Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

David DePape, the man charged in the hammer attack targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband pled not guilty Wednesday to attempted murder and other state charges.

DePape, 42, previously pleaded not guilty to federal charges of assault and attempted kidnapping. Wednesday’s arraignment was for state charges.

The suspect also waived his right to a speedy trial. He will be back in court on Feb. 23 to set his trial date, a judge ruled, according to local media reports.

In November, during his initial arraignment, DePape pleaded not guilty via his public defender and denied all allegations against him. The Canadian national currently remains held without bail.

“Mr. DePape will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and held accountable for his heinous crimes,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a statement on Wednesday.

DePape’s public defender, Adam Lipson, told reporters that he had no comments after Wednesday’s hearing. He said the suspect is “going to be fighting this case in court, not the hallway.”

Prosecutors alleged DePape broke into the Pelosis’ residence in San Francisco at around 2 a.m. on Oct. 28 before he went upstairs and asked a sleeping Paul Pelosi where his wife, Nancy, was. The House speaker was out of town.

Family members said that Pelosi, 82, suffered a skull fracture and was hospitalized for several days before he was released. He was seen with his wife at a public event at the Kennedy Center Honors earlier this month.

Court papers also said that Paul Pelosi then told DePape that he had to use the bathroom and called 911 from his cellphone. Two officers arrived before encountering DePape and Pelosi struggling over a hammer, prosecutors said. When the officers told the two to drop the hammer, DePape got control of the tool and used it to hit Pelosi in the head.

The home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in San Francisco on Oct. 28, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In a hearing earlier this month, prosecutors showed new evidence that included Pelosi’s 911 call, body camera footage, and the hammer that was allegedly used in the attack. A 15-second-long bodycamera clip was also played, according to reports, showing the front door opening, the alleged attack, and DePape telling officers that he won’t drop the hammer.

San Francisco Police Department Lt. Carla Hurley told the court that when she interrogated DePape, he told her that he had other targets, including Hunter Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, actor Tom Hanks, and others. Jenkins and other prosecutors said that the attack was politically motivated—based on statements that he made to investigators.

“There is evil in Washington, what they did went so far beyond the campaign,” DePape told Hurley, according to a recording that was played in court.

DePape also allegedly told Hurley that when police approached Pelosi’s home after he entered, he recalled saying, “I’m not going to surrender, I am here to fight. If you stop me from going after people, you will take the punishment instead.”

Other Details

Family members, however, said that DePape shared their left-wing views and questioned those claims.

“‘I’m surprised about the whole thing. There is still a lot of info that hasn’t been given to the public. I have no clue what happened or how it happened. There are more questions than answers right now. Do we even know what really happened?” Sky Gonzalez, DePape’s son who lives with his family in Berkeley, told the Daily Mail in December.

Front entrance of David DePape’s former house and camper van currently belonging to his ex-wife Oxane Taub at 1526 Woolsey Street in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 30, 2022 (Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times).

While Gonzalez admitted that he hasn’t seen his father in years, he asserted DePape is not “a danger to society” and added he doesn’t “even know if he even attacked Mr. Pelosi.”

“My father had a lot of political views and told me about a lot of different things, but he didn’t subscribe to either political party, Democrat or Republican,” he said, adding that he believed his father was a member of the left-wing Green Party.

Days after the attack was reported, DePape’s former partner, nudist activist Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, said that he suffered from mental illness. Several years ago, he disappeared for months and came back believing he was Jesus Christ, Taub told local media.

In response to a recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision to keep the Title 42 illegal immigration law in place, Joe Biden begrudgingly stated that while the federal government is required to continue enforcing them, the removal of covid-based restrictions is ‘long overdue’. 

The comment represents even more proof that Biden and Democrats are intent on creating an open migration environment and will do nothing to secure the border. 

It should be noted that the Biden Administration continues to promote pandemic fear-mongering despite the fact that the vast majority of the country has moved on. 

Yet, when it comes to the disastrous flood of illegal migrants invading the southern border the White House is not at all concerned about the spread of covid and continues to ignore the crisis. 

It is this kind of hypocrisy that leaves border states with little option other than to bus the migrants they can’t send back across the border over to Democrat run sanctuary cities.  

Dissenting opinions from the Supreme Court’s decision argue that the crisis on the border is not a “covid crisis”, therefore Title 42 serves no purpose. 

They acknowledge the crisis exists, but since it is not covid related they (and Biden) want to remove the only legal tool available to deter migrants from skipping across the border with the expectation of a free ride and welfare benefits.

Numerous officials including the Democrat Mayor of El Paso (an epicenter of the border calamity) have admitted that the end of Title 42 would result in a massive spike in migrant caravans well beyond what the US is already dealing with. 

Keeping the law in place is essential if the threat is to be averted.

Oil futures ended lower Wednesday, with optimism over the demand outlook stemming from China’s continued relaxation of COVID-19 curbs offset by a surge in cases of the disease.

“The somewhat firmer dollar and doubts about how quickly Chinese demand would bounce back following the country’s scrapping of its quarantine rules weighed on oil and other commodities such as copper on Wednesday,” said Raffi Boyadjian, lead investment analyst at XM, in a note.

“With Covid infections still very high, it could be several weeks if not months before demand fully recovers in China and oil prices are slipping today as investors reassess the outlook,” he wrote.

With the winter storms, this week’s API report maybe distorted.

API

• Crude -1.30mm

• Cushing -338k

• Gasoline +510k

• Distillates +38k

US Crude stocks fell for the 2nd straight week (6th of the last 7 weeks) according to API, which reported a 1.30mm barrel drawdown…

Source: Bloomberg

WTI hovered around $78.75 ahead of the API report and was unmoved by the small crude draw…

Amid the extremely low liquidity, volatility is heightened this week after the Kremlin said this week it would ban exports of Russian crude oil and refined products to foreign buyers that adhere to a price cap.

“The outlook remains highly uncertain for the oil market,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda.

China’s success in pivoting away from Covid-Zero could be key to a recovery but it will take time to understand the implications on oil demand, he said.

But oil still looks set to close the year with a gain.

There has been some concern with more than a million “active subscribers” on the Starlink network that median download speeds are slowing. To solve this, Starlink has launched the first batch of next-generation satellites into orbit early Wednesday to add even more broadband capacity to the network. 

Falcon 9 launches 54 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit; completes SpaceX’s 60th mission of 2022! pic.twitter.com/MIstToPIyL

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 28, 2022

Around 0434 ET, a Falcon 9 rocket with 54 upgraded Starlink internet satellites was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The payload was successfully delivered to low Earth orbit. 

“Under our new license, we are now able to deploy satellites to new orbits that will add even more capacity to the network.

“Ultimately, this enables us to add more customers and provide faster service, particularly in areas that are currently oversubscribed,” Jesse Anderson, a SpaceX production and engineering manager, said during live launch commentary. 

SpaceX’s Gen2 of Starlink will help expand bandwidth capacity for the already 3,330 first-generation satellites working to provide high-speed, low-latency internet to customers worldwide. This comes as the network faces congestion issues with many new customers. 

On Dec. 1, the Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX to launch 7,500 upgraded satellites into low Earth orbit. This was only a partial approval of what SpaceX initially wanted of 30,000 of these satellites orbiting the planet. 

“Starlink Gen2 satellites will be capable of beaming service directly to smartphones, Elon Musk has said. SpaceX plans to launch most of these satellites using its huge Starship rocket, which is still in development,” Space.com wrote. 

Authored by NAMCIOS via BitcoinMagazine.com,

The tech company led by Michael Saylor has increased its bitcoin holdings by 2,500 BTC despite selling bitcoin for the first time to generate a tax benefit.

• Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy bought 2,395 BTC for $42.8 million in cash between Nov. 1 and Dec. 21, 2022.

• It then sold 704 BTC at a loss on Dec. 22 to offset previous capital gains.

• MicroStrategy then bought 810 BTC on Dec. 24.

Software analytics company MicroStrategy has sold bitcoin for the first time since it first began adding the digital currency to its treasury in 2020.

The sale took place on December 22, 2022, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The move was carried out in order to generate a net tax benefit, as the losses involved in the sale are able to offset previous capital gains, per the filing.

Two days later, MicroStrategy bought back more bitcoin than it sold, however at a higher price – $16,845 per BTC on the 810 bitcoin purchase vs. $16,776 on the 704 bitcoin sale.

A larger purchase preceded the sale.

MicroStrategy bought 2,395 bitcoin between November 1 and December 21, 2022, before embarking on the tax-loss harvesting strategy.

The purchase cost about $42.8 million, translating to an average price of $17,871 per bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expenses.

Ultimately, the transactions resulted in an increase of MicroStrategy’s bitcoin holdings by 2,500 BTC.

The company led by Michael Saylor now holds 132,500 BTC, acquired for about $4.03 billion at an average price of $30,397 per bitcoin. As a result, the Virginia-based firm currently faces an unrealized loss of over $1.8 billion.

Update (1500ET): US federal officials have stated that the US will require travelers from China to submit a negative COVID-19 test beginning on January 5th.

Why not now?

Is the Biden administration xenophopbic for singling out the Chinese travelers?

As we detailed earlier, Bloomberg reports that Italian health authorities will begin testing all arrivals from China for Covid after almost half of the passengers on two flights to Milan were found to have the virus.

Additionally, in Germany, health authorities are “closely watching” the situation in China, according to Health Ministry spokesman Sebastian Guelde.

China’s National Health Commission announced on Dec. 26 that the country would end all quarantine requirements for inbound travelers from Jan. 8, 2023.

Travelers will need to obtain a negative PCR test within 48 hours of departure, it said. Currently, travelers entering China need to undergo five days of mandatory quarantine in an approved facility, followed by three days at home.

The health body added that outbound tourism, which plummeted to almost nothing during the pandemic, will resume in an “orderly” fashion.

It also removed the cap on the number of international flights to and from China.

Crucially for the rest of the world, as The Epoch Times reports, data from travel sites show that Chinese residents are rushing to book overseas trips.

Chinese travel platform Tongcheng Travel released data on Dec. 27, showing that the number of searches for visas to go abroad increased by 10 times, and the search volume of international air tickets soared by 850 percent.

Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and the UK were among the most searched destinations.

Sean Lin, a virologist and former lab director at the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) opening up of the country is actually a strategy to get everyone infected not only within China, but around the world.

“When they can’t control the outbreak, they push it to the whole world. Just like when COVID first broke out in Wuhan, people who had been infected in Wuhan were allowed to travel around the world. The strategy is the same now as before,” he said.

Lin pointed to the regime’s lack of transparency amid the latest outbreak, a consistent behavior over the past three years during the pandemic.

“The CCP is not sharing data, and the international community doesn’t know how many different virus variants are spreading in China, and whether there are other compound infections,” he said.

“Under such circumstances, it is extremely irresponsible for the CCP to let the people out of the country which is a huge epidemic area. Put another way, it has a very treacherous purpose and is very malicious.”

Bloomberg notes that Italy is now sequencing those tests to see if there are new variants coming from China, the Health Ministry said in a statement. If a new strain is found, officials may impose stricter curbs on travel from China.

“We have no indication that a more dangerous mutation has developed in China that would give rise to a declaration of a virus variant area, which would result in corresponding travel restrictions,” he added.

Finally, the critical question for the world’s liberal globalists – will it be xenophobic again to block Chinese visitors?

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Before I took on my current persona as either a “Putin Stooge,” a “shill for the Fed,” or a naïve apologist for neoliberalism, I used to be a chemist specializing in process efficiency and root cause analysis.

While I learned many things during those twenty-plus years, the most startling conclusion I came to was that laziness has a real place in process improvement.

If you really want some industrial or bureaucratic process streamlined, give that job to the guy who most hates having his time wasted. He will invariably find a way to make that ‘work’ into something he only has to do sparingly.

It led to one of my first rules of organization, if you want something done right give it to the “lazy” guy.

That “lazy” guy isn’t really lazy.

What he is, is unmotivated, because all he sees is waste and waste offends his narcissism. Nothing is worse than wasting his time doing unnecessary tasks. So, give him some tedious thing to improve and he will find not only the fastest way to do it, but also very likely the best way because while he doesn’t want his time wasted, he also doesn’t want to be yelled at by someone he sees as inferior.

Only then will you get an honest day of work out of someone like him.

It’s not like I wouldn’t know this from personal experience or anything.

When I was a chemist, I was obsessed with doing everything I could to optimize internal processes, be it shaving a few seconds here or there off a temperature program to analyze heavy metals by atomic spectroscopy or optimizing the deposition rate of a plating bath.

For me, the goal was always the same, work hard now to generate free time later to devote myself to something more valuable.

I benefited from having a less stressful work environment, the company benefits from lower COGS and the goodwill you generate leaves you far less vulnerable to middle-management scrutiny.

It was this ‘laziness’ that afforded me hundreds of hours over the years to pursue my hobbies while at work. Those were, in short, board gaming, monetary theory and politics.

One could say y’all are now the ‘beneficiaries’ of all that ‘laziness.’ (sic)

While podcasts are all the rage now, and with good reason, during my last ‘corporate’ job (which is really stretching that definition) I consumed every internet radio show I could on gold, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Buffalo Sabres.

But simultaneously I also produced reams of data in service of putting strict process controls on a novel nickel-boron coating whose lack of such had the company hemorrhaging capital.

Respect the Order

What you learn in all of this is that “order of operations” matters.

Coders understand this explicitly. So do engineers. It’s especially true in chemistry, where for one reaction to take place another reaction has to happen before it. Do it in the wrong order and you get a mess at best, or blow up the building or poison yourself at worst.

Switching metaphors, in your typical “euro-style” board game, the order in which you take the actions necessary to fulfill your strategy matters greatly. In these games, where luck is minimized or removed completely, players fight for access to a limited number of places to ‘do a thing,’ be it play a card, place a worker, build a city or whatever.

The goal is to collect more of what you need to win while subtly denying your opponent what he needs.

Sometimes you have to make a sub-optimal move for yourself in order to block someone else getting to that thing that would benefit them more. It’s incredibly passive-aggressive, but it’s also instructive, because it is so unabashedly human.

Math has it’s order of operations as well, PEMDAS for short — Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction. We’ve all seen the quizzes on social media testing our knowledge of this.

It is this attention to the order of operations that is important in trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world today.

One of my most common complaints with my ‘libertarian brethren’ is that they are always jumping to ‘end-game’ while not thinking through the moves that get us there.

In monetary theory we can do the math and realize the system is doomed.

By taking that variable and adding it into the political mix we can solve the geopolitical equation and then make grand pronouncements about the where everything winds up.

While this is an important first step in waking people up, it’s also absolutely why, as a political force, ‘libertarians’ are spent. Ron Paul broke through into the popular zeitgeist in 2008 and 2012 with “End the Fed” and his critiques of foreign policy.

The problem was, however, the movement never grew up. It never engaged with the world that was versus still selling the world we’ll never get.

And rightly, people wandered away looking for those with real answers to today’s problems.

I’ve been there and made many a decision based on the equation I solved only to be frustrated like many others by the future not working out like the model I’d constructed.

The typical cope then is to scream, “Corruption!” and bitch about them rigging the gold price or trashing Bitcoin or whatever. And don’t get me wrong, I’m with y’all on that. They are rigging the markets, intervening at every turn, if not turning them into completely fake markets.

But that should have been expected. Because in the proper ‘order of operations’ those with power and money will always react to defend themselves against the growing realization that they are fucking us over.

Remember, they’re trying to ‘win’ this game as well.

And so, if they can get to that richer spot on the board before you do, they will. Don’t bitch about the game board being tilted against you, accept that it is part of that mini-game and widen your perspective on the larger game afoot.

And that’s the real problem. We have too many ‘lazy’ analysts who got red-pilled, saw the game for what it was and stopped at “anger” rather than doing the hard work of reaching ‘acceptance.’

This is where we are today and why, for many, the world is so hard to make sense of.

The Larger Bowl

When you realize that everyone’s incentives map to their own particular definitions of winning that’s when real headway can be made in understanding.

Because here’s the thing. Our insights into the world aren’t novel or unique. In fact, more often than not they are just our finally understanding the reality that’s always been in front of us. We’re latecomers to a geopolitical party that’s been going on for decades.

I know I feel like that on more days than I care to admit.

They’ve finally told us what their end game looks like. It speaks to a confidence of their making that real. If we ignore the order of operations of how we get to our preferred outcome — a decentralized world with private property and sound money that should maximize human dignity — the irony is we’ll have a lower probability of it occurring on any time line that matters to us or even our children.

This is why I’m willing to see The Fed and the NY Boys as our temporary allies in that fight for human dignity. They have their definitions of winning the game they’re playing and should act accordingly.

So, while we should all long for the day that these assholes are dead and buried by the natural forces of decentralization and entropy, there are a thousand interstitial steps that have to happen first.

And it won’t matter if bitcoin eventually wins if the world goes through a sixty year Dark Age in the meantime. That’s not leadership, that’s cowardice.

So, yes. Davos has their definitions of winning. The Russians have theirs. China theirs.

And we need to have ours.

It is this curious admixture of incentives, this coincidence of wants, that is the interesting part. It’s where the game actually lives.

And while we don’t have a crystal ball as to how well everyone in the game will respond to these pressures and counter-pressures, with an accurate map of their incentives we can, at least make some observations.

The problem for many is they checked out long before they’d even identified the players at the table, so the game seems incomprehensible and the players wiser and more powerful than they actually are.

That’s why I think this year is going to be one of the most interesting to analyze in real time and why we all have to up our game.

Laziness only gets you so far, it may get you to the root cause of the situation, but that’s when the real work begins.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon if you like doin’ work.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, was granted bail last week on the conditions of a $250 million bond that he would be on house arrest at his parent’s house in Palo Alto, California. His parents secured his bail with the equity in their house. Word has quickly spread of SBF’s location, prompting the family to fortify the home. 

NYPost reported the family had contracted a private security firm in the Bay Area to patrol the grounds for $10,000 per week to protect SBF from mounting death threats. 

One source told the Post, “They’re [family] nervous … there have been numerous death threats. They’re not taking any chances.”

Days ago, NYPost reported Bankman-Fried’s parents hired workers to construct a network of security cameras around the home on the edge of Stanford University’s campus. 

“Stanford officials have also taken steps to secure the area around the Bankman-Fried homestead, barricading both ends of their short block and stationing privately contracted security guards at the gates,” NYPost added. 

Drove past SBF of FTX parents home in Stanford ….the street is blocked with serious looking private security in a truck. Didn’t even get close enough for a great pic. Surprisingly no press. pic.twitter.com/NgmK7Kzbyp

— Kendall Ananyi🦄🌟🌟🌟🌟 (@kananyi) December 28, 2022

The fear is SBF has become a sitting duck at his parent’s home on Cooksey Lane. The NYPost published the location of the street in a picture of a private security guard in front of the house. 

There have been numerous incidents at Cooksey Lane. Visitors have stopped by, and at least one person who “lost everything” in the FTX collapse gazed upon SBF’s current lodgings. 

And here’s something that makes you go, hmm…

Alameda has started dumping tokens again, just days after SBF arrived home. $SOL, $LDO and $APT are amongst the most affected, dropping ~10% in a matter of hours.

Live now to explain exactly what’s going on 👉: https://t.co/2ICdYHuUkB pic.twitter.com/iZfxnEo909

— Miles Deutscher (@milesdeutscher) December 28, 2022

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

Most refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast have begun procedures to restart operations that were disrupted by the massive winter storm late last week, but a full return to normal output of motor fuels could take up to two weeks for some facilities.   

The freezing temperatures affected refinery equipment and caused issues at the steam and co-generation units at some refineries, sources with knowledge of the situation told Reuters on Wednesday.

Pemex’s Deer Park refinery and Motiva Enterprises’ Port Arthur, the biggest refinery in the United States, could see their restart stretched out to the first or second week of January, sources familiar with the refineries’ operations and schedules told Reuters.

Winter Storm Elliott led to hard-freeze warnings issued for all the states along the U.S. Gulf Coast, where most of the U.S. refining capacity is located.   

As of Friday, December 23, as much as 1.5 million bpd of the Gulf Coast’s refining capacity was shut down due to the freezing temperatures, per Reuters estimates.

Refineries run by Motiva Enterprises, Marathon Petroleum, and TotalEnergies outside Houston were shut late last week. Operations at other refineries in Texas, run by ExxonMobil, Valero Energy, and LyondellBasell, were also disrupted by the severe winter storm.  

In total, the extreme winter weather affected some of the output at refineries along the Gulf Coast that process a combined 3.58 million barrels per day (bpd) and deliver around 20% of U.S. motor fuels.

Last week, the national average gasoline price dropped for a seventh consecutive week, but it’s not certain this week will bring another decline in gasoline prices, due to the rally in oil prices and the refinery outages due to the storm, according to fuel savings app GasBuddy.

“We’re still waiting for the national average to fall below $3 per gallon, something that is suddenly a bit less likely given the extreme cold weather, interrupting refining operations in the south, curbing gasoline production and potentially driving prices up slightly,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said on Tuesday. 

An initial excited bid in US equities this morning ignited hopes that the Santa Claus rally could indeed make an appearance… but that’s all been decimated now as Nasdaq and Small Caps lead the puke lower…

Source: Bloomberg

The S&P is back below the critical JPM Collar 3835 level…

The market’s Fed rate expectations have risen hawkishly this week…

Source: Bloomberg

…and that has dragged bond yields higher (along with inflation and growth anxiety from China’s re-opening), with the 30Y getting close to 4.00% once again…

Source: Bloomberg

Meanwhile, China’s Yuan is being dumped too, back above 7/USD…

Source: Bloomberg

And gold is sliding back towards $1800…

As the USD spikes higher, and oil prices are tumbling amid very thing liquidity…

So it seems China re-opening is now ‘bad’ news, like Zero-COVID was ‘bad’ news?