Transgender Athlete Wins Four Female Running Competitions In A Row

Transgender Athlete Wins Four Female Running Competitions In A Row

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A transgender athlete who now identifies as a woman has won four different female running competitions so far this year alone after smashing a women’s 5000 meter record last year.

50-year-old Canadian Tiffany Newell ‘transitioned’ into a woman in 2017 and began competing in women’s sport in 2020 after claiming to have met World Athletics guidelines on testosterone levels.

Newell scooped first place at the 3000 meter for women aged 45-49 event at the Winter Mini Meet on January 8 and then also ranked first in the women’s 5000 meter for women aged 45-49 event just days later.

On February 5, Newell repeated the achievement by winning the the 1500 meter for women aged 45-49 competition.

After he turned 50, the athlete then won first place at the 1500 meter for women aged 50-54 competition held from February 23 to February 26 in Toronto.

The International Consortium on Women’s Sport, a group demanding the protection of female competitions, reacted to the news by asserting it was a blatant example of “sex discrimination.”

Last year, Newell smashed the Canadian record in the 5000 meter indoor running competition for women aged 45-49 held at Toronto’s York University, beating it by six seconds, while also winning the 800 meter women’s race at the same event.

During a previous interview, the athlete argued against the creation of a category solely for transgender competitors.

“The policy makes sense for non-binary athletes, but I don’t feel comfortable racing against men. It categorizes me in the sex I am not identified as,” Newell said.

“I am a woman, and I feel most comfortable racing against women or other transgender women. I believe an open category can work if athletes can continue to race against athletes of the same gender.”

“Despite protests from trans activists, studies have consistently affirmed that trans-identified male athletes retain a significant edge over their female counterparts, even after starting hormone therapy,” reports Reduxx.

“In 2020, a study released in the British Journal of Sport Medicine noted that trans-identified males were able to complete 31% more push-ups and 15% more sit-ups in one minute on average than a female Air Force service member. They also ran 1.5 miles 21% faster.

“But even after two years on testosterone suppression treatment, the males were still 12% faster on average than biological females.”

Earlier this month, American surfing icon Bethany Hamilton vowed to boycott the professional tour over a rule change that allows biological males who identify as women to compete against female surfers.

As we highlighted last year, swimming’s world governing body slapped a total ban on transgender athletes that have gone through any form of male puberty from taking part in women’s competitions.

poll conducted last summer found that only 28 per cent of Americans support transgender athletes being allowed to compete in female sports tournaments.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 18:05

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Elon Musk Allegedly Forming New AI Venture To Take On ‘Woke’ ChatGPT

Elon Musk Allegedly Forming New AI Venture To Take On ‘Woke’ ChatGPT

The first indication Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be taking on a new project to develop a ‘non-woke’ alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot was his recent reply to the chatbot’s founder Sam Altman. 

Another hint occurred last week. Musk commented on a video featuring long-time associate David Sachs who criticized ChatGPT’s woke “security layer.”

“There is mounting evidence OpenAI’s safety layer is very biased… If you thought trust and safety were bad under Vijaya or Yoel, wait until the AI does it,” said Sacks, regarding a content censoring program run by former Twitter General Counsel and Head of Legal Vijaya Gadde and former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth.

Musk commented on Sacks’ video, calling it and the thread “very important.” 

The saying goes, ‘go woke, go broke,’ and perhaps that’s why Musk is allegedly assembling a team of AI experts to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, The Information reported. 

The world’s richest man approached Igor Babuschkin, an AI researcher who previously worked at Alphabet, about opening a research lab. 

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI as an early investor in 2015, left the company in 2019 — has voiced dissatisfaction with its direction.  

The Information noted Musk and Babuschkin’s discussions to launch an AI lab were in the early stages. Babuschkin told the publication that he hadn’t joined the project. 

Even with ChatGPT’s safety layer, the chatbot sometimes produces incredibly woke and racist responses. The news of a potentially ‘anti-woke’ chatbot is a welcoming sign for free speech. 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 17:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/RiAx3YO Tyler Durden

WHO Was ‘Complicit’ In China’s Cover-Up Of COVID-19 Origins: Sen. Daines

WHO Was ‘Complicit’ In China’s Cover-Up Of COVID-19 Origins: Sen. Daines

Authored by Samantha Flom and Melina Wisecup via The Epoch Times,

The World Health Organization (WHO) was “complicit” in helping China’s communist regime cover up the origins of COVID-19, according to Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.).

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) questions U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as he testifies at a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 3, 2022. (Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)

Speaking with NTD News, The Epoch Times’ sister outlet, Daines on Feb. 27 suggested that the WHO could not be trusted due to its compliance with in China’s attempts to hide the truth of how the pandemic began.

“Based on what we are seeing in the latest intelligence reports about the origin of COVID—that there’s credible evidence now that it may indeed have been a leak out of the Wuhan lab, given the role that WHO played in many ways of being complicit with the Chinese and covering up what happened in Wuhan—I thinkyou’re going to see a lot of new questions as the evidence continues to come out of Wuhan as to what really happened to the origins of the COVID,” the senator said.

Daines’ remarks came amid calls from his fellow senators for the Biden administration to declassify a U.S. Energy Department report that concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a Wuhan laboratory leak.

According to a Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal report, the assessment was described in a document update by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The report added that officials who had access to the classified report said the judgement was made with “low confidence,” given the lack of access to China. The FBI, in its own 2021 assessment, came to the same conclusion but with “moderate confidence,” the WSJ said.

As news of the report has spread, cries for transparency have erupted on Capitol Hill, including from Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Mike Braun (R-Ind.), all of whom said they felt the information should be declassified.

The Biden administration has new ‘intel’ pointing to a lab leak,” Braun wrote in a Monday tweet. “The American people deserve to see it!”

The Senate Republicans’ concerns were also shared by their counterparts in the House, as House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) called on the Energy Department, State Department, and the FBI to provide documents and testimony on the matter.

“Since April 2, 2020, Committee on Oversight and Accountability Republicans have been investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s role in obscuring the truth regarding the initial outbreak, and whether any U.S. taxpayer dollars funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) dangerous gain-of-function research,” the lawmakers wrote in letters to the three departments. “The Select Subcommittee is now the only Committee in Congress with explicit jurisdiction to conduct this wide-ranging and important investigation.”

Uncovering the truth, the congressmen added, “is vital to U.S. national security, critical to the prevention of future pandemics, and will bring some semblance of closure to the families of those who lost loved ones during the pandemic.”

At a White House press briefing on Monday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby addressed the subject, noting that the president agreed that determining the source of the pandemic was important, but added, “There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how COVID started.”

Braun, responding to that comment via Twitter, said: “Let the American people decide for themselves. Declassify all COVID origins intel.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the World Health Organization for comment.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 17:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/LtuJSaN Tyler Durden

Previewing The Vote On ESG Investing, And A Debt Ceiling Update

Previewing The Vote On ESG Investing, And A Debt Ceiling Update

In his latest note, Stifel’s chief Washington Policy Strategist Brian Gardner, discusses the potential overturn of a DOL rule regarding ESG investing, and also shares an update on the debt ceiling.

According to Gartnet, the ESG resolution is likely to pass the House and could pass the Senate, but President Biden is expected to veto the legislation and the DOL rule is likely to remain in place. Regarding the debt ceiling, it appears that budget options are limited.  These fiscal constraints create political risk for Speaker McCarthy.  This note also explores how the lack of options for budget cuts could lead to a political standoff and create market volatility this

His full note is below:

Vote on ESG Investing and Debt Ceiling Update

The House will consider legislation to overturn a DOL rule regarding ESG investing.  The resolution is likely to pass the House and could pass the Senate, but President Biden is expected to veto the legislation and the DOL rule is likely to remain in place.

Regarding the debt ceiling, it appears that budget options are limited.  These fiscal constraints create political risk for Speaker McCarthy.  This note explores how the lack of options for budget cuts could lead to a political standoff and create market volatility this summer.

ESG Vote

House Republicans are scheduled to vote on legislation that would block a Department of Labor (DOL) rule that permits fiduciaries to consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors when making retirement investment decisions. The legislation in being considered under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a mechanism through which Congress can overturn regulatory actions by federal agencies.  The significance of the CRA is that it allows the Senate to pass the legislation by a simple majority vote rather than by the typical 60-vote, super-majority threshold. 

The ESG-related bill is likely to pass the House and while the outcome in the Senate is unclear, the CRA procedure makes Senate passage more plausible than it would be under regular order.  However, even if the ESG bill passes both chambers of Congress, President Biden is expected to veto the resolution and the chances of Congress over-riding the president’s veto are remote.  The DOL rule is likely to remain in place for now.

Debt Ceiling/Budget Options

A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report estimated that Treasury will exhaust its extraordinary measures to manage the debt ceiling (“X-date”) sometime between July and September.  Thus, Congress and the Biden administration are still months away from concluding a debt ceiling agreement.  However, the parameters of a potential deal are emerging, and it is becoming increasingly likely that a debt ceiling deal will be limited in scope. 

Key congressional Republicans have already acknowledged that Social Security and Medicare are off-the-table.  Those two programs combined with interest payments on the national debt account for approximately 71 percent of federal spending.  Congressional Republicans also seem committed to current levels of defense spending despite a loud minority within the party that seem to want defense cuts. Defense accounts for another 14 percent of federal spending which means that negotiations will focus on only 15 percent of federal spending.

Further underlining how difficult it will be to achieve large budget cuts, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Jody Arrington (R-TX) released a list of items to be considered during budget talks. Some of these cuts are one-time savings which others are spread over multiple years which further illustrates that limited amount of spending each party will be fighting over.

Chairman Arrington’s list includes:

  • Recapture unobligated COVID money ($100 billion)

  • Reinstating work requirements in welfare programs (“tens of billions”)

  • Reduce fraud in the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and SNAP (Food Stamp) Program ($70 billion).

  • Capping Obamacare subsidies at 400 percent of poverty and recovering overpayments ($65 billion).

  • Cancel some EPA programs from the Inflation Reduction Act ($27 billion for the EPA with no specific programmatic purpose and $60 billion for “environmental justice” programs).

  • End President Biden’s student loan initiatives – ($25 billion from ending loan repayment moratorium and $379 billion from prohibiting debt cancellation).

  • Rescind $3 billion for new USPS electric vehicles, $1 billion for “clean” garbage trucks, $3.4 billion for “regional greenways” and “tree planting,” and $5.6 billion for low emissions buses.

  • End approximately $281 billion in improper payments recently identified in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

  • “Stop Woke-Waste” – Eliminate a series of program all of which appear to cost less than $5 million and some less than $1 million which in a $6 trillion-plus budget are mere rounding errors.

Although it appears the differences between Democrats and Republicans will be narrow, passing a debt ceiling bill through Congress will not be a slam dunk.  Democrats are likely to dig in to protect their favorite programs.  At the same time, some Republicans could vote against any bill that they think fails to cut spending enough.  The situation puts House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in a tenuous position.  Speaker McCarthy has a narrow majority (currently five votes) and a group within his party that might oppose any debt ceiling bill.  This, in turn, could force McCarthy to make concessions with Democrats which could undercut McCarthy’s standing among conservative Republicans.  Disgruntled conservative Republicans could force a vote on McCarthy’s speakership and while most Republicans would vote for McCarthy again, it is unclear that there would be enough Democrats to save him. 

Most House Republicans seem open to voting for a modest debt ceiling deal but without a unanimous vote by Republicans, it could be difficult for McCarthy to reach a deal with the White House and Democrats which is why financial markets could be volatile this summer as the X-date approaches.  Investors could start to discount a negative outcome on debt ceiling negotiations when the X-date becomes more certain (rather than the current estimate of a three-month window) and if headlines start to suggest that Congress might fail to raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 17:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/BGgVWef Tyler Durden

Stockman: No More Ukraines

Stockman: No More Ukraines

Authored by David Stockman via LewRockwell.com,

Joe Biden must think that he’s the world’s Rich Uncle. In a meeting with the so-called Bucharest Nine today he promised these former Warsaw Pact nations—which should never have been admitted to NATO in the first place—unlimited economic and military support.

Nine more Ukraines if need be.

Biden conveyed reassurances that the United States is prepared to speed to their defense if they come under offensive action by Moscow. These nations include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

For want of doubt, here’s the just-in-case-you-missed-the-message amplification from NSC spokesman John Kirby. Said the Deep State’s favorite shill, who is apparently serving the national security complex in endless rotation, having moved from State to DOD and then to the National Security Council during the last decade, with a stop in between at CNN:

“These are largely the group of eastern flank NATO allies who are basically and, quite frankly, literally on the front lines of our collective defense right now,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had previewed. 

He said the president’s purpose in the meeting is to “reaffirm the United States’ unwavering support for the security of that alliance and trans-Atlantic unity.” It’s also meant to send a message to Putin that his country can’t intimidate these democracies, some of them relatively new and fragile.

Well, let’s see. Where is it documented that Putin has ever threatened Bulgaria or Hungary or  Slovakia or Lithuania or any of the others for that matter? As it transpired, Hungary’s leader even refused to attend this pointless Biden photo op.

After all, what in the world could Putin gain by attacking these nations and occupying what would be hostile populations and damaged economies? A tremendous fiscal drain on his already beleaguered finances would be the only certainty.

The fact is, Washington has become so crazed with anti-Putin war fever that it doesn’t even ask, let alone answer, these foundational questions. Instead, it has just lapsed into grade school reasoning by analogy. If Putin attacked the government of Ukraine, why then it’s a sure bet that the nine yellow dominoes highlighted in the map below are next on the list to fall.

No, not at all. Ukraine is sui generis. It’s a hodge-podge of variant histories, ethnicities and religious traditions that never belonged under the roof of a single state.

Moreover, its propinquity to things Russian is an unassailable matter of history. Prior to the arrival of communist rule after WWI, its various regions had marinated for centuries as vassals under the tutelage of Czarist Russia. Ukraine’s historically meandering boundaries, in fact, were only finally frozen in current form by the brutal dictates of Lenin, Stalin and  Khrushchev.

During the long amalgamated history of these neighboring, mainly Slavic populations the eastern and southern portions of the current Ukraine map became populated and economically developed by Russian speaking migrants. At length, they converted the largely empty, herder-dominated steppes into the flourishing bread basket, mining district and industrial work shop of old Russia.

This arrangement was essentially continued by the communist commissars after they consolidated control in 1922, save only for an arbitrary administrative re-arrangement which put the old “Novorossiya” (New Russia) of Catherine the Great’s time into a wholly unnatural state rechristened as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.

These artificial borders and the ethnic hodge-podge within them were held together at the gun point of Ukraine’s local communist rulers until 1991, when the scourge of Soviet Communism perished from the earth. And almost immediately thereafter, the elections showed that the state confected by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev had never been built to last; and that the verdict of Ukraine’s nascent democracy was that partition would someday be the only answer.

As it happened, Viktor Yanukovych was the last democratically elected politician before Washington essentially took-over the country. Of course, by the writ of the Ukraine’s de facto rulers on the Potomac he was illegally deposed and driven out of the country via the coup d’ etat in February 2014.

Needless to say, Yanukovych had been the champion of the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas and southern rim of the Black Sea. He ran on what was called the “Regions” party platform in both 2004 and 2010, against vehemently pro-Ukrainian candidates, whose bases of support were in the central and west geographies.

As shown in the two maps below, both elections were a case of red state versus blue state electoral division on steroids. Except unlike the US where a GOP gubernatorial candidate actually got a 47% showing in the deep blue state of New York this past election, the vote split in the most hard core of the respective regions (dark red and dark blue) was upwards of 90/10 in many localities.

In the 2004 election, Yanukovych narrowly lost the overall count, even as he dominated overwhelmingly in the east and south.

2004 Election Results in Ukraine

By contrast, in 2010 Yanukovych retraced the same massive domination of his own Russian-speaking regions while striking out in the west. But this time with the help of Washington-based election consultants (i.e. the infamous Paul Manafort) he managed to accumulate enough incremental votes to come out on top in the nation-wide tally.

2010 Election Results in Ukraine

Needless to say, when the foolish neocons led by the detestable Victoria Nuland, who surrounded then Vice-President Joe Biden, fomented the coup against Yanukovych in February 2014 they had no clue as to the tenuous political balance they were upending.

But it didn’t take long to strike the match. In short order the followers of the WWII Hitler ally, Stephan Bandera, who dominated the unelected, Washington-installed government in Kiev, made two destructive moves that amounted to a signal to “let the partition begin”.

The first of these was to abolish Russian as an official language in the Donbass and elsewhere. And the second was the massacre by fire of pro-Russian trade unionists in a building in Odessa by supporters of the Kiev government.

It was only a matter of time, therefore, before most of the red-colored territories on the maps above declared their independence. It was also in short order that the people of what had been the Russian province of Crimea after Catherine the Great purchased it from the Ottoman’s in 1783 voted overwhelmingly to re-join the Russian Federation. That ended their brief sojourn in the Ukrainian state, which had been Khrushchev’s 1954  gift to the communist thugs in Kiev who had helped him seize power after Stalin’s death.

Also, in short order the new proto-Fascist government in Kiev moved to deeply antagonize its historic neighbor and former fealty overlord in Moscow by seeking to join NATO and launching a brutal, unrelenting war on the breakaway Republics of the Donbas. This onslaught ended up killing upwards of 15,000 civilians during the eight year run-up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Needless to say, Putin was no more interested in having nuclear missiles planted even closer to his own border than was President John Kennedy in October 1962. Nor was he about to countenance the continued slaughter of Russian speakers in the Donbass after Kiev launched a drastically stepped up shelling and bombing campaign on these beleaguered areas one week before the February 24th invasion.

Below, we will amplify further on the overwhelming reasons why the Ukraine situation is a one-off civil war situation and the unfinished and unstable residue of a state which was never built to last.

Accordingly, it is not a case at all of legitimate sovereign borders being violated. Nor does it involve an assault on the hypocritical notion of a “liberal international order” that has not actually ever existed and which, instead, has been a cover for Washington’s global hegemony all along.

But the lessons are nonetheless profound. History accumulates and eventually leads to destructive, but wholly unnecessary outcomes.

That is the case today with the utterly foolish action of Washington during the 1990s and 2000s to bring former Warsaw Pact Nations, and even breakaway Soviet Republics into a NATO alliance whose mission was over and done in 1991.

It should have been dismantled then and there. When the old Soviet monster with its 50,000 tanks and 7,000 nuclear warheads posed along-side the Bucharest Nine pictured above disappeared into the dustbin of history, there was no longer a threat to the east. There was no “front line” to defend.

At that point Washington should have and easily could have led the world to disarmament and to a revival of the lasting peace that had disappeared in the “Guns of August” in 1914.

But now the NATO section 5 mutual defense commitment to these nations is equivalent to a stupid charity that the nearly bankrupt Federal government cannot afford in any case.

There is absolutely nothing in it for the enhancement of America’s homeland security, and huge incentives for the politicians of these nations to caterwaul against Russia rather than seek peaceful accommodation.

But Sleepy Joe is a captive of the Dems “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and cannot think rationally for a moment about the Russian President.

Still, the latter most definitely did not cause the Dems to loose the 2016 election. They brought Trump’s freakish victory upon themselves by their choice of candidate and embrace of policies that much of Flyover America found deeply repugnant.

When Washington began its foolish campaign to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep in 1997, there was one American who actually possessed more knowledge, experience and analytical savvy about Russia and eastern Europe than the entire treaty-ratifying US Senate combined.

We are referring, of course, to Ambassador George F. Kennan. The latter was the intellectual father of the post-war containment policy against the Soviet Union and had spent decades in the US embassies of Europe and the Soviet Union, before going on to hold high rank in the State Department during the crucial years after WWII when the Cold War was born. Thereafter he joined academia at Princeton, where he produced a prodigious flow of scholarly work on national security policy, including a ringing dissent on the folly of LBJ’s war on Vietnam.

So by the time he penned a New York Times op ed upon the initial expansion of NATO in 1997, which he succinctly entitled “A Fateful Error”, the 93-year old Kennan had decades and decades of wisdom under his belt as a policy-maker and historian. And almost all of it was directly pertinent to the disorder left behind in the wake of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991.

Kennan pulled no punches on the matter of NATO expansion:

The architect of the cold war policy of containment did not mince words in arguing that “expanding Nato would be the most fateful error in American policy in the entire post-cold war era”. He predicted that “it would inflame nationalistic, anti-western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”, “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy”, “restore the atmosphere of cold war to east-west relations”, and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking”.

A fair share of the script readers and stenographers who comprise today’s mainstream media, of course, have a faint knowledge of George Kennan and his unequivocal stance against NATO expansion, if any at all. Their blinders are simply the product of a quarter-century of accumulated recency bias—a process by which the once unthinkable becomes the unchallenged status quo.

The fact is, once the Soviet Union with its 50,000 tanks, 40,000 nuclear warheads, 5 million men under arms and frightfully militarized economy disappeared into the dustbin of history there was no purpose whatsoever for the perpetuation of NATO.

In that sense, Kennan’s “containment” policy had achieved 100% of its goal. The fearsome enemy on the eastern flank of Europe had literally vanished, meaning that what had been a one-time expedient of the Cold War could and should have been disbanded. In the rubble of the dismembered Soviet Union there was no threat left and nothing to defend or contain.

NATO’s warranted interment didn’t happen, however, and for the immensely trivial reason that the utterly unprincipled Bill Clinton determined to make hay one more time in the political posturing grounds of the “Captive Nations”. And with respect to this long forgotten matter your editor happened to have held a front row seat.

When we went to work on Capitol Hill for a GOP congressman at the peak of the Cold War in 1970 our first assignment was drafting a resolution during Captive Nations Week calling for the liberation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania etc from yoke of Soviet tyranny. Such resolutions had nothing to do with actual policy, of course, which was to leave the Great Russian Bear undisturbed in his lair called the Warsaw Pact. But as a home-front politicking matter such resolutions were catnip to the eastern European constituencies.

After eastern Europe was peacefully liberated in 1991, however, this Captive Nations gambit became self-evidently obsolete, but the Clinton Administration soon had a handy PR substitute. Namely, NATO membership for the woebegone remnants of the Warsaw Pact—a seemingly harmless gesture that had no real purpose other than to express solidarity with back home constituencies of eastern European descent.

NATO expansion, in effect, was a way for Washington politicians to say: We are still with you!

Indeed, since there was no plausible reason for maintaining a war alliance against an enemy that didn’t exist, NATO became the equivalent of a diplomatic American Legion hall. It was a place for bureaucratic veterans of the Cold War to swap combat stories and to pretend they still had something worthwhile to do.

Unfortunately, it didn’t stay that harmless. The military-industrial complex soon realized that it needed a tangible enemy to justify current procurement and new weapons systems and also that the former Captive Nations comprised an expanded market for its wares.

So the 14 new NATO nations formed a ready-made shopping mall for additional weapons sales.

That all might have been harmless enough, save for two untoward developments. The first was the designation of Russia and Putin as enemy #1 by the neocons after their adventures against “terrorism” in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the middle east came a cropper a few years after the memory of 9/11 had dimmed.

The demonization of Putin became especially urgent in late 2013 when he deftly put the kibosh on the neocon’s plan for regime change in Syria. By convincing Assad to give up his chemical weapons under international supervision, the case for military removal of the Syrian president quickly evaporated.

In short order, however, these same neocons got their revenge by fomenting a coup d’ etat on Putin’s doorstep in Ukraine. And it was led by Washington’s hand-picked proto-fascists who detested all things Russian, including the considerable populations and regions of Ukraine which were Russian-speaking.

As it happened, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to recognize the near-conspiracy on the banks of the Potomac that sent the fragile politics of the artificial state of Ukraine into a tail-spin, and which at length paved the way to the catastrophe underway there at present.

The fact is, the detestable Kagan family comprises the high preisthood of the neocon synod that has infiltrated the foreign policy establishment of both parties. And it just so happens that the very high priest of that lamentable synod, Robert Kagan, is married to Victoria Nuland, a war-mongering national security apparatchik who has served every administration since Bush the Younger, and who was the archetict of the Maidan coup on the streets of Kiev in February 2014.

From that moment on, Putin was transformed from a mere bad guy into the incarnation of evil itself in the neocon narrative. And his rational actions after the coup to reclaim Moscow’s centuries old naval bases in Russian Crimea and to offer succor to the imperiled Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas only added fuel to the fire.

But then came the deluge. In a word, the freakish election of Donald Trump in 2016 was falsely laid at Putin’s doorstep, even as Washington’s bipartisan ruling elites and their henchman in the mainstream media went berserk against the Donald.

At length, it turned into a a full-fledged mania—a Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) that pales into insignificance prior outbreaks of American political irrationality, such as the McCarthyism of the 1950s and the Red Hunts of 1919.

In a word, the TDS has utterly destroyed Washington’s foreign policy compass. The demonization of Putin has become so extreme and un-moored from reality that Washington is literally possessed by a ghost of the old Soviet Union. That is, it imagines a ferocious and powerful enemy on the “eastern front” that simply does not exist.

For crying out loud, GDP is a measure of latent capacity to make war, but the GDP of NATO is 26 times larger than that of Russia. Likewise, defense budgets are a measure of actual current military capacity, of which NATO’s war spending is 15 times larger. And that’s in the here and now.

Moreover, from the point of view of Vlad Putin leaping over the Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats to invade the American shores, the question recurs: How many aircraft carriers does he have compared to America’s 20 aircraft and heliocraft carriers?

One!

And it’s 38 years old!

In a word, the absurdity of Washington’s proxy war against Russia and this week’s meeting of the so-called Bucharest Nine is the product of a foreign policy compass that has been shattered by two decades worth of myths and lies that served the short-term interests of Washington’s career politicians and their Deep State masters.

But go back to the fact that George Kennan was right 26 years ago and the truth that nothing has changed in the interim to alter his judgement.

In that context, what would a president not entombed in the false narrative of the past quarter century actually do?

Here are a few possible starters:

  1. Arrange exile for Zelensky in Costa Rica ( far better than he deserves);

  2. Agree to a settlement in Ukraine that partitions the country and allows the territories in the east and south previously known as Novorossiya (New Russia) to go their separate way or rejoin Mother Russia;

  3. Remove NATO’s missiles and other advanced warfare capability from the former Warsaw Pact countries, so as to eliminate the military threat on Russia’s doorstep;

  4. Arrange for the early dissolution of NATO after the Ukraine proxy war has been extinguished;

  5. Re-open and complete an updated version of the nuclear arms treaties enacted near the end of the Cold War, two of which were abrogated by Washington and one this week by Moscow;

  6. Cut the egregiously bloated $850 billion defense budget by 50% and lead the world into a new global treaty to drastically reduce the scale and cost of conventional arms;

  7. Begin the nearly insuperable challenge of sharply paring back the nation’s $2 trillion plus annual deficits, which extend as far as the eye can see.

That would be a start. It would put America back on the road toward rational homeland security, and enable a global future not imperiled by the threat of Nuclear Armageddon.

*  *  *

Originally posted at David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 16:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/H1ihw6F Tyler Durden

WTI Limps Lower After API Reports 10th Straight Weekly Crude Build

WTI Limps Lower After API Reports 10th Straight Weekly Crude Build

Oil prices ended the day to the upside with WTI topping $77 intraday (but ended Feb with its 4th straight monthly loss).

“Oil prices have fallen for the month due to an extremely warm winter in the U.S. and Europe,” Jay Hatfield, chief executive officer at Infrastructure Capital Management, told MarketWatch.

“In addition, recent mixed data on inflation and associated hawkish [Federal Reserve] commentary have been a headwind for oil as the dollar strengthened and stock prices came off of highs.”

Overhanging the market is uncertainty around the global economic outlook as the Federal Reserve and other major central banks continue to push interest rates higher in a bid to rein in inflation, and the signs from week-after-week of inventory increases remains an ominous one.

API

  • Crude +6.203mm (+350k exp)

  • Cushing +483k

  • Gasoline -1.774mm (-300k exp)

  • Distillates -341k (-700k exp)

If API’s data is confirmed tomorrow, this will be the 10th straight weekly build in crude inventories and 9th straight build in stocks at Cushing. Products, on the other hand, did see a drawdown…

Source: Bloomberg

Crude has struggled to find direction in February, trading within the smallest monthly range since July 2021, hovering just below $77 ahead of the API print and limped slightly lower on the report…

Still, crude has been stuck in a trading range since December, with WTI trading between a bottom near $70 and highs just above $80 a barrel.

Notably, the last few weeks have seen one of the fastest builds in crude inventories in history…

Not exactly a bullish/no-landing signals.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 16:37

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Is Investigating a School Sexting Incident the Same As Possessing Child Porn? A Judge Says No.


A school principal is seen in the hallway

A Colorado school administrator will no longer face child pornography charges for investigating a student sexting incident, a local judge ruled late last month, ending a legal odyssey that raised broader questions about prosecutorial discretion, overcriminalization, law enforcement accountability, and coercive plea bargaining.

Bradley Bass of Brush, Colorado, was facing up to 12 years in prison, a spot on the sex offender registry, and an end to his career. But that potential punishment never fit the alleged crime, particularly when considering that no one involved in the case, including the prosecution, posited Bass meant any harm when he conducted a probe in accordance with school board policy.

There was “no evidence of deceit or concealment,” wrote Morgan County District Court Judge Charles M. Hobbs, and “no improper motive.” That was clear from the start of the case, though it didn’t deter prosecutors.

Last year, Bass learned that explicit images of a female student were circulating among male students. School Resource Officer (SRO) Jared Barham first received that tip; he was temporarily working nights and declined to investigate or share the tip with other officers.

So Bass investigated the complaint. “The school administration prioritized this as a high-priority matter, because their concerns are [the] best interests of the students,” says Michael Faye, who represented Bass. “He basically did the officer’s work for him.”

Bass’ probe turned up risqué pictures saved in Snapchat, a photo-sharing app where images typically disappear after receipt. To collect evidence, he took pictures of the photos on his work cellphone, uploaded them to a school server, and says he told the boys to delete the pictures. A forensic investigation concluded that Bass did not access the pictures after the fact, and the female student in question maintained that Bass did nothing wrong.

He was arrested, booked at the Morgan County Detention Center, and charged with four counts of sexual exploitation of a child anyway. There’s an interesting carve-out to that law: It “does not apply to peace officers or court personnel in the performance of their official duties.” Put differently, Barham opted not to do his job, so Bass was arrested for doing it for him. It wasn’t necessarily an outlier moment. “We had testimony at the hearing that this SRO had multiple times stated to different teachers, ‘Hey, it’s easier if you guys do this kind of stuff. If I get involved, it takes it up a notch, and it’s easier if I come in after the fact,'” says Faye. “So that was kind of the underlying premise here.”

At its core, the case around Bass was more about prosecutorial discretion than it was about child pornography. The law the government used to prosecute Bass has an immunity statute, which provides that someone acting in accordance with school board policies is protected from civil and criminal prosecution. This would seem a fairly clear-cut example of that.

Prosecutors disagree. “From the beginning and it still troubles me now: We had a school administrator that knowingly kept nude images of a juvenile student on his phone,” 13th Judicial District Attorney Travis Sides told The Colorado Sun. “So in other words, he could pull up that image whenever he wanted to, anytime a day or night.”

Perhaps it should matter to Sides that forensics concluded Bass never pulled up the images and only took them in the absence of the school police officer doing his job. And perhaps it did matter to the government, despite their public statements. Had Hobbs not thrown out the case in accordance with the law, the government had offered Bass a “deal”: Plead guilty to obstructing justice, and the case would go away.

That may sound like a nice bargain. Consider, however, what the implication is: Bass would face up to 12 years in prison and a slew of other life-altering consequences for exercising his Sixth Amendment right to trial after the government made clear with its deal that such a severe punishment was not necessary. That sort of over-charging is common and gives prosecutors leverage to coerce guilty pleas—even from people who aren’t guilty.

It’s a practice some say is unconstitutional. In Maricopa County, Arizona, for instance, defendants are given a plea deal and told in fine print that they will face significantly more time behind bars if they merely want to review the state’s evidence against them or attend a preliminary hearing. One such defendant, Michael Calhoun, was given a nine-year plea deal offer for selling about $20 worth of drugs and told that if he did not accept it outright, he would face a “substantially harsher” fate. He sued in 2021, challenging the legality of that approach.

Bass may relate more with another defendant in Maricopa County, Levonta Barker, who received a plea deal offer for aggravated assault and kidnapping. Barker, too, was told that reviewing the evidence or attending a probable cause hearing would cost him. That’s unfortunate for many reasons, most notably because he was innocent—something the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office was forced to admit after Barker had already spent a month in jail.

With such a wide separation between plea deals and the punishments meted out after trial, defendants have to decide if exercising their constitutional right to a trial by jury is worth the risk. “The plea they’re offering potentially lets me stay as a husband and a dad, and to me those are the biggest priorities in my life,” Bass said. “I basically need to choose: Do I want to clear my name and risk losing my entire life, or do I want to not clear my name but not lose my life?”

Bass will no longer have to make that choice. But whether or not he will ever clear his name is debatable. “The accusation carries such a stigma that people are always going to wonder. So no matter what he does, no matter what court rulings we got, I don’t think he ever recovers from this,” says Faye. “That’s always been the thing that really strikes me about the system is just…how much power and discretion the prosecutor has.”

The post Is Investigating a School Sexting Incident the Same As Possessing Child Porn? A Judge Says No. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Prominent Climate Change Activist Researchers Finally Call for Solar Geoengineering Research


example graph demonstrating seeding the stratosphere with particles to reflect a portion of sunlight away from the earth and thus cooling the planet a bit

Recent research strongly suggests that the worst-case scenarios of man-made global warming resulting largely from rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are highly implausible. Simply put: Imminent climate armageddon is not in the cards. But what if the more sanguine calculations for increases in future global average temperatures turn out to be wrong and the world starts heating up much faster? Wouldn’t it be wise to have available some kind of emergency cooling system for the planet?

Yes, says a group of prominent activist climate change researchers in an open letter calling for just such research. The letter points out that “the most rapid way to potentially counter some near-term climate warming is through an important class of climate intervention techniques that slightly change the energy entering and leaving the planet.” They particularly cite solar radiation management (SRM) techniques such as releasing reflective sulfate particles high in the atmosphere (stratospheric aerosol injection) or spraying sea salt into low clouds over the ocean (marine cloud brightening) as possible ways to slow unexpectedly fast future warming.

Notable signatories to the open letter include Columbia University climatologist James Hansen, Rutgers University climatologist Alan Robock, and Harvard applied physicist David Keith. Hansen notoriously first testified before a congressional committee that man-made climate change had been detected way back in 1988. Keith is already leading a team of scientists seeking to research solar geoengineering.

The open letter further notes that “since decisions on whether or not to implement SRM are likely to be considered in the next one to two decades, a robust international scientific assessment of SRM approaches is needed as rapidly as possible.” Needed research includes computer model simulations, observations, analytical studies, and small-scale field experiments.

The arguments in the open letter for proceeding with SRM research mirror those I made most recently in my October 2022 Reason feature article, “The Unscientific Panic Over Solar Geoengineering.” In fact, I first argued in favor of researching SRM as an emergency cooling system for the planet in 2008. And well before my article, University of California, Irvine astrophysicist and Reason contributing editor Gregory Benford argued in his 1997 Reason article, “Climate Controls,” for research into various geoengineering proposals including SRM aimed at cooling the climate.

As I reported in my October 2022 article, proponents of SRM research already face considerable opposition from activist groups and scientific research colleagues:

In January [2022], a group of climate researchers published an open letter in the journal WIREs Climate Change calling for “an international non-use agreement” to prohibit research and development of solar geoengineering technologies. “These proliferating calls for solar geoengineering research and development are cause for alarm,” they argued, “as they risk the normalization of these technologies as a future policy option.” To stop that, “a strong political message to block these technologies is needed.” They seek to completely halt all research in its tracks.

However tardy, at least the climate researchers and activists behind the new open letter should be commended for recognizing that mandated solar geoengineering research ignorance will not yield economic and environmental bliss for future generations that will be coping with whatever the effects of climate change turn out to be.

The post Prominent Climate Change Activist Researchers Finally Call for Solar Geoengineering Research appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Left Is Right To Fear Tucker Carlson

The Left Is Right To Fear Tucker Carlson

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClear Wire,

The news broke last week that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Tucker Carlson of Fox News access to thousands of hours of surveillance video from the day of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Naturally, this has led to panic on behalf of the usual suspects – the leftist mob who are not outside the Capitol but within its halls. These petty tyrants think only they should have access to information – and control its release.

First up was Rep. Bennie Thompson, the former chairman of the House Select Committee on January 6, who could have released the footage any time he wanted during the 18 months when he was supposedly seeking the truth.

His statement was typical of the smears progressives employ to kill the messenger before the message can get out. You know the type. Just think back to the phony claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Russian information operation” and the accompanying attacks on the New York Post for trying to get the laptop’s incriminating information to the public.

Thompson’s statement suggested that providing the footage to Carlson created “significant security concerns” and said Carlson “routinely spreads misinformation and Putin’s poisonous propaganda.” Not to be outdone, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and known liar Adam Schiff, called Carlson a “right-wing propagandist” and “a man who spews Kremlin talking points.” The California Democrat was joined by fellow select committee member Jamie Raskin of Maryland who smeared Carlson again as a “Pro-Putin journalist.”

How did one of America’s top journalists become a Putin puppet? Well, to decipher that, you have to go back at least to the 2016 campaign and the two years after, when the New York Times and Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for making up stories about how Donald Trump was either a willing partner of Russia or an unwitting stooge. Carlson never bought into the hoax. He was exposing the Democrats’ narrative as the cynical nonsense it was, and therefore he had to be destroyed.

Then when he asked hard questions about the war in Ukraine, Carlson became an enemy of the national security state – yes, the same national security state that President Eisenhower warned us against as long ago as 1961. Unfortunately, the national security state now controls most of the national media, and the pro-war forces don’t like not being able to control Carlson, so they have to attack him endlessly. His coup in obtaining access to the Jan. 6 footage is just the latest opportunity.

You can be sure that the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC will do everything they can over the next week to smear Carlson for having the temerity to actually allow the American public to make our own judgments about what the footage shows – and reach our own conclusions about why Nancy Pelosi hid the Jan. 6 footage for two years.

Instead of condemning Carlson and Speaker McCarthy, all loyal Americans should be thanking them for deciding that “we the people” ought to be trusted with the facts, not spoon-fed them selectively. Heck, the Democrats didn’t even think we could be trusted with knowing how much surveillance video existed. For months, we have been told there were 14,000 hours of raw footage, but now we find out it is actually as much as 44,000 hours. Did anyone on the Jan. 6 committee even try to wade through that footage to see if it confirms their pre-established narrative of an armed insurrection? Or were they afraid of what they would find?

Whatever they thought then, it is obvious what they think now – that it will be dangerous for the American public to see what really happened. And until the footage is aired on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” there’s no guarantee we will see it. You can be sure that Democrats in the House will be working overtime to keep that from happening, just as Democrats in the White House worked feverishly to convince Twitter and Facebook to suppress Hunter’s damning laptop. The common thread always seems to be that anyone opposed to Democratic Party politics is a Russian stooge or a Putin puppet.

When I heard those criticisms of Tucker Carlson, it reminded me of a similar canard used against another journalist many years before, a journalist who like Carlson was unafraid of entrenched power and who stood up for American principles at every opportunity.

That journalist was Edward R. Murrow, who exposed the anti-American demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a time in the 1950s when most members of the media – like most citizens of the country – were terrified of being labeled a Communist if they didn’t carry a torch for McCarthy’s witch hunt.

Murrow’s program “See It Now” was noted for fearless journalism, and the March 9, 1954, episode entitled “A Report on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy” was the high-water mark of Murrow’s career, leading to the eventual condemnation of McCarthy by the Senate.

Being a fair-minded journalist, Murrow offered McCarthy a full episode of “See It Now” to respond to Murrow’s report. In that response, McCarthy resorted to the same name-calling tactics that Thompson, Schiff, and Raskin used last week in attacking Carlson. The only difference was that McCarthy smeared Murrow, the most reputable journalist of his day, as a Communist rather than a tool of Russia, though the difference is mostly academic when you think about Putin’s past.

McCarthy attacked Murrow as “a symbol, a leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors” and claimed that Murrow, “as far back as 20 years ago, was engaged in propaganda for Communist causes.”

Most significantly, McCarthy dressed up in the mantle of a defender of freedom just as the members of the Jan. 6 committee tell us they are defenders of democracy. He proclaimed that his wish to humiliate, harass, and lock up anyone who had ever spoken a kind word about communism was to ensure that “We Americans live in a free world, a world where we can stand as individuals, where we can go to the church of our own choice and worship God as we please, each in his own fashion, where we can freely speak our opinions on any subject, or on any man.”

So, too, do the Democrats in charge of the Jan. 6 committee proclaim that they are defending democracy against those who have different opinions about an election, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who can apparently be locked up for years without trial. But if democracy needs defending, it is not from protesters, but from those who believe only their truth can be spoken, only their narrative can be heard.

Like Murrow, Tucker Carlson can be counted on to follow the facts, and for that reason he is indeed dangerous – not to democracy, but to demagogues.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 16:20

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Formidable Feb Data F**ks Bond Bulls As ‘Fed Pivot’ Puke Punks Stocks, Commodities

Formidable Feb Data F**ks Bond Bulls As ‘Fed Pivot’ Puke Punks Stocks, Commodities

2023 so far – a tale of two narratives…from ‘soft’ landing to ‘no’ landing…

February’s macro theme was the death of The Fed Pivot narrative as expectations for an H2 2023 rate-cut collapsed and the terminal rate outlook priced in rose significantly…

Source: Bloomberg

This was all sparked by the massive surge in positive macro surprise data in the US (Feb saw the biggest absolute jump in the Citi US Economic Surprise Index since July 2020)…

Source: Bloomberg

February’s micro theme was the ongoing intraday dominance of 0DTE trading with SPX 0DTE options making up over 50% of volume…

For example, there are 7 major options lines with Open Interest over 10k that expire in the next few days…

Source: Bloomberg

As Goldman’s traders noted, these are significant positions for a relatively quiet week with Q1 earnings mostly wrapped and no major economic data points. This is becoming the new normal.

And the impact of 0DTE is clearly seen here in the poster-child stock…

Source: Bloomberg

As Charlie McElligott explains, 0DTE options flows leading to an “intraday Vol only” dynamic (via market-maker Gamma hedging requirements creating “accelerant flows”… which then later see a ubiquitous “mean-reversion” from monetization of both bot 0DTE Calls and Puts), which leaves “close-to-close” volatility bleeding lower as any ‘intraday’ event is washed away. The latter of which helps explain why Vix and the market have decoupled in recent days…

Source: Bloomberg

Overall, February was the unwind of January’s cross-asset-class trends… with Equities being the last to wake up to reality…

Source: Bloomberg

After an extremely strong January, February flopped with The Dow leading the swing lower, but all the US majors red in the month (Nasdaq briefly tagged green today for the month but could not hold it)…

This was The Dow’s worst month since Sept 2022.

Today ended ugly with some dramatic selling pressure with everything closing red on the day…

…but once again it was all about the 0DTE trend-runners with early action offsetting before 0DTE traders bid puts aggressively into the market rally but as 0DTE call-owners covered, stocks rolled over and accelerated lower into a smallish MoC sell wave.

HIRO Indicator | SpotGamma™

That late push drove the S&P down to test the 50DMA once again…

That has left The Dow in the red YTD, while Nasdaq 100 remains up over 10% YTD…

Energy stocks were the month’s biggest laggard while Tech outperformed…

Source: Bloomberg

After January’s biggest monthly short squeeze since Jan 2021, February saw ‘most shorted’ stocks actually sink

Source: Bloomberg

Bonds were a bloodbath in February with yields at the short-end up a stunning 60bps (while the long-end outperformed, 30Y yields were still up 30bps on the month)…

Source: Bloomberg

While the 10Y Yield pushed up towards (but did not tag) the 4.00% level, the 2Y yield broke back above its November highs to its highest yield since July 2007…

Source: Bloomberg

The yield curve (2s30s) has never closed in a more inverted manner than now…

Source: Bloomberg

Also, we note that inflation expectations (1Y Inflation Swap) soared back to life in February…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar soared back into the green for the year in February, after four straight monthly declines…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin & Ethereum managed modest gains in February while Ripple and Solana ended the month lower…

Source: Bloomberg

Commodities, broadly speaking, ended the month of February lower with Silver lagging and Energy the least bad (after NatGas roared back from its mid-month carnage)…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold ended the month in the red for the year, despite a decent surge higher today – but overall Feb saw 3 or 4 major selling waves…

Silver’s relative clubbing (down to a $20 handle today) has lifted the Gold/Silver ratio back above 85 to its highest since early Oct 2022…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices remain rangebound with WTI trading in a $73-83 range for the last 3 months…

US NatGas prices have collapsed since early December but while the leg higher in the bottom right of this chart doesn’t look like much, it pushed Henry Hub back top almost unchanged on the month (after briefly tagging a $1 handle)…

Finally, amid all the chaos of the month, financial conditions have tightened notably (now back to unchanged YTD), slowly but surely catching back up to monetary policy’s tightness…

Source: Bloomberg

And as unimpressed as Powell pretended to be about this decoupling, the volume of FedSpeak uttered by his pals would argue very different.

Nomura’s Charlie McElligott issued a warning though this morning for the way forward:

The onus is now on even bigger upside surprise data to substantiate ongoing FCI tightening and pricing of higher terminal rates from here….and which increasingly looks like a tall order, now that Street economists are taking-up their growth and inflation estimates again in unison, AS WELL AS the fact that we actually HAVE seen financial conditions adjust appropriately MUCH “tighter” over the past month as a data “headwind”.

Said another way, the bar is getting very high for sustained economic data “beats” which has been the catalyst for the Rates / terminal repricing in recent weeks, which then knocked-on into the FCI tightening which had hit risk-assets over the past two weeks…which likely means that “downside surprises” should be expected soon, as is the natural “mean-reversion” in economic surprise indices (“upside surprise” vs low expectations, which causes a upwards revisions to conensus estimates, which then increases frequency of “downside surprises”—the cycle continues).

And if “sustained better data = higher terminal repricing” is still part of your current Equities “bear-case” from here (after you already squeezed most of the blood from that stone over the past two weeks), you better be careful…

Sure, another big NFP could very well restart the “higher terminal / FCI tightening” spiral yet-again for markets in a week and a half… but for now, we are again “priced-to-perfection” across nearly all-assets following the multi-week positioning- and market narrative- reset.

For now, bonds are at their cheapest to stocks since the very peak in 2007…

There Is An Alternative after all…

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 16:01

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