Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Donates $1 Billion In Dog-Themed Memecoin To India Covid Relief Fund
Vitalik Buterin has turned a memecoin marketing stunt on its head, while donating over a billion dollars to a noble cause.
In a move that captivated the attention of Crypto Twitter on Wednesday, Coindek’s Zack Swards writes that the Ethereum founder regifted unsolicited tokens sent to his public wallet by the creators of Shiba Inu coin (SHIB) – a memecoin based on the joke crypto Dogecoin and which has been dubbed the “Doge Killer“, Dogelon (ELON), Akita Inu (AKITA), mwDOGE (mwDOGE) and OURSHIB (OSHIB), public blockchain records show.
Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens (worth a nominal $1.2 billion at press time but soon to be much less) to the India Covid Relief Fund kicked off by Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal late last month. He also sent about $431 million of AKITA to Gitcoin, according to the records, a public Ethereum-based fundraising platform.
In an apparent marketing stunt, memecoin creators have been sending large amounts of their tokens to the Ethereum figurehead in recent days CryptoSlate reported Monday At one point, Vitalik was sent trillions of SHIB tokens worth over $8 billion!
The sudden popularity of SHIB appears to be partly the handiwork of social-media influencers on popular Chinese platforms, including Weibo and WeChat. Charles Xue Biqun or Xue Manzi, a billionaire venture capitalist and one of the most active investors in the Chinese internet industry, has mentioned SHIB in multiple posts on Weibo to his more than 11 million followers. He has also been actively talking about dogecoin, according to his Weibo feed.
“Doge No. 2 hits new all-time highs, almighty,” he wrote in a Weibo post dated May 8, with screenshots of SHIB/USDT and DOGE/USTD pairs on crypto exchange Huobi.
“Doge has already gone up a lot,” Alex Zuo, vice president of China-based crypto wallet Cobo, said. “It gives an example of the ‘wealth-making effect.’ Plus that Shiba inu coin may also benefit from the localization…. With all the promotions by influencers on Weibo.”
“We find it very inexplicable,” Zuo said. “I didn’t buy any SHIB and no one around me has bought any.”
However, as the memecoin mania caused Ethereum gas fees to surge to staggering highs, the network’s founder was incentivized to strike back.
Once Buterin started unloading, SHIB tumbled roughly 38% but still boasts a market cap of $9 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. The coin has had more than $7 billion in volume in the last 24 hours.
Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America’s intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept “protected” even from its allies.
The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the “Arab Spring.”
There was an attempt at a response — companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a “denial of service” attack — but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.
The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched The Intercept in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden’s archive of leaked secrets, and its first story described how the NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets. A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, “We kill people based on metadata.”
Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who’ve flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years, including the FBI’s Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA’s John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned Price, and many others.
Once again, Internet platforms, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, and payment processors like PayPal are working to help track down and/or block the activities of “extremists.” This time, they’re on the same side as the onetime press allies of Wikileaks and Snowden, who began a course reversal after the election of Donald Trump.
Those outlets first began steering attention away from intelligence abuses and toward bugbears like Trumpism, misinformation, and Russian meddling, then entered into partnerships with Langley-approved facsimiles of leak sites like Hamilton 68 , New Knowledge, and especially Bellingcat, a kind of reverse Wikileaks devoted to exposing the misdeeds of regimes in Russia, Syria, and Iran — less so the United States and its allies. The CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, Marc Polymeropolous, said of the group’s work, “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this.”
After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and “domestic extremists” stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to “smoke ‘em out of their holes.” The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication, which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online network “that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves.”
Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical “hidey holes.” We’ve seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts, ProPublica arguing that Apple’s lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Vergeand Vice and The New York Timeslistening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech about imploring the “authorities” to use the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” argument to shut down Fox News.
Multiple outlets announced plans to track “extremists” in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica, and Berkley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program used “high-precision digital forensics” to uncover “evidence” about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the “sedition hunters” at the Twitter activist group “Deep State Dogs” to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to “sleuthing communities”:
The FBI wants photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral, and has published images of more than 200 suspects. But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by without any signs of action…? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video, hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence… the FBI’s bureaucracy isn’t necessarily designed to keep organized.
The Intercept already saw founding members Poitras and Greenwald depart, and shut down the aforementioned Snowden archive to, in their words, “focus on other editorial priorities” — parent company First Look Media soon after launched a partnership with “PassionFlix,” whose motto is, “Turning your favorite romance novels into movies and series.” Last week, they announced a new project in tune with current media trends:
Are there legitimate stories about people with racist or conspiratorial views who for instance shouldn’t be working in positions of authority, as cops or elected officials or military officers? Sure, and there’s a job for reporters in proving that out, especially if there’s a record of complaints or corruption to match. It gets a little weird if the newsworthiness standard is “person with a job has abhorrent private opinions,” but it’s not like it’s impossible that a legit story could be found in something like the Gab archive, especially if it involves a public figure.
But that depends on the media people involved having a coherent standard for outing subjects, which hasn’t always (or even often) been the case.
Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones “violent white supremacists” — they’re a lot of things, but “violent white supremacists”? In the first piece about “extremists” on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man’s attorney later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction. When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he “certainly wouldn’t want to accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists.” When asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he’d be naming public figures only, the sarcastic answer this time was, “Of course I won’t be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended at all costs.”
Greenwald left the organization among other things after an editor asked that he address the “disinformation issue” in a piece about Hunter Biden’s laptop, a reference to a claim made by 50 intelligence officers that the story had “the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” He found it inappropriate then for a publication with The Intercept’s history to be pushing an intelligence narrative, and the Gab project struck him in a similar way.
“The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state agencies is a short one,” says Greenwald, “and with its statements about what they are doing with this Gab archive, TheIntercept and its trite liberal managers in New York have now taken it.”
Stagflation Scare Sparks Carnage In Crypto, Stocks, & Bonds
Taken together a much weaker-than-expected payroll and much higher-than-expected CPI report suggests more than a whiff of stagflation…
Source: Bloomberg
Stagflation? Inconceivable?
Stocks are down for a third straight session, which hasn’t happened since March. Small Caps were the biggest loser on the day followed by Nasdaq after the plunge oin CPI and immediate bounceback failed (with stocks ending at the lows of the day)…
Today was the biggest loss for S&P since Feb and Dow’s worst day (-700) since January.
Small Caps are down 6% since Friday’s close but the rest of the market is a shitshow too…
Heading into the 1430ET ‘margin call’ time, a major sell-program hit markets (and another around 1525ET). Note that there was barely any aggressive BTFD programs…
Source: Bloomberg
And today’s Nasdaq-led plunge leaves the tech-heavy index up less than 1% YTD…
Source: Bloomberg
Small Caps and Nasdaq closed below their 100DMAs…
Tech and Consumer Discretionary are the big laggards this week with Staples and Healthcare down least…
Source: Bloomberg
FANG Stocks erased all of yesterday’s bounce (-8% from highs), falling back to their lowest close since March
Source: Bloomberg
AAPL and AMZN closed below their 200DMA…
Cathie Wood was clubbed like a baby seal again today…
Source: Bloomberg
Unprofitable Tech stocks tumbled to their lowest in 6 months (down 37% from highs)
Source: Bloomberg
“Most Shorted” Stocks tumbled to their lowest
Source: Bloomberg
Recent IPOs extended their losses today, now down over 28% from highs…
Source: Bloomberg
Growth/Value is at a critical level…
Source: Bloomberg
VIX surged above 27 today – its highest since early March…
And as Larry McDonald’s Bear Traps Report notes, our 21 Lehman Risk Indicators are flashing. The spread between the 2nd and 8th month volatility futures contracts is the highest since March.
Source: Bloomberg
As this spread rises (money managers paying-up for near-term volatility), it is a major warning sign for the market. Once it blows positive, it speaks to a capitulation buying opportunity (with the exception of March 2020).
Treasuries were dumped along with stocks today…
Source: Bloomberg
10Y Yields topped at last week’s spike highs before rotating modestly lower
Source: Bloomberg
The odds of a rate hike before Dec 2022 are rising…
Source: Bloomberg
The combined drop in bonds and stocks was the biggest daily loss since February…
Source: Bloomberg
Real yields and gold remain tightly coupled…
Source: Bloomberg
Gold was hit too, back to pre-payrolls levels….
Oil ended higher, but well off its highs with WTI back below $66…
The dollar spiked today – amid the smell of widespread liquidation in everything – erasing the payrolls plunge losses…
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin rallied overnight but was dumped along with everything else today after CPI…
Source: Bloomberg
Ether ended back below $4000 after surging to a new record high just shy of $4400…
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, there’s no inflation if we just ignore the things we need to live (food) and work (gas – which just topped $3 for the first time since 2014)…
CDC Credibility ‘Eroding’ According To Ex-Obama Official
The credibility of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is “eroding” after the agency failed to update its pandemic mask guidance, as well as recent accusations that powerful teachers unions are dictating CDC policy in terms of school reopenings.
“I think the CDC’s credibility is eroding as quickly as the cases of coronavirus are eroding,” said Dr. Kavita Patel, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Obama official. “That’s not good news, because, we do need workplace guidance, we need school guidance,” she added in comments to CNBC‘s Shephard Smith.
“There are men and women working on the lines outside on telephone and electricity lines, and they’re still wearing masks because, in the absence of this guidance, we’re making it up,” she added. “That actually puts more of us at risk, so this is time to step up. These are the hard parts of government and public health communication, but we desperately need someone to do it.”
Patel’s comments echo those of prominent Republican Senators, including Susan Collins (ME) and Lisa Murkowski (AK).
“I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance from the CDC,” said Collins during a Tuesday Congressional hearing on the pandemic response. “I always considered the CDC to be the Gold Standard. I don’t anymore.”
And according to Murkowski, federal mask requirements are endangering fishermen.
“You’re out on a boat. The winds are howling. Your mask is soggy wet,” she said during the hearing. “Tell me how anybody thinks that this is a sane and a sound policy?”
Meanwhile, earlier this month emails obtained by the New York Post revealed that the American Federation of Teachers lobbied the CDC – and even suggested language – for the agency’s official school-reopening guidance released in February.
The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.
“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president, Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” wrote AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner in a Feb 1 email — which described the union as the CDC’s “thought partner.”
“We were able to review a copy of the draft guidance document over the weekend and were able to provide some initial feedback to several staff this morning about possible ways to strengthen the document,” Trautner continued. “… We believe our experiences on the ground can inform and enrich thinking around what is practicable and prudent in future guidance documents.”
Walensky wasn’t on the Feb 1 email, but it was forwarded to her by Carole Johnson, the White House coronavirus testing coordinator. Many emails included Will McIntee, an associate director of public engagement at The White House. -NY Post
On Tuesday, CDC Chief Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky responded to criticisms over the agency’s response – telling Senators that the school guidance changes were due to an “oversight” – and that “The back-and-forth was a normal part of the agency’s process for drafting guidance,” according to the New York Times.
Ms. Collins also accused the C.D.C. of using faulty data in its recent mask guidance for the outdoors. The agency announced last month that “less than 10 percent” of transmission was occurring outdoors, a statistic infectious disease experts said was a misleading exaggeration. Dr. Walensky said that the C.D.C. had used a rigorous aggregation of studies in a renowned medical publication, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, to back that figure.
And Ms. Collins quoted pediatricians saying that the C.D.C.’s guidance for summer camps — in which federal officials said that children could be within three feet of peers in same-group settings but must wear masks at all times — was illogical. Dr. Walensky allowed that the guidance would change now that adolescents can receive the vaccine.
“We have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission and unworkable restrictions on summer camps,” Ms. Collins said. “It matters because it undermines public confidence in your recommendations, in the recommendations that do make sense.”
Dr. Walensky said that the C.D.C. was working to update its guidance as more Americans get vaccinated and as scientists glean new insight. The agency’s drafting process — seeking internal and external expert input — was collaborative and responsive, she said. -NYT
Today Bob Baffert, the trainer of the 2021 Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit, admitted that the now disqualified horse was treated with an anti-fungal ointment called Otomax, which includes betamethasone. That is the anti-inflammatory drug found in the horse’s blood after the race that led to the disqualification and the declaration of Mandaloun as the new winner. However, that means that thousands of betters were ripped off by betting on Mandaloun to win or betting on combinations of placement of the top horses. Conversely, those who collected on the longer shot Medina Spirit will be allowed to keep their winnings... which leave us wondering, is there no one for an honest gambler to sue?
As may come as a surprise to some, if you lose money on a rigged game or disqualified horse, you are not entitled to a refund.
So in the 147th Kentucky Derby people put down huge sums not just on the winning horse but horses to place and show. Medina Spirit was paying out 12-1.
Many people lost a lot of money and a much smaller number won a windfall. However, while the owner has to return the prize money, gamblers are told to take a ride around the track for their troubles.
The reason is that the rules of Kentucky Horse Racing Commission control and those rules mandate that the bets and payments are final despite a later showing that it was a ripoff for gamblers. Once the race is called, it can be uncalled for the horse but not the gamblers.
This is not the first such case at the Kentucky Derby.
In 1968, Dancer’s Image won but phenylbutazone was found in a post-race urinalysis of Dancer’s Image. Forward Pass was declared the winner.
As a side note, this could be a novel way of rigging a windfall on betting. You do not drug your horse but someone else’s horse which was not expected to win. That horse is then disqualified after the race. If you are bookie, you clean up on the lost bets on the best horses and pay little on the dark horse.
So here is my concern.
This was either negligence or intentional cheating if the rub account is accurate. Either way, the owner and managers of Medina Spirit cost a class of gamblers millions. Why isn’t any intentional or negligent act subject to lawsuit under tort? Both factual and legal causation could be claimed. If the alleged rub causation is proven, it is the but for cause for the loss of millions through disqualification. It does not seem particularly remote for purposes of proximate or legal causation. While one can hardly predict a win either with the use of such drugs, this is not some attenuated chain of causation or a case where there are many intervening forces or agents.
Courts could clearly rule that this is unforeseeable as a consequence, particularly in the negligent use of a rub. However, it does not seem so unforeseeable in a heavily regulated and tested industry. This is one of the primary concerns for both owners and tracks in the use of medicine or products that can transfer banned substances (or result in unacceptably high levels of the substance).
Courts are often faced with a reduction in the opportunity of survival or profits. There is a novel comparison that could be drawn to the tort of “loss of chance” in the failure to diagnose diseases. Such torts are allowed even where there was less than a fifty percent chance of survival. U.S. courts have found the requirement of at least a 50 percent survivability line to be too severe. One of the first opinions was handed down in 2008 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Matsuyama v. Birnbaum. That case involved a patient who complained about gastric distress and was diagnosed as gastritis. He had gastric cancer and died later. His family sued and the court ruled that the requirement of a better than fifty percent survivability was a view rejected by an increasing number of courts and experts. In 1983, in Herskovits v. Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, the court found that even a 14% reduction in the survival chances from lung cancer was actionable. (Note: Some English courts have proven hostile to such claims as in Gregg v Scott [2005] UKHL 2; [2005] 2 WLR 268, where a court rejected such a claim for a man whose chances of surviving non-Hodgkins Lymphoma was reduced from 42% to 25% due to a failure to diagnose the illness.).
I have never seen such a case but it could present some novel issues for a class action against the owner. Even if this is more problematic for negligence which can arise in a myriad of ways, an intentional act (if it were ultimately proven) would seem to justify some level of recovery for those injured. Obviously, courts will be reluctant to open up the floodgates to good bets gone bad. However, this seems a far more credible claim when a gambler actually won a race but was denied the winnings due to the conduct of an owner.
US Spends 90% More Than It Collects In First 7 Months Of Fiscal 2021
With “base effect” all the rage this month, moments ago we also got the 1-year anniversary of the Covid crash in the US budget deficit dataset when the Treasury reported the April government revenue and spending. And while the data in isolation wasn’t pretty, it was absolutely stellar compared to last April’s blowout $738 billion deficit.
Last month, the US collected $439.2BN in receipts, a solid improvement to the $267.6BN in March and 81.6% higher than the $241.9BN in receipts collected last April when the US economy was in freefall. Of note: $7.2BN of the money collected by the Treasury included $7.2BN in Fed remittances from “profits” on the Fed’s QE.
Outlays, while ugly at $664.8BN, were also an improvement compared to the $927.2BN the US spent in March when it funded the latest Biden fiscal stimulus, and down 32.2% from the $979.9BN last April when the Trump admin unleashed the first stimulus.
The resulting April deficit was “only” $225.6 billion, which while still staggeringly high, was a fraction of the near record $738BN deficit recorded a year ago.
Yet despite the modest relative improvement in April, on a year-to-date basis the picture has never been uglier: in the seven months through April for Fiscal 2021, the Treasury collected $2.14 trillion in receipts while spending 90% more, or $4.075 trillion.
As a result, seven months into the fiscal year, the YTD deficit stood at a record $1.932 trillion compared to $1.481 trillion, although whether 2021 overtakes 2020 depends on if and when Biden will pass his next (of many) stimulus programs.
Actor and Grammy Award winning musician Donald Glover says that television shows and movies are becoming increasingly boring because “people are afraid of getting cancelled.”
Glover, also known by his stage name Childish Gambino, made the comments via his official Twitter account.
“Saw people on here havin a discussion about how tired they were of reviewing boring stuff (tv & film),” remarked Glover.
saw people on here havin a discussion about how tired they were of reviewing boring stuff (tv & film).
Apologists immediately reacted to the remarks by claiming Glover was referring to the cancellation of TV shows and not “cancel culture” itself, although the comments clearly indicate Glover was referring to cancel culture.
The left has attempted to continue to maintain the doublethink of claiming that cancel culture “doesn’t exist,” despite having weaponized it to routinely cancel “problematic” actors and musicians who dare to dissent from ‘woke’ cult dogma.
As we previously highlighted, The Who legend Roger Daltrey made similar comments to Glover last week when he said the woke generation was making everything miserable, including themselves.
“It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere,” said Daltrey.
Farrakhan Muhammad was detained near Jacksonville police said after he was found and taken into custody at a McDonald’s located at 802 South Walnut Street in Starke, according to NBC affiliate WTLV. He was found in his car after it ran out of gas, apparently due to the closures of gas stations.
He was reportedly arrested by US marshals via a regional NY/NJ task force.
A 4-year-old Brooklyn girl was one of three people hit with stray bullets from when Muhammad allegedly opened fire on a crowded street corner on Saturday.
Senior NYPD sources told NBC News that detectives think he was trying to shoot his brother but missed, hitting the pedestrians in the busy tourist hub.
The shooting, which isn’t believed to be an incident of terrorism, has been portrayed as emblematic of the surge in violent crime in the city over the last year.
ARK’s Wood Predicts “Very Serious” Commodities Correction, Claims EVs Will Keep Oil From Rising
During ARK’s monthly webinar yesterday, Cathie Wood reached back and delivered what are likely to be some of her “greatest hits” when looking back on 2021. While it certainly takes a “visionary” to buck trends, Wood made some predictions during her webinar that we can only describe as bold.
In what many would argue is the beginning of a monstrous inflationary commodities supercycle, Wood took to her platform to suggest that, instead, we were heading for a large correction in commodity prices.
Of course, continued inflation and a rise in commodities (especially oil) would likely continue to drag investor cash out of the types of equities Wood has stocked her flagship ARKK fund with, from top to bottom. Ergo, her comments yesterday reminded us of the scene in the movie Liar, Liar, when Jim Carrey is asked why he is objecting to testimony in the courtroom and he replies frankly to the judge: “Because it’s devastating to my case!”
First, Wood channeled her inner Gartman to opine on oil, stating there would be “a very serious correction in commodity prices” and stating she would be “surprised” if oil prices hit $70 again, according to Kitco News.
“Yields for the benchmark 10-year Treasury will likely stay within a range between 1.5% and 3% while oil prices are unlikely to go above $70 per barrel,” she continued.
Apparently unaware that petroleum and oil are used for things other than vehicles, Wood said on her call that “electric vehicles will keep crude from breaking out.”
“The scramble is more today than what we’ve seen in any other cycle. We will have a very serious correction in commodity prices. Many consider what has happened in the last 3 months to be the equivalent of the tech and telecom bust. We do not believe that this is the case in the least,” Wood said.
She also called for deflation to be the zeitgeist in coming years: “Deflation, rather than inflation, will likely be the dominant theme in global markets in the years ahead due to technological innovation,” she also said, apparently unaware of anything the Federal Reserve has been doing for the last 18 months.
“While the investor rotation into value stocks has been ‘powerful,’ high-growth stocks remain attractive,” she proclaimed, continuing to talk her book.
Meanwhile, over in the world of copper and oil – well, we’ll just leave these here…
The most concerning aspect of the border crisis is the increasing number of illegal aliens who are getting away, says National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd.
“We don’t know who they are, where they’re from, or what their intentions are,” Judd told The Epoch Times.
“When you look at border security, when you look at the border, we have to be able to identify who’s coming into the United States. And if we can’t do that, it’s impossible to protect the American public.”
In February, Border Patrol estimated that around 30,000 illegal aliens crossed the U.S.–Mexico border and evaded capture; in March, it was around 37,000; and the preliminary numbers for April show around 42,600 escaped. That’s about 1,400 per day.
On May 5, the Webb County Sheriff’s Office discovered 76 illegal immigrants locked inside a residence in Laredo, Texas.
On top of that, Judd said, “it’s very fair to say that there’s a large number of people that are able to get away that we don’t even detect.”
Some of those illegal aliens who manage to bypass Border Patrol then end up getting picked up during a high-speed vehicle chase, or locked in a tractor-trailer unit, or packed by the dozens in a stash house. Others die on ranchland trying to get around a Border Patrol checkpoint, or they’re abandoned by a smuggler because they get sick.
“Everything that we’re seeing—this boat that capsized—everything is related,” Judd said, referring to a human smuggling operation gone bad off the coast of San Diego on May 2. A total of 33 people were pulled from the water after a 40-foot trawling-style boat smashed into rocks and broke apart. Three people died.
“As long as we continue to, in essence, encourage people to cross our borders illegally, we’re going to continue to see the stash houses, we’re going to continue to see the boats, we’re going to continue to see the semis filled with people,” Judd said.
“It’s the most inhumane thing I’ve ever seen in my life as it pertains to the border, but it’s being encouraged. Because we have basically an open borders policy right now.”
76 illegal immigrants are discovered in a stash house in Laredo, Texas, on May 5, 2021. (Webb County Sheriff’s Office)
In early May, Houston police discovered 97 illegal immigrants in a suburban house in an alleged human smuggling case, according to the Justice Department. The illegal aliens were from Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras, and were aged between 21 and 31. Five people have been charged with human smuggling.
Border Patrol agents in the Laredo sector have been involved in dismantling about 140 stash houses since Oct. 1, 2020—a 230 percent increase over the total found during the entire previous fiscal year.
“The rescued were found in very poor conditions,” the sheriff’s office wrote in a Facebook post.
“We have seen other cases where, due to the heat and cramped areas, situations like this one have led to death,” said Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar.
Sheriffs and landowners from all over Texas are saying they’re stretched for resources to deal with the new influx of illegal activity flowing up from the border.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin told The Epoch Times that on May 6, a vehicle traveling through town at 140 miles per hour crashed through two buildings while trying to evade law enforcement.
Sheriff Pinky Gonzales of Refugio County, Texas, said he’s calculated more than 3,000 deputy man-hours since January to deal with cross-border crime.
“We have just been overwhelmed, overwhelmed with these cases. I have 13 deputies working around the clock, and sometimes I have to call those that are off to come help us,” Gonzales said.
Further north, in Lavaca County, Sheriff Micah Harmon said his deputies have dealt with numerous vehicle pursuits and bailouts.
In one recent pursuit, a pickup truck carrying 18 to 20 illegal aliens crashed into a tree and caught fire.
On the state level, Gov. Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star on March 6 in response to the burgeoning number of illegal border crossings, as well as human and drug smuggling throughout the state.
During the first four weeks of the operation, Texas Department of Public Safety officers referred more than 16,000 illegal immigrants to Customs and Border Protection and arrested 598 criminals, Abbott said on April 1. In addition, state troopers seized 14 pounds of cocaine, 23 firearms, and almost $1 million in currency and arrested nine gang members involved in smuggling contraband, he said.
Judd said he doesn’t see anything on the horizon from the Biden administration that will reduce the trajectory of illegal activity at the border.
“When we do not remove people who crossed the border illegally, that is, in fact, an open border,” he said.
“And I think that as the American public starts to recognize and realize this, I think that there’s going to be a huge outcry. I think there’s going to be a huge pushback. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done.”
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have said they are concentrating on sending more aid to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration in Central American countries and Mexico.
