Month: February 2025

Authored by an anonymous NIH official via Paul Thacker’s The DisInformation Chronicle,

As someone who works directly with the NIH Director’s office, I am dismayed by the disingenuous coverage of NIH in places like the New York Times and Science Magazine. Very little of what I read comports with my own experience and I am worried that scientists and the general public are getting a false view of the real problems inside the world’s largest funder of biomedical research.

Every large institution is fraught with palace politics, but today’s NIH is suffering from a deeply entrenched senior leadership in the director’s office that is plagued by enmity, distrust and isolation. The NIH Director works in Building 1 and oversees 27 other Institutes that research various diseases—the one most people have heard of is the National Cancer Institute. But to most of these institute directors, Building1 is a dark hole they both fear and despise. If you’re a running a research lab in Wisconsin this probably doesn’t matter to you; if you’re bed ridden with an undiagnosed, complex neurological disease—a life put on hold—why would you care?

But at every level today NIH’s management is distanced further away from its overall mission to advance science that improves health.

NIH scientists are quite busy with their research and don’t always read news about NIH scandals. I don’t, because I don’t really have time, nor do I care. But turmoil from the recent election has caused me to read about the retirement of Dr. Lawrence Tabak, who served as Principal Deputy Director, the number two position at NIH. I have worked with and observed Dr. Tabak’s ascent to this commanding position at NIH, from which he weaponized systems and processes to harm those who disagreed with his views or decisions.

Yet, I saw none of this in a news account by the New York Times and much of the reporting seemed to describe a different person than the Larry Tabak that I know. According to this New York Times reporter, Tabak’s retirement was “surprising” as he was “long considered a steadying force” and “someone who could work across party lines.”

Tabak’s retirement was not “surprising.” After Trump won office, Tabak told senior NIH officials several times in private meetings that he might be forced to retire or step down. And he was only a “steadying force” if he liked you personally and you didn’t dare to question his decisions or those made by his favored staff.

I find it odd that the New York Times would report that Tabak was “someone who could work across party lines.” Like almost every NIH leader, Tabak is a committed Democrat who can work with Republicans if he holds his nose, but he despised President Trump. Several have heard Tabak say several times that he couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Trump.

Science Magazine quoted former NIH employee Carrie Wolinetz complimenting Dr. Tabak, saying, “There is probably no single person who is as universally highly respected at NIH as Larry Tabak.” On the contrary, he is likely the most feared and disliked individual at the NIH and his departure brings relief to many.

Science Magazine must have been hunting only for compliments, because they also ran a comment posted on Bluesky by Jeremy Berg, former director of NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Berg very accurately describes that it was Tabak’s unfortunate job to deal with all the NIH’s messy and intractable problems. “Larry has shoveled so much $hit over the years that he would have been well qualified to work behind the elephants in an old circus,” Berg said.

But Tabak flung that $hit on many of those around him, often injuring us with the same shovel he threw around to make himself look good to his superiors and university leaders. As for the STAT news headline that Tabak’s retirement “adds to sense of deep uncertainty,” I would say it brings a sense of optimism about the agency’s future.

Like almost every NIH leader, Tabak is a committed Democrat who can work with Republicans if he holds his nose, but he despised President Trump.

I can only guess that NIH leadership and the press office are feeding these stories to reporters, because they do not comport with the experiences of many others including myself. My point is that outsiders are given a warped view of the problems inside the agency, and are not equipped to understand that change is needed.

Tabak’ retirement put him in the news, a position he shied away from for many years. He virtually ran the NIH because Francis Collins, who was director for over a decade, allowed him full rein. Widely regarded as an expert chess player, Tabak ran the place behind the scenes like a mafia Don, rewarding his friends and bullying others who hurt his ego.

When the Senate confirmed Monica Bertagnolli as the new NIH Director in 2023, I wondered if her leadership might fix many of the agency’s problems, but this was not the case. Dr. Bergnatoli lost 36 votes in her confirmation to mostly Republican senators from rural states, and she was hell bent on keeping that job.

She began to court the Senators she lost, and started building a research portfolio focused on a more politically neutral definition for diversity. Instead of using race or color as a means of establishing diversity, she launched new initiatives that called for diversity based on access to rural health care.

But this work meant she did not have the time to focus on running NIH, and because Tabak knew how to get things done, he became her valuable second hand and continued holding on to power. Collins was very crafty in managing NIH politics and let Tabak do his dirty work, as long as he behaved in public, as self-effacing and humble. But Bertagnolli was just clueless, and Tabak surrounded her with people based on loyalty to him, not her mission for public research.

The word diversity is a big buzzword inside the NIH but I don’t really think they care about hiring minorities and women as much as following guidelines, rules and regulations that tout diversity. Minority women and men across the campus are just not promoted. Yes, there have been initiatives, and diversity emails to read, and classes to take, but NIH has long been a male dominated environment.

It’s a Woke culture that isn’t really woke.

There have been attempts to change this with more female leaders in the last 10 years. But NIH is not a merit-based system. It’s a cabal where people appoint their loyalists and contrive to manipulate our public agency to their personal advantage. Not enough women are at the top with clout to give handouts, so it’s a slow, slow transformation.

The NIH is now in the press almost every day for alleged “funding cuts for research” but that’s not really true. The NIH has cut costs that universities can charge for administrative fees, but they have not cut the grant money provided directly to scientists. I can’t explain why this is being twisted in the news, but I’m sure that people in the director’s office are doing this to harm the credibility of the incoming NIH Director.

These are the games that NIH leadership play all the time. They use the media to manipulate coverage and maintain control, often to cover up things they fail to deliver to the public.

Some of this misinformation you are reading about NIH funding cuts is likely also coming from universities who have grown used to fat checks from the NIH, but nobody is really taking money away from them. It’s about being fair with taxpayer money.

Everyone thinks that the most prestigious scientists on planet Earth work at universities like Harvard and Oxford, but within the scientific world many are in awe of the researchers at the NIH. Over 170 NIH scientists or those whose research is supported by NIH have won Nobel Prizes. NIH has its own intramural science program designed to perform cutting edge studies, some of which is almost impossible to do in a university setting. For example, if a child or an adult has a very rare condition that no one can diagnose, NIH can actually do genetic analyses and work backwards to identify the cause of the disease and then design therapies to help these patients.

But over the last decade or so, NIH’s intramural program has ballooned into an unmanageable enterprise, with over 1,2000 principal investigators. And while brilliant work is being done, there’s also complacency, stagnation, and entitlement. Because they are at NIH, federal researchers get a lot of guaranteed money that scientists at universities have to bust for. And there’s not much accountability.

NIH labs and research programs get reviewed by scientists at prestigious research universities to ensure they publish excellent studies. But these university scientists are, at the same time, beholden to the NIH for grants to fund their own studies. This conflict of interest ensures that the reviews are biased to favor NIH labs, because no professor wants to anger the agency that funds his own grants.

For this reason, numerous NIH scientists go unchecked and continue running their research programs for too many years.

Tony Fauci is the most notable example of someone rising through the ranks to become an institute director who was feared for decades because he held the purse strings to billions of dollars in grants as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Anyone inside the NIH who questioned Tony got shafted and targeted by the leadership in the NIH Director’s office.

Throughout the pandemic, America was consumed by debate over whether the pandemic started from a lab accident, and most scientists seem to believe it didn’t. But in his final week, President Biden handed Tony Fauci a preemptive pardon, and the pardon stretched all the way back to 2014. That was the first year Fauci began funding EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted with a lab in Wuhan, China for gain-of-function virus research. A few days after President Trump was sworn in, the CIA released a Biden administration assessment that found the coronavirus is “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals.

When Congress investigated Fauci’s management of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance they found a lack of transparency and a blatant cover-up. These congressional hearings are available online, as are the Committee reports and the NIH documents and emails Congress released. Yet Tabak nor anyone inside the Director’s office ever discussed these matters with the broader NIH community, nor did they inform NIH scientists of what Congress uncovered.

Nobody within NIH leadership was held responsible for what happened with EcoHealth Alliance, nor have they been held liable for other scandals. Congress found that NIH hid their handling of sexual harassment complaints, forcing a Committee to send them legal subpoeanas. NIH also denied performing gain-of-function studies on monkeypox virus, until Congress caught them doing so. Pile on top of this, an NIH Alzheimer’s researcher was caught in fraud, and there has been a complete lack of accountability for an NIH-funded scientist who failed to release a study on puberty blockers, because the results did not align with orthodoxy that puberty blockers benefit transgender children.

In each of these disgraceful incidents, the NIH old guard circled the wagons instead of protecting science, because they are corrupted with power. The proof is in their behavior, and every time Congress confronted them, there was always this stonewalling and masking of accountability

Coverup has been the hallmark of people in the director’s office for over a decade.

Most staff, including myself, are puzzled by the sudden change of attitude towards NIH, both by Congress and the public. How did an institution that was held in such high regard and that was blessed with bipartisan support for so long sink to this level of distrust and suspicion?

If you go to the press, to complain about the NIH you are done for. Remaining anonymous while speaking up for change is now the best option for anyone at NIH wishing for a complete leadership overhaul to bring about a brighter future.

President Donald Trump is planning an executive order to make English the official language of the United States.

The planned order, obtained and reviewed by The Epoch Times and confirmed by a White House official, is unique to the nation’s 250-year history.

Aaron Gifford reports via The Epoch Times that the new order would rescind a federal mandate by President Bill Clinton that required any agencies receiving federal money to provide language assistance to those who do not speak English.

It would allow agencies to maintain practices of providing documents in services in other languages “but encourages new Americans to adopt a national language that opens doors to greater opportunities.”

“Agencies will have the flexibility to decide how and when to offer services in languages other than English to best service the American people and fulfill their agency mission,” the White House fact sheet of the planned order reads, also noting that English is the most widely used of the 350 different languages spoken across the country.

“Establishing English as the official language promotes unity, establishes efficiency in government operations, and creates a pathway for civic engagement.”

The order, once signed, is contrary to President Joe Biden’s efforts to promote bilingualism and, in some cases, preferred treatment to those still learning English.

Biden’s Department of Education secretary, Miguel Cardona, used his final days in office to push to states and school districts a dual instruction plan by which class time in all subjects would be split between English and a foreign language.

The fact sheet also notes that 180 nations have an official language and that at least 30 U.S. states and five territories have already embraced English as the official language.

“This order celebrates multilingual Americans who have learned English and passed it down while empowering immigrants to achieve the American Dream through a common language,” the fact sheet reads.

Trump is likely to face resistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, which has pushed for more federally funded translation services to assist illegal immigrants, teacher unions, and various other civil rights organizations that have opposed his platform from day one.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, according to its website, monitors any movement toward making English the nation’s official language and calls any English-only provisions “linguistic racism” reflective of earlier laws that promoted discrimination.

“Laws were enacted to prevent Chinese from testifying in court, Japanese from owning land, German from being learned in schools, and Hispanic children from attending integrated schools,” the website says.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Chinese researchers, led by a virologist whose work had fueled concerns about a possible COVID-19 lab leak, have discovered a new bat coronavirus that is similar to the one that causes COVID-19, and that is capable of infecting humans.

The virus, called HKU5-CoV-2, can enter human cells through the ACE2 receptor, the same gateway for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that sparked a global pandemic five years ago, according to a study recently published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Cell.

The lead researcher is Shi Zhengli, who, for years, led work on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that has been under scrutiny amid ongoing questions about the origins of COVID-19.

The researchers collected nearly 1,000 anal swabs from pipistrellus bats across five Chinese provinces and took them to the state-owned Wuhan research institute.

The virus belongs to a distinct lineage of coronaviruses that also include the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus. Lab experiments indicate this virus strain may infect a wide range of mammals. The HKU5-CoV-2 has the potential to jump from one species to another, researchers said, noting the recent detection of viral sequences closely related to HKU5-CoV in farmed minks.

The virus doesn’t enter human cells as readily as the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suggesting the risk of its “emergence in human populations should not be exaggerated,” the paper states. The researchers also identified antibodies and antiviral drugs that target the virus.

Findings about the virus raised concerns from Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and laboratory director at Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, who has been critical of the Wuhan Institute’s virus experiments.

“In nature, this virus poses minimal threat to humans,” he told The Epoch Times on Feb. 25.

“However, [with] laboratory enhancement of transmissibility or pathogenicity, this virus could create a highly extremely threatening new bioweapons agent and pandemic pathogen.”

China is currently experiencing a surge of human metapneumovirus cases while the regime continues to resist international probes of the origin of COVID-19.

In January, the CIA became the third U.S. executive agency to back the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have come from a Chinese lab.

Ebright expressed concern that the newly discovered virus is being reported and researched by Shi, given her past line of research that he described as “reckless.”

Pandemic research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which has used federal grants to support bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab, received an official funding ban in January from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said its investigation found the U.S. group had been facilitating lab experiments in Wuhan that enhance coronavirus features, including through gain of function research.

The Chinese foreign ministry, in a Feb. 12 press conference, denied that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in gain of function studies of coronavirus.

Shi left her former facility and joined Guangzhou National Laboratory as a researcher in May 2024. The lab was set up in 2021 to focus on significant respiratory diseases and their prevention, according to its website.

The virologist has posted hiring notices for postdoctoral researchers to join her team to study emerging infectious diseases, molecular epidemiology, cross-species viral transmission, and molecular mechanisms of pneumonia from respiratory viral infections.

A dozen researchers from the Wuhan Institute, along with six from her current lab, were coauthors of the February research paper.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was aware of the Cell study but “there is no reason to believe it currently poses a concern to public health.”

“The publication referenced demonstrates that the bat virus can use a human protein to enter cells in the laboratory, but they have not detected infections in humans,” Paul Prince, a spokesperson for the center, told The Epoch Times.

He added that the agency will “continue to monitor viral disease activity and provide important updates to the public.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Shi for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“It may be time the FBI’s New York field office gets paid a visit in the style it’s very well accustomed to doling out.” 

– Mike Benz

Turns out new Attorney General Pam Bondi was a little off the mark earlier this week when she said the Jeffrey Epstein files were sitting on her desk. Actually, it was a six-hundred-pound tar-smeared hairball with a gift tag that read: “To Pamela Jo from her Friends in Blobville, good luck untangling this!” Well, she did tell Fox News host Jesse Waters that the thing sitting on her desk was “disgusting.”

As promised, those Epstein files were released on Thursday — a measly two-hundred pages — to much chagrin and embarrassment for all, since the material turned out to be the same old lists and flight logs that every blogger and his uncle has already put out on the Web for years — say, what . . .?

But then the plot thickened later in the day when AG Bondi said a whistleblower informed her that the New York office of the FBI and their counterparts in the Southern District of NY (Manhattan) DOJ offices were hiding “thousands and thousands” of pages evidence and other stuff (videos? photos?) they had been sitting on for years.

AG Bondi quickly fired off a letter to brand-new FBI Director Kash Patel demanding that the New York FBI office deliver all that stuff to Washington by eight o’clock in the morning today (Friday). If you were Mr. Patel, rather than waiting until morning, wouldn’t you just take a twilight ride up the Jersey Turnpike from Blobville to the Big Apple with an FBI swat team and bust into both the FBI and DOJ offices there. . . and maybe frog-march a few federal employees onto the street like so many grannies caught praying in front of an abortion mill?

Of course, I am writing this a few hours before the Friday morning deadline. So, for now there are only the ancillary considerations in this fast-developing denouement to the longest and slowest-running case of trans-national fuckery in world history. Some little details do stick in one’s craw. For example, Maurene (spelled that way) Comey, daughter of fired FBI director James Comey has been a lead US attorney out of the SDNY in the case against Ghislaine Maxwell and the more recent case against Sean (“Diddy”) Combs — both cases revolving around grand-scale sexual depravity among world-class celebrities. Note, too, that the SDNY was the origin point of more recent janky cases brought against Mr. Trump in the 2024 runup to the election.

And, as independent investigator Mike Benz points out, Bill Barr was USAG in 2019 when Jeffrey Epstein was finally busted, stuffed into the Manhattan federal lockup, and promptly (shall we say, conveniently) turned up dead a few days later (putting aside the known irregularities involving the disposal of his body and the pathology reports about the cause-of-death). Did you notice that no one was ever disciplined for that? Not the two guards on the floor that night who claimed they fell asleep. Not the warden of the jail who failed to check whether the security cameras were working (they weren’t) on his most important prisoner’s cell?

Nor did Bill Barr ever answer for that, or for some other capers — such as sitting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the fall of 2019 when Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee held preliminary hearings to consider impeaching President Donald Trump over his inquiring phone call to V. Zelenskyy in Ukraine. The laptop, you surely know, was stuffed with deal memos and emails about the Biden family’s ex-officio financial shenanigans in Ukraine that surely would have amounted to exculpatory evidence and was withheld from Mr. Trump’s lawyers through the entire psychodrama of the impeachment and trial in the Senate.

Then there is the peculiar history of Bill Barr’s dad, Donald Barr, present at the founding of the CIA (as an OSS officer in WWII), who groomed young Jeffrey Epstein into a job teaching math New York’s Dalton prep school in 1974 on the basis of fake college credentials (Stanford). Epstein was soon transformed into a Wall Street go-getter and most probably an agent for Mossad, Israeli intel. Epstein’s rise in high finance and international spookery led him to crypto-British media mogul and Mossad agent Robert Maxwell and Maxwell’s sex-crazed daughter Ghislaine. . . and the Epstein underage sex operation proceeded from there.

Coincidentally, Donald Barr’s son, Bill Barr’s rise in Blobville neatly parallel’s Epstein’s rise. Barr signed on with the CIA in 1973, worked as an “analyst,” quit to go to law school in 1977, landed in the Reagan White House, than the Bush One White House where he performed clean-up operations on the lingering Iran-Contra mess, eventually becoming US Attorney General in 1991. Between 1994 and 2019, he racked up a personal fortune in blob-centric law, becoming Attorney General a second time in 2019, under Mr. Trump, whom he sedulously stabbed in the back, butt, and liver during his tenure.

Now, it is well-known that Donald Trump consorted with Jeffrey Epstein at various points in his life. Mr. Trump, in his role as New York real estate mogul, was but another celebrity butterfly in Epstein’s vast collection. He admits flying on the notorious Epstein airplane, though, he has said only to catch a ride somewhere. Mr. Trump later clashed with Epstein, as far, even, as blackballing him from the Mar-a-Lago club. (Epstein’s role as a high-toned pimp was becoming known in the early 2000s, though his legal culpability was neatly minimized by Barack Obama’s DOJ.)

In light of all this, it appears that Mr. Trump has no reservations these days about disclosing whatever lurks in the blob files about these skeezy matters. Of course, it is a little hard to believe that blob agents did not dispose of the evidence well in advance of January 20. Other whistleblowers say that FBI agents have been “working night and day” to destroy files on “stand-alone” FBI servers in the days preceding Kash Patel’s arrival on the premises.

As I wind up today’s post at 8:02 in the morning, something new should have landed on Pam Bondi’s desk in place of that six-hundred-pound hairball. Not a whisper of news yet. No perp-walks out of SDNY or the New York FBI office. And, of course, The New York Times, barely a mention on yesterday’s Epstein doings. There’s a long work-day ahead. Stand by.

Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank has relisted his 400-acre equestrian farm in northern Baltimore County—formerly owned by the Vanderbilt family—for $22 million, marking its second appearance on the market in less than a year. The listing comes as Under Armour grapples with years of financial troubles and recent restructuring, with shares down 87% from their 2015 peak. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that Plank’s Sagamore Farm—think of it as the billionaire’s playground—was listed by real estate agent Denie Dulin of Compass. The 16,000-square-foot main house features six bedrooms and overlooks a private dirt flat track for horse racing in the Worthington Valley area.

Plank purchased the property around 2007 but declined to tell WSJ how much he paid for the farm. He noted that more than $22 million was spent on the land and renovations over the years.

In the early days of ownership, and while UA shares were much higher, Plank ran a racehorse operation out of the farm. However, due to time commitments, he closed the farm’s racehorse operations in 2021. 

“That’s a business you don’t want to be in unless you’re in it all the time,” he said.

Time commitment? Or spending at least a million a year or more to upkeep the farm was a money pit.

In recent years, Plank has been locked in a dispute with a local conservatory group after he made plans to expand his Sagamore Spirit Distillery on the property. 

UA shares over the last decade have been a rollercoaster down. 

UA revenues stagnate. 

Plank should pick his local politicians more wisely. The billionaire hosted far-left Democrats, including Gov. Wes Moore, at Sagamore’s main house last spring in a closed-door fundraiser.

Moore (Soros-friendly) has accelerated Maryland’s rapid demise into twin crises…

Back to the farm, WSJ noted:

Plank, who has been CEO of Under Armour off and on since he founded the company in 1996, started quietly shopping Sagamore Farm off-market last year.

One investor group in the Baltimore area that inquired about purchasing the farm last year told us that zoning issues on the property deterred them from buying it. Much of the property is restricted by conservation zoning, they said.

“Plank has sold two other high-profile homes in the past decade, a Georgetown mansion for $17.25 million in 2020 and his Park City, Utah condo for $18 million in 2023,” WSJ noted. 

With UA shares near record lows and Plank offloading multiple properties in recent years, the re-listing of Sagamore may signal the billionaire’s growing need for liquidity.

The question now is, which Maryland billionaire will buy the property next? David Smith of Sinclair? 

In the latest manifestation of the Trump administration’s earnest campaign against divisive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, the Department of Education on Thursday announced the launch of an internet portal that citizens can use to report DEI-driven wrongdoings in publicly funded K-12 schools. The portal’s debut comes as school officials across the country are shrugging off a Trump administration deadline to purge their institutions of DEI under threat of losing federal funding. 

The web page, which has already gone live, is open for use by parents, students, teachers, and anyone else who wants to report destructive DEI practices at schools anywhere across the country. “The U.S. Department of Education is committed to ensuring all students have access to meaningful learning free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination,” reads the text atop the portal, which is bluntly named “End DEI.”

The department said it will use the reports to identify potential investigation targets, with the threat of a withdrawal of federal funding. The portal asks tipsters to provide their email address, identify the offending school or school district, and use up to 450 words to detail the DEI-flavored wrongdoing. 

The End DEI portal is a way of adding teeth to a Feb. 14 Department of Education directive that gave schools two weeks to tear out discriminatory programs — from hiring practices to segregated graduation ceremonies to indoctrination about “structural racism” — or face federal enforcement action:    

The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.

“For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies—but their concerns have been brushed off, mocked, or shut down entirely,” said Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty in a statement encouraging parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal” that’s unfolded in public schools. “This webpage demonstrates that President Trump’s Department of Education is putting power back in the hands of parents,” she added.

Others don’t share Justice’s joy. “This so-called ‘tip line’ is a shameless attempt to silence educators and dismantle programs that ensure every child—no matter their race, gender, or background—has a fair shot at success,” said Democratic Rep. Alma Adams, ranking member of the House Higher Education and Workforce Subcommittee. 

Trump’s war on government-facilitated DEI has predictably sparked resistance. Last Friday, US District Judge Adam Abelson, a Biden appointee, issued an injunction blocking the administration from canceling all federal contracts considered DEI-related. In his opinion, Abelson said Trump’s order potentially discriminatory, and was worded vaguely to an extent that parties to federal contracts reasonably feared “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.”    

Meanwhile, government officials and education associations across the country are advising schools to continue doing business as they like. “There’s nothing to act on until we see the administration or its agencies try to stop something,” American Council on Education president Ted Mitchell told AP. “And then we’ll have the argument.”

Get ready — the fur’s about to fly. 

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

One of the most referenced valuation measures is Dr. Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings Ratio, known as CAPE. Valuations have always been, and remain, an essential variable in long-term investing returns. Or, as Warren Buffett once quipped:

“Price Is What You Pay. Value Is What You Get.”

One of the hallmarks of very late-stage bull market cycles is the inevitable bashing of long-term valuation metrics. In the late 90s, if you were buying shares of Berkshire Hathaway, it was mocked as “driving Dad’s old Pontiac.” In 2007, valuation metrics were dismissed because the markets were flush with liquidity, low interest rates, and “Subprime was contained.”

Today, we again see repeated arguments about why “this time is different” because of ongoing beliefs that the Fed will bail out markets if something goes wrong. Of course, it is hard to blame investors for feeling this way, as it has repeatedly occurred since the “Financial Crisis.”

There is little argument, and as shown, current trailing valuations are elevated.

However, we need to understand two crucial points about valuations.

1. Valuations are not a catalyst of mean reversions, and;
2. They are a terrible market timing tool.

Furthermore, investors often overlook the most essential aspects of valuations.

1. Valuations are excellent predictors of return on 10 and 20-year periods, and;
2. They are the fuel for mean reverting events.

Critics argue that valuations have been high for quite some time, and a market reversion hasn’t occurred. However, to our point above, valuation models are not “market timing indicators.”  The vast majority of analysts assume that if a measure of valuation (P/E, P/S, P/B, etc.) reaches some specific level, it means that:

1. The market is about to crash, and;
2. Investors should be in 100% cash.

This is incorrect.

Valuations Reflect Sentiment

Valuation measures are just that—a measure of current valuation. Moreover, valuations are a much better measure of “investor psychology” and a manifestation of the “greater fool theory.” This is why a high correlation exists between one-year trailing valuations and consumer confidence in higher stock prices.

What valuations do express should be obvious. If you “overpay” for something today, the future net return will be lower than if you had paid a discount for it.

Cliff Asness of AQR previously discussed this issue:

“Ten-year forward average returns fall nearly monotonically as starting Shiller P/E’s increase. Also, as starting Shiller P/E’s go up, worst cases get worse and best cases get weaker.

If today’s Shiller P/E is 22.2, and your long-term plan calls for a 10% nominal (or with today’s inflation about 7-8% real) return on the stock market, you are basically rooting for the absolute best case in history to play out again, and rooting for something drastically above the average case from these valuations.”

We can prove that by looking at forward 10-year total returns versus various levels of PE ratios historically.

Asness continues:

“It [Shiller’s CAPE] has very limited use for market timing (certainly on its own) and there is still great variability around its predictions over even decades. But, if you don’t lower your expectations when Shiller P/E’s are high without a good reason — and in my view, the critics have not provided a good reason this time around — I think you are making a mistake.”

So, if Shiller’s CAPE predicts long-term return outcomes with a long lag, is there potentially a better measure?

A Fly In The CAPE Ointment

As noted, valuations are a significant predictor of long-term returns. However, investors’ collapsing holding periods of equities have created a mismatch between valuations and expectations. Furthermore, extensive changes in the financial system since 2008 support the argument that using a 10-year average to smooth earnings volatility may be too long. These changes include:

• Beginning in 2009, FASB Rule 157 was “temporarily” repealed to allow banks to “value” illiquid assets, such as real estate or mortgage-backed securities, at levels they felt were more appropriate rather than on the last actual “sale price” of a similar asset. This was done to keep banks solvent as they were forced to write down billions of dollars of assets on their books. This boosted the bank’s profitability and made earnings appear higher than they may have been otherwise. The ‘repeal” of Rule 157 is still in effect today, and the subsequent “mark-to-myth” accounting rule is still inflating earnings.
• Another recent distortion is the heavy use of off-balance sheet vehicles to suppress corporate debt and leverage levels and boost earnings.
• Extensive cost-cutting, productivity enhancements, labor off-shoring, etc., are heavily employed to boost earnings in a relatively weak revenue growth environment.
• A surge in corporate share buybacks to reduce outstanding shares and boost bottom-line earnings per share to support higher asset prices.

The last point is one of the most significant supports of higher valuations in the previous 15 years. As noted in “Earnings Estimates Are Overly Optimistic,” buybacks have contributed to higher earnings per share despite lackluster growth in top-line revenue.

A Look At The Impact Of Buybacks

Since 2009, corporate reported earnings per share have increased by 676%. This is the sharpest post-recession rise in reported EPS in history. However, that sharp increase in earnings did not come from revenue. (Revenue occurs at the top of the income statement.) Revenue from sales of goods and services has only increased by a marginal 129% during the same period. As noted above, 75% of the earnings increase came from buybacks, accounting gimmicks, and cost reductions.

Using share buybacks to improve underlying earnings per share contributes to the distortion of long-term valuation metrics. As the WSJ article stated in a 2012 article:

“If you believe a recent academic study, one out of five [20%] U.S. finance chiefs have been scrambling to fiddle with their companies’ earnings. 

This should not come as a major surprise as it is a rather “open secret.” Companies manipulate bottom line earnings by utilizing “cookie-jar” reserves, heavy use of accruals, and other accounting instruments to either flatter, or depress, earnings.

What is more surprising though is CFOs’ belief that these practices leave a significant mark on companies’ reported profits and losses. When asked about the magnitude of the earnings misrepresentation, the study’s respondents said it was around 10% of earnings per share.“

Unsurprisingly, 93% of the respondents pointed to “influence on stock price” and “outside pressure” as the reasons for manipulating earnings figures. Such “manipulations” also suppress valuations by overstating the “E” in the CAPE ratio.

Another problem is the duration mismatch.

Duration Mismatch

Think about it this way: When constructing a portfolio containing fixed income, one of the most significant risks is a “duration mismatch.”  For example, assume an individual buys a 20-year bond but needs the money in 10 years. Since the purpose of owning a bond is capital preservation and income, the duration mismatch is critical. A capital loss will occur if interest rates rise between the initial purchase and sell date 10 years before maturity.

One could reasonably argue that due to the “speed of movement” in the financial markets, a shortening of business cycles, and increased liquidity, there is a “duration mismatch” between Shiller’s 10-year CAPE and the current financial markets.

The chart below shows the annual P/E ratio versus the inflation-adjusted (real) S&P 500 index.

Importantly, you will notice that during secular bear market periods (shaded areas), the overall trend of P/E ratios is declining.  This “valuation compression” is a function of the overall business cycle as “over-valuation” levels are “mean reverted” over time.  You will also notice that market prices are generally “trending sideways,” with increased volatility during these periods.

Furthermore, valuation swings have vastly increased since the turn of the century, which is one of the primary arguments against Dr. Shiller’s 10-year CAPE ratio.

But is there a better measure?

Introducing The CAPE-5 Ratio

Smoothing earnings volatility is necessary to understand the underlying trend of valuations better. For investors, periods of “valuation expansion” are where the gains in the financial markets have been made over the last 125 years. Conversely, during periods of “valuation compression,” returns are much more muted and volatile.

Therefore, to compensate for the potential “duration mismatch” of a faster-moving market environment, I recalculated the CAPE ratio using a 5-year average, as shown in the chart below.

There is a high correlation between the movements of the CAPE-5 and the S&P 500 index. However, you will notice that before 1950, the movements of valuations were more coincident with the overall index, as price movement was a primary driver of the valuation metric. As earnings growth advanced much more quickly post-1950, price movement became less dominating. Therefore, the CAPE-5 ratio began to lead to overall price changes.

Since 1950, a key “warning” for investors has been a decline in the CAPE-5 ratio, leading to price declines in the overall market. The most recent decline in the CAPE-5 is directly related to the collision of inflation and the contraction in monetary policy due to increased interest rates. However, complacency that “this time is different” will likely be misplaced when the CAPE-5 starts its subsequent reversion.

The Deviation Matters

We can look at the deviation between current valuation levels and the long-term average to better understand where valuations are currently relative to history. It is crucial to understand the importance of deviation. For an “average,” valuations must be above and below that “average” over history. These “averages” provide a gravitational pull on valuations over time, which is why the further the deviation is away from the “average,” the more significant the eventual “mean reversion” will be.

The first chart below is the percentage deviation of the CAPE-5 ratio from its long-term average going back to 1900.

Currently, the 107.01% deviation above the long-term CAPE-5 average of 15.86x earnings puts valuations at levels only witnessed two (2) other times in history. As stated above, while it is hoped “this time will be different,” which were the exact words uttered during the five previous periods, the eventual results were much less optimal.

However, as noted, the changes that occurred post-WWII regarding economic prosperity, operational capacity, and productivity warrant examining only the period from 1944 to the present.

Again, as with the long-term view above, the current deviation is 90.15% above the post-WWII CAPE-5 average of 17.27x earnings. Such a deviation level only occurred twice in the last 80 years: in 1996 and 2021. Again, as with the long-term view above, the resulting “reversion” was not kind to investors.

Conclusion

Is CAPE-5 a better measure than Shiller’s CAPE-10 ratio? Maybe, as it adjusts more quickly to a faster-moving marketplace. 

However, I want to reiterate that neither Shiller’s CAPE-10 ratio nor the modified CAPE-5 ratio were ever meant to be “market timing” indicators.

Since valuations determine forward returns, the sole purpose is to denote periods that carry exceptionally high levels of investment risk and result in abysmal future returns.

Currently, valuation measures clearly warn that future market returns will be substantially lower than they have been over the past 15 years. Therefore, if you are expecting the markets to crank out 12% annualized returns over the next 10 years so that you can meet your retirement goals, it is likely that you will be very disappointed.

*  *  *

For more in-depth analysis and actionable investment strategies, visit RealInvestmentAdvice.com. Stay ahead of the markets with expert insights tailored to help you achieve your financial goals.

Bitcoin briefly entered a bear market earlier, tumbling 21% over seven sessions before staging a sharp rebound in early European trading – up 7.5% off its lows of about $78.4k. 

The turnaround was partially fueled by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, after news hit via Bloomberg that it enabled its entire model portfolio business to allocate funds into the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT).

BLACKROCK ADDS OWN BITCOIN ETF TO MODEL-PORTFOLIO LINEUP

Thank you for your panic sales

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 28, 2025

“We believe Bitcoin has long-term investment merit and can potentially provide unique and additive sources of diversification to portfolios,” Michael Gates, lead portfolio manager for BlackRock’s Target Allocation ETF model portfolio suite, wrote in investment commentary on Thursday.

The IBIT addition presents a potential new source of demand for the ETF, as Bitcoin trades around the $84k mark at lunchtime.

Goldman Sachs’ Blake Germani, Suzanne Dannheim, and Solo Semenyuk provided fresh insights into institutional crypto sentiment in a client note Friday, summarizing key takeaways from the firm’s latest digital assets survey for the fourth quarter of top hedge fund managers and asset allocators worldwide:

• 62% trade physical crypto or products linked to crypto (directly or indirectly)

• 65% expect to maintain or increase their crypto holdings within the next 12 months

• 50% believe counterparty risk is the most important aspect when picking a spot cryptocurrency trading counterparty

Here’s the survey:

Institutional ownership of digital assets is rising in President Trump’s second term. 

Authored by Mike Solana via PirateWires,

Dad’s home. 

Earlier this week, Amazon founder, part-time rocket man, and fellow billionaire media mogul Jeff Bezos announced The Washington Post’s opinion page was adopting a new philosophy.

Henceforth, he published to X, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

From here, he provided quite a bit of context on his thinking:

Predictably, reaction from even the center left was immediately hysterical. This was the end of democracy, we were told, and the rise of fascism. No, scratch that. This was actual Nazi shit. Jeff Bezos is an “oligarch,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of a private citizen’s decision not to publish communism in the op-ed section of a newspaper he owns. And then, my personal favorite: Bezos’ pivot to “individual liberties” hits trans women hardest.

But his decision mostly just strikes me as inevitable, and not only because Bezos has previously signaled his displeasure with the overall communist barista disposition of his paper, a once-storied institution disgraced by several years of openly partisan propaganda (an evolution I’ve covered in detail for Pirate Wires). There’s also been something of a media reckoning since Trump’s re-election, in which even overtly left-wing organizations are reexamining their bias. In part, they’ve done so with integrity. There are many journalists who really do want to understand what’s going on, and who really are aware they got the last few years wrong — in everything from their surreal pro-crime positioning to predicting the last election. In large part, however, mainstream outlets are responding to the national backlash against their coverage that’s cost them a significant portion of their audience.

Over the weekend, MSNBC rocked the internet with its decision to shake-up prime-time programming, including the controversial move (according to Rachel Maddow only) to cut Joy Reid, the openly racist psych ward patient and self-proclaimed beneficiary of affirmative action who, more importantly, no longer had much of an audience. The Los Angeles Times began its pivot even before the last election, when it, along with the Washington Post, opted out of a presidential endorsement. And the New York Times continues to successfully enforce the zero-bullshit social media policy it adopted back when it still employed popular performance artist Taylor Lorenz.

Still, in reaction to the Bezos op-ed blitzkrieg, media reaction was not only immense, but almost uniformly self-defensive. The lack of control over a billionaire’s op-ed page was, for some reason, too great a slight to bear. On the more good-natured end of the spectrum, writers tended to simply conflate the op-ed page with reporting, and incorrectly imply that Bezos would be shaping reported news coverage. Then, there were business questions. The New York Times Mike Isaac wondered why Bezos bought the paper in the first place, which I guess is fair enough — though my sense is he probably did it more for the legacy of Watergate than the smooth boomer ramblings of Jennifer Rubin. But over on BlueSky? Our favorite mental patient was working through it.

“I told you all @jeffbezos was feral,” wrote Kara Swisher, who then went on to reference Orwell. “He’s now killed the Graham/Bradlee legacy of justice, the First Amendment and basic humanity in a vomitous spew of nonsense, testosterone fueled (and HGH) double talk that is more than a little pathetic and utterly shameless.” At the time of my writing, she’s posted and reposted 21 times on the subject.

From Unherd, the upstart media outlet “challenging the herd with new and bold thinking,” editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote, “There is a rich irony in an oligarch touting his commitment to freedom in a memo narrowly restricting the range of views available at his paper.”

Mostly, this is how detractors framed Bezos’ decision: an unthinkable, hypocritical violation of free speech from a crowd of businessmen who’ve spent years defending it from, well, the likes of Kara Swisher, who favor draconian political censorship because — and I’m trying to steelman this, I promise — they think it will stop fascism. Which I guess we now have? (It’s hard to keep up.)

There’s a lot we could unpack here, but probably nothing is more important than the outrageous entitlement on display. In the meandering thoughts of the average loser writer, which they for some reason continue to shamelessly post publicly on X and Bluesky, we often encounter the implicit, and sometimes stated belief that their work, composed of their personal opinions, is itself a kind of social good. These people are not just sharing their thoughts on why democracy is actually a coup, or calling out the inherent white supremacy of the latest Traitors episode. They are speaking truth to power in a manner the public should — indeed, must in the case of outlets like NPR — support.

It doesn’t matter that an anti-capitalist writer who thinks the assassin Luigi Mangione “made some good points” works for an outlet owned by some other ostensibly free human being who is (I really must mention!) paying their salary. It doesn’t matter if, in the case of Joy Reid, the American public is totally disinterested in what they’re saying. These people are not only entitled to share their personal opinions from the largest and most influential media platforms in America, their act of sharing is itself an essential public service.

I can’t stress enough how important this is, because you will never understand the media until you comprehend this point: these people not only believe they are right, they believe you should be forced to listen to them speak because they are right. They are professional opinion havers. No mere human plebes, these are doctors for bad ideas (on occasion, they will even rattle off a laundry list of bullshit degrees to prove it). Therefore, any act that inhibits their ability to speak, for whatever reason, is a moral ill, and they tend to assume it’s illegal. I am not being hyperbolic.

Earlier this week, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the Trump administration would be choosing which news outlets are joining the press pool moving forward. It was “a sharp break from a century of tradition,” wrote the AP, “in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans.” This “neutral” fact gathering organization was not satisfied with a little bit of tough language, however. The AP is presently suing White House officials, including the press secretary, over their first ouster from the briefing room, alleging a violation of their First Amendment rights.

The New York Times is not yet litigating (give them a minute), but the sentiment was echoed by Peter Baker, their White House correspondent:

“A president doesn’t pick.” I find this all very confusing. If the president doesn’t pick which reporters are in the press pool — which, by the way, is in his actual house — who does? Who is this “independent group” determining which journalists are invited to the White House? Because I’m a journalist, and I still haven’t received my invitation. Surely, if all journalists enjoy some sort of First Amendment right to ask the president annoying questions in his living room (almost explicitly the AP’s claim), that right extends to your friendly neighborhood Pirate King. Right?

Who the hell makes this decision?

Well, I did a little digging, and as best I can tell both the Times and the AP are referring to the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), an organization of the very journalists who sit in the White House briefing room. Of course, this organization can’t issue badges, as it has no actual power. The Press Secretary has always issued the badges after rubber stamping the WHCA’s “requests” (implicit demands?). But how would you define a scheme like this? Because it’s certainly not democratic, or republican. If you just break it down, what it really looks like is a hereditary aristocracy, in which badges are kept in their respective sacred houses, and passed down from one anointed writer to another. Put a little more simply, the New York Times gets to decide who covers the president, and that group always includes the New York Times.

I guess there are probably decent arguments in favor of a scheme like this. It’s just hard to really identify its potential value following four years of our aristocrats playing block-and-tackle for a left-wing president with, I’m pretty sure, actual dementia. These are really our most deserving arbiters of truth? I mean, you can’t even say they’re popular. It’s the year of our lord 2025. Joe Rogan gets more traffic when he drops a pod about aliens than the Times gets on a typical news day. Which is maybe really why they’re mad. Without a lot of cheating the system, how else will these people find their audience?

I think what we’re looking at here is the end of patronage for the far left. The system was quiet, unofficial, and endlessly wrapped in moralizing bullshit. From Twitter before Musk to every mainstream press outlet in the country, billionaires artificially amplified the views of virulently left-wing writers who, separate from their opinions, also controlled culture. And I imagine for someone like Kara Swisher, who has only ever had her biases confirmed by this system, an absence of privilege is frightening. She must be especially anxious as center right upstarts gain momentum across alternative media platforms — organically. But the people freaking out over the Washington Post doing less antifa shit in their op-ed page are being shortsighted, as are the right wingers celebrating.

It’s obviously true that it’s much more difficult for reflexively left-wing writers to connect with their audience today than it was a decade ago. This is due both to political moderation from the major media companies, and to competition from the alternative press enabled by social media platforms and new tools like Substack. But the very platforms and technologies that grew our current new class of media outlet (yours truly included) are not partisan technologies. Look to the world of streaming, where terrorist-fetishizing Marxists like Hasan are dominant. The truth is, bootstrapping new media companies has never been easier, the left still maintains a near monopoly on writing talent, and the audience for crazy left-wing bullshit, while slightly diminished, is now larger than the ecosystem sustaining it. From where I’m standing, that looks like opportunity for crazy people.

A few years ago, media upstarts tended to code right because everything else was coded left, and the new companies we watched rise up were all servicing an audience ignored by the machine. But if the blue-haired “yay Hamas” girlies are the ones without a home today, might there be room for a communist Pirate Wires? I shudder to think it. But I do think it.

The fragmented media landscape of our future is here, and the next Gawker is coming. So fear not, L-taking MSNBC cat moms, the pendulum is swinging. Now, if you can find it in yourself to stop complaining for a second and start building, it won’t matter what Bezos is doing to the house that built Rubin. And, frankly, I’m looking forward to your (limited) success. The woke whack-a-mole influencers have grown tedious in their victory, and I’m feeling bored without the SSRI-rattled blue checks on X.

See you in the arena.

—SOLANA

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In recent weeks, Ant Group, the Alibaba-affiliated fintech giant, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms have both ventured into the humanoid robotics race, while Elon Musk’s Tesla has been developing a bi-pedal, autonomous humanoid robot for the past several years. 

Goldman’s Jacqueline Du, Yuichiro Isayama, and others provided clients last Sunday with an investment guide to “Skynet”—outlining the companies most exposed to the global humanoid robotics industry.

Goldman’s Investing Guide To Skynet https://t.co/ZRKpiIUFok

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 23, 2025

On Thursday, Jacqueline Du, Zhou Li, and other analysts at Goldman penned a new note about key takeaways from meetings with China humanoid robotics company Unitree. The title of their note is “China Humanoid Robots: Unitree (private) trip takeaways: Robust hardware performance albeit still not ready for useful tasks.” 

Du outlined that Unitree’s H1 humanoid robot “is still incapable of handling complex and delicate tasks,” adding, “For commercialization progress, the company commented that humanoid robots can hardly achieve same-level efficiency as human workers in 2-3 years but meaningful application may arise over the horizon of 5-10 years.” 

Here’s more color from the analysts about their meeting with Unitree to gauge what’s happening in the industry: 

As part of our post-CNY pulse check field trip (Feb 24 – Feb 26, 2025), we visited Unitree (private) and watched its live demonstration of H1 humanoid robots and robot dogs.

Unitree showcased the capabilities of its H1 humanoid robot, which include walking and dancing, with robust hardware performance and strong autonomous self-balancing. This could be attributed to the company’s substantial motion control experience from its robot dogs development. During our previous field trip in 2023 and booth visit at 2024 CIIF (China International Industrial Fair), we understand from Unitree’s technical staffs that the underlying technology of motion control for humanoid robots and robot dogs is largely the same. However, H1 only have 19 DoFs (Degree of Freedom), and thus is still incapable of handling complex and delicate tasks. For commercialization progress, the company commented that humanoid robots can hardly achieve same-level efficiency as human workers in 2-3 years but meaningful application may arise over the horizon of 5-10 years. The company’s current humanoid robot shipment is at a few hundred units, meeting demand from R&D in universities’ labs and robot data collection & training.

The company also demonstrated its GO2 robot dog, showcasing its leading technology in robot dogs’ gait control algorithms. Unitree delivers thousands of units of robot dogs (all models including GO2 and B2, etc.) annually, mainly applied to patrol & inspection and substitution of hazardous tasks (fire rescue, power substation/nuclear power plant inspection). Unitree has a 60-70% market share in the quadruped robot market globally with 50% overseas revenue contribution, per the company.

The company has successfully equipped its robot dogs with LLM API, enabling robot dogs with voice control capability. However, robot dogs with LLM is incompetent for fully autonomous operation. Unitree’s humanoid robot only adopted rotary actuators (planetary reduction gear) in terms of hardware design, so further software and hardware iterations are required for large-scale applications. Per the company, its humanoid robot has experienced technology iteration with substantial improvement every year. As a reference, each generation of Unitree’s robot dog can improve its athletic performance (speed, reactivity, step climbing and self-balance ability, etc.) by 2-3X.

All in, the takeaways from our Unitree visit are in line with our view that the technology inflection point for humanoid robots remains unclear due to insufficient capability handling multiple generalized tasks. We model 76k/502k units of global humanoid robot shipments by 2027E/2032E, which is at a slower pace than market expectations as we believe it will likely take longer for AI-empowered robots to be ready. We believe investment opportunity at this stage remains in supply chain component names as we see a comprehensive ecosystem taking shape. We prefer actuator assemblers and harmonic gear suppliers on higher product adoption certainty and stronger technology barriers – stay Buy on Sanhua, Neutral on Leaderdrive, Best Precision and Moons’ Electric on valuation.

What’s more realistic this decade is the proliferation of robotic dogs, which are already being deployed on modern battlefields worldwide. The rise of Skynet is unlikely to be widely seen until the early 2030s, but in the meantime, big tech firms will continue showcasing their robots—much like Tesla has periodically done with Optimus.

This is coming…

. . .