Category: zerohedge

Just days after Axios reported that Matt Gaetz, a conservative pro-Trump Republican from the Florida panhandle with a national profile, planned to quit Congress and take a job at Newsmax, the NYT has published some bombshell allegations. The paper reported Tuesday evening that Gaetz is a “subject” in a federal investigation examining whether he had illegal sexual relations with a minor (an unnamed, unidentified woman who was reportedly 17 at the time). Investigators are also looking into whether the woman traveled with Gaetz, which would constitute another federal offense.

The investigation was reportedly opened during the final months of the Trump Administration before AG William Barr left office. The NYT says Gaetz wasn’t targeted directly, but that the behavior in question is somehow tied to a Florida official named Joel Greenberg who was indicted last summer on a range of charges including sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, at least one of whom was an underage girl. Greenberg has since resigned his post as tax collector in Seminole County (north of Orlando) and is in jail awaiting trial after having his bail revoked.

No charges have been brought against Gaetz, and his criminal exposure remains unclear. Gaetz addressed the charges directly in a statement to the NYT, saying he believed the investigation might have resulted from somebody’s attempt to “to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward.” Gaetz told the NYT “I only know it has to do with women,” in regards to the investigation.

Gaetz added that the investigation might be part of a scheme to extort his family for $25MM, before telling a reporter that both he and his father had worn a wire while cooperating with the FBI after being approached by people who said they could make the investigation “go away”, though he didn’t elaborate. He also told the NYT in a later interview that “it is verifiably false that I have traveled with a 17-ear-old woman.”

In a statement published later, Gaetz said “The allegations against me are as searing as they are false,” Gaetz said in an interview. I believe that there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to criminalize my sexual conduct, you know when I was a single guy.”

Gaetz also published a statement on twitter reiterating his comments about his family cooperating with the FBI, after becoming “victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25MM.” The part about the involvement of a corrupt DoJ official differed from his earlier statement.

Over the past several weeks my family and I have been victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25 million while threatening to smear my name.

We have been cooperating with federal authorities in this matter…

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) March 30, 2021

…and my father has even been wearing a wire at the FBI’s direction to catch these criminals. The planted leak to the FBI tonight was intended to thwart that investigation.

No part of the allegations against me are true, and the people pushing these lies are targets…

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) March 30, 2021

…of the ongoing extortion investigation.

I demand the DOJ immediately release the tapes, made at their direction, which implicate their former colleague in crimes against me based on false allegations.

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) March 30, 2021

The 38-year-old congressman proposed to his girlfriend at Mar a Lago late last year. But he made headlines months ago after proclaiming that he “had a son”, later explaining the son, Nestor Galban, 19, was actually the brother of his then-girlfriend. “He is a part of my family story,” Gaetz told People magazine in June. “My work with Nestor, our family, no element of my public service could compare to the joy that our family has brought me.”

The nature of Greenberg’s relationship to Gaetz is unclear. But one thing is for sure: progressives on twitter are having a field day as Gaetz’s plans to jump to Newsmax evaporate. They’re also slamming him for hypocrisy, after Gaetz repeatedly criticized top Democrats for ties to convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s kinda surprising that Matt Gaetz leaked he’s retiring early from politics. I figured he’d still be attracted to his career given that it’s still pretty young.

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) March 30, 2021

Matt Gaetz belongs in prison. For so many reasons.

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 30, 2021

Gaetz was first elected to Congress in 2016. As a member of the Florida State Legislature and the scion of a Republican political family,

Democratic Congressman is already pushing to have Gaetz stripped of his House Judiciary Committee assignment, an echo of how Democrats disenfranchised Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

Rep Matt Gaetz should be taken off the @HouseJudiciary Committee until the @TheJusticeDept investigation is completed. He should not be sitting on a Congressional Committee with oversight over the DOJ while the Department is investigating him. https://t.co/TKRfSyCgHe

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 30, 2021

The DOJ does not take lightly opening a criminal investigation against a Member of Congress. Hard to believe root cause of problem would be a single former DOJ official making up allegations. There would be an entire team of federal agents & prosecutors investigating Matt Gaetz. https://t.co/kLx1CP5hjJ

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 30, 2021

There’s clearly a lot going on here, and we suspect more information about the investigation, and Gaetz’s claims, will surface in the coming days. In the meantime, one twitter user pointed out that Gaetz’s extortion claims aren’t actually all that far-fetched.

Explosive allegations by Gaetz that we will undoubtedly learn more about.

Note that it is possible for him to be the victim of extortion and also be implicated in wrongdoing himself.

In other words, whether he was extorted and whether he committed a crime are separate issues. https://t.co/ja6Qa9usbw

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) March 30, 2021

While chaos reigns in various parts of the US equity and bond markets, bitcoin has been quietly surging higher in the last few days.

Source: Bloomberg

In fact, US rate forecast volatility is now higher than bitcoin’s realized risk…

Source: Bloomberg

Ahead of President Biden’s pitch tomorrow for another $3 trillion in spending, the crypto patch has been bid and helped today by the news that PayPal will launch “Checkout With Crypto” – a cryptocurrency service for merchants across the US.

“This is the first time you can seamlessly use cryptocurrencies in the same way as a credit card or a debit card inside your PayPal wallet,” PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters.

Checkout With Crypto service will enable those holding cryptocurrencies on the platform to spend it with all of PayPal’s merchants. Supported cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin; the payments company will, however, convert the cryptocurrency to fiat money for the actual payment.

“We think it is a transitional point where cryptocurrencies move from being predominantly an asset class that you buy, hold and or sell to now becoming a legitimate funding source to make transactions in the real world at millions of merchants,” Schulman added.

Also buoying bitcoin prices is the news that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has unveiled plans to launch a new Bitcoin derivatives product that will enable traders to speculate on fractional units of the flagship digital currency.

CoinTelegraph reports that CME Group’s Micro Bitcoin futures contract, which is set to launch May 3 pending regulatory approval, will be worth 0.1 BTC. The smaller contract size provides market participants with an additional tool to hedge their Bitcoin price risk, CME said Tuesday. CME’s current Bitcoin contract unit is 5 BTC.

Tim McCourt, CME Group’s global head of equity index and alternative investment products, explaine:

“The introduction of Micro Bitcoin futures responds directly to demand for smaller-sized contracts from a broad array of clients and will offer even more choice and precision in how participants can trade regulated Bitcoin futures in a transparent and efficient manner at CME Group.”

CME launched its Bitcoin futures contract in December 2017. The Chicago Board Options Exchange, Its larger crosstown rival, was the first to introduce the derivatives contract during the same month but has since abandoned Bitcoin futures altogether.

CME has noted a steady uptick in crypto derivatives trading since the first Bitcoin futures contract launched more than three years ago.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

Perhaps that is one reason why bitcoin options traders have started to build a sizable position in call options (levered bets on higher prices), betting on prices above $80,000 by the end of April.

Source: bybt

According to the latest data, 5,580 bitcoin (around $330 mm notional) of contracts are outstanding in $80,000 strike April Calls.

Notably, as CoinMinks reports, significant volume has also accumulated around contracts with a strike price of $120,000.

This means that some traders believe the bitcoin price will more than double in the next five weeks.

According to data aggregator Skew, probability estimates based on market data for the April 30 contract suggest that options traders may be a bit too optimistic. The analytics platform gives it a probability of just 6.19% that bitcoin will top $80,000 (and only a 2.15% chance that the bitcoin price will even reach $100,000 by the April 30 expiration date).

The upcoming Coinbase IPO may also be a catalyst for the upside call-buying.

Authored by ‘An American Educator’ via The Critic,

In a warning to teachers around the world, one American teacher opens up about the invasion of woke orthodoxy in the education sector…

I am an American educator who began teaching nearly two decades ago. During that time, I have taught at some of the most prestigious private secondary schools in the United States. Starting about five years ago, these schools began to be consumed by woke ideology.

When I say “consumed by woke ideology” I mean that these schools are obsessed with sophomoric and divisive notions of diversity, equality, and justice; increasingly hostile to freedom of expression; addicted to cancelling anything that offends the woke movement; and prioritising activism over understanding as the goal of education.

I am writing this letter to alert those we may describe as “sleep-wokers”. A sleep-woker is one who has not taken the woke creed to heart, yet nevertheless tacitly complies with the linguistic, pedagogical, political, and moral imperatives of wokeness. Sleep-wokers go through the motions; they are like religious folk who say prayers without thinking, attend worship services without engaging, and perpetuate dogmas without believing. I was a sleep-woker. In some ways, due to a combination of timidity and tiredness, I still am.

Sleep-woking, like sleepwalking, is very dangerous. While sleep-woking, an English teacher can unwittingly help cancel Chaucer, Keats and Conrad in the name of decolonisation. A biology teacher might find herself obliged to deny important differences between the sexes. A football coach will not be able to cheer on a player after a strong tackle, as strength and physical violence smack of toxic masculinity.

Most of my sleep-woking colleagues are good people. Like me, they were lulled into complacency by a woke take-over that was slow and subtle. What’s more, some changes were initially promising and even corrective — of course we should pay more attention to marginalised voices and overlooked narratives, and I am glad that we now do. To bemoan an expanded curriculum is simple chauvinism. In the end, however, wokeness has proven to be oppressive and totalitarian rather than inclusive and liberating.

It is worth noting that I have been a supporter of the left for most of my life. The only political donation I have ever made went to a candidate in the most left-leaning wing of the most left-leaning party in American politics. My objection is to the effect of woke ideology on education, not to liberal politics. My grievance is that teachers are increasingly under pressure to adopt the woke agenda or be ostracised.

I empathise with the difficult situation that top school officials find themselves in. As wokeness takes over American culture, schools face enormous pressure to follow suit. That said, those with the power to stop the degradation of education have a special responsibility to do so, and those of us with less power have a responsibility to remind our superiors of their duty.

Here is some of what wokeness has wrought at top American schools:

Offence in is the Eye of the Offended

Schools openly preach that if one feels offended, one has been offended. For example, if a student or colleague claims to have been offended by your words or actions, it does not matter if you intended no offence. More troubling is the fact that it does not matter if your words and actions were not those that a rational person should find offensive — you are an offender merely by virtue of the fact that someone claims to have been offended.

Schools cannot yet codify this into an official policy. What the schools are starting to do, however, is to change the ethical norms associated with offence. Since legal norms follow ethical norms, if schools (and societies) succeed in changing the ethical norms of speech and offence, they will eventually have a basis upon which to change the legal norms. As soon as they can show that a normal or typical person is offended by certain language or certain ideas, they will be able to argue that a person presenting such language and ideas is failing to abide by the reasonable ethical expectations of school culture. In short, we are training students how to be offended so that their perceived offence can be used to eliminate anti-woke expression.

Elimination of Non-Woke Student Clubs

Any student group that resists woke orthodoxy is likely to be forcibly disbanded or prevented from forming. Student clubs cannot form without faculty sponsors. Since the vast majority of the faculty at these schools are woke (or too afraid to be seen as non-woke), conservative students have trouble officially meeting and inviting speakers. If a non-woke speaker is invited, the wokes mobilise to deny them a platform and they feel righteous for doing so. Few conservative students openly identify as such because they are afraid of repercussions from faculty and from other students. Not only is this unfair, but it is also dangerous. Alienated conservative students are being pushed away from moderate disagreement and towards political extremism.

No Resisting Woke Slogans

Opposing woke slogans or voicing contrary slogans is not tolerated. Since opposing wokeness is thought to be motivated by hate, voicing opposition to woke slogans is tantamount to hate speech. A student who challenges a woke slogan is bullied and harassed by the woke majority. Meanwhile, woke slogans and images are hung in school buildings and cannot be removed.

Cultural Appropriation

White or Western students are told not to participate in cultural traditions of non-white, non-Western people — the oppressors cannot participate in the culture of the oppressed. For example, several white students who wore shirts with African designs were reprimanded and forced to change their clothes. The fact that the shirts were a gift from their teacher, a black African man, made no difference. The students wore the shirts to show affection for their teacher and to honour his gift, but that was still cultural appropriation.

In another instance, a musician was reprimanded for blending a western and non-western musical style into a new artistic expression. The musician was accused of cultural imperialism.

Cancelling Curriculum

Shakespeare, Homer and other canonical authors are being eliminated from the curriculum. In some cases, schools and teachers boast about cancelling these patriarchal racists. Even at schools that do not officially cancel canonical Western texts, the texts are subtly replaced in the name of anti-racism.

Most of my students will go to university never having read Homer or Shakespeare, though they will have been required to read many texts and attend many lectures on intersectionality and gender identity. They can speak at length about toxic masculinity and a panoply of so-called phobias, but they would not recognise the terms “iambic pentameter” and “dactylic hexameter”, let alone recognise actual examples of the meter.

Normalising Fallacies

Ad hominem attacks are presented as the cornerstone of critical thinking rather than as a fallacious form of argumentation. We teach students to evaluate texts and arguments by primarily attending to the author’s race, gender, and sexuality.

Mandatory Training

Students attend mandatory training sessions in which experts teach them how to identify and report microaggressions. And since to a student with a hammer everything looks like a nail, the students begin informing on each other and on their teachers. White teachers are told to attend racial-political re-education workshops in which they strive to overcome their whiteness in the classroom. (It has long been accepted that “whiteness” is a meaningful category.)

If you claim to not be a racist, you are seen as the worst, most unredeemable kind of racist. You are a heretic who will not admit heresy. You are thought to be suffering from something called “white fragility”.

Trigger Warnings

Before introducing a new unit, teachers compile lists of trigger warnings for the material in that unit. A trigger warning serves to alert students to any and all things in the unit that could cause them stress, frustration, anger, or sadness. These lists are shared with students.

Manners and Dress Codes

A side-effect of the woke attack on tradition, authority, and hierarchy has been the revocation of dress codes. So long as their genitals are covered and no profane words are visible, students can and do wear anything they like. Arguably the only rule left in the dining halls and cafeterias is “Don’t throw food.”

Many students eat meals with headphones in their ears while watching videos on their phones. The less respectful students don’t bother with headphones. “Sir” and “Ma’am” have long since disappeared as too authoritarian and gendered. The terms “master” and “headmaster” cannot be used as master might connote slavery.

Elimination of Objective Assessments

Exams are being eliminated for two reasons: first, because exams are apparently inherently racist, sexist, classist, heteronormative, or otherwise unfair; second, because exams cause students stress, and stress makes students feel bad, and feeling bad negatively impacts their well-being. Additionally, some students do poorly on exams, and this has the potential to result in a situation that is inequitable.

Pronouns

Faculty are frequently pressured to identify their pronouns. Failure to identify one’s pronouns is seen as transphobic or cis-centric or both. Students can reassign their own pronouns at will. If a teacher mistakenly does not use the student’s preferred pronoun, the teacher is accused of misgendering. Misgendering a serious offence, even a kind of violence.

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The unchecked advance of wokeness will do two things to your school.

• First, you and your students will lose the ability to freely read, write and speak as pupils and teachers. Second, the education that you now provide will become unrecognisably impoverished.

• This second effect is probably the hardest to believe, especially for those of you at top academic institutions, but it is the effect of which I am most certain. In place of free-thinking young scholars, you will begin turning out a generation of woke activists who believe that feelings matter more than facts, that perception is reality, and that it is more important to judge a text than to understand it — where “judging” means anachronistically interpreting the author’s words in light of the most recent woke orthodoxy.

Many of my students claim to be proud practitioners of social justice (don’t push them too hard on what that means) yet they have only an elementary command of grammar and geography, struggling to write complete sentences and unable to locate Turkey on a map. Some have begun to ask why we take math so seriously given that math is apparently grounded in Western patriarchal rationalism. Wokeness has been achieved at the expense of education. Reason has been subordinated to passion. Plato’s charioteer has been replaced by the horses he was meant to reign in.

Perhaps some of you are disturbed by some of the woke excesses at your schools and in your communities, even if, like me, you readily support appeals for greater diversity, genuine inclusion, and a multicultural curriculum. Perhaps your instinct has been to dismiss these excesses as isolated incidents. Like me, you might have said “The pendulum will swing back” or “That will never happen at my school.” I am writing to say that the pendulum will not swing back because the woke movement is not a pendulum; it is a steamroller.

I am not claiming any moral high ground. My own failure to push back in the right ways and at the right times makes me part of the problem. Nor am I here trying to convince anyone else to become bothered by the advance of woke culture into education. If what I am reporting does not bother you, ignore me. If wokeness has begun to concern you, however, you now have a glimpse of where your own school may be headed.

One of the canniest bits of woke linguistic manipulation has been appropriation of the term “woke” itself. To not be woke is to be asleep: unconscious or ignorant of what is really going on.

Either one is woke or one is not aware of reality. Or, as I was recently told by a student, if you are not woke, it must be because you are uneducated or hateful — or both.

Such is the woke reality.

In just a few days, US high frequency economic data will lap March 2020 when the US economy literally shut down and sent all economic indicators in freefall to a degree not seen since the Great Depression (and in many cases, more).

When that happens, while March/April economic data will rise only modestly compared to the previous month, it will be a veritable explosion compared to the shutdown a year ago. This is the so-called “base effect” and while many economists will ignore it, especially when it comes to inflation data, the impact for many will be jarring especially when investors see charts that have gone, for lack of a better word, vertical.

To preview the annual change base effect that is coming in everything from retail sales, to income and spending, to housing data, to jobs and unemployment, we have pulled some of the most representative real-time indicators available from JPMorgan and Bank of America, starting with what is perhaps the most illustrative chart of all: JPM’s spending tracker on the bank’s own consumer (debit and credit) cards.

Here the 65% surge in spending is not because of an actual surge in spending March, but because spending last March imploded. Which is why to normalize for the post-March 2020 shock, banks will likely show not just the Y/Y chart, but also a chart comparing to 2-year ago or, better yet, a pre-covid blended trend as JPM has done in the chart above.

Bank of America published a similar chart, showing a huge jump in Y/Y card spending, especially among households who received stimulus payments – and this time on both a 1 and 2 year basis – while household that did not receive stimulus saw a roughly 30% jump in Y/Y spending due to the base effect, and only a modest increase in 2Y spending.

Here are some other charts showing how the 1-Year, but not 2-Year change, has gone vertical:

… And some more.

… And even more…

But nowhere is the base effect more visible than in the 1-year spending on airlines, where we see a very clear “lift off” formation in progress.

Treasury yields blew out overnight (with the belly in particular feeling the heat: 5s +5.5bps, 10s +6.0bps) during the Asian session in continuation of yesterday’s move higher, as the usual suspects – Japanese commercial banks – resumed selling in droves (see “Morgan Stanley Identifies The Source Of Massive Treasury Selling“), although it wasn’t clear what if any catalyst sparked the selling.

Trying to make some sense of the latest move in yields Nomura’s Charlie McElligott offered three reasons for the return of the reflation theme:

1. vaccine renormalization
2. fiscal stimulus now circulating into the “real economy”, and
3. the expected large upside surprise in Friday’s NFP data now increasingly being priced-in, whose release McElligott notes “comes dangerously on the illiquid ‘Good Friday’ holiday-shortened session, risking a disorderly move”

We won’t focus much on topics 1 and 2 which we have covered extenisvely elsewhere on multiple occasions, but instead we will preview what may be a truly blockbuster payrolls report on Friday, coming right at a time when stocks are closed and when bonds are open only until noon.

So why focus on Friday’s jobs report? Because one month after the February Payrolls printed at 379K, nearly double the consensus estimate of 198K, Wall Street expects the labor market to resume its torrid upward trajectory with a whopping 650K print.

While on the surface this will likely send yields sharply higher as it provides fresh fuel to the reflation narrative, a chart published today by JPMorgan took our breath away. In the bank’s latest “quant and econ dashboard report”, JPMorgan compares the BLS payrolls series with its own alternative data-based tracker of jobs data. Remarkably, it found that after a period of almost uniform convergence between the two series, the March “alternative data” print was a whopper, one which implies the matched BLS print will be around 1.8 million jobs!

To be sure there are several other reflationary considerations laid out by McElligott, which we note below…

• With the market sniffing the pull-forward of US QE taper in addition to then likelihood of “front-loaded” Fed hikes, 5s are in a really tricky spot, and this is why 5s30s—which was really the “reflation steepener” of choice for so long last year—has now actually stalled-out, sitting around this 1.50 level for approximately two months now
• The better the reopening data gets, the more likely it is that we more of this inflection from phase 1 steepening “reflation feel-good” as the long-end reflects higher growth- and inflation- expectations, to the phase 2 flattening “Fed tightening” stage, where the front-end / belly leading the repricing ahead of Fed policy adjustment—with the potential for this to begin evidencing itself to markets by the time of the next Fed SEP in June potentially needing to reflect an improved forecast

In this context, imagine what happens to the 10Y – and certainly the belly and the 5Y – if we do get a 1.8MM print (which has quickly emerged as the whisper number for Friday), smashing expectations by 3x, and unleashing a volley of TSY selling as the herd panics and dumps Treasurys faster than you can say a “failed 7Y auction.” Perhaps the only question in this “blowout payrolls” scenario is whether the 10Y – which today rose as high as 1.78% will find support at 2.00% or will it blow out above the level most on Wall Street (according to the latest BofA Fund Manager Survey)…

… agrees is the trigger for chaos not just in the bond but also stock market.

Virgin Galactic has billed itself as a space tourism company, and that reality is no longer a distant dream for virtually everyone. 

On Tuesday, Virgin unveiled the first SpaceShip III in its expanding fleet, VSS Imagine, that will capitalize on space tourism by taking passengers to low Earth orbit. 

“For us to make the business start to scale, at the places that we’re aspiring towards, we need two things: We need many more ships than we have right now and we also need the ships that we bring forward to be built in a way that they’re able to be maintained in a way that we can have much quicker [turnaround times between flights] than what we have with Unity,” Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier told CNBC.

The expansion of Virgin’s fleet is an essential milestone towards allowing everyone’s access to space (well, for those who can afford it). 

Virgin will commence ground testing, with glide flights of VSS Imagine later this summer from Spaceport America in New Mexico. 

The breakthrough livery design, finished entirely with a mirror-like material, reflects the surrounding environment, constantly changing color and appearance as it travels from earth to sky to space. Along with providing thermal protection, this dynamic material is naturally appealing to the human eye, reflecting our inherent human fascination with space and the transformative experience of spaceflight.

Leveraging a modular design, the SpaceShip III class of vehicles are built to enable improved performance in terms of maintenance access and flight rate. This third generation of spaceship will lay the foundation for the design and manufacture of future vehicles. -Virgin press release 

The introduction of the SpaceShip III class of spaceships is an important milestone in Virgin’s multi-year effort that targets flying 400 flights per year.

Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, stated in a company press release: 

“Today we unveiled our SpaceShip III class of vehicles, marking the beginning of the Virgin Galactic fleet. VSS Imagine and Inspire are stunning ships that will take our future astronauts on an incredible voyage to space, and their names reflect the aspirational nature of human spaceflight. Congratulations to our dedicated team who worked so brilliantly to achieve this milestone.”

Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin, commented:

“Virgin Galactic spaceships are built specifically to deliver a new, transforming perspective to the thousands of people who will soon be able to experience the wonder of space for themselves. As a SpaceShip III class of vehicle, Imagineis not just beautiful to look at, but represents Virgin Galactic’s growing fleet of spaceships. All great achievements, creations and changes start with an idea. Our hope is for all those who travel to space to return with fresh perspectives and new ideas that will bring positive change to our planet.”

At the moment, a 90-minute sub-orbital flight costs around $250,000, and more than 600 people have already signed up. Flights are expected to begin in 2022. 

Besides low earth orbit travel, Virgin has also unveiled conceptual images of a supersonic commercial jet, sort of like the Concord. 

Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via Forbes.com,

Being a lifeguard in California can be unbelievably lucrative. If we had only known, many of us would have packed our bags and headed west for a career on the California beach.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that lifeguards make a fortune in Los Angeles County. Seven lifeguards made more than $300,000 and 82 lifeguards had total earnings that exceed $200,000 in 2019, the latest year available.

Fernando Boiteux was the most highly paid and earned $391,971. As the “acting chief lifeguard,” he out-earned 1,000 of his peers: salary ($205,619), perks ($60,452), and benefits ($125,900).

The second highest paid, Captain Daniel Douglas, pulled down $140,706 in base pay, and a whopping $131,493 in overtime pay, with $21,760 in “other pay” and $74,709 in benefits. Total compensation amounted to $368,668.

Overtime pay drove earnings into corporate executive range.

Thirty-one lifeguards made between $50,000 and $131,493 in overtime during the year. For example, Daniel Douglas (comp: $368,668; overtime: $131,493), Jaro Snopek (comp: $292,455; overtime:$119,669) and James Orr (comp: $281,270; overtime: $113,015) each made over $100,000 in overtime alone.

OPENTHEBOOKS.COM

Furthermore, we found that most of the top-paid lifeguards were men. In fact, only two of the top-twenty high-earners were women: Virginia Rupe ($281,000), a captain, and Christine Linkletter ($279,980), a section chief.

You might assume that high pay rewarded great heroism, but you’d be wrong. We found that many of the lifeguards who won the Medal of Valor –  exhibiting bravery for saving lives – failed to crack the top of the county’s payroll.

The 2020 Medal of Valor winner, Edward “Nick” Macko, an ocean lifeguard specialist, earned “only” $134,144 in compensation. His compensation ranked 167th out of the 1,001 employees in the L.A. lifeguard corps.

Macko jumped into the rough waters in a remote Palos Verdes gorge and pulled a man to safety through potentially skull-crushing swells and over razor-sharp rocks. Most of his rescue was captured on video and shows why he earned the honor.

The 2019 Valor award winners, Ocean Lifeguard Specialists Shaun Gudmundsson (comp: $165,761) and Ruben Carmona (comp: $194,919), “performed an extremely dangerous nighttime water rescue” of two trapped fishermen from hurricane-caused rising tides and surf.

Another 2019 Valor winner, Jon Van Duinwyk (comp: $238,434), singlehandedly rescued a 70-year-old man trapped inside a 25-foot sailboat during a huge storm surf off Dockweiler Beach. The lifeguard “risked his life to enter the vessel, extricate the elderly man, as the boat was breaking up in the 8 foot shore pound.”

Beach lifeguard pay dwarfs that of their colleagues at the pools. We found 332 pool lifeguards in L.A. County, but the highest paid “senior pool lifeguard” made only $46,997, including pay and benefits.

Why beach lifeguards earn so much money is a question L.A. taxpayers might start asking. A lifeguard’s job can be dangerous, but it’s unclear why residents should foot the bill for so much overtime when the state’s public employees already cost taxpayers $45 billion a year.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com compiled these numbers from Freedom of Information Act requests as well as benefit data listed at Transparent California.

*  *  *

Further Reading

• LA’s 2020 Beach Closure Order

• On March 27, 2020, L.A.’s Department of Public Health closed all its beaches, which stayed closed until May 13, 2020. It said the closure was necessary “to both enforce social distancing measures and stem the spread of COVID-19 within the community.” The L.A. beaches closed again over Fourth of July weekend “due to concerns about excessive crowds,” reopened the following Monday, and have stayed open since.

• 2017 Beach Awards news

• 2019 Beach Awards news and news

• Forbes: Why California Is In Trouble – 340,000 Public Employees With $100,000+ Paychecks Cost Taxpayers $45 Billion.

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Adam Andrzejewski (say: And-G-F-ski) is the CEO/Founder of OpenTheBooks.com. Our mission: “Every Dime, Online, In Real Time.”

What does the leveraged blow-up of Archegos Capital Management mean for risk assets? Tony Greer of TG Macro joins Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington to answer this question and update his outlook on stocks, bonds, housing, the U.S. Dollar, and gold as the bond rout shows little sign of stopping. Tony notes that the forced liquidation of Archegos ceased to impair stocks today—for now, at least—but remains as a potential sign that there is some market danger underneath the hood. Tony cites this as a reason why, on the margin, he is moving somewhat into cash and gold and out of stocks. Tony makes sense of the action in Treasury yields and tells Ash why he thinks the U.S. Dollar has been driving higher, especially against the yen. Tony speculates as to why commodities have proved resilient in the face of this dollar strength, which is normally a headwind. Lastly, Ash tells Tony about his evolving journey in the crypto world from a fan’s creation of Ash’s very own non-fungible token (NFT) to Ash’s experience buying Ethereum for the first time.

As we have reported numerous times, at this point, the reality that vaccine passports will essentially become an individual’s ‘passport to life’ seems like a foregone conclusion. The EU is already working on rolling out a digital system to allow residents to prove their vaccination status in a desperate attempt to save the summer tourism season, which faced devastation last year because of the pandemic.

As the Biden Administration works with the private sector to develop a standardized way for Americans to prove their status (an effort that’s being led by airlines and their consultants), MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a frequent and early GOP critic of President Trump, wants Americans to know that if they don’t support vaccine passports, then they’re “an idiot” and a “moron” who should probably “crawl back to your cave.”

We imagine Scarborough’s corporate sponsors, who are depending on the scheme to entice people to get out and consume,

Republicans and civil liberties advocates have criticized vaccine passports as s step toward “totalitarian communism”, and even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has vowed not to let them become a requirement in the state of Florida.

Scarborough’s rant continues, blasting Americans skeptical of vaccine passports as opposing the teachings of Jesus: https://t.co/7A5c27ifZM

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 30, 2021

But that apparently didn’t occur to Scarborough as he chided Americans for “following conspiracy theories” and for living in “ignorance and stupidity.”

“They’re being stupid, they’re following conspiracy theories…they don’t understand because maybe they’re such morons,” he thundered. “If they don’t want to take the vaccine and they want to die, that’s their right as Americans. They can live in ignorance and stupidity.”

“Our government, our sports teams, our concert promoters damned well better put together something where you can show your vaccine receipt,” he said.

“This anti-science idiocy, you know, let them do that under a rock or in their caves,” he added, concluding that “the time to try to reason with these people has long passed.”

Scarborough was instantly blasted online for his rant, which some called out as “totally unhinged.”

To put it another way: “Our government damned well better systematically violate individuals’ right to informed consent.”

Like in The Matrix, there are those who will fight for their own enslavement. https://t.co/LPzYvNNIFH

— Jeremy R. Hammond (@jeremyrhammond) March 30, 2021

WTF! This dude is totally unhinged!@JoeScarborough https://t.co/rcLiR41Ex7

— Laura (@llsch1) March 30, 2021

With enough enthusiasm from the private sector, the US government may only step in to ensure standardization. Speaking to reporters on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that “we want to drive the market toward meeting public interest goals.” The government “is not viewing its role as the place to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens,” Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid-19 adviser, added during Psaki’s briefing.

Of course, views on vaccines are much different in Europe, where Germany on Tuesday is reportedly planning to bar the AstraZeneca jab, limiting to only patients under the age of 60. The effort follows publication of new research purporting to link the AstraZeneca jab with rare, but deadly, blood clots that have occurred in a small number of patients. The EMA and WHO haven’t denied a connection, but continue to insist that benefits of the jab far outweigh the costs.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

New York City Police are searching for this man who attacked a 65-year-old Asian woman in broad daylight in Midtown on the sidewalk on West 43rd Street near Ninth Avenue.

In a press release, police say they are “asking for the public’s assistance in identifying the following individual wanted in connection to a hate crime assault incident.“

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea speaking on CNN affiliate NY1 Tuesday called this most recent attack “very disturbing.”

“It’s really disgusting when you see the video,” he said.

“We’re calling on all New Yorkers, anyone with information, we put out a pretty good picture of the, the individual that we want to talk to that was seen walking away, and you just try to make sense of it…and you can’t,” he said.

The New York Post reported that the suspect yelled anti-Asian statements while he beat the woman, including, “F**k you, you don’t belong here.”

The video below shows a man inside a building just a few feet away watching the attack. Like others, he does nothing.

One person who did act was a security guard who walks over and closes the door. Another man stops undoing packages to watch the entire attack without intervening.

The Post reports that the guard insisted that he was unaware of the attack. However, he could at a minimum clearly see the woman in distress on the ground.

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The New York police department has recorded a 1,300 percent increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic and as we previously noted, they held a press conference last week to highlight the assailants…

At the NYPD press conference on anti-Asian hate crimes today, they show booking photos of suspects apprehended & those they’re continuing to search for. The hate crime suspects appear to all be people of color. #StopAsianHate pic.twitter.com/rZSwlkagAA

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) March 25, 2021

[ZH: Spot the ‘white supremacist’ in the booking photos of the Asian hate-crime perpetrators…]

[ZH: As we previously highlighted, if you rely on The New York Times, the Democratic Party or CNN – they are interchangeable – for your perception of reality, you now believe America is reeling from the latest expression of white supremacy: Anti-Asian racism. The New York Times, the leader in mass hysterias fomented by the left – hysteria is the oxygen of the left – printed this headline last week: “Attacks on Asian-Americans in New York Stoke Fear, Anxiety and Anger.” And the subhead reads: “Hate crimes involving Asian-American victims soared in New York City last year.”

If one reads past the headline – which most people do not – the article gives the actual numbers: “The number of hate crimes with Asian-American victims reported to the New York Police Department jumped to 28 in 2020, from just three the previous year.”

A report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism drew national media attention for identifying a 149% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020 compared to 2019 in 16 of our largest cities. A startling number — until you learn the actual number of hate crimes in those cities rose from 49 to 122 – in a country of 330 million people.

So, to cut through the gaslighting, here are the facts according to the most recent FBI crime data (2019):

• White Americans make up 70% of the population and are cited for 52% of all hate crimes (nearly 20% below the percentage of the white population).

• Black Americans are 13% of the population but are cited for 24% of all hate crimes (nearly double the percentage of the black population).

• Black Americans are also cited for over 50% of all violent crime in the nation.

But, in what could be called “compound lying,” the Times did blame “former President Donald J. Trump, who frequently used racist language to refer to the coronavirus.”

Of course, the Times did not provide an example of Trump’s racist language with regard to the coronavirus. One must assume that blaming the Chinese government for the virus or referring to the virus as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” is regarded as racist, even though virtually every prior epidemic was named after its city or region of origin: the “Spanish Flu,” “Hong Kong Flu,” “Ebola Virus,” etc.

Meanwhile, the blanketing of the country with the Atlanta lie and the anti-Asian violence continues. The cover of this week’s Time features a drawing of a young Asian woman under the headline: “We Are Not Silent: Confronting America’s Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence.”

We look forward to seeing what President Biden will do about this wave of African American violence against Asian Americans…

We can’t be silent in the face of rising violence against Asian Americans. That’s why today I’m taking additional steps to respond–including establishing an initiative at the Department of Justice to address anti-Asian crimes.

These attacks are wrong, un-American, and must stop.

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 30, 2021