Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

Who watches the watchers?

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. 

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement.

“As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” 

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.” 

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda. 

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.

Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was. 

Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself. 

While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax. 

Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election. 

Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.

Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified. 

While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:

As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.

 McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.

Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists. 

Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”  

Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes. 

The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution. 

Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.

Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information. 

The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions. 

During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed. 

Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper. 

Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.

The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016. 

In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.” 

Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency: 

I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.

When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.

To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.” 

“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,”  Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.

What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence? 

What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?

The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption. 

Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.

Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI. 

There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau. 

The three reforms most commonly suggested include:

1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections;

2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or

3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas. 

The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes. 

The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax. 

Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics. 

We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Those hoping for a Christmastime government shutdown were once again disappointed when Congress passed a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill that few, if any, Representatives and Senators read before voting on. The Republican leadership celebrated this bloated monstrosity because it spends $858 billion on warfare while “only” spending $772.5 billion on welfare.

No one should think Republican insistence on more warfare than welfare spending means Democrats oppose the warfare state. Under President Biden and a Democrat-controlled Congress, “defense” spending has increased by 4.3 percent over the last two years. Similarly, every Republican President in recent years—including two who had a Republican-controlled Congress for at least part of their term—supported huge increases in welfare state spending. Most Democrats only pretend to oppose warfare and most Republicans only pretend to oppose welfare to appease their parties’ respective bases.

The Omnibus appropriates a $44.5 billion giveaway to Ukraine. This brings the total US spending on Ukraine’s military to over $100 billion – approximately 50 percent more than Russia’s entire military budget! This money is spent in a conflict that does not affect US security, yet one that would likely have not occurred were it not for prior US meddling in the region.

The Omnibus bill provides $11.3 billion for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a $569.6 million increase and $524 billion above the President’s request. According to the Democratic leadership, the funding increase is so the FBI can better fight “extremist violence and domestic terrorists.”

The public recently learned what the FBI considers an appropriate way to fight “extremism,” with the release of emails between Twitter officials and the FBI. These memos show the Bureau was working with Twitter—and almost certainly other social media companies—to suppress certain stories, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, and points of view, such as skepticism regarding masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates. The bureau even used taxpayer funds to reimburse Twitter for the costs of implementing these “requests.” Government officials working with private companies to silence American citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

This is hardly the first time the FBI has violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. In fact, since its founding the Bureau has targeted political activists and leaders such as Martin Luther King, whose agenda was considered “extreme” or “dangerous” by the Bureau’s corrupt leadership. The idea of a national police force with the power to target Americans because of their political beliefs would have horrified the drafters of the Constitution. The federal government has no constitutional authority over criminal law except for cases of piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Libertarians, constitutional conservatives, and progressives who still care about civil liberties should join together to defund the FBI.

The fiscal year 2022 omnibus appropriations bill expands government, reduces liberty, and increases government debt, forcing the Federal Reserve to monetize more debt leading to more price inflation. Our political elites prioritize militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home over addressing the problems facing the American people like the Federal Reserve’s destructive monetary policy. This will fuel growing discontent with the political system.

As the economy continues to worsen and the attempt to run the world continues to result in failures, the discontent will grow until the welfare warfare system collapses and, hopefully, a new error of liberty peace and prosperity dawns.

Southwest Airlines canceled nearly 3,000 flights on Monday, as a historic winter storm and inadequate staffing made for a perfect storm of holiday chaos the day after Christmas. 

As of 9PM on Monday, Southwest had canceled 2,882 flights – or 70% of its schedule, according to flightaware.com. Overall, 82% of Southwest flights were either canceled or delayed. By airport, Denver International saw 24% of flights canceled, while 29% were delayed.

Tomorrow is also slated to be a total mess, with over 2,400 Tuesday flights canceled.

Is it time for @USDOT to require Southwest the ability to rebook on other airlines during IROPS?

— Ross Feinstein (@RossFeinstein) December 27, 2022

“Yikes, @SouthwestAir! This is clearly a meltdown,” tweeted former TSA official Ross Feinstein, who’s been monitoring the situation.

.@SouthwestAir has now canceled 60% of their operation tomorrow, Dec. 27.

Today, Dec. 26, they have canceled 70% of their operation, and that number is increasing. https://t.co/TLaJRmE2NU

— Ross Feinstein (@RossFeinstein) December 27, 2022

@cbschicago @nbcchicago @ABC7Chicago @fox32news What is happening with Southwest at MDW? Cancelled flights for no flight staff, no customer service, exorbitant wait times on hold, people stranded, how are people getting their baggage from cancelled flights? Insanity. pic.twitter.com/KVPiIIFy9x

— Mary Harlow (@HarlowCRNA) December 26, 2022

A Southwest official, Chris Perry, told NPR that the disruptions are a result of the ongoing winter storm, and that the company “stabilize and improve its operation” as the weather improves.

From Houston, Texas, and Tampa, Fla., to Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colo., passengers are sharing photos and video of overwhelmed baggage claim areas and long lines at reservation counters. At Southwest, the customer service phone line’s hold times averaged more than two hours, sometimes reaching four hours, according to Colorado Public Radio. -NPR

“I’m okay with these travel situations and fly on by myself when it’s just me, but when my one-year-old has to suffer through it because of ineptitude and mismanagement, that becomes personal,” said Southwest passenger Joshua Caudle, adding “I’m never going to do this with that company again.”

James Baker, a #Southwest passenger, was flying from Sacramento to Buffalo for Christmas. His Buffalo flight ended up being canceled. Now he’s trying to get back home, but has been stuck in Denver for days. @DenverChannel pic.twitter.com/8a9RIE85uD

— Brandon Richard (@BrandonLRichard) December 26, 2022

Big mess at BWI this morning. Over 100 flights cancelled so far this morning. People have been waiting in line at the Southwest ticketing counter for hours. Some people tell me they’ve waited since 2:30 this morning. People are sleeping all over the airport. @wbaltv11 pic.twitter.com/DPiIOdWwJG

— Breana Ross (@breanarossWBAL) December 26, 2022

Other problems include “connecting flight crews to their schedules,” according to Perry, who who said this has made it difficult for employees to participate in crew scheduling services and get reassignments.

A Southwest passenger who says she was attempting to fly from Missouri to Denver said she missed spending Christmas with her family after several delays and cancellations to flights out of the Kansas City International Airport. Despite her being grounded, her luggage was sent to Denver without her, she wrote on Twitter. -NPR

“This is really as bad as it gets for an airline,” said Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, calling it a “full-blown meltdown.”

“We’ve seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there’s pretty clear skies across the country.”

Southwest Airlines Disaster

Houston Hobby Airport

12/25@SouthwestAir #SouthwestAirlines #Southwest #southweststolechristmas #Houston pic.twitter.com/iO6ummEi6P

— JT (@jtmma567) December 26, 2022

Still stranded at the Vegas airport (24+ hrs, multiple canceled flights) This is the @SouthwestAir rebooking line. It wraps around and then goes all the way to the end of the room. It also doesn’t move #Southwest #southweststolechristmas #southwestAir pic.twitter.com/OmCCuqLRn9

— Evan Knupp (@EvanKnupp) December 26, 2022

Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times,

Netflix customers may soon face criminal charges for sharing their password next year.

The popular streaming service is planning to put an end to password sharing beginning in early 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Netflix has been exploring ways to crack down on it for some time, and this is the first official notice that the changes will finally happen.

The company claimed that out of the 222 million households around the world with valid subscriptions, there were at least “100 million additional households” using their services via password sharing.

Households using Netflix through password sharing reportedly include more than 30 million households across the United States and Canada, Newsweek reported.

Netflix offers shared accounts with separate profiles and multiple streams in its plans, but only people living under the same roof apply.

The online media platform has been losing revenue for years to unauthorized password sharing, but it was willing to overlook the matter due to a surge in subscriptions over the past two years.

However, revenue has been falling since the start of this year, as it faces its first drop in subscribers in a decade.

The company has introduced fees for people sharing accounts not living in the same household in order to fight a decline in subscribers.

Subscription sharing has also made it more difficult for the company to expand its service and productions into new markets, according to the company.

The Netflix logo on top of their office building in Hollywood, Calif., on Jan. 20, 2022. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

Netflix’s terms of service had never allowed for multi-household sharing, which has read that it is the responsibility of “the member who created the Netflix account and whose payment method is charged” for any activity that occurs through the account.

“To maintain control over the account and to prevent anyone from accessing the account, the account owner should maintain control over the Netflix ready devices … and not reveal the password or details of the payment method associated with the account to anyone,” according to the terms.

“We can terminate your account or place your account on hold in order to protect you, Netflix or our partners from identity theft or other fraudulent activity.”

At one time, it considered offering pay-per-view content to discourage those with accounts from sharing their passwords, but company executives voted against that plan.

Netflix Executives Enforce Sharing Rules Due to Revenue Shortfall

Meanwhile, Reed Hastings, the Netflix co-CEO,  decided it was now the time to act on the password-sharing issue, which was neglected for too long.

His co-CEO Ted Sarandos agreed and said that the streaming service would finally crack down on it.

Viewers generally oppose price hikes, and the company needs to find a way to handle the sharing issue so people will “see the value” in the company, Sarandos told CNBC.

“There are folks who are enjoying Netflix, literally for free today,” said Sarandos.

“So, they’re getting a lot of value out of it. I think they’ll be happy to have their own account.”

Netflix will slowly phase out password sharing over time rather than ending it immediately so to avoid alienating customers and will ask those who share accounts with others outside of their household to start paying in 2023.

Users Will Be Tracked to Enforce Restrictions on Non-Subscribing Users

Those who continue to share an account outside the primary subscriber’s immediate household will have to pay additional fees under the new rules.

Netflix said it may possibly charge just below its $6.99 ad-supported plan for non-household users to boost revenue and wants those who are sharing passwords illegally to sign up for their own subscription.

The streaming service also expects to introduce other ad-supported subscription plans over time.

For example, Netflix’s current premium plan allows for Ultra HD 4K streaming and support for watching on four supported devices like iPhones, iPads, and Macs at one time, as long as those devices are owned by people in the same household but it does not allow multiple viewers watching outside of the same household.

The company will consider tracking particular information, such as Device IDs, IP addresses, and account activity, to help identify whether viewers are part of the same household to enforce the new rules, reported The Dallas Morning News.

The online video service had been testing add-on payments for password sharing in some Latin American countries, with an additional $3 fee.

The trial program reportedly makes primary account holders provide a verification code to anyone outside their household in order to access their account and repeatedly asks for the code until a monthly fee is paid to add non-household subscribers.

A similar method may be imposed on users in North America next year.

China has sent 71 warplanes and seven ships near Taiwan over a 24-hour period this weekend, which was intended as a clear warning signal in response to President Biden signing the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, given it includes $10 billion in military grant assistance to Taiwan. 

The majority of those warplanes are said to have crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, with the Taiwanese military counting 47 jets breaching the de facto boundary line. The threatening flights occurred between 6 a.m. Sunday and 6 a.m. Monday.

A statement from the People’s Liberation Army’s  Eastern Theater Command included a rare direct reference to the United States and its deepening ties to Taipei. “This is a firm response to the current US-Taiwan escalation and provocation,” the Eastern Command statement said.

Over the weekend, and while much of the West was celebrating the Christmas holiday, China’s Foreign Ministry elaborated its response to the NDAA passage, signed into law by President Biden Friday, just before the bulk of PLA aircraft buzzed the island, saying the new funding for more weapons for Taiwan “blatantly interferes in China’s internal affairs.”

“This sends a gravely wrong signal to ​’​Taiwan independence​’​ separatist forces and severely affects peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan is China’s Taiwan. No external interference in China’s internal affairs will be tolerated​,” it said further.

“The US needs to stop seeking to use Taiwan to contain China, stop fudging, distorting and hollowing out the one-China principle, and stop moving even further down the wrong and dangerous path​,” the foreign ministry continued.

The latest sortie from the PLA included 18 J-16 fighter jets, 11 J-1 fighters, 6 Su-30 fighters and drones, according to Taiwan’s defense ministry, which typically scrambles its own fighters in response and uses coastal anti-air defense systems to monitor inbound activity.

The NDAA that was just signed into law makes clear that the US is rapidly accelerating its Ukraine-ification of Taiwan, including explicitly preparing to wage war against China, but no doubt we’ll be told any action taken in response is “unprovoked” https://t.co/KMTKPcpcKw

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 26, 2022

President Tsai Ing-wen in response vowed to bolster the island’s civil defense systems. “The more preparations we make, the less likely there will be rash attempts of aggression. The more united we are, the stronger and safer Taiwan would become,” Tsai ​said.​​

On Friday the PLA military had sent 39 aircraft and three warships toward Taiwan. But Sunday into overnight Monday’s flights marked a record number of Chinese aircraft breaching Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over a single day period.

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

Russia has said it’s willing to resume natural gas supplies to Europe through the Yamal-Europe Pipeline. The Yamal-Europe Pipeline usually flows westward but has been mostly reversed after Poland turned away from buying from Russia in favor of drawing on stored gas in Germany.

“The European market remains relevant, as the gas shortage persists, and we have every opportunity to resume supplies. For example, the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, which was stopped for political reasons, remains unused” TASS has cited Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak as saying. 

Previously, state-owned gas producer Gazprom revealed that it expected to pump 43 million cubic meters of gas per day to Europe via Ukraine through Sudzha. Unfortunately, the pipeline blew up during planned maintenance work near the village of Kalinino, about 150 km (90 miles) west of the Volga city of Kazan. 

To put the size of the pipeline in context, its run rate is a tiny portion of the 155 billion cubic meters of natural gas that Europe imported from Russia in 2021. Europe has managed to stockpile huge volumes of natural gas for the winter season, so much so that prices have tumbled sharply in recent months.

Whereas supplies of Russian pipeline gas – the bulk of Europe’s gas imports before the Ukraine war – are down to a trickle, Europe has been hungrily scooping up Russian LNG in the meantime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the bloc’s imports of Russian liquefied natural gas jumped by 41% Y/Y. Novak has revealed that in the 11 months of 2022, Russian LNG exports to Europe increased to 19.4 bcm, with the figure expected to hit 21 bcm by year-end.

“Russian LNG has been the dark horse of the sanctions regime,” Maria Shagina, research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, told WSJ. Importers of Russian LNG to Europe have argued that the shipments are not covered by current EU sanctions and that buying LNG from Russia and other suppliers has helped keep European energy prices in check.

Questions are already looming about the health of the auto market – and specifically the EV space – after it was announced just days ago that Tesla would be suspending operations at its key Shanghai plant for one day longer than expected this week.

Now, it looks as though NIO is joining the party, with its CEO warning investors of a potentially rocky start to 2023 on the horizon. 

Bloomberg reported on Sunday that Chief Executive Officer William Li said this week that the company could “face a challenging first half as a cut in government subsidies and the broader economic slowdown erode local demand in the world’s largest new-energy vehicle market”. 

Li said that demand could be pulled forward to the end of 2022 as customers look to try and place vehicle orders before national subsidies run out. He made the comments in Hefei, Central China this week, also noting that that the residual effects of the pandemic continue to mire the company. 

“It will also take time for both the supply chain and consumer confidence to recover from the pandemic,” he said.

Though Li says he expects a “full recovery” by May or June, we’re not so sure. The industry looks bleak. For example, Tesla also announced last week it would be halting production for slightly longer than expected at its Shanghai plant this month.

Additionally, just days ago we published commentary from an auto industry insider who said that a “massive wave” of car repossessions and loans defaults would soon be on the horizon in the United States. 

As we noted in early December, for almost a year now, we have been dutifully tracking several key datasets within the auto sector to find the critical inflection point in this perhaps most leading of economic indicators which will presage not only a crushing auto loan crisis, but also signal the arrival of a full-blown recession, one which even the NBER won’t be able to ignore, as the US consumers are once again tapped out. We believe that moment has now arrived.

But first, for those readers who are unfamiliar with the space, we urge you to read some of our recent articles on the topic of car prices – which alongside housing, has been the biggest driver of inflation in the past 18 months – and more specifically how these are funded by the US middle class, i.e., car loans, and last but not least, the interest rate paid for said loans. Here are a few places to start:

• Are We Headed For An “Auto Loan Crisis” As Delinquencies Begin To Rise? – July 7
• A Flood Of Repossessed Vehicles Poised To Hit The Used-Car Market – July 25
• American Drivers Go Deeper Into Debt As Inflation Pushes Car Loans To Record Highs – Aug 29
• Credit Card Rates Just Hit A Record As The Average Car Loan Rises To Fresh All Time High – Oct 9
• New-Car Loan-Rates Set To Hit 14-Year High As Affordability Crisis Worsens – Nov 3

Authored by Francis Sempa va RealClearDefense.com,

Thirty-five years ago, Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was released to widespread acclaim.

It was (and is) riveting history, explaining the interaction of economics, geopolitics, and social momentum in international relations since the 16th century. One of the main themes of Kennedy’s history was the concept of imperial overstretch – that the relative decline of great powers often resulted from an imbalance between a nation’s resources and commitments. And Kennedy opined that the United States needed to worry about its own imperial overstretch.

Kennedy summarized his historical findings with a passage that has great relevance to 21st century global politics:

[I]t has been a common dilemma facing previous “number one” countries that even as their economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes our productive investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits overspending priorities, and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense.

The timing of Kennedy’s book was bad. It appeared in 1987, yet two years later the United States won its long Cold War victory over the Soviet Union.

How could the U.S. be in decline when it just won an historic victory in what President John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle?” But Paul Kennedy’s history was sound. Great power decline, as Kennedy showed in his survey of five centuries of international politics, usually takes a long time – often centuries. And “decline” in international politics is a relative term – a great power declines usually in relation to other powers. Decline does not mean collapse – though that sometimes happened–but it does signal a shift in the global balance of power.

And great power statesmen rarely appreciate that decline. President George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” after the fall of the Soviet empire. His son, President George W. Bush, after the September 11, 2001, attacks made it U.S. policy to spread democracy throughout the world. He launched the Global War on Terror and the United States fought two long wars that in the end accomplished very little. In the meantime, China was rising economically and militarily, and soon would begin to flex its geopolitical muscles in the western Pacific and across Eurasia.

Kennedy’s book took the long view of history. Unipolar moments–a term coined by Charles Krauthammer–are just that: brief moments in history that do not erase long term trends. It is arguable that America’s decline began when President Woodrow Wilson and congress made the United States a belligerent in the First World War. Wilson and his “progressive” cohorts started the U.S. on the path to globalism, which after a brief interlude in the 1920s, was continued under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration which attracted “progressives” by the thousands to Washington, D.C., and government service. “Progressives” think they can use national power to make the world a perfect place. James Burnham brilliantly captured the progressive approach when he noted that progressives like Eleanor Roosevelt treat the world as their slum.

Our victory in World War II disguised that decline – it was another unipolar moment where the United States’ power appeared unchallenged relative to other great powers. The Truman administration took imperial overstretch to new limits. As Walter Lippmann and later George Kennan pointed out, the Truman Doctrine was a globalist’s delight, and its global reach required the institutionalization of the national security state–what President Eisenhower later called the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower knew all about the military-industrial complex – he had been a part of it since the beginning of the Cold War and observed its growth and growing influence during his presidency.

It was Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy aide Henry Kissinger who recognized the existence of long-term relative decline that Paul Kennedy later wrote about in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Nixon and Kissinger understood history and the realities of international politics in Toynbeean terms. That is why they simultaneously pursued the opening to China and detente with the Soviet Union. Eurasia had to remain geopolitically pluralistic for the United States to be secure. Korea and Vietnam were symptoms of decline – wars that perhaps we should not have fought, or that we should not have had to fight, and that we refused to win, but that fed the beast of the military-industrial complex. And the roots of those wars also extended back to the Truman administration’s catastrophic “loss of China.”

Some observers in 1949 – including Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and then-congressman Richard Nixon – recognized how disastrous the communist victory in China was to future American security. Taking the long view of history, our “tie” in Korea and loss in Vietnam pale in significance to the loss of China because China’s rise in the 21st century may end up being the proximate cause of America’s relative decline.

Toward the end of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy expressed the then-controversial belief that great power wars were not a thing of the past. “Those who assume that mankind would not be so foolish as to become involved in another ruinously expensive Great Power war perhaps need reminding that that belief was also widely held for much of the nineteenth century.” For three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States thought and acted as if great power wars were behind us. It took the Trump administration’s national security strategists – especially Elbridge Colby – to redirect our national defense strategy toward great power competition. Our sleepwalk through history ended with the simultaneous challenges of China and Russia. Paul Kennedy’s great book deserves to be remembered as a warning that the “end of history” is a dream.

A rare and hugely significant incident occurred Monday along the heavily fortified border which separates the Korean peninsula. South Korea’s military has confirmed it fired warning shots and scrambled jets after the north sent drones that violated the south’s sovereign airspace.

It is reported to be the first such major territory breaching incident in a half-decade, also resulting in Seoul sending surveillance aircraft across the border in response. The North Korean drones penetrated deep into the south’s territory, resulting in civilian commercial flights to be temporarily grounded in and around Seoul. 

“South Korea’s military detected five drones from North Korea crossing the border, and one traveled as far as the northern part of the South Korean capital region, which is about an hour’s drive away, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said,” according to The Associated Press.

“The military responded by firing warning shots and launching fighter jets and attack helicopters to shoot down the North Korean drones,” the report based on official military statements contines. “The attack helicopters fired a combined 100 rounds but it wasn’t immediately known if any of the North Korean drones were shot down, according to the Defense Ministry.”

Only one of the five drones was observed flying back across the border into North Korea, while the others disappeared from radar, according to the south’s Joint Chiefs.

Among surveillance countermeasures authorized in response, the Joint Chiefs said that its surveillance aircraft photographed sensitive North Korean facilities from which drones usually operate.

The south’s significant rapid response to the drones breaching the border resulted in a crashed manned aircraft. Seoul identified that one of its KA-1 light attack airplanes crashed while taking off, resulting in both pilots ejecting safely.

“Our military will thoroughly and resolutely respond to this kind of North Korean provocation,” Maj. Gen. Lee Seung-o, spokesman for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press briefing.

Tensions along the militarized border have already been high due to Pyongyang firing off a record number of ballistic and other missiles this year, including a pair fired last week toward Japan. With now days left in 2022, analysts have tracked over 90 missiles fired this year.

#BREAKING: South Korea has scrambled fighter jets and attack helicopters and has fired warning shots after North Korean drones violated its airspace

– North Korean drone flies over capital of Seoul

– A South Korean Ka-1 fighter jet crashed while fighting a North Korean drone pic.twitter.com/mJf2n1Dn1X

— Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) December 26, 2022

“North Korea has launched at least 92 ballistic and other missiles in 2022 — more than in any previous year,” The New York Times has tallied in a new report. “Each was in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban the country from testing ballistic missiles, as well as nuclear devices.”

Monday’s fresh incident illustrates how close the rival sides of the Korean peninsula are to firing on each other’s military assets at any time. The Kim Jong-Un regime has also been expressing anger over recent US-S.Korea military drills which has featured US nuclear-capable bombers and F-22 stealth jets flying over the peninsula and regional waters.

Another day, another TWITTER FILES drop exposing the incestuous relationship between big tech and government.

Today’s edition, dropped by journalist David Zweig, focuses on ‘how Twitter rigged the Covid debate‘ by taking direction from both the Trump and Biden administrations (while at the same time trying to censor the former president). What’s somewhat notable is how aggressive government (and ex-government) officials were in trying to stifle free speech, while Twitter’s non-government-linked employees would often push back (and then totally fold) – a theme we’ve observed in previous drops. In one such instance, former head of Twitter’s Trust & Safety team Yoel Roth tells former FBI lawyer and then-Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker to calm his tits over a Trump tweet.

Of course, in the end the government typically got its way, as you will read below.

1. THREAD:

THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Zweig, who was granted access to internal files while on assignment for The Free Press, notes that “both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.“

What’s more, the censorship effort extended to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.

7. It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. pic.twitter.com/OgOrRxBBBW

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Continued via The Free Press (emphasis ours),

In July 2021, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a 22-page advisory concerning what the World Health Organization referred to as an “infodemic,” and called on social media platforms to do more to shut down “misformation.”

“We are asking them to step up,” Murthy said. “We can’t wait longer for them to take aggressive action.” 

That’s the message the White House had already taken directly to Twitter executives in private channels. One of the Biden administration’s first meeting requests was about Covid, with a focus on “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to a meeting summary by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy.

They were especially concerned about Alex Berenson, a journalist skeptical of lockdowns and mRNA vaccines, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform:

By the summer of 2021, the day after Murthy’s memo, Biden announced publicly that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing misinformation about vaccines. Just hours later, Twitter locked Berenson out of his account, and then permanently suspended him the next month. Berenson sued Twitter. He ultimately settled with the company, and is now back on the platform. As part of the lawsuit, Twitter was compelled to provide certain internal communications. They revealed that the White House had directly met with Twitter employees and pressured them to take action on Berenson. 

The summary of meetings by Culbertson, emailed to colleagues in December 2022, adds new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign, and illustrates how it tried to directly influence what content was allowed on Twitter. 

Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more.

Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government. 

But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. As a result, legitimate findings and questions about our Covid policies and their consequences went missing.

There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process.

First: Much of the content moderation on Covid, to say nothing of other contentious subjects, was conducted by bots trained on machine learning and AI. I spent hours discussing the systems with an engineer and with an executive who had been at the company for more than a year before Musk’s takeover. They explained the process in basic terms: Initially, the bots were fed information to train them on what to look for—but their searches would become more refined over time both as they scanned the platform and as they were manually updated with additional chosen inputs. At least that was the premise. Though impressive in their engineering, the bots would prove too crude for such nuanced work. When you drag a digital trawler across a social media platform, you’re not just catching cheap fish, you’re going to snag dolphins along the way.

Second: Contractors operating in places like the Philippines were also moderating content. They were given decision trees to aid in their process, but tasking non-experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate. The notion that remote workers, sitting in distant cube farms, were going to police medical information to this granular degree is absurd on its face.

Embedded below is an example template—deactivated after Musk’s arrival—of the decision tree tool that contractors used. The contractor would run through a series of questions, each with a drop down menu, ultimately guiding them to a predetermined conclusion.

Third: Most importantly, the buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter. They chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees. They determined suspensions. And as is the case with all people and institutions, there was both individual and collective bias. 

At Twitter, Covid-related bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas. Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.

Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter. 

Here is one such tweet, from March 15, 2021, regarding vaccination.

Internal emails show an “intent to action” by a Twitter moderator, saying Kulldorff’s tweet violated the company’s Covid-19 misinformation policy, and claimed he shared “false information.”

But Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. 

Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines. After Twitter took action, Kulldorff’s tweet was slapped with a “misleading” label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet’s ability to be seen and shared by others, a core function of the platform.

In my review of internal files, I found numerous instances of tweets about vaccines and pandemic policies labeled as “misleading” or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views. 

For example, a tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker with more than 18,000 followers, was flagged as “misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, for showing that Covid was not the leading cause of death in children, even though it cited the CDC’s own data.

Read the rest here…