Month: July 2021

President Biden’s southern border crisis is growing increasingly grave by the week. A flood of migrants continues to pour into the country as the president, earlier this year, reversed many of his predecessor’s immigration policies, including having asylum seekers remain in Mexico instead of in the U.S. and ending border wall construction.

Speaking first hand about the border crisis, because frankly, the mainstream media continues to ignore the issue, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently appeared on the Sara Carter Show podcast to discuss immigration. 

“Not only are we fighting illegal immigration and the cartels,” Paxton said, “but we’re fighting the Biden administration.” Instead of lending a hand to the Lone Star state, “They’re on the side of the cartels literally helping them to transport human beings into our state.”

As a result, the attorney general admits he’s afraid of his own federal government. “Look, I’ve never been more afraid of our own government than I am right now. I’ve never been more afraid of law enforcement,” Paxton told Carter. “These are people that we expect to hold to a very high standard, whether it’s whether it’s you know, the FBI or the CIA, these national federal organizations have become very political.”

Every passing day, the Biden administration continues to mishandle the border crisis. The reversal in former President Trump’s policies has resulted in a massive surge in migrants, including unaccompanied minors, which has overwhelmed capacity at immigration facilities. 

Paxton’s only solution to combat the administration is through a barrage of lawsuits:

“We are definitely in the fight with the Biden administration. We have 11 lawsuits right now, that’s in the first six months of his administration,” he said. “They matter because we have to fight, we have to hold them accountable for violating federal law, for not following the President’s constitutional duty.”

With the administration’s unwillingness to secure the border, South Dakota is sending their National Guard members to defend Texans from border chaos. 

On Tuesday,  Fox News’ Bill Melugin snaped images of at least 100 migrants in La Joya, Texas, who just crossed the border. 

He said this is the “largest single group of migrants I’ve ever seen is currently being apprehended here in La Joya, TX. At least 100+ and more still coming down the road. Many children coughing, some moms breastfeeding. Some I talked to are from Nicaragua, Honduras, & Guatemala.” 

One of Melugin’s images shows the +100 group of migrants lined up alongside U.S. Customs and Border Protection trucks. Agents appeared to be interviewing the migrants. There was no word on what agents were discussing. 

Here are other images of the large group. 

On Monday, former Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Ron Vitiello told “Fox & Friends First” that the “root cause of the chaos” at the southern border is Biden’s quick reversal of former President Trump’s immigration policies. 

Listen to the entire interview or skip to the 32-minute mark where Carter and Paxton talk about the border crisis. 

Authored by Winnie Han via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Counterfeit products have been circulated in China’s electronics market for a long time. However, as the global chip shortage intensifies, a large amount of refurbished, substandard fake chips are flood the market, exposing major deficiencies in China’s quality control standards.

China Economic Observer reported a chip agent revealed that to meet the growing demand, suppliers were no longer keeping their counterfeiting practices secret. Instead, they are openly creating separate production lines to expedite the sales of counterfeit or refurbished chips. Furthermore, businesses are no longer offering the shoddy products at half price. Many are being sold at full market value.

The agent identified two types of counterfeit chips. The first involves recycling used chips from e-waste by removing the logo and cleaning them for resale with new packaging. The second involves packaging the substandard chips from the regular production line and selling them as good products.

Not surprisingly, customers were often dissatisfied with the product’s performance, reliability, and durability. However, the deficiencies were not immediately evident until after the chips were used over time or under extreme conditions. At which point, it would be the customers or manufacturer of the final products who suffer a loss, while the fake chip providers often avoid troubles, according to the chip agent.

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Are Most Affected

China has long relied on imported chips. Small and medium-sized enterprises are unable to directly order from overseas manufacturers due to the small quantities, and can only purchase through third-party distributors. Thus, small and medium-sized enterprises in China have become the largest buyers of fake chips, and also the largest group of victims.

For example, a small company once designed a simple data acquisition card. The debugging stage always showed abnormal results. It raised concerns about the design. But through the help of a chip disassembly company that compared it with an authentic chip purchased through proper channels, they found that the problem stemmed from the chip being fake.

Some of the Fake Chips Flowed Overseas

The commercial district of Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen, Guangdong, is well known for its counterfeit chip dealers. It has become the largest distribution center for integrated circuit products in Asia. While most of the chips produced there stay in China, many are believed to be filling overseas supply chains, especially through the exporting of Chinese electronic products. It prompts legal liability concerns that rarely get resolved.

Zhu Yicong, a senior equity partner at Yingke (Shenzhen) Law Firm, told Chinese state media that legal actions are rarely taken against China’s questionable chip manufacturers. This is despite how China’s laws consider it illegal to offer “substandard”  or counterfeit products. But because the term “substandard” is ambiguous, independent examiners may be needed to prove the chips being sold are not genuine and reliable.

Another reason is that some buyers, due to supply shortages or cost-cutting, take a tacit attitude towards illegal chips, and deliberately mix the genuine chips with the fake ones, which encouraged the formation of a counterfeit industrial chain. Unfortunately, the end-users and consumers have to bear all the risks.

Widespread power outages in Iran which have continued this week have plunged entire cities into darkness and is fueling growing anti-government protests less than a month before hardline judiciary cleric Ebrahim Raisi enters office as president. Frequent power cuts have also high neighboring Iraq, given it’s currently reliant for much of its electrical supply on Iran’s infrastructure. 

Multiple social media videos have spread across the internet which show Iranians chanting “death to the dictator” and other anti-Ayatollah slogans, though the footage can’t be verified. 

Protests reported across #Iran tonight against power blackouts and electricity outages that major cities are seeing.

This one in city of Ray, Tehran province, tonight outside electricity company. People calling for officials resignations: pic.twitter.com/67TEGlsomp

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) July 5, 2021

Iranians have over the past months come to expect such disruptions, but starting late Saturday unusually long power outages impacted large swathes of Tehran and nearby Karaj, among others. 

The weekend Tehran outage had been unannounced (after for months the country has implemented scheduled power cuts over a severe supply shortage and rising demand), and sparked widespread anger. It went from 11pm Saturday night through early the next morning in the middle of a hot summer.

Iran hawks in the West are seizing upon the protests in an attempt to argue against restoring the JCPOA nuclear deal…

More chants of “Death to Khamenei” tonight in Shiraz over power outages in #Iran. The int’l community obsessively focuses on reviving a stale nuclear deal. But regime mismanagement, abuses, & prioritization of terror proxies over its people continue with impunity. pic.twitter.com/LbcCOU2MHM

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) July 5, 2021

The regional news source Iran International explained that the country’s power consumption this summer “has topped 60,000 megawatts per day, a more than ten percent increase compared with last year, while electricity generation has remained the same at 50,000-56,000 megawatts.” And further the report notes:

As electricity remains subsidized and cheap, there is no incentive for people to limit its use. It also makes Iran a magnate for cryptocurrency mining by huge computer farms that are consume perhaps up to ten percent of electricity supplies in the country.

In recent months authorities have vowed to disrupt all illegal crypto mining, despite it once being a key way for the country to offset the severe US sanctions blow under the past Trump administration. 

#Iranian agricultures from Khuzestan attacked Energy ministry offices due to electricity outages in last days which caused them heavy damages. pic.twitter.com/c4qrpog2xR

— BenSabti (@BeniSabti) July 6, 2021

The hotter temperatures and growing broad-level frustration has resulted in rare acts of self-criticism by the government, starting with speaker of the parliament Mohammad Qalibaf, who began this week with a written statement acknowledging the “frequent power outages throughout the country and disruption of people’s lives and businesses require planning and management.

“If the increase in consumption and excess demand is not compensated in the short term for any reason, at least stick to the announced blackout schedule so that people can plan for problems,” he continued in unusually blunt recognition of the crisis.

And this was followed Tuesday with an unprecedented apology from outgoing president Hassan Rouhani:

In a government meeting broadcast live on state TV, Rouhani acknowledged that chronic power outages over the past week have caused Iranians “plenty of pain” and expressed contrition in an unusually personal speech.

“My apologies to dear people who have faced these problems and pain,” he said.

Some Iranian towns are actually experiencing water supply cut offs to boot, given in some places it relies on power to pipe supply.

By SouthFront.org,

The United States seems to have stepped in a wasp’s nest after their most recent strikes on ‘resistance’ positions along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The US strike took place on June 27th. The response from the resistance came on the very next day.

The largest American base in Syria – at the al-Omar Oil Field came under fire by at least 8 rockets, which resulted in no casualties but significant material damage. Exactly a week later, reports surfaced of another rocket attack on al-Omar, this time the rumors were first spread by a US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) spokesman.

The reports of an attack were subsequently denied by both the US and the SDF. Other reports, however, said the blasts were caused as a result of “training” activity taking place among foreign forces there.

Alongside all of this, US convoys in Iraq are subject to daily IED attacks, with the most recent one taking place on July 5th, in the Baghdad governorate.

There is no single area of focus for these attacks, as they happen all across Iraq’s provinces.

In the very early hours of July 6th, another attack took place in Iraq – this time in Baghdad’s “Green Zone” which hosts various important buildings, such as the US Embassy. The Union 3 US base is located there, and C-RAM air defense systems were activated in response to a suicide drone attack on the compound. In the middle of the night air raid sirens sounded and then the air defenses were activated and began hunting for the UAV, successfully downing it judging by footage that’s available online.

A more successful attack was aimed at al-Asad Air Base, also located in Iraq.

On July 5th, at least three rockets landed on the base, not causing any casualties and undisclosed material damage. Ain al-Asad has been the frequent target of rocket attacks attributed to Iran-backed Shiite militias operating both in Iraq and Syria. The base was also targeted by Iranian ballistic missiles in January of 2020, after the US killed Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad with an air attack. Soleimani was Tehran’s top Middle East operator.

The United States accuses Iranian-backed militia groups of launching regular rocket attacks against its troops in Iraq. The American punitive air strikes on bases operated by these militias along the Syrian-Iraqi border come in response to these “violations”. The Hashed-al-Shaabi, an Iraqi paramilitary alliance that includes several Iranian proxies and has become the main power broker in Baghdad, said the raids killed four of its fighters in the Qaim region near the border with Syria.

As such, it is likely that the response against Washington’s forces is far from over.

The price of gold has swung to a premium in India, one of the countries that helps drive the most demand for the precious metal. It marks the first time in more than two months it has sold for a premium, according to a new report from Reuters featured on Mining.com. 

The demand comes after pandemic restrictions in the country were slightly relaxed over the last 60 days. This has catalyzed a bump higher in retail demand, as people make purchases for weddings, the report says. 

Local gold futures on Friday of last week traded at about 47,400 rupees per 10 grams of gold and dealers were charging a premium of up to $3 per ounce this week compared to last week’s discount of $12. 

One dealer based in Mumbai said: “There is slight improvement in demand from jewellers as some of them think prices could rise above $1,800 and want to stock up.”

Meanwhile premiums in China – another major driver of gold demand – narrowed to between $3 and $4 per ounce versus between $3 and $6 per ounce last week. The report also notes that a growth in shipments from Switzerland in April and May was due to local prices trading at a premium, rather than an improvement in demand. 

In Hong Kong, premiums were at $1 versus $0.70-$1 an ounce in the week prior. In Japan, demand was quiet, with premiums at $0.50 per ounce. 

Vincent Tie, sales manager at Singapore dealer, Silver Bullion, concluded: “Investors’ demand for gold has marginally increased since May as they are back in the market buying the dip, seeing current prices as a good opportunity.”

 

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Did you know that NASA is going to send a spacecraft on a suicide mission in an attempt to change the trajectory of a massive space rock?  The good news is that the space rock that NASA will be crashing this spacecraft into is not on a collision course with Earth.  It is only a test.  But why has NASA suddenly become so concerned with figuring out how to defend the Earth from giant asteroids?  Could it be possible that there is something heading toward Earth in the future that they haven’t told us about yet?

According to NASA, there are more than 26,000 asteroids that pass near Earth, and more than 2,000 of them are classified as “potentially dangerous” asteroids.

Most of those “potentially dangerous” asteroids aren’t that large, but 158 of them do have a diameter of more than one kilometer.

If one of those monsters were to hit us, it would be a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

Of course there are countless other space rocks that our scientists have not discovered yet, and those probably represent the greatest threat.  Because if you don’t see a threat coming, you can’t get prepared for it in advance.

These days, NASA officials have become quite preoccupied by the threat that giant space rocks potentially pose, and we are being told that “scientists are at work on a plan to avoid the destruction of Earth by an errant asteroid”.  The following comes from an article that was just published by the Boston Globe…

NASA and a cadre of the world’s leading engineers and space scientists are at work on a plan to avoid the destruction of Earth by an errant asteroid like the one 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs, created a cloud of dust so impenetrable that it blocked out the sun, and plunged the planet into a prolonged winter that sent half of all plant life into extinction.

Personally, I think that this is something that NASA should definitely be focusing on, because the threat is very real.

Most people don’t realize this, but our planet is actually being pelted by space debris on a constant basis at this point.  In fact, NASA says that we are being hit by very small objects “every day”…

Every day, Earth is bombarded by tons of dust and sand-sized particles from the solar system. Meteoroids burn up as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere causing little or no damage. They are easy to spot, streaking across the night sky in brilliant, short-lived bursts of light. Of more concern are the asteroids that pass by Earth unnoticed; they are difficult to detect and track as observers depend on reflected sunlight to spot them.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the objects that we encounter are too small to do any damage.

But it is just a matter of time before a really big space rock comes along.

NASA officials like to give the impression that they have a really good idea of what is going on up there, but the truth is that our ability to detect large space rocks is still quite limited.  In May, a “potentially hazardous” asteroid that came close to Earth was only discovered about a week before it arrived…

The reason why 2021 KT1 is news is that NASA estimates that it’s between 492 feet/150 meters and 1,082 feet/330 meters in diameter. It wasn’t observed until late in May 2021 just a week before its closest pass.

And late last year a fairly large asteroid was not discovered until it had already buzzed dangerously close to our planet…

Wow. A low-flying space rock set a record last Friday (appropriately, the 13th), when 2020 VT4 passed just under 400 kilometers (250 miles) over the Southern Pacific.

The asteroid was spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 14th, just 15 hours after approach. This is not uncommon for fast-movers, especially asteroids that are coming at the Earth from our sunward blind-spot, like 2020 VT4.

So if a major threat is headed our way, we may or may not see it coming in advance.

If we do have advance warning that a huge asteroid is coming, obviously we would want to try to do something about it.  With such a scenario in mind, NASA will soon be crashing the DART spacecraft into a giant space rock called Dimorphos…

Developed by a team of scientists from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, DART is an unmanned, remotely controlled astronomical suicide mission designed to nudge an asteroid that is half a mile in diameter out of its orbit. Doomsayers take note: This is only a test. The asteroid in question, Didymos — Greek for “twin,” and so named because it was discovered to be paired with its own small moon — is not actually on a collision course with Earth.

Sometime between Thanksgiving week (perhaps as soon as the evening of Nov. 23) and February 2022, the team behind DART will launch it from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft will, if all goes according to plan, travel 6.8 million miles to reach and collide with Didymos’s moonlet, Dimorphos, which is 525 feet in diameter.

Is NASA testing out technology that they plan to use on another giant space rock at a later date?

Some have suggested that an asteroid known as Apophis could hit us on April 13th, 2029…

On April 13, 2029 (which happens to be Friday the 13th), something unsettling will happen.

A decent-sized asteroid, the 1,100-foot-wide Apophis, will pass so close to Earth it’ll be visible in the sky from certain places. Crucially, the giant rock will not strike our humble planet. But it will pass closer than 20,000 miles from the surface, which is closer than where some of the United States’ most prized weather satellites orbit.

But NASA insists that Apophis will not hit us “for at least a century”…

After its discovery in 2004, asteroid 99942 Apophis had been identified as one of the most hazardous asteroids that could impact Earth. But that impact assessment changed as astronomers tracked Apophis and its orbit became better determined.

Now, the results from a new radar observation campaign combined with precise orbit analysis have helped astronomers conclude that there is no risk of Apophis impacting our planet for at least a century.

Estimated to be about 1,100 feet (340 meters) across, Apophis quickly gained notoriety as an asteroid that could pose a serious threat to Earth when astronomers predicted that it would come uncomfortably close in 2029. Thanks to additional observations of the near-Earth object (NEO), the risk of an impact in 2029 was later ruled out, as was the potential impact risk posed by another close approach in 2036.

The orbit of Apophis is now very well known by astronomers all over the globe.  To me, all of the giant space rocks that are floating around up there that we don’t know about represent a much greater threat.

Unfortunately, the number of large space rocks going by our planet has been steadily increasing, and I believe that there is a good chance that we could see an asteroid impact long before 2029 ever rolls around.

If NASA officials know about such a threat, for now they aren’t admitting that to the public.

But they are admitting that they are trying to figure out how to deflect a very large asteroid, and that should definitely be getting our attention.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Former NYPD police captain Eric Adams has officially won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary despite a vote-counting ‘discrepancy’ last week which – had it not been caught – would have likely resulted in former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia clinching the win.

The Associated Press called the race for Adams shortly after the most recent batch of results were released in New York’s ranked-choice primary on Tuesday afternoon, setting him up as the overwhelming favorite to win the general election in November, according to The Hill.

Adams, a former police captain who entered primary voting as the frontrunner, bested a crowded field of Democrats, including former New York City Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley. -The Hill

Adams will face Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who sailed to an easy win over restaurateur Fernando Mateo in last month’s Republican mayoral primary, receiving 68.9% of the Republican vote.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) disclosed from her ivory tower late last week that her investor husband, Paul Pelosi, made several now-profitable trades in various securities.

For starters, Pelosi bought both Amazon on May 21 when it closed at $3,259.05. Fast forward six weeks and great news for Amazon after the Pentagon pulled the rug out from Microsoft’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing deal (opening the door for Bezos), and the trade is looking great.

Then there’s Pelosi’s 40% Nvidia score after a June 3rd, pre-split purchase. 

The worst thing about these transactions is that they were done in MAY and JUNE, but disclosed in July!

Incredible when elected officials are using highly leveraged options on maybe private information

Paging @ryangrim @krystalball @esaagar @TheYoungTurks @FoxBusiness @cvpayne

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 6, 2021

That’s not all! 

Paul Pelosi on May 21 spent up to $250,000 on 50 Apple calls that have a strike price of $100 and that expire on June 17, 2022. He also bought 20 Amazon calls, costing up to $1 million, that have a strike price of $3,000 and that also expire on June 17, 2022. 

On June 18, Paul Pelosi, exercised his Alphabet call options giving him the right to buy 4,000 shares at a price of $1,200 apiece, or $4.8 million. The Alphabet call options were originally purchased on Feb. 27, 2020. 

The transactions were disclosed in a filing on Friday, July 2. –Fox Business

According to Fox Business, “The speaker has no involvement or prior knowledge of these transactions,” adding “The speaker does not own any stock.”

Pelosi purchases multi-million dollars worth of FAANG and $NVDA call options in a report out minutes ago pic.twitter.com/cKS0owvFZU

— congresstrading.com (@congresstrading) July 6, 2021

The Pelosis have at least one ardent defender in former Rep. Jill Long Thompson (D-IN), who insists that even though Paul is married to the House Speaker, it’s unlikely that he would “have any information that someone else wouldn’t,” adding “Members of Congress make it clear what their positions are on these issues and the fact that they’re working on a piece of legislation that would be public information.”

On June 11, the House Judiciary Committee advanced several bills with bipartisan support which would limit the powers of FAANG companies. The bills, which passed through committee by slim margins, have yet to be voted on by the House.

This is not the first time that investments made by Paul Pelosi have been made in close proximity to happenings in Congress. 

Paul Pelosi in March exercised $1.95 million worth of Microsoft call options less than two weeks before the tech stalwart secured a $22 billion contract to supply U.S. Army combat troops with augmented reality headsets. 

In January, he purchased up to $1 million of Tesla calls before the Biden administration delivered its plans to provide incentives to promote the shift away from traditional automobiles and toward electric vehicles. –Fox Business

The SEC is a joke.#Tesla #GameStop #StockMarket pic.twitter.com/qrIUjZ3h5j

— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) February 2, 2021

Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats are going after Redditors who’ve banded together to squeeze meme stocks.