Authored by Thomas Buckley via The Brownstone Institute,

As with misinformation, labeling someone who disagrees with the current standardthink as a “denier” has become, pardon the term, endemic amongst the woke.

Covid denier, climate denier, election denier, science denier – are all bandied about to immediately end debate,  tar any difference of opinion as literally insane, and depict anyone who ever disagrees with you as stupid and evil. 

This epithet is now even being used pre-emptively to makes sure that no matter what anyone who now or ever questions the move to ban gas stoves will not be doing so based on facts or logic but because of their “gas stove denialism.”

Like so much woke terminology, the initial meaning of the term is far removed from its current usage, though it has the distinct advantage of being generally familiar, allowing it to be “Trojan Horsed” (admittedly, some arise sui generis) into public discourse.

Common usage of the term “in denial” (besides the joke about the river in Egypt) seemed to come to the fore mostly in regards to an inability to face up to an obvious, almost always, personal truth.

In denial about your drinking, in denial about the fact that your kids are actually monsters, in denial about your sexuality (nothing to do with today’s genderpalooza) and on and on.

But, like in almost every case in which the woke have stolen a term from the self-help/therapy movements the term has been utterly bastardized.  For example, trigger and safe space are now used in the opposite way of their initial intent – see here. 

All of these terms started as ways to focus on personal responsibilities and actions and not in any way, shape, or form carried societal baggage and/or implications.

And then, in the 1980s, there was a shift, though a rather understandable one.  There are those who, sadly and stupidly, deny that the Holocaust happened, that Hitler didn’t kill millions of Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and the disabled and political opponents and, well, it’s a very long and terrible list.  

Hence the term “Holocaust denier,” an accurate and correct description of someone who, despite the overwhelming physical evidence of the event, denies its occurrence, almost always because of their personal political ideology.

It is crucial to emphasize that denying the Holocaust happened is extremely different from the current crop of dissent-crushing “denials.”  The former involves a very specific proven fact; the latter – climate, election, etc. – all involve differences of opinions and reasonable and appropriate debates over whether something did, or is going to, happen.

But the appropriately fetid stench attached to “Holocaust denier” intentionally and destructively is made to come along with all of the current “denials.”  In other words, if you are an election denier or climate denier you are just as terrible as a Holocaust denier even though nothing could be further from the truth.

If used in its initial meaning, a climate denier would be one who claims the climate doesn’t exist, an election denier would a person who said the 2020 election never happened.

And no – that’s not what is being claimed.

The debate over climate change is one that should be taken seriously and done impartially; the discussion around the glaring voting security issues that appeared in 2020 should be considered similarly.  The science denier epithet attached to anyone who wondered about the risk and efficacy of the COVID vaccines is especially egregious because “science” cannot, by definition, be believed or denied – while technically a noun it is in fact a verb, it is a process and one cannot “follow the science,” just as one cannot follow a car one is driving.

Climate denier/denialism implies ostrich-like stupidity – how can a person possibly disagree with the fact that we’re all either going to drown or burn or freeze or dehydrate or starve or flood or desert or disease or war ourselves to death in the next few decades unless we do something NOW?  Never mind that doing most of the things proposed NOW are unnecessary, contradictory, contra-indicated, and could end modern civilization as we know it and that, considering the utterly scientifically shoddy if not outright fraudulent actions many in the climate brigade have taken,  should not even be included in any rational discussion of the topic.

The same is true with election denier.  The 2020 election was quite possibly the most unusual election in the nation’s history.  Barriers put in place years ago to try to ensure secure and accurate voting were obliterated, massive numbers of ballot were mailed out practically willy-nilly, the unconscionable practice of ballot harvesting was normalized in many states, counts were stopped and started and dragged on for days and on and on.  Just these undisputed facts alone are enough for intelligent reasonable involved citizens to legitimately wonder if the election was truly fair and honest.

And it should be noted that in all three cases – climate, election, and science – that those who toss the “denier” term about are also those same people who ignore, denigrate, and outright block any attempt to actually figure out what exactly happened.  Remember: If you can evade any impartial investigation, you can declare with confidence that no investigation has ever found fault with your claims of the final and definitive and certain truth of your position.

There are people who benefit from advertising “denialism.”  From last week’s private jet and meat and booze and hooker and billionaire-fueled Davos event to legacy media desperate to keeps its subscribers terrified and therefore more likely to continue to subscribe to the  tastefully decorated hallways and board rooms of massive financial institutions and international foundations and agencies and organizations to academics desperate to secure grant funding and make a name for themselves to tech giants who wish everyone lived by their algorithms because that would make selling ads so much easier to people who yearn for the psychological comfort of social acceptance and the feeling of being right all the time – these are the people that benefit every time someone outside their circle is called a denier.

In the end, for the truth to prevail, “denialism” must be denied its power to stifle dissent, obfuscate facts, and intellectually segregate those with other opinions, those with legitimate questions, those who are not in denial of reality.

US housing market pain could be ahead, but some affluent New York suburbs are bucking the trend early this year as open houses are packed. 

Falling mortgage rates might be stoking demand in a suburb about 20 miles north of Manhattan known as Scarsdale. Or rather, it could be the lack of inventory. Whatever is driving the housing market in the wealthy suburbs of New York has led to homes still selling over ask. 

“Demand is very high in all price ranges,” Laura Miller, the listing agent with Houlihan Lawrence, told Bloomberg. She said:

“There are tons of buyers and not enough inventory.”

Even with the 30-year home loan rate doubling, demand for homes just outside of the city is high. Realtor.com data shows New York’s Westchester County, which includes Scarsdale and Bronxville, and New Jersey’s suburbs in Essex and Bergen counties, are still seeing homes sold for more than 10% over the listing price. 

With the spring real estate market underway, there will be a lot of housing markets nationwide that will experience unevenness: 

“This is going to be a spring season characterized by big differences between markets.” 

 “In some places new listings will lead to a line of people out the door and in others, crickets,” said Benjamin Keys, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

No matter a boom or bust in the economy, a group of buyers still need homes. Many of them are finding out that inventory in the suburbs around NYC is shrinking. Realtor.com data also confirmed this and said Westchester had one of the steepest drops in active listing in the US last month, falling 15% from a year earlier. Fewer homes mean prospective homebuyers are chasing less supply which can spark bidding wars.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country’s housing markets are frozen (besides Florida and a few other states) due to an affordability crisis. The good news is that home prices have yet to spiral lower because of limited inventory. However, some economists are warning about a 10-15% slide in overall home prices over the next couple of years. 

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board apologized to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the weekend after one of its members described him a racist.

Pierre Rutledge, the head of the Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board, issued a statement on behalf of the organization and apologized to the Republican governor after a member said last week that DeSantis is a racist.

“We take it to heart when someone uses the term racist,” Rutledge said, reported Fox News and the Miami Herald, which reported that he made that comment at a Feb. 3 press conference. “Words matter. And so as chair, I must start by saying we want to pull that back. There’s nothing wrong with saying ‘we’re sorry.’ That’s not what we intended to say or be depicted by anyone. And that’s not the feeling of this board.”

Another official, Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam, said that he also “can’t call the governor racist. I don’t know him personally. I don’t know his heart,” reported WSVN. However, he claimed that DeSantis’ policies “always [seem] to attack black people and people of color,” without elaborating.

DeSantis’s administration has not responded to a request for comment.

Rutledge, who is also a local school administrator, did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment. The Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board also did not respond to a request for comment.

Rutledge’s comment came after Miami lawyer Stephen Hunter Johnson said last week that “our governor is racist” during a Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board meeting about DeSantis having blocked an African-American studies course, according to the Herald. After the comment, the board members unanimously voted to draft a letter to DeSantis to object against his rejection of the course.

During Friday’s news conference, Rutledge made the apology while also simultaneously saying that the board released the letter to DeSantis to criticize his decision.

“Politics has no place in determining school curriculum,” Rutledge said, according to WSVN. “If we rely on elected officials to tell our children what they can and cannot learn about, that is the epitome of political indoctrination.”

Read more here…

Disney has nixed an episode of “The Simpsons” from their streaming service in Hong Kong which references “forced labor camps” in China.

The episode, “One Angry Lisa,” which originally aired in Ocober, was inaccessible from the Disney+ platform in Hong Kong, according to the Financial Times.

In the episode, Marge Simpson is taking a virtual bike class with the Great Wall of China in the background. Her instructor says “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labor camps where children make smartphones.“

Disney+ removed an episode of Simpson (again) in Hong Kong due to reference of China’s forced labor camp. This is what you’ve missed. pic.twitter.com/zdEihr4LuR

— Asian American Conservative (@FactcheckingCon) February 7, 2023

The removal comes after the CCP imposed a controversial national security law in Hong Kong in 2020, under which offenses defined by the regime as ‘secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces’ can result in a lifetime of imprisonment.

This isn’t the first time Disney has bowed to Beijing. In 2021, the company pulled a 2005 episode referencing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. 

Simpsons episode with Tiananmen Square sign saying ‘on this site, in 1989, nothing happened’ is missing from Disney+ https://t.co/K0LCP4csgw

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 29, 2021

The decision to censor in China’s favor is probably “to do with the company’s ties, current and future, in mainland China,” said Kenny Ng, associate professor at the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University in a statement to FT, adding “It could be strategic to eliminate any China-offending episodes.”

More via the Epoch Times:

The pulled episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pan,” features the Simpsons’ visit to Tiananmen Square, where they see a joke placard that reads, “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

In 1989 a student-led pro-democracy movement broke out in China. Protesters called for democratic reforms in the Chinese government and staged mass protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On June 4, the CCP sent troops to quash the protests, resulting in the deaths of thousands, according to rights groups’ estimates.

In the episode, the family also visits the embalmed body of former CCP leader Mao Zedong, whom Homer Simpson calls “a little angel that killed 50 million people.”

Under Mao’s leadership, historians have estimated that millions died during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) movement.

In 2020, the company came under fire for partly filming the live-action movie “Mulan” in the Xinjiang region, where Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are being detained in internment camps.

The movie features in its credits a “special thanks” to CCP agencies that are accused of participating in human rights violations against Uyghurs in the region, prompting calls for a boycott of the film.

According to a 2020 report by PEN America, a New York-based nonprofit group focused on defending free speech, U.S. studios’ investment in theme parks in China serves as a form of business pressure, given that companies would stand to lose billions of dollars if Beijing decided to punish them.

“Disney, for example, has a 47 percent stake in the Shanghai Disneyland Park, which opened in 2016 and which cost over $5.5 billion to build,” the report reads.

Forced Labor in China

The CCP has been accused of committing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The United Nations released a report in August 2022 detailing abuses committed by the regime.

The U.N. report found that the scale and brutality of the detentions, framed by the CCP as compulsory reeducation camps or “vocational skills education centers,” likely qualified as a crime against humanity.

One week ago, when summarizing Powell’s unexpectedly dovish post-FOMC press conference, we retorted to the Fed’s WSJ mouthpiece Nick Timiraos that the “Keyest takeaway: Burns 2.0 just steamrolled Volcker 2.0.“

Keyest takeaway: Burns 2.0 just steamrolled Volcker 2.0 https://t.co/OQixemDItY

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 1, 2023

Wall Street, where bearish sentiment continues to dominate…

… did not like this assessment, instead arguing that the bulls only heard what they wanted to hear, that Powell was much more hawkish, etc, etc, and that the real Powell would be revealed today during his interview with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club in Washington, where he would shock the world with his unabashed hawkishness, or something. That did not happen, instead here are the highlights.

• Disinflation has begun but has begun in the goods sector, about 25% of the economy. Long way to go and it will not be smooth, it will be bumpy move lower.
• Labor market is extraordinarily strong. It’s good that inflation is coming down as we have not seen this before with a strong labor market.
• Powell says that he sometimes gets the data the night before but only him with no clarification on which types of data that he receives.
• On rate cuts by year-end, are markets wrong to remove those cuts? He had a data dependency type of response.
• Not considering changing the 2% target
• The shortage of workers feels more structural than cyclical, which is a problem.
• Says labor market is “at least at maximum employment” which he defines as when a person wants a job, they can get a job. Says we may be beyond max employment. As JPM explains, this is the fear factor that full employment triggers inflation. If last Friday’s print is true, it seemingly disproves the hypothesis.
• QT is passive not active and will take a couple years to get to a comfortable level. MBS sales are not on the list of active discussions.

Some more from JPM chief economist Michael Feroli:

Powell’s remarks today at the Economic Club of Washington were pretty similar to what he said after last Wednesday’s FOMC meeting: disinflation has begun, it has a long way to go, and further interest rate increases are likely needed. While he gave no sense that he was aiming to “set the record straight” after the perceived dovishness of last week’s presser, he did warn that the peak in the funds rate could be higher, particularly if the labor market remained strong. In short, this was a message of data dependency. 

Anyway, Powell’s speech has come and gone, and just as we warned last night, not only did he not flip his post-FOMC dovishness (instead beat the data-dependency drum), but with positioning so bearish ahead of his speech today, stocks suffered a blistering delta squeeze (this is how JPM’s desk framed it: “For bullish Equity investors, Powell’s speech was a welcome outcome: assuming the majority of the balance of Fedspeaks this week is in the Bostic camp (2x more hikes, avoid a recession, etc) Powell’s speech today could help balance the view.” More amusingly, it was what we said last week after the first Powell appearance, that prompted BofA’s chief economist Michael Gapen to title his Fed Watch post-mortem note today “Volcker has left the building: Hoping for painless disinflation.” At least he didn’t say Volcker was steamrolled by Burns…

Here’s why the chief economist at BofA agrees with what we said one week ago:

Volker has left the building: Hoping for painless disinflation

In remarks today at The Economic Club of Washington, DC, Chair Powell said that the stellar January employment report did not fundamentally change his view about the outlook for monetary policy, though it did “underscore” his belief that reducing inflation to the 2% target would likely “take time” and involve “ongoing rate hikes.” He added that continued strong employment gains could mean a peak policy rate above where markets are currently pricing (circa 5.0-5.25% based on federal funds futures contracts).

As he did during the press conference following the February FOMC meeting, Powell clearly stated that he believes the disinflation process has begun. That said, he emphasized that it is only clear in goods prices, which are only 25% of core CPI, while the process has yet to show through in services inflation. He said he continues to expect that housing services inflation will slow “in the second half of this year” and nonshelter services inflation will cool when wage growth cools. In addition, he said non-shelter services inflation is his “biggest worry” when it comes to the outlook for inflation.

It is what Gapen says next that goes on to explain the market’s eventual meltup, and close at session highs: i.e., “We’re not in Wyoming anymore“

As we noted following the February FOMC meeting, Chair Powell appears to have embraced recent disinflationary trends and expressed optimism that it will continue. In our view, Chair Powell is placing more weight on an “immaculate disinflation” scenario, where inflation pressures subside without some softening in labor market conditions, including higher unemployment. This stands in contrast to the Powell from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last August, who leaned strongly into doing whatever it takes to bring inflation down and emphasized that inflation was unlikely to subside without some “pain” in labor markets. To be fair, Powell did say the Fed’ s baseline includes a softening in labor markets, but it took forty minutes of continued questioning to get to this answer.

A slightly different way of saying the same comes from JPM’s Feroli who writes:

Late last year Powell and other Fed speakers seemed intent on managing market expectations. More recently, they appear content conveying that they will respond to the data and letting the market take that as fair warning. This is sensible. While Powell has recently questioned the market’s more benign inflation forecast, he hasn’t protested it too strongly—after all doing so would be asserting with vigor that the Fed will miss its inflation target. Nor has he committed to maintaining restrictive rates for a certain amount of time. Instead, he’s emphasizing what conditions require more or less restraint. Last year the Fed guided the market for many steps of the way, which was easier when the goal line was far away. This year, the market shouldn’t expect the same degree of hand holding.

Incidentally, BofA’s Gapen is less sanguine about a favorable, “immaculate” outcome: “In terms of our outlook for monetary policy, we cannot fully rule out “immaculate disinflation” outcomes. We, too, are optimistic about being past peak inflation and have inflation falling back to the Fed’s 2% by then end of 2024. That said, we would be surprised to see inflation fall all the way back to 2% without a reconciling of the imbalance between labor demand and labor supply. The labor market remains exceptionally hot, labor demand far exceeds labor supply, and, although wage growth has moderated , it continues to run at rates above what the Fed believes is needed to achieve its inflation mandate.” 

It’s unclear how the market interpreted that last bit, but judging by the double reversal in stocks and final surge in risk (as well as yields) to close the day, traders were confident enough that “Volcker leaving the building” is good enough to push spoos back to 4300 which appears to be the market’s next destination, at least until such time as bears like Marko and Wilson capitulate.

More in the full note available to pro subs.

By Jessica Menton, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analyst

There’s a little bit of good news for investors worried that stock prices are going to be pummeled by shrinking corporate profits. The drop so far seems largely priced in.

When the S&P 500 Index hit a low in October, the market was effectively factoring in a 15% decline in earnings-per-share over the next 12 months, according to Bloomberg Intelligence’s fair-value model.

But the reality — at least for now — hasn’t been quite so grim.

With the fourth-quarter results from more than half of the S&P 500 companies already in, earnings per share have fallen 2.8% from a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s less than the 3.3% drop expected before earnings season began.

The smaller-than-anticipated drop suggests that the profit contraction isn’t beginning as badly as once feared, lending support to share-price valuations. That’s likely one reason why the market is rewarding companies that exceed expectations and even dialing back the punishment of those that fall short.

“This earnings season was already projected to be pretty bad,” said Michael Casper, an equity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence. “When results come in line with projections or slightly worse than expected, it’s clear that investors had already priced that into stocks so equities aren’t going to get punished as much this time around.”

That doesn’t mean that stock investors are in the clear, particularly given the broad uncertainty about how long the Federal Reserve will keep monetary policy tight to ensure that inflation continues to come down. As a result, the worst of the profit hit may not come until the economy slows further or even lapses into a recession, which has raised some concerns about whether price-to-earnings ratios are too high after the S&P 500’s nearly 15% rebound from the October trough.

“The fundamentals have started to change,” said Rob Haworth, senior investment strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management.

“When does the Fed reach its peak rates? Will inflation slow sufficiently in 2023? Will there be a reset in corporate earnings? We’ve gotten progress in all three that has been supportive for equity markets, but investors are still cautious given uncertainty with economic growth.”

The main locus of investors’ valuation concerns are the growth stocks that have benefited the most from the retreat of bond yields from last year’s peaks, since those rates are used to put a value today on profits that aren’t expected until years in the future. In fact, the forward multiples for technology, media and telecommunication shares in the S&P 500 have returned to levels above the pre-pandemic norm at around 20 times earnings, above the five-year average of 17.6 times shortly before the pandemic struck.

That may exert a limit on future gains, particularly after the recent surge in payroll growth cast doubt on speculation that the Fed would start cutting interest rates late this year. If a strong labor market keeps wage growth elevated and prevents inflation from coming down as fast as policymakers want, the bank may raise rates more aggressively — or hold them higher for longer — than the markets had been expecting.

“People are getting ahead of themselves with the Fed slowing down policy,” Casper, the Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, added. “It’s tough for stocks to move materially higher in the near term toward record highs. It’ll probably be a bumpy ride because there’s not a lot of room for equities to inflate further.”

Following a historic plunge in the net worth of Gautham Adani, who is still India’s richest and was briefly the world’s richest man, following a scathing report by short-seller Hindenburg Research which cut the market value of Adani’s network of businesses by more than half, hedge funds and distressed debt specialists have seen enough and are rushing to scoop up bonds related to Adani’s business empire as they look to capitalize on falling prices.

According to Bloomberg, Oaktree and Davidson Kempner, two of the largest US distressed hedge funds, were among those buying the debt in recent weeks. Distressed funds have been actively trading the bonds from their Asian offices, Bloomberg reports citing a person familiar with the matter. It was not clear whether the firms already held Adani bonds prior to US short-seller Hindenburg Research publishing its report on Jan. 24.

Last month all publicly traded securities linked to Adani’s sprawling empire tumbled after Hindenburg accused the group inflated revenue and stock prices. The conglomerate has repeatedly denied Hindenburg’s allegations of corporate wrongdoing and threatened legal action, but has largely failed to stem the drop.

Meanwhile, on a call with clients last week, Goldman traders said Adani securities had drawn interest from investors amid an equity rout and a debt slump that pushed some bonds to distressed levels. According to Goldman, Adani debt had hit a floor in the short term and bonds of Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone Ltd. had become interesting at the current price. The price of those bonds rose in the following days as investors looked to capitalize on the potential for a rebound.

Adani Ports said earlier Tuesday it will repay around 50 billion rupees ($604.6 million) of debt in a bid to improve its leverage metrics. Similar loan repayment news helped push Adani stocks higher for the first time after days of declines.

Update (1425ET): 

The death toll continues to climb. 

NBC News reported at least 7,266 people were killed in Turkey and Syria. 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday evening that 5,434 people were killed and 22,168 injured. He said at least 8,000 people had been pulled from collapsed buildings. 

🚨 WATCH || Overwhelmed rescuers struggled to save people trapped under the rubble as the death toll from a devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria approached 7,200 on Tuesday

– https://t.co/Jf9fs8w3s0 pic.twitter.com/fq8e2rpfll

— PiQ (@PriapusIQ) February 7, 2023

The Syrian Health Ministry said 812 people were killed, with another 1,832 injured. In Syrian rebel-held areas, about 1,020 died, and 2,400 were injured. 

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said 338,000 people were in government shelters or hotels. Tens of thousands of others were taking refuge in community centers, stadiums, shopping malls, and other buildings that were still structurally sound. 

Erdogan also declared a state of emergency in the quake-affected areas:

“We are declaring ten cities impacted by the earthquake zone,” he said, adding the emergency order will last for three months. 

Here’s more shocking footage:

Kahraman Maraş southern Turkey, before and after the #Earthquake pic.twitter.com/XvdQBcXO46

— Asaad Sam Hanna (@AsaadHannaa) February 7, 2023

Drone footage from Malatya, #Turkey shows massive devastation after Earthquake. Entire buildings, neighborhoods wiped: pic.twitter.com/XI6QWLPHSK

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) February 7, 2023

❗️Devastating visual from the earthquake affected region 👀

Turkey earthquake death toll rises to 5,434 with 31,777 injured

Video credit on the visual pic.twitter.com/hAgRx4f0JH

— OsintTV📺 (@OsintTV) February 7, 2023

WATCH – Turkey’s Iskenderun port on fire after earthquake https://t.co/bhAZaY1HO5 pic.twitter.com/slvoQbz8vn

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) February 7, 2023

*   *   * 

The death toll from the powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria early Monday surged to more than 5,000 on Tuesday, according to WaPo. Thousands of buildings collapsed in southern Turkey and Northern Syria. Rescue teams from around the world are pouring into the region to comb through the rubble and search for survivors. 

Turkey’s Vice President Fuat Oktay said deaths had increased to 3,419. He said another 20,534 people were injured. Another 1,602 people were dead on the Syrian side of the border, bringing the total between the countries to 5,000. 

Two alarming estimates, one from the US Geological Survey and the other from the World Health Organization’s senior emergency officer for Europe, indicated that the death toll in both countries could surpass 10,000 and reach as high as 20,000. The high estimates are due to the powerful quake and aftershocks that toppled large multi-family residential structures. 

No words.. I can’t … this is hell #Turkey #earthquake pic.twitter.com/B6xn1g6r5y

— Abier (@abierkhatib) February 6, 2023

We never know when the ground we stood on gonna shatter and our lives crumble.
Prayers to all the souls and people in Turkey and Syria.

Everyday we are alive, is a day worth living for. #TurkeyEarthquake #syriaearthquake #bbrightvc pic.twitter.com/PmPirXroV1

— BrightVC UK Fanclub (@bbrightvc_ukfc) February 7, 2023

Since the quake struck early Monday, southern Turkey has recorded a staggering 285 aftershocks. A few of those quakes were enough to cause new buildings to collapse, said Orhan Tatar, an official from the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, who WSJ quoted. Tatar warned: 

“Every minute, new tremors are happening.” 

Here’s a map of where the first quake struck. 

President Recep Erdogan said the quake is the country’s largest disaster since the 1939 Erzincan earthquake that killed upwards of 30,00 people. South-central Turkey sits on major fault lines, with three tectonic plates sliding past each other. 

Via OilPrice.com,

• BP has just announced that it will be revising its emissions targets in order to produce more oil and gas to meet global demand.

• The British energy giant previously aimed to cut emissions by 35-40% by 2030, but now it is targeting a 20-30% decrease.

• BP has also recorded bumper profits which have been met with criticism, reigniting calls for tougher windfall taxes.

BP has scaled back its climate ambitions, easing plans to slash the amount of oil and gas it produces over the current decade to meet global demand.

The energy giant had previously promised its emissions would be 35-40 percent lower by the end of this decade.

It is now targeting a 20-30 percent cut and plans a greater production of oil and gas over the next seven years compared with previous targets.

This is a definitive pivot in policy from BP, which was one of the first fossil fuel producers to commit to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The company has also increased its payout to shareholders by 10 percent – spending a further £2.3bn ($2.75bn) buying back its own shares.

In total, BP handed back more than £11.7bn ($14bn) to shareholders in 2022 – £3.7bn ($4.4bn) in dividends and £8.4bn ($10bn) in share buybacks.

BP has revelled in record gas prices and a robust performance across oil markets

This follows a historic year of trading for the energy giant, which announced record profits powered by soaring oil and gas prices following the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

BP’s earnings for the full year than doubled to £23bn ($27.7bn) in 2022 in line with record gas prices and 14-year peaks in the cost of oil.

This is more than double last year’s takings of £10.6bn ($12.8bn), in line with resurgent earnings across the energy industry.

The fossil fuel titan’s bumper profits were powered by another quarter of booming trading, with BP capping off the year with a three-month earnings window of just under £9bn ($10.8bn)

Shares in the company were up 5.7 percent in early afternoon trading on the FTSE 100 following the results, trading at 505p per share.

It follows Shell’s bumper £32.2bn ($39.9bn) profits for the full-year, alongside massive earnings reported by energy giants operating Stateside such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil.

Total and Equinor are expected to unveil their own results tomorrow, with Aramco scheduled for next month.

Energy giants have unveiled bumper full-year profits so far – with some of the biggest players still to announce their figures

Labour: Scrap investment relief from EPL

The latest wave in mega earnings has triggered familiar calls for the windfall tax to be toughened up with Labour calling for the investment relief to be ditched from the Energy Profits Levy (EPL).

Ed Miliband, Labour’s Shadow Climate Change and Net Zero Secretary, said:

“It’s yet another day of enormous profits at an energy giant, the windfalls of war, coming directly out of the pockets of the British people. What is so outrageous is that as fossil fuel companies rake in these enormous sums, [the Prime minister] Rishi Sunak still refuses to bring in a proper windfall tax that would make them pay their fair share.”

Last November, Jeremy Hunt hiked the EPL from 25 to 35 percent – which has been imposed on North Sea oil and gas profits to harness record profits for support packages to ease energy bills for households and businesses.

This was on top of the special 40 percent corporation tax the fossil fuel industry already pay.

However, the EPL also included a 91p in the pound relief rate companies investing domestically in the UK.

BP’s share price has risen significantly during this year’s trading (Source: London Stock Exchange)

Labour has labelled this a “fossil fuel investment loophole” and forecasts £13bn in takings from scrapping the relief scheme, and backdating the tax from the start of 2022.

Industry trade group Offshore Energies UK opposed calls for a toughened windfall tax, arguing that it was wrong to offer false resolutions to consumers.

Mike Tholen, OEUK’s director of sustainability, said:

“These calls for an increase in the UK windfall tax, linked to the global profits of energy producers, are deliberately misleading. The UK is subject to global tax agreements which say that it cannot tax profits made by companies outside of the country. That means such a tax could never be implemented. It is irresponsible to pretend otherwise.”

He noted that the windfall tax was already having an effect on the industry with Harbour Energy recently pulling out of the licensing round for further projects while Total has pulled out of £100m investment plans in North Sea.

Meanwhile, Shell is rowing back its pledge to spend £25bn in the UK over the current decade, and will now assess projects on a “case by case basis.”

As it stands, BP’s UK operations accounts for less than 10 percent of its global profits.

It is expected pay around cough up £880m ($1.06bn) towards the Energy Profits Levy in the fourth quarter and £1.52bn for the full year ($1.83bn).

BP has committed £18bn in UK investments over the current decade, including 75 percent in low and zero carbon.

President Biden will read a carefully prepared State of the Union Speech on Tuesday night in front of a newly divided Congress, where he’s likely to tout last week’s jobs report, and use it as a soft launch for his 2024 reelection campaign despite the fact that a majority of Democrats who don’t want him to run again.

Biden will likely argue that Americans are doing better on average than when he took office, and falsely claim that inflation isn’t his fault.

BIDEN SAYS HE TAKES NO BLAME FOR INFLATION

BIDEN SAYS INFLATION WAS THERE WHEN HE ARRIVED

Green light to raising inflation target: it was Trump’s fault

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 3, 2023

“Do I take any blame for inflation? No,” Biden said Friday. “Because it was already there when I got here, man. … Jobs were hemorrhaging, inflation was rising, we weren’t manufacturing a damn thing here, we were in real economic difficultly, that’s why I don’t.”

Except… inflation was 1.4% when Biden took office.

Even The Hill notes that “there are signs that even a productive past year that featured major investments in the economy and declining concerns about a recession may not be enough for Biden to excite even some in his own party about a 2024 bid.“

“I think this is an impossible speech to give because it’s a speech that requires him to speak both about the state of the union as it is and the direction he hopes to lead it, which is about playing the role of statesman. But it also is going to lay the groundwork for most likely his own run for office in 2024, which will call for him to be decidedly political and to cover all kinds of ground,” said William Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

What else will Biden say?

Biden will likely call on Congress to raise the debt limit without conditions, challenging Republicans to send him a ‘clean’ bill, while warning against cuts to Social Security and Medicare – cuts which House Speaker Kevin McCarthy already said were off the table.

He will undoubtedly mention the war in Ukraine, framing it as a broader fight against Russian aggression. Some foreign policy experts have suggested Biden may use the speech to lay out a possible roadmap to ending US involvement in Ukraine, The Hill reports.

Biden may also call for police reform following the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police – which was widely framed as an issue of white supremacy, despite involving only black officers, working for a black Chief of Police, and a black suspect. Nichols, 29, died in a hospital on Jan. 10, three days after he was beaten by the five officers – who have all been hit with several charges.

He may also encourage lawmakers to strike a bipartisan immigration deal after his administration spent the last two years encouraging unchecked illegal migration into the United States.

What won’t Biden mention?

Unless his doctors failed to dial in his cocktail, Biden probably won’t touch on his classified document scandal, the Hunter Biden investigations, or the removal of several Democrats – including Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, and Ilhan Omar, from prominent Congressional committees.

We also don’t imagine he’ll mention the embarrassing Chinese spy balloon he let traverse the entire United States before shooting down.