Month: June 2021

Sidney Powell, Who Denied That Her Wacky Election Conspiracy Claims Were Statements of Fact, Now Says She Will Prove They Were True


Sidney-Powell-12-8-20-b-Newscom

Former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, who faces defamation lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages because of her wacky claims about presidential election fraud, argues that her accusations against Dominion Voting Systems are not actionable because “no reasonable person” would have understood them as statements of fact. But her comments at a conference last month in Dallas undermine that already risible defense.

“I don’t think they realized that some of us litigators were going to catch on and hold their feet to the fire and expose what really happened,” Powell said during the “For God & Country: Patriot Roundup” gathering on Memorial Day weekend, which also featured prominent election conspiracy theorists such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Florida congressman Allen West, and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R–Texas). She predicted that Dominion’s lawsuit will be dismissed because “we meant what we said, and we have the evidence to back it up.” If the lawsuit proceeds, she added, “then we will get discovery against Dominion, and we will be on offense.” Powell also held out hope that Donald Trump “can simply be reinstated” after “a new inauguration” once her claim that Joe Biden stole the election with Dominion’s help is verified.

That stance is quite different from the position that Powell’s lawyers took in their response to Dominion’s defamation complaint last March. Although Powell repeatedly implicated the company in an elaborate international conspiracy to deprive Trump of his rightful victory in the 2020 election, they said, “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” They suggested that the implausibility of Powell’s accusations meant they could not qualify as defamation:

Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as “wild accusations” and “outlandish claims.” They are repeatedly labelled “inherently improbable” and even “impossible.” Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.

Powell herself described her charges against Dominion, which she said had systematically switched “millions” of Trump votes to Biden votes, as “legal opinions that she stands behind, as they were based on sworn affidavits, declarations, expert reports and documentary evidence.” At the same time, she insisted those “legal opinions” could not be defamatory because they were not “statements of fact.”

But now Powell is saying she will defeat Dominion’s lawsuit by showing “what really happened”—i.e., by proving the truth of her claims. “We meant what we said, and we have the evidence to back it up” is impossible to reconcile with the position that Powell was not making statements of fact.

“That seems like an extremely damaging admission from Ms. Powell that eviscerates her main defense, which is based on a distortion of the opinion doctrine to begin with,” Ted Boutrous Jr., a defamation specialist at Gibson Dunn, told The Daily Beast. “Dominion will have a field day with this statement in opposing her efforts to dismiss the case before trial, and before the jury if and when the case goes to trial.”

Two other lawyers interviewed by The Daily Beast were more equivocal, but they agreed that Powell’s vow to prove that Dominion actually was involved in an unprecedented election conspiracy did not help her case. “Powell’s rather odd statement certainly won’t help her defense,” said Sam Terilli, former general counsel for the Miami Herald. “It’s just hard to know in advance, but it clearly could be a problem.”

Reason Contributing Editor Ken White, a First Amendment specialist, told The Daily Beast Powell’s recent comments could come back to haunt her if Dominion’s lawsuit survives her motion for dismissal. “Her stance ‘I can prove it’ is definitely inconsistent with her lawyers’ stance ‘nobody would take it as anything but opinion,'” he said. “It’s tricky, though. Generally at this stage, a court wouldn’t be considering extrinsic evidence like her statements—they consider what’s in the complaint and what’s in public record (like court filings, etc.). The way it could play out is that the judge ignores it for now but revisits it at a later stage (like summary judgment) if the claims against her survive.”

In addition to the Dominion lawsuit, which seeks $1.3 billion in damages, Powell faces a $2.7 billion lawsuit by Smartmatic, which played almost no role in the 2020 election but nevertheless figured prominently in her fraud fantasy, and a lawsuit by Dominion executive Eric Coomer, whom she fingered as a leader of the imaginary scheme. Coomer is seeking “actual and special damages against Defendants in an amount to be proven at trial.”

Those plaintiffs thought “they could shut us up by, say, suing me for $4.3 billion in three different states,” Powell said in Dallas. Clearly, she is not shutting up, a decision that may cost her.

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The Colonial Pipeline Hack, The ‘Russians’, & The FBI’s Ransom-Grab – What Really Happened?

The Colonial Pipeline Hack, The ‘Russians’, & The FBI’s Ransom-Grab – What Really Happened?

Speculation has been running rampant over today’s FBI press conference revealing the recovery of most of the ransom paid to “Russian” hackers by Colonial Pipeline.

Ben THE Kaufman summarizes:

Media: “The FBI hacked Bitcoin and can take anyone’s funds.”

Reality: The pipeline hackers didn’t have the Bitcoin in the first place but kept it in a remote server the FBI could access with subpoena.

Media coverage is mostly lies at this point.

Which raises the following point (h/t Jordan Schachtel):

So the “hackers” brought down the largest pipeline on the east coast…

…but couldn’t spend 50 bucks on a clean hardware wallet to secure their bitcoin?

Makes sense to me!

So what really happened?

Jordan Schachtel explains at ‘The Dossier’ Substack

Top Department of Justice officials claimed to strike a major blow against the culprits of the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack Monday, announcing that they had seized almost all of the funds paid to the affiliate group responsible for contracting the DarkSide ransomware attack.

Colonial Pipeline suffered a ransomware attack in early May and responded by preemptively shutting down the pipeline’s entire operations for some time, forcing a temporary but major energy crisis throughout the Southeastern United States. In order for the computers that maintained the pipeline to get back to full operation, Colonial agreed to pay a ransom in the form of 75 bitcoin, which was worth about $5 million at the time.

Now, here’s where things get weird: 

In their triumphant statements this morning, the DOJ claimed to have seized the funds from the group that reportedly paid DarkSide for their Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) attack on Colonial. Notably, they did not secure the funds from DarkSide, which took a fee from the ransom in bitcoin that remains in the possession of the shadowy operation.

“There is no place beyond the reach of the FBI to conceal illicit funds that will prevent us from imposing risk and consequences upon malicious cyber actors,” FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said in a statement.

“We will continue to use all of our available resources and leverage our domestic and international partnerships to disrupt ransomware attacks and protect our private sector partners and the American public.” 

Now, the DOJ does appear to have secured the affiliate funds, but not in the fashion that it is being advertised by federal officials and widely reported in the corporate press.

Bitcoin is secured through a currently unbreakable cryptographic formula known as a Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. You can safely rule out the possibility that the feds broke this form of encryption and were able to pull off this computing power miracle, which is only theoretically possible through the use of quantum computing, a technology that is still very much a work in progress.

The feds did not “hack” a bitcoin wallet in this manner, though they certainly seemed happy to give off that impression, as it sows doubt about the security of the bitcoin network.

The DOJ has historically been extremely hostile to bitcoin, labeling it as a preferred monetary system for cyber criminals, despite bitcoin transactions being publicly available to anyone with access to the internet.

A DOJ warrant from Monday morning gives us much more detail about how the government actually secured the bitcoin funds. They did so by obtaining a warrant on a bitcoin wallet or exchange that had servers in Northern California. Yes, you read that correctly. The entity responsible for the ransomware attack did not in fact have custody over their bitcoin. Instead, they were using a custodian for their funds. It is unclear whether this account with servers in the United States is an FBI wallet or the affiliate’s wallet, but the major error in bitcoin 101 custody remains the surprising issue. Using a custodian for your funds instead of maintaining possession of them is a very basic error, especially for an allegedly sophisticated hacking gang.

Given that bitcoin transactions are publicly available, it was easy for the feds to track the funds transferred from Colonial to this outfit, as Colonial’s initial transfer to the bitcoin wallet is public information. All they had to do was “follow the money,” which strangely made its way into a U.S. based custodial address.

The latest events surrounding the Colonial Pipeline drama simply do not square with the narratives coming out of the Biden Administration and its stenographers in the corporate press.

We were told this much-hyped hacking group of alleged Russians posed a serious threat to our entire critical infrastructure, yet in the same breath happened to have committed a laughably amateurish bitcoin custody faux pas that allowed for the feds to easily take back possession of the affiliate funds. 

I will refrain from getting conspiratorial about possible government involvement and leave that to the readers in the comments section.

In my opinion, this ransomware attack was successful largely due to Colonial’s lack of basic security measures in place. Similar to the notorious DNC emails hack (with the same claimed Russian government culprits), where John Podesta’s password was literally the word password, the hackers succeeded because Colonial had no measures in place to protect themselves. Everything else in the timeline going back to early May seems blown way out of proportion.

Despite the claims made by some powerful people in D.C., there is no compelling evidence that this incident was some kind of Kremlin-directed operation to decimate America’s critical infrastructure.

In the end, the Russians and Bitcoin are not the antagonist actors in this story, though the DOJ seems more than happy to promulgate both of these narratives. Once the feds were able to identify a bitcoin “hot wallet” (as opposed to an offline bitcoin wallet that is controlled by the hackers themselves) was connected to online servers, it became a routine process to seize the funds through legal channels.

There’s also the possibility that the feds identified an individual or group in the affiliate organization responsible for contracting the ransomware attack due to some kind of sting operation. Once identified, the FBI may have proceeded to require these entities to send their funds into a bitcoin wallet in Northern California that is controlled by the FBI.

Anyway, the real issue here is how easily this could have all been avoided. It shows how horrifically poor our infrastructure is protected in this nation, to the point where a cheap ransomware attack by unnamed actors can result in a nationwide energy crisis.

The story has nothing to do with U.S. adversaries and digital currencies, but of unbelievable incompetence and neglect on the part of Colonial and our overall security apparatus. It’s called *critical* infrastructure for a reason.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/08/2021 – 17:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3g08LIB Tyler Durden

Sidney Powell, Who Denied That Her Wacky Election Conspiracy Claims Were Statements of Fact, Now Says She Will Prove They Were True


Sidney-Powell-12-8-20-b-Newscom

Former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, who faces defamation lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages because of her wacky claims about presidential election fraud, argues that her accusations against Dominion Voting Systems are not actionable because “no reasonable person” would have understood them as statements of fact. But her comments at a conference last month in Dallas undermine that already risible defense.

“I don’t think they realized that some of us litigators were going to catch on and hold their feet to the fire and expose what really happened,” Powell said during the “For God & Country: Patriot Roundup” gathering on Memorial Day weekend, which also featured prominent election conspiracy theorists such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Florida congressman Allen West, and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R–Texas). She predicted that Dominion’s lawsuit will be dismissed because “we meant what we said, and we have the evidence to back it up.” If the lawsuit proceeds, she added, “then we will get discovery against Dominion, and we will be on offense.” Powell also held out hope that Donald Trump “can simply be reinstated” after “a new inauguration” once her claim that Joe Biden stole the election with Dominion’s help is verified.

That stance is quite different from the position that Powell’s lawyers took in their response to Dominion’s defamation complaint last March. Although Powell repeatedly implicated the company in an elaborate international conspiracy to deprive Trump of his rightful victory in the 2020 election, they said, “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” They suggested that the implausibility of Powell’s accusations meant they could not qualify as defamation:

Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as “wild accusations” and “outlandish claims.” They are repeatedly labelled “inherently improbable” and even “impossible.” Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.

Powell herself described her charges against Dominion, which she said had systematically switched “millions” of Trump votes to Biden votes, as “legal opinions that she stands behind, as they were based on sworn affidavits, declarations, expert reports and documentary evidence.” At the same time, she insisted those “legal opinions” could not be defamatory because they were not “statements of fact.”

But now Powell is saying she will defeat Dominion’s lawsuit by showing “what really happened”—i.e., by proving the truth of her claims. “We meant what we said, and we have the evidence to back it up” is impossible to reconcile with the position that Powell was not making statements of fact.

“That seems like an extremely damaging admission from Ms. Powell that eviscerates her main defense, which is based on a distortion of the opinion doctrine to begin with,” Ted Boutrous Jr., a defamation specialist at Gibson Dunn, told The Daily Beast. “Dominion will have a field day with this statement in opposing her efforts to dismiss the case before trial, and before the jury if and when the case goes to trial.”

Two other lawyers interviewed by The Daily Beast were more equivocal, but they agreed that Powell’s vow to prove that Dominion actually was involved in an unprecedented election conspiracy did not help her case. “Powell’s rather odd statement certainly won’t help her defense,” said Sam Terilli, former general counsel for the Miami Herald. “It’s just hard to know in advance, but it clearly could be a problem.”

Reason Contributing Editor Ken White, a First Amendment specialist, told The Daily Beast Powell’s recent comments could come back to haunt her if Dominion’s lawsuit survives her motion for dismissal. “Her stance ‘I can prove it’ is definitely inconsistent with her lawyers’ stance ‘nobody would take it as anything but opinion,'” he said. “It’s tricky, though. Generally at this stage, a court wouldn’t be considering extrinsic evidence like her statements—they consider what’s in the complaint and what’s in public record (like court filings, etc.). The way it could play out is that the judge ignores it for now but revisits it at a later stage (like summary judgment) if the claims against her survive.”

In addition to the Dominion lawsuit, which seeks $1.3 billion in damages, Powell faces a $2.7 billion lawsuit by Smartmatic, which played almost no role in the 2020 election but nevertheless figured prominently in her fraud fantasy, and a lawsuit by Dominion executive Eric Coomer, whom she fingered as a leader of the imaginary scheme. Coomer is seeking “actual and special damages against Defendants in an amount to be proven at trial.”

Those plaintiffs thought “they could shut us up by, say, suing me for $4.3 billion in three different states,” Powell said in Dallas. Clearly, she is not shutting up, a decision that may cost her.

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Watch: Kamala Harris Snaps At NBC Host After Being Caught In Border Lie

Watch: Kamala Harris Snaps At NBC Host After Being Caught In Border Lie

Things aren’t going so well for Vice President Kamala Harris during her Guatemala trip, where as we observed earlier she went full Trump mode in a speech before Guatemalan press: “…I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States Mexico border: Do not come, do not come,” she said.

Simultaneously NBC News published a sit-down interview between Harris and news anchor Lester Holt which took place during the trip. He pressed her on why she hadn’t visited the border and that’s where things quickly got testy…

Given she was recently “put in charge” of the crisis, Holt had asked simply whether she had any near future plans to visit the US-Mexico border – a line of inquiry which she clearly took offense to.

“We are going to the border, we’ve been to the border. So this whole – this whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border, we’ve been to the border,” Harris said

“You haven’t been to the border,” Holt accurately shot back.

A visibly upset Harris then came back with a retort that was awkward at best: “And I haven’t been to Europe, and I don’t understand the point that you’re making,” she snapped. “I’m not discounting the importance of the border,” she claimed while continuing to lose her cool.

Her irritation appeared to stem from being caught in the lie, given the whole tense exchange had been kicked off with the following: 

“The question that has come up and you heard it here and you’ll hear it again I’m sure, is, ‘Why not visit the border? Why not see what Americans are seeing in this crisis?'” Holt wondered aloud.

“Well, we are going to the border,” Harris responded. “We have to deal with what’s happening at the border, there’s no question about that. That’s not a debatable point. But we have to understand that there’s a reason people are arriving at our border and ask what is that reason and then identify the problem so we can fix it.”

As we noted earlier, Kamala Harris’s enormous ego and disturbing lack of self-awareness had quite the weekend.

For one, while en route to Guatemala she walked to the back of Air Force 2 on D-Day and handed out cookies of herself donning a distinctive pearl necklace and frosted face, prompting condemnation and ridicule from Twitter users far and wide.

Then, upon touching down in Guatemala to meet with foreign leaders about what can be done to stem the influx of illegal immigrants into the United States, the Vice President was greeted by protesters bearing signs. “Trump Won” , “Stop Funding Criminals” , and “Kamala Go Home” were among them, according to the Floridian Press.

* * *

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/08/2021 – 17:05

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Biden, Capito Infrastructure Talks Break Down After Failing To Reach Deal; Will Shift To Bipartisan Group

Biden, Capito Infrastructure Talks Break Down After Failing To Reach Deal; Will Shift To Bipartisan Group

Talks between President Joe Biden and Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) – lead GOP negotiator on infrastructure legislation – have ended with no resolution, according to Bloomberg‘s Josh Wingrove. The negotiations, held via teleconference between the White House and a small group of Republican senators, were weighed down by deep disagreements over what actually constitutes ‘infrastructure,’ with Republicans using the dictionary definition of roads and other public works, and Democrats expanding it to include just about anything they want it to mean.

The talks will now shift to a bipartisan group after Biden reportedly said that the GOP offer was too low and too vague.

 

The talks concluded Tuesday after a brief phone call between the president and the West Virginia senator. Biden will instead seek to develop an infrastructure bill with a bipartisan group of lawmakers, a White House official said.

The bipartisan group of 20 senators has not yet signed off on a proposal, according to members. Instead, a smaller faction led by Utah Republican Mitt Romney and Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema have agreed on a spending level and how to pay for it, according to Romney, though he declined to give any details. -Bloomberg

As noted earlier by CNN, the discussion between Capito and Biden would likely be their last before the president leaves on his first international trip to Europe, however staff-level talks are expected to continue.

Biden and Capito had been speaking frequently since the White House introduced a comprehensive infrastructure plan, however talks had been dragging on post a Memorial Day deadline without any significant breakthroughs, which led to pressure from Democrats to shift to bipartisan negotiations.

According to Bloomberg, Romney and members of the smaller group will meet this evening to discuss their proposal.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/08/2021 – 16:51

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Who Loses When The China-Bat-Cave Narrative Implodes?

Who Loses When The China-Bat-Cave Narrative Implodes?

Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,

The story about Wuhan’s “wet market” is taking on water.

We’ve moved well past the “trust but verify” stage. We’re now in the “don’t trust a damn thing they say” stage.

In this case, “they” refers mostly to the Chinese Communist Party.

But the public’s mistrust has spread to our own government’s public health experts, and to much of the Western media, as well.

We still don’t know where the COVID-19 pandemic originated, but the more we learn, the less China’s official story sounds right. The World Health Organization’s year-long endorsement of Beijing means nothing. At this point, even the WHO is starting to say we need a more thorough investigation. Good luck with that. China has prevented independent scientists from conducting any serious, open inquiry of the pandemic’s origins. That won’t change.

China’s secrecy tells us sometimes, but we can’t be sure what. Remember, U.S. intelligence agencies and the George W. Bush administration made the wrong inference from Saddam Hussein’s secrecy about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam impeded international inspectors to search freely for WMDs, which he possessed previously. There was no proof he had destroyed them. Yet he blocked unannounced international inspections of Iraqi sites that might contain WMDs. The natural inference was that he still had those weapons and was hiding them. American and British intelligence researched that conclusion. The CIA director famously told President Bush it was a “slam dunk.”

It wasn’t. What Saddam was actually hiding was that he didn’t have WMDs. He was hiding that less from his Western enemies and more from his dangerous neighbor, Iran, and possibly from internal enemies in Iraq itself. That mistaken inference is worth remembering as we ponder the still-murky origins of the Wuhan virus. We know China is hiding something. What we don’t know is what it is hiding and why.

  • Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.

  • Beijing could be hiding that the escaped virus was artificially enhanced, made more contagious and lethal (called “gain of function”).

  • Beijing could be hiding the fact that China’s military was involved in this gain-of-function project, or at least in some aspects of the lab’s research.

  • Beijing could be hiding that Chinese political leaders knew, early on, that the virus spread from human to human and that it kept this crucial finding secret for months. During that period, Beijing and the WHO were falsely telling the world that the virus could not spread from human to human.

  • Beijing could be hiding that Chinese leaders not only knew the virus was contagious, but that they acted on that knowledge by allowing Chinese nationals to travel freely around the world, spreading the disease, while sharply restricting travel within China from Wuhan. And, finally,

  • Beijing could be hiding anything and everything simply because that’s how totalitarian regimes operate. They always hide information, control the flow, and prevent outside inspections.

Whatever they’re hiding, they have powerful reasons. The Chinese Communist Party knows how high the stakes are if it is found responsible for a deadly lab leak and for keeping that information secret when others could have acted promptly and saved countless lives. Americans will be outraged, as they should be, and Washington will be forced to take serious action.

That action will begin with a reconsideration of bilateral trade relations, Chinese investments in the U.S., and Chinese students at U.S. universities. Our Asian allies, Japan, Australia, and India are likely to follow suit. Britain may well do the same; South Korea is more uncertain. Europeans will be reluctant since they have strong trade ties and few security interests in the Pacific.  If the U.S. relationship with China deteriorates like this, Biden may be forced to bolster the military budget, something he has avoided so far.

Who loses in this shifting environment?

Here’s a preliminary assessment of the biggest losers.

1) U.S. firms with large economic stakes in China, everything from factories to consumer sales. Beijing will threaten to retaliate against them if Washington applies sanctions. The same will apply to international companies from any other countries that apply sanctions.

2) The feckless news media — including the social media giants — that considered the mere suggestion that the pandemic might have begun with a lab leak an outrageous conspiracy theory. They damned Sen. Tom Cotton and then President Trump for even suggesting it.

3) U.S. public health experts, particularly Dr. Anthony Fauci. He’s spinning as fast as he can, but he’s facing big trouble on multiple fronts. He was already hurt by his fibs about masks. Initially, he told the public they weren’t helpful, even though he privately believed they were, because he didn’t want public demand to crowd out health-care workers who needed the masks. His priorities were right, but he was wrong to mislead the public.

Lying about masks is not Fauci’s biggest problem, however. His biggest problems are his possible connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and his unwillingness to entertain the lab leak conjecture a year ago, when the investigation should have been ramped up. He helped quash that conjecture and now admits he didn’t really have strong evidence to do so. His recently released emails also show he  had a close working relationship with scientists at the Wuhan lab and that he trusted their reassuring statements. By then, however, the virus was spreading outside China and everybody at the lab was under close control of Chinese political authorities. Those authorities had one overriding goal: avoid any responsibility for this global health catastrophe.

4) Democrats lose because they are both the party of government and the party of science. If Donald Trump was the bullhorn for federalism and deregulation, Biden and his party are Mr. Microphone of centralized government and Washington experts. Their reliance on Washington is baked into Democrats’ DNA and has been since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So it’s not a good look when experts are wrong, as they have been so often during the pandemic.

The key point is that the experts have been confused about technical questions of public health, not general political issues. Nothing could be more technical than questions about what’s safe to do during a pandemic and what’s unsafe. Which precautions really work? Which ones don’t? Do we really need to sit six feet from each other? Did we really need to cancel all those outdoor sporting events? We still don’t know the answers to even the most basic questions like “Do face masks help?” and “Why have blue states with stringent lockdowns fared no better than red states with much looser restrictions?” We still don’t know when it was safe for kids to return to school — private schools have been operating all year with few problems — but we do know now that the Centers for Disease Control was collaborating with the teacher unions on that question.

The less confidence we have in public health bureaucrats and the federal government on the pandemic issue, the worse it is for the party of Washington experts. And that party is the Democrats.

5) Joe Biden is at least slightly damaged because he’s made partisan statements about local decisions on reopening the economy. He has defended restrictions by Democratic governors and called some Republican state elected officials “Neanderthals” because they reopened their economies before he wanted them to do so. Turns out the Neanderthals were right: There don’t appear to have been net negative health effects from doing so — and there were very positive economic ones. It also turns out that Biden’s aides were smart to advise him never to say anything that they haven’t written down for him. Republicans may use “Neanderthals” like they did “Deplorables,” as a way to rally their voters against condescending elites.

And, most of all,

6) China. The only question is “How big will their loss be and what global repercussions will it have?”

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/08/2021 – 16:44

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3v6lxJM Tyler Durden

Kamala Harris Campaigned on a Kinder, Gentler Migration Policy. Now She’s Telling Guatemalans, ‘Do Not Come.’


polspphotos804544

Vice President Kamala Harris went to Guatemala this week on her first official trip abroad. The visit came in connection to her new leading role in the White House effort to stem Central American migration to the U.S.-Mexico border. Arrivals there have surged in recent months, leading Harris to lay out a plan to tackle factors driving migration from Guatemala.

Alongside announcements of aid and collaborative anti-corruption initiatives, Harris issued a direct warning to would-be migrants: “Do not come. Do not come.” She continued, “I believe if you come to our border you will be turned back.”

That statement couldn’t be any more different from her campaign trail rhetoric. In a 2019 interview with National Public Radio, Harris marketed herself as the antithesis of former President Donald Trump and his harsh immigration policies. “I disagree with any policy that would turn America’s back on people who are fleeing harm,” Harris said. “I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for.”

Yet that’s exactly what Harris proposed yesterday, despite the fact that Guatemalans are eligible to pursue a legal immigration pathway at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Migrants arriving at the Southwest border may apply for asylum, a process they can only initiate from U.S. soil or at a port of entry. This differs from refugee status, which people apply for and attain before arriving in the U.S. Gaining asylum tends to be quicker than receiving refugee status—valuable for migrants who face hostile conditions at home, as is often the case among Central Americans. Anyone may apply, but eligibility hinges on an applicant proving that he’s been persecuted on grounds of race, religion, nationality, belonging to a certain social group, or political opinion.

In effect, Harris is trying to convince migrants not to pursue the first step necessary to legally gaining asylum.

David J. Bier, an immigration research fellow at the Cato Institute, explains that there are many frameworks in place outlining migrants’ rights to do this. “On paper, there are numerous laws and treaties that purport to protect the rights of asylum seekers and other vulnerable people,” Bier says. “The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, Refugee Act, Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the Convention Against Torture, and 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol” all provide domestic and international protections, Bier notes.

That apparently isn’t enough to appease Harris—or, at least, her current politics.

Though she now calls would-be border crossing “illegal migration,” she previously supported eliminating criminal penalties for that action. Her presidential campaign site called Trump’s border strategy “disastrous and cruel” and she promised to “ensure those fleeing persecution have a full and fair opportunity to make their claim” in immigration court. Those previous sentiments have seemingly vanished.

Bier says that Harris’ “proposed solutions are somewhat more dialed back versions of Trump’s ideas,” despite the Biden-Harris administration’s supposed commitment to rolling back the former president’s immigration approach. “She wants to continue to expel migrants who cross the border back to Mexico, which was precisely Trump’s preferred policy,” he observes.

These policies are likely to be ineffective as well. “I don’t foresee Harris’s proposed solutions having any significant effect on migration from Central America,” says Bier. “The main reason that immigrants come illegally is the lack of legal options.” Without meaningful efforts to make legal immigration easier, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes at the Southwest border. Bier warns that Harris’ proposals will backfire, creating “a greater perception of chaos when the situation hardly changes.”

The Harris of 2019 had no problem advocating that migrants get their day in court. “I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge,” she said then. Let’s hope Harris has another change of heart.

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Kamala Harris Campaigned on a Kinder, Gentler Migration Policy. Now She’s Telling Guatemalans, ‘Do Not Come.’


polspphotos804544

Vice President Kamala Harris went to Guatemala this week on her first official trip abroad. The visit came in connection to her new leading role in the White House effort to stem Central American migration to the U.S.-Mexico border. Arrivals there have surged in recent months, leading Harris to lay out a plan to tackle factors driving migration from Guatemala.

Alongside announcements of aid and collaborative anti-corruption initiatives, Harris issued a direct warning to would-be migrants: “Do not come. Do not come.” She continued, “I believe if you come to our border you will be turned back.”

That statement couldn’t be any more different from her campaign trail rhetoric. In a 2019 interview with National Public Radio, Harris marketed herself as the antithesis of former President Donald Trump and his harsh immigration policies. “I disagree with any policy that would turn America’s back on people who are fleeing harm,” Harris said. “I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for.”

Yet that’s exactly what Harris proposed yesterday, despite the fact that Guatemalans are eligible to pursue a legal immigration pathway at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Migrants arriving at the Southwest border may apply for asylum, a process they can only initiate from U.S. soil or at a port of entry. This differs from refugee status, which people apply for and attain before arriving in the U.S. Gaining asylum tends to be quicker than receiving refugee status—valuable for migrants who face hostile conditions at home, as is often the case among Central Americans. Anyone may apply, but eligibility hinges on an applicant proving that he’s been persecuted on grounds of race, religion, nationality, belonging to a certain social group, or political opinion.

In effect, Harris is trying to convince migrants not to pursue the first step necessary to legally gaining asylum.

David J. Bier, an immigration research fellow at the Cato Institute, explains that there are many frameworks in place outlining migrants’ rights to do this. “On paper, there are numerous laws and treaties that purport to protect the rights of asylum seekers and other vulnerable people,” Bier says. “The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, Refugee Act, Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the Convention Against Torture, and 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol” all provide domestic and international protections, Bier notes.

That apparently isn’t enough to appease Harris—or, at least, her current politics.

Though she now calls would-be border crossing “illegal migration,” she previously supported eliminating criminal penalties for that action. Her presidential campaign site called Trump’s border strategy “disastrous and cruel” and she promised to “ensure those fleeing persecution have a full and fair opportunity to make their claim” in immigration court. Those previous sentiments have seemingly vanished.

Bier says that Harris’ “proposed solutions are somewhat more dialed back versions of Trump’s ideas,” despite the Biden-Harris administration’s supposed commitment to rolling back the former president’s immigration approach. “She wants to continue to expel migrants who cross the border back to Mexico, which was precisely Trump’s preferred policy,” he observes.

These policies are likely to be ineffective as well. “I don’t foresee Harris’s proposed solutions having any significant effect on migration from Central America,” says Bier. “The main reason that immigrants come illegally is the lack of legal options.” Without meaningful efforts to make legal immigration easier, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes at the Southwest border. Bier warns that Harris’ proposals will backfire, creating “a greater perception of chaos when the situation hardly changes.”

The Harris of 2019 had no problem advocating that migrants get their day in court. “I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge,” she said then. Let’s hope Harris has another change of heart.

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‘Spermageddon’ Has Been Canceled, Says New Study


spermDreamstime

The idea of “Spermageddon,” as the popular science press likes to call it, was launched by a group of Scandinavian researchers in an article published by the journal BMJ back in 1992, in which they reported that the average human sperm count had fallen by nearly 50 percent over the last 50 years. The authors speculated that increasing exposure to “compounds with oestrogen-like activity” might be responsible for declining sperm counts. In their 1996 book, Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival?—A Scientific Detective Story, zoologist Theo Colborn and her colleagues argued that pervasive synthetic chemicals dubbed “endocrine disrupters” were responsible for all manner of health and environmental problems, including falling sperm counts. Ever ready to fan the flames of panic, the publicists at Greenpeace quickly initiated a clever campaign of advertisements declaring, “You’re not half the man your father was.”

In 1997, California Department of Health Services epidemiologist Shanna Swan and her colleagues published a study in Environmental Health Perspectives that also found declining sperm counts in the U.S. and Europe. “Among the adverse health endpoints that have been linked to endocrine-altering chemicals in the environment,” they noted, “male reproductive dysfunction, and particularly impaired semen quality, is of particular concern.”

Swan has a made a career out of flogging the idea that trace exposures to synthetic endocrine disrupting chemicals are drastically harming human male fertility. For example, she was a co-author of a 2017 meta-analysis in Human Reproduction Update that reported “a significant decline in sperm counts (as measured by SC [sperm concentration] and TSC [total sperm count) between 1973 and 2011, driven by a 50–60% decline among men unselected by fertility [that is, it is not known whether or not they had conceived a pregnancy] from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.”

Earlier this year, Swan and her co-author Stacey Colino popularized their alarm over the alleged harms of commonly used synthetic endocrine disrupting chemicals in their new book, Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. Swan and Colino even recycled the old Greenpeace claim, “A man today has only half the number of sperm his grandfather had.”

A new analysis in Human Fertility by an interdisciplinary team led by Harvard science historian Sarah Richardson finds that the 2017 meta-analysis by Swan and her colleagues suffers from significant methodological problems. Consequently, their claims about declining human sperm counts and rising rates of infertility are at least exaggerated, if not just wrong.

Among other things, the new study finds that Swan’s falling sperm count trend in “Western” countries was obtained only after cobbling together data showing no significant trends in U.S. sperm counts with declining Western European trends. In addition, average sperm counts in the flat trend in “Other” populations from South America, Asia, and Africa were actually fairly close to the now lower Western sperm counts reported by Swan. Consequently, the authors of the new study observe that Swan’s research “produces a picture of crisis around declining sperm counts among Western men, but treats the already lower average sperm counts of non-Western ‘Other’ men as outside of the umbrella of concern and crisis.”

Richardson and her colleagues also note that Swan’s declining Western sperm counts are still well within the World Health Organization’s normal range of 15–259 million sperm per milliliter for individuals. In response to Swan’s 2017 article, Peter Schlegel, the chair of urology at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, told The New York Times in 2018, “if you had a decrease in sperm count in the 50 to 60 percent range, we would expect the proportion of men with severe male infertility to be going up astronomically. And we don’t see that.”

With respect to fertility, Allan Pacey, an andrologist at the University of Sheffield and the editor of Human Fertility, told The New York Times that, “doubling your sperm count from 25 to 50 million doesn’t double your chances. Doubling it from 100 to 200 million doesn’t double your chances—in fact it flattens off, if anything. So this relationship between sperm count and fertility is weak.”

Swan’s claim that exposure to minuscule amounts of synthetic endocrine disrupting chemicals found in plastics, flame retardants, electronics, food packaging, pesticides, personal care products, and cosmetics is causing widespread health problems has been debunked many times. Recently, a group of European toxicologists pointed out in a 2020 editorial in the Archives of Toxicology that “the potencies of S-EDCs [synthetic-endocrine disrupting chemicals] are much lower than for N-EDCs [natural-endocrine disrupting chemicals], drugs or endogenous hormones.” They conclude that “therefore, at the low human exposures that have been demonstrated in all sensibly conducted studies, S-EDCs have virtually no chance to physiologically compete with natural hormones in binding to free receptors. This implies that the health risks of the known S-EDCs are nil or at least negligible.” That is to say that trace exposures to the chemicals that worry Swan cannot be responsible for the supposed declines in sperm counts she claims to have discovered.

Based on their analysis of what they call Swan’s “Sperm Count Decline” hypothesis, Richardson and her colleagues counter with their proposed “Sperm Count Biovariability” hypothesis. They suggest that the data show that sperm counts vary naturally over time and within populations. “Sperm count varies within a wide range, much of which can be considered non-pathological and species-typical,” they further note. “Above a critical threshold, more is not necessarily an indicator of better health or higher probability of fertility relative to less.”

In other words, the claim that Swan makes in Count Down that men face “environmental emasculation” is false.

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WTI Dips After Smaller Than Expected Crude Draw, Sizable Product Builds

WTI Dips After Smaller Than Expected Crude Draw, Sizable Product Builds

Oil prices spiked today with WTI back above $70 for the first time since Oct 2018 as traders edged down their odds of a completed Iran nuclear deal (which would likely bring new supply). US told Iran on Tuesday that it must let the UN atomic agency continue to monitor its activities, as laid out in an agreement that has been extended until June 24, or put wider talks on reviving the Iran nuclear deal at risk…

“I would anticipate that even in the event of a return to compliance with the JCPOA (2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), hundreds of sanctions will remain in place, including sanctions imposed by the Trump administration,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

The record surge in Job Openings also helped ignite today’s momentum higher in oil.

“Blinken is looking at the reality of the situation and saying even if we do get a deal, there’s a long way to go,” said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.

“All those people expecting a flood of oil are going to be disappointed.”

On the more bearish side overnight, data showing China’s crude imports were down 14.6% in May on a yearly basis weighed on futures (before the buying panic arrived).

“We’re looking for a pretty sizable drawdown in U.S. crude oil inventories, while the demand thesis keeps improving,” said John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital LLC. “This atmosphere remains bullish, as we’re heading into a structural deficit in terms of supply versus demand.”

API

  • Crude -2.108mm (-3.5mm exp)

  • Cushing -420k

  • Gasoline +2.405mm

  • Distillates +3.752mm

Analysts expected a sizable crude draw last week (the third in a row) but were disappointed in its magnitude which combined with significant product builds is less than the perfect bullish setup so many expected

Source: Bloomberg

WTI hovered just above $70 ahead of the API data and dipped after the notable product builds…

“The fundamental environment on the oil market remains favorable: fuel demand is recovering strongly not only in the United States, but also in Europe following the (partial) lifting of restrictions,” Commerzbank said.

 

 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/08/2021 – 16:35

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