Month: August 2024

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

As the high generated by the previous iteration of financial repression wears off, the dose increases, as do the stakes when that high wears off.

You’ve no doubt heard “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The original quote noted by reporter Peter Arnett in 1968 was “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The phrase (whether an exact transcript or not) became emblematic of America’s war in Vietnam, encapsulating the impossibility of fighting an unconventional war without front lines for “the hearts and minds” of the citizens with massive firepower.

We find ourselves in a similar situation today as all the immense firepower of central bank stimulus and intervention will be unwound in a chaotically destructive fashion in what I term The Great Unwinding of all the excesses of leverage, debt, stimulus and feverish speculation that now dominate the global financial system and economy.

As in Vietnam, the policies were launched with good intentions: Saving South Vietnam from Communism, the Domino Theory, etc. were the stated goals at the start, just as the goal of all the “emergency measures” pursued by central banks and Treasury departments in 2008-09 was “saving the system from collapse,” a possibility succinctly expressed by President Bush at the time: “This sucker’s going down.”

Just as America’s intervention in Vietnam was an “emergency measure” that started out limited and then ballooned into all-out war, the Federal Reserve and other central banks unleashed the financial equivalent of Operation Rolling Thunder while governments cranked up deficit spending, i.e. borrowing and spending trillions to prop up the economy.

The policies that were announced as “emergency measures” quickly became permanent and were expanded as ending the programs would have torpedoed the fragile debt-based asset bubbles being inflated to boost the wealth effect, a metric eerily similar to the Vietnam War’s infamous body count, where “winning” morphed into counting the casualties of the “emergency measures.”

That the bottom 90% lost ground as the Fed boosted the wealth of the top 10% was another case of destroying the town to save it. Collateral damage is the antiseptic phrase of choice in such cases, and so as the Fed’s bubble inflation enriched the already-wealthy–the wealth effect sounds so bubbly and positive, doesn’t it?–the real economy became addicted to near-zero-interest debt, extreme leverage and gaming the Fed’s expanding interventions: buy the dip, because the Fed will always leap into action to “save” the market.

The problem with interventions and addictions is that it takes ever larger doses to maintain the high. There is no consequence-free intervention or addiction, and so with each new round of stimulus, the economy’s dependence on Fed / central bank manipulation–oops, I meant intervention–also expanded.

How the housing sector survived without trillions of dollars in Fed manipulation is a mystery, as the Fed buying trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) is now the permanent policy, and reversing that “support” would unleash frighteningly uncontrollable market forces.

That’s where all this has taken us: the unmanipulated market is now Nemesis. Should the Fed and Treasury loosen their grip and the market wrenches free, then the global financial system and the global economy that now depends on it will both unwind in non-linear, unpredictable ways that will wipe out much of the debt, leverage and phantom wealth of The Everything Bubble.

Lost in all the speculative babble of how to game the Fed’s next round of Rolling Thunder is the catastrophic unfairness of the Fed’s 15 years of propping up zombies and enriching the already-rich. The bottom 90% who live off their labor have seen their earnings lose purchasing power and assets such as houses soar out of reach, while the Fed and the other central banks have institutionalized moral hazard for the super-wealthy, who can count on the Fed bailing them out while the not-wealthy pay 22% interest on credit cards.

Equally catastrophic is the incentivizing of speculation over productive investment of capital. Yes, we’re all fans of reusable rockets and battery factories, but the $100 trillion in “wealth” added since 2009 isn’t the result of incredible leaps in productivity; the vast majority of that “wealth” is the result of credit-asset bubbles inflated by the Fed and other central banks.

Meanwhile, the noose of financial repression keeps tightening, as depicted on this chart, courtesy of Richard Bonugli, with whom I discussed The Great Unwinding in a new podcast. (33 min)

As the high generated by the previous iterations of financial repression wears off, the dose increases, as do the stakes when that high wears off. This is how we get to the body count phase, where statistics are issued to “prove we’re winning,” when in fact the financial sector is increasingly fragile and the economy is increasingly dependent on the next dose of Fed fentanyl.

We’re now so high on Fed fentanyl–rate cuts incoming!–that we don’t even notice that speculation has replaced productivity growth as the source of “wealth”:

Financial Repression is generous with collateral damage. Trillions in Fed fentanyl and federal deficits, and the bottom 50% received a staggeringly large 0.2% boost in their signal-noise share of the nation’s financial wealth, all the way up to 2.6%, yowza.

We got your wealth effect right here: lucky you don’t actually need wages to live, right? Oh, you do? Well, sorry about that…

Too bad you weren’t already wealthy, then the Fed would have made you a lot wealthier.

The unwinding will be uneven, of course, with a great many towns destroyed to save them, and eventually the dominoes falling will reach us, wherever we are. The financial system is tightly bound globally, so as it unwinds it will take down the equally tightly bound global economy.

And so here we are: it became necessary to destroy the global economy to save it. We hope you enjoy the fireworks.

New podcast: The Great Unwinding. (33 min)

*  *  *

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The tab for New York City to house and feed scores of illegal migrants has likely surpassed $5 billion, of which $2 billion alone has been spent on housing, according to city data cited by the NY Post.

Since the spring of 2022, some 212,000 ‘asylum seekers’ have flowed through the system, according to City Hall.

Money spent so far includes:

• $1.98 billion on housing and rent.

• About $2 billion on services and supplies.

• Nearly $500 million on food and medical costs.

• Another $500 million on IT, administrative and other costs. 

The NYPD has spent $21 million on public safety and security related to the migrants.

The eye-popping figures, listed on the city’s online asylum-seeker funding tracker, shows the city overall spent $4.88 billion combined through fiscal years 2023 and ‘24. Based on the rate of spending, the city likely exceeded more than $112 million since the start of the new fiscal year beginning July 1, or will soon, cracking $5 billion.

Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has even projected the cost could double, hitting $10 billion over the three year period ending June 30, 2025.

In a recent posting, the city’s Department of Homeless Services revealed two more contracts this week totaling a combined $40 million in order to provide services to migrants at hotels converted into emergency shelters – which include hotels at the heart of the Broadway tourist disrict.

According to Mayor Eric Adams’ chief of staff Camille Joseph Varlack, “This is not a New York City issue or even a United States issue, this is a worldwide issue,” adding “We’ve had the opportunity to speak to other cities who are expecting and experiencing migration and we expect that to continue between wars and climate change and all the other issues.”

Hotels Raking It In…

As noted last month by The Blaze, and The New York Post, New York City hotels will be taking in more than $1 billion in taxpayer cash to support migrants. Their reports note that the city currently uses 193 migrant shelters, with about 80% housed in motels, hotels, or inns.

According to a May analysis by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, the average cost per hotel room is $156, though some reports suggest these locations may be charging over $300 per night since migrants began arriving in spring 2022.

The report highlights that by May 31, the city had spent about $4.88 billion on the migrant crisis, with $1.98 billion allocated specifically to migrant housing, including hotels, motels, and tent cities at Randall’s Island and Floyd Bennett Field.

The Blaze wrote that CoStar reported in November 2023 that up to 16,000 hotel rooms have been taken off the market for migrants, impacting the hotel industry negatively.

William Shandler, who is a manager at Iron Bar commented: “Our taxes are being used to pay for the migrants, and where are we supposed to make revenue? How as a business could we function?”

Councilwoman Joann Ariola added that hotels are “not for sheltering the masses of people pouring over our borders every day,” but rather for tourism. “These locations were meant to boost the economy of this city, but instead they’ve become a net drain and are costing us enormously,” she told the New York Post. 

The Post wrote that the city’s financial support has bolstered the hotel industry, which added 21,000 rooms in the four years before the pandemic, according to the Department of Planning. When tourism plummeted in 2020, former Mayor Bill de Blasio provided a lifeline by contracting hotels to house the homeless.

Mayor Eric Adams has continued this practice. By September, the city extended a three-year, $1.3 billion contract with the Hotel Association of New York City to house migrants. Additionally, a $76.69 million emergency contract was signed in January for shelter at 15 hotels.

HANYC’s president, Vijay Dandapani, stated they’re working to keep costs low while supporting the city’s efforts to care for asylum seekers.

Enjoy your next vacation to New York City!

Oil prices are lower this morning – following bond yields, bitcoin and big-cap all lower post-CPI – erasing the small gains overnight following API’s reported big crude draw.

“Macroeconomic eyes remain very much glued on the state of inflation in the United States this week. With US PPI coming in 0.1% softer-than-expected yesterday, any such replication in the CPI reading today will hear not only a clamour of calls for the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates but see another bout of speculative equity buying,” PVM Oil Associates noted.

For now, the official DOE data will likely decide the next leg.

API

• Crude: -5.2mm

• Cushing: -2.277mm

• Gasoline: -3.689mm

• Distillate: +612k

DOE

• Crude: +1.36mm

• Cushing: -1.665mm

• Gasoline: -2.894mm

• Distillate: -1.673mm

Bucking the API reported draw, DOE official data reports that crude stocks rose last week, ending a six-week streak of draws, but Cushing stockpiles continued to sink as did product inventories…

Source: Bloomberg

Stocks at the Cushing hub fell to their lowest since February…

Source: Bloomberg

The Biden admin added 694k barrels of oil to the SPR…

Source: Bloomberg

For context, there’s a long way to go..

Source: Bloomberg

US Crude production dipped off record highs…

Source: Bloomberg

WTI is extending its losses for now…

Middle East tensions remain heightened, with Iran still claiming the right to retaliate against Israel following the assassinations of key leaders in the Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups it backs. A direct attack on Israel is expected, but Iran has so far delayed any strike.

The Nord Stream pipeline explosion was one the largest acts of industrial sabotage in modern history. Nearly two years later, speculation continues to swirl about who was behind the attack. 

Was it the CIA, as famed journalist and Pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh claimed? Did the Russians blow up their own undersea pipeline in the Baltic Sea? Or was it a Ukrainian commando with a sailing yacht? 

A new report surfaced on Wednesday, released by several German media outlets, including ARD, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Zeit. It details how German officials obtained an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen named ‘Volodymyr Z’ in June, who was living in Poland at the time.

Polish National Public Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Anna Adamiak told Reuters that the arrest warrant was sent to the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw in June.

Volodymyr Z was a diver wanted in connection with the Nord Stream explosion that rocked the NatGas pipeline, which stretches from Russia to Germany, in September 2022. 

“Ultimately, Volodymyr Z. was not detained, because at the beginning of July he left Polish territory, crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border,” Adamiak said. 

She continued, “Free crossing of the Polish-Ukrainian border by the above-mentioned person was possible because German authorities… did not include him in the database of wanted persons, which meant that the Polish Border Guard had no knowledge and no grounds to detain Volodymyr Z.”

UPDATE: Poland confirmed it had received a European arrest warrant from Germany for a suspect in the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

The Polish prosecutor’s office said Volodymyr Z. could not be arrested as he left the country for Ukraine in early July. pic.twitter.com/saOVCJCaxk

— DW News (@dwnews) August 14, 2024

In February, Swedish and Danish authorities closed their investigation into who was behind the pipeline sabotage. 

• Sweden Halts Nord Stream Investigation, Hands Off To Germany, As Hersh Fills In More Blanks

• Denmark Drops Probe Into Nord Stream Gas Pipeline Sabotage

In early 2023, months after the pipeline attack, journalist Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report on his Substack that alleged the US blew up the Russia-to-Germany NatGas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise. 

“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report, entitled How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline, reads.

Days after the explosion, America’s corporate media outlets pushed this propaganda. 

The mainstream news media is the main source of disinformation today pic.twitter.com/QreqONGS7h

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 8, 2023

One can’t help but wonder if the latest push by EU corporate media is yet another misinformation and disinformation campaign to shift the blame from the US to Ukraine.  

Following last month’s ‘deflationary’ print (-0.1% MoM), analysts expected headline CPI to rise 0.2% MoM and they were spot on, shifting the YoY CPI print to 2.9% (from 3.0%) – the lowest since March 2021…

Source: Bloomberg

Goods deflation continues to drag overall CPI lower…

Source: Bloomberg

For context, Goods prices are down 1.9% YoY – the biggest deflationary impulse since 2004. Services prices continue to rise YoY but at the slowest pace since 2022…

Source: Bloomberg

The 3m and 6m annualized CPI rates continue to trend lower (with Energy a particularly volatile factor)….

Source: Bloomberg

Core CPI also rose 0.2% MoM (as expected), and the YoY rate of inflation slowed to 3.2% (from 3.3%) – the lowest since April 2021…

Source: Bloomberg

While Core CPI is slowing YoY, the Core goods deflation appears to have stalled…

Source: Bloomberg

However, that is the 50th straight month of MoM increases in Core CPI, and a record high…

Source: Bloomberg

Under the hood, used car prices fell 2.3% along with airline fares (-1.2%) while Car insurance costs jumped 1.2% and furniture prices rose 0.3%…

Source: Bloomberg

Perhaps more worrying is the fact that rent inflation has stopped falling…

• July Shelter inflation up 0.33% MoM and up 5.05% YoY vs 5.16% in June

• July Rent Inflation up 0.42% MoM and up 5.09% YoY vs 5.07% in June

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, the so-called SuperCore CPI rose 0.2% MoM (same as the rest), dragging the YoY down to 4.73% (still notably elevated)…

Source: Bloomberg

Transportation Services jumped notably MoM..

Source: Bloomberg

So, is this ‘good’ news or bad news?

Finally, money supply growth is reaccelerating…

Source: Bloomberg

Is this the trough for CPI?

As Bloomberg notes, while the pace of inflation has come down, its still growing, and consumers in the New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA metro, and the Dallas area still are dealing with inflation in excess of 4% — the highest among large metro areas in the US.

Will The Fed really cut rates as rent inflation inflects higher for the first time since 2023?

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics,

Apparently Saul Alinsky has been resurrected and is working as the chief propaganda coordinator for the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.

Alinsky was a 1960s radical who helped shape the strategy for a leftist takeover of the bulwark institutions that for two centuries had protected the American republic from opportunistic would-be dictators.

Alinsky’s goal was to create a guidebook for how leftist radicals could wrest America’s domestic and foreign policy away from conservatives, moderates, and traditional liberals. His 1971 blueprint was called “Rules for Radicals,” and it instructed left-wing activists how to gain power in their communities through a campaign of character assassination, manipulation, and ruthless persistence.

Those three characteristics have been in plain view for the last two weeks as Harris and her surrogates have unleashed a series of attacks on Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance.

In particular, Harris and the left-wing media have adopted two of Alinsky’s rules in order to try to destroy the public image of Trump and Vance. The first is: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” The second rule is “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Both of those can be seen in the push to label Trump and Vance as “weird,” an insult employed by Harris’ running mate Tim Walz when he was auditioning for the job. There is absolutely no response to that insult except to say, “I’m not weird; you are,” and that’s the tactic Trump’s team employed, but it was hopeless. The Democrats picked the target, froze it, and personalized it. Alinsky was right. You can’t counterattack ridicule.

So the best you can hope for is to expose the attack as itself being ridiculous. Vance has tried to do that by pointing out that Walz’s policies such as putting tampons in elementary school boys bathrooms are what’s weird. It might have been an effective counter-tactic when this country had a media that wasn’t thoroughly partisan. But a press corps thrilled to join in regurgitating Democratic Party talking points doesn’t care how weird it is that Tampon Tim can’t tell the difference between boys and girls.

The good news is that Donald Trump is very familiar with the Democrats’ tactic of character assassination. For the past nine years he has been subjected to endless false attacks that aimed to polarize him as first a Russian stooge, then a white supremacist, and finally an enemy of democracy who threatened a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t reelected in 2024. Those attacks have all been exposed as partisan chicanery, but that doesn’t stop his opponents from repeating them every chance they get.

Two weeks ago, Democrats and the mainstream media were caught red-handed as they tried to jump-start a new hoax that suggested Trump would cancel future elections if he were elected this year.

The video that played on Sunday morning shows and across the universe of cable news channels for three days at the end of July came from a speech that Trump delivered to the Turning Point Action Believers Summit on Friday, July 26. This clip from CNN typified the way Trump’s words were portrayed, with one commentator saying that “it certainly sounds like a presidential candidate that is determined to shut down the democratic process.”

CBS News reached the same conclusion, saying that on social media there were “some calls of alarm in response to Trump’s comments, expressing concern that they alluded to authoritarianism and could be interpreted as an indication that he would not leave office if he wins the election.”

That’s ridiculous, of course, and if there should be any concern about Trump’s words, it would be about how nonchalantly the media distorted them for the purpose of character assassination.

The part of Trump’s speech that was played or quoted ad infinitum by mainstream media for those three days was this:

“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians … In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Twisting those words to suggest Trump was planning “to shut down the democratic process” is just cynical. But if anyone were sincerely alarmed, you’d think that their next step would be to listen to the entire speech where these words were uttered to find out if there was any missing context.

A real journalist would look for answers before running with a hugely damaging and potentially slanderous story. But this episode demonstrates conclusively that there are very few real journalists left in America.

I knew the real meaning of Trump’s words because I had watched the speech live on a streaming channel, but how much work would it take for a highly paid network reporter or anchor to look at the Believers speech after the fact before accusing the former president of plotting to eliminate elections?

If they had, they would have found that, a little over 37 minutes into his speech, Trump explained to his audience that Christians vote in disappointingly low numbers, and if they wanted him to return to the White House, they needed to go out and vote “at least this election.”

Here’s the full quote that I don’t believe was ever played, not once, by any major media outlet:

And by the way, Christians have to vote. You know, I don’t want to scold you, but do you know Christians do not vote proportionately, they don’t vote like they should. They’re not big voters … They have to vote. If they don’t vote, we’re not going to win the election. If you do vote, we’re going to win in a landslide. Too big to rig. We’re gonna win in a landslide. … You know, you have tremendous power, but you just don’t know that. But you have to use that power. Christians are a group that’s known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election, just get us into that beautiful White House. Vote for your congressmen and women. Vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better. This country will be great again like never before. You gotta vote. … This election will be the most important election in the history of our country. We’re going to save our country with this election.

Who knows how much damage the reporting of CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC did to Trump while the “Canceled Elections Hoax” played out from that Friday until Tuesday of the following week? And I don’t expect that we have heard the last of this hoax, any more than we have heard the last of the “Very Fine People Hoax” after seven years.

But there was a sudden and definitive end to the use of the misleading clip on TV news outlets starting that Monday night, July 29. That’s because Laura Ingraham aired an interview with Trump on Fox News where she asked him specifically what he meant by saying that Christians wouldn’t have to vote again in four years.

Trump repeated to Ingraham exactly what he had said in his speech – that Christians tend not to vote in as high numbers as other interest groups – but even Ingraham had a hard time grasping the idea. Certainly she had never watched the video of the entire speech, and apparently neither did anyone on her staff, because she truly seemed to be unsure why Trump had said that he wanted Christians to “vote, just this time.” Even after Trump explained, she still wanted him to reassure her that he didn’t plan to cancel future elections.

To be clear, Ingraham is a lawyer by training, not a journalist. Even so, she shamed the real journalists by at least asking the target of the smear to explain himself. But that wouldn’t have even been necessary if anyone in the media had bothered to listen to the Believers speech in the first place.

And even after the Ingraham interview, there were several news articles that simply refused to comprehend Trump’s explanation. The New York Times characterized the interview as Trump declining “to back away from [the] ‘You don’t have to vote again’ line” and saying that he “brushed aside multiple requests to walk back or clarify the statement.”

Wrong. Actually, the New York Times declined to accept Trump’s explanation and tried unsuccessfully to keep the hoax alive. But as we see every day, the real hoax is journalists pretending to be fair and impartial when, in fact, they are just tools of the radical left who have one goal in mind: Target Trump.

Saul Alinsky would be proud.

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His newest book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Gettr @HeartlandDiary.

A German military base, home to thousands of troops, was placed under lockdown on Wednesday following a suspected sabotage targeting its water supply, according to Spiegel magazine. 

Die Bundeswehrkaserne Köln-Wahn ist abgeriegelt. Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen gehen die Behörden dem Verdacht einer Straftat nach. Soldaten dürfen kein Trinkwasser entnehmen. https://t.co/7ICbP2IZtW

— DER SPIEGEL (@derspiegel) August 14, 2024

Officials at the Cologne-Wahn military base, which has 4,300 soldiers and 1,200 civilian employees, informed all military personnel and employees not to drink the water as they believed it had been contaminated. 

Military police and the military intelligence agency found damage to a stretch of fence on the base’s perimeter, with reason to believe someone illegally entered the base. Spiegel said officials are investigating all alleged crimes.

Here’s more from Spiegel:

In an internal communication from the Bundeswehr’s Territorial Command (TFK), personnel still in the barracks are asked to speak to “unknown persons within sight” and to report “any suspicious behavior.” This is an indication that the authorities are searching the area for possible perpetrators. Already on Wednesday night, there were internal reports from the Bundeswehr that a suspicious person had been spotted near the fence around the barracks and had fled after being discovered.

The TFK’s statement also states that the barracks will remain sealed off until further notice – “neither in nor out.”

A spokesperson for the Territorial Command in Berlin confirmed to Reuters that the military base was locked down but declined to provide more information on what that entailed. He said, “We have our reasons for taking this action, and we take the case seriously.” 

Cologne-Wahn is a critical military hub that supports war efforts in Ukraine. It also houses military aircraft used for travel by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his ministers. 

 

Authored by Huey Freeman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Men tend to get cancer more often than women, and that prevalence is expected to worsen.

“Substantial disparities in cancer cases and deaths were observed among men in 2022, and these are projected to widen by 2050,” according to a study published Monday in Cancer, an Interdisciplinary Journal of the American Cancer Society.

By 2050, the number of new cancer deaths for men globally is expected to reach 10.5 million, a 93 percent increase. Additionally, the number of new cancer cases for men is projected to rise by 84 percent. Both rates are higher for men than for women.

The rise in the number of cancer deaths is particularly pronounced in men aged 65 or older, marking an over 117 percent increase. Almost two-thirds of the males who developed cancer or died from the disease were in this age group.

Lifestyle Choices Are the Main Factors

The 2050 estimate was based on 2022 observations, with researchers making projections for every five years.

Researchers ascribed lifestyle choices like smoking and alcohol consumption as the main factors for the widening gap between sexes.

The researchers analyzed data on 30 cancers among men in 2022, gathered from 185 countries and territories.

Researchers also said that men tend to get exposed to more carcinogens in the workplace, participate less in cancer prevention screenings, and are less involved in early treatment, which contributes to a higher cancer incidence rate.

The cancer death rate for men was 43 percent higher than it was in women in 2020, with 120.8 deaths per 100,000 men, compared to 84.2 per 100,000.

Lung cancer was the most common cancer and caused the most deaths, the authors said, although the leading cancer was noted to vary slightly across different age groups.

Cancers Affecting Men Receive Less Attention

The study pointed out that cancer affecting women receives more public attention.

“Early detection and interventions for female-specific cancers, such as breast and cervical cancer, have been beneficial; however, there are no comparable programs for male-specific cancers, such as prostate or testicular cancer,” the researchers wrote.

Additionally, males participate less often in screening programs for diseases afflicting both sexes, such as colorectal cancer, according to the study.

Male Smokers Outnumber Female Smokers 5 to 1

Though smoking is a leading cause of death around the globe, there is a big difference in the prevalence of male smokers versus female. According to a study by University of Washington researchers, 32.6 percent of men worldwide smoked in 2020 compared to 6.5 percent of women.

Smoking is a leading risk factor for cancer, and it is linked to lung, mouth, prostate, and blood cancer, along with others. Alcohol consumption, which is also more prevalent in men, has been linked to cancers such as liver, colorectal, prostate, and stomach cancer.

Days ago we featured a report detailing how the US is ready to get back to ‘business as usual’ regarding Saudi Arabia, as the Biden administration is set to lift its three-year ban on sales of offensive weaponry to the Gulf kingdom.

Biden has been hoping to broker a Saudi-Israel normalization deal during this closing phase of his administration, and he’s trying to woo Riyadh connected with efforts toward a Gaza ceasefire to end the war there.

On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that the offensive weapons pipeline to Saudi Arabia is back on, reporting that the US is sending shipments of bombs worth more than $750 million. This is expected to be complete in the coming months, before Biden exits the White House. 

These bomb shipments have been on pause in the wake of the half-decade long Saudi/UAE/US coalition operation in Yemen, which resulted in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis at that time. 

Worsened relations between Washington and Riyadh also were on display in the years after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi intelligence in Istanbul, likely on orders from crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS).

But despite Biden previously calling MbS a “pariah”, a new quid pro quo arrangement is back on, per the WSJ:

The deliveries will include 3,000 Small Diameter Bombs and 7,500 Paveway IV bombs, which have been on hold since President Biden halted the shipments in 2021 over Saudi Arabia’s punishing war in Yemen.   

The shipments underscore White House attempts to woo Riyadh, hoping closer ties with the oil-rich kingdom will pay dividends in the administration’s final months. The Biden administration has been drafting a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia, as well discussing plans to provide assistance so the kingdom can acquire civil nuclear power. 

The initial pause in offensive weapons was ostensibly to prepare each side to agree to a 2022 ceasefire deal to end the Yemen war.

But now with the Yemeni Houthis’ onslaught of attacks on Red Sea shipping in order to punish Israel as well as Western powers for their support of the IDF military campaign in Gaza, the US is ready to arm the Saudis again.

“We are regularly conducting airstrikes to degrade Houthi capabilities, an effort that is ongoing and will continue together with a coalition of partners,” a senior Biden official recently told Reuters.

A deep dive on the inner workings of failed enforcement of weapons controls in the Biden admin by @dawnmenorg’s Josh Paul: “the End of a Pause, as the U.S. Lifts Ban on Air-to-Ground Munitions to Saudi Arabia” https://t.co/if1pBGSAno

— Sarah Leah Whitson (@sarahleah1) August 13, 2024

“We have designated the Houthis as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, and we will have imposed sanctions and additional costs on the Houthi smuggling networks and military apparatus,” the official continued. “This pressure will continue to build over the coming weeks.” But in reality Biden’s Middle East policy has gone nowhere, and seems to have only escalated tensions across the region.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Belarus announced late last week that it shot down several Ukrainian drones over its airspace, which it later discovered were full of NATO electronics, and subsequently decided to strengthen defenses along its southern border.

It’s also considering shutting down the Ukrainian Embassy in Minsk too. This follows their border crisis from a little more than a month ago after Ukraine’s military buildup back then and comes amidst Ukraine’s sneak attack against Russia’s Kursk Region, both of which were analyzed below:

* 30 June: “Keep An Eye On Ukraine’s Military Buildup Along The Belarusian Border”

* 8 August: “Five Lessons For Russia To Learn From Ukraine’s Sneak Attack Against Kursk Region”

* 10 August: “Last Year’s Pentagon Leaks Proved That Zelensky Was Plotting To Invade Russia Since January 2023”

In brief, the first crisis de-escalated after Kiev reportedly removed its troops first and then Minsk naively assumed that its neighbor thus had no aggressive intentions so it followed suit, while the second is the natural culmination of those aforesaid attacks. It should also be said that Belarus’ decision to de-escalate border tensions with Ukraine inadvertently freed up more of the latter’s forces for invading Russia even though that’s of course not what Lukashenko intended to have happen.

The fog of war makes it difficult to accurately assess the situation in Kursk Region, but most reports indicate that Ukraine’s offensive has halted and that it might be digging in for the long run. This adds context to its drone incursions over Belarus by suggesting that its General Staff could be probing for weaknesses all along the Union State’s border. The swiftness with which Ukraine broke through the Russian border might embolden it to try replicating this against Belarus as a diversionary tactic.

It’s premature to jump to conclusions, but that could further stretch Russia’s forces and help advance Ukraine’s goal of coercing its foe to transfer some of them from the Donbass front if it happens, which is widely thought to be the primary objective behind its sneak attack against Kursk Region. Likewise, Ukraine’s reported probing into Belgorod Region and its latest attack against the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) complement these efforts, all of which aim to keep Russian on edge and guessing.

The military-strategic situation is curiously similar to the days before Ukraine’s ultimately failed counteroffensive last summer when “The Union State Expected That The NATO-Russian Proxy War Will Expand” to possibility include Belarus, Moldova, and/or Russia’s pre-2014 territory. That didn’t happen as is now known, perhaps due to urgently improved border defenses at the time that might have since been scaled back due to complacency, but Ukraine certainly seems to be seriously considering it now.

As for the Moldovan option, it’s always been a wildcard that Kiev has thus far held off on playing despite prior Russian concerns, though that doesn’t mean that it should be forgotten about. One argument against expanding the conflict to that front is that it could inadvertently stretch Ukraine’s own forces even further and thus facilitate a possible Russian breakthrough in Donbass, which is precisely what Ukraine is trying to prevent or delay as long as possible through various means.

The same goes for attacking Belarus or launching another sneak attack against a different region within Russia’s pre-2014 territory, let alone all at the same time, whereas more attacks against the ZNPP wouldn’t entail the same military risks even though the environmental ones are much greater. At the same time, however, the Belarusian option might be more enticing for Ukraine to contemplate than any other when recalling what Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper reported earlier in the spring.

They claimed that Belarus’ direct involvement in the conflict would trigger the tripwire for a conventional NATO intervention, which could relieve pressure on Kiev while provoking a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis that might see Russia freeze its advance in Donbass. Of course, neither can be taken for granted: NATO might decline to conventionally intervene if Ukraine provokes Belarus to respond, and Russia might not freeze its offensive in Donbass as part of some mutual de-escalation deal with NATO.

Nevertheless, Kiev might still gamble that it can get NATO to directly intervene on its side by provoking Belarus to respond, including through a potentially forthcoming conventional attack. The conflict’s military-strategic dynamics continue to favor Russia even in spite of what’s happening in Kursk Region so Ukraine might soon become desperate enough to implement its own “Samson Option” of trying to expand the conflict in every direction possible if its leadership comes to believe that defeat is inevitable.

In that scenario, it might also finally play the Moldovan wildcard and attempt Kursk-like sneak attacks against other Russian border regions, though even then it couldn’t be taken for granted that NATO would conventionally intervene or that their intervention would result in preventing Ukraine’s defeat. Moreover, the US might calculate that frantically trying to expand the conflict in every direction possible isn’t in its interests, in which case it could try to dissuade Ukraine of this or covertly stop it if it still does.

In connection with that, it’s relevant to reference Bloomberg’s hit piece from earlier this month against Zelensky’s hawkish chief of staff Andrey Yermak, which this analysis here argues could be the beginning of an American campaign for weakening that grey cardinal’s influence. This radical ideologue is a major obstacle to the resumption of peace talks and he might even be the one who put Zelensky up to invading Russia. So long as he retains the president’s ear, then Ukraine’s “Samson Option” can’t ever be ruled out.

It therefore follows that the US might want to drive a wedge between them in order to reduce the chances that Yermak convinces Zelensky to go all out if he believes that defeat is inevitable, and thus risk provoking a NATO-Russian hot war, instead of resuming peace talks in that event. After all, Ukraine might have wanted to expand the conflict into Belarus, Moldova, and/or Russia’s pre-2014 territory as part of its counteroffensive, but the US could have advised against it out of an abundance of caution.

Last year would have been a much better time to do that than now when Ukraine still had tens of thousands more troops, hundreds of more Western vehicles, and much higher morale. Going this route one year later after so many losses doesn’t make military-strategic sense except if Ukraine is seriously flirting with the “Samson Option”, which the US might either begrudgingly agree to go along with or might soon intervene behind the scenes to stop in some way if it’s against that happening.

This insight enables observers to better understand Belarus’ military buildup along the border, which is a reaction to Ukraine’s latest drone incursions. Ukraine carried them out in order to prompt this response from Belarus as Yermak-advised Zelensky considers whether it’s worth expanding the conflict in the hopes that NATO would then conventionally intervene in his support should that happen. Whatever he decides to do will have an outsized influence on events as everything rapidly approaches the end game.