Category: zerohedge

As Israel starts doling out the first booster shots (courtesy of Pfizer, which has just shipped millions of additional jabs to the tiny Mediterranean nation) several European nations are jumping on the bandwagon and doling out booster shots – including the UK and Germany.

The Telegraph reported over the weekend that Great Britain would offer 32MM booster jabs starting early next month, with more than 2K pharmacies set to carry out the booster jabs. 2.5MM booster doses are expected to be delivered during the first week of September alone.

Pharmacies will be at the forefront of the vaccine program so that GPs and other NHS staff can focus on the growing backlog of patients waiting for other treatments. Assuming a Sept. 6 start, the UK expects to dole out the final third jabs by December.

The NHS has even proposed doling out booster shots alongside the flu vaccine for patients deemed to be the most high-risk. They will receive one injection in each arm.

“That is the plan, wherever possible,” said one government source, who stressed that it “depends on final JCVI [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] advice and coronavirus vaccine booster trials”.

HMG will be aiming to administer 2.46MM jabs a week throughout the fall to try and meet the deadline for the rollout.

With more jabs set to receive emergency approval in the UK, the government expects booster doses will be manufactured by a host of different producers, per the Telegraph.

Source: The Telegraph

Details about the booster jab rollout leaked to the press after vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi briefed British MPs on the plan.

Like the UK, Germany also plans to start offering booster shots to the elderly and at-risk starting Sept. 1, the AFP reports.

The modified guidance will also lead to broader access for those aged 12-17, as all vaccine enters will start offering jabs to minors, although presently Germany’s STIKO vaccine commission recommends the vaccine only for minors with pre-existing conditions. Within the EU, the EMA has approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna jabs for all minors and adults over the age of 12.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn and Germany’s 16 regional health ministers are expected to finalize the plans during a meeting on Monday.

More European countries are expected to follow suit, even as the number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to move lower across Europe as the latest wave of infections, caused by the delta variant, begins to wane.

Earlier we reported on the price hikes now being charged by Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech for their jabs, which the companies argue is warranted due to their increased efficacy vs. other jabs produced by AstraZeneca, JNJ and the Chinese state-controlled firms.

Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,

“One should never be afraid to lose, this is sport.”

Doing well in the Olympics does more for a nation’s mental health than any amount of politicking or dull economics numbers. Time for the UK to learn from success and do even more to broaden access as the Disruptive Tokyo Games highlights the opportunities!

I’m afraid there won’t be a lot of insights on markets, or facts about equity and bond valuations this morning. Instead, I’m wondering about sport and some of the extraordinary things we’ve been watching from the Tokyo Olympics – and what it might mean for the UK in particular.

Nothing should detract from the dedication and success of individual athletes. Their triumphs in the adversity of training, competition and the expectations put upon them is worthy of our utmost admiration. We love and praise them for it. But, let’s be brutally honest: the Olympics are about national pride – how well your country is performing relative to everyone else.

Tokyo is also the Disruptive Games – new sports hinting at an even more exciting. I wonder if the founders of the modern games ever imagined how loudly we’d be cheering on 13year-old skateboarders, or rock climbers. Sport is changing. It’s become more commercialised but also democratised. The barriers to entry are falling. There is nothing like the feel-good factor of seeing your nation do well in the Olympics – a factor smart politicians should be picking up on.

There is still much to debate about the Olympics. Golf? Why? (There is no universe I can imagine where golf improves anything…) The Women’s Rugby Sevens was simply fantastic. I am miffed so little of the sailing was actually shown – the BBC’s contract with the TV rights owner, Discovery, was farcical.

Personally, my favourite athlete of all time remains Alf Tupper – the fictional “tough of the track” who appeared in the Victor comic back in the 1960s and 70s. The friendly tousle-haired working class hero was presented as the antithesis to the posh clubs of his time. Training on a diet of fish’n’chips, hitch-hiking his way to races, regularly punching out toffs who tried to have him thrown out for his lack of running-club tie, Alf would always do the right thing to ensure Gold for Britain, including sacrificing his own medal chances.

Forget the fact the Americans and Chinese dominate the medal tables. If you want to brag about Olympic success, then historically the nation to beat is Jamaica – consistently the Caribbean island wins more gold per head than anyone else. The Kiwis, the Dutch and the Danes also do pretty well, unlike India which, despite its massive population, possesses an anthem you are unlikely to become familiar with at prize giving time.

The Olympics are all about personal triumph – but to achieve success athletes require political will and support. The UK has been doing rather well in international sport these last 25-years. From winning practically nothing at the Atlanta Games, we are now well up the Medal table – 6th this morning – winning more medals across a wider range of sports than anyone else (13 different sports disciplines compared to 12 for the Chinese and Americans). The Australians particularly, but also the Chinese and the Americans, have won their medals in a relatively small number of focused, targeted sports.

Sport has a remarkable ability to change lives for the better. Whether it’s making ourselves fitter, giving us a passion, or turning us into champions – or simply generating feel-good. We learn life-lessons from defeat and triumph equally. Yet, for all the noise around the Olympics and our suddenly professed interest in the intricacies of Horse Dancing for the three days its on TV every 4 years, the UK by-and-large remains a nation of couch potatoes.

Participation is not just a matter of diversity or opportunity – it’s equally about personal choice. It’s very difficult for people to motivate themselves to go down the gym, go for a walk in the rain, or, in my case, get out my warm bed to rig my dinghy and brace myself for the inevitable capsize. Every time I do I feel better for it, energised, invigorated and promising to do more.. until I roll over and go back to sleep the next day. Across the nation, millions of people just don’t participate because they don’t perceive access to sporting opportunity.

Whatever the politicians say about encouraging sports across the community, allocation of Lottery funding to sports based on analysis of the ones most likely to win medals has been one factor behind the UK’s recent successes. The Australians joke the Brits only win in sports where its mostly sitting down that counts – like rowing, sailing and equestrian. These are not sports that occur naturally in the inner cities…..

Cycling is a little better – the UK has done particularly well, not only in the Olympics but where it really counts: beating the French in the Tour de France. While cycling is having a banner year, it’s been a shocker for the UK rowing team – riven by allegations from some elite athletes of a bullying coaching culture, the team failed to hit its targets, despite millions in funding. In contrast, the most popular athletes in the UK today are probably the two BMX gold medal winners; Bethany Shriever and Charlotte Worthington, silver medalist Kye Whyte, and the mountain bike champion Tom Pidcock.

Bethany’s story shows why UK sport needs to be constantly re-inventing itself. Unlike the perception of pampered rowing toffs based in their multi-million facility across the Thames from Eton (the UK’s poshest school), their diet experts, massage parlours and multiple coaches, Bethany comes across as utterly genuine. Her BMX racing was initially written off by the funders, and she had to take a job and crowdfund her path to Tokyo.

Charlotte’s dedication to her sport has seen her break her leg twice in training, and also suffer funding crisis. No mental health wobbles were going to stop her after she fell pulling a spectacular stunt on her first run – she went straight back out and nailed it on the second. Kye’s success is largely down to the remarkable inner city Peckam BMX club – the polar opposite in terms of diversity and access to opportunity to the conventional vision of elite sport generates.

Fortunately, British Cycling’s performance team realised these relatively new disciplines were new avenues towards success – but also that they are much more accessible to more people than velodromes, expensive lycra suits and multi-million pound bikes. Rather than locking the new bike sports out the funding was belatedly found to support them. Cycling now scores top in terms of hitting diversity and medal targets.

But what does it mean for the nation? How do we continue to generate success and feel-good? There are so many new sports like Skateboarding, Sports Climbing and Surfing getting the attention of the TV audiences. Paris in 2024 will see Breakdancing added to the list. Even surfing is now accessible to the inner cities – surf machines and parks are springing up around the country. Why should the UK not win a surfing medal one day? I’d urge the politicians to encourage it as a goal.

For all the money we’ve squandered in recent years on tanks that don’t tank, or test and trace apps that don’t, or government programmes that gorge on our taxes.. what would be so wrong with splurging a little more to give every kid even greater access to new sports? Lets build more skate, bmx and ski parks.

The UK is doing well in Tokyo. Let’s do even better in Paris! Because that will really upset our chums across the Channel – which is ultimately the reason the UK is the UK!

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In an almost unprecedented move, Germany has joined the US and UK in bolstering its military presence in the South China Sea, on Monday sending a warship to contested waters to counter China’s expanding territorial ambitions for the first time in two decades.

Reuters cited defense officials in Berlin who said “the German navy will stick to common trade routes,” who further described that “The frigate is not expected to sail through the Taiwan Strait either, another regular U.S. activity condemned by Beijing.”

“Nevertheless, Berlin has made it clear the mission serves to stress the fact Germany does not accept China’s territorial claims,” the report added.

German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer in a fresh statement stressed that “We want existing law to be respected, sea routes to be freely navigable, open societies to be protected and trade to follow fair rules.” And a statement made last week by Kramp-Karrenbauer explained that “Stronger defense and security cooperation fills the multilateralism that is so important to us with life and strengthens the partnership with friends in Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.”

The German frigate now en route to the region has been identified as the “Bayern” – which is kicking off a seven month voyage to the Indo-Pacific, including stops in Australia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. As the maritime monitoring site Naval News details:

On the way, exercises are planned with the navies of Australia, Singapore, Japan and the United States of America.

…The vessel is expected to cross the South China Sea in mid-December, making it the first German warship to pass through the region since 2002.

US pass throughs of the contested Taiwan Strait – again which Germany is not expected to undertake itself – have now been a monthly feature of President Biden’s policy and stance toward China. 

Berlin has the added pressure, however, of not wanting to introduce new tensions with Beijing given China has lately become Germany’s most important trading partner.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

China and Russia will be key to solving an ancient geopolitical riddle: how to pacify the ‘graveyard of empires’…

So this is the way the Forever War in Afghanistan ends – if one could call it an ending. Rather, it’s an American repositioning.

Regardless, after two decades of death and destruction and untold trillions of dollars, we’re faced not with a bang – and not with a whimper, either – but rather with a pic of the Taliban in Tianjin, a nine-man delegation led by top political commissioner Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, solemnly posing side by side with Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Lateral echoes of another Forever War – in Iraq – apply. First, there was the bang: the US not as “the new OPEC,” as per how the neo-con mantra had visualized it, but with the Americans not even getting the oil. Then came the whimper: “No more troops” after December 31, 2021 – except for the proverbial “contractor” army.      

The Chinese received the Taliban on an official visit in order once again to propose a very straightforward quid pro quo: We recognize and support your political role in the process of Afghan reconstruction and in return you cut off any possible links with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, regarded by the UN as a terrorist organization and responsible for a slew of attacks in Xinjiang.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang explicitly said, “The Taliban in Afghanistan is a pivotal military and political force in the country, and will play an important role in the process of peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction there.”

This follows Wang’s remarks back in June, after a meeting with the foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan, when he promised not only to “bring the Taliban back into the political mainstream” but also to host a serious intra-Afghan peace negotiation. 

What’s implied since then is that the excruciatingly slow process in Doha is leading nowhere. Doha is being conducted by the extended troika – US, Russia, China, Pakistan – along with the irreconcilable adversaries, the Kabul government and the Taliban.  

Mullah Baradar speaks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (right foreground) in Tianjin. Photo: Chinese Foreign Ministry

Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem stressed that the Tianjin meeting focused on political, economic and security issues, with the Taliban assuring Beijing that Afghan territory would not be exploited by third parties against the security interests of neighboring nations.

This means, in practice, no shelter for Uighur, Chechen and Uzbek jihadis and shady outfits of the ISIS-Khorasan variety.   

Tianjin has been added as a sort of jewel in the crown to the current Taliban diplomatic offensive, which has already touched Tehran and Moscow.

What this means in practice is that the real power broker of a possible intra-Afghan deal is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Russia and China are meticulously monitoring how the Taliban have been capturing several strategic districts in provinces from Badakhshan (Tajik majority) to Kandahar (Pashtun majority). Realpolitik dictates that the Taliban be accepted as serious interlocutors. 

Pakistan, meanwhile, is working closer and closer within the SCO framework. Prime Minister Imran Khan could not be more adamant when addressing US public opinion: “Washington aimed for a military solution in Afghanistan, when there never was one,” he said.

“And people like me who kept saying that there’s no military solution, who know the history of Afghanistan, we were called – people like me were called anti-American,” he said. “I was called Taliban Khan.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (R) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (2d from the window on the left side of the picture) and his delegation in Islamabad on December 18, 2020. Photo: AFP / Pakistan Prime Minister Office

We are all Taliban now

The fact is that “Taliban Khan,” “Taliban Wang” and “Taliban Lavrov” are all on the same page.

The SCO is working all-out to present a road map for a Kabul-Taliban political settlement in the next round of negotiations in August. As I have been chronicling it – see, for instance, here and here – it’s all about a comprehensive economic integration package, where the Belt and Road Initiative and its affiliated China-Pakistan Economic Corridor interacts with Russia’s Greater Eurasia Partnership and overall Central Asia-South Asia connectivity.  

A stable Afghanistan is the missing link in what could be described as the future SCO economic corridor, which will integrate every Eurasian player from BRICS members India and Russia to all Central Asian ‘stans.

Both President Ashraf Ghani’s government in Kabul and the Taliban are on board. The devil, of course, is in the details of how to manage the internal power play in Afghanistan to make it happen.   

The Taliban have done their crash course on geopolitics and geoeconomics. In Moscow, in early July, they had a detailed discussion with Kremlin envoy for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov.

In parallel, even the former Afghan ambassador to China, Sultan Baheen – no Taliban himself – admitted that for the majority of Afghans, irrespective of ethnic background, Beijing is the preferred interlocutor and mediator in an evolving peace process.    

So the Taliban seeking high-level discussions with the Russia-China strategic partnership is part of a carefully calculated political strategy. But that brings us to an extremely complex question: To which Taliban are we referring? 

There’s no such thing as a “unified” Taliban. Most old-school top leaders live in Pakistan’s Balochistan. The new breed is way more volatile – and feels no political constraints. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, with a little help from Western intel, might easily infiltrate some Taliban factions inside Afghanistan. 

Very few in the West understand the dramatic psychological consequences for Afghans – whatever their ethnic, social or cultural backgrounds – of living essentially under a state of non-stop war for the past four decades: USSR occupation; intra-mujahideen fighting; Taliban against Northern Alliance; and US/NATO occupation.

In February 1980 Afghan refugees who have fled the area of Kabul in December 1979, are shown in the Aza Khel refugee camp near Peshawar in Pakistan. Photo: AFP / EPU

The last “normal” year in Afghan society was way back in 1978.     

Andrei Kazantsev, a professor at the Higher School of Economics and director of the Center for Central Asia and Afghanistan Studies at the elite MGIMO in Moscow, is uniquely positioned to understand how things work on the ground.

He notes something I saw for myself numerous times; how wars in Afghanistan are a mix of weaponizing and negotiation:

There is a little fighting, a little talking, coalitions are formed, then there is fighting again; talking again.

Some have defected over, betrayed each other, fought for a while, and then returned. It’s a completely different culture of warfare and negotiation.

The Taliban will simultaneously negotiate with the government and continue their military offensives. These are just different tools of different wings of this movement.

I’m buying: how much?

The most important fact is that the Taliban are, de facto, a constellation of warlord militias. What this means is that Mullah Baradar in Tianjin does not speak for the whole movement. He would have to hold a shura with every major warlord and commander to sell them whatever political road map he agrees with Russia and China.

This is a huge problem as certain powerful Tajik or Uzbek commanders will prefer to align themselves with foreign sources, say Turkey or Iran, instead of whoever will be in power in Kabul.

The Chinese might find a detour around the problem by literally buying everyone and his neighbor. But that still wouldn’t guarantee stability.

What Russia-China are investing in with the Taliban is to extract iron-clad guarantees:

• Don’t allow jihadis to cross Central Asian borders – especially Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan;

• Fight ISIS-Khorasan head-on and don’t allow them sanctuary, as the Taliban did with al-Qaeda in the 1990s; and

• Be done with opium poppy cultivation (you did give it up in the early 2000s) while fighting against drug trafficking.

An Afghan farmer harvests opium sap from a poppy field in Dara-l-Nur, District of Nangarhar province, in 2020. Photo: AFP / Wali Sabawoon / NurPhoto

No one really knows whether the Taliban political wing will be able to deliver. Yet Moscow, much more than Beijing, has been very clear: If the Taliban go soft on jihadi movements, they will feel the full wrath of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

The SCO, for its part, has kept an Afghan contact group since 2005. Afghanistan is an SCO observer and may be accepted as a full member once there’s a political settlement.

The key problem inside the SCO will be to harmonize the clashing interests of India and Pakistan inside Afghanistan.

Once again, that will be up to the “superpowers” – the Russia-China strategic partnership. And once again, that will be at the heart of arguably the top geopolitical riddle of the Raging Twenties : how to finally pacify the “graveyard of empires.”  

As U.S. health officials and the Biden administration desperately try to kickstart the stalling rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in face of the highly contagious Delta variant, President Biden gave a speech on Thursday, where he once again urged Americans to get vaccinated and announced additional steps to encourage vaccination.

Source: Bloomberg

Echoing statements from the CDC and his chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, Statista’s Felix Richter notes that Biden referred to the current situation of rising infections as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, calling the fact that unvaccinated Americans are dying despite the availability of an effective vaccine “an American tragedy”. He went on to emphasize that getting vaccinated is not a political statement, nor is it a proper exercise of personal freedom. “With freedom comes responsibility,” Biden said. “Your decision to be unvaccinated impacts someone else. So, please, exercise responsible judgement. Get vaccinated — for yourself, for the people you love, for your country.”

Biden then urged employers to offer paid time off for workers to get themselves and family members vaccinated. He also called on local and state governments to offer a $100 cash bonus to those who get fully vaccinated, hoping that a little monetary incentive could at least sway those undecided on whether to get jabbed. Finally, stopping just short of a mask mandate for federal employees, he announced several inconveniences for unvaccinated federal workers, including a mask mandate, strict testing rules and being banned from work-related travel.

As the following chart, based on findings from KFF’s COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor, suggests, Americans aren’t easily persuaded when it comes to their stance on COVID-19 vaccines.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Having circled back to a group of respondents originally surveyed in January, KFF found that two thirds of those who did not want to get a vaccination in January stand firm on their refusal to get jabbed, with another 9 percent wanting to wait and see.

Meanwhile 24 percent of those against the vaccine in January ended up with at least one dose in June, most of them convinced by family members or their employers. Of those who were keen to get vaccinated in January, 92 percent have received at least one dose by now, while another 3 percent plan to get it asap.

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

Becoming a “Nation of Renters” is clearly a big part of the New Normal…

The incipient “Great Reset” is a multi-faceted beast. We talk a lot about vaccine passports and lockdowns and the Covid-realated aspects – and we should – but there’s more to it than that.

Remember, they want you to “own nothing and be happy”. And right at the top of the list of things you definitely shouldn’t own, is your own home.

The headlines about this have been steady for the last few years, but it has picked up pace in the wake of the “pandemic” (as has so much else). An agenda hidden on back pages, behind by Covid’s meaningless big red numbers, but perhaps no less sinister.

You can find articles all over the net talking up renting over owning.

Last month, for example, Bloomberg ran an article headlined:

America Should Become a Nation of Renters”

Which praises what they call “the liquefaction of the housing market” and gleefully expounds on the idea that “The very features that made home buying an affordable and stable investment are coming to an end.”

The Atlantic published “Why Its Better To Rent Than Own” in March.

Financial pages from Business Insider to Forbes to Yahoo and Bloomberg again are filled with lists titled “9 Ways Renting is Better Than Buying”, or similar.

Other publications go more personal with it, with anecdotal columns about ignoring financial advice and refusing to buy your home. Vox, never one to sell their agenda with any kind of subtlety, have a piece titled:

Homeownership can bring out the worst in you

Which literally argues that buying a house can make you a bad person:

It’s the biggest thing you might ever buy. And it could be turning you into a bad person.

So what exactly is the narrative here? What’s the story behind the story?

The short answer is fairly simple: It’s about greed, and it’s about control.

It almost always is, in the end.

The longer answer is rather more complicated. Major investment firms such as Vanguard and Blackrock, along with rental companies such as American Homes 4 Rent, are buying up single-family homes in record numbers – sometimes entire neighbourhoods at a time.

They pay well over market value, pricing families who want to own those homes out of the market, which forces the housing market up whilst the Lockdown-created recession is lowering wages and creating millions of newly unemployed.

Of course, this is motivating people to sell the houses they already own.

People all across America have been saddled with houses worth less than they bought them for since the 2008 economic crash, and are eager to take the cash from private investment firms paying 10-20% over market value. Combine an economic recession with a created housing boom and you have a huge population of motivated sellers.

Of course, many of these sellers don’t realise, until it’s too late, that even if they attempt to downsize or move to a cheaper area, they may be priced out of the market completely, and forced to rent.

As such, in the last year, the private investment share of single-family home purchases is estimated to have increased ten-fold, going from 2% in 2018 to over 20% this year.

As more and more people are forced to rent, of course, rental properties will be in higher and higher demand. This in turn will drive the cost of renting up.

Market Watch has already reported that, in the last year, rent has increased over 3x faster than the government predicted.

This problem is likely to get worse in the near future.

Last night, Congress “accidentally failed” to extend the Covid-related eviction ban.

Which means, this weekend, while Senators adjourn to the summer homes they probably don’t rent, the ban will officially end and a lot of people are likely to have their houses foreclosed or their landlords kick them out.

The newly empty buildings will be a feeding frenzy for the massive corporate landlords. Who will descend on the banks like starving hyenas to snap up the foreclosed properties for pennies on the dollar. Just like they did in 2008.

None of this is any secret, it’s been covered in the mainstream. Tucker Carlson even did a segment on it in early June.

The Wall Street Journal headlined, back in April, “If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund”, and reported:

Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices

However, since then, something has clearly changed. The propaganda machine has kicked into gear to defend Wall Street from any backlash.

No better example of this shift can be found than The Atlantic, which ran this story in 2019:

WHEN WALL STREET IS YOUR LANDLORD

With help from the federal government, institutional investors became major players in the rental market. They promised to return profits to their investors and convenience to their tenants. Investors are happy. Tenants are not.

…and this story last month:

BLACKROCK IS NOT RUINING THE US HOUSING MARKET

The real villain isn’t a faceless Wall Street Goliath; it’s your neighbors and local governments stopping the construction of new units.

Going back to the Vox well we have:

Wall Street isn’t to blame for the chaotic housing market

Which ran just a few days after the Atlantic article, and is practically identical.

Both these (oddly similar) articles argue that Wall Street and private equity firms can’t be blamed for buying up houses, and that the real problem is the lack of supply to meet demand.

You see, all the “selfish” people who already own homes (they did say it makes you a bad person) are blocking the construction of new houses, and thus driving up the cost of property through scarcity.

This has been a logically flawed argument around the housing market for decades.

That there aren’t enough houses for people to buy is patently absurd when the US census data says that there are over 15 million houses currently standing empty. That’s enough to house all of America’s roughly 500,000 homeless people 30x over.

There’s plenty of houses, there’s just not enough money to buy them.

The reason for that is the same reason the California has massive “homeless camps” in its major cities, and that so many people are having to become renters instead of owners: wage stagnation.

For decades now, wage increases have lagged behind increases in the cost of living. In the 1960s one full-time job could afford a decent standard of living for a family of four or more. These days both parents work, sometimes multiple jobs each.

It was huge amounts of financial de-regulation which created this situation. So, whether you believe Vox’s BlackRock apologia or not, one way or another Wall Street very definitely is to blame.

But this isn’t just about money. It never is. Just as the war on cash isn’t just about efficiency, and the environmental push isn’t just about climate change. Ditto veganism. It’s about control. Just like vaccines, lockdowns and masks.

It always comes down to control.

It’s an oft-used cliche, but no less true for that, that homeowning “gives people a stake in society”. A family-owned house is a source of security for the future and something to leave your children. It is also sovereignty and privacy. Your own space that no one else can control or take away.

In short: A homeowner is independent. A renter is not. A renter can be controlled. A homeowner can not.

It’s the same reasoning behind the way working people were encouraged to take out loans and become debt slaves. If you limit people’s options, if you make them rely on you for a roof over their heads, you have control over them.

There’s a great article about this situation called “Your New Feudal Overlords”.

Under Feudalism, land wasn’t owned by the working class, but provided to them by landed barons, hence the term “Land Lord”. If you disrespected your Lord, or broke his rules, or he perceived another peasant/farm animal/crop would be a better use of the land, he could take it back.

Essentially, the behaviour of serfs was kept in check by their reliance on the nobility for a place to live. That’s very much the dynamic they’re going for here.

Rental agreements can be full of any terms and conditions the landlord wants, and the more desperate people get the more of their consumer rights they will sign over.

Maybe you’ll agree to smart meters which monitor your internet or power-usage habits, and then sell the data to behavioural modellers and viral marketers.

Maybe you’ll have to agree to certain power limitations or water shortages in order to “fight climate change”.

Maybe it will get worse than that.

Maybe they’ll go full Black Mirror style corporate dystopia. Maybe, through affiliation programs, the mega-equity firm which owns your rental house has ties to McDonald’s, and as such will require you to not eat at any competing fast-food franchises, or demand you observe at least ninety seconds of Disney advertisements per day.

Maybe it will be as simple as including vaccine status in the tenancy agreement, making it impossible for the unvaxxed to find a home.

Maybe they just want to make poor people miserable.

After all, the super-wealthy have got all the money they could ever need, and all the luxury they could ever use. Their living standards are as high as physically possible. So maybe the only way they can keep “winning”, is to start driving the living standards of us proles down.

No air travel. No vacations. No going out at all. Live in a tiny house, or a pod. Eat bugs. Get rid of your car. Rent your clothes. Or your furniture. Pay taxes on sugar. And alcohol. And red meat.

They’ve been very clear about this. They’ve told you about the Great Reset and the Internet of Things. That’s the plan.

You won’t own a house. And you’ll be happy…or else the mega-corporation you’re forced to rent from will kick you out.

In a move that is likely going to prompt litigation for centuries to come, M. Richard “Dick” Robinson Jr., the late owner of Scholastic Corp., the book company responsible for publishing books like “Harry Potter”, has snubbed his family and left his entire fortune – worth $1.2 billion – to his former lover.

Robinson died on June 5 while in Martha’s Vineyard and his will directed that his fortune be left to his “longtime romantic partner” Iole Lucchese, according to the NY Post.

Lucchese is Scholastic’s chief strategy officer. A copy of Robinson’s will was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, who said it called Lucchese “my partner and closest friend.” 

Family members told the Journal they’re “unhappy” about the firm being left to Lucchese, who they called an “outsider”. They’re also apparently upset that Lucchese will have control of Robinson’s personal possessions, the report said.

And so goes the the inevitable plunge into the legal system, as the family is reportedly “reviewing their legal options” and seeking to cut a deal with Lucchese.

Robinson’s youngest son, who is 25, called the move “unexpected and shocking”. “What I want most is an amicable outcome,” he said. 

Robinson’s 34 year old son said he had never even met or spoken to Lucchese. The family held a call with her last week. The son “operates a sawmill and workshop that produces lumber, flooring and furniture from trees in Martha’s Vineyard,” the Post reported. 

Robinson’s younger brother said: “Our family value was we’d rather not have the financial benefit that we might get from a sale if it means the company won’t be in the future what it was. Everybody knows Scholastic and has a good feeling about it and it does good things for teachers. It’s more than just a business for us.”

One of Robinson’s sisters commented to the Journal: “Our first goal is the continuation of the mission and legacy of Scholastic, the vision and brilliant lifework of both our father and our brother Dick, and we are confident that the new management of the company is fully committed to this goal.”

Robinson’s will named Lucchese as co-executor of his will, alongside of Scholastic’s general counsel, Andrew Hedden. Lucchese is tasked with distributing Robinson’s personal possessions “with the request, but not the direction” that she hand out items “as she believes to be in accordance with my wishes,” the Post wrote.

“You might think from the will that he didn’t see his sons. That’s not true. For the last two years I saw him multiple times a week,” Robinson’s youngest son said. 

Robinson reportedly spoke about how he had to work his way up at the company, which neither of his sons did. Lucchese now owns 53.8% of the company’s Class A shares – about 3 million shares – which hold the majority of the the voting power. 
 

Authored by Grant Newsham via The Epoch Times,

Foreigners have been buying—or at least renting—America’s ruling class since the republic was founded. Almost exactly 225 years ago, in his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington warned against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” adding that “foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

In modern times, Saudis, Japanese, South Koreans, and Israelis—to name a few—have all managed to purchase influence. But the usual goal is to gain advantages for their own nations. What we are seeing now is something much more dangerous—using influence to corrode the United States from within.

One nation is pouring highly addictive and unpredictable illicit drugs into the American bloodstream – killing tens of thousands a year. And the American elites are doing absolutely nothing about it. Now THAT is influence.

The drug? Fentanyl. The country? Communist China.

Fentanyl mostly originates in China, often moving via Mexico (and Mexican drug gangs) into the United States. The Chinese are also into the money laundering part of the business—helping drug gangs launder (or recycle) their massive earnings. Talk about a “win-win”—as the Chinese communists like to say.

Casualties

The deluge started around 2013 and has picked up steadily since then. The numbers are staggering.

In 2017, 28,000 Americans died of overdoses involving fentanyl.

In a 2018 meeting with President Donald Trump, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to restrict all fentanyl-like substances. Trump declared this a “gamechanger.” Not surprisingly, the fentanyl and drugs kept flowing.

In 2019, over 37,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses. That’s nearly five times the number of American troops killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2020, the U.S. government reported 93,000 American residents died from a drug overdose—the vast majority from fentanyl poisoning. The COVID-19 lockdowns have helped bump up the already horrific death totals.

Yet, even as the death toll mounts, U.S. businesses and financial titans never mention it. The think tanks are mostly silent. Academia? Can’t be bothered. The U.S. media often downplays or ignores the fentanyl bloodbath, and even more so the source, seemingly afraid to mention the C-word, China.

Packets of fentanyl mostly in powder form and methamphetamine, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection say they seized from a truck crossing into Arizona from Mexico, is on display during a news conference at the Port of Nogales, Ariz., on Jan. 31, 2019. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection/Reuters)

And on Capitol Hill where there’s bold, blustery, “bi-partisan” talk about taking on the Chinese regime, when it comes to fentanyl and China one hears little.

Excuses

Even the Trump administration—the firmest yet in standing up to China—didn’t make so much of the fentanyl issue, though Mr. Trump raised it directly with Xi, and others did try.

One official suggested calling the “fentanyl scourge” the “Third Opium War.”  The response from inside the Beltway was immediate and visceral: “You can’t say that” (when it comes to China there’s all sort of things “you can’t say”).

In this case, the response was particularly curious as, in some quarters (including in China), there is a tendency to excuse Chinese non-cooperation as payback for the Opium Wars of the 19th century.

Payback? The Opium Wars were 180 years ago. By that logic, slave labor in Xinjiang is “payback” for the pre-Civil War plantations. How does creating new despair and death rectify old despair and death?

American elites also have plenty of other “insider” excuses for why the Chinese regime (or, better said, won’t) stop the illicit drug flow.

Three of the most common:

1) The Chinese regime is in a legal bind as fentanyl producers keep jiggering the formula to avoid the “illegal list” and therefore the producers are always one step ahead of a government that can’t revise laws fast enough, try as it might.

A nice excuse, but in China the law is what Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) say it is, as even billionaire Jack Ma and any number of other powerful and well-connected Chinese tycoons and officials have discovered the hard way. If Beijing wants to shut down fentanyl producers the law is no obstacle.

2) Chinese local authorities, supposedly outside of Beijing’s reach, won’t stop fentanyl production since they want tax revenues and employment—and are also thoroughly corrupt.

True enough. But local officials are also frightened of being caught crossing Beijing—everyone knows what happed to Ma.

3) Chinese authorities can’t locate the illegal drug producers. China is a big place, you know.

The CCP is creating a surveillance state that even George Orwell couldn’t have imagined. Draw a mustache on a poster of Xi and see how long it takes to be arrested and imprisoned. Post on social media that Xi resembles Winnie the Pooh and you’ll have Ministry of State Security agents at your front door in minutes.

The CCP police can do whatever they want. “Disappear” people, arrest starlets, kidnap billionaires and booksellers—take foreigners hostage and lock them up? No problem. The only restraints come from Zhongnanhai—the very top of the CCP.

The fact the Chinese regime doesn’t ban fentanyl in its entirety—much less go after producers the way it goes after Uighurs, Christians and Falun Gong, or Hong Kongers—suggests the CCP is glad America is awash in fentanyl.

And when Trump told Xi to knock off the fentanyl flow back in 2018, Xi reportedly replied: “We don’t have a drug problem in China.” That means Xi can control the drugs and he’s channeling the chemical warfare agents—in true “unrestricted warfare fashion”—towards his #1 rival and greatest enemy. Most things involving the CCP just aren’t that hard to figure out.

The Effects of China’s Chemical Warfare

The carnage can’t be overstated. Fentanyl is ravaging all parts of American society. And about half of the deaths attributed to fentanyl are young people of military age.

As one former U.S. government official noted, this is the equivalent of removing five or six divisions of Army or Marines off the rolls every year. And don’t forget the “battlefield casualties” who survive but can no longer function as productive members of society, the burden and expense of caring for them, and the devastated families left broke and broken.

One hears elites who should know better say the victims are just “druggies” and wouldn’t have joined the military anyway. That’s malicious and wrong. Young people have been misbehaving for centuries, and that includes many who join the U.S. military. But a six-pack or a joint is one thing; a difficult to identify drug that is often mislabeled and unpredictably kills or permanently disables in minute quantities, is quite another.

From China’s perspective, what’s not to like? You’re weakening your avowed enemy, which you plan to dominate by mid-century. And, even better, the CCP makes a lot of money from the drug trade—and in convertible currency. Buy fentanyl and you pay in dollars.

Accomplices

While China is ultimately to blame, it is America’s own ruling class that refuses to do anything about it for fear of “offending” China. Or, more accurately, for fear of not being able to feed their own addiction—to Chinese money. Money that, in some small part, may have come from selling fentanyl to Americans in the first place.

Maybe overlooking 93,000 dead countrymen and exponentially more left in the wreckage in exchange for Chinese cash is easier when you think it’s just deplorables and Neanderthals in fly-over country who are dying.

It can’t be helped if these people were too stupid and lazy to “learn to code” or to get a Wharton MBA when their jobs, livelihoods, and communities were shipped overseas from the 1990s onwards—mostly to China—by those same political and business elites.

Countering ‘the Most Baneful Foes’

Watching America’s elites do nothing – or worse even calling for unrestricted engagement with the Chinese regime – one concludes that the Chinese have indeed gotten their money’s worth from America’s ruling class.

Just listen to the head of the U.S.–China Business Council, or the CEO of Boeing, or Nike, or Apple if you don’t believe me.

‘Chemical warfare’ as suspected 44 lbs of Fentanyl seized by law enforcement officials in Dayton, Ohio during the week of Oct. 21, 2019. (Montgomery County Ohio Sheriff’s Office)

Here’s an idea: require prospective graduates from elite MBA and International Relations programs, as well as Congressional staffers—and maybe even members of Congress themselves—to spend a couple of weeks in the so-called “Rust Belt” that’s been hit both by fentanyl and the carnage caused by the pedigreed classes when industries and jobs were shipped off to China.

Try: Youngstown, Ohio; Uniontown, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; or East Cleveland, if you need some idea. Though the list could be much, much longer. Put them up in a local motel and require them to be outside on the streets from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. “soaking in the atmosphere.”

And maybe, for a break, accompany the EMTs out on drug overdose calls. Or stop off at the local high schools and sit in with the guidance counselors—just to get a sense of things and the bright futures too many of these kids face.

Is this likely? No.

One gets the impression America’s Best and Brightest just don’t care. They have become willing accomplices to the “baneful foes.”

This is particularly infuriating because we can fight back. China is not invulnerable. They’ve hit us where it hurts—in our families and communities. We need to hit them where it hurts—in their elites.

Message to President Joe Biden:

You have sworn to protect American citizens, not to ensure Wall Street and U.S. industry can take advantage of Xi’s umpteenth promise to “open up.”

So do one or, ideally more, of the following:

First, suspend all Chinese financial institutions from the U.S. dollar network. Start with the People’s Bank of China.

Second, immediately de-list every Chinese company from the New York Stock Exchange and other exchanges. They should not have been listed in the first place.

Third, revoke the Green Cards and visas—and place liens on the properties and bank accounts—of the top 500 CCP members’ relatives in the United States.

China can stop pushing drugs into America. It just needs a reason to do so. And we need to give them one. And, at the same time, we need to break our most “insidious” addiction, the one of our elites to Chinese money.

Four days ago, we reported a shipping container-sized Tesla Megapack battery unit at the world’s largest energy storage project, operated by France’s Neoen SA, in Australia’s Victoria, dubbed “Victorian Big Battery,” caught fire during a test-run. 

Victoria Country Fire Authority (CFA) published a statement Monday that said the 13-ton battery was finally extinguished after four days, according to Bloomberg. 

“There was one battery pack on fire to start with, but it did spread to a second pack that was very close to it,” Chief CFA Fire Officer Ian Beswicke said in a statement. CFA has yet to determine the origins of what caused the Tesla battery to combust spontaneously. 

On Friday, when the fire was first reported, CFA officials were so concerned about toxic fumes spewing from the battery unit that they issued air quality warnings for surrounding suburbs and urged people to move indoors. 

The problem with lithium-ion batteries is that besides emitting toxic fumes during a blaze, the sheer amount of water to extinguish the fire is not ESG-friendly. 

For a regular Tesla car battery weighing around 1,200 pounds, it takes about 20 tons of water to put out the blaze. Some Tesla vehicle fires have taken upwards of 75 tons of water. 

Now picture a 13-ton, or approximately 26,000-pound battery catching fire and the amount of water needed to extinguish it. CFA didn’t release the number of tons of water it took to extinguish the blaze, but statements show it took four days to put out flames. 

As for the considerable amounts of gas and smoke emitted from the lithium-ion battery blaze, there has yet to be any quantifiable data released by CFA detailing the environmental impact. 

The whole ESG push for “green technology” on the grid sounds wonderful, but if a mishap occurs, firefighters do not have the technology to quickly and efficiently put out a lithium-ion battery blaze. 

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via Summit News,

Politically correct ideology is masking and contributing to the widespread failure of our institutions…

We know the nature of mass hysterias in history, and how they can overwhelm and paralyze what seem to be stable societies.  

We know the roots and origins of the cult of wokeness.  

And we know, too, how such insanity—from the Salem witch trials to Jacobinism to McCarthyism—can spread, despite alienating most of the population, through fear and the threat of personal ruin or worse. These are the dark sides of the tulip, hula-hoop, and pet-rock fads, the mass obsessions so suited to past affluent Western societies.  

But does wokeism serve another purpose as well? Specifically, does it either hide preexisting incompetence or fuel it?  

In the last 18 months, we have seen most of our major institutions go woke and spend considerable amounts of time, capital, and labor on what might be called “commissarism.” Yet in their zeal to rectify society in general and sermonize, virtue signal, pontificate, and perform to the public, many institutions are increasingly failing at what they were established to do. 

Of course, public servants have long suffered the “Bloomberg effect”—focusing on misdemeanors to virtue signal competence as penance for failing to solve the existential crises. If you cannot clear New York City of snow in a timely manner, then lecture the trapped on everything from global warming to the dangers of super-sized soft drinks. Yet wokeism is a bit different since it now pervades our societies as a pandemic of its own.

Take Delta Airline CEO Ed Bastian. He earns $17 million in annual compensation, and lectures the state of Georgia and the nation at large on our supposedly racist voting laws. The issue at hand is mostly a requirement to show a valid ID to vote—in the manner one must present identification to enter the boarding area of Bastian’s planes. Surely if one should vote without an ID, why not then be allowed to board a Delta flight?

I also suggest the public try to call Delta’s consumer helplines to fix the airline’s post-quarantine screw-ups with credits, refunds, rebooking, and recalibrating charges. Just try it—but expect several hours of wait time on the phone. We know now Delta is woke, but what we don’t know is whether one’s past purchase of a ticket will ensure a spot on a Delta flight, or whether prior money or mileage credited will ever be returned or applied to future travel.  

A cynical observer might suggest that if Ed Bastian cannot ensure adequate consumer service, it won’t matter since he weighs in on voting laws. (Or is it worse than that? Because he pontificates on voting laws and other assorted woke issues, he thinks he can simply worry less about his own consumer services?) 

American Airlines CEO Doug Parker is woke, too. He has denounced a new Texas voting law likewise requiring tougher ID usage—although he later  admitted that he had never read the new statute before virtue signaling its illiberality.  

I suggest Parker might first ensure that his airline has not become a Third-World carrier before he seeks to enlighten Americans on their supposed backwardness. I just took a flight on one of Parker’s American Airlines flights from central California to Dallas, Texas. But right before boarding the full flight, passengers were apprised that American did not have enough gas in the plane to make it to Dallas—and couldn’t find any in Fresno. So it was “stopping off” on the way in San Francisco to “fill up”—180 miles away and in the exact opposite direction of its eventual destination. I’ve only twice been on a plane without enough fuel to reach its destination and in need of a detour to find gas somewhere— once 15 years ago in Mexico and the other in 1974 in Egypt.  

We’ve seen an epidemic of well-compensated professional (and Olympic) athletes lecture the country on its various sins of racism, sexism, and the usual affiliated -isms and -ologies. Like the now passé Colin Kaepernick, they devote enormous time to what in normal times would be called extraneous efforts or even distractions from their business at hand. 

Is there a connection between their wokeness and the general lack of interest in the NBA, Major League Baseball, NFL, and the Tokyo Olympics? Is the public sense not just that they do not wish to be talked down to by such privileged and spoiled 20- and 30-somethings, but also that the level of play of professional and amateur sports seems on the decline as well? Or is it that these woke, young athletes can handle sports or social hectoring, but not both—and it shows in their performances and in the lack of mass appeal?

Hollywood is the worst offender. Almost daily a mega-star joins the outrage twitter chorus to remind us of her exemplary virtue or his singular outrage over “social injustice.” They belong to this strange collection of celebrity-obsessed multi-millionaires whose homes, lifestyles, modes of transportation, and fashion are Versailles-like—yet whose daily lives never quite match their sanctimonious barking.  

The real travesty is that Hollywood simply makes poor movies, or rather mostly remakes them ad nauseam, ensuring only that they are “diverse” and proportionally—or now reparationally—representative of “the other.” Two genres tend to dominate the current movies: computer-enhanced comic-book films (sometimes apparently white-washed by progressive executives so as not to offend the racist 1.5 billion-viewer Chinese market), and “the hero versus the Man” movies.  

The latter usually pits an attractive and courageous young investigator, lawyer, journalist, whistleblower, or public servant against a malicious conspiratorial corporation whose racism, environmental desecration, sexism, and thievery must be exposed in gallant, lone-ranger fashion. Not only are these Maoist scripts boring and repetitive but they sprout from a self-indulgent, hyper-corporate Los Angeles capitalist culture that gave us the Hollywood-beloved, and woke-before-his-time Harvey Weinstein. 

Universities are the old-new woke bastion. We will probably never know the machinations used by our elite colleges and universities to warp race in favor of some, and against others, among this year’s first incoming class of the post-2020 riot era. 

Mostly wealthy, white bicoastal administrators and middle managers across all sectors send out communiques, on spec, attesting to their own superior virtue with vocabulary so trite and predictable that a computer programmer could institutionalize and improve on the boilerplate in a few hours. Their bogeyman target is the noxious white male heterosexual—of course, exempting the memo writers themselves, due to their superior morality.  

The woke have unleashed a veritable jihad to root out and banish those infected with “whiteness” among us. But aside from their main mission of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, can we say that woke universities—on the side—are turning out talented and educated graduates who will ensure American prosperity, freedom, preeminence, and the sort of lifestyle the young now assume as their birthright? To ask the question is to know the answer. What else could happen when there are more diversity, equity, and inclusion facilitators on elite campuses than there are history professors? 

Is the general knowledge of the college student superior to his counterpart of five, 10, or 20 years ago?  Did the great experiment with various “studies” courses (black studies, peace studies, environmental studies, equity studies, Asian studies, La Raza studies, etc.) result in better writers, thinkers, speakers, analysts, mathematicians, and scientists than what was produced by the old Shakespeare English course, or Western Civ highlights from Homer to Locke, or advanced calculus? Is the campus more tolerant than it was in 1980, more open to free speech, more determined to protect the constitutional rights of its students? 

The military is an especially good example of a major American institution whose woke credentials are now ostentatious, but whose performance in a cost-to-benefit analysis seems increasingly anemic. 

We know that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, is popular for the moment with the Left in Congress. As a result, like many of his predecessors, if he wishes, Milley can gravitate to lucrative defense contractor boards upon retirement—without a finger-pointing Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) castigating him as a get-rich, revolving-door apparatchik.  

Milley and others, such as Admiral Michael Gilday, have given spirited, if incoherent, defenses of why they want their enlistees to read Ibram X. Kendi’s texts on “antiracism”—or at least why they want the Washington elite to know they recommend them to their soldiers and sailors. We know that multimillionaire ex-Raytheon board member, consultant, and now defense secretary, General Lloyd Austin is auditing the ranks to weed out suspicious white male insurrectionaries, an investigation that so far seems to lack any actual data to justify said witch hunt. The chain of command, which can enact social change by fiat, is in this case beloved by the Left. And the officer corps has made the necessary adjustments to ensure their own rapid promotions. 

Thus, there is little protest about the military budget being slashed by the beloved Joe Biden, after it was markedly raised by the hated Donald Trump, who among his many other sins jawboned the NATO allies finally to pony much of their promised military contributions to the alliance. 

Milley’s earlier apologies for doing a photo-op with President Trump while the rascal supposedly cleared the environs with tear gas were mostly empty virtue signaling, given the inspector general of the Interior Department found no such presidential edict or any use of such an agent.  

Indeed, a dozen or so of our best and brightest retired four-stars had blasted their former commander-in-chief as fit for removal the “sooner, the better,” a veritable monster who employed Nazi-like tactics, emulated Mussolini, and took his immigration policy in part from Auschwitz.

But was such energy, rhetorical imagination, and refined conscience evident in our stellar victories in Afghanistan and Iraq? Was the Libyan intervention a model of military planning, on both the strategic and tactical levels? Have our innovative weaponry, training, and displays of strength deterred the Chinese military? Have our latest naval and aviation acquisitions proven to be models of brilliant cost-effective investments? In our woke age, do our soldiers die on the battlefield in proportion to their sex and race, in conformity with the new proportional representation gospel and in all other areas of military endeavors?

We could ask the same of the FBI and CIA, given the loud, recent wokeist careers of John Brennan, James Clapper, Kevin Clinesmith, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. From such sanctimony we might assume the FBI had successfully ferreted out and preempted the Boston Marathon bombers, or the San Bernardino terrorists; or that we knew from the CIA the threats posed by the Phoenix-like reappearance of the “J.V.” ISIS killers in Iraq, the Spratly Island aggrandizement by China, the true nature of the Wuhan lab leak, the location of existing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or Syria, and the current status of the Iranian nuclear program. 

The point is not to berate our institutions, but to warn them.  Either their abilities to carry out their assigned tasks are becoming diminished by Nineteen Eighty-Four-like wokism, or they are using ideological camouflage simply to mask their unaccountability—and their increasing incompetence.