Month: June 2021

South Korea has become ground zero for speculative crypto traders looking to try and build wealth by hoisting their life savings into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

This means wild successes when the price bitcoin and other coins moves higher, but also devastating mood swings when cryptos crash. 

“I can’t think of anything… It’s completely unbearable,” one young woman told Nikkei after investing her life savings of about $900 into virtual currency “as a way to build a nest egg in a country where saving for the future”.

She had been riding high in April when cryptos were making new highs, but has since experienced a 40% drawdown. She told Nikkei: “I’ll have to hold until the price goes up again. I’m not sure how many years that will take, though.”

She’s a microcosm of a country which accounts for 10% of all trades in crypto. The massive volume sometimes means that cryptos can trade with premiums of up to 20% in South Korea. Trading is focused mostly on altcoins, with only about 10% of the virtual trade going to bitcoin.

And the traders are mostly people in their 20s and 30s. 2.5 million new accounts were opened in the country during the first quarter of 2021. 33% of those were people in their 20s and 31% were people in their 30s. 

53% of university students polled in a new survey this week “expressed a positive opinion about investing into cryptocurrency” while 24% said they have pulled the trigger.

The biggest appeal was listed at 33% of participants drawn to the “high rate of return”. But even more of a stand out is the 15% who referred to crypto as the “last chance of escape” from their current social status.

The “last chance of escape” is indicative of many South Korean traders who believe that the “conventional path to happiness their parents took — getting married, buying a home and having kids” no longer is attainable. Instead, they look to cryptos to try and “reverse their fortunes”. 

And those who speak out against cryptos are ridiculed. Eun Sung-soo, chairman of the Financial Services Commission said last month that cryptos “are not securities bound by the Capital Market Acts, but are instead virtual assets with no known substance.” 

Eun said: “The government has no duty to protect them. If they are walking down the wrong path, adults must warn them that they are making a mistake.”

That touched off a “firestorm of criticism from young people.” Some called for Eun’s resignation, posting things online like: 

“You have people in their 40s and 50s speculating on housing upon which our citizens livelihood depends, yet it is inappropriate for people in their 20s and 30s to invest in coins? There’s a whole lot we can learn from The Grown-Ups.”

South Korea is implementing new rules for crypto come later this year, requiring crypto platforms to partner with banks to ensure legitimacy. Bithumb, Upbit, Coinone and Korbit have already struck banking deals, while most other banks are hesitant to strike deals. 

Even more worrisome is the fact that many crypto trades are being financed with debt. The country’s central bank noted that household debt grew 8% at the end of 2020 from a year earlier – however, debt by those between 20-39 was up 17%.

Kim So-young, professor of economics at Seoul National University, concluded: “The level of borrowing by young people is not that great, so a series of personal bankruptcies by that contingent will only have a minor effect on the financial system. However, young people who are about to enter the labor market are going bankrupt and being left unable to plan for the future, which will result in a loss for the economy as a whole.”

Authored by Jon Sanders via The American Institute for Economic Research,

If you’re among those of us who aren’t tribally invested in Covid politics but would like good information about when life will resume as normal, chances are you’re interested in herd immunity. You’re likely not interested in having to rely on the Internet Archive for good information on herd immunity. Alas, it’s become a go-to place for retrieving, as it were, previously published information on herd immunity that became inconvenient post-vaccine and then virtually Memory-Holed.

Over the past 15 months, the litany of Experts’ True Facts and Science regarding various aspects of SARS-CoV-2 has changed more often than the starting lineup of a bad minor league ball club. Covid-19 is spread by droplets, especially from asymptomatic people, until one day it was airborne all along and people who weren’t sick in all likelihood weren’t even sick. Stay at home, you’re safer indoors, even stay away from parks and beaches; well, actually, outdoors is the place to be. Masks don’t work against viruses and are actually unhealthy to wear if you’re not sick, then suddenly they did work and without one you might as well be shooting people. Everyone knows and PolitiFact verified that the virus couldn’t have been created in the prominent infectious disease lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in bats coincidentally at Covid Ground Zero until, one day, PolitiFact had to retract the entire “Pants on Fire!” article. And so forth.

Unfortunately, information about herd immunity has also not been immune to this kind of meddling. Until recent months, people readily understood that active immunity came about either by natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity. Natural immunity comes from battling and defeating an actual infection, then having your immune system primed for the rest of your life to fight it off if it ever shows up again. This immunity is achieved at a sometimes very high personal price. 

Vaccine-induced immunity is to prime your immune system with a weaker, non-threatening form of the invading infection, so that it’s ready to fight off the real thing should you ever encounter it, and without your having first to risk severe illness or death. 

Those interested in herd immunity in itself likely don’t have a moral or political preference for one form of immunity to the exclusion of the other. Immunity is immunity, regardless of whether a particular person has it naturally or by a vaccine. All immunity contributes to herd immunity.

Others, however, are much less circumspect. They seem to have forgotten the ultimate goal of the public campaign for people to receive vaccination against Covid-19. It’s not to be vaccinated; it’s to have immunity. People with natural immunity — i.e., people whose immune systems have faced Covid-19 and won — don’t need a vaccine.

They do, however, need to be considered in any good-faith discussion of herd immunity. There are two prongs to herd immunity, as we used to all know, and those with natural immunity are the prong that’s being ignored. It’s not just mere oversight, however. Fostering such ignorance can lead to several bad outcomes:

• People with natural immunity could be kept from employment, education, travel, normal commerce, and who knows what other things if they don’t submit to a vaccine they don’t need in order to fulfill a head count that confuses a means with the end

• The nation could already be at herd immunity while governors and health bureaucrats continue to exert extreme emergency powers, harming people’s liberties and livelihoods

• People already terrified of Covid — including especially those who’ve already had it — would continue to live in fear, avoiding human interaction and worrying beyond all reason

• People could come to distrust even sound advice from experts about important matters, as they witness and grow to expect how what “the experts” counsel diverges from what they know to be wise counsel while it conforms to and amplifies the temporary needs of the political class

Those of us wanting good information certainly don’t want any of those outcomes. But others seem perfectly fine to risk them. They include not only elected officials, members of the media, political talking heads, self-important bureaucrats, and their wide-eyed acolytes harassing shoppers, but strangely also highly prominent health organizations.

For example, late last year Jeffrey Tucker showed that the World Health Organization (WHO) suddenly, and “for reasons unknown,” changed its definition of “herd immunity.” Using screenshots from a cached version on the Internet Archive, Tucker showed how the WHO altered its definition in such a way as to erase completely the role of natural immunity. Before, the WHO rightly said it “happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” The WHO’s change stated that it happens “if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” Not long after Tucker’s piece appeared, the WHO restored natural immunity to its definition.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seemingly apropos of nothing, on May 19 issued a “safety communication” to warn that FDA-authorized SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests “should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time.” The FDA’s concern appears to be that taking an antibody test too soon after receiving a vaccination may fail to show vaccine-induced antibodies, but why preclude its use for “identifying people with an adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2 from a recent or prior infection?” Especially after stating outright that “Antibody tests can play an important role in identifying individuals who may have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and may have developed an adaptive immune response.”

Then there is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that ubiquitous font of fatuous guidance. He had told people that herd immunity would be at 60 to 70 percent immunity, and then he started publicly cinching those numbers up: 75 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent, even 90 percent (as if Covid-19 were as infectious as measles). He is quoted in the New York Times admitting to doing so deliberately to affect people’s behavior:

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.“

Now — or better put, as of this writing — Fauci has taken to arguing herd immunity is a “mystical elusive number,” a distracting “endgame,” and therefore not worth considering. Only vaccinations are worth counting. As he put it recently, “We don’t want to get too hung up on reaching this endgame of herd immunity because every day that you put 2 million to 3 million vaccinations into people [it] makes society be more and more protected.”

While composing an article about natural immunity and herd immunity for my home state of North Carolina, I happened to notice that the Mayo Clinic had removed a compelling factoid about natural immunity. It’s something I had quoted in an earlier discussion of the matter and wanted to revisit it. 

Here’s what the Mayo Clinic once wanted people to know in its page on “Herd Immunity and COVID-19” with respect to natural immunity: “[T]hose who survived the 1918 flu (influenza) pandemic were later immune to infection with the H1N1 flu, a subtype of influenza A.” The Mayo Clinic pointed out that H1N1 was during the 2009-10 flu season, which would be 92 years later. That finding attested to just how powerful and long-lived natural immunity could be.

As can be seen from the Internet Archive, however, sometime after April 14 the Mayo Clinic removed that compelling historical aside:

The Mayo Clinic also reoriented its page to feature vaccination over “the natural infection method” (method?) and added a section on “the outlook for achieving herd immunity in the U.S.” This new section stated that “it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity” but encouraged people nonetheless that “the FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at protecting against severe illness requiring hospitalization and death … allowing people to better be able to live with the virus.”

Why, from people who know better, is there so much interest in downplaying or erasing natural immunity? 

Is it because it’s hard to quantify how many people have natural immunity? Is it out of a mix of good intentions and worry, that discussing natural immunity would somehow discourage (“nudge,” in Fauci’s term) people from getting vaccines who otherwise would? Is it simple oversight, being so focused on vaccinations that they just plain forgot about natural immunity? Or is something else at work?

Whatever the reason, it’s keeping Americans in the dark about how many people have active immunity from Covid-19. It’s keeping people needlessly fearful and suspicious of each other. It’s empowering executive overreach. Worst of all, it’s tempting people to consider government and business restrictions on the unvaccinated, regardless of their actual immunity.

Former Temple University business school dean Moshe Porat is defending inflating his school’s ranking to U.S. News and World Report by feeding the periodical false data. 

Porat asked a judge to dismiss fraud charges against him in a May 28 court filing, claiming “that the government hadn’t sufficiently shown that he profited from the alleged scheme,” Bloomberg reports.

This was, of course, while he was running the school’s Richard J. Fox School of Business, which he headed up for more than 20 years. 

Porat’s lawyers argued that “the Supreme Court had previously established that a certain amount of monetary gain was necessary to sustain a wire fraud charge” and that such a gain could not be proven, despite whether or not prosecutors could prove he engaged in a deceitful scheme. 

Recall, we reported back in April when Porat was charged federally for “manipulating data” to become the number one ranked MBA program in the country. He was indicted on one count each of conspiracy and wire fraud. 

Isaac Gottlieb, a statistics professor, and Marjorie O’Neill, who submitted data to magazines that rank college programs, were also named in the indictment, according to the report. 

Temple’s online MBA had been ranked top in the nation by U.S. News and World Report since 2015. The university stayed at the top of the list for 3 years after that and used its ranking to attract students and win donations. 

Porat allegedly hand picked a small group of employees to focus on the rankings, including stat professor Gottleib, who was also to reverse engineer the magazine’s ranking criteria. Porat appointed O’Neill as the sole liaison between the university and the magazine. 

The indictment “claims Fox manipulated data in its part-time MBA program, conflating its data with other programs to drive better rankings,” NBC reported.

U.S. News called out Temple’s online MBA data and stripped the school of its ranking. Temple was then forced to pay the U.S. Department of Education $700,000 and later settled a class action suit by offering $250,000 in scholarships.

Temple called Porat the “mastermind” of the fraud and asked him to resign. 

Attorney Carolyn P. Short wrote in court papers: “He conceived it, controlled it and kept it hidden, only to try later to cover it up. M. Moshe Porat bears personal responsibility for the Fox School’s intentional submission of false ranking data.”

Porat says he is being used as a scapegoat by Temple. His lawyer commented: “We are disappointed that, after cooperating with the government in its investigation, the United States Attorney’s Office decided to bring these charges, which Dr. Porat vigorously denies.”

“Dr. Porat dedicated forty years of his life to serving Temple University, first as a faculty member, and ultimately as Dean of the Fox Business School, and he did so with distinction. He looks forward to defending himself against these charges and to clearing his name,” the statement continued.

The kicker? Porat is still a tenured professor at the university and is making $316,000 per year. He hasn’t taught a class or published research since 2018. 

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In twenty-first century America, millions of Americans—Christians and social conservatives especially—are finding that the nation’s most influential institutions appear to be implacably hostile toward them.

These institutions include universities, public schools, the news media, and government bureaucracies. Moreover, corporate America has increasingly embraced a posture of hostility toward groups considered to be “right wing” or conservative.

Recent examples are numerous, to say the least. Major League Baseball, for instance, recently moved its all-star game out of the state of Georgia with the explicit purpose of punishing voters and policymakers who supported policies MLB didn’t like. These “objectionable” policies were mostly supported by conservatives. Meanwhile, YouTube—owned by Google corporation—bans content creators who express opinions Google’s employees and leaders disagree with. These opinions are usually ones we would consider to be “conservative” or at least “anti-Leftist.” Twitter and Facebook employ a similar bias when actively intervening to ban users and opinions deemed unacceptable by corporate personnel.

In other words, corporate power is being used to wage ideological battles far beyond the usual issues of minimizing the firm’s tax burden or avoiding regulatory compliance costs. Corporate America has chosen a side in the culture war.

This evolution from market entrepreneur to exploitive plutocrat illustrates a problem with the interventionist state in a mixed economy: economic power tends to be converted to political power.  Moreover, so long as consumers continue to pour resources into powerful firms through the marketplace, these firms’ exploitation of competitors, taxpayers, and ideological adversaries is likely to continue. 

Market Democracy: How Firms Get Rich in the Marketplace

Ludwig von Mises understood that in a market economy, the firms that are most successful are those that succeed in the “democracy” of the marketplace. Mises describes this “consumers’ democracy” in Socialism:

“When we call a capitalist society a consumers’ democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers’ ballot, held daily in the marketplace.”

In other words, the money goes where the consumers want it to go as directed in their daily spending decisions in the marketplace. Those business owners who convince consumers to willingly hand over their money are the business owners who end up controlling the most resources.1

This is a frequent theme in Mises’s writing. If we imagine the market economy as an immense seafaring ship, Mises notes, the capitalists are only the “steersmen” of the ship. If they wish to succeed, the capitalists must ultimately take orders from the consumers who are the real captains of the ship.

This is generally the case with most of the firms which we today find are increasingly and openly political and ideological. Firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like became mega-companies by delivering a product or service that a large number of people freely chose to use.

This doesn’t make these firms superior on a moral or philosophical level, of course. Just because a firm is good at delivering what the consumers want doesn’t mean it is spiritually edifying, or morally upright. These firms’ success merely means people like to use their products. The end. That’s it.

After all, we can point to plenty of successful enterprises that aren’t exactly laying the foundation for a virtuous and prosperous commonwealth. Pornographers, for instance, make boatloads of money. They’re very popular with consumers. At least with male ones. This doesn’t make pornographers national treasures. 

Corporate Welfare Is Only Part of the Picture

But it is hard to deny that firms like Google and Facebook got to where they are by winning “votes” in the “consumers’ democracy.” Nonetheless, some critics of today’s corporate jihad against ideological adversaries insist that these firms are only successful because they are “monopolies” or that they only gained so much market share by dirty tricks and corporate welfare schemes.

These claims are generally unconvincing. Certainly, these firms are today able to gain some advantages by manipulating the policy environment through lobbying and other political efforts. Yes, these firms have likely managed to increase profits and diminish competition through intellectual property laws, through tax breaks, and through regulations that favor large firms over small firms. These are bad things, and these firms increase the profitability of their companies at the expense of both competitors and taxpayers. 

But the primary and most fundamental reasons that these firms became large and powerful in the first place is the fact they were skilled at the game of market democracy. Direct competitors to Google and Facebook and Twitter exist. Few people choose to use them.  There are plenty of things to watch on television other than major league baseball—many of which are a lot less boring than baseball. Yet countless consumers continue to watch MLB games anyway. 

Those who dislike these companies don’t like to hear it, but this is the reality: Google, MLB, Facebook, et al are powerful companies not simply because they are big and enjoy some regulatory advantages. They’re winning mostly because the general public either actively likes them or at least can’t be bothered with finding alternatives. 

If we are upset with the fact that these companies command immense amounts of resources and can use these resources for political purposes, it’s easy to find who is most to blame: the American consumer. 

The Losing Side of Market Democracy

In a system of market democracy, the consumers chose the winners. But since we live in a mixed economy and under an interventionist regime, those winners are now using their resources to crush their ideological opponents. 

This is very frustrating to those on the receiving end of this corporate political aggression, of course. Perhaps even more discouraging is the fact that everywhere they look, conservatives and Christians see relatives and neighbors continue to voluntarily pour their own money and resources into the firms that are avowed enemies of anyone skeptical of today’s corporate ideological zeitgeist. No matter how hostile of condescending these firms and their leaders get, hundreds of millions of consumers of all ideological bents just keep slavishly logging in to Facebook and watching many hours of videos on YouTube.  

What Can Be Done?

For those who keep losing to their ideological opponents in the marketplace, this raises a question: if a large number of consumers insist on supporting firms and CEOs who are openly hostile to a certain segment of the population, what can be done?

There are three possibilities:

1. Use the regime’s coercive power punitively against one’s ideological opponents.

2. Use regime power to strip opponents of any advantages they may enjoy in terms of monopoly power, regulatory favors, tax advantages, and political influence.

3. Deprive these ideological opponents of resources by successfully competing against them in the democracy of the marketplace.

The first option is the most attractive to the average American playing a short-sighted game. It’s the usual political “solution”: I see a problem, so let’s pass new government regulations to “fix” things! In this case, we might envision laws designed to  make social media companies be “fair.” Of course, we’ve seen attempts at making media be “fair” before. Federal regulators spent much of the twentieth century regulating “fairness” in media. To see the success of that effort, we need only look at most TV news. Regulation fails again and again. Moreover, it only paves the way for larger amounts of bureaucratic control over the lives of ordinary Americans. When the other side again gains control of the regime, these regulatory powers are then used against those who naively thought the regulations would fix anything.

The second option is more promising. It is always a good idea to seek out and destroy any regulations, statutes, or taxes that favor large firms over smaller firms and potential competitors. This means abolishing any tax “incentives” that can be accessed by large firms, but not by smaller firms. It means slashing the duration of patents and other forms of intellectual property. It means ending any special legal protections enjoyed by these firms—such as those in so-called Section 230. 

But even with all those legal advantages and tricks removed, these firms may continue to be successful and influential firms for many years to come. So long as these firms enjoy the votes of consumers in the “consumers’ democracy” the firms are likely to be profitable. The firms will consequently have access to immense amounts of resources, with which they can buy political influence and promote their own vision for American society. 

Only when these firms face real competition from successful competitors—or when consumers change their buying habits in other ways—will the situation change. That’s bound to happen eventually. But for those who fear the political clout of these corporate behemoths, it’s imperative to speed up the process. 

More than a year since the virus pandemic began, New York City’s economy is roaring back open. But at least one segment of the metro area’s economy remains in dire straits: the office space market. 

According to Bloomberg, citing a commercial real estate brokerage report by Colliers, Manhattan’s supply of office space continues to hit new records even as leasing increases. 

The availability rate rose for a 12th straight month in May to 17%; inventory since the pandemic began jumped 70% to a whopping 92 million square feet. 

Colliers had some good news. It said demand is coming back with leases increasing 8% versus last May, while the average asking rents rose 0.4% to $73.26 a square foot.

Even before the pandemic, Manhattan’s office market was in a slump. Compound that work-at-home fad as becoming the “new normal” and the supply glut of corporate space in the borough could be a long-lasting trend, pressuring rents and eventually forcing building operators into financial distress. 

According to data from Kastle Systems, approximately 18% of office workers in the metro area are back at work as of late May. JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Facebook Inc. are some companies preparing to bring employees back to offices in the coming months. 

Colliers said subleasing represented 23% of total availability, the lowest since last July. It said sublease inventory space is 75% more than since the pandemic began.

Emptied skyscrapers across Manhattan don’t just apply to office buildings. There’s also surging residential inventory as people have been fleeing the liberal-run city in droves for suburbia. After all, who wants to be cooped up in a studio flat during a virus pandemic as the town descends into a socio-economic disaster. For the same price as a flat in Manhattan, one can purchase a home with acreage in the countryside. 

Kastle’s data on Americans getting back to work on a nationwide basis show returning to the office is happening at a snail’s speed. 

It seems like work-at-home is becoming permanent, and commercial real estate could be in for a reckoning once the Federal Reserve begins to taper.  

Authored by Mathew Di Salvo via Decrypt.co,

In brief

• Miami’s Bitcoin 2021 conference kicked off today.

• Ron Paul railed against the Federal Reserve and said it should be scrapped.

• “Bitcoin better be considered seriously,” said the former Texas congressman. 

The Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami kicked off today with libertarian and ex-presidential candidate Ron Paul slamming the Federal Reserve and saying that Bitcoin needs be “considered seriously,” given the current state of the economy and the Fed’s monetary policy.

The former black sheep of the Republican Party told the Miami crowd that the US’s current monetary policy is a disaster and that the central bank should be scrapped entirely. Paul made a name for himself during the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections with calls to “end the Fed.” 

Touching on President Joe Biden’s $6 trillion budget proposal—which would be the biggest federal spending since World War 2—Paul said that current economic policy can’t go on for much longer. 

“The problems are going to get worse,” he told an enthusiastic crowd.

“There’s a lot of free money that’s circulating these days, and it’s all fake and it’s all political corruption that goes in. Free money means they either print it or steal it.” 

He added:

“If you know anything about me, I’ve been in politics a couple of years…I have a solution. One of my solutions for foreign policy was when we were in places we shouldn’t be in, I said, ‘We just marched in, let’s march out.’” 

“And that’s what we should do with the Federal Reserve too—we don’t need the Federal Reserve, it’s built with corruption so what we need to do is get rid of it,” he said.

Paul, a former Republican congressman for Texas, was referring to the US government’s stimulus package initiated last year to confront the economic effects of lockdowns and quarantines as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The US government has since pledged to spend more—something that the most ardent cryptocurrency enthusiasts think will eventually cause inflation, the downfall of the dollar and the mass adoption of Bitcoin.

Paul, who previously said that Bitcoin should be free from government interference, added that he doesn’t know much about cryptocurrency, but that it could provide solutions to what he deems is problematic government spending. 

“[Government spending is] going to work well for Bitcoin,” he said.

“Bitcoin better be considered seriously.” 

The 2021 Bitcoin conference in Miami started today and will run until tomorrow, with over 50,000 people expected to attend. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor and pro-skater Tony Hawk are all guest speakers.

Real Vision editors Max Wiethe and Jack Farley make sense of a truly odd week, one that began with the reappearance of memestock mania and ended with the S&P 500 flirting with all-time highs (and with the VIX very close to a pre-pandemic low). Farley and Wiethe cover today’s strong rally in stocks as well as bonds, on the release of the U.S. non-farm payrolls data which missed economist expectations. Farley inspects Bill Ackman’s latest plans to acquire a slice of Universal Music Group via his SPAC, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings ($PSTH), and Wiethe looks forward to next week’s Fed meeting and release of the latest inflation data.

After more than two years of UFO ‘evidence’ via the New York Times detailing dozens of encounters between Navy pilots and unidentified aerial phenomena, the punchline – according to an upcoming government report, is: ‘we don’t think it’s aliens, but it’s not Americans‘ – and therefore America should probably spend untold billions on figuring out how to make 90-degree turns at mach 5 and disappear into the ocean, after disabling a nuclear installation.

Or, as journalist Caitlin Johnstone puts it: The MSM is wasting no time using the UFO report to promote an arms race.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via substack:

The New York Times has published an article on the contents of the hotly anticipated US government report on UFOs, as per usual based on statements of anonymous officials, and as per usual promoting narratives that are convenient for imperialists and war profiteers.

Together with one voice, the anonymous US officials and the “paper of record” which is supposed to scrutinize US officials assure us definitively that the mysterious aerial phenomena that have reportedly been witnessed by military personnel are certainly not any kind of secret US technology, but could totally be aliens and could definitely be a sign that the Russians or Chinese have severely lapped America’s lagging military development.

“The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology,” NYT was reportedly told by the officials. “That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret.”

Oh well if the US government has ruled out secret US government weaponry programs, hot damn that’s good enough for me. Great journalism you guys.

One senior official said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology.

He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology https://t.co/bgYtohKC9O

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) June 4, 2021

“Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China,” the Times reports. “One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology.”

“Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers it the ability to evade American missile-defense technology,” NYT adds. “China has also developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers’ hypersonic research had far outpaced American military development.”

The article goes on to describe how the US military have been “unsettled” by aircraft moving and behaving in ways known technologies cannot explain. The implication of scary foreign adversaries having “outpaced American military development” to such an extent is of course that the US military is going to require a far bigger budget with far more intensive weapons development.

This would be the same New York Times that has consistently supported all of the US military’s devastating acts of mass murder around the world, by the way.

This won’t be the last time we hear the imperial media warning us that UFOs may be a sign of a frightening gap in technology leaving the US defenseless against far more powerful foreign foes, and they’ve already been priming us for it. Republican Rachel Maddow aka Tucker Carlson has been shrilly pushing this narrative for weeks now and demanding that the US government do more to address the fact that in alleged encounters with these aircraft, “our military was completely outmatched technologically by whatever these were.”

“UFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they’re a prima facie challenge to the United States military,” Carlson said on a segment last month. “They’re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they’re doing it with impunity. And they appear to be focused on the U.S. military.”

“Why isn’t the Pentagon more focused on this? It seems like a threat if there ever was one,” Carlson huffed.

In another segment Carlson had on military intelligence veteran Luis Elizondo, a leading figure in the steadily intensifying new UFO narrative which kicked off in 2017, claiming the aforementioned Senate report on the subject will reveal “an intelligence failure on the part of the US intel community on the level of 9/11.”

“If there’s a foreign adversary that can put a nuclear warhead within moments over Washington DC, okay, that’s a problem,” Elizondo told Carlson’s Fox News audience.

All this over some completely unverifiable testimony, and a few videos being confirmed by the Pentagon which can all be explained by easily identifiable mundane phenomena.

I can’t predict the future, but I won’t be at all surprised if we begin seeing this arms race angle become the dominant aspect of this UFO story in the coming months/years. It would certainly fit the pattern of the US war machine and mass media promoting completely unverifiable allegations about foreign governments to justify further cold war escalations.

In the early sixties President John F Kennedy falsely promoted the “missile gap” narrative, telling the public that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in nuclear weapons when he knew full well the US nuclear arsenal had always far surpassed the USSR’s in number, quality and deployment. Kennedy used this hawkish narrative to win an election and advance the largest peacetime expansion of US military power ever, leading directly to the events which gave rise to the Cuban Missile Crisis which came far closer to ending our world than most of us like to think about.

I have no idea what if anything is going on with these UFO phenomena, but I do know the world-threatening new cold war the US is waging against Russia and China is insane. There is no valid reason our planet’s dominant power structures cannot at the very least cease brandishing armageddon weapons at each other and begin collaborating toward a better world together.

Reject the propagandists and cold warriors, no matter how elaborate or bizarre their manipulations become. Keep an eye on these bastards, and help spread awareness of what they’re about.

_______________________

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Yesterday Russia announced the dramatic news at its own ‘Davos-style’ economic forum in St. Petersburg which is running this week that it will dump the US dollar from its $186 billion National Wealth Fund. As we detailed previously it comes as Washington continues to tighten the sanctions screws on Moscow, blaming it for everything from a series corporate cyberattacks that’s appeared to target American infrastructure to election interference to expansionist aims in Ukraine to cracking down on opposition activists.  

On Friday President Vladimir Putin hinted further at the rationale behind what was obviously a retaliatory and defiant we don’t need the US strong bit of messaging from Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov at the forum – who emphasized the day before, “We can make this change rather quickly, within a month”. Putin followed during his address by charging the United States with using the dollar as a tool to “wage economic and political war” on rival countries. Thursday’s prior National Wealth Fund announcement had delineated it will alternately pursue investments in euro, Chinese yuan as well as gold assets.

Putin in his Friday speech hung a further threat over Washington, saying according to Reuters that Russia “may consider settling transactions for oil and gas in other national currencies and the euro.” 

And further, “Putin said it would be a serious blow to the US dollar if Russia’s oil companies stopped using the currency, but that Moscow did not want to do that.” Here’s more of his comments addressing this future provocative last-ditch scenario:

Putin also said European nations should pay for Russian gas in euros, as Moscow pursues its de-dollarization efforts amid US sanctions.

“The euro is completely acceptable for us in terms of gas payments. This can be done, of course, and probably should be done,” he said.

Putin went on to deplore what he said was Washington’s use of the dollar as an economic and political tool, saying that “its use as an instrument of competition and political struggle has hurt its role as the world reserve currency”.

“We need to find ways to regularize these relations,” he said of the admittedly “extremely low level” status in relations with the Biden administration. With just under two weeks to go until the much anticipated in-person summit with Joe Biden set for June 16 in Geneva, he additionally accused the US of openly seeking to “hold back” Russia’s development. 

Wasn’t the invasion of Iraq fundamentally an oil currency war?

OPEC momentum towards the euros as an oil transaction currency standard and the macroeconomics of the “petro-dollar” was considered a real threat to US economic hegemony at the time

So what’s Putin playing at …? https://t.co/kUvpvkDH5g

— unworry (@unworry) June 4, 2021

He asserted that Russia ultimately “has no issues with the US” but it’s the United States that “has an issue with us: they want to hold back our development, they talk about it publicly.”

All of this appears to confirm the pessimistic assessments of officials on either side head of the summit, who are not expecting any “breakthroughs” – instead it appears the rhetoric continues growing hotter, and threats getting progressively louder. But Washington has long take threats of dumping the dollar as fighting words, as its recent legacy of regime change wars might attest.