Authored by Seth Smith via The Brownstone Institute,

Three years ago few of us knew the impending storm that was brewing; one that would upend the very fabric of global democracy, destroy whole communities, businesses and families and cause a vast number of children and adolescents to become unmoored and disengage from society, among many other deleterious outcomes. 

Perhaps most chilling of all has been the sinister turn in those three years of what was once seemingly a force for good, “public health;” which changed into a punitive and authoritarian entity that wilfully engages in iatrogenesis and the disenfranchisement of those skeptical of the medical-industrial complex through widespread and draconian vaccine mandates. 

In retrospect, America in February of 2020 seems like a libertarian, innocent age compared to our current one. We did not live under the shadow of possible nuclear holocaust. Everyday life was devoid of the nanny-state elements of our current age. Many of us had gone through life never quite knowing what the destructive power of a government run amok looked like. 

Now we know.

Not only do we once again live under the imminent threat of atomic annihilation, as our global “leaders” continue to play out a 21st-century version of Dr. Strangelove, but Covid offered an opportunity to further militarize and subordinate society. For let’s call lockdowns what they were: martial law. 

Moreover, the government and the security state during the last few years has proved itself to be in the service of only a tiny sliver of shadowy and in some cases invisible elites and “experts” whose actions have, in America most especially, been held to little accountability. In the face of lockdowns, which happened to be the most universally undemocratic and destructive event of my lifetime, regular citizens were held in contempt and with little more agency than the serfs of the Middle Ages. Some of us were made completely irrelevant and “non-essential.” 

Yet, amongst this wreckage and horror, many skeptical people, who once believed in benevolent leaders, have been freed from the flawed faith in “good” government. In this freedom lie several important lessons for how to move forward into a (hopefully) less totalitarian future.

Lesson #1: We need to hold the medical-industrial complex accountable.

My skepticism about the medical-industrial complex felt inchoate and somehow unfounded pre-Covid. Sure, I knew I’d be given a lecture at every doctor’s appointment about how I needed to schedule colonoscopies (in my early 40s!), buy new medicines, get blood work done, no questions about my holistic well-being, diet, etc. It didn’t matter which doctor I saw, they were all like that. There was always a feeling that these big buildings and office parks that housed the machinery of the medical industrial complex were, like consolidated public schools or prisons, quite anti-human. But I still . . . believed, more or less. 

What the Covid mania revealed is that much of the medical-industrial complex, like the military-industrial complex, is part of a system of hierarchical relationships that only truly benefits those in power. The beneficiaries being Big Pharma, massive corporate health systems, wealthy physicians and even a security state/biodefense apparatus that sees vast swaths of the global population as dots on a chart to be manipulated, vaccinated and medicalized. 

Even worse, iatrogenesis – the massive health harms caused by Covid medical interventions – generates unseemly and massive profits, again for a tiny segment of individuals with unfathomable power and wealth (Bill Gates is the prime example). This sinister complex relies on sickness, not health to make their profits. I believe this is one reason why Covid was so intensely medicalized and why we all became pawns of the vaccine industry, instead of public health pursuing more holistic attempts for better outcomes for people with Covid. 

None of us has to take this lying down, though. Health consumers can take back their rights through the great work of organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund and No College Mandates, two groups with writers affiliated with Brownstone Institute. 

Lesson #2: The “real” American left is not MSNBC and has perhaps vanished entirely 

The American liberal-left is a coalition that has deteriorated so far as to be unrecognizable, filled with purity tests, blind obedience to secret service agencies like the FBI, the CIA and shadow organizations in the military like DARPA, with authoritarian leaders who constantly virtue signal and who will censor and cancel those they do not agree with. 

For many years, since the late Obama years particularly, I’ve felt more and more out of place within the cultural ideology of the American left, which has placed identity politics above economic fairness, and in many instances is entirely unrecognizable from the “left” of old. 

Covid remains the demarcation point–when I and millions of others abandoned the movement entirely.

Nothing about being a cheerleader for lockdowns represented traditional leftist values. In fact, I would argue that the natural place for the American left was to viciously oppose lockdowns, because they so deleteriously affected the working class, working poor, and minorities. And yet the silence on the left in the mid-part of 2020, much to my horror, soon became derision and then full scale hatred toward those of us who proclaimed our opposition to lockdowns, even with reasoned analysis or proposals such as the Great Barrington Declaration. 

That we were brutally censored and that all protestations ended up falling on deaf ears was such an alienating experience, many of us who at one time proclaimed to be “of the left” have abandoned the project entirely, and most especially the political party that was supposed to represent us in America, the Democrats. We have emerged politically homeless; some having even established alliances within the welcoming arms of the libertarian and conservative movements. 

This begs the question that many of us have pondered: what is the political left now? And what has it always been? 

It certainly does not resemble the George Orwell version, which had so much influence on me as a college student. The spirit of the left contained in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” for instance, feels like a world gone by, infused as it was with a healthy skepticism, admiration and reverence for the working classes, and the mutually supportive ideas of liberty and egalitarianism. Such humility and nuance have almost wholly disappeared from our current rendition of “leftism.” 

Some of us have even wondered (and indeed Orwell pondered the same thing): does leftism, if unchecked, always loop into something horrendous, the inevitable conclusion not being utopia but the graveyards of Cheong Ek or tendentious, censorious authoritarianism? 

Does dialectical materialism only go down one road in the end, and that toward Stalinism or fascism? 

Yet, despite the loneliness of becoming a dissenter within one’s old political home, the complete destruction of what used to be “left” and in some instances “right” political spheres is in itself freeing. Many of us are carving out new political identities and in some cases new political parties and alliances are forming. This outcome will ultimately be very healthy for the future of democracy. 

Lesson #3: We have proof that “experts” are often wrong. 

A healthy skepticism of the “experts” and elites has always been a hallmark of American life, especially out here in the provinces where I reside. Yet, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy – the last book he published and maybe most prescient – many American elites and professional “experts” have now completely abandoned their advisory roles to become de facto rulers in themselves, worshiped in almost a religious sense by a segment of completely secularized, well-to-do liberals. These elites, however, mostly hold contempt toward the working and middle class. This has been happening for quite some time (Lasch’s book was published in 1996).

The most egregious recent example of this worship and the power of the 21st century technocrat is embodied by the former Director of NIAID, Anthony Fauci, who was the public face of the disastrous Covid response for nearly three full years. The myopic reverence for this man is dangerous on many levels, but it also showcases a grave weakness of modern humanity; many of us will give up even the most basic freedoms because we blindly trust a technocratic “savior” who just may have all the wrong data or simply be a mendacious, cunning bureaucrat. 

Yet, before Covid many of us, including myself, trusted unelected bureaucrats like Fauci far too often with little questioning of their motives. Lockdowns showed their hand and tipped the balance toward egregious authoritarianism. Unelected administrative-state actors should not have any ability to create policy by fiat, and groups such as the NCLA are fighting many of the unconstitutional edicts pushed forward by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH as part of the Covid response.

Lesson #4: The technology that was supposed to lessen inequality actually increases societal rifts.

The modern worship of technology has created an undemocratic information ecosystem rife with inequity, which helped smooth the way for authoritarian and coercive lockdown policies. In fact, with the aforementioned DARPA heavily involved in the Covid response and Big Tech gaining nearly unfettered power during the pandemic, technology’s tentacles are lodged in every classroom, courthouse and boardroom across the country. It seems likely that the architecture for future lockdowns is now firmly in place. 

We should never, at any moment moving forward, accept this as our future. The Western world imitated China’s brutal, authoritarian lockdowns because digital technology facilitated it. These policies would have been impossible as little as 25 years ago. 

And in the end it was all a sham. 

Millions still had to keep the sewers clear, emergency services running, the lights on and our grocery stores stocked. Working class people, many of whom were rightly skeptical of the Covid vaccine, and who subsequently lost their jobs because of the illegal vaccine mandates, were completely ignored by the laptop class who were able to work from home. In the midst of receiving endless curbside deliveries, virtue signaling on social media about “anti-vaxxers,” and sidelining those who actually had to leave their homes and work for a living, Big Tech only fueled the culture wars and ultimately hurt the working class. 

Lesson #5: The most meaningful things are still the most meaningful things. 

If we cannot trust the experts, the government, the global order, or technology, who can we trust? This is perhaps the most important question of all, and one that has been asked from time immemorial. In intense readings of Leo Tolstoy’s non-fiction work during this strange and awful time, especially Patriotism and Government and The Kingdom of God is Within You, I’ve come to realize that in the very act of trusting monolithic institutions or the state in general, we are looking for all the wrong answers and even perhaps asking the wrong questions.

For, like all of the material world, institutions are fallible and crumble. The right questions are much larger and far more personal, and the answers are immutable and have been there forever.

Outside the bounds of our fallible institutions, the most important answers to nearly every question are to be found in authentic feelings of love and belonging. Love for your family, or the little plot of land and house that you own, or the tiny farming community that you live in, the church you belong to, or the group of kind-hearted and supportive friends and writers, like those who have found one another in Brownstone Institute and other grassroots communities. 

Faceless federal institutions and their representatives do not deserve our love, nor in most cases do they deserve even admiration or respect. They are the products of very flawed, uncaring systems and are ultimately artificial creations of a flawed humankind. 

Despite the anguish and pain we have all felt–and the divisions the last three years of authoritarianism have created–don’t let the elites and their petty politics divide your friendships and family. Love is still the ultimate answer. 

The list of state-funded entities pushing narratives, crushing questions, demanding censorship, and feeding the liberal media unsourced ‘facts’ is about to grow dramatically as the shadowy line between First Amendment protections and Orwellian DoubleSpeak gets blurred by Matt Taibbi’s latest exposition from his delving deeper into The Twitter Files.

In the recent past, we have seen the farce of ‘Hamilton68’ and its efforts to tamp down any dissenting voice of reason as ‘Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigners’.

Today, we find about about The Global Engagement Center (GEC), The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), and New Knowledge (NK) – all doing similar censorious things by similar censorious methods, demanding social media entities blacklist accounts for the barest minimum of reasons.

The silver lining of this exposure is that not just does this reduce their reach by their actions being brought into the light, but it turns out that several Twitter executives, including Trust and Security chief Yoel Roth, rejected many of these requests, even going so far as to mock some of the requests. One former intel source sums up the situation perfectly in his comments to Taibbi:

“It’s an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex…” specifically discussing the GEC, but the comments could apply to any of these entities, adding,

“all the shit we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home.”

Matt Taibbi and the team at Racket put together the following thread of examples of that ‘shit’…

Take a breath…

On June 8, 2021, an analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab wrote to Twitter:

“Hi guys. Attached you will find… around 40k twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior… and Hindu nationalism more broadly.”

DFRLab said it suspected 40,000 accounts of being “paid employees or possibly volunteers” of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

But the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.

“I have no connection to any Hindu folks… Just a Reagan Republican here in CT,” replied “Bobby Hailstone.”

“A Hindu nationalist? I’ve never even been out of this country. Let alone the state of NJ,” said “Lady_DI816.”

“These people are insane!” said “Krista Woods.”

Twitter agreed, one reason many of the accounts remain active.

“Thanks, Andy,” replied Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

“I spot-checked a number of these accounts, and virtually all appear to be real people.”

Again, apologies: here is the “India List” https://t.co/848us04x0Y

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023

DFRLab is funded by the U.S. Government, specifically the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

Director Graham Brookie denies DFRLab it uses tax money to track Americans, saying its GEC grants have “an exclusively international focus.”

But Americans on DFR’s list, like Marysel Urbanik, are unconvinced its focus is “exclusively international.”

“This is un-American,” says Urbanik, who immigrated from Castro’s Cuba.

“They do this in places that don’t believe in free speech.”

The Global Engagement Center is usually listed as a State Department entity.

It’s not.

Created in Obama’s last year, GEC is an interagency group “within” State, whose initial partners included FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.

GEC’s mandate: “To recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign… disinformation.”

On the surface, it’s the same mission the United States Information Agency (USIA) fulfilled for decades, with a catch. USIA focused on foreign “disinfo.”

GEC’s focus is wider.

GEC could have avoided controversy by focusing on exposing/answering “disinformation” with research and a more public approach, as USIA did. Instead, it funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious – and idiotic – new form of blacklisting.

https://t.co/0emM8JQDzO GEC asks Twitter to review 499 accounts as “foreign” disinformation, for reasons that include using Signal to communicate and tweeting the hashtag, #IraniansDebateWithBiden. https://t.co/Gz1ZAElqrI pic.twitter.com/31Di6SSI1D

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023

14. Here are 5500 names GEC told Twitter it believed were “Chinese… accounts” engaged in “state-backed coordinated manipulation.” It takes about negative ten seconds to find non-Chinese figures: https://t.co/pkttqOL34S pic.twitter.com/wjyuJrUFpN

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023

GEC’s “Chinese” list included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees based abroad.

“Not exactly Anderson’s besties, but CNN assets if you will,” quipped Twitter’s Patrick Conlon.

“A total crock,” added Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

GEC passed some good information to Twitter, but mostly not.

Taibbi points out that the root problem was exemplified by a much-circulated 2020 report, “Russian Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda.”

This GEC report was contradictory.

On one hand, it offered reasoned evidence that a specific outlet was partnered with the Russian Foreign Ministry, which would make it a true “proxy site.”

However, the same report advanced a far lazier idea.

Along with state actors, groups that “generate their own momentum” should also be seen as parts of a propaganda “ecosystem.”

Independence, GEC said, should not “confuse those trying to discern the truth.”

And while the “ecosystem” is not a new concept. It’s been with us since Salem: guilt by association.

As one Twitter exec put it perfectly:

“‘If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked,’ does not exactly resonate as a sound research approach.”

GEC sent Twitter a series of reports on a series of topics, often employing the “ecosystem” concept.

Its report on France “attributes membership in the yellow vest movement as being Russia-aligned,” is how Twitter’s Aaron Rodericks put it.

GEC’s report on China was “more entertainment value than anything,” said Rodericks.

“It equates anything pro-China, but also anything against China in Italy, as part of Russia’s strategy.”

And so, as Taibbi reports, Twitter staffers showed professionalism.

They tended to look at least once before declaring a thing foreign disinformation. This made them a tough crowd for GEC.

Fortunately, there’s an easier mark: the news media.

GEC’s game was simple:

1. create an alarmist report,

2. send it to the slower animals in journalism’s herd,

3. and wait as reporters bang on Twitter’s door, demanding to know why this or that “ecosystem” isn’t obliterated.

Twitter emails ooze frustration at such queries. UGGG! reads one.

Roth noted Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy was quoted in Frenkel’s story and said: “Seems like ASD are back at their old tricks.”

Roth was referring to the fact that the ASD created Hamilton 68, another guilt-by-association scheme detailed in Twitter Files #15.

The Hamilton “dashboard” claimed to track accounts linked to “Russian influence activities,” but the list was largely made up of Americans.

But facts didn’t matter to these fact-checkers…

In a crucial in-house Q&A in mid-2017, Roth was asked if it was possible to detect “Russian fingerprints” using Twitter’s public data.

Though “you can make inferences,” he said, “in short, no.”

Twitter therefore knew from the first days of the “foreign interference” mania that the media zone was flooded with bad actors playing up cyber-threats for political or financial reasons, GEC included.

“GEC has doubled their budget by aggressively overstating threats through unverified accusations that can’t be replicated either by external academics or by Twitter,” wrote Rodericks.

The same is true of New Knowledge, the scandal-plagued company staffed by former NSA officials that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) hired to do “expert” assessments of the initial batches of “suspect” Facebook and Twitter accounts.

When Twitter saw New Knowledge and its reporter-worshipped “disinformation” gurus like Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta were making analytical leaps they felt were impossible, they knew something was off.

After Politico cited a New Knowledge report to the SSCI as evidence for what it called a “sweeping effort to sow divisions,” Twitter dug in.

NK pointed to five supposedly Russian accounts it said were “relatively easy to find with the Twitter public API.”

Roth scoffed.

Roth said two of the five accounts were a “small Indonesian content farm… just commercial spam. (Would suspend but don’t want to throw fire on the NK report by making anyone think they’re correct.) Becca account is an American and not at all suspicious.”

Twitter’s Nick Pickles: “New Knowledge’s pitch… pick accounts that they have deemed to be IRA controlled, and then spin up bigger macro analysis… stories about ‘2000 Russian accounts tweeting about Kavanagh/Walkway/Caravan’ [were] often based on media activity from NK.”

As Matt Taibbi concludes, just like Hamilton 68, GEC and New Knowledge littered the media landscape with flawed or flat-out wrong news stories.

Exacerbating matters, Americans in both cases paid taxes to become the subject of these manipulative operations.

Foreign cyber-threats exist, and there are sophisticated ways of detecting them.

But GEC and its subcontractors don’t use those, instead deploying junk science that often lumps true bad actors in with organic opinion.

https://t.co/nHnOyqlWrV IG report shows GEC was initially obligated $98.7 million, of which roughly $80 million came from the Pentagon. It reportedly gave to at least 39 different organizations, whose names were redacted.

Why is this list secret? pic.twitter.com/W8yUes75Ly

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023

Twitter comms official Ian Plunkett wrote years ago that “misinformation, like [countering violent extremism, or CVE] before it, is becoming a cottage industry.”

Disinformation is the counterterrorism mission, rebranded for domestic targets.

Reauthorization for GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year. Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

This past month a poll held by ABC and the Washington Post with a 37 year history asked Americans if they were better or worse off in the two years since Biden entered the White House.

If you were to ask Biden this question, you would be regaled with a flurry of great news about a fantastic economic recovery, epic jobs numbers, falling inflation and a dropping deficit.

When you ask actual average citizens, you get a much different reply.

According to the ABC/Post poll, Americans say they are worse off than they have ever been, with the most negative data in the history of the survey. Over 40% of respondents indicated their financial situation was worse under Biden. Only 16% of people said they were better off. Not only that, but 60% of Democrats polled said they did NOT want Joe Biden as their candidate in 2024, and 62% of all people polled said they would be disappointed or even angry if Biden remained in the White House for a second term. This is astounding.

How does one reconcile this reality with the claims made by Joe Biden on the economy? If this is the “greatest economic recovery ever” then why are so many Americans in financial misery?

The number of lies surrounding Biden’s economic platform are too many to count, but I will try to go through the key arguments that the White House is promoting these days and outline why these claims are manipulative or outright fraudulent.

Let’s get started…

Record Jobs Creation?

Biden and his team are quick to suggest that data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates an incredible jobs recovery which he is happy to take credit for. “You don’t have a recession when you have 500,000 jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told ABC’s “Good Morning America” program on Monday. “What I see is a path in which inflation is declining significantly and the economy is remaining strong,” Yellen added.

This is coming from the same woman who denied for years that inflation was real and a threat to our financial system. The same woman that reluctantly admitted to inflation only after it hit 40 year highs. So, keep in mind that Yellen’s track record indicates she is either an idiot or a liar.

Also, these kinds of statements are made while deliberately ignoring the context and details of the situation. Over 25 million+ jobs were lost on Biden’s watch as he aggressively pushed for national covid lockdowns. These lockdowns were useless in stopping the spread of the virus, but they were very effective at killing the economy.

Many conservative red states defied Biden, Fauci and the CDC and reopened after a few months when it became clear that covid was not a threat to the vast majority of people. Blue states languished in lockdowns and irrational fear for much longer. Only recently have most US states backed away from the covid hysteria and so jobs are returning. 25 million+ were lost, and 12 million have been recovered. Hardly anything to brag about, but when you look at it as if the lockdowns never happened, it might be impressive.

Beyond the return of jobs lost during the lockdowns, there is also the issue of around $8 trillion+ in stimulus in less than two years of pandemic response. The lockdowns could not have happened without covid checks and PPP loans, and the covid stimulus helped directly trigger the inflation avalanche that had been building for years. Part of this process happened under Trump’s watch, to be sure. However, it was Biden and the leftists that tried to keep the mandates and lockdowns going even when the data showed they were useless.

With $8 trillion in fiat pumped directly into the system, retail and service industries exploded in 2021 as people rushed to buy goods. Prices exploded, too, because supply could not meet demand. The problem is that the jobs created during this event are a temporary condition of inflation, not a natural result of a recovering economy. In other words, Biden’s jobs market is an illusion built on fiat. I predict we will see considerable job losses this year as savings accumulated from covid stimulus run out and as consumer credit runs dry.

Then, there is the issue of potentially fake or exaggerated BLS jobs data. Only last year the Philly Fed had to revise and refute White House labor gains and cut over 1 million jobs from their stats in the process. This is a massive discrepancy. Though it’s impossible to prove at this stage, I suspect that there is a concerted agenda to lie about employment numbers, either to make Biden look good, or to facilitate an excuse for the continuance of interest rate hikes into economic weakness.

If the BLS numbers are accurate, then why is there a record number of Americans worse off under Biden? One, the jobs being created are low wage. Two, the numbers are fake. Three, inflation is so high that wages cannot keep up with the increase in prices.

Falling Inflation?

If we calculate inflation according to the standards set during the last stagflation crisis in the 1970s and early 1980’s, then the real inflation rate is closer to 15%. Official CPI according to the new way of calculation is 6.4%. Did inflation fall recently? Yes, but not because of Biden.

The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates to nearly 5%. Keep in mind that this is after keeping rates at near zero for around 14 years, and they are expected to continue to climb to a possible 6% or more this year. Higher rates mean far less lending and far less spending by consumers and the government. They also mean that corporate stock buybacks which originally relied on cheap overnight loans from the Fed are going to slowly die out, causing stock markets to fall. The most obvious consequence of this trend will be mass job losses as companies cut costs.

Falling Budget Deficit?

Again, this has nothing to do with Biden. He is trying to spend more and add more to the budget through his “Inflation Reduction Act”. Despite his many promises, he is not trying to reduce the budget.  He will be FORCED to do this, however, by tightening fiscal policy.

Why is the deficit falling? Because the Fed is raising interest rates and this makes it more expensive for the government to borrow and spend. Higher interest rates raise the federal government’s borrowing costs and future interest payments on the national debt. As rates rise government programs must curb spending – meaning they are forced to reduce the budget deficit instead of spending money they don’t have.

The Reality

US retail sales just witnessed a steep decline through the end of 2022 and the holiday season, indicating that the effects of covid stimulus are well and truly over. Manufacturing tumbled as 2022 closed, defying Biden’s assertions that he is bringing back domestic production. US imports of goods have also tumbled and shipping is down across the board, yet another sign that the economy is stalling.

Intermittent spikes in retail sales have occurred, as we saw in January, but so has credit card debt, suggesting that consumers are now leaning on credit in order to cover increased costs triggered by inflation.  Retail sales are not increasing, just the prices and credit expenditures.  In fact, polls show 33% of Americans say it will take them at least 2 years to pay off their credit card debts, and 50% of Americans say they need their credit cards just to cover normal essential living expenses. 45% of people said they had to take on more debt during the pandemic.

The Tech sector is starting mass layoffs right now and may be a canary in the coal mine for what is about to happen to the rest of the jobs market this year. And, inflation remains high enough that 56% of Americans say they cannot keep up with the cost of living, while 77% are worried about their future financial prospects.

This information does not jive with Biden’s story at all. There is no recovery, we are in the midst of a stagflation crisis with elements of a growing recession. I believe 2023 will be the year that the recovery narrative collapses, but the government under Biden will seek to hide the implosion for as long as possible.

*  *  *

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Authored by Jesse Felder via TheFelderReport.com,

We have already seen an inordinate amount of outright fraud this cycle (see this and this) that has, so far, proven to be a terrific indicator of where we stand in the larger market cycle.

Today, Bloomberg reports that earnings quality for the S&P 500 Index recently fell to its worst levels in at least three decades and this may be an important sign of where we stand in the larger economic cycle.

The way they quantify “earnings quality” is to compare the aggregate net income of all companies in the index (ex-financials and energy) to aggregate cash flow. Normally, cash flow should be greater than earnings because it adds back non-cash charges like depreciation and amortization. When that is not the case it can be a red flag that companies are resorting to accounting gimmicks to make earnings look better than they otherwise would.

“Managers are under so much pressure to deliver earnings that they’re using a lot more accounting than they have in the past to make their earnings look good,” said Sanjeev Bhojraj, alumni professor in asset management at Cornell University.

“If my dollar of earnings has no cash or negative cash, that’s poor quality because all the earnings that I have are just accounting.”

By inference then, companies haven’t employed “financial shenanigans” (to borrow a term from CFRA Founder Howard Schilit) to inflate earnings as aggressively as they are doing today at any point in the past few decades.

Another way to approach this issue is to compare S&P 500 Index earnings to NIPA profits (tracked by the BEA). These two figures are plotted in the chart below.

As Gavekal founder Charles Gave recently pointed out (hat tip, David Hay), “When S&P 500 profits diverge dramatically from NIPA profits, it is a sure sign that accounting methods have changed at S&P 500 companies. If S&P 500 profits rise to exceed NIPA profits by 20% or more, it is a signal that companies’ reported profits are being generated largely by their accountants.”

Moreover, there are important economic implications from all of this.

Gave continues, “Usually this means that the economy is on the brink of a recession, and that the stock market is about to take a beating.”

Last year, we crossed that 20% threshold between S&P 500 earnings and NIPA profits.

Perhaps we should add this to the growing list of leading indicators pointing to recession.

Having frequently asked when billionaire activist investor Dan Loeb would revisit the melting ice cube that is Intel, where his hedge fund Third Point revealed an activist stake in 2020 and pushed the company to explore “strategic alternatives” only to quietly unwind the position in 2021 when the stock soared before subsequently crashing…

When is @DanielSLoeb1 going activist on intel again?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 23, 2022

… moments ago we got the answer when CNBC’s Scott Wapner reported that Loeb is turning his attention not to Intel, which just slashed its dividend by 66%, and which some have speculated is too far gone for even a brilliant activist to save as the following chart of its projected revenue shows…

… but to its biggest competitor AMD.

According to CNBC, the hedge fund manager took the bet when AMD shares struggled: AMD shares have underperformed the rest of the sector over the last 12 months, down more than 30% as the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index declined 14%.”

However, unlike Intel which continues to plumb new lows, AMD has bounced back this year by 21% as China opened up its economy and the overall stock market has rebounded. The chipmaker recently reported fourth quarter earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations for sales and profit, but guided analysts to a 10% decline in year-over-year sales in the current quarter.

The news has predictably sent AMD stock surging.

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Mississippi has become the latest state to ban health care professionals from providing “gender-affirming care” for transgender youth in what officials say will stop the attempt to “push a sick and twisted ideology” on children.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, signed the GOP-led House Bill 1125, also known as the “Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures (REAP) Act” into law on Feb. 28.

Under the legislation, which is effective immediately, individuals in the state are banned from “knowingly engaging in conduct that aids or abets” the performance or inducement of gender transition procedures for Mississippians under the age of 18.

The bill also prevents public funds or tax deductions for prohibited gender transition procedures, noting that the direct or indirect use, grant, payment, or distribution of public funds to any entity, organization, or individual that provides gender transition procedures to individuals under the age of 18 is also prohibited.

It also puts in place enforcement procedures on the Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure. Any health care professional found to be in violation of the ban will have their license to practice medicine in the state revoked.

‘Sick and Twisted Ideology’

The measure, which also prevents Medicaid from reimbursing or providing coverage for gender transition for persons under the age of 18, allows for health care providers to be sued by their former patients, via their “parent or next friend” within 30 years.

“At the end of the day, there are two positions here. One tells children that they’re beautiful the way they are. That they can find happiness in their own bodies. The other tells them that they should take drugs and cut themselves up with expensive surgeries in order to find freedom from depression. I know which side I’m on. No child in Mississippi will have these drugs or surgeries pushed upon them,” said Reeves in a statement.

In a separate statement on Twitter shortly before signing the law, Reeves said there are individuals in the state who are “attempting to push a sick and twisted ideology that seeks to convince our kids they’re in the wrong body and the solution is to drug, sterilize, and castrate themselves.”

“To these radical activists I only have one thing to say: Not in Mississippi,” the governor wrote.

The signing of the bill makes Mississippi the latest state to enact a ban on gender-affirming care after South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, also a Republican, signed a similar “Help Not Harm” bill into law last month.

Read more here…

If you’re active in the markets, it’s almost a certainty that you’ve heard a joke about betting on the opposite of whatever non-stop-stock-picker Jim Cramer suggests to retail investors. 

Now, retail investors can do just that. There is a new pair of products coming to market this week called the Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF (ticker SJIM) and the Long Cramer Tracker ETF (LJIM) that will now allow investors to bet against (or with) the Mad Money host. 

The same group that brought you SARK, the inverse ARKK Fund ETF are the ones putting together the ETFs. The funds are the brain-child of Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management. 

“If he specifically says either buy, buy, buy a stock, then we’re gonna go short that stock at the next practical moment,” he recently told Bloomberg. “If he tells you he hates a stock or sell, sell, sell or something like that, then we’re gonna go long that name again at the next kind of practical entry point.”

The inverse fund “is an actively managed exchange traded fund that seeks to achieve its investment objective by engaging in transactions designed to perform the opposite of the return of the investments recommended by television personality Jim Cramer,” the company said in a prospectus late last year. 

“Under normal circumstances, at least 80% of the Fund’s investments is invested in the inverse of securities mentioned by Cramer,” it says of its strategy. 

The filing continues:

The Fund’s adviser monitors Cramer’s stock selection recommendations throughout the trading day as publicly announced on Twitter or his television programs broadcast on CNBC, and sells those recommendations short or enters into derivatives transactions such as futures, options or swaps that produce a negative correlation to those recommendations.

The Fund’s portfolio generally is comprised of 20 to 25 equity securities not recommended by Cramer. To the extent possible, the Fund’s portfolio is equally weighted. The Fund may invest in securities with any market capitalization and in securities of issuers located in the United States and abroad.

Should Cramer recommend buying any of the securities in the Fund’s portfolio, the Fund will dispose of those holdings. Should Cramer recommend selling any of the securities in the Fund’s portfolio, the Fund will keep those holdings. If Cramer does not take any view on any of the securities in the Fund’s portfolio, the adviser retains discretion to sell positions once profit or loss targets are met, or market conditions such as large swings in either direction necessitate a sale and replace them with securities that meet the criteria of the Fund’s initial portfolio. Under normal circumstances, the Fund will hold positions no longer than a week.

As we said back in October, we’re sure the new ETF will have no trouble attracting attention and investors. Also, as contrarians, we also can’t help but wonder if this public acceptance of Cramer’s uncanny ability to get things wrong is finally a reason to start looking at taking him seriously.

Authored by Zack Voell via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Inscribing bits of data onto the Bitcoin blockchain through Ordinals has captured the attention of cryptocurrency enthusiasts inside and beyond Bitcoin since the start of 2023.

Whether or not Bitcoin “should” be used for this NFT-like activity is a hotly-contested issue and the data coming from the effects of this mini Bitcoin collectives craze is intriguing. Inscriptions could be a short-lived fad, but several early data sets from the first weeks of inscription activity show tremendous interest in this new use case for the Bitcoin network. Diving in, this article provides an overview of six sets of data from the inscription mania.

OVERVIEW OF BITCOIN INSCRIPTIONS DATA

The amounts and weights of pending transactions in Bitcoin mempools around the world are a clear signal of how popular inscription transactions have been to Bitcoin users amid the ongoing mini-craze over Bitcoin NFTs. Throughout most of the current bear market cycle, pending transaction levels in Bitcoin mempools have stayed fairly low, especially when compared to the height of both the 2017 and 2021 bull markets. In fact, a Twitter bot called Mempool Alert tweets every time its mempool empties, and the tweets were posted on a consistent basis for months throughout 2022.

The mempool pending transactions visual below shows the total weight of unconfirmed transactions throughout most of February 2023. The surge in pending transactions directly correlates to the inscriptions craze, which has somewhat subsided toward the end of February.

Source

Inscription transactions are notoriously large, and the block sizes that have come from the inscription craze prove it. For years, the sizes of Bitcoin blocks hovered just below 1.5 megabytes (MB) as the line chart below illustrates. But the vertical increase in block sizes on the far right side of the chart is due entirely to Bitcoin inscriptions.

With these Bitcoin NFTs becoming popular, blocks started being produced between 2 MB and 2.5 MB on average. Several blocks flirted with the 4 MB limit, including the “giant” Taproot Wizard block mined by Luxor in collaboration with Udi Wertheimer and others.

Switching to a bit of “off-chain” data, the interest in Bitcoin inscriptions is also apparent from Google Search queries. The line chart below is taken from the Google Trends page for search interest in “Bitcoin Ordinals,” and the near-vertical increase in interest over time is impossible to miss. It should be noted that these search trends data sets are scored on a relative basis to search interest in weeks and years past. But of particular noteworthiness is that Google Trends has indexed this phrase at all. Not every term or phrase is indexed by Google Trends, only those with a material amount of minimum search volume over time. That trending data for “Bitcoin Ordinals” made the database at all is remarkable.

Critics of NFTs — and especially of inscriptions on Bitcoin — will occasionally slight the entire type of network use as a form of “privilege” by elites in developed countries goofing around with a serious monetary network. But global trends for Ordinals searches don’t show the U.S. as even a top-five country. Singapore, Czechia, Portugal and Singapore top the list, according to Google’s data.

Sorting by transaction forms included in blocks also illustrates the intensity of the inscriptions craze that kicked off 2023 for Bitcoin. According to data shared to Twitter from a Bitcoin node run by Pierre Rochard, the research director at Riot Blockchain, inscription transactions accounted for nearly 60% of block space near the height of the Bitcoin community’s first foray into Ordinals. As the data visualization below illustrates, that number steadily grew from 20% to 60% within a week.

Community data from groups of inscriptions enthusiasts also present some additional context for this social and technical movement inside of Bitcoin. The bar chart below represents data compiled by OrdinalHub with a list of original inscription Discord groups and their member counts as of early February.

By a large margin, Satoshibles and Taproot Wizards were the largest communities at that point in time. But the sheer number of Discord groups that almost instantaneously were created signals the passion that Bitcoin artists have had for this new use for the network.

At present, many of the Discords are certainly larger than the data in the above chart represent. But by now, some of the data is sure to have been corrupted by bots and various other spoofs (intentional or not) of community data, which makes this data snapshot taken near the communities origins unique.

One final piece of data that deserves inclusion in any analysis of Bitcoin inscriptions is around the money — how much miners are making from “the inscribeoooors” who etch their bits of data into the Bitcoin network. Miners are being paid handsomely for building blocks with inscription transactions.

In the line-bar combination chart shown below, daily amounts spent on inscription transaction fees and the total aggregate amount paid to miners from inscription transactions are visualized. In a few short weeks, well over $1 million has been paid out to miners from inscribers. And this data only captures the on-chain payments — out-of-band payments are not included here, which would make the number somewhat larger.

Even though much of the early data sets show that the intensity of early inscription activity has tapered off relative to its highs toward the end of February, how long this trend will last is unknown. It could be a fad that dies out before the current bear market ends, and inscription critics can then dance on the grave of Bitcoin NFTs. Or it could become a longstanding fixture of demand for block space and regular fee revenue for miners.

The future is uncertain, but the possible effects of inscriptions are impossible to ignore.

Now that soaring rates have burst the commercial real estate bubble, the carnage is coming fast and furious.

This morning Bloomberg reports that Wall Street’s largest commercial real estate landlord, private equity giant Blackstone, has defaulted on a €531 million ($562 million) bond backed by a portfolio of offices and stores owned by Sponda Oy, a Finnish landlord it acquired in 2018.

While the PE firm had sought an extension from holders of the securitized notes to allow time to dispose of assets and repay the debt, the surge in market volatility triggered by the war in Ukraine and rising interest rates interrupted the sales process and bondholders voted against a further extension, the Bloomberg sources said.

And since the security has now matured and has not been repaid, loan servicer Mount Street has determined that an event of default has occurred, according to a statement Thursday. The loan will now be transferred to a special servicer.

“This debt relates to a small portion of the Sponda portfolio,” a Blackstone representative said in an emailed statement. “We are disappointed that the servicer has not advanced our proposal, which reflects our best efforts and we believe would deliver the best outcome for note holders. We continue to have full confidence in the core Sponda portfolio and its management team, whose priority remains delivering high-quality retail and office assets.”

And while Blackstone is understandably trying to minimize the news, the PE firm clearly continues to scramble to stabilize the bleeding in its massive real estate portfolio and on Wednesday it said that it had blocked investors from cashing out their investments at its $71 billion real estate income trust (BREIT), as the private equity firm continues to grapple with a flurry of redemption requests.

BREIT said it fulfilled redemption requests of $1.4 billion in February, which represents only 35% of the approximately $3.9 billion in total withdrawal requests for the month, the firm said in a letter to investors as Reuters first reported.

The silver lining is that the total BREIT redemption requests in February were 26% lower than the approximately $5.3 billion reached in January, the firm said. However, should rates keep rising it is likely that the March redemption flood will be higher again.

“While gross redemptions for February are consistent with prior management commentary, the overarching data continue to align with our view around decelerating retail-oriented product organic growth broadly,” Credit Suisse analysts, led by Bill Katz, said in a note to investors. As we previously reported, Blackstone has been exercising its right to block investors’ withdrawals since November last year after requests hit a preset 5% net asset value of BREIT, which is marketed to mostly high net worth individuals.

Credit Suisse downgraded its rating of Blackstone’s stock to underperform in November partly because of the rise in investor redemptions from BREIT. Blackstone’s shares were down 0.25% at $90.57 per share in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The stock lost 43% of its value last year.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

The US State Department-funded Global Disinformation Index punished conservative websites by throttling their advertising revenue if they gave credence to the COVID-19 lab leak theory, despite it subsequently proving likely true.

The Global Disinformation Index is a British-based non-profit group that previously received $665,000 from the Global Engagement Center and National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a State Department-backed group, while it was overseeing censorship of “conspiracy theories” about COVID-19.

One of these conspiracy theories was the notion that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, which GDI claimed had “been fact-checked and proven untrue.”

GDI abused its influence to pressure Big Tech firms like Google to cut advertising from conservative websites that pushed the lab leak theory, placing them on a secret blacklist called a “dynamic exclusion list” in an effort to put them out of business.

The group targeted firms that were “providing ad revenue streams to known disinformation sites peddling coronavirus conspiracies.”

Microsoft later had to suspend its partnership with the group after the GDI had been using the company’s Xandr advertising and analytics subsidiary to freeze out conservative sites.

From 2021 onwards, the lab leak theory was no longer being treated as a “conspiracy theory,” and both the Department of Energy and the FBI recently came out and asserted it was likely true.

“GDI is part of [a] disturbing constellation of pop-up censorship organizations that all descended on stifling COVID origins discourse online simultaneously,” Mike Benz, a former State Department official told the Washington Examiner.

This once again underscores how hysteria over ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ has been weaponized to justify the censorship of awkward stories and even facilitate actual cover-ups.

As we highlighted yesterday, the Chinese Communist Party threatened Elon Musk to stop sharing stories about the Wuhan lab leak, suggesting Tesla’s business interests in China would be at risk if he kept amplifying the issue.

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