Category: zerohedge

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The North Carolina elections board declared this week that it has the power to bar Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) from running for office due his actions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. It insists that it can enforce Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment and declared that he is an insurrectionist. It is a position that, in my view, is wholly outside of the language and intent of this provision. Cawthorn is right to challenge any such action as unconstitutional.

In a filing to dismiss a lawsuit by Cawthorn, the board wrote

“The State does not judge the qualifications of the elected members of the U.S. House of Representative. It polices candidate qualifications prior to the elections. n doing so, as indicated above, States have long enforced age and residency requirements, without question and with very few if any legal challenges. The State has the same authority to police which candidates should or should not be disqualified per Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The asserted authority would invite partisan and abusive practices by such boards. It is also wrong on the purpose of this constitutional provision. Moreover, there is a vast difference between enforcing an objective standard on the age of a candidate and enforcing the subjective standard whether that candidate’s views make him an “insurrectionist.”

As I have previously written, (here and here and here), Democrats are playing a dangerous game with the long-dormant provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the “disqualification clause.” The provision was written after the 39th Congress convened in December 1865 and many members were shocked to see Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, waiting to take a seat with an array of other former Confederate senators and military officers.

Ironically, it was Justice Edwin Reade of the North Carolina Supreme Court who later explained, “[t]he idea [was] that one who had taken an oath to support the Constitution and violated it, ought to be excluded from taking it again.” So, members drafted a provision that declared that “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

The mantra that this was an insurrection does not meet the standard. The Constitution fortunately demands more than proof by repetition. In this case, it requires an actual rebellion. The clause Democrats are citing was created in reference to a real Civil War in which over 750,000 people died in combat. The confederacy formed a government, an army, a currency, and carried out diplomatic missions.

While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell this week called it an “insurrection,” there are ample legal reasons to reject that characterization in court. (I agree with McConnell in his other comments criticizing the sanctions against Republicans supporting the House committee investigating Jan. 6th).

Jan. 6 was a national tragedy. I publicly condemned President Trump’s speech that day while it was being given — and I denounced the riot as a “constitutional desecration.” However, it has not been treated legally as an insurrection. Those charged for their role in the attack that day are largely facing trespass and other less serious charges — rather than insurrection or sedition. That’s because this was a riot that was allowed to get out of control by grossly negligent preparations by Capitol Police and congressional officials. While the FBI launched a massive national investigation, it did not find evidence of a conspiracy for an insurrection.  Only a handful were charged with seditious conspiracy, a broadly defined offense.

I still believe that Jan. 6 was a protest that became a riot. That is not meant to diminish the legitimate outrage over the day. It was reprehensible — but only a “rebellion” in the most rhetorical sense. More importantly, even if you adopt a dangerously broad definition of “insurrection” or “rebellion,” members of Congress who supported challenging the electoral votes (as Democrats have done in prior years) were exercising constitutionally protected speech.

Before the riot, Cawthorn declared “The Democrats, with all the fraud they have done in this election, the Republicans hiding and not fighting, they are trying to silence your voice,” he said. “Make no mistake about it, they do not want you to be heard.”

While he later voted against certifying President Biden’s victory, he also later signed a letter congratulating Biden on the win.

That does not make Cawthorn an insurrectionist and this Board is not tasked with enforcing the 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause. The board’s position is itself a threat to democracy and free speech. It is only the latest first anti-democratic measure being used in the name of democracy.

The board interpretation would allow partisan members to toss opponents from ballots to prevent voters from making their own decisions. That is something that has been a practice in countries like Iran, not the United States. Hopefully, a court will make fast work of any such effort in this case. If Democrats believe Cawthorn to be an insurrectionists, they are free to use that label in the campaign. However, the voters, not board members, should be the final arbiters of such questions in a democratic system.

Russia has for a couple months insisted that it has no plans to invade Ukraine, even as positioned extra forces in the south near the border, but the Kremlin is now issuing fresh warnings on its ‘red lines’ after reports emerged that Ukraine has requested THAAD missile defense systems from the US military. 

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov responded to the reports Wednesday, saying the missile request if true would mark a serious “provocation” and that it would be a significant setback for the Ukraine crisis, according to RIA news agency.

However, Ryabkov admitted that at this point the US THAAD deployment remains “hypothetical” and appears to the be speculation among the media. Reports suggested they would be deployed around the large northeast Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which Ryabkov dismissed as “blackmail and a provocation,” according to TASS news agency.

“Everything that is happening in this field from the standpoint of supplying Ukraine with military equipment, ammunition and weapons, including lethal weapons, is an attempt to exert extra pressure, including military-technical pressure, on Russia. Obviously, there is a great deal of blackmail involved, too,” Ryabkov said.

Referring to Ukraine’s military and its Western backers in NATO, he said “this group of [Russia’s] opponents has virtually nothing left in its arsenal by and large.”

“Instead of de-escalation, including an unconditional demand Kiev comply with the Minsk agreements to the full extent there have followed all sorts of media fakes. Some of these are obviously addressed to the incompetent public at large, which is eager to buy any such news, in particular, negative sensations. But we do not yield to provocations. What he have seen is a provocation of the first water,” Ryabkov added.

The THAAD system is capable of intercepting both high-altitude and intermediate-range missiles. But so far the main weapons entering Ukraine from the West appear to be smaller anti-tank and anti-armor munitions, using for closer range combat. 

The AN/TPY-2 radar system, which is part of the THAAD complex, is capable of watching the aerospace situation over a significant part of Russian territory and can allow Kiev and its NATO allies to ‘peek’ deep into Russian territory for up to 1,000 km,” https://t.co/K1cGzQDl9p

— M.E (@MikeElmurranie) February 8, 2022

Meanwhile, President Putin reportedly complained to his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron when the two met in Moscow for some five hours that NATO is continuing to “pump Ukraine with weapons.”

“NATO member countries continue to pump up Ukraine with modern types of weapons, allocate significant financial resources for the modernization of the Ukrainian army. They send military specialists and instructors,” Putin said at a press conference immediately following the summit with Macron, which was aimed a finding a path toward de-escalation.

Via The Brownstone Institute,

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published by the Centers for Disease Control has released a fascinating study on comparing hospitalization with Covid-19 immunity status, thus addressing a topic of pressing concern for public health.

The study, published in the January 28, 2022 weekly, carries the self-explanatory title “COVID-19 Cases and Hospitalizations by COVID-19 Vaccination Status and Previous COVID-19 Diagnosis — California and New York, May–November 2021.”

The key contribution is the following chart, which illustrates the effectiveness of the vaccine (for the duration of the study) and plots that against the effectiveness of natural immunity with and without the vaccine.

What it reveals is a point that has been strangely disputed or at least too often left unacknowledged: the power of natural immunity to serve as protection against severe outcomes from reinfection.

This reality bears strongly on the question of vaccine mandates.

Brownstone has kept a running list of studies that confirm the same: that list is now up to 150 studies.

Here is the chart.

Below, you can watch a video by Vinay Prasad who explains it in some detail.

Both Ford and GM are directing their dealers to stop charging so much for autos, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal. Dealerships have been marking up vehicles over sticker price as a result of a drought of inventory, attributable to supply chain issues and the semiconductor shortage, combined with increased demand.

But Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley said this week that dealers who gouge prices will “face consequences” that may include losing supplies of future models. “We have very good knowledge of who they are,” he said on his company’s earnings call, talking about these dealerships. 

Farley noted that around 10% of the roughly 3,000 dealerships in Ford’s U.S. network are charging above the sticker price, the report said. Ford will punish those who don’t stop with “punitive action”, the report said.

GM also called out “a small minority of bad actors” engaging in the practice, and said it could also withhold vehicle shipments as a result. 

Most dealerships are franchise dealerships, the Journal notes, “which are independent businesses that purchase cars from the factory”. While they control the final transaction with the customer, the auto companies still control supply and can offer promotional programs. 

The practice of overcharging has been rare in the past, and companies have said before that they disapprove of the tactic, claiming it reflects poorly on the brand. 

But the practice has become routine over the past year thanks to supply chain lockups and shortages in computer chips. 

A spokesman for the National Automobile Dealers Association commented: “This is simply a temporary symptom of supply and demand being entirely out of whack. Dealers and consumers have always been free to agree on the price of the vehicle.”

Jon Harding, a project manager for a utility company in Southern California, told the Journal that while shopping around he got more than 12 quotes that were above sticker price. He said the experience was harrowing and left him considering buying another Tesla, a purchase that comes directly from the company, and not through a dealer. 

He concluded: “The dealer represents the manufacturer, it’s the person you deal with. Right now, they’re not representing the brands very well by trying to jack people around.”

Commentary authored by Roger L. Simon via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

What irony!

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger must be turning over in their graves.

Bernie Sanders must be having sleepless nights.

The left-wing anthem “Which Side Are You On?” is no longer about whether you’re a “union man” or a “thug for J.H. Blair.” It’s about the size of your stock portfolio or when to go public with your start-up.

The oh-so-progressive GoFundMe crowd-funding site—run by about as pure a group of upscale lefty elitists as you could invent, with its CEO being a former a consultant for the multimillion-dollar drug pushers at McKinsey—has turned against those lowly 16-hour-a-day working-stiffs, the Canadian truckers, for deigning to risk their jobs and livelihood to protest vaccine mandates.

At first, calling the truckers occupiers and accusing them—without the slightest proof—of violent acts, GoFundMe essentially absconded with the US$8 million donated to the truckers through its site and peremptorily decided to distribute the money to charities of its choice (one can only imagine).

Sounds like “misappropriation of funds,” at the minimum, and possibly fraud. Don’t these people have lawyers? But worse than that, it was one of the more clueless readings of public sentiment in recent years—and there have been many.

Maybe it’s because those lefty elitists on their board don’t do much shopping on their own, send assistants to the supermarkets for food, and don’t see the empty shelves, so they think they can push the truckers around. That’s an explanation, anyway, but blowback happened fast enough that GoFundMe quickly rescinded its “charitable” decree and promised to return the money to the donors.

Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called for an investigation of GoFundMe (when are we going to start calling him “America’s governor”?), as have officials in Georgia.

Good for them, but what interests me here is how it came to be that supposedly left-leaning organizations, indeed basically the entire modern-day American left, came to be so anti-working class.

It could be a “Just So Story” in a style reminiscent of “How the Camel Got His Hump” or “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” although far less beguiling and humorous than Rudyard Kipling would have made it. (Kipling, whose stories many of us enjoyed as children, has become a particular target of those fun suckers known as the “woke.”)

GoFundMe versus the truckers may prove to be a paradigm case for our time—and it’s about class.

To understand it, you have to go back to the man who started it all, Karl Marx, who expected his communist revolution to begin in heavily industrialized Germany.

He was wrong, of course. It began in the much less developed and largely agrarian Russia. In Germany, the working class was not nearly as attracted to his theories as he had hoped. The majority rejected them.

This trend continued as communism did better in poorer countries (China, Cambodia) than it did in the industrialized West, where it was supposed to take hold.

This failure was not lost on a group of intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School, who brought their revised Marxian theories designed to succeed where the working class approach had failed—notably via the so-called march through the institutions (media, entertainment, education)—to the United States at the end of World War II.

This indeed was an intellectuals-first revolution, and it has succeeded almost completely in our university system, where their “critical theory” dominates. They also succeeded, to lesser but still powerful degrees, in turning the media and entertainment, pretty much destroying Hollywood in the process. Why would the Chinese object?

This was clearly a top-down revolution, with elites dictating to hoi polloi what they should think and how to behave. In the way of the world, those elites also became increasingly rich, richer than anyone else in the history of the human race (the likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, et al.). They knew best. (Someone should write a book about that.)

In the process, the working class, what Amity Shlaes earlier called “The Forgotten Man,” was forgotten.

Which brings us to the truckers. This time—I think, hope, and pray—these elites have gone too far. The yawning gap between them and the people they lord over has become too great. People are sickened, as they should be, by the arrogance.

Thank you, GoFundMe, for blowing it. This is a teaching moment. Let’s use it.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Japan Machine Tool Orders, the best leading indicator of the global industrial cycle, accelerated in January. And recent data suggest the backlog at Los Angeles Port may begin to ease by summer. At the same time, the coming Federal Reserve rate-hiking cycle is a major wild card for investors. Darius Dale, founder and CEO of 42 Macro, joins Real Vision’s Maggie Lake to talk about why, according to his analysis, “deflation” is now equal to “inflation” as the dominant short-term market regime. Was the January sell-off merely a precursor to a larger correction? However the case turns, Fed Chair Jay Powell’s “right-tail hawkishness” means more volatility. Darius shares his thoughts on a murky macro picture and how specific assets are likely to perform under various scenarios. Want to submit questions? Drop them right here on the Exchange: https://rvtv.io/3HESUe5

The race to be a leader in the domain of “Web3” intensified on Wednesday as Microsoft published a job opening looking for a director of crypto development.

According to the posting, the software giant is looking for a business development director to assist the company in the field of cryptocurrencies and – most importantly – “Web 3.0”. The individual will join the company’s AI and Emerging Technologies business development team.

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.

The AI and Emerging Technologies business development team is responsible for the inorganic growth of Microsoft’s products and services, in these key areas.  This role requires an understanding of the Web 3.0 market and you will drive collective impact on growing the business.

Among other responsibilities, Microsoft’s head of crypto would be tasked with the “evaluation of potential acquisitions” and improving “the use of our products and increas[ing] adoption.”

The role would be a senior-level position requiring the individual to work with other “senior members of the Business Development organization” to create “data-driven strategies that will impact both short- and long-term engineering plans and product ideas.”

You will also work cross-company with Product, Finance, Marketing, Legal, and other stakeholders to ensure a well-thought-out and executable plan is delivered and help drive executive approval on key initiatives. This is a role with potential for high impact and direct exec level visibility (CVPs, EVPs).   

Other requirements and responsibilities of the role will include:

• Lay the foundation to support and inform Microsoft’s Web 3.0 strategy
• Advise leadership on key technology and product roadmap considerations
• Work with engineering teams across the company to understand when existing infrastructure can be leveraged, enhanced or built
• Develop the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Microsoft’s web 3.0 partnership model including infrastructure and APIs
• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, and other cross-functional teams to develop a business development build, buy, partner view

The job posting also includes more in-depth descriptions of the role’s responsibilities, including people management, customer and partner focus, partnership strategy, negotiation and – most importantly – deal management.

It’s just the latest sign that Microsoft intends to grow its footprint in the world of decentralized finance via an acquisition-focused strategy.

Confused about Web3.0 and its relationship to the world of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and decentralized finance? Well, in a recent post on his substack “Moment of the Deep”, Deep Pulusani offers a helpful and in-depth explanation:

Some notes before we start: the term web3 today is sometimes used synonymously to mean cryptocurrency, blockchain tech, virtual reality/augmented reality & the metaverse. I find that people already have a more intuitive understanding of how VR/AR may change the future. Therefore, I’ll only be writing about how crypto & blockchain tech in the context of web3 will transform the future, since it’s a bit more challenging to understand and abstract in its concepts.

Often this subject is explained with technical specifications or more commonly with political terms, ideas about liberty, decentralization, censorship, and power. These are all important; but what ultimately determines if web3 powered by crypto is the future lies in the economic and productive value it brings, the increases in quality of life it can achieve. These are the aspects I hope to make clear.

Where we’ve come from and where we are

All of the iterations of the web are digital revolutions, i.e. not only do more of our analog (physical) lives move to the digital realm, but new digitally native (digital-first) experiences are invented as well.

Web1 (1990s): a revolution in information availability.

Information and content from the real world is put online. Information is no longer a local phenomena nor a physical one, but is available for anyone with an internet connection to access. Early web protocols also allow for file transfers, emails, and web pages.

Examples: personal web pages, Encyclopedia Britannica & Encarta online, FTP, MapQuest

Web2 (2000-): a revolution in creation, experience, and connection.

The static becomes dynamic, and a convergence of hardware and software technologies enable us to experience rich interfaces and interactions on the web. Our lives start to become increasingly digital – compare what percent of your daily attention is focused online in 1999, then 2009, and then 2019. The ecosystem and interface of web2 is now rich enough where people can spend the majority of their lives online – from their careers, relationships, hobbies, investments, etc. – we now spend much of our lives in digital space. We also consume most of our content digitally, create much of our output digitally, and connect most frequently with others through messaging apps and social networks.

Examples: YouTube, Google Docs, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Robinhood, smart home & smart health devices

Web3 (2015-): a revolution in coordination, ownership, and value transfer.

I’ll break down each of these web3 revolutions in the ‘Web3 Paradigm Shifts’ section further below. It’s important to note first, however, that much of what will happen in web3 has its roots in web2. What’s often lost in all the web3 talk is that the web2 era is not over and will continue to produce enormous value and new companies. Let’s see how web3 powered by crypto is the next logical step to some of the revolutions of web2.

Web3 Extensions of Web2.

New and more powerful networks.

In web1 times, your networks might’ve included your local community, your job, your family, and friends you grow up with. Maybe you were part of a mailing list or a forum if you were savvy online. In web2, networks proliferated rapidly, and continue to explode. You might have networks on FB, telegram groups, IG niches, corners of Twitter, or varied family/friend WhatsApp groups.

This network creation continues in web3 with the introduction of the value network. Examples include Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, countless others – each currency representing its own individual network of users. In addition, you have the tokens built on top of these programmable currencies, tokens that any individual or business can issue. The result is a proliferation of value networks that are themselves nested into a larger, more powerful network that it can communicate with and transfer between. This is an extremely powerful new invention because a value network can be added to all of our existing networks in web2 – to our existing social networks, messaging networks, and content networks – or to brand new networks entirely. Essentially any network can be monetized, tokenized, or incentivized, creating supercharged versions of our already rich variety of networks.

Explosion of creative activity, niches, and formats.

Even if we just include web2 companies launched in the past few years alone – TikTok, Substack, Clubhouse, etc. – there’s so many creative and productive niches for individuals to occupy. Couple that with increasingly easier ways to distribute content among a proliferation of platforms (aka networks), it’s no wonder there has been an explosion of creative activity and individual power over the past 20 years. In the web1 world, we still mainly had movie stars and bestselling authors. In web2, we have stars and activists in every genre, category, and format you could ask for. What progresses in web3 is the further expansion of platforms, niches, and content types. Most notably, you will see more purely digital creation and digital reward (e.g. create an opera in a virtual world that’s monetized by a virtual currency that’s easily tradeable into other virtual currencies or goods). Furthermore, the platforms that creators and producers use will be less intrusive, less expensive, and more malleable than the monolithic platforms of today.

Ease of global collaboration

Cloud storage & editing, powerful front-end frameworks, and ever-increasing browser strength have made it possible to collaborate effectively with anyone, anywhere, and in practically any field. Figma and Airtable are just two examples of recent web2 companies that have accelerated the ease of collaboration with individuals halfway around the world. The pandemic has further accelerated this phenomena. With web3, we now have organizations that can be independently formed with no underlying platform dependence. These organizations, dubbed DAOs, can be both incentivized to work towards a common goal and govern themselves through tokenization. Anonymous, pseudonymous, or fully public individuals can have their work measured and verified through a publicly available blockchain.

Disintermediation and distribution.

Web3 will continue the trend of removing distance between producer and consumer. There is a continual disintermediation happening on the web. During web1, to release a successful music album you had to go artist → label → distributer → retailer → consumer. At each step there is profit loss and gatekeepers deciding whether you can continue onward to distribute. In web2 you got to go either 1-step closer (artist → label → platform → consumer) or 2-steps closer for those fully independent ( artist → platform → consumer). Web3 continues this disintermediation, as the platform merely becomes the underlying network or protocol the connection is made over (artist → consumer via protocol or network). There’s no longer gatekeepers or an expensive take-rate. There can still be curators to guide consumers (the difference being that a curator can make money independently of the artist’s margin). The end goal is that all service providers or product creators have the option to be connected directly with service seekers and product consumers.

Disintermediation is only possible because of the increasing ability to self-distribute. In the past, middle men at each step were essential to ensure wide distribution. Web2 gave us powerful tools of self-distribution through platforms like Amazon, Shopify, Google Ads, Social Media, SoundCloud, etc. In web3, we can maintain all the tools of web2, but now we introduce tokenized systems. By creating tokens that somehow represent your business or art in your chosen way, early fans and early users become incentivized to spread your art by holding those tokens. Those fans will now distribute that art for you through their own individual networks and tools.

Web3 Paradigm Shifts

Users become owners.

Employee stock options made many tech employees rich with the advent of web-first tech companies. However, for companies that rely on network effects – which is all social media, all sharing economy e.g. Uber, all marketplaces e.g. Amazon, all cloud tools, all games – the early users are equally as important. Without the early users, later users don’t join in, and a company never gains traction. Today, however, early users are not compensated for this essential contribution. In web3, through both fungible and non-fungible tokens, users & early evangelizers will win when a company wins too.

In common press about web3, what’s often talked about is that we’ll now be compensated for our data. This is true – unlike our data being owned by the platforms (Twitter, FB, etc.) it will travel with us and be owned by us. However, the more valuable and scarce asset that users give over to apps is their attention, and this will be the far greater reward to users. Power users and heavy users of games, cloud tools, and content platforms, will eventually either be incentivized by the app or move on to companies that do incentivize their valuable attention.

Any agreement becomes possible.

At each era of the web, we can code increasingly powerful experiences (i.e. code becomes more abstracted from the binary 0s and 1s that the computer actually runs). When web2 rolled around, internet connections were fast enough and devices strong enough to have rich streaming & content experiences. In web3, the game-changing abstraction is smart contracts. Smart contracts essentially allow any agreement between individuals, groups, protocols, or mix of the bunch. Relying on the legal system to enforce billions of agreements small and large on the web is neither desirable nor realistic. A smart contract’s ability to allow for agreements between two untrusted individuals without burdening the legal system creates a major shift in a human’s ability to coordinate behavior and form agreements between groups. In web3, code enforces the agreements and the blockchain infrastructure protects against manipulation of this code. Smart contracts are natively digital, meaning they can be combined and stacked with other contracts to create powerful systems and infrastructures. The implications of this are not yet fully realized, but one hint to the power of smart contracts is the emergence of decentralized finance, which has disrupted a giant sector in a very short period of time. Smart contracts can now be embedded in all the software and hardware we use – any object can be embedded with operating rules, sharing terms, & financial agreements between parties. Combine this with the ability to interface with any other contract on the network, and the creative, collaborative, and productive uses of these contracts become limitless.

Everything can be a financial instrument.

People often ask why not just use fiat currency through PayPal or Stripe – what’s the functional point of an open-source digitally native currency like Ethereum? The answer is that you can program it, build on top of it, and integrate it with anything digital – whether a smart hardware device or a software application. Even everyday items like your chat groups, gifs, or your writing journal can be made into a financial instrument. That universe becomes bigger when imagine digitally native assets and services that have not even been invented yet. Any individual can perform this integration, not just institutions. Usually when people think of financial instruments, we think of ownership, of buying and selling. But these aren’t the only functions of financialization – we can integrate all financial functions including borrowing, lending, insurance, and merging. With financial functionality, also comes executive functionality, like governance and direction. Now imagine these functions available to any asset or network, both digital and physical.

A new identity emerges.

Tokens don’t necessarily have to represent money or value – we can use tokens to verify productive work done, or personal and career milestones reached. Because web3 transactions are stored on a publicly available network, our web3 wallet can not only represent transactions we’ve made and tokens we own, but organizations we’re apart of, events we’ve attended, people we know, content we’ve created, and work we’ve done. We can carry this history around to any app connected to the network that we grant access to. Those concerned with privacy never have to expose their physical identity, as wallets are simply avatars which maintain the right to hide or expose the physical identity behind it. Instead of our creative and productive output being spread out and siloed over various companies – LinkedIn, Twitter, IG – our web3 wallet can be carried with us wherever we go. Apps, games, and experiences can then interact with the specific identity the user brings to create tailored and one-of-a-kind experiences for the user’s history. Collaborators and employers can verify your expertise, your skill, your network, and things you’ve created or worked on through your wallet, without requiring a resume or contacting references.

Postscript: Why did I write this?

There’s something odd about writing articles that predict the future. If the writer is correct, the future is going to happen anyway, so what’s the point of writing an article about it now? What’s the point of another article hyping up a future that is certain?

Because web3 is so widely misunderstood, the future is uncertain. The economic and productive value that web3 can bring is deeply threatened by governments and regulators around the world.  This is somewhat expected from authoritarian governments that will naturally crack down on web3 because of what it entails – shared equity and decision making, mass participation and organization – as retaining centralized power is essential to their literal survival. This has already become apparent in China. What’s essential is that major democracies, especially the world’s wealthiest USA and the world’s biggest India, foster the web3 experiment. It’s essential that we let things develop before overzealously legislating in the name of protection. Unfriendly governments could have firewalled the web1 internet and set progress back a decade because it was now easier for criminals to communicate and spread criminal information.  Undoing legislation and regulatory burdens is much harder than waiting to pass them in the first place. Web3 built on crypto has the possibility to be the major boon for wealth inequality (see paradigm shifts listed above), an issue all sides of the political spectrum claim to want to solve. Democratic governments: let’s let web3 grow, develop, and make mistakes. We’re still so early.

*  *  *

Follow me on twitter @momentofdeep for more content like this.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

“There’s no hiding place down here,
There’s no hiding place down here,
Oh I ran to the rock to hide my face
The rock cried out, ‘No hiding place’
No hiding place down here.”

— TRADITIONAL GOSPEL SONG

It seems there’s a whole lotta hidin’ goin’ on out there, folks. While I’d like to spend a thousand words chronicling my disappointment with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for his hypocrisy over the Joe Rogan controversy, that would miss so much of the point.

Not that Dwayne doesn’t deserve our derision for abandoning Rogan. He does. For a guy who’s built his persona around embracing everything that came before, good or bad, watching him reconsider his friendship with Rogan publicly is the ultimate betrayal of that carefully crafted persona.

Respect is hard to earn and very, very easy to lose.

Especially since it took the internet all of five minutes to dig up performances as “The Rock” which are cringe-worthy by any recent standard and him deleting tweets which were, by his own standard today, unacceptable.

So, how many rocks do you have to hide behind in your glass mansion, Dwayne?

But, again, this article isn’t about Dwayne’s flirtations with mendacity. I could literally give zero shits about his past, even though what he did as The Rock in the ring was far more venal and debasing to himself and his audience than anything Joe Rogan ever said on his podcast about black people.

Because there are no good guys in this scenario. Johnson should have stuck by Rogan. Rogan shouldn’t have apologized.

Everyone is making mistakes left and right and it will cost them more than millions of dollars.

Casting Stones

But it wasn’t because Rogan used the word that rhymes with bigger in honest inquisitions on racism and the fearlessness of those comics who blazed a trail before him.

It was because he vastly underestimated the scope and scale of the operation being run on him.

Rogan handled the initial onslaught well. As Jordan Peterson pointed out a few days ago:

That was early last week. But then the next hammer dropped. He committed the unforgiveable sin.

He apologized.

Joe caved to the pressure. His self-image and basic decency was cynically used against him to get that apology for being a successful white guy who doesn’t know his subordinate place in the new order.

This is both a strategical and tactical error on his part that will hurt him more than Peterson sees here. Because they won’t stop until he’s destroyed, now that he’s given them something to throw at him. They know his weakness now.

I’m sure that Rogan thought, “I’ll just tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.” That is consistent with his personality and his persona, since they are one and the same, unlike apparently Dwayne.

Never Give Up, Never Apologize

But there’s no hiding from the mob, especially an unforgiving mob obsessed with power and the need to take Joe Rogan down now that he nearly single-handedly destroyed the COVID-19 vaccine narrative with the truth and a couple of podcasts.

It’s easy for those behind this targeted smear campaign to gin up some fake outrage which empowers the false virtue of their cult members to attack Rogan and Spotify. When all you believe in is power, when humanity is nothing but a wall to project your own self-loathing onto, then there are no restraints on your behavior.

My intuition here is that this is not just Davos at work, but specifically this bus is being driven by Obama, who pulls the strings of the Biden administration and who, it looks like, has now corrupted Dwayne Johnson since Dwayne’s being courted as the Democrats’ 2024 savior.

(and I’m happy to have Dwayne disabuse me of this accusation)

One only has to look at the arc of Johnson’s character in the latter seasons of Ballers to see where he’s personally headed: to take on the “old boy’s club of the NFL (Wall St.) and be a champion of the people.” If there was ever a job interview masquerading as entertainment you couldn’t have asked for a better example. (Again come at me bro! mahalo!)

The difference between these two guys couldn’t be clearer. Johnson was chosen by the Old Boys’ Club while still thinking he’s the one making the choice to be a leader of the people.

On the other hand, Rogan was chosen by the people to be their proxy for keeping the lights on in the cave, screwing up the shadow play on the wall so they can make up their own minds.

Leaders are Made, Not Born

And while Joe can deny that responsibility, or more importantly, refuse to play the game, the game came to him when he signed a $100 million contract with Spotify last year.

I told you then that he blew up the Death Star with that contract. He moved off YouTube and gave his content to Spotify to distribute, validating them and providing a counterpoint to Apple, Amazon and everyone else.

But he had to know spitting in their eye repeatedly would bring the hammer down.

Joe Rogan has now told the entire country that he’s had enough. And we needed someone like Joe to do this.

That said, Rogan is only one half of the story, however. Because at the same time, one of these platforms needed to break away from the herd and welcome the dissenters.

For Spotify, Joe Rogan is the ‘killer app’ they needed to differentiate themselves as non-partisan and begin the exodus away from the big platforms who have become nothing but partisan.

I don’t know if the board at Spotify know what they’ve just unleashed but they better realize it quick. They’re Echo Base and the walkers will be landing real soon now

And this is why Rogan’s apology is so damning. He had the world ready to follow him. But he did the one thing you can never do in this Age of Rage, apologize to them for who you were or who you are.

If they can’t handle all of you then they can’t have any of you.

So, Joe, I know you feel terrible about this, but why? No one owns any word. Words are not violence if they aren’t meant that way. Anyone who thinks that is the one with the problem.

No matter how big your voice, you can’t be responsible for people’s reactions. Their emotions are their own to process. And if they choose to process them as temper tantrums on Twitter or Instagram then let their actions be their judge.

You gained my respect speaking honestly. You lost it, apologizing because that honesty hurt the feelings of people who already despise you.

A Race Already Run

The truth is that this was a fight lost two generations ago when it became verboten for white people to use that word out of deference to try and heal a real divide within society.

It was an apology for a past that many of us did not engage in nor are proud of. But, it was never about that. It was always the camel’s nose under the tent. Political correctness and self-censorship are the very essence of totalitarianism. It is Marxist power theory 101.

But, where does it end? Should I, as a second-generation Italian immigrant (with black curly hair when I had any and a dark complexion), be held accountable for U.S. slavery which ended legally 40 years before my grandparents fled their homeland’s poverty for a better life in Brooklyn and Queens?

That apology then has grown into the virus we have today, where everyone left of Karl Marx is a fascist and we’re taking our societal cues (this week) from the people who believe men can have babies.

It’s not just that we shouldn’t apologize for who we aren’t but that apologies based on any kind of collective identity is antithetical to civil society. Joe Rogan knows that. Dwayne Johnson was supposed to know that.

Joe. You apologized to people without shame or conscience.

And what is missing in all of this frustration and fake outrage is that everyone, all of us, are being played for even reacting to this nonsense in the first place.

Keep on Truckin’

Controversies like this are meant to drive a reaction, to grant legitimacy to a non-issue and give people a chance to be self-righteous. The NPC’s screaming for Rogan’s censorship refuse to admit they are just pawns in Davos’ ugly game of division while the #ungovernables are disappointed that Rogan didn’t rise to the occasion and give them a little more courage.

Ultimately, though, none of this Rogan nonsense matters. I would have loved for Joe to stand tall, but he didn’t. He’s to be commended for taking the ball this far.

Because while Obama and Davos were busy attacking a podcaster for being a bigger-man than anyone in the dying media space, Canada’s truckers provided that leadership to the world.

And that has truly lit the fire of resistance in a way that Rogan standing up to false accusations of racism cannot douse.

Canada’s truckers are not domestic terrorists or white supremacists or menaces to society. They are simply people who have no other options left given that Davos’ lil’ buddy, Prime Minister Justin “Blackface” Trudeau has mandated, extra-constitutionally, a two-tiered society that even his RCMP personal guard cannot abide.

There is no amount of fake sincerity for the well being of the people you govern that can cover the naked authoritarianism of cretins like Trudeau. The ‘Freedom Convoy’ was en route for days and what does he do the moment the trucks show up in Ottawa?

He runs into hiding while leaving his civil servicemen to deal with the problem. It isn’t just that Trudeau is a venal little prick who can’t stand tall and lead his cadre of government thugs into battle against a bunch of peaceful protestors. I’d almost respect him for that.

If you act on beliefs that strongly and can lead men to action, that counts for something. But leading from behind the shadows is the most shameful act of all. Joe Rogan’s mistake was not grasping leadership when it was presented to him.

Trudeau’s mistake was in accepting the leadership in the first place when he wasn’t strong enough to wear the crown when things went a little off script.

Now the City of Ottawa and the “laptop set” are angry they can’t get a good night’s sleep after they took away the rights of people whose only crime was not obeying an unlawful edict from a over-reaching government.

You can’t take everything away from someone and expect them not to react to it. These people have had their lives ripped from them and you can’t sleep because their honking their horns?

How about trying to listen to them as opposed to acting like you have the right to tell them to shut up?

Trudeau can hide from the truckers but he can’t hide from us. He can talk down to them (and us) all he wants but he stands naked (shudder) in the light of something far worse than The Rock’s weakness, his lack of shame.

No matter how many jerrycans of diesel fuel the cops confiscate, or millions of dollars GoFundMe steals or traffic citations issued, what’s happening in Ottawa is beyond their control.

This is the real issue, not The Rock’s 10-year-old transphobic tweets or Joe Rogan triggering a bunch of self-obsessed ninnies. The real issue is that we see them for what they are and now that they’ve crossed the line their legitimacy is gone.

The truckers in Ottawa have already moved far past just lifting the vaccine mandates or anything having to do with COVID-19 restrictions.

They want Justin Trudeau’s government to resign. They want the globalist shills that infect the upper echelons of all the major Canadian parties unemployed like they are. After all, fair is fair, right?

They’ve already gotten one scalp, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. The only move left for Trudeau is violence.

And they’ve done something Joe Rogan wasn’t willing to do, inspire people to get past the fear of losing something in order to truly gain something the Trudeaus and the Obamas of the world don’t want them to ever have, their self-respect.

I can only hope that the police and military there see this for what it is, an opportunity to stop hiding behind their badges and their ‘duty’ and remember who they remember themselves being.

The truckers have done the heavy lifting. They lifted rocks. Now it’s time to move mountains.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon if you like lifting rocks.

BTC: 3GSkAe8PhENyMWQb7orjtnJK9VX8mMf7Zf
BCH: qq9pvwq26d8fjfk0f6k5mmnn09vzkmeh3sffxd6ryt
DCR: DsV2x4kJ4gWCPSpHmS4czbLz2fJNqms78oE
LTC: MWWdCHbMmn1yuyMSZX55ENJnQo8DXCFg5k
DASH: XjWQKXJuxYzaNV6WMC4zhuQ43uBw8mN4Va
WAVES: 3PF58yzAghxPJad5rM44ZpH5fUZJug4kBSa
ETH: 0x1dd2e6cddb02e3839700b33e9dd45859344c9edc
DGB: SXygreEdaAWESbgW6mG15dgfH6qVUE5FSE

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) gave embattled Wuhan lab collaborator EcoHealth Alliance a $4.67 million grant in late 2021, despite the New York-based nonprofit coming under intense scrutiny after leaked documents revealed that founder Peter Daszak applied for a grant to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work. -Telegraph

Yet, despite EcoHealth’s shocking attempt to create exotic strains of bat covid – in the middle of a pandemic, for which ground zero was the city he was previously genetically modifying bat covid in (and failed to report an ‘accidental’ gain-of-function outcome), USAID decided to move forward with a nearly $5 million grant to EcoHealth, according to the Washington Examiner‘s Jerry Dunleavy.

You’ll recall that Daszak was also part of the WHO team that dismissed the lab-leak theory as “extremely unlikely,” as well as the February 2020 Lancet letter which dismissed the hypothesis that his colleagues could be behind this as a conspiracy theory.

And get this, “the grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance will implement the Conservation Works Activity in southwest Liberia,” a USAID spokesperson told the Examiner. “CWA partners will work with local communities to improve farming practices and sustainable opportunities that reduce reliance on land, wood, or wildlife in conservation areas.”

The project began Oct. 26, 2021, just six days after the National Institutes of Health revealed that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grants with the agency, with NIH revealing further violations in January.

The Washington Examiner asked USAID officials if the problems with NIH were considered, as well as the fact that the Wuhan lab is considered by U.S. intelligence to be the plausible origin of COVID. USAID did not answer any of those questions directly. -Examiner

“CWA was competitively bid and awarded,” a USAID spokesperson said. “EcoHealth Alliance has experience monitoring wildlife and understanding forest-disease dynamics in Liberia, and its consortium partners have substantial experience with protected area management and rural development in Liberia.”

As Dunleavy notes, more than two dozen House Republicans shot a letter to USAID Administrator Samantha Power this week.

“[We are] deeply concerned by this award given EcoHealth and Dr. Daszak’s troubling record of failing to report findings from federally funded research, refusing to cooperate with congressional oversight of federal funding awarded to the organization, and collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the letter reads, adding that USAID’s PREDICT program provided $1.1 million to Daszak’s nonprofit between 2009 and 2019, with funds allocated for a sub-agreement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They added that USAID provided a further $2.5 million in funding between 2011 and 2021.

Emails show EcoHealth sought to delay the release of taxpayer-funded viral sequences early in the COVID-19 pandemic in part because Chinese authorities had not yet approved the data’s release. Daszak urged his colleagues in a late April 2020 email to delay the release of the data to a public NIH database because it would bring “very unwelcome attention” to “PREDICT and USAID.”

EcoHealth’s website touts its involvement in USAID’s PREDICT program, saying it “works at the leading edge of this field by building local capabilities and testing high-risk wildlife” in places such as China.

EcoHealth has received tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. government in recent years, including $6.99 million in 2021, with the aforementioned $4.67 million from USAID as well as $2.075 million from NIH. A government funding database shows EcoHealth received $25.1 million in 2020, including $21.26 million from the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency plus $2.49 million from NIH. -Washington Examiner

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

When the state / empire loses the ability to recognize and solve core problems of security and fairness, it will be replaced by another arrangement that is more adaptable and adept at solving problems.

From a systems perspective, nation-states and empires arise when they are superior solutions to security compared to whatever arrangement they replace: feudalism, warlords, tribal confederations, etc.

States and empires fail when they are no longer the solution, they are the problem. As the book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization explains, when the dissolution of the state / empire becomes the pain-reducing solution, the inhabitants withdraw their support and the empire loses its grip and expires.

As I explain in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, states and markets are problem-solving structures. These structures solve problems by optimizing adaptability and beneficial synergies that reinforce one another as evolutionary advances.

The rise of the middle class is an example of beneficial synergies: as this new class gains access to credit, expertise, trade, enterprise and pricing power for their labor, they have the means to transform their labor into capital by saving earnings and investing the capital in assets, new enterprises, etc. which then generate income from capital which fuels synergistic increases in credit, expertise, assets and income from investments.

States / empires fail and expire when they elevate the fatal synergies created by self-serving elites. Rather than encourage the dynamics of adaptation–competition, transparency, accountability, experimentation and dissent– the elites suppresses these forces as threats to their monopolies, cartels and wealth.

Stripped of adaptability and beneficial synergies, the state / empire is no longer able to solve problems. It becomes the problem which cannot be resolved.

A key dynamic fueling fatal synergies is the hubristic confidence that low-cost abundance is a birthright bestowed by the state /empire, so resources can be endlessly squandered on excess and extremes of consumption and waste. The state / empire no longer focuses on securing the material sources of security (food, energy, etc.) or the accountability, competition, dissent and transparency required to solve systemic problems.

Instead, the state / empire dissolves into divisive camps seeking to protect their petty fiefdoms and expanding their wealth at the expense of the populace. The super-wealthy build $500 million yachts and palaces, politicians trade on their positions to accumulate fortunes, and corruption replaces governance.

Markets spiral into fatal synergies as low quality products and services, speculative excess, extremes of grotesque consumption and blood-soaked entertainment become “growth industries” while blackouts dim electrical grids and store shelves empty of essentials.

The market solution to everyone already owning everything is to engineer planned obsolescence into every product and form service-sector cartels that then strip services to the bone to juice profits, a.k.a. the crapification of all goods and services.

The state / empire also fails to maintain basic security and functions such as tax collection and a fair enforcement. Petty crimes are exploited by those in power (civil forfeiture) while resistance to the state is severely punished. There are two legal systems, one for the commoners and another for the elite.

The state / empire protects those profiting from the status quo and then calls this profiteering a “solution.” But this profiteering doesn’t solve any problems; it is the problem, as self-serving profiteering protects its privileges by corrupting the state, finance and the economy.

For its part, the market seeks to maximize profits in excesses of consumption, predatory lending (student loans), the wholesale destruction of quality by monopolies and cartels and extremes of speculation. Maximizing profits by any means available has no moral foundation; predatory student loans are profitable, obscure medical billing is profitable, selling products designed to fail is profitable, declaring software outdated is profitable, deceiving consumers is profitable, and so on, in an endless array of shoddy, unhealthy products, rapacious services, fraudulent overcharges, etc.

Since problems go unresolved, things fall apart and the masses veer into extremes of derangement and magical thinking: fanaticism is substituted for friendship, cults abound, common ground vanishes and all the failures of the system are papered over with Bread and Circuses, free money, gaudy entertainments and lifeless displays of conspicuous consumption that reveal the decay and degradation.

Protecting the few stripmining the system at the expense of the many is not problem-solving. It adds a layer of problems that the state /empire is incapable of resolving. Ossified, sclerotic, self-serving, corrupt, focused on virtue-signaling and the appearance of tackling problems rather than actually solving problems because some sacred cow would lose its privileges and income stream, the state / empire is the problem, not the solution.

When the state / empire loses the ability to recognize and solve core problems of security and fairness, it will be replaced by another arrangement that is more adaptable and adept at solving problems. Artifice, fantasy, magical thinking, excuses and absurd cover stories are not part of problem-solving. Problems can only be solved if reality is faced directly.

When reality is unacceptable because it negatively impacts those stripmining the system for private gain, the state / empire is already on its fatal spiral to collapse.

*  *  *

My new book is now available at a 20% discount this month: Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $8.95, print $20). If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.