Month: March 2023

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Senate Republican revealed during a March 28 hearing that an internal Department of Justice (DOJ) memo dissuaded U.S. Marshals from arresting protestors in violation of laws against picketing the homes of judges.

The materials revealed during the hearing show that U.S. Marshals were explicitly directed not to arrest protestors at the homes of Supreme Court (SCOTUS) justices.

“People want justice to be blind,” said freshman Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), who unveiled the findings during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared before the panel to testify on the DOJ side of President Joe Biden’s proposed budget.

Section 1507 of U.S. Code prohibits the picketing of Supreme Court (SCOTUS) justices or other federal judges to change the outcome of a legal case. But when protestors demonstrated at the homes of conservative justices to protest their leaked abortion decision in June 2022, U.S. Marshals made few arrests in connection to the statute.

This, Britt revealed, was not a mistake. Rather, she showed that a DOJ memo had directly dissuaded agents from making arrests on the basis of Section 1507, instructing them to arrest protestors only as a “last resort” to protect the justices.

Section 1507 explicitly prohibits “picketing” or “parading” near the residences of judges or justices in order to influence the outcome of a case.

A few weeks earlier, Garland fielded questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on his agency’s failure to prosecute those picketing the homes of justices.

During that and other testimony, Garland has insisted that the decision to arrest protestors lies with U.S. Marshals.

“U.S. Marshals have the authority to arrest anyone under that statute or any other federal statute,” Garland said. “The attorney general does not make the decision to arrest. The Marshals on the scene—they do make the decision of whether to arrest.”

But newly uncovered materials used to train Marshals to protect the homes of SCOTUS justices show that they were “actively discouraged” from making arrests on grounds of this statute, Britt said.

“Those materials show that the Marshals likely didn’t make any arrests because they were actively discouraged from doing so,” Britt said.

The training materials told the Marshals “to avoid, unless absolutely necessary, any criminal enforcement action involving the protestors.”

Marshals were also told, “Making arrests and initiating prosecutions is not the goal of the [Marshal Service] presence at SCOTUS residences.”

“The ‘not’ is actually italicized and underlined,” Britt noted.

The next slide of the training “not to engage in protest-related enforcement actions, beyond those that were strictly and immediately necessary and tailored to ensure the physical security of the justices.”

Read more here…

Authored by Thomas Fazi via UnHerd.com,

We all lose from the global war on farmers…

France is in flames. Israel is erupting. America is facing a second January 6.

In the Netherlands, however, the political establishment is reeling from an entirely different type of protest — one that, perhaps more than any other raging today, threatens to destabilise the global order.

The victory of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the recent provincial elections represents an extraordinary result for an anti-establishment party that was formed just over three years ago. But then again, these are not ordinary times.

The BBB grew out of the mass demonstrations against the Dutch government’s proposal to cut nitrogen emissions by 50% in the country’s farming sector by 2030 — a target designed to comply with the European Union’s emission-reduction rules. While large farming companies have the means to meet these goals — by using less nitrogen fertiliser and reducing the number of their livestock — smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”.

It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters. But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

Given the irrational nature of the policy, many protesting farmers believe it can’t simply be blamed on the urbanite “green elites” currently running the Dutch government. They suggest one of the underlying reasons for the move is to squeeze small farmers from the market, allowing them to be bought out by multinational agribusiness giants who recognise the immense value of the country’s land — not only is it highly fertile, but it is also strategically located with easy access to the north Atlantic coast (Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe). They also point out that prime minister Rutte is an Agenda Contributor of the World Economic Forum, which is well known for being corporate-driven, while his finance minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Employment are also tied to the body.

The struggle playing out in the Netherlands would seem to be part of a much bigger game that seeks to “reset” the international food system. Similar measures are currently being introduced or considered in several other European countries, including Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Britain (where the Government is encouraging traditional farmers to leave the industry to free up land for new “sustainable” farmers). As the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy sector, agriculture has naturally ended up in the crosshairs of Net Zero advocates — that is, virtually all major international and global organisations. The solution, we are told, is “sustainable agriculture” — one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which form their “Agenda 2030”.

This issue has now been pushed to the top of the global agenda. Last November’s G20 meeting in Bali called for “an accelerated transformation towards sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems and supply chains” to “ensure that food systems better contribute to adaptation and mitigation to climate change”. Just a few days later, in Egypt, the COP27 annual Green Agenda Climate Summit launched its initiative aimed at promoting “a shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets”. Within a year, its Food and Agriculture Organization aims to launch a “roadmap” for reducing greenhouse emissions in the agricultural sector.

The endgame is hinted at in several other UN documents: reducing nitrogen use and global livestock production, lowering meat consumption, and promoting more “sustainable” sources of protein, such as plant-based or lab-grown products, and even insects. The United Nations Environment Programme, for example, has stated that global meat and dairy consumption must be reduced by 50% by 2050. Other international and multilateral organisation have presented their own plans for transforming the global food system. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy “aims to accelerate our transition to a sustainable food system”. Meanwhile, the World Bank, in its climate change action plan for 2021-2025, says that 35% of the bank’s total funding during this period will be devoted to transforming agriculture and other key systems to deal with climate change.

Alongside these intergovernmental and multilateral bodies, a vast network of “stakeholders” is now devoted to the “greening” of agriculture and food production — private foundations, public-private partnerships, NGOs and corporations. Reset the Table, a 2020 Rockefeller Foundation report, called for moving away from a “focus on maximising shareholder returns” to “a more equitable system focused on fair returns and benefits to all stakeholders”. This may sound like a good idea, until one considers that “stakeholder capitalism” is a concept heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, which represents the interests of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet.

The Rockefeller Foundation has very close ties to the WEF, which is itself encouraging farmers to embrace “climate-smart” methods in order to make the “transition to net-zero, nature-positive food systems by 2030”. The WEF is also a big believer in the need to drastically reduce cattle farming and meat consumption and switch to “alternative proteins”.

Arguably the most influential public-private organisation specifically “dedicated to transforming our global food system” is the EAT-Lancet Commission, which is largely modelled around the Davos “multistakeholderist” approach. This is based on the premise that global policymaking should be shaped by a wide range of unelected “stakeholders”, such as academic institutions and multinational corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments. This network, cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, consists of UN agencies, world-leading universities, and corporations such as Google and Nestlé. EAT’s founder and president, Gunhild Stordalen, a Norwegian philanthropist who is married to one of the country’s richest men, has described her intention to organise a “Davos for food”.

EAT’s work was initially supported by the World Health Organization, but in 2019 the WHO withdrew its endorsement after Gian Lorenzo Cornado, Italy’s ambassador and permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, questioned the scientific basis for the dietary regime being pushed by EAT — which is focused on promoting plant-based foods and excluding meat and other animal-based foods. Cornado argued that “a standard diet for the whole planet” that ignores age, sex, health and eating habits “has no scientific justification at all” and “would mean the destruction of millenary healthy traditional diets which are a full part of the cultural heritage and social harmony in many nations”.

Perhaps more important, said Cornado, is the fact that the dietary regime advised by the commission “is also nutritionally deficient and therefore dangerous to human health” and “would certainly lead to economic depression, especially in developing countries”. He also raised concerns that “the total or nearly total elimination of foods of animal origin” would destroy cattle farming and many other activities related to the production of meat and dairy products. Despite these concerns, raised by a leading member of the world’s top public health body and shared by a network representing 200 million small-scale farmers in 81 countries, EAT continues to play a central role in the global push for the radical transformation of food systems. At the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, which originated from a partnership between the WEF and the UN Secretary-General, Stordalen was given a leading role.

This complete blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private-corporate spheres in the agricultural and food sectors is also happening in other areas — with Bill Gates standing somewhere in the middle. Alongside healthcare, agriculture is the main focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances several initiatives whose stated aim is to increase food security and promote sustainable farming, such as Gates Ag One, CGIAR and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Civil society organisations, however, have accused the Foundation of using its influence to promote multinational corporate interests in the Global South and to push for ineffective (but very profitable) high-tech solutions which have largely failed to increase global food production. Nor are Gates’s “sustainable” agricultural activities limited to developing countries. As well as investing in plant-based protein companies, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Gates has been buying huge amounts of farmland in the US, to the point of becoming the biggest private owner of farmland in the country.

The problem with the globalist trend he embodies is obvious: ultimately, small and medium-scale farming is more sustainable than large-scale industrial farming, as it is typically associated with greater biodiversity and the protection of landscape features. Small farms also provide a whole range of other public goods: they help to maintain lively rural and remote areas, preserve regional identities, and offer employment in regions with fewer job opportunities. But most importantly, small farms feed the world. A 2017 study found that the “peasant food web” — the diverse network of small-scale producers disconnected from Big Agriculture — feeds more than half of the world’s population using only 25% of the world’s agricultural resources.

Traditional farming, though, is suffering an unprecedented attack. Small and medium-scale farmers are being subjected to social and economic conditions in which they simply cannot survive. Peasant farms are disappearing at an alarming rate across Europe and other regions, to the benefit of the world’s food oligarchs — and all this is being done in the name of sustainability. At a time when almost a billion people around the world are still affected by hunger, the lesson of the Dutch farmers could not be more urgent, or inspiring. For now, at least, there is still time to resist the Great Food Reset.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville is under bipartisan fire for his month-long blockade of promotions for generals and admirals, as the Alabama Republican demands the Pentagon halt its controversial abortion policy.

In October, the Department of Defense announced it would start covering travel and transportation costs for service members seeking out-of-state abortions — and granting them administrative leave so they don’t have to tap their vacation time.

In February, Tuberville announced he would use Senate rules to place a hold on promotions for generals and admirals — along with senior DoD civilian appointments requiring Senate approval — until the Pentagon ends the abortion policy. 

The hold prevents the Senate from approving promotions in batches by unanimous consent. They can still be approved using “regular order,” which takes much longer and would require Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to allocate time for floor votes on each promotion. That would take weeks.  

The abortion policy was the Pentagon’s response to the Supreme Court’s June overturning of Roe v Wade, freeing states to enact new restrictions on abortions. As he announced the policy via memorandum, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the high court decision “has impacted access to reproductive health care, with readiness, recruiting and retention implications for the force.”

“The practical effects of recent changes are that significant numbers of service members and their families may be forced to travel greater distances, take more time off from work, and pay more out of pocket expenses to receive reproductive health care,” he wrote. 

Though the new policy doesn’t pay for abortion procedures themselves, Tuberville argues the Pentagon is using the policy as a backdoor means of funding abortions with taxpayer dollars, something that’s generally prohibited under federal law. 

“Federal law only allows the military to provide abortions in very narrow circumstances: rape, incest, and threat to the life of the mother,” Tuberville said on the Senate floor last week. “Yet, the Biden administration has turned the DoD into an abortion travel agency. They did it using a memo.”

Tuberville’s procedural hold on the military promotions is creating a growing backlog, with some 160 general and admiral promotions stopped in their tracks. 

The issue came up at a Senate Armed Services hearing on Tuesday, with Austin declaring that Tuberville’s hold posed a growing threat to military readiness. “Not approving the recommendations for promotions actually creates a ripple effect through the force that makes us far less ready than we need to be.”

In defending the abortion policy, Austin said, “Almost one in five of our troops is women. And they don’t get a chance to choose where they’re stationed. So almost 80,000 of our women are stationed in places where they don’t have access to non-covered reproductive health care” — an elaborate euphemism for an abortion that’s ineligible for taxpayer funding. 

Tuberville, the former college football coach, was criticized for his tactic by Democrats and Republicans alike.

GOP Senator Tuberville is inflicting unnecessary damage to our military by blocking the promotion of 160 officers.

For what? So he can push the MAGA hard line on blocking women’s choice?

Women in the military are more than capable of making their own healthcare decisions.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) March 28, 2023

Schumer said Tuberville was “taking our military, our national security, our safety hostage” and breaking with a tradition by which promotions sail through the Senate. Maine Republican Susan Collins expressed a more gentle “concern” over imposing consequences on generals and admirals who are “not making the policy” that Tuberville is fighting. 

Tuberville said he isn’t budging until the abortion policy is suspended or revoked, and shrugged off assertions that the policy mitigates what would otherwise be a recruiting handicap: “Over the past 40 years, I don’t recall one military person ever complaining that we weren’t performing enough abortions.” 

“[My promotion hold] is about not forcing the taxpayers of this country to fund abortions,” said Tuberville. “As long as I have a voice in this body, Congress will write the laws, not the secretary of defense, not the Joint Chiefs.”

Authored by Derek Scissors via RealClear Wire,

It might be easy to embrace recent warnings against a bellicose bipartisan consensus in Washington regarding China. But the real peril is that the true China consensus — which includes Democrats and Republicans, the administration and Congress — is to do nothing but talk, especially if action comes at a price.

Last month gave us a perfect example. February was full of anti-China speeches: Republican-run congressional hearings, Democratic-run hearings, and Biden administration revelations. In the end though, nothing of substance happened, nor is it likely to happen.

There is no standing up to the People’s Republic of China without costs. It has the world’s second largest economy as well as its second most powerful military. It is led by a dictator-for-life who intentionally hearkens back to a man who caused mass starvation. Winning even a peaceful contest would require sacrifices. Deterring Xi Jinping by preparing for conflict requires more. As sacrifice is not appealing to most American politicians, they instead spout rhetoric while hoping for a contest of convenience.

The administration’s actions include the Department of Commerce calling for tens of billions of dollars to vastly boost domestic semiconductor production, prioritizing it as a vital national interest. Given the PRC’s intent to globally dominate low-end chips, Commerce appears correct. But challenging as this goal is, Commerce is diluting its plan by also asking for better day care as part of the package. This, of course, is a counter-incentive for companies willing to build in the U.S. It creates an opposite effect to what was originally intended.

The administration has treated supply chains similarly, stirring in political priorities such as promoting green energy output without specific plans to secure green energy supply chains. While it is no surprise that political actors would use China as cover for executing domestic policies, it means far less gets done. Export controls on semiconductors were announced to great fanfare last October, with promises of more to come. Yet five months later, we don’t even have the final regulations.

Concerning licensing permissions, Commerce has gone from terrible to mediocre under the Biden administration. Last year, it accepted 70% of applications to export controlled items to the PRC. Not exactly tight restrictions, but still a substantial improvement over the Trump Commerce Department’s performance, during a supposed “trade war,” where the number may have been over 90%. 

Part of the blame is with Congress. Being placed on Commerce’s “Entity List,” which imposes license requirements on foreign individuals, entities, or governments, requires just a license application. Yet many members of Congress have pretended for years that this is a blacklist preventing designated foreign firms from receiving American technology. In fact, tens of billions of dollars’-worth in licenses have been granted to these firms, most of whom were also eligible for American investment. The Entity List has always been fraudulent, and Congress willingly plays along.

Will the new House Select Committee on China mean more effective legislation? Doubtful. Members within the Select Committee are genuinely concerned with the economic and military risks China poses, and they have allies elsewhere in Congress. But the Select Committee has no official jurisdiction — it can only talk, not act. This is an ideal outcome for those who want to appear politically strong while having no obligation at all to back up their words.

The Financial Services Committee, possibly the most important House committee, held a China hearing in early February. According to its Republican chairman and Republican-called witnesses, the top China threat is the U.S. responding in any serious way to China. Their conclusion: The U.S. should face up to the PRC’s military buildup, its domestic and international repression, and its economic predation by continuing to invest freely in the PRC.

With this “pressure” from some Republicans, the Biden administration does not feel compelled to truly compete. An executive order to address the more than $1 trillion the U.S. has invested in the PRC is many months overdue. Even if issued, it may prove an almost entirely empty action. 

Other consequences to inaction are looming. China continues to steal intellectual property (IP), subsidize production that uses the IP, and drive advanced American companies out of business. It will also spread repression and more intensely target Taiwan. Politicians who take this seriously must propose policies that involve some pain, because that is what’s required for the U.S. to win. Politicians who don’t take the PRC seriously are easy to spot. They’ll be pushing some domestic agenda unrelated to China, tilting at windmills, and, above all, talking.

Derek Scissors is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the chief economist of the China Beige Book. The views expressed are the author’s own.

By John Kemp, senior market analyst

India’s electricity transmission system is coming under increasing strain as booming power demand outstrips growth in despatchable generation.

Mild temperatures in February and March have masked the struggle to meet fast-growing loads from industry as well as for refrigeration and air-conditioning.

But periods of more severe temperatures between April and September are likely to reveal the increasingly thin margin of spare generation.

Total electricity consumption increased by 8% in February 2023 compared with the same month a year earlier and by 13% compared with February 2021, according to the Grid Controller of India.

Peak demand met was up by 8% compared with a year ago and 11% compared with 2021 (“Monthly report”, Grid India, March 23, 2023).

But generation capacity has increased by only 4% since 2022 and 9% since 2021, ensuring generation units must be used more intensively.

Like other countries before it, India is experiencing classic pressure on its transmission system associated with rapid industrialisation and electrification of the economy.

Pressure on the network is evident from the amount of time frequency on the transmission system is below the minimum target level.

Frequency is related to the balance between generation and load – excess generation causes frequency to accelerate, excess load causes frequency to drop.

Grid controllers are therefore instructed to keep frequency within tight limits to ensure the network remains stable and avert the risk of a cascading failure.

India’s grid is synchronised at 50.00 cycles per second (Hertz) with a maximum acceptable operating limit of 50.05 and a minimum of 49.90. But frequency fell below the minimum acceptable target of 49.9 Hz almost 11% of the time in February 2022 up from 6% in 2022 and 7% in 2021.

The increasing incidence of under-frequency shows controllers struggled to schedule enough firm generation to meet increasing demand on the system.

So far, periods of under-frequency have been modest, in contrast to March and April 2022 and October 2021, when severe under-frequency was the forerunner of widespread blackouts.

But strain on the system will increase as temperatures rise towards their summer peak in June and again in September-October after the monsoon fades.

The system is already running hard. Peak electricity demand in January (210,618 megawatts) and February (209,665) was only slightly lower than at the height of last summer in June 2022 (211,856).

India needs to maximise generation from all sources, fossil fuels (coal, gas and diesel) as well as renewables (hydro, solar and wind) this summer to keep the lights on.

Government policy aims to maximise the availability of firm generation by prioritising coal movements on the rail network, mandating coal imports, and building up inventories in the yards of coal-fired power stations.

Policymakers have ordered privately owned and captive coal-fired and gas-fired generators to ensure their units are ready to run in the event of an instruction from the grid.

How has your March Madness bracket fared? Many have been completely demolished over the last few weeks. 

This March is the craziest in decades. For the first time since 1979, not a single No. 1, 2, or 3 seed will advance to the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship’s Final Four National Semifinals. 

The Final Four matchups will commence on Saturday at around 6 pm ET, featuring Florida Atlantic taking on San Diego State, followed by UConn going head-to-head with Miami.

We want to turn out attention to savvy Wall Street traders, macro tourists, hedge fund portfolio managers, and business executives who utilize the Bloomberg Terminal. We want to shed light on their brackets, plus who they collectively think will win the tournament. 

For the Florida Atlantic versus San Diego State slot, an overwhelmingly large number of Terminal users had Alabama, then Purdue, Arizona, Duke, Marquette, and Baylor. Just a slither had San Diego State, while Florida Atlantic was nowhere to be found. 

For the second game, UConn versus Miami, most Terminal users picked Houston, Kansas, UCLA, Texas, Gonzaga, and number six on the list UConn. Miami was the ninth pick. 

Here is the complete breakdown of the tournament winner predictions from Terminal users, with UConn ranking fifth, San Diego State 15th, Florida Atlantic 25th, and Miami didn’t make the cut. 

While we cannot disclose the names of the top-performing Terminal users, you can definitely take a look at the firms that employ them…

And for users who filled out their brackets for a cause. Here’s their ranking plus which charity. 

Clearly, not all Terminal users are geniuses. We’ll provide an update on their rankings prior to the championship game.

Authored by Lipton Matthews via The Mises Institute,

Political correctness in Western societies fosters polarization and a toxic culture of ignorance. Although people are rightly outraged by the cancellation of prominent figures, the most glaring consequence of political correctness is the proliferation of ignorance. When speakers are cancelled for contradicting sacrosanct opinions, this leads to an environment where people never arrive at the truth because ideas are not disputed in the public domain.

This devolution of Western culture stymies free speech and intellectual progression.

While some view cancel culture as primarily an assault on freedom, its effects are infinitely more pernicious. Societies evolve by exchanging inferior ideas for superior ones, and cancel culture is disrupting the mechanism filtering out bad ideas. Due to cancel culture, people hold steadfast to false doctrines; the belief that the gender pay gap is a result of discrimination is a classic example that continues to circulate despite evidence showing that gaps are an outcome of working hours and occupational segregation.

The effect of endorsing inaccurate assumptions is that such beliefs will be employed to justify misguided policies.

If people think that women on average earn less than men because of discrimination, they will lobby for policies to rectify the problem, and such policies could be expensive to implement. Entertaining ignorant beliefs will also make it difficult to improve social mobility and narrow the highly touted black-white achievement gap.

Current narratives state that blacks are underperforming in education because of racism, and some propose abolishing standardized tests as a tool to help black students. However, research shows that black students are likely to do well when teachers impose rigorous standards rather than when standards are diluted. Case after case reveals that when scrutinized, politically correct views fail to pass the accuracy test. Nonetheless, wrongheaded ideas are propagated as gospel to the detriment of intellectual progress.

People are entitled to express political opinions and promote them as accurate. However, critics are not obliged to accept folly as truth. The popularity of dubious ideas would not be a problem if proponents would desist from compelling critics to espouse these views or be expelled from polite society. Institutionalizing fallacious ideas has resulted in widespread confusion, especially since these fallacies are inconsistently applied. In polite society, it is objectionable to say that race is not a social construct, and even mainstream consensus purports that race is primarily a social category, but it must be noted that consensus is not evidence.

Yet, despite the acceptance that race is malleable, Rachel Dolezal became a pariah after she was exposed as a white woman pretending to be black. However, why should this pose a problem when race is a social construct? Culture is shared and learned, and we all have the capacity to appreciate foreign cultures. Based on the malleability of race, a white person identifying as black should not be seen as problematic. Sex is biological, so although a man can identify as a woman, he can never become a woman. Yet, activists are infuriated when white people identify as black, even though doing so is more logically plausible than a man identifying as a woman.

Some find white people identifying as black offensive because they claim that doing so provides these white people with benefits that belong to historically oppressed black people. But this is a double standard, since men who identify as women gain benefits that belong to women, who are also seen as oppressed. It is mind-boggling that woke activists can’t see the parallels between transracialism and transgenderism. Moreover, equally outrageous is that they don’t seem to recognize that trans women are depriving real women of benefits when trans women profit from gender quotas.

For years, feminists have been arguing that women have been disenfranchised. Today, many feminists, except for some radicals, advocate for the disenfranchisement of women by embracing male athletes who compete with females. Instead of empowering women, the idiocy of political correctness inspires feminists to endorse the marginalization of women. Allowing men to compete with women diminishes opportunities for female advancement, but stating the obvious will ruin one’s career.

Kathleen Stock was ruthlessly hounded by the unthinking mob for arguing that allowing men to identify as women creates dangerous spaces for women. Stock asserted that the desire to be seen as trans friendly has led companies to advocate policies that make women susceptible to violence:

Even more pressingly, if we lose a working concept of “female” . . . self-declared trans women (males) may well eventually gain unrestricted access to protected spaces originally introduced to shield females from sexual violence from males. We are already seeing the erosion of these, as companies and charities open formerly female-only spaces such as changing rooms, shared accommodation, swimming ponds, hospital wards, and prisons, to everyone out of a desire not to appear transphobic.

Moral blind spots and contradictions are baked into the psyche of political correctness. Another issue is that denying the genetics of IQ is fashionable despite evidence to the contrary. Politically correct thinkers struggle to appreciate that IQ is genetic, but they don’t have a problem accepting the heritability of other traits or diseases if they can prove that such inherited characteristics disadvantage minority groups. For example, many believe that blacks are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure because during the slave trade’s Middle Passage, Africans who retained salt had lower mortality rates. Therefore, they passed on genes conducive to salt retention, which leads to hypertension.

However, this idea was thoroughly debunked by Heidi L. Lujan and Stephen E. DiCarlo in an academic paper:

Available evidence suggests that the difference in salt-sensitivity between African-Americans and Caucasians (European-Americans) is significantly smaller than what the Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis suggests. In fact, Chrysant and colleagues were unable to find differences in the blood pressure response to salt by race, age, sex, or body weight. Thus, salt sensitivity is not a racial problem, but rather a human problem, and the generalization that blacks are salt sensitive and whites are not should be discarded.

Nevertheless, the evidence does not seem to disabuse politically correct activists of incorrect notions. Indeed, sensitive topics can be involved in political debates, but sympathizing with delusional people will create a generation of idiots and destroy civilization in the process.

As Goldman noted overnight, the bank had received quite a few inbound client inquiries as to what may be behind the recent jump in crude oil prices which after tumbling to the lowest level since 2021 have rebounded back to almost $80/bbl. One answer may come from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, where producers have shut in or reduced output at several oilfields following a halt to the northern export pipeline, company statements showed, with more outages on the horizon.

Iraq was forced to halt around 450,000 barrels per day of crude exports, or half a percent of global oil supply, from the Kurdistan region (KRI) on Saturday through a pipeline that runs from its northern Kirkuk oil fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, Reuters reported.

Turkey stopped pumping Iraqi crude from the pipeline after Iraq won an arbitration case in which it said Turkey had violated a joint agreement by allowing the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to export oil to Ceyhan without Baghdad’s consent.

Iraq’s government said it’s up to Kurdistan to break the oil deadlock. “The ball now is the Kurds’ court,” Asim Jihad, a spokesman for Iraq’s Federal Ministry of Oil, said in an interview.

Meanwhile, oil firms operating in the KRI are being forced to halt output or move production into storage, which many say will reach capacity within days, as talks drag between Turkey, Baghdad and the KRG to resume exports.

Norwegian oil firm DNO said on Wednesday it had begun shutting down production at its Tawke and Peshkabir fields, where production averaged 107,000 barrels per day (bpd) last year. This represents a quarter of total Kurdish region exports, DNO said.

Genel Energy, a partner in the fields, said: “Peshkabir production was halted last night and plans drawn up to conduct deferred maintenance. Tawke production shutdown has started but will take an additional day or so.” Genel Energy’s remaining assets in KRI continue to flow into storage, the firm said. Production from its Sarta field can flow into storage until the end of the week, while tanks can hold production from Taq Taq until around April 21, a company spokesperson said on Wednesday. The fields produced a respective 4,710 bpd and 4,490 bpd last year.

Canada-based Forza Petroleum, formerly Oryx Petroleum Corp, was forced to shut in production earlier this week from the 14,500 bpd Hawler license, which produced an average 13,700 bpd in January and February.

Gulf Keystone has reduced production at the Shaikan oil field, which previously produced around 55,000 bpd, and said on Monday it would suspend production after a few days. The company declined to comment on current production levels.

Dallas-based HKN Energy, which operates the Sarsang block, said on Monday it would shut in operations “within a week if no resolution is reached” as its storage facilities approach capacity. The block produced 43,048 bpd in the fourth quarter of last year.

In response, the White House – which has been paranoid about even one drop of oil not hitting the global market on time – is pushing Iraq and Turkey to restart exports of crude oil and to resolve a dispute with Kurdish authorities as soon as possible, because the last thing Biden needs in addition to a bank crisis and deposit runs is another surge in gasoline prices.

And while the Turkey-Iraq spat has taken off almost half a million barrels off the market, and pushed the price of Brent higher, the question is how long before CTAs – which are massively short oil – start to cover. As Goldman calcualted yesterday, “systematic positioning here leans short (went from short $10bn in energy before Feb 22 to now being short $30bn). Cot data re-affirming the above, with positioning coming in from late Feb/early-March highs.” A condition projection of CTA activity in oil shows massive buying in the coming weeks should the price of oil turn higher, creating a positive feedback loop of more buying and more short covering.