Texas Gov. Abbott: Border Agents Seized Enough Fentanyl To Kill Every New Yorker
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News the amount of fentanyl seized at the southwest border could kill everyone in New York.
Abbott said US border agents intercepted a mindboggling 800% increase in fentanyl shipments in April versus the same time last year.
“But I gotta tell you there’s a new dynamic about what’s going on at the border that Americans need to know about and that is increased apprehension of fentanyl coming across the border,” the governor said. Yes, there may be people coming across but there are dangerous drugs coming across the border.”
“We had almost an 800% increase April over April of the amount of fentanyl that has been apprehended by the Texas Department of Public Safety,” Abbott said, indicating that amount of fentanyl seized could “kill every single person in the state of New York.”
The governor bashed the Biden administration for their poor job at managing the crisis at the border.
Readers may recall President Biden canceled U.S.-Mexico border wall construction – only to admit the southern US border is in a “crisis” – then the administration reinstated the US Army Corps of Engineers to continue building on a 13.4 mile stretch of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley.
Seriously what a shitshow.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued the Biden administration over alleged immigration law violations. He said his state is working to keep all Americans safe by apprehending illegal immigrants and stopping drugs from flowing onto city streets.
“On the national level with regard to the Border Patrol, they apprehended last month—in the month of April, more than 170,000 people,” the governor said. “That is a tenfold increase over the prior April where they apprehended about 17,000 people.”
While Abbott is combating drug traffickers as much as he can even though the Biden administration appears clueless about the severity of the border crisis but maybe as of late is beginning to realize the shitshow, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) posted some troubling opioid overdose deaths showing a drastic increase countrywide since the virus pandemic began in March 2020.
Texas is doing as much as it can to combat drug traffickers and illegal immigrants. It’s time the Biden administration get serious about the crisis at the border.
There is an extraordinary column in the Washington Post from Glenn Kessler on a key figures in past coverage on the removal of Confederate statues. The Post ran a widely cited article on how Robert E. Lee’s own descendant wanted the general’s statues to be removed.
The problem is that no one at the Post appears to have actually checked to see if Rev. Robert W. Lee was an actual descendant. It now appears that he is not, according to Kessler. While Kessler strangely does not believe this wants his signature “Pinocchios,” he should be credited for doing something that no one in the media seemed inclined to do: confirm the story, even belatedly.
It was, as the old journalistic saying goes, “a fact too good to check.”
Kessler is rebounding from a controversy over what many viewed as a “hit job” that he wrote on Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) in which he suggested that Scott had lied about this family history. Despite an accusatory headline, Kessler actually found nothing that refuted Scott’s “from cotton to Congress” account. This family claim by Rev. Lee may have been entirely fabricated and certainly was made without clear factual basis.
Rev. Lee was lionized by the Post and other media after he denounced Gen. Lee at the MTV Video Music Awards.
“My name is Robert Lee the Fourth. I am a descendent of Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general whose statue was at the center of violence in Charlottesville. We have made my ancestor an idol of white supremacy, racism and hate. As a pastor, it is my moral duty to speak out against racism, America’s original sin. Today, I call on everyone with privilege and power to answer God’s call to confront racism and white supremacy head-on.”
The media could not get enough of the image and Rev. Lee fueled the frenzy. In an opinion article in The Washington Post, June 7, 2020, Rev. Lee was identified as “Plaintiff Reverend Robert Wright Lee IV (“Lee”) is a white resident of Iredell County. Lee is the fourth great-nephew of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.”
Even lawyers took the claim at face value in what could be viewed as an even more serious breach. In a lawsuit seeking removal of a Confederate statue, filed in Iredell County, the court was told “Plaintiff Reverend Robert Wright Lee IV (“Lee”) is a white resident of Iredell County. Lee is the fourth great-nephew of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.” Lawyers are not allowed to make such representations to the Court without a good-faith basis, particularly on the background of a key party. Lee is prominently featured as the second named Plaintiff in the lawsuit.
The Post has found no evidence that Rev. Lee is in any way related to Gen. Lee. He may be just a guy named Lee.
Editor’s note: In a May 14 Fact Checker column, Glenn Kessler reported that a search of genealogical records had found no evidence that the Rev. Robert W. Lee IV, author of this column, is descended from the family of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In response to a subsequent inquiry from Post Opinions, Lee stood by his claim to be a descendant but was unable to provide any supporting evidence. He said documents that would support his claim are in the possession of another family member and that he no longer has access to them.
Robert W. Lee IV is the pastor of Unifour Church and author of the book “A Sin by Any Other Name: Reckoning With Racism and the Heritage of the South.”
Kessler noted that “the Rev. Robert W. Lee IV has, since 2016 “parlayed his ancestry on behalf of what many may regard as a noble cause” — not to mention parlayed to international notoriety.
What is interesting is that Rev. Lee does not contest that he has been falsely claiming the distinction. He issued a statement on Sunday that notably did not contest the findings or, more importantly, supplied any proof of his earlier claims. Instead, he cites his own credentials as an anti-racism activist:
“My mission and ministry has been confronting white supremacy as a sin. Regardless of whether you believe me or the article, the fact remains that either lineage participated and profited from racism and slavery. That ends with me.”
What was more curious is Rev. Lee previously harrumphing at the notion that anyone in the media was focusing on whether his claim of being a descendant was actually true: “Why the Post is so focused on my heritage and lineage while not focusing on the issues of the statue at hand is beyond me.”
It was certainly beyond most in the media who were only interested in using the image of a Lee descendant to support the removal of statue regardless of the truth of the matter. Rev. Lee used his claim to elevate his voice above others and add the support of a Lee family member to the cause of removing these statues. He then expressed surprise that anyone is interested in confirming if he misled millions on this claim.
The appeal of using a descendent to make such demands is obvious.The media did the same thing with a descendent of Thomas Jefferson. The suggestion is that, if the family does not support these figures, only racists would fight to preserve statues. The effort is to cut short a needed debate over how to describe what statues should be removed and what should be retained.
As I have previously written, there are statues that should be removed but it is important that such decisions are made collectively and with circumspection:
Two decades ago, I wrote a column calling for the Georgia legislature to take down its statue of Tom Watson, a white supremacist publisher and politician who fueled racist and antisemitic movements. Watson was best known for his hateful writings, including his opposition to save Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager accused of raping and murdering a girl. Frank was taken from a jail and lynched by a mob enraged by such writings, including the declaration of Watson that “Frank belongs to the Jewish aristocracy, and it was determined by the rich Jews that no aristocrat of their race should die for the death of a working class Gentile.”
Yet today there is no room or time for such reasoned discourse, just destruction that often transcends any rationalization of history.
The parading of claimed distant relatives calling for removals is a powerful way to undermine arguments that we are wiping away our own history rather than presenting these figures in their proper context.
Rev. Lee knew that his views on the removal of statues was not nearly as important as his self-identity as a descendant of Gen. Lee.
Yet, the fact that he may not have any familial connection to the general is being dismissed by Lee and others. It was useful as a narrative at the time and served its purpose.
The fact that it may be “fake news” is barely worth a mention on most news sites that ran with the story. It is an example of the corrosive effect of advocacy journalism. It comes at too high a price — in this case for both Rev. Lee and the media. As Gen. Lee noted “Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so is dearly purchased at a sacrifice.”
America’s Armpit Is Now Also Socialist Hell: New Jersey Residents To Pay The Most Taxes Over Their Lifetime
When it comes to living in the US, New Jersey isn’t seen as the worst state of the bunch… but it’s close: according to a recent YouGov poll, the Garden State ranks 3rd from the bottom, only above Alabama and Mississippi (DC is not yet a state, but the Biden admin is doing everything in its power to change that).
To be sure, while much of this catastrophic reputation may be without merit, the state’s governor is doing everything in his power to make it more than justified. Starting with the state’s stern refusal to not follow the new CDC regulations (confirming yet again that masking was indeed all about posturing and politics from day one and not “the science”), and unlike neighboring NY which will fully lift its capacity restrictions on Wednesday when it lifts its mask mandate, NJ Gov Murphy has decided to make his own “science” and is keeping its indoor mask mandate in place indefinitely.
But while the mask mandate (we hope) is “transitory”, a far more credible reason why New Jersey will soon be the most loathed state in the union, and that’s because according to a new study from fintech company Self, residents of New Jersey will face the highest tax burdens over a lifetime: just shy of $1 million.
While New Jersey is emerging as the 9th circle of taxation hell, at the other end of the scale, West Virginians will pay the least over their lives, at $321,000, the study showed.
Those living in New Jersey will pay on average a grand total of $931,698, well above the $827,185 for Massachusetts residents and $805,213 for Connecticut. Nationwide, Americans will pay $525,037 over their lives, which includes taxes on income, property, cars and retail spending, Bloomberg reported.
Putting this historic burden in context, the average person will spend about one-third of their earnings on taxes, according to the study, which is based on the 2019 Consumer Expenditure Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although that hardly presupposes that the average Garden State resident will make $3 million; quite the contrary once the mass exodus from the most taxes state begins in earnest and all the wealthiest residents bail for more hospitable pastures.
But wait, it gets better: the payments, which aren’t adjusted for inflation, will be even higher once Joe Biden’s proposed tax increases get approved by Congress. And, as we reported earlier, Biden is also pressing for significant relief for lower-income and middle-class families, including an extended, stepped up child tax credit which will push up the taxes even higher.
Most of the lifetime tax bill, nearly two-thirds, is in the form of state and federal levies on income. Auto taxes cost an average of $29,521 over the years. Californians and New Yorkers will pay the most in sales taxes, roughly $40,000, over their lifetimes.
A National Pulse review of White House Visitors Logs from November 2014 reveals a meeting in the White House Situation Room, chaired by then-Ebola Czar Ron Klain. The meeting appears to have been coordinated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and included several high-level U.S. government agency heads.
The high profile summit came just weeks after the Obama administration issued a moratorium on the same “gain of function” experiments that Dr. Fauci now claims were never directly funded by his government agency to take place at the Wuhan lab in China.
President Obama and other senior White House officials – potentially including then-Vice President Joe Biden – may also have been present.
The Situation Room Summit, 2014.
On the morning of November 17th, 2014, Dr. Anthony Fauci made his way to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB), otherwise known as the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB). The meeting was confirmed in the White House logs by Department for Homeland Security administrator Drew Cramer.
At 10am, he met with the man who would become known 7 years later as Joe Biden’s “prime minister,” Ron Klain. Four others joined Dr. Fauci, including former Walmart executive-turned-Health and Human Services staffer Leslie Dach.
David J Horowitz, who headed the legal side of the Ebola crisis; the Center for Disease Control’s Mitchell Wolfe; and the founding director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Robin Robinson, were all present.
BARDA is described as being “responsible for the procurement and development of medical countermeasures, principally against bioterrorism, including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats, as well as pandemic influenza and emerging diseases.”
Included on the roster for the Situation Room were then Centers for Disease Control Director Thomas Frieden and Rear Admiral Stephen Redd of the U.S. Public Health Service. In other words: a top team discussion.
Visiting government officials are, as a matter of routine, noted in the official records. White House employees, including the President and Vice President, are never logged in this manner.
But the summit was clearly an important one, and appears to have prompted a subsequent discussion later that day in the White House Situation Room, suggesting the involvement of President Obama, or at least then-Vice President Joe Biden.
A new appointment was made on November 17th for later that day, as the above graphic reveals.
Infectious Diseases.
Less than a week before the Situation Room summit, President Obama had declared a new vision for the United States and China in the arena of infectious diseases.
The United States expresses appreciation for China’s approximately $130 million in contributions to the international Ebola response. The United States and China are working together to provide needed equipment, supplies, and treatment facilities in Liberia, and our health personnel are working side-by-side to address the Ebola epidemic at its source. The two sides call on all members of the international community to step up their efforts in support of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response. Together, the United States and China are committed to working jointly with partners through the Global Health Security Agenda to develop long-term capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious diseases.
Just ahead of the Obama-Xi agreement, Fauci ushered two additional groups into Rooms 230 and 210 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (OEOB) to meet Klain. The dates of these meetings were November 6th and 10th, 2014.
These details may go some way to helping uncover the truth behind the National Institute for Health (NIH) and its alleged funding of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The information puts Klain and Obama at the head of the table for the decision to green-light what Fauci has been ferociously denying as of late.
Tony and Ron.
Dr. Fauci and Ron Klain would go on to enjoy a close, working relationship, and these meetings underscore their collaboration on the future of U.S.-CCP collaborative research. Critics may also suggested Dr. Fauci had a political conflict of interest when advising President Trump in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. His own party affiliation and his family’s donation history seem to confirm this.
One challenge they faced was to craft a more robust public relations campaign to counter growing media criticism of Obama’s lame Ebola response, the worst of it coming as a result of Donald Trump’s tweets.
As a political operative, Klain was an unusual pick as Ebola Czar. But he was effective.
A Joe Biden loyalist, he did one thing fabulously well, he made Dr. Fauci a media darling and began reversing the Obama administrations public relations misfortunes on their handling of the matter.
Two days after Klain’s appointment to the role on October 17, 2014, Fauci appeared on every television network’s Sunday show to tamp down criticism of the Klain as an Ebola czar. And it worked well for both men.
For Fauci, multiple meetings with Obama would soon follow, including a high-profile hug-fest in the Oval Office on October 24, 2014, in which Fauci introduced Ebola survivor Nina Pham to Obama. The media was enthralled with the “Tony Fauci Healthcare Hero” narrative.
A few years later, Pham sued her employer – Texas Health Resources – and slammed a video featuring her and her doctors as “a public relations stunt and an invasion of privacy.”
Denial over Wuhan.
Fauci and Klain were on the same page in their early assessments of the outbreak in Wuhan.
In a January 21, 2020 interview with Greg Kelly on Newsmax, Fauci said: “This is not a major threat to the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States should be worried about right now.”
Coming in behind Fauci’s bewildering and unhelpful advice was Ron Klain’s own public statements, such as those made on January 30th 2020, in article in The Atlantic.
The piece by Klain opened with Chinese Communist Party talking points, and went on to parrot Fauci’s downplaying of the virus while more hawkish types such as Steve Bannon and Dr. Peter Navarro banged the drum for immediate action.
“We do not know yet how grave a threat the new coronavirus will turn out to be. On the one hand, scientists have quickly sequenced the virus and are working on a vaccine. China has imposed draconian quarantines to slow the virus’s spread, and is rapidly building massive new hospitals to treat its victims. To date, the U.S. has seen only a handful of cases, all of them the product of travel to China, not transmission here. These are causes for concern, but not overwrought fear,” Klain wrote.
He added:
“Ultimately, the question may never be called on the coronavirus, which could be less of a threat than early indications suggest…”
His conclusion needs no explainer:
“Five presidents—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—have looked to Tony Fauci for advice; it is not impossible to imagine Trump being the first to angrily dismiss the counsel he offers if it does not fit with his own poor instincts.”
Trump, in fact, heeded Fauci – to his and the world’s detriment.
Now the world needs to know what was discussed in these critical 2014 meetings, and how Fauci and Klain’s relationship progressed through to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
WTI Extends JCPOA Whipsaw Losses After Small Crude Build
A volatile in the energy complex as Iran nuke deal headlines (first optimism, then pessimism) sparked a dump-n-pump in crude prices (after Brent tagged $70 earlier in the day).
“I said that significant progress have been achieved, in my view,” Ulyanov said in the tweet.
“That is true. But unresolved issues still remain and the negotiators need more time and efforts to finalise an agreement on restoration of JCPOA.”
A return to the 2015 nuclear deal could allow for the removal of U.S. sanctions on the Persian Gulf country’s crude exports, raising the prospects of more crude coming back to the market. Iran has already been preparing to ramp up global oil sales, though the flow of additional crude may be gradual even if a deal is struck.
As the Colonial Pipeline shutdown is set to show up in this data, we suspect there will be lots of noise and recent trend shifts.
API
Crude +620k (+1.7mm exp)
Cushing -53k
Gasoline -2.837mm (-1.2mm exp)
Distillates -2.581mm (-300k exp)
After a surprisingly small draw the prior week (after a big draw the week before that), analysts expected a modest build last week, likely impacted by the pipeline closures’ impact on refinery demand and API reported a mere 620k barrel build…
Source: Bloomberg
WTI hovered around $65.50 ahead of the API print and dipped lower after the data hit…
Given today’s highly sensitive price action, the only thing that matters for the current trend is JCPOA and not Indian COVID or US reopening demand.
”The devil is in the details,” said Tom Finlon of Brownsville GTR LLC, a trading and logistics firm based in Houston. Despite “periodic comments on progress,” talks have been at “an impasse on substantive issues, so it’s not going to be that easy.”
Finally, we remind readers that, according to the International Energy Agency: The world has a choice — stop developing new oil, gas and coal fields today or face a dangerous rise in global temperatures.
Peak Wall Street Optimism Is Now Behind Us: It’s All Downhill From Here
While we previously shared our thoughts on the noise value of the latest BofA Fund Manager Survey, which again “found” that being long bitcoin is the most crowded trade on Wall Street, when in reality it is anything but, it’s worth pointing out some of the signal in the survey conducted by BofA Chief Investment Strategist, Michael Hartnett, who writes that the May survey showed investor sentiment was “unambiguously bullish” with a whopping 69% expecting “above-trend” growth and inflation, a record high. Needless to say, inflation is now by and far the consensus trade…
… and while stagflation is a distant third at 8%, and double the odds of outright deflation, it is starting to creep higher…
… and as Hartnett warns, the creeping Main Street inflation has now triggered Wall Street deflation in the form of sliding China tech, US hyper-growth, XBT; and most notabtly, the 3rd lowest tech allocation since ‘06, which cements the flight from tech we have been discussing in recent weeks.
This is concerning because without tech (as a reminder just the 5 FAAMG stocks make up 25% of the S&P500), it is unlikely that the broader market can rise, and in a hyperfinancialized economy such as this one, without stocks the economy itself will be hobbled. That’s why, as Goldman first noted last week, BofA sees the first of signs “peak optimism” on growth, manifesting in a decline from 90% to 84% in May…
… shrinking profits margins (46% to 26%)…
… capex (54% to 51%)…
… and inflation (93% to 83%).
So if it’s all downhill from here then what happens next is a big drop in rates: according to BofA, since 1994 every time we hit the 5 peaks in “FMS optimism” has been followed by 75bps drop in 10Y Treasury yield next 2 quarters… although according to Hartnett it is less likely in ‘21 as Fed policy stance so uber-easy that FMS investors see inflation (35%) and taper tantrum (27%) as biggest 2 “tail risks”.
In light of the above it is probably not a surprise that investors are “positioned for inflation with a hint of defensives” resulting in the following asset allocation
commodities & cash up,
stocks down;
sector positions in “late-cycle” banks & resources now exceed 2006 highs,
tech OW at 3-year lows,
furious May short-covering in staples;
Euro-area #1 OW regionally,
investors long UK stocks for 1st time since Jul’12.
Hartnett’s reco for contrarian trades: stagflation bears (i.e. weaker growth) should short Europe, financials, materials, consumer cyclicals…
while inflation bulls (i.e. lower inflation) should go long Treasuries, tech stocks, EM, which is in line with BofA’s own second half cyclical value to defensive growth view.
Gold Gains As Dollar, Commodities, Crypto, & Stocks Slump
The US cash open sparked a buying panic in stocks (after Nasdaq had given up all its overnight gains accelerating lower after the dismal housing data) and then again as 1430ET (margin call time) loomed, the broad market took a big hit. The ubiquitous dip was bought (back up to unch for Nasdaq and Small Caps) but then with about 10 mins to the close, everything fell apart…
Two relatively large sell programs hit…
Source: Bloomberg
VIX jerked back above 21 on that final puke…
Nasdaq tested up to its 100DMA this morning but failed…
Healthcare and Utes managed gains on the day with Energy and Industrials hit hardest…
Source: Bloomberg
AT&T has been monkeyhammered back to reality
While the EV SPAC boom is busted…
Source: Bloomberg
That didn’t stop China EV Retailer Jiuzi debuts 800% above IPO price on Nasdaq
In fact, the forward inflation curve implies CPI above 2% for years to come (and above 3% for at least the next 3 years)…
Source: Bloomberg
Despite a modest puke across the US open after dismal Housing Starts data, Treasuries ended very modestly bid overall on the day (belly outperformed by 1-2bps vs wings unch)
Source: Bloomberg
The dollar tumbled to its lowest close since January 6th (barely above it) and is back in the red for 2021…
Source: Bloomberg
Pushing very close to critical support…
Source: Bloomberg
Cryptos staged an early rebound but ended back towards the lows with Bitcoin testing down below $43k once again…
Source: Bloomberg
Ether was also lower on the day but outperformed Bitcoin…
Source: Bloomberg
WTI was clubbed like a baby seal today on Iran nuke deal headlines (which were quickly walked back). WTI fell close to a $63 handle (and we noted Brent broke above $70 before its plunge) ahead of tonight’s API inventory data…
Gold managed to hold on to gains for the day…
As bitcoin and the dollar sink, there has been a renaissance in the barbarous relic…
Which clobbered commodities intraday…
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, today’s horrible housing data sent US Macro Surprise data to its lowest since June 2020…
Source: Bloomberg
And, with markets awash in liquidity, plenty on Wall Street see bubble risks growing across systemically important assets, including dollar-denominated high-yield credit. Debt spreads have tightened this year to levels not seen seen 2007.
Source: Bloomberg
Kathy Jones of Charles Schwab & Co. is telling clients to beware the “nuttiness” in corporate junk bonds.
“Israel is Winning Battles, Hamas is Winning the War.”
So ran the headline in the Jerusalem Post atop an analysis of the Gaza war, which began:
“The IDF is registering great achievements in Operation Guardian of the Walls, but meanwhile the house appears to be collapsing from within.”
Hard to disagree.
Consider this New York Times commentary about Israel’s prime minister from the runner-up to the Democratic presidential nominee in the primaries of 2016 and 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders:
“Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism …(and) legitimized these forces … by bringing them into the government. … Racist mobs that attack Palestinians on the streets of Jerusalem now have representation in its Knesset.”
Sanders’ wing of the party is moving toward the Palestinian side of the conflict.
“Israeli air strikes killing civilians in Gaza is an act of terrorism,” says Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
Tweets Michigan’s Rep. Rashida Tlaib:
“Israel targeting media sources is so the world can’t see Israel’s war crimes led by the apartheid-in-chief Netanyahu. It’s so the world can’t see the killing of babies, children and their parents. It’s so the world can’t see Palestinians being massacred.”
Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan concurs:
“We cannot just condemn rockets fired by Hamas and ignore Israel’s state-sanctioned police violence against Palestinians — including unlawful evictions, violent attacks on protestors & the murder of Palestinian children … US aid should not be funding this violence.”
While Israeli attacks are killing Hamas commanders and destroying the sites from which Hamas has fired 3,000 rockets, Israel is suffering serious and intangible losses.
Palestinians in Jerusalem and on the West Bank have risen in solidarity with Arabs and Muslims in Gaza. A dozen were slain last week.
Arab citizens of Israel are daily fighting Jews in cities like Jaffa, Acre and Lod. Writes the Post: “With riots shaking all parts of Israel,” the country “is being torn apart from within.”
Beyond Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel, Lebanese and Jordanians are protesting on the border. In U.S. and European cities like Berlin, London, Paris and Madrid, protesters numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands are marching in solidarity with the Palestinians and condemnation of Israel as a racist and an “apartheid” regime.
Saturday’s morning attack that brought down Gaza’s 12-story tower that housed the Associated Press and Al Jazeera caused a backlash in much of Western media against Israel, which claims the building contained an Hamas intelligence center and was a legitimate target.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden have come out in defense of Israel’s right to attack sites from which rockets are being fired into Israel. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, however, has been more muted in backing Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
The GOP seems more solidly behind Israel. More than three dozen Senate Republicans last week urged Biden to “unequivocally” support Israel’s right to defend itself and to “immediately” end negotiations with Iran on sanctions relief, charging Tehran with supporting terrorist activity by Hamas against Israel.
In a letter to Biden, 44 Republican senators wrote:
“Over the past couple days, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, who are funded by Iran, have launched a series of rocket attacks into Israel. They are targeting Israeli civilians and cities, including Israel’s capital Jerusalem.”
Where Israel goes from here, however, is currently unclear.
President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, in which the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan established relations with Israel, appear now to be on hold.
For, on Sunday, a statement by the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation called for an immediate halt to what it described as Israel’s barbaric attacks on Gaza and blamed “systematic crimes” against the Palestinians for the fighting which has lasted for a week.
The OIC statement came after a virtual meeting in which Saudi Arabia condemned Israel’s violation of the sanctity of Muslim holy sites and evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.
Clearly, the principal winner from this conflict is Bibi Netanyahu, who was within days of being replaced as prime minister by an opposition coalition when fighting erupted. He is now seen by Israelis as a decisive war leader, defending the country from thousands of rockets and severely pushing the enemies firing those rockets.
As for the two-state solution to which the world has been committed for decades, that prospect seems further from reality than ever.
Having seen what Hamas is capable of and willing to do, what Israeli will be eager to enter a peace agreement with the Palestinians that would mean vacating much of the West Bank, sharing Jerusalem as the capital of both countries, and a Palestinian right of return to lands from which their families were driven in the 1948-1949 Israeli War of Independence, which Palestinians remember as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
A military truce may be at hand, but that is all it will be – a truce before the next round of fighting.
Tesla On “Autopilot” Strikes Washington Sheriff’s Vehicle
Everyone is focused on the Tesla Model X that reportedly killed one Chinese policeman while injuring another in a collision in the Chinese city of Taizhou, in Zhejiang province on Monday. Meanwhile, another Tesla accident was on the opposite side of the world, in Washington state, that struck a police car while operating on “autopilot.”
NBC News reports the 2015 Tesla Model S on “autopilot” plowed into the driver’s side of a Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office vehicle on Saturday evening around 6:40 p.m. in Snohomish County, north of Seattle. Luckily, the deputy nor driver of the Tesla was seriously hurt.
The driver of the Tesla told Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office that he assumed the vehicle would move over on its own before hitting the parked police cruiser on the side of the road. The sheriff’s office noted the Ford Police Interceptor Utility vehicle had its emergency lights on when the Tesla struck it.
Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office said, “This is a great reminder that vehicles may have autopilot to assist, but it cannot be relied upon to get you safely from one destination to the next.”
You know it. We know it. Everybody knows it:Tesla’s “Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving” names for its supposedly autonomous driving features are misleading. This has led drivers, like a 25-yo man in San Francisco last week, to be arrested by the police for reckless driving after he sat in the backseat of his Tesla while the car piloted itself down Interstate-80. This kind of reckless behavior is made possible by the company mislabeling its driver-assisted modes as full autonomy, causing some people to feel overconfident about the vehicle’s capabilities.
The Colonial Pipeline attack involved a ransom paid in crypto, so the usual suspects are on the attack. If you are an investor or business leader who has contemplated adopting bitcoin, you have already been bombarded with negative news headlines and internal emails telling you why this latest development is important.
To save you the trouble of having to read them, I’ve prepared a summary:
Dear reader,
A serious crime has been committed, and cryptocurrency was involved. Yada yada yada, bitcoin bad.
Sincerely,
Someone Really Smart
Needless to say, their analysis is correct. A crime has been committed, and the crooks used crypto. I’m sure the articles you’ve been sent say a lot more, but the rest is likely filler. Crypto was used by criminals, yada yada yada, crypto bad.
I could write an entire book refuting this conclusion. But I won’t. I’ll just leave you with some fun facts about money and payments:
Fraudulent activity involving plastic cards reached $27b in 2018, doubling what they were just five years earlier. The numbers have gone up since.
There is a specific type of wire fraud that uses scam emails. According to the FBI, over $25b was stolen in a 3 year span using this method alone.
Hackers once used SWIFT messaging to steal over $100m from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Most of the money was never recovered, despite being sent through the regulated banking system.
Back when people wrote checks, check fraud was fairly common. There’s a great movie starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio about this. (I highly recommend it!)
The Colonial Pipeline hack involved a ransom payment of $5m. The Bitcoin blockchain has been settling over $10b per day in the month of May. The ransom payment represented .05% of one day’s volume.
There is over 2 trillion dollars worth of physical bills in circulation. Harvard Professor Ken Rogoff — whose analysis has been applauded by the likes of Ben Bernanke — estimates that a third of that cash is involved in drug deals or tax evasion.
That’s over $600b in illicit activity, or the annual GDP of Switzerland.
The Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis estimates that the percentage of Bitcoin that was involved in illicit activity in 2020 was also one third — but one third of one percent.
That’s only $10b
Global financial institutions paid more than $10b in money laundering related fines in 2020 alone.
The U.N. estimates that $1.6 trillion per year is involved in money laundering.
That’s more than double the total value of all Bitcoins in existence.
In conclusion: crypto is definitely used in criminal activity. Yada yada yada, so is everything else
