Month: December 2021

Authored by James Bovard,

Federal agencies don’t count what politicians don’t want to know. President Biden and other Democrats continuously invoke “science and data” to sanctify all their Covid-19 mandates and policies, but the same shenanigans and willful omissions have characterized Covid data.

During his update on his Winter Covid Campaign on Tuesday, President Biden declared, “Almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” This was true from the start of the pandemic in early 2020, until the vaccines’ efficacy began failing badly in recent months. Oregon officially classifies roughly a quarter of its Covid fatalities since August as “vaccine breakthrough deaths.” In Illinois, roughly 30 percent of Covid fatalities have occurred among fully vaccinated individuals. According to the Vermont Department of Health, “Half of the [Covid] deaths in August were breakthrough cases. Almost three-quarters of them in September were,” as well, according to Burlington, Vermont TV station WCAX.

The Biden administration guaranteed that the vast majority of “breakthrough” infections would not be counted when the Centers for Disease Control in May ceased keeping track of “breakthrough” infections unless they resulted in hospitalization or death. Ignoring that data permitted Biden to go on CNN in July and make the ludicrously false assertion: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” But federal data on fully vaxxed Covid fatalities is far flimsier and less reliable than the numbers compiled by some states. Honestly recognizing the limits of vaccines could be fatal to Biden’s push for compulsory vaccinations.

The same policymakers who claim to be guided by data have little or no idea how many Americans have been hit by Covid. According to the CDC, there have been 51,115,304 Covid cases in America. But a different CDC web page estimates that there had been 146.6 million Covid infections in the US as of October 2, 2021. That CDC analysis estimated that only one in four Covid infections have been reported, which would mean that based on the latest official case numbers, more than 200 million Americans have contracted Covid. For Biden and his fellow policymakers, a potential error of 150 million Covid infections is “close enough for government work.” Relying on the lower number is convenient for policymakers who want to continue ignoring the natural immunity acquired by 199 million Americans who survived Covid infections.

Deceptive federal Covid data is not an anomaly. The same charades permeate the official data guiding both domestic and foreign policies.

Federal education policy has perennially been exempt from the fraud penalties that the Federal Trade Commission inflicts on private corporations. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2002, promised that federal mandates would make all students proficient in reading and math by the year 2014. Almost half the states responded to the law’s perverse incentives by “dumbing down” academic standards, lowering passing scores on tests to avoid harsh federal sanctions. It was obvious within the first year that the law was backfiring, but the feds covered up the catastrophe to permit President George W. Bush and other politicians to continue lying about saving America’s children.

Food stamps have been one of the most popular ways for politicians to prove their love of downtrodden Americans. Liberals perennially claim that the food stamp program has a fraud rate of only one percent. But that is based solely on the number of violators who get caught, and federal rules discourage states (which administer the program) from vigorously pursuing violators. New Mexico Human Services Secretary Sidonie Squier complained in 2013 that the biggest fraud issue in her state was recipients selling their food-stamp Electronic Benefit (EBT) Cards and claiming that they were lost or stolen. Roughly 70 percent of all the EBT cards issued in New Mexico in 2012 were replacement cards. Squier told Albuquerque’s KOB-TV, “We know that there are some people who lose them four, six, or eight times, and it’s pretty suspicious, but you can’t do anything about it based on the federal rules. They want people to have the cards — they want the cards replaced.”

The Peace Corps, one of the most sainted federal agencies, is also guilty of perennially covering up deadly risks to its recruits. The Peace Corps has long acted as if its volunteers’ good intentions are body armor that shield them against all perils. But its basic model – sending inexperienced young college graduates to live and work alone in many of the world’s most dangerous nations – is failing mightily. The Peace Corps routinely buries evidence of rapes suffered by its volunteers. Michael O’Neill, the Peace Corps’ security director from 1995 to 2002, commented, “Nobody wanted to talk about security [for volunteers]. It suppresses the recruitment numbers.” After a 29-year-old volunteer was gang-raped in Bangladesh, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tx) condemned the agency’s reaction: “For political reasons, the Peace Corps did everything it could to ignore and cover up the dastardly deed, blaming the crime on the victim.” A 2021 USA Today investigation found that the agency continues suppressing evidence even though almost half of the female Peace Corps recruits “who finished service in 2019 were sexually assaulted in some way.” But this horrendous failure rarely shows up in the agency’s endless press release victory proclamations.

Federal statistics cannot raise the dead, but they can make troublesome corpses vanish. The Obama administration vastly increased drone killings of terrorist suspects in many nations and claimed that almost all the victims were bad guys. A Salon analysis, summarizing an NBC News report, noted, “Even while admitting that the identities of many killed by drones were not known, the CIA documents asserted that all those dead were enemy combatants. The logic is twisted: If we kill you, then you were an enemy combatant.” Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, leaked information revealing that nearly 90% of people who were killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets. Biden’s Justice Department responded by coercing Hale into pleading guilty to “retention and transmission of national security information.”

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media has portrayed federal officials like Tony Fauci as America’s “best and brightest.” But Washington is full of Towers of Paternalist Babel built on statistical quicksand. Bureaucracies conspire against admitting their failures, and politicians often rig reporting requirements to hide the damage their laws inflict. Anyone who has blind faith in federal data is unfit to judge public policy in the real world.

Goldman Sachs has unleashed its annual ‘themes of the year’ crossword, but before we dive into that, the following six quotes seemed to sum things up rather well:

“The volatility in individual stocks driven by casino-like trading is a by-product of a culture of extreme risk-taking… But today’s investors also don’t necessarily understand the amount of risk that they’re taking.”

– Arthur Levitt, Former Chair, US Securities and Exchange Commission

“All major commodity bull markets and inflationary episodes have been invariably tied to re-distributional, or populist, policies that have reduced income and wealth inequality.”

– Jeff Currie, GS Global Head of Commodities Research

“A core group of crypto people see this as – and I quote from the Blue Brothers here – “a mission from god”… They will never sell. And because of that, bitcoin and ether can’t go to zero.”

– Michael Novogratz, Co-Founder and CEO, Galaxy Digital Holdings

“The pandemic compressed about 20 years of change into 20 weeks, marking the biggest shift in the way people work since WWII.”

– Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

“Europe has seldom missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity over the last decade.”

– Timothy Garton Ash, Professor, University of Oxford

“The Fed’s delayed and slow reaction to inflationary pressures has unfortunately increased the probability that it will have to slam on the brakes by raising rates very quickly after tapering and at a more aggressive pace than it would have if it started to tighten policy earlier.”

– Mohamed A. El-Erian, President, Queens’ College, Cambridge University

Now, get to scribbling:

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Across:

6. Nicholas Bloom, Professor of Economics at Stanford University, finds that about _______ of all working days were spent working from home during the height of the pandemic (Issue 100).

7. Christian Mueller-Glissmann, GS Senior Multi-Asset Strategist, has found that _______ portfolios often suffer during or after periods of high and rising inflation (Issue 97).

12. In the process of going public, a SPAC sells units consisting of a common share and a fractional _______ , with each whole _______ allowing an investor to purchase one common share (Issue 95).

13.  According to George Magnus, Associate at the China Center, Oxford University, President Xi Jinping’s personal agenda is to revamp the party-centered China model to put _______ back into the phrase ” _______ with Chinese characteristics” (Issue 101).

15. Mohamed A. El-Erian, Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz, argues that survey-based inflation _______ are not well anchored, as both short and long-term _______ have risen lately (Issue 103).

17. The _______ Inflation Targeting framework was adopted by the Fed at the 2020 Jackson Hole Symposium (Issue 97).

18. Enrico Moretti, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that pandemic-related shifts in work are unlikely to cause a permanent shift in the economic _______ of the US (Issue 100).

19. David Brady, Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, argues that the Senate tends to be more _______ than the House, and this more _______ tendency is apparent in the historic pattern of failed legislation (Issue 99).

21. _______ are the building blocks of technology, and are central inputs in many everyday devices (Issue 103).

24. Jeff Currie, GS Global Head of Commodities Research, argues that a _______ tax/price is the most efficient way to solve climate change (Issue 104).

25. In order to be approved to receive funds from the EU Recovery Fund, EU member states must commit to spending a minimum of 20% of expenditures on _______ (Issue 102).

26. Dean Baker, Co-Founder of the Center for Economic Policy Research, believes that there has been a permanent shift in thinking about the role of _______ policy in supporting the economy (Issue 99).

27. Political _______ in the US has increased over the past several decades as both the Democratic and Republican parties have become more ideological (Issue 99).

28. A Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) takes a company public through a _______ (Issue 95).

30. Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, doesn’t believe that cryptocurrencies are _______ , because cryptocurrencies have no income or utility that can be used to determine their fundamental value (Issue 98).

Down:

1. According to Michele Della Vigna, GS Head of Energy Industry Research, capital markets are driving de-carbonization through a _______ in the cost of capital between high and low carbon investments (Issue 104).

2. Jan Hatzius, GS Head of GIR and Chief Economist, doesn’t find the discussion of _______ very illuminating in the context of one-off spending increases, because _______ are a longer-run concept (Issue 97).

3. According to Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and former President of the European Commission, _______ is the biggest obstacle to further EU integration (Issue 102).

4. Michael Klausner, Professor of Business and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, believes that the shareholder _______ inherent in the structure of SPACs has made them a bad deal for post-merger investors (Issue 95).

5. A wage-price _______ occurs when wage increases lead to prices increases, which in turn lead to further wage increases (Issue 103).

8. Many Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications currently live on this network (Issue 98).

9. Michael Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital Holdings, believes that _______ adoption and the macro factors behind it are a mega bull trend (Issue 98).

10. A-Shares, which are RMB-traded shares of China-based companies, represent the _______ of China’s equity market (Issue 101).

11. A change of the _______ Treaty is required for a permanent change of EU fiscal rules (Issue 102).

14. David Li, Professor at Tsinghua University, notes that China still has significant work to do to catch up with other countries in _______ technologies, like high-quality electronic components (Issue 101).

16. Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, believes that despite the big jump in _______ over the course of the pandemic, the opportunities that technologies like AI and machine learning offer mean that we’re not even close to seeing peak _______ (Issue 100).

20. Evidence suggests that the volume and impact of _______ trading has grown a lot since the advent of widespread commission-free trading (Issue 96).

22. A short  _______ occurs when the price of a heavily-shorted security moves sharply higher, forcing short-sellers to buy it back in order to cover their position (Issue 96).

23. Arthur Levitt, former chair of the SEC, and Owen Lamont, Associate Director of Multi-Asset Research for Wellington Management’s Quantitative Investment Group, believe that despite a perception that short-sellers create volatility, they actually play a vital role in _______ discovery (Issue 96).

29. Chris James, Founder and Executive Chairman of Engine No. 1, has found a clear linkage between _______ criteria and a company’s ability to create value over the long term (Issue 104).

*  *  *

Good luck

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You can find the solution here (don’t cheat).

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that President Biden signed on Monday includes amendments that block him from taking steps to close the notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The bill extends amendments that were in previous NDAA’s that block the White House from using funds to transfer or release Gitmo detainees into the US or other countries. The bill also blocks the use of funds to close the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay altogether.

After signing the bill, Biden released a statement denouncing the restrictions. “Unfortunately, section 1032 of the Act continues to bar the use of funds to transfer Guantánamo Bay detainees to the custody or effective control of certain foreign countries, and section 1033 of the Act bars the use of funds to transfer Guantánamo Bay detainees into the United States unless certain conditions are met,” the statement said.

Biden said the provisions “unduly impair the ability of the executive branch to determine when and where to prosecute Guantánamo Bay detainees and where to send them upon release.” Despite his objections, Biden still signed the massive $777.7 billion NDAA that authorized about $25 billion more than he requested from Congress.

Biden has pledged to close Gitmo, but the same promise was also made by President Obama. There are currently 39 detainees in the prison, and only 11 have been formally charged with crimes. Gitmo costs about $540 million to operate each year, meaning the US government spends over $13 million for each prisoner.

In July, Biden transferred former detainee Abdul Latif Nasser to his home country of Morrocco. Nasser was held since 2002 on no charges and was cleared for release five years ago. Like other Gitmo inmates, Nasser faced torture and other abuses during his time at the US military prison.

Years ago, we predicted that the Fed’s commitment to phase out Libor, the interest rate set by committee (not market forces) that had come to undergird trillions of dollars in loans and securities around the world, would ultimately prove unsuccessful.

Now, as the FT points out, it appears we were correct.

Libor won’t be phased out completely by the start of next year. While technically speaking no new securities can be bechmarked to Libor, there’s still the matter of the $230 trillion in existing contracts that rely on the benchmark. And the rates that undergird these contracts will continue to be published.

Still, plenty of other Libor rates won’t. Only the most popular will survive, according to the FT. So in a way, next month does mark the moment when “four years of arduous preparation to live without it goes into effect.”

“It’s one of the biggest transitions in financial markets in decades,” said Dixit Joshi, group treasurer of Deutsche Bank.

“This is a milestone for the regulators since the great financial crisis about lessons learned.”

But it’s not a complete break, which is what the world was promised in the wake of the scandals that inspired the decision.

Much lower in its story on the impending Libor deadline, the FT concedes that, in order to make the transition “work”, America’s financial regulators had to help build a workaround whereby futures markets based on the US dollar LIbor would need to be allowed to continue on until mid-2023, something we noted a year ago.

As a result, the US dollar Libor rates will continue to be published until that point (and potentially beyond mid-2023, once regulators devise some new excuse for keeping it alive for even longer).

According to one expert quoted by the FT, most people never even believed regulators would make it this far which is…not exactly a vote of confidence.

“If you’d asked anyone at the end of 2017 if this was going to happen by the end of 2021, they’d have laughed at you,” said Sarah Boyce of the UK’s Association of Corporate Treasurers.

Now it seems the skeptics have been partially vindicated.

That scepticism has been partially vindicated. Even as the year began, contracts worth $265tn were still attached to Libor. Embedding an alternative for US dollar Libor has been particularly tricky because it was a new rate. To ease the burden, UK and US authorities have allowed US dollar Libor for existing contracts to continue until mid-2023, although new business is barred after December. The FCA also allowed “synthetic” versions of sterling and yen Libor for a year to wean more stubborn contracts off the rate. Even so, daily publication of 24 Libor rates will go after December.

US regulators decided to create a whole new rate to try and wean people off of Libor, and still they’ve been met with only limited success. The new rate is called “Sofr” – the “Secured Overnight Financing Rate”. According to data from the government, the latest Sofr overnight rate is close to even with its Libor equivalent.

At the end of the day, forcing lenders to stop using Libor will be like “enforcing prohibition.” Parties will keep on using Libor until the very last second, until continuing on is no longer an option.

“Telling people to stop using Libor is like reimposing prohibition. People will keep drinking right up until the last moment,” said Mark Cabana, head of US rates strategy at Bank of America.

And regulators are warning now that this time, they’re for real.

“Market participants have all the tools they need to meet this deadline. The responsibility is on market participants to take the action needed to prepare for a world with no new Libor,” said Tom Wipf, a senior executive at Morgan Stanley, who chairs the industry body to lead the shift from US dollar Libor.

Even so, the market accepts change is coming. At CME Group, the world’s largest futures market, open positions in Sofr-linked futures outstripped Libor-linked futures for the first time in December.

Prosecutors first accused banks of more or less openly rigging Libor in their own favor to benefit their trading books back in 2012.

Even if regulators succeed at getting rid of Libor, pretty soon, a whole decade will have passed since the discovery of the ‘scandals’ that inspired regulators to go after Libor. Soon, people will forget why they even bothered to try to dump Libor in the first place. One critic described the transition as akin to “open heart surgery” for the financial system. And it’s going to be difficult to keep justifying something so taxing.

Authored by Dominick Sansome via TheAmericanConservative.com,

Earlier this month, Representative Adam Schiff was reported to have doctored a text message between former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Republican representative Jim Jordan in the ongoing investigations of the House January 6 Committee. This report should hardly come as a surprise.

On the House floor, Schiff was confronted by Republican Congressman Jim Comer for peddling the “Russia hoax.” He responded by launching into a tirade of circumstantial evidence that was supposed to prove Trump-Russia collusion. Given Schiff’s most recent ethically questionable choice in the January 6 Commission, it is worth recounting his central role in the collusion investigations.

Schiff was one of the main proponents of the collusion theory from day one.

Throughout the 45th president’s tenure, the congressman continuously assured the Trump-deranged media that there was “plenty of evidence” of collusion with Russia hiding “in plain sight”, and that the proof was “more than circumstantial.” Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, he also continued to maintain the legitimacy of the legally abominable FBI application for surveillance warrants on then-Trump aide Carter Paige, one of the main premises justifying the subsequent Mueller investigation.

Schiff was undeterred when House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes released a memo in 2018 that detailed this corrupt FISA process. Nunes, a Republican congressman also from California, presented damning proof that the entire application was largely predicated on the now-debunked dossier by Christopher Steele—in reality, a political operation funded by the Clinton campaign through research firm Fusion GPS. Nunes’ memo was immediately denounced by the entire Democrat establishment as false, and Schiff subsequently responded with a memo of his own. The latter purported to document the errors of its Republican-derived counterpart.

Naturally, the Schiff memo was the story that stuck for the zealots of the Russia collusion cult in Washington and their media enablers; this, despite the fact that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz would go on to confirm the veracity of the very claims on which Schiff was attempting to cast doubt. The Wall Street Journal previously documented the exact falsehoods in the Schiff memo and the inspector general’s refutations here.

When Schiff was called out by Comer on the House floor, the former launched into a series of “Are you aware?” questions that were ostensibly meant to maintain support for the Trump-Russia thesis (outside of the Steele Dossier). Yet Schiff’s statements are still based on, to use his own words, mere “circumstantial evidence.” It is worth considering Schiff’s reasoning behind each claim:

“Are you aware that the president’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, met with an agent of Russian intelligence and provided Russian intelligence with internal campaign polling data, as well as strategic insights about their intelligence in key battleground states?”

The “agent of Russian intelligence” to whom Schiff is referring here is Manafort’s longtime Ukrainian business associate Konstantin Kilimnik. According to the Washington Times, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s final report on Russian election interference—a more than 900 page report of which Kilimnik and Manafort are central focuses—states that Kilimnik was “a Russian intelligence officer.” Manafort’s lawyer responded to the accusation by claiming that there are classified documents that would, if released, prove this to be false; however, if Kilimnik is indeed a Russian asset as stated by the Senate report, then he “may have been connected to the GRU [Russian state intelligence service]” responsible for hacking into the DNC in 2016.

In the second part of his statement, Schiff refers to Manafort’s providing polling data to Russian intelligence (Kilimnik, on the presumption that he is a Russian agent). The Mueller report had already cast doubt on this being connected to “Russian interference,” however, as the meeting in which this transaction took place is purported to have happened only after the reports of a Russian cyber attack had already been released by the U.S. media. Collusion would thereby be assumed only on the evidence that Manafort had an ongoing relationship with Kilimnik, and must have subsequently known about the latter’s speculative ties with the GRU and its attempt to influence the U.S. election. Circumstantial indeed.

“Are you aware that while the Trump campaign chairman was providing internal polling data, that Kremlin intelligence was leading a clandestine social media campaign to elect Donald Trump?”

In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report defending a 2017 intelligence community assessment that there was “unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.” The report finds that the essential task of the Russian interference was to sow discord in the United States, primarily through social media posts and advertisements that were aimed at denigrating Hillary Clinton and undermining trust in U.S. democracy.

This is in part contrary to the 2018 House Intelligence Committee report, which found that the intelligence community’s assessment on “Putin’s strategic intentions” were insufficient. When viewing the various posts, advertisements, and accounts (examples available for download from the House Report here) attributed to Russian intelligence agents, it is evident that there was a clear intention to sow discord; however, the sheer number of social justice posts related to racial equality and police brutality seem to suggest that the Russian influencers may have sought social tension as the goal in itself, rather than a means to get Trump in particular elected.

Regardless, Schiff’s two statements together allude to the notion that Manafort was giving polling data in battleground states to Kilimnik, ostensibly all in an attempt to then have Russian hackers specifically target voters in politically purple areas.

“I am aware of President Trump’s son meeting secretly in Trump Tower New York with a Russian delegation with the purpose of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian delegation represented was part of the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump in 2016.… And when asked about that secret meeting, both the president and his son lied about it.”

Donald Trump Jr. did indeed meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting is reported to have been short and fruitless, with then-candidate Trump having had no knowledge of it. Although this is not illegal, it is ethically questionable, even given the fact that politics is indeed a dirty game; however, it also incidentally sheds light on another strange development in the Trump-Russia saga. Veselnitskaya is documented as having met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson just hours before the Trump Tower meeting, and then again after. Recall that Fusion GPS is the Clinton-financed firm responsible for compiling the Steele Dossier, seeking to tie Trump to Russia. While Trump Jr. meeting with Veselnitskaya under the pretenses of getting dirt on a political opponent may not be considered honorable (even though that was the very mechanism working against Trump at that exact moment), the surrounding circumstances raise just as many, if not more, questions about Clinton corruption as they do Trump collusion.

Although not mentioned by Schiff in this specific instance, also consider his maintaining the guilt of Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. In another supposed tie between Trump and Russia, Flynn was caught in a carefully set perjury trap arranged by James Comey’s FBI. Comey actually bragged in an open forum about his taking advantage of the hectic Trump transition—which unelected bureaucratic forces and Obama holdovers mobilized to make as difficult as possible—to get agents into the White House and attempt to interrogate various officials, of whom Flynn was foremost.

Schiff is not unique in his views among the Democratic Party or its political allies in relation to the Russia narrative, and no one can question the congressman’s determination in investigating corruption stories related to Trump—regardless of how scant or shoddy the hard evidence that the allegations are based on may be. It is important, however, to consider the circumstances he presents in support of his ongoing belief in collusion, as it is telling of how the congressman treats evidence that is politically inexpedient to his predetermined conclusions.

This is relevant given his central position on the House January 6 Committee, and may have very real consequences for the fate of the American citizen’s upon whom the latter’s deliberations are focused.

While Ghislaine Maxwell stood trial for her part in Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex-trafficking operation, federal prosecutors quietly dropped their case against two jail guards who allegedly ‘slept on the job’ while the wealthy pedophile killed himself – or was murdered, depending on who you believe, or whether one has common sense.

On December 13, federal prosecutors in Manhattan signed a nolle prosequi, a document indicating to the judge that they wish to drop the case, according to Insider. The filing didn’t appear on the court’s public docket until Thursday, more than two weeks later, and one day after Maxwell was convicted for sex-trafficking girls to Epstein to be sexually abused.

The guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were arrested charged in November 2019. According to the original complaint, they two had fallen asleep, browsed news feeds, and shopped for motorcycles and furniture (with unexpected income, perhaps?), instead of performing their rounds at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They were also charged with falsifying documents and conspiracy to defraud the US.

Did we mention that prison surveillance footage of the alleged suicide disappeared? Yes, we did.

Did we mention that Epstein had reportedly been in ‘good spirits‘ right before his suicide – meeting with his lawyers for up to 12 hours a day to discuss his case? Yes, we did.

Epstein, or a homeless guy in an Epstein mask, was found dead in his cell on the morning of August 10, 2019. While the NY City head coroner ruled it a suicide, Epstein’s brother hired a private coroner who ruled that the financier’s broken neck bones were more consistent with a homicide.

Noel and Thomas pleaded not guilty to the charges against them for falsifying records. In May this year, they entered a deferred prosecution agreement where prosecutors agreed not to bring the guards’ case to trial until after they finished cooperating with an investigation into the circumstances of Epstein’s death with the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. The OIG has yet to release a report in connection with the investigation.

A public status conference for the case against Noel and Thomas had been scheduled for December 16, but was canceled on December 15 without explanation, or scheduling of a future meeting. -Insider

According to the December 13 filing, Noel and Thomas had complied with the terms of their non-prosecution agreement and completed community service.

Via Doomberg Substack,

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.” – Carl Reiner

At its core, the human body is a symphony of chemical reactions. The complexities and interdependencies of the molecular machinery that makes our bodies function are almost too staggering to ponder. As any chemist can attest, chemical reactions are usually quite sensitive to temperature, and sensitivity to temperature varies substantially across reaction pathways. As such, temperature control not only dictates reaction rates, but it also influences product and byproduct distributions. At one temperature, two reagents might react cleanly to produce a desired product with high purity. At a different temperature, an undesirable pathway might become more kinetically favored, leading to the accumulation of unwanted impurities.

One of the miracles of the body is its ability to maintain strict internal temperature control, which allows it to regulate the speed and product distributions of the myriad of chemical reactions that are occurring inside you as you read this. The equilibria are delicate, so much so that fluctuations of a mere few degrees can be fatal. This concept of “normal” body temperature is widely understood, but its direct, vital connection to the core chemical reactions occurring inside you is less well known.

Because internal temperature is critical to sustaining life, the body has developed elaborate heat management systems, including discomfort nudges (like shivering and sweating) that are meant to directly generate or shed heat and motivate you to relocate to a more suitable environment. If you stand outside for a few minutes in the winter wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt, you become uncomfortable rather quickly. Return inside to a warm fire and a rewarding comfort envelops you. Just don’t get too close to the fire, lest the body be forced to nudge you back outside.

Thermal comfort is the technical phrase that describes the human need to maintain a reasonable temperature and humidity environment, and it is generally accepted that people are most comfortable when the temperature is between 67°F and 82°F and the humidity is between 30% and 60%. It should come as no surprise to most readers that we invest a staggering amount of energy on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) to keep ourselves in such favorable settings. The US Department of Energy estimates that 40% of the country’s CO2 emissions can be traced back to the need to achieve thermal comfort, significantly more energy than is used in the transportation sector. When we at Doomberg say energy is life, we aren’t just referencing the energy that goes into producing food or clean water – exposure to the elements and lack of thermal control will kill you much faster than a shortage of either of those.

Consider Boston, Massachusetts, the unofficial capital of New England (for our international readers, New England consists of six states in the US Northeast, namely Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont). Given its northern latitude, the citizens of Boston experience cold and sometimes brutal winters, but more reasonable summers. Globally, far more people die from exposure to cold than to heat, and this makes winter energy policy especially consequential. In the chart below, we’ve plotted the daily average high and low temperatures for the city and overlaid the thermal comfort zone for easy reference. Not surprisingly, the coldest months of the year are December, January, and February. During these months, an enormous amount of energy is consumed as the population seeks to achieve thermal comfort, and the amount of energy needed to do this is bounded by the laws of physics – it scales with the delta from the thermal comfort zone – and, as a practical matter, the tactics deployed at the extremes are highly inefficient.

In her excellent book Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, Meredith Angwin describes how a combination of bad policy, complicated governance, and dense bureaucracy has made the entire electric grid of New England incredibly vulnerable to collapse, especially during winter cold snaps (you can buy Angwin’s book here and follow her Twitter account here). She tells the story of how Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) like ISO New England have evolved to oversee bulk electric power systems and transmission lines, and how producers of electricity must subordinate their natural gas consumption for use in home heating during extreme cold weather events. Of course, the demand for electricity skyrockets during these same extreme events as people supplement their home heating needs with electric space heaters, further exacerbating the problem.

Angwin goes on the tell the story of how New England’s electric grid nearly collapsed during cold snaps in late December 2017 and early January 2018. In the book, she quotes from an op-ed she wrote for the Valley News shortly after the incident (emphasis added throughout this piece):

“Around 5:00 P.M. on January 6, 2018, I snapped a light on as the sun went down. The temperature was around minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit. It had been zero at lunchtime and would be minus 15 the next morning. As usual, the light went on. As grid operator ISO New England had planned, oil had saved the grid. During that very cold week, about one-third of New England’s electricity came from burning oil. The people at ISO-NE might think it is unfair to say that they planned to save the grid with oil, but they did, because of the Winter Reliability Program.”

She goes on to describe that while burning oil had averted disaster, it had only barely done so. The grid was hours away from rolling blackouts before the weather thankfully turned warmer. The book then covers the broken interplay between policy, markets, and fuel security, how renewables impact the grid, and her thoughts on a more rational path forward. It is well worth a full read.

You would think that the near collapse of their energy grid would have motivated the good people of New England to get serious about shoring up their energy needs ahead of future cold snaps. You would be wrong. Instead, they have set about the task of systematically dismantling existing critical infrastructure and blocking the development of proven technologies. In 2019, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station was shuttered, leaving New England with only two nuclear power facilities. There are no plans to build more.

New England Nukes, Photo Credit EIA

More urgently, virtually every attempt to expand the region’s natural gas pipeline infrastructure has been delayed, blocked, or abandoned. Here’s a sobering report from InsideSources from mid-2019 that describes the situation:

“As activists become more adept at enlisting government in their war on oil and gas pipelines, even small projects are becoming difficult to build.

Last month, voters in Longmeadow, Mass., approved a non-binding ballot measure encouraging the town to buy land to block a local natural gas metering and transfer station.

This past Earth Day, the mayor of Holyoke, Mass., announced his opposition to a proposed 2.1-mile, 12-inch natural gas pipeline that would increase capacity to meet rising demand. He asked federal regulators to reject the pipeline.

In March, the Bristol, Vt., Selectboard voted to cancel a license agreement with Vermont Gas that would have allowed Bristol residents to connect to a gas line that runs from Colchester to Middlebury, vtdigger.com reported.

From large, interstate pipelines to small lines connecting towns and neighborhoods, anti-fossil fuel activists have proven highly successful at blocking, through regulations or lawsuits, new natural gas infrastructure in the Northeastern United States.”

Just last month, voters in Maine killed an electricity transmission line project that would have brought renewable hydro power from Quebec to Massachusetts. Here’s a report from the Boston Globe:

“In what appears to be a stunning setback to Massachusetts’ climate goals, Maine voters on Tuesday rejected a referendum on a transmission line that would bring hydroelectric energy from Canada to the Bay State.

As of just before midnight, with 421 of the state’s 571 precincts reporting, a “yes” vote to stop the $1 billion project that is already under construction had garnered 60 percent support, according to unofficial results.

Energy from the line is a key part of how Massachusetts plans to achieve its goal of halving emissions by the end of the decade. The Maine vote does not spell the immediate end of the project, as the line’s supporters are already saying they will contest the referendum in court, but even that will likely result in a set-back to the project’s planned timeline—and there is no time to waste.”

The great irony of the situation is New England sits only a few hundred miles from the most prolific natural gas producing region on Earth – the Appalachian Basin. According to the US EIA, if the region were a standalone country it would have been the third largest natural gas producer in the world in the first half of 2021, behind only Russia and the rest of the US. And yet, by refusing to build the necessary pipeline infrastructure, New England has opted out of sharing in this critical domestic bounty. If any thought leaders from the region are reading this piece, the Doomberg team put together this handy guide to solving your regional energy problems:

If New England’s refusal to use natural gas from right next door is ironic, how it sources liquefied natural gas (LNG) is downright perverse, albeit for reasons mostly beyond its control. We’ve written before about how the US has become a substantial player in the LNG market, and how the energy crisis in Europe spread to Asia, causing a bidding war for LNG supply. As luck would have it, New England is a now victim of that bidding war and is facing the prospect of dramatically less LNG supply this winter. How did this happen?

One of the most controversial laws in the US is the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, more commonly known as the Jones Act. The law is meant to help ensure a healthy US merchant marine fleet and to support domestic shipbuilding. These are considered critical to national security, especially during times of war. A key stipulation of the law is that foreign-owned ships cannot transport goods between two US ports – only ships built, owned, and crewed by Americans are permitted to do so.

While the US has become the largest producer of natural gas and an ever-larger exporter of LNG, the country does not produce LNG carriers. Since there are no US LNG carriers, New England cannot benefit from the build-out of LNG export facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, despite having significant LNG import facilities like the one in Everett, Massachusetts.  That means New England is in the same bidding pool as Europe and Asia. Amazingly, most LNG imports to the Everett terminal have come from Trinidad and Tobago! Instead of simply building pipelines to its land neighbors, New England pays for boats to sail more than 2,000 miles – burning fossil fuels and polluting the oceans as they do so – and pays a substantially higher price for the privilege. Bonkers!

As we head into the depths of winter, New England is substantially behind in procuring LNG from the international market. Here’s how S&P Global described the situation last week:

“So far this winter season, New England has received just a single cargo at the region’s Everett LNG import terminal, which delivered the regasified equivalent of about 2.9 Bcf on Nov. 3. From November to March last season, Everett received seven cargoes carrying 20.5 Bcf. During the 2019-2020 season, the terminal took nine cargoes carrying nearly 23.5 Bcf, Platts Analytics data shows.”

We leave you with a tweet we posted a week ago today that went viral. At the time of this writing, it has been seen by nearly 250,000 people and has over 1,900 likes. With less nuclear, insufficient natural gas pipelines, and no LNG available to save the day, New England is one cold snap away from a substantial disaster. If you live there, prepare your thermal comfort zone accordingly.

New England opposed natural gas pipelines and shut down nuclear. If you live in New England, I suggest you pick up a wool blanket or two. In the war between platitudes and physics, physics is undefeated.

— Doomberg (@DoombergT) December 24, 2021