant; Labour is an anti-racist party and therefore must be held to a higher standard.)

A new book by Tom Bower paints a portrait of a power hungry anti-semite who regularly hangs out with Muslim extremists. Anyone with an ounce of sense will struggle to find the Labour leader in this description; for his part Bower had the sense not to source his allegations so there’s no way to check up on which of these might be true and which are blatant fabrications. For anyone interested, Peter Osborn has a thorough debunking. The advantage of mudslinging is that it sometimes sticks. Many British voters can’t say exactly why they don’t like Corbyn, but they know that they don’t like him. Even if these allegations were defendable, Corbyn’s Labour party has effectively won the debate on austerity.


Both parties are promising to protect the NHS from privatization, but only one party is actually selling NHS data to private companies like Amazon. That should matter a lot more than whether or not the British public would like to go on holiday with Jeremy Corbyn. Whatever the outcome, this is one of the most fascinating elections on record. Arguments for the status quo – that the rich should see the biggest gains when capitalism works and the poor should pay when it doesn’t – aren’t working. Demonization of one’s opponents has always been a part of electoral politics, but in this election that’s pretty much the only tactic in play, at least for the Tories. Their victory would be a huge triumph of the British propaganda system. It would also be a huge failure for democracy.

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Just not a funny one.

• The Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke (Taibbi)

The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.” If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was. Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find. Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.

Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up. However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president). Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency.


This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role. Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications. Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”

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Make sure it’s no longer hidden. Put the spotlight on Brennan and Clapper to start with.

• The Hidden Hand (Faddis)

The essence of a coup, which some might refer to as covert action, is the hidden hand. One does not announce that a foreign power is overthrowing the government and installing a new government. One pulls strings as if from behind a curtain, making events that are all part of a carefully orchestrated plan appear disconnected, spontaneous and serendipitous. As I read through the recently released IG report for the second time, as someone with a great deal of experience in military and intelligence matters, I see that hand everywhere. Per the IG report, a single report is delivered to the FBI in the summer of 2016. It concerns a meeting between a cooperative contact of a foreign intelligence service and a junior level employee of the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos.

The report relates what are frankly very amorphous comments by Papadopoulos concerning the Russian government and its alleged possession of information on Hillary Clinton. On any other day this report would command no attention whatsoever. The source in question has no track record of any kind with the FBI. Papadopoulos has been employed by the Trump campaign for perhaps 90 days at this point, and there is no reason to believe he has contacts of significance in the Kremlin. Not on this occasion. This one report from a foreign intelligence service goes directly to the top of the FBI. The Director himself, James Comey is briefed. A full investigation is launched. Multiple confidential human sources are tasked. Wiretaps are ordered. A task force is organized. Crossfire Hurricane is born.


There is a problem, though. This hand, perhaps because it is controlled by individuals who have made their bones riding desks in Washington, DC and not in the field running actual operations, is clumsy. The information regarding Papadopoulos provided the needed pretext to start an investigation, but most of the people who will now form the investigative team are not in on the plot. They will have to be led to the pre-ordained conclusion, so that it appears that they did so without outside interference. And these investigators have a pesky habit of actually doing their jobs.

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Bad for automakers and Big Oil. Other than that, though…

• The Global Auto Market Collapse (ZH)

It is no secret that the auto market worldwide has been mired in recession that looks to not have any plans of decelerating anytime soon. We have covered, at length, the collapse of auto sales not only in the U.S., but in leading global markets like China and Europe over the last 18 months. We have also covered how the “silver lining” of EV sales and investment in electric vehicles, may not be enough to stoke a recovery in the industry, especially with major cities like Beijing starting to shy away from purchase subsidies. The contagion has spread, and a new article by Bloomberg includes four charts that show just how damaging the effects have been globally. The first shows that global auto sales peaked two years ago at slightly under 86 million on an LTM basis. In October, that number stood at 78 million, a decline of about 9%.

The second chart shows trends from across the globe, noting that since China’s market is so big, that it is been obscuring falling trends elsewhere in the world. The chart shows China, Asia ex-China, North America, Europe, Latin America and Africa/Middle East all in steep downtrends.

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Europe’s “new growth strategy.” Oh boy…

• EU Lauds New Green Deal As Europe’s ‘Man On Moon Moment’ (DW)

The European Commission signed off on President Ursula von der Leyen’s “European Green Deal” on Wednesday in Brussels, with a promise of money for EU nations that are lagging behind. The European Green Deal will still need to be approved — by the leaders of the EU’s member states and the European Parliament — for the climate policies to be implemented into law. The climate change resolutions will be considered by the leaders of EU countries at their meeting in Brussels on Thursday. Von der Leyen, who has put climate issues at the center of her presidency, described the plan as Europe’s “new growth strategy.”


“We do not have all the answers yet, today is the start of a journey, but this is Europe’s man on the moon moment. The European Green Deal is very ambitious, but it will also be very careful in assessing the impact and every single step we’re taking.” Von der Leyen said an economic growth plan based on fossil fuels and pollution was “out of date and out of touch.” “The European Green deal is on one hand about cutting emissions, but on the other hand, about creating jobs and boosting innovation.”

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Can she stay out of the debate and still win?

• “Afghanistan Papers” May Be A Game Changer For Tulsi Gabbard (IDS)

Three very interesting things happened today in Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for the US Presidency. First, there was a huge story in The Washington Post about the so-called “Afghanistan Papers,” which reveal thousands of pages of confidential interviews with hundreds of key US government officials telling how the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations lied to the American public about the prosecution of the 18-year US war in Afghanistan—how successive US administrations manipulated data about the war to paint a much rosier picture of US and Afghan government achievements throughout the conflict. How big is this story? Think “Pentagon Papers.” Daniel Ellsberg. Think Vietnam big.

The story should suck up a lot of oxygen over the next few weeks, and it is one that should produce some unusually positive coverage for Tulsi, given that the issue of the failures of US military interventionism overseas has been the primary focus of her campaign. The second interesting thing is the story has the potential to tie into another story involving a management consulting firm called McKinsey & Company that performed confidential contract work in Afghanistan and Iraq. The reason McKinsey could be relevant to Tulsi’s campaign is that one of her main rivals for the nomination, Pete Buttigieg, happened to work for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010. Pete has indicated that his stint with McKinsey involved working on “war zone economic development to help grow private sector employment” in Iraq and Afghanistan.


In plain language, Pete appears to have been part of broader effort by the US government to transform Afghanistan into some sort of a mini capitalist democracy—not unlike the silly US plan to create a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq. Now, there may be nothing to the connection between the first and second stories. However, during Tulsi’s town hall this evening in Nashua, New Hampshire, it is curious that Tulsi specifically mentioned McKinsey in referencing how most of the hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars that have been spent in Afghanistan have not gone to fight terrorism but rather to enrich US defense contractors such as the “McKinsey group.” She very slyly slid in McKinsey and moved on.

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Gee, we’re surprised…

• Vatican Caught Using Charity Donations To Cover Budget Shortfalls (ZH)

While Pope Francis has long preached about the ills of economic inequality and sins of capitalism, the Catholic church has been robbing Peter’s Pence to the tune of over $50 million annually to plug holes in their out-of-control budget – after paying over $3 billion in pedophile priest settlements around the world over several decades. According to the Wall Street Journal, most of the roughly $55 million the church takes in annually goes towards “plugging the hole in the Vatican’s own administrative budget, while as little as 10% is spent on charitable works.” “The little-publicized breakdown of how the Holy See spends Peter’s Pence, known only among senior Vatican officials, is raising concern among some Catholic Church leaders that the faithful are being misled about the use of their donations, which could further hurt the credibility of the Vatican’s financial management under Pope Francis.” -Wall Street Journal

Of note, Peter’s Pence is an annual collection event held every June, billed as a fundraising event for the needy. It is described as a “gesture of charity, a way of supporting the activity of the Pope and the universal Church in favoring especially the poorest and Churches in difficulty. It is also an invitation to pay attention and be near to new forms of poverty and fragility.” “A section of the website dedicated to “works realized” describes individual grants, such as €100,000 in relief aid to survivors of last month’s earthquake in Albania or €150,000 for those affected by cyclone Idai in southeastern Africa in March.” -WSJ


“The purpose of the Peter’s Pence Collection is to provide the Holy Father with the financial means to respond to those who are suffering as a result of war, oppression, natural disaster and disease,” according to the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Except that for at least the past five years, just 10% of the money collected (over $55 million in 2018) – actually goes towards the types of charitable causes advertised for the collection, according to ‘people familiar with the matter,’ who added that approximately 2/3 of the funds have been used to help plug the budget shortfall at the Holy See – which consists of the central administration of the Catholic Church as well as the global papal diplomatic network. Last year, the budget deficit reached around $78 million on total spending of around $334 million.

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The FBI know where she is.

• ‘She Was So Dangerous’: Where In The World Is The Ghislaine Maxwell? (G.)

Maxwell and Epstein’s relationship seems to have been complex. Sarnoff says Maxwell once told her she wanted very much to marry Epstein. “Maxwell is very clever,” Sarnoff says. “In spite of her personal insecurities, as a result of her father’s death and financial challenges, I believe she nevertheless knew exactly what she was doing when she agreed to solicit girls on his behalf. However, I don’t think that phase of their relationship began until she understood Epstein would not marry her.” Farmer says Maxwell told her they were married. In another interview, this time with the Miami Herald, which has doggedly investigated Epstein, Giuffre alleges Maxwell had asked her to have a child with Epstein and hand the baby over for Maxwell and Epstein to raise; she would be paid an allowance of $200,000 a month.

Ransome, who says she was kept for six months on Epstein’s private island and claims she was raped several times a day, said: “They were never like a couple. Jeffrey and Ghislaine were best friends, or like brother and sister. Never holding hands or kissing. And she wasn’t his employee.” When Maxwell found that Farmer had spoken out, she made threatening calls – Farmer says she has been in hiding “for many years”. “Ghislaine kept threatening my life. She found out where I was living, and she would send messages to me or I would get a call and I would have to move again. Most of her threats were veiled, like: ‘You better look over your shoulder because there’s someone coming for you.’ She told me she was going to burn all my paintings, my career was burned.” In 2015, Giuffre sued Maxwell for defamation, after Maxwell said she was lying about the allegations she had made.


The case was settled out of court and Maxwell began retreating from public view. She was no longer seen in public with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. [..] Kaiser says he has not been able to serve Maxwell with legal papers “because she’s off hiding somewhere”. Does he have any idea where she is? “No, I wish I did. We’ve looked various places so far to no avail. We thought we had a lead in some compound in Colorado, a very good friend of hers, a wealthy family – we thought she might be there, but we’re not sure. I expect the FBI knows exactly where she is. They may be building a case. I don’t believe they’ve given up on pursuing some of [Epstein’s] enablers and I have to believe that would include Maxwell.”

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Is there a media shift? There does seem to be a small one in Oz politics.

• Assange’s Father Hopeful Of Son’s Release (9News)

The father of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is confident a tide of public opinion is turning in support of the Australian languishing in a UK cell. As Assange awaits an extradition hearing which could eventually result in him facing criminal charges in the US, his father John Shipton is campaigning for his diplomatic release. The 75-year-old has visited about eight countries this year raising support for his son’s release During that time his son has won increasing support from politicians on all sides both at home and overseas. The Australian group concerned about Assange’s health and potential extradition includes conservative MPs George Christensen and Barnaby Joyce, independent Andrew Wilkie and Green politicians.

“Basically the malice and spite demonstrated by the United Kingdom and Sweden is of concern to every Australian,” Mr Shipton told AAP. “We are working towards the government involving itself diplomatically to ensure Julian’s return home to Australia and the prosecution stopping immediately.” He said filmmaker James Ricketson and journalist Peter Greste were both brought back to Australia from Cambodia and Egypt respectively via diplomatic intervention and Assange’s case was no different. “There’s no difference whatsoever,” Mr Shipton said. Mr Shipton said the media played a part in a decline in support for Assange while he sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for almost seven years.


“The mobbing and smearing (of Assange) is only possible with the permission, participation, of the media,” he said. “But it seems to have stopped and is reversing itself as the media realises their position is subsequently very tenuous. “What will happen if Julian is dragged away in a yellow jumpsuit with chains around him is the prestige of every journalist in the western world will fall to zero.” Despite the persistence of the UK and US and what he describes as “procedural malfeasance and abrogations of all Julian’s human rights”, Mr Shipton remains optimistic about his son’s release. “I think we’ll win,” he said.

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Debt Rattle December 10 2018

Dec 102018
 
 December 10, 2018  Posted by at 9:58 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Jerry Bywaters Oil Field Girls 1940

 

• Investors Managing $32 Trillion In Assets Call For Climate Change Action (R.)
• BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil Face Shareholder Challenge Over Carbon Targets (G.)
• Bear Market Is Here, Stocks To Plunge At Least 20% – Ned Davis Research (CNBC)
• Everyone Is Bearish But No-One Is Short (ZH)
• Senior Tory Vultures Circle With May On Brink (Ind.)
• EU’s Top Court Says UK Can Unilaterally Stop Brexit (R.)
• UK Government Funds Secret Anti-Corbyn, Labour Unit (DR)
• Comey: FBI Never Verified Steele Dossier Used To Justify Special Counsel (ZH)
• Russian Stealth Jets To Be Armed With New Hypersonic Missiles (ZH)
• Medical Researchers Still Routinely Hiding Funding From Big Pharma (RT)
• Italian Priests Vow To Open Church Doors To Evicted Immigrants (G.)
• Why Greeks Traditionally Decorate a Boat Instead of a Christmas Tree (GR)
• The Antidote To Civilisational Collapse (Adam Curtis)

 

 

Right. Questions: How much of the $32 trillion was made doing things that increased emissions? How much of it is presently invested in polluting companies? And how much are the investors prepared to lose in order to comply with whatever it takes to lower emissions?

To put it simply: these people are talking their books. They got rich by polluting. They intend to get even richer by going green.

If you’re serious about the topic, don’t join them.

• Investors Managing $32 Trillion In Assets Call For Climate Change Action (R.)

Global investors managing $32 trillion in assets have called on governments to accelerate steps to combat climate change, as policymakers meet for talks at a United Nations conference in Poland. A total of 415 investors from across the world including UBS Asset Management and Aberdeen Standard Investments signed the 2018 Global Investor Statement to Governments on Climate Change demanding urgent action. “The global shift to clean energy is underway, but much more needs to be done by governments to accelerate the low carbon transition and to improve the resilience of our economy, society and the financial system to climate risks,” the statement said.

The intervention is the single largest on the topic to date, the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change said, as talks continue in the Polish city of Katowice to agree how to slow global warming to below 2ºC. That goal was agreed at a 2015 meeting in Paris, but investors said national governments were being too slow in enacting the policies needed to help the world transition to a low-carbon economy. Failure to act could lead to permanent economic damage three or four times the scale of the impact of the financial crisis, British asset manager Schroders said.

As well as ramping up the involvement of the private sector, governments needed to commit to improving climate-related financial reporting, a move that would help investors better assess the risk and allocate capital to the right companies. “The reality is that the long-term nature of the challenge has, in our view, met a zombie-like response by many,” said Chris Newton, Executive Director Responsible Investment, IFM Investors. “This is a recipe for disaster as the impacts of climate change can be sudden, severe and catastrophic.”

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If these activist shareholders succeed, the value of their shares will plunge. That’s why in an earlier vote at Shell, 94% of shareholders votied against and 5% abstained. That reduces this to window dressing.

• BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil Face Shareholder Challenge Over Carbon Targets (G.)

BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil face a shareholder challenge to set carbon targets in line with the Paris climate agreement, as a green group seeks to repeat its success in pressuring Shell to set environmental benchmarks. When Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, laid out an ambitious long-term carbon target last year, he acknowledged the role played by a resolution on carbon targets submitted by Dutch activist shareholders Follow This. Follow This is hoping to use investor power to push other major oil and gas firms into setting similar goals. The organisation has bought shares in several major fossil fuel groups and has submitted two resolutions to the European firms BP and Shell. It will file identical resolutions with the US companies Chevron and ExxonMobil later this week if other parties do not submit a similar demand.

Investors at the firms’ annual general meetings next year will be asked to vote in favour of them publishing climate change targets in alignment with the international goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures well below 2C. Mark van Baal, the founder of Follow This, said: “Targets should be on the agenda of every oil company, given that the oil industry can make or break the Paris climate agreement.” The group has little chance of winning by persuading a majority of the four companies’ shareholders to back the resolution but it believes the tactic can put public and investor pressure on firms. Although backed by the Church of England and major pension funds, the resolution filed for Shell’s AGM on carbon targets failed in 2017, with 94% of shareholders voting against and 5% abstaining.

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New Davis have no idea how big the fall will be, no more than you or I. And besides, they think that by spring, “the pain will be largely behind the Street”.

• Bear Market Is Here, Stocks To Plunge At Least 20% – Ned Davis Research (CNBC)

The wild trading that’s gripped Wall Street may be no ordinary correction. According to Ned Davis Research’s Ed Clissold, a bear market is officially here. “If you take this as a typical bear market, not associated with a recession, it’s going to take you down around 20% — maybe a little bit more,” the firm’s chief U.S. market strategist told CNBC’s “Futures Now” last week. “That’s what we need to be thinking about over the next several months.” A bear market is defined as an environment when overwhelming pessimism sparks a 20% drop or more from recent highs. In this case, it would wipe out 588 points from the S&P 500’s all-time high of 2940.91 hit on Sept. 21. The index closed Friday in correction territory at 2,633.08. That’s down 10% from the high and 4.6% for the week.

Originally, Clissold called for a bear market to hit Wall Street in 2019, due to jitters over interest rate hike risks, U.S.-China trade tensions and slowing growth in earnings and the economy. However, he decided to move up his forecast due to “severe” technical damage from the October correction. Now, it appears the market may soon get hit with another batch of discouraging news. “Earnings growth is becoming a front-burner issue. Everybody expected it to slow down next year because we don’t have the benefit of tax cuts. But the slowdown is probably going to be more than expected,” said Clissold. [..] He may be predicting a deep pullback, but he does not see any signs of a recession. By spring, Clissold said, the pain will be largely behind the Street.

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Everyone still relies on central banks.

• Everyone Is Bearish But No-One Is Short (ZH)

In the past two months we have written extensively on how most market participants got caught offside by the dramatic reversion in risk assets, and which after several attempts at bottom-fishing – attempts which have failed because as Morgan Stanley first noted two months ago the Buy The Dip trade no longer works…

… increasingly more traders have thrown in the towel, resulting in YTD returns which are truly “historic” with not one single asset generating positive returns for the first time since the Nixon presidency.

Well, that’s not exactly right: one asset is outperforming – the one which usually does best just as the economy slides into a recession or worse: cash. As Bank of America notes, the YTD score for the top global assets is the following: • equities -4.2%, • bonds -2.3%, • commodities -6.2%, • cash 1.7%, • US$ 4.9%.

Drilling down reveals an even uglier picture: the 2018 bear market has spared nobody with US Treasuries down -4.9%, the 5th largest loss since 1970, US IG bonds -3.3%, their 4th largest loss since 1970, meanwhile 1881 of 2767 global stocks are in a bear market, down more than 20%, 86 of 94 equity indices underwater, and the cherry on top – the FAANG bull market “leader” is down -26% from highs, which according to BofA’s Michael Hartnett is “a big nasty bear market.” The result, per Bank of America, is that “capitulation to lower credit & equity allocations begins but from high allocations to risk assets.” That’s the good news: the bad news is that even as investors are bailing out of risk assets, they are also dumping safe havens like treasuries, and in the last week we saw broad based risk-off flows, including $5.2BN outflow from equities, and $8.1BN outflow from bonds this week

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By the day, it becomes more like one of those Shakespeare plays with gossiping and backstabbing and all that. Love it.

• Senior Tory Vultures Circle With May On Brink (Ind.)

Theresa May is set for the bleakest week of her time in power after leadership rivals publicly positioned themselves to grab the Tory crown if her Brexit plans collapse. Ex-cabinet ministers Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Esther McVey all signalled a willingness to bid for the leadership amid speculation that Ms May faces a heavy defeat in the crunch Commons vote on her proposed Brexit deal. More resignations were expected from the front bench in the run-up to the vote, with government insiders indicating it could still be delayed. If she survives the first half of the week, Ms May is expected to head to Brussels where she will implore the EU to offer a concession on the hated “Irish backstop” so that she can try to sell the deal to Tory rebels one last time.

The prime minister spoke to president of the European Council Donald Tusk on Sunday, who said afterwards that it would be “an important week for the fate of Brexit”. In London thousands of protestors waving union jacks joined a “Brexit betrayal” march sponsored by Ukip and addressed by far-right activist Tommy Robinson, while even more were said to have turned up to an anti-fascist counter-march. The febrile atmosphere as the week starts is only set to intensify as MPs return to Westminster on Monday, with talk of Conservative plots and leadership challenges filling the air. One Tory backbencher told The Independent: “No one knows if the prime minister is still going to be in Downing Street at the end of the week.

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Ha ha! Don’t forget to say thank you to the EU for your freedoms, Brits! Rumor has it May’s Plan B will include a second vote that does not have a Remain option.

• EU’s Top Court Says UK Can Unilaterally Stop Brexit (R.)

The European Union’s top court ruled on Monday that the United Kingdom can unilaterally revoke its divorce notice, raising the hopes of pro-Europeans ahead of a crucial vote in the British parliament on Prime Minister Theresa May’s divorce deal. Just 36 hours before British lawmakers vote on May’s deal, the Court of Justice said in an emergency judgement that London could revoke its Article 50 formal divorce notice with no penalty. May’s government says the ruling means nothing because it has no intention of reversing its decision to leave the EU on March 29. But critics of her deal say it provides options — either to delay Brexit and renegotiate terms of withdrawal, or cancel it altogether if British voters change their minds. “The United Kingdom is free to revoke unilaterally the notification of its intention to withdraw from the EU,” the court said.

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Surprised? Don’t be.

• UK Government Funds Secret Anti-Corbyn, Labour Unit (DR)

A secret UK Government-funded infowars unit based in Scotland sent out social media posts attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. On the surface, the cryptically named Institute for Statecraft is a small charity operating from an old Victorian mill in Fife. But explosive leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal the organisation’s Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists. The “think tank” is supposed to counter Russian online propaganda by forming “clusters” of friendly journalists and “key influencers” throughout Europe who use social media to hit back against disinformation.

But our investigation has found worrying evidence the shadowy programme’s official Twitter account has been used to attack Corbyn, the Labour Party and their officials. [..] David Miller, a professor of political sociology in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, added: “It’s extraordinary that the Foreign Office would be funding a Scottish charity to counter Russian propaganda which ends up attacking Her Majesty’s opposition and soft-pedalling far-right politicians in the Ukraine. “People have a right to know how the Government are spending their money, and the views being promoted in their name.”

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That’s not legal, is it?

• Comey: FBI Never Verified Steele Dossier Used To Justify Special Counsel (ZH)

Former FBI Director James Comey didn’t know a lot during Friday’s congressional testimony – claiming hundreds of times (245 according to Trump) that he simply couldn’t remember various things. What Comey did remember, however, confirms that the FBI could not verify the dossier submitted by former UK spy Christopher Steele – which the agency used as the foundation of a spy warrant application to surveil the Trump campaign. While Comey said the dossier came from “a reliable source with a track record, and it’s an important thing when you’re seeking a PC warrant,” he also admitted that the FBI was unable to corroborate the document’s claims.

“But what I understand by verified is we then try to replicate the source information so that it becomes FBI investigation and our conclusions rather than a reliable source’s,” Comey said, adding “That’s what I understand it, the difference to be. And that work wasn’t completed by the time I left in May of 2017, to my knowledge.” The FBI is required to fully vet information they submit to FISA courts, which they of course did not do in their haste to deploy a counterintelligence dragnet on the Trump campaign during the final months of the 2016 US election. Steele, meanwhile, was fired by the FBI for leaking information to the press while the agency was using him as a source. To get around this, the FBI went through former #4 DOJ official Bruce Ohr – who was demoted twice for lying about his contacts with Steele.

Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for the embattled research firm Fusion GPS on the Trump dossier. Fusion GPS hired Steele as part of their ongoing effort to investigate the Trump campaign and any ties with Russia. It was discovered in 2017 that Fusion GPS was being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the campaign’s law firm Perkins Coie to investigate any alleged ties between Trump and Russia. More importantly, the FBI used information from Steele, a foreign source who was openly antagonistic about Trump. In fact, Ohr told FBI officials that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president,” as stated in the House Intelligence Committee investigation memo. -Sara Carter

Comey’s confirmation echoes comments made in a string of emails quietly requested by House Republicans for declassification – as reported last week by The Hill’s John Solomon. The emails – kept from Congressional investigators for over two years, “included then-FBI Director James Comey, key FBI investigators in the Russia probe and lawyers in the DOJ’s national security division,” according to the report – and took place in early to mid-October of 2016, prior to the FBI successfully securing a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

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In a worst case scenario, the US will use this as a reason to attack now, before Americans figure out they can’t win.

• Russian Stealth Jets To Be Armed With New Hypersonic Missiles (ZH)

The advanced Sukhoi Su-57 multipurpose jet, Russia’s first domestically produced fifth-generation stealth fighter, will be armed with new hypersonic missiles, according to a Russian military source. “In accordance with Russia’s State Armament Program for 2018-2027, Su-57 jet fighters will be equipped with hypersonic missiles,” a Russian defense industry source toldTASS news agency on December 06. “The jet fighters will receive missiles with characteristics similar to that of the Kinzhal missiles, but with inter-body placement and smaller size,” the source added. Moscow said the new Kinzhal (“Dagger”), a nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missile, can hit speeds of up to Mach 10 and can perform evasive maneuvers that can render NATO’s US-led missile defense system completely “useless.”

The missile can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads with a range of about 1,200 miles. The new hypersonic missile will be much smaller than the current Kinzhal; this is due to size constraints of fitting the weapon inside the stealth aircraft’s weapons bay. The alternative would be mounting the missile on the outside of the plane, but that would increase the jet’s radar signature. No details within the report explain about a timetable for the development or the planned specifications for the new missiles. The Defense Ministry would neither confirm nor deny the information. The Kinzhal missile is currently being tested in field training exercises.

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The US needs to clean up its pharma, along with the entire healthcare system.

• Medical Researchers Still Routinely Hiding Funding From Big Pharma (RT)

A huge proportion of scientists and doctors publishing in major medical magazines continue to conceal ties to corporations relevant to their research, while punishment for not declaring interests remains weak, says a new report. “The system is broken,” Mehraneh Dorna Jafari, assistant professor of surgery at the University of California, Irvine, told the New York Times and ProPublica, an investigative journalism non-profit. Jafari was one of the authors of a landmark study published back in August that took the names of the 100 doctors receiving the most funding from medical equipment and drug manufacturers, and then studied whether they declared a potential conflict of interest in their published research. Only 37 did.

For example, Dr. Howard A. Burris III, has been elected as the president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) that includes 40,000 members, and can make influential recommendations on cancer drugs worth tens of billions of dollars. Companies where Burris is an employee have been paid $114,000 in speaking fees, and $8 million in research funding by private corporations. Yet in none of his last 50 articles did the man, whose bio boasts that he “was selected by his peers as a ‘Giant of Cancer Care’ for his achievements in drug development,” think it was necessary to declare any potential biases resulting from corporate involvement.

In the latest investigation, the Times and ProPublica revealed that Dr. Robert J. Alpern, the dean of the Yale School of Medicine, writing about an experimental kidney disease drug failed to state that he was on the board of the company producing it. When journalists approached the publisher of the article, the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, its editor discovered that all 12 authors of the article in question had interests they failed to declare.

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Really? Salvini is about to take on the Pope?

• Italian Priests Vow To Open Church Doors To Evicted Immigrants (G.)

Italian priests have declared their willingness to “open the church doors of every single parish” to people expelled from reception centres as an anti-immigration law from Italy’s rightwing government threatens to make thousands homeless. The so-called “Salvini decree” – named after Matteo Salvini, the interior minister and leader of the far-right League – left hundreds in legal limbo when its removal of humanitarian protection for those not eligible for refugee status but otherwise unable to return home was applied by several Italian cities soon after its approval by parliament earlier this month. The Catholic church expressed its profound disapproval immediately after the vote.

The Vatican’s position is “very clear”, its secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said last week. “You don’t leave migrants in the street … A profound sense of solidarity must prevail. You cannot put people in this position. You must always focus on people and their rights.” According to Italy’s ministry of the interior, between 2016 and 2017 Italy provided humanitarian protection to 39,145 asylum seekers, who under the Salvini decree risk being made homeless within weeks. In early December, a letter announcing the expulsion of 50 people was sent to the reception centre in Mineo, Sicily: the largest in Europe after the Moria camp in Greece.

The bishop of Caltagirone, Monsignor Calogero Peri, said he was prepared to provide 40 beds in nearby facilities owned by the church to welcome people who risk expulsion. “And if there are not enough beds? I have already spoken with other bishops: we will open the church doors of every single parish under our control,” he said. “It’s not a question of politics. It’s a matter of protecting individuals. Imagine this: in Italy now it is a crime to abandon dogs, but it is not a crime to abandon people. Even worse, abandoning men, women and children is now the law.”

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A little nothing news. But cute.

• Why Greeks Traditionally Decorate a Boat Instead of a Christmas Tree (GR)

The most traditional symbol you will find in Greece during the holidays is a small boat decorated with lights, usually placed in the main square of a town and close to the more international Christmas tree. To karavaki, or small boat is rooted in the traditions of a country with a symbiotic relationship with the sea. In fact on the many Greek islands the Christmas boats remain the most popular ornament of the holiday season. Different legends explain the tradition of the Christmas Greek boat. One of them is related to Saint Nicholas (Agios Nikolaos), the Patron Saint of Sailors. This saint is celebrated on December 6, the day when many households start decorating their houses for Christmas. Some agree that this is why boats are decorated, in order to honor the saint.

It’s also true that Greece is proud of the large amount of sailors, fishermen and intrepid captains the country has, which makes them as a symbol of local identity. Men would often be away for months at a time, and those back home would be anxiously waiting for their return. On the islands, the wives, mothers, and daughters of seaman used to spend the cold and dark winter months with their heart and mind at sea. There, their men were battling the stormy seas during the holiday season. These were months of expectation, hope, and prayer for their safe return. The joy of seeing the boats coming back, approaching the shores, made the women celebrate in relief. The boat is a symbol to honor those brave men coming back home.

The tradition wanted the small wooden boats placed inside close to the fireplace and pointing towards the center of the house, never towards the door. They were also lovingly decorated to give a warm welcome to the men of the household. Even kids prepared their own boats with paper and chips of wood, and on Christmas Eve, they used these little boats to collect the treats they had received when singing the carols (kalanda) from house to house.

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Don’t miss the fantastic Adam Curtis. He knows more about what makes our world go round than just about anyone. Watch his docs, all of them.

• The Antidote To Civilisational Collapse (Adam Curtis)

Adam Curtis: “HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling.

I thought “that’s a brilliant title” because, although we are not in any way really like the Soviet Union, there is a similar feeling in our present day. Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same. There is a sense of everything being slightly unreal; that you fight a war that seems to cost you nothing and it has no consequences at home; that money seems to grow on trees; that goods come from China and don’t seem to cost you anything; that phones make you feel liberated but that maybe they’re manipulating you but you’re not quite sure. It’s all slightly odd and slightly corrupt.

[..] No one is really sure what Trump represents. My working theory is that he’s part of the pantomime-isation of politics. Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go “This is terrible, this is outrageous,” and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it’s like they’re together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go “Boo!!”. Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but no one is really analysing it.

This is the problem with a lot of journalism, especially liberal journalism at the moment. It’s locked together with those people in the theatre. If you look at the New York Times, for example, it’s continually about that feedback loop between what Trump has said and the reaction of liberal elements in the society. It’s led to a great narrowing of journalism. So in a way, he is part of the hypernormal situation because it’s a politics of pantomime locked together with its critics. [..] ..It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a distraction from what’s really happening in the world. I would argue that there is a sense—in a lot of liberal journalism—of unreality. They’re locked into describing the pantomime politics and they’re not looking to what Mr Michael Pence is really up to, and what’s really happening outside the theatre.

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Debt Rattle December 7 2014

Dec 072014
 
 December 7, 2014  Posted by at 11:53 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Arthur Rothstein Accident on US 40 between Hagerstown and Cumberland, Maryland Nov 1936

• OPEC And American Shale Keep The Oil Price Spiralling Downwards (Guardian)
• Oil Poised to Extend Drop After Hitting Five-Year Low (Bloomberg)
• Fossil Fuel Companies “The Sub-Prime Assets Of The Future” (Telegraph)
• Osborne Oversees Biggest Fossil Fuel Boom Since North Sea Oil (Guardian)
• Delinquent US Car Loans Up 27% From Last Year (NY Times)
• Goldman Needs Volcker Delay to Avoid Private-Equity Losses (Bloomberg)
• Wells Fargo Breaks Citigroup’s 2001 Record for Bank Value (Bloomberg)
• Russia Braces For An Economic Winter (Observer)
• Why A Moscow Meltdown Could Spread Around The Globe (Observer)
• Clashes At Greek Protests To Mark Police Shooting (BBC)
• Angry Families Of MH17 Crash Victims Seek UN Investigation (Reuters)
• Ukraine’s Made-in-USA Finance Minister (Robert Parry)
• Prosecutor Freezes Accounts Of Former Vatican Bank Heads (Reuters)
• Australian Banks Seen Needing $25 Billion After Inquiry (Bloomberg)
• Minimum Viable Sociopathy (Dmitry Orlov)
• Archbishop Calls For £150 Million State-Backed Food Bank System (Daily Mail)
• Hunger in UK Shocks Me More Than Africa (Archbishop Of Canterbury)
• Has Modern Art Exhausted Its Power To Shock? (BBC)
• California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years (Bloomberg)

” .. the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a huge increase in the number of investors hedging on crude hitting $40.

• OPEC And American Shale Keep The Oil Price Spiralling Downwards (Guardian)

Oil prices were back near five-year lows – below $70 per barrel – at the end of last week as commodity traders, analysts and governments struggled to come up with new forecasts for 2015. The benchmark, Brent blend, had recovered from a major drop in the aftermath of last month’s meeting of the oil producers’ cartel, Opec. However, it was back down at $69.17 on Friday as the market bet on a prolonged low in prices. Igor Sechin, Russia’s most senior oil official, warned that Opec’s unwillingness to cut production could push oil down to $60, while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a huge increase in the number of investors hedging on crude hitting $40. Forecasting the future price of oil has always been fraught.

There were few warnings in the first half of the year that prices were set to plunge by 40% from a June high of $115. Analysts at Citi are now expecting Brent to average $80 over the next 12 months, while their counterparts at Natixis believe it could fall as low as $74 – and that the US benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, will slump below $70. Standard Chartered described Opec’s decision to keep the production target unchanged as “extremely negative for oil prices for 2015” and has cut next year’s Brent price forecast by $16 a barrel to $85. The reasons for the cuts are faltering growth in demand as the global economy continues to stutter, plus soaring production from the shale fields of Texas and Pennsylvania.

Lower prices have also been supported by a relatively benign geopolitical environment, because energy supplies have not been endangered by the Russian stand-off with the west over Ukraine or Islamic State’s advances in Syria. A divided Opec is now hoping that falling prices will be devastating for higher-cost US frackers, forcing them to shut down output and gradually bring balance to the wider oil markets. But according to Paul Stevens, oil expert at Chatham House, a similar strategy in the late 1980s did not encourage North Sea and other producers to halt production and the price continued to slide downwards.

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“We’re way oversold in both Brent and WTI, not to mention the products, and the market’s not responding ..”

• Oil Poised to Extend Drop After Hitting Five-Year Low (Bloomberg)

West Texas Intermediate and Brent crudes are poised to decline from the lowest closing levels in more than five years after shrugging off a sign that the market has dropped too fast. The 14-day relative strength index (BCOM) for WTI slipped to 27.0364 yesterday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Investors typically start buying contracts when the reading is below 30. The 14-day RSI for Brent slipped to 23.6843. The move highlights the extent of the bear market in the face of technical support. “We’re way oversold in both Brent and WTI, not to mention the products, and the market’s not responding,” Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities said by phone yesterday. “A market that ignores these bullish signals is heading much lower.”

Futures fell 1.5% in New York and 0.8% in London yesterday. State-run Saudi Arabian Oil extended its discount for Arab Light sales to Asia next month to $2 a barrel below a regional benchmark, according to a company statement Dec. 4. That’s the lowest in at least 14 years. The slide in prices accelerated as the dollar surged to a five-year high, curbing the appeal of commodities as a store of value. WTI for January delivery dropped 97 cents to $65.84 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday. It was the lowest settlement since July 29, 2009. Prices are down 33% this year.

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There’s a lot of uncertainty about how and to what extent climate agreements will result in stranded assets. Investment in fossil fuels carries a lot of risk, for yet another reason.

• Fossil Fuel Companies “The Sub-Prime Assets Of The Future” (Telegraph)

Investing in fossil fuels is becoming increasingly risky because global action to tackle climate change will curb demand, forcing companies to leave unprofitable reserves in the ground, Ed Davey, the energy secretary, has warned. Financial authorities must examine the risks posed by coal, oil and gas companies to prevent pension funds investing in what could become “the sub-prime assets of the future”, Mr Davey said. The comments are Mr Davey’s first intervention into the debate over the “carbon bubble”, the theory that the world’s existing fossil fuel reserves are overvalued because the majority must be left unburned in the ground if extremes of global warming are to be avoided.

Mr Davey told the Telegraph: “One has got to worry about the investments for pensioners. “If pension funds are investing in companies or banks have on their balance sheets huge amounts of assets in fossil fuels, and those assets don’t give the return that people expect – because of changes in technology where low-carbon becomes cheaper or because of the world having to take action against carbon emissions – one has got to protect those pensioners and those investments.”

Keeping global warming within 2C (3.6F), the level scientists say is necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change, will require the world to slash its carbon dioxide emissions, phasing out the unabated burning of fossil fuels for electricity. UN talks are ongoing in Lima this week with the aim of achieving a global emission reduction agreement next year. Mr Davey singled out coal – the dirtiest of the fossil fuels – as “the short-term biggest worry by a long way” as countries including China commit to cap their coal use. “Investing in new coal mines is going to get very risky,” he said.

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The timing is exquisite.

• Osborne Oversees Biggest Fossil Fuel Boom Since North Sea Oil (Guardian)

George Osborne has sparked the biggest boom in UK fossil fuel investment since the North Sea oil and gas industry was founded in the 1970s. Analysis of new Treasury data also shows investment in clean energy has plummeted this year and is now exceeded by fossil fuels, while road and airport building is soaring. After years of coalition infighting over green energy, the stark shift marks a major victory for the chancellor. But it conflicts with David Cameron’s recent statement that climate change is “a threat to our national security and to economic prosperity” and his 2010 pledge to the lead the “greenest government ever”. UK ministers are currently at UN climate talks in Peru arguing for strong action against global warming.

In Wednesday’s autumn statement, Osborne added £430m to the billions in tax breaks he has granted the fossil fuel sector since 2012. Taxpayers will also now fund seismic exploration to help companies find more oil and gas and will pay £31m for shale gas research drilling plus another £5m to “ensure the public is better engaged” with fracking. Osborne said the North Sea tax breaks “demonstrate our commitment to the tens of thousands of jobs that depend on this great British industry”. Joan Walley MP, who heads parliament’s environmental audit committee, said: “Taxpayers should not be propping up the fossil fuel industry in the 21st century.

Tax breaks should be used to support firms that come up with innovative clean energy solutions, not to keep us drilling for the fossil energy fuelling climate change.” Matthew Spencer, the director of the thinktank Green Alliance, whose experts performed the new analysis, accused Osborne of political manoeuvring before the general election. “A series of short-term tactical decisions have reversed what was a very encouraging picture for UK infrastructure. These stark figures show that you can’t focus on oil extraction and road building and expect to deliver a cleaner, leaner economy.”

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But all is well?!

• Delinquent US Car Loans Up 27% From Last Year (NY Times)

An increasing number of borrowers are falling behind on their car payments, even as the total amount of outstanding debt reaches new heights, according to the latest report by Experian, the credit and research firm. In a presentation on Wednesday, Experian said the balance of loans that were 60 days delinquent increased 27%, to roughly $4 billion, in the third quarter from the same period a year ago. Signs of trouble in the market come after a significant increase in lending to people with damaged credit and limited financial means. Analysts have warned that a loosening of underwriting standards for subprime auto loans could cause widespread losses in the financial system because much of the debt has been securitized and bought by investors around the globe. Some of the highest delinquency rates in the quarter are concentrated across the South in Mississippi, South Carolina and Alabama. North Dakota had the lowest delinquency rate.

Finance companies, which tend to focus more on subprime customers than traditional banks, had the largest increases in delinquencies in the third quarter. As the delinquencies have mounted, so has the regulatory scrutiny. Subprime auto lenders have faced an onslaught of scrutiny from regulators and prosecutors, worried that the high-cost loans take advantage of some of the nation’s most vulnerable borrowers. The examinations have touched on virtually every player in the broader subprime auto lending ecosystem from used car dealers to lenders. In the latest chapter, the American Honda Finance Corporation, a lending unit of the automaker, disclosed on Tuesday that the company was bracing for an enforcement action from the Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over concerns that it gives more costly loans to minority borrowers. The authorities, the company said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday, notified the lender last month about the looming action.

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Here’s betting they’ll get it.

• Goldman Needs Volcker Delay to Avoid Private-Equity Losses (Bloomberg)

Goldman Sachs has $7 billion invested in private equity that it might have to sell at a loss. For Morgan Stanley, it’s $2.5 billion. The big sums explain why Wall Street has been lobbying regulators to delay a July deadline for complying with the Volcker Rule, which restricts banks from investing in private equity as part of a ban on making market bets with their own capital. Banks argue that if they dump holdings quickly, they will have to accept discount prices. Analysts and lawyers for the financial industry say Wall Street’s concerns have begun to make headway with the Federal Reserve, which plans to decide on an extension soon. “There’s considerable pressure the Fed is feeling in that they don’t want institutions to have a bloodbath trying to divest funds,” said Kevin Petrasic, a partner at Paul Hastings in Washington. “The Fed has been indicating flexibility.”

The Volcker deadline underscores the tension regulators face between enforcing rules meant to curb risk-taking and responding to banks’ complaints that many Dodd-Frank Act reforms aren’t workable. The Fed is deciding what to do after lawmakers lambasted it at congressional hearings last month for weak oversight of Wall Street. Before the 2008 financial crisis, banks purchased shares in thousands of private-equity and venture-capital funds. The money invested was used to buy stakes in private companies, meaning it’s locked up for years until the businesses are sold. When Congress included the Volcker Rule in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, it realized banks might have difficulty dumping holdings. As a result, lawmakers authorized the Fed to put the deadline off for several years. Banks want an extension until 2022, which would allow them to keep their private-equity investments until they expire. Fed General Counsel Scott Alvarez told a conference of banking lawyers last month that the central bank will make a decision soon.

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Hardly a recovery, if there’s one at all, but banks are worth more than before the crisis. This is us. This is what we do.

• Wells Fargo Breaks Citigroup’s 2001 Record for Bank Value (Bloomberg)

Wells Fargo finished trading yesterday as the most valuable U.S. bank ever, surpassing Citigroup’s 2001 record. Wells Fargo closed with a market capitalization of $285.5 billion, based on 5.19 billion shares outstanding on Oct. 31, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That beats the previous record set by Citigroup on Feb. 5, 2001, when its value reached $283.4 billion, the data show. Wells Fargo, which counts Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway as its largest shareholder, doubled its size in 2008 by outmaneuvering New York-based Citigroup to purchase Wachovia Corp. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf made one of out every four U.S. mortgages last year and now oversees the most U.S. bank branches.

“Our focus is on doing what is right for our customers every day, and we are pleased our investors place their confidence in Wells Fargo,” Ancel Martinez, a bank spokesman, said in a statement. Wells Fargo rose 1% to $55.03 in New York, and the stock’s 21% gain this year tops the 7.7% advance for the KBW Bank Index of 24 U.S. lenders. Berkshire’s stake in the San Francisco-based bank is valued at more than $25 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

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Russia will act when it’s had enough of this.

• Russia Braces For An Economic Winter (Observer)

A website that was going viral on Russian social networks last week shows the rouble-dollar exchange rate, the rouble-euro exchange rate and the price of Brent crude changing in real time against a backdrop of slowly breaking waves, as soothing music plays in the background. “Russian zen: meaningless and merciless”, reads the bottom of the page Zenrus.ru. It is a play on a famous quote that Russian revolt is “meaningless and merciless.” A zen-like calm is probably hard to come by for those watching the exchange rate and the price of oil: the rouble fell to new all-time lows of more than 54 to the dollar last week after the Opec oil producers’ group decided not to reduce production, which would have bolstered sinking oil prices. Russia is especially vulnerable to those prices, since energy exports make up half of its budget, and on Monday its currency recorded its largest single-day decline since the Russian financial crisis of 1998.

In all, the rouble has sunk by more than 40% this year as Russia has been buffeted by sanctions over its role in the Ukraine crisis and steep falls in the oil price. By the end of the week Brent was hovering below $70 a barrel, down from more than $105 at the start of the year. The picture of Russia’s economic future is grim, despite the rosy outlook President Vladimir Putin tried to put on it in his annual address to the federal assembly on Thursday. Inflation has been rising, and recession next year is all but certain. On Tuesday, the economic development ministry reduced its GDP growth forecast for 2015 from 1.2% to –0.8%. State-owned banks have sought help from the government after the Ukraine sanctions cut them off from the western financial industry and its cheaper credit.

According to Vladimir Tikhomirov, an economist at Russian bank BKF, the two main factors responsible for Russia’s economic woes – sanctions and a low oil price – probably won’t change any time soon. “Oil has a stronger effect on the economy than sanctions, and the oil price and sanctions are speeding up macroeconomic processes that were already there,” Tikhomirov says. “The economy was slowing down due to structural difficulties even when oil prices were high. I think that next year there won’t be new sanctions but the current sanctions will remain; I think next year the oil price will be around $80 a barrel; and I think that the economy will shrink.”

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Merkel herself has said it would be a bad thing if Russia goes into a financial crisis.

• Why A Moscow Meltdown Could Spread Around The Globe (Observer)

Russia matters. It mattered in 1998 when the shock waves from its debt default reverberated around the world. And it would matter again should the plunging oil price lead to economic collapse. That’s despite the fact that Russia is a massive land mass with a relatively small economy. It accounts for only 3% of global GDP and it is dominated by an energy sector that is responsible for 70% of exports. To an extent, the structure of Russia’s economy should mitigate contagion risks. Lacking a modern manufacturing sector, it is not vital for global supply chains and, in theory, any other energy producer could make good the disruption to oil and gas supplies in the event of a deep and damaging recession. But there are at least five ways in which a crisis for Russia could spread. Russia’s immediate problems have been caused by the sharp drop in the price of crude and it is not the only one to be suffering. Venezuela and Iran are finding it hard to cope with oil down at $70 a barrel. If Russia goes, it will be a case of: who’s next?

Second, Russia still has close economic links with eastern Europe, so a collapse would have serious consequences for countries such as Poland and an already imploding Ukraine. Western Europe, too, would be affected if for any reason gas supplies through Russia’s pipeline were cut off. Third, confidence would be hit. Germany’s weak economic performance since the spring can, in part, be attributed to the gloomier economic mood. The slowdown in the rest of the eurozone has probably had a bigger impact on German activity but the tension between Moscow and Kiev has certainly not helped. Russia might be enough to tip Germany into recession, which in turn would be enough to ensure that the European Central Bank began a quantitative easing programme.

Fourth, nobody is quite sure how Vladimir Putin, pictured, would respond to the most challenging economic circumstances since 1998. Any confidence effects from an economic crisis would be exacerbated by the knowledge that Russia is controlled by a president able to make felt his country’s still considerable geo-political and military clout. Finally, the assumption is that financial market exposure to Russia is relatively limited given that overseas banks had $209bn (£134bn) of loans to Russia when sanctions were imposed in March. On the face of it, western investors do not look all that vulnerable and have had time to get their money out. But that was also the assumption in 1998, when Barclays had to set aside £250m to cover its Russian losses. Financial trades are now so complex and leveraged, it is impossible to know for sure how big losses might be this time.

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Is Greece set to explode again?

• Clashes At Greek Protests To Mark Police Shooting (BBC)

Clashes have erupted in the capital of Greece during protests marking six years since police shot dead an unarmed teenager. At least 5,000 demonstrators marched in Athens on Saturday. Some attacked shops and hurled petrol bombs at riot police. Police officers used tear gas and a water cannon to disperse protesters. The demonstrators had been marking the anniversary of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos’ death. He was shot by an officer who has since been jailed. Mr Grigoropoulos’ killing on 6 December 2008 sparked violent riots across Greece, with cars being set alight and shops looted in a number of cities. Clashes have also broken out on previous anniversaries of his death. On Saturday, anti-establishment protesters attacked banks and damaged shops and bus stops.

At one point, demonstrators looted a clothes shop and set fire to the merchandise in the street, the Associated Press news agency reported. According to Reuters, police said they detained close to 100 protesters. Clashes primarily took place in Athen’s Exarchia neighbourhood, but violence was also reported in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece. No injuries were reported in either city. Protesters have also been expressing support for Nikos Romanos, a friend of Mr Grigoropoulos who witnessed his death. Romanos, 21, has been jailed for attempted bank robbery. He is currently on hunger strike, demanding study leave after he was accepted onto a university course.

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WHile the government can’t stop blabbing about respect for vistims and their families, the familes themselves say: “The Netherlands “has completely botched” the fact-finding investigation and the legal framework of the case..” “There is no coordination, there is no leadership whatsoever (by) Holland.”

• Angry Families Of MH17 Crash Victims Seek UN Investigation (Reuters)

Relatives of MH17 crash victims, angered by what they see as Dutch mishandling of inquiries into the disaster, want a special U.N. envoy to launch an international investigation. A letter sent to Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Friday, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, said Dutch officials had failed to build a case. They asked that inquiries by the Safety Board and prosecution service be handed over to the United Nations. Rutte should “request the U.N. to appoint a special envoy to take over,” said the letter written by Van der Goen Attorneys. Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was downed on July 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew, two-thirds of them Dutch. Experts say the most likely cause was a ground-to-air missile fired from territory held by pro-Russian separatists. The Dutch launched the largest criminal investigation in their history after the crash. This week, trucks are carrying pieces of the plane home, but much of the wreckage still lies in Ukrainian fields.

Dutch investigators, leading a case involving 11 countries, have not concluded how the plane was shot down or identified suspects. The Netherlands “has completely botched” the fact-finding investigation and the legal framework of the case, said the letter, sent on behalf of 20 relatives from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. Dutch prosecutors have been unable to access the crash site, in a war zone disputed by Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels, or not met international requirements to secure evidence, the letter said. “Nobody knows who is doing what,” said Bob van der Goen, a spokesman for the law firm. “There is no coordination, there is no leadership whatsoever (by) Holland.” Rutte said on Friday the Dutch teams were returning to the Netherlands. “We have done everything we could. In view of the safety situation and the weather, we cannot do anything more right now,” he said. An international inquiry is the only way to identify who shot down the plane and ensure they are brought to court, the letter said.

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What a story, the recent – foreign – additions to the Kiev government.

• Ukraine’s Made-in-USA Finance Minister (Robert Parry)

Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a former U.S. State Department officer who was granted Ukrainian citizenship only this week, headed a U.S. government-funded investment project for Ukraine that involved substantial insider dealings, including $1 million-plus fees to a management company that she also controlled. Jaresko served as president and chief executive officer of Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) with $150 million to spur business activity in Ukraine. She also was cofounder and managing partner of Horizon Capital which managed WNISEF’s investments at a rate of 2 to 2.5% of committed capital, fees exceeding $1 million in recent years, according to WNISEF’s 2012 annual report.

The growth of that insider dealing at the U.S.-taxpayer-funded WNISEF is further underscored by the number of paragraphs committed to listing the “related party transactions,” i.e., potential conflicts of interest, between an early annual report from 2003 and the one a decade later. In the 2003 report, the “related party transactions” were summed up in two paragraphs, with the major item a $189,700 payment to a struggling computer management company where WNISEF had an investment. In the 2012 report, the section on “related party transactions” covered some two pages and included not only the management fees to Jaresko’s Horizon Capital ($1,037,603 in 2011 and $1,023,689 in 2012) but also WNISEF’s co-investments in projects with the Emerging Europe Growth Fund [EEGF], where Jaresko was founding partner and chief executive officer.

Jaresko’s Horizon Capital also managed EEGF. From 2007 to 2011, WNISEF co-invested $4.25 million with EEGF in Kerameya LLC, a Ukrainian brick manufacturer, and WNISEF sold EEGF 15.63% of Moldova’s Fincombank for $5 million, the report said. It also listed extensive exchanges of personnel and equipment between WNISEF and Horizon Capital. Though it’s difficult for an outsider to ascertain the relative merits of these insider deals, they could reflect negatively on Jaresko’s role as Ukraine’s new finance minister given the country’s reputation for corruption and cronyism, a principal argument for the U.S.-backed “regime change” that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February.

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Small fish.

• Prosecutor Freezes Accounts Of Former Vatican Bank Heads (Reuters)

The Vatican’s top prosecutor has frozen €16 million in bank accounts owned by two former Vatican bank managers and a lawyer as part of an investigation into the sale of Vatican-owned real estate in the 2000s, according to the freezing order and other legal documents. Prosecutor Gian Piero Milano said he suspected the three men, former bank president Angelo Caloia, ex-director general Lelio Scaletti, and lawyer Gabriele Liuzzo, of embezzling money while managing the sale of 29 buildings sold by the Vatican bank to mainly Italian buyers between 2001 and 2008, according to a copy of the freezing order reviewed by Reuters. The money in the three men’s bank accounts “stems from embezzlement they were engaged in,” Milano said in the October 27 sequester order.

Milano’s investigation follows an audit of the Vatican bank by non-Vatican financial consultants commissioned last year by the bank’s current management. The Vatican bank earlier this year also filed a legal complaint against the three men. The men have not been charged. The Vatican spokesman on Saturday issued a statement confirming the freezing but gave no names, amounts or other details. The Vatican bank said in a separate statement that it had pressed charges against the three as part of its “commitment to transparency and zero tolerance, including with regard to matters that relate to a more distant past”. The bank statement also gave no details, citing “the ongoing judicial enquiry”.

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For starters.

• Australian Banks Seen Needing $25 Billion After Inquiry (Bloomberg)

Commonwealth Bank of Australia and its three main competitors may need as much as A$30 billion ($25 billion) after a government-commissioned inquiry called for “unquestionably strong” capital levels, analysts said. The shortfall is based on lenders needing to boost levels to within the top quartile of their global peers and set aside additional funds against potential losses on home mortgages, as recommended by the Financial Systems Inquiry report released today in Sydney by Treasurer Joe Hockey. Australia’s major lenders hold about 10% to 11.6% of their assets as Tier 1 capital compared with at least 12.2% at the world’s safest banks, the government’s first inquiry into the financial system since 1997 said. Given banks’ reliance on overseas investors for debt funding, the financial system must be robust, the report said,

“The onus on capital is in line with global changes and Australia has to fall in line,” John Buonaccorsi, a Sydney-based analyst at CIMB Group Holdings Bhd. said in a phone interview after the report was released. “I don’t expect a straight capital raising yet.” Australia’s largest banks are initially more likely to resort to dividend reinvestment plans, where investors swap all or part of their dividend for new shares, and limiting increases in payout ratios, he added. Buonaccorsi expects a shortfall between A$25 billion and A$30 billion. Omkar Joshi, who helps oversee A$1 billion as an investment analyst at Watermark Funds Management, estimated a A$15 billion to A$20 billion gap. Their predictions were based on an average mortgage risk weight of 25% to 30% and systemically important bank buffer of 2%.

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“.. if the progress of our lives starts looking too much like a random walk, then we tend to start asking ourselves difficult questions, like “What’s it all about?” and drinking too much. And that causes our walk to get even closer to random. ”

• Minimum Viable Sociopathy (Dmitry Orlov)

If you simply wander aimlessly through life, breathing oxygen and eating and excreting organic matter, then you will still get somewhere. Statistically, a blind-drunk sailor who walks out of a bar will, on average, while stumbling along on his way to nowhere in particular, cover the distance of √n steps for every n steps he takes. This is known as a random walk, or Brownian motion, which is fine for molecules at anything above 0ºK, and perhaps for drunken sailors too, but most of us sentient beings want our lives to have a bit of meaning. And if the progress of our lives starts looking too much like a random walk, then we tend to start asking ourselves difficult questions, like “What’s it all about?” and drinking too much. And that causes our walk to get even closer to random. And therein lies a great danger, because this sort of downward spiral inevitably ends with somebody else telling you “What’s it all about” and what it is you have to do, supposedly for your own good, though it hardly ever is.

There is also the opposite danger. If you keep your eyes fixed on your goal and make a concerted effort to make n steps of progress in its direction for every n steps you take, then you will quickly happen upon a wall with a gate in it, and a guard at that gate will demand to see your permit, degree, qualification or certificate before letting you pass through that gate. And the process of you getting that permit, degree, qualification or certificate will end with somebody else telling you what your goal ought to be. The goal is, universally, to accumulate things: dollars or stripes on your uniform or publications and citations, or earwax. Details don’t matter, but what matters is that these things never have much of anything at all to do with your original goal.

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We need more people like Welby.

• Archbishop Calls For £150 Million State-Backed Food Bank System (Daily Mail)

A new row over food banks erupted last night after a report backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury called for a £150 million state-backed system to combat hunger in Britain. The Most Reverend Justin Welby appeared to be on course for a clash with David Cameron after calling on the Prime Minister to reverse his decision not to take European funds to boost UK food banks. Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday, Archbishop Welby makes a powerful call for more help to prevent families going hungry. The Archbishop is to launch a Parliamentary report in Westminster tomorrow, and calls on the Government to take ‘quick action’ to implement its recommendations in full. Separately, this newspaper has obtained details of the report’s radical proposals, which call for:

  1. A new publicly funded body, Feeding Britain, involving eight Cabinet Ministers, to work towards a ‘hunger free Britain’.
  2. Bigger food banks, called Food Banks Plus, to distribute more free food and advise people how to claim benefits and make ends meet.
  3. A rise in the minimum wage and the provision free school meals during school holidays for children from poor families.
  4. New measures to make it harder to strip people of benefits for breaking welfare rules – including soccer style ‘yellow cards’ instead of instant bans.
  5. Action to make supermarkets give more food to the poor.

The report by the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in Britain comes amid an intense debate over welfare and poverty. Experts claimed that Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement last week would mean massive cuts in welfare in the coming years. Praising food bank volunteers who have rescued the poor from hunger, the Welby-backed report says they have achieved the ‘equivalent to a social Dunkirk.’ Notably, it adds: ‘This extraordinary achievement has been done without the assistance of central government. If the Prime Minister wants to meet his Big Society it is here.’

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The growing poverty in Britain is indeed a disgrace.

• Hunger in UK Shocks Me More Than Africa (Archbishop Of Canterbury)

In one corner of a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo was a large marquee. Inside were children, all ill. They had been separated from family, friends, those who looked after them. Perhaps, mostly having disabilities, they had been abandoned in the panic of the militia attack that drove them from their homes. Now they were hungry. It was deeply shocking but, tragically, expected. A few weeks later in England, I was talking to some people – a mum, dad and one child – in a food bank. They were ashamed to be there. The dad talked miserably. He said they had each been skipping a day’s meals once a week in order to have more for the child, but then they needed new tyres for the car so they could get to work at night, and just could not make ends meet. So they had to come to a food bank.They were treated with respect, love even, by the volunteers from local churches. But they were hungry, and ashamed to be hungry. I found their plight more shocking. It was less serious, but it was here.

And they weren’t careless with what they had – they were just up against it. It shocked me that being up against it at the wrong time brought them to this stage. There are many like them. But we can do something about it. Two weeks ago, people in churches up and down the land listened to the passage in St Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus describes who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When Christ returns, He will say: ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom… for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.’ The good people are surprised, they don’t remember helping anyone so powerful, and think He has mixed them up with someone else. Jesus tells them: ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these… you did it to me.’ Those who did not give food to the hungry or a drink to the thirsty find out God has taken their lack of kindness into account too.

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Art reflects society before society reflects upon itself.

• Has Modern Art Exhausted Its Power To Shock? (BBC)

Modern art’s desire to shock and to defy cliche has become a cliche in itself, and spawned a culture of fakery, argues Roger Scruton. “To thine own self be true,” says Shakespeare’s Polonius, “and thou canst be false to no man.” Live in truth, urged Vaclav Havel. “Let the lie come into the world,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “but not through me.” How seriously should we take these pronouncements, and how do we obey them? There are two kinds of untruth – lying and faking. The person who is lying says what he or she does not believe. The person who is faking says what he believes, though only for the time being and for the purpose in hand. Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he has created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself is a member.

In all ages people have lied in order to escape the consequences of their actions, and the first step in moral education is to teach children not to tell fibs. But faking is a cultural phenomenon, more prominent in some periods than in others. There is very little faking in the society described by Homer, for example, or in that described by Chaucer. By the time of Shakespeare, however, poets and playwrights are beginning to take a strong interest in this new human type. In Shakespeare’s King Lear the wicked sisters Goneril and Regan belong to a world of fake emotion, persuading themselves and their father that they feel the deepest love, when in fact they are entirely heartless. But they don’t really know themselves to be heartless – if they did, they could not behave so brazenly. The tragedy of King Lear begins when the real people – Kent, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester – are driven out by the fakes.

The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is Molière’s Tartuffe, the religious impostor who takes control of a household through a display of scheming piety. Like Shakespeare, Moliere perceives that faking goes to the very heart of the person engaged in it. Tartuffe is not simply a hypocrite, who pretends to ideals that he does not believe in. He is a fabricated person, who believes in his own ideals since he is just as illusory as they are. Tartuffe’s faking is a matter of sanctimonious religion. With the decline of religion during the 19th Century there came about a new kind of faking. The romantic poets and painters turned their backs on religion and sought salvation through art. They believed in the genius of the artist, endowed with a special capacity to transcend the human condition in creative ways, breaking all the rules in order to achieve a new order of experience. Art became an avenue to the transcendental, the gateway to a higher kind of knowledge.

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At least.

• California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years (Bloomberg)

Record rains fell in California this week. They’re not enough to change the course of what scientists are now calling the region’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years. Just how bad has California’s drought been? Modern measurements already showed it’s been drier than the 1930s dustbowl, worse than the historic droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s not all. New research going back further than the Viking conquests in Europe still can’t find a drought as bad as this one. To go back that far, scientists consulted one of the longest records available: tree rings.

Tighter rings mean drier years, and by working with California’s exceptionally old trees, researchers from University of Minnesota and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute were able to reconstruct a chronology of drought in southern and central California. They identified 37 droughts that lasted three years or more, going back to the year 800. None were as extreme as the conditions we’re seeing now. One of the oddities of this drought is that conditions aren’t just driven by a lack of rainfall. There have been plenty of droughts in the past with less precipitation. (The drought of 1527 to 1529, for example, was killer.) What makes this drought exceptional is the heat. Extreme heat.

Higher temperatures increase evaporation and help deplete reservoirs and groundwater. The California heat this year is like nothing ever seen in modern temperature records. The chart above shows average year-to-date temperatures in the state from January through October for each year since 1895. California’s drought has withered pastures and forced farmers to uproot orchards and fallow farmland. It may cost the state $2.2 billion this year, with 17,100 jobs lost and 428,000 acres of land left unplanted. Tensions are still running high between farmers and salmon fishers, who rely on the same waters. Young salmon even qualified for migration assistance this year – via tanker truck – when river levels were too low to make the swim. The effects of prolonged drought are cumulative. Maps from the U.S. Drought Monitor below show the worsening of conditions over the last three years.

More than half of the state remains in “exceptional drought” (crimson). It’s a distinction marked by crop and pasture losses and water shortages that fall within the top two percentiles. Record rainfalls recorded across the state this week — including in San Francisco and Los Angeles — did little to overcome the state’s moisture deficit, the National Drought Mitigation Center reported yesterday.

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