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

A U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) paper released Thursday found that thousands of young children have been taken to the emergency room over the past several years after taking the very common sleep-aid supplement melatonin.

The agency said that melatonin, which can come in gummies that are meant for adults, was implicated in about 7 percent of all emergency room visits for young children and infants “for unsupervised medication ingestions,” adding that many incidents were linked to the ingestion of gummy formulations that were flavored. Those incidents occurred between the years 2019 and 2022.

Melatonin is a hormone produced by the human body to regulate its sleep cycle. Supplements, which are sold in a number of different formulas, are generally taken before falling asleep and are popular among people suffering from insomnia, jet lag, chronic pain, or other problems.

The supplement isn’t regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and does not require child-resistant packaging. However, a number of supplement companies include caps or lids that are difficult for children to open.

The CDC report said that a significant number of melatonin-ingestion cases among young children were due to the children opening bottles that had not been properly closed or were within their reach. Thursday’s report, the agency said, “highlights the importance of educating parents and other caregivers about keeping all medications and supplements (including gummies) out of children’s reach and sight,” including melatonin.

The approximately 11,000 emergency department visits for unsupervised melatonin ingestions by infants and young children during 2019–2022 highlight the importance of educating parents and other caregivers about keeping all medications and supplements (including gummies) out of children’s reach and sight.

The CDC notes that melatonin use among Americans has increased five-fold over the past 25 years or so. That has coincided with a 530 percent increase in poison center calls for melatonin exposures to children between 2012 and 2021, it said, as well as a 420 percent increase in emergency visits for unsupervised melatonin ingestion by young children or infants between 2009 and 2020.

Some health officials advise that children under the age of 3 should avoid taking melatonin unless a doctor says otherwise. Side effects include drowsiness, headaches, agitation, dizziness, and bed wetting.

Other symptoms of too much melatonin include nausea, diarrhea, joint pain, anxiety, and irritability. The supplement can also impact blood pressure.

However, there is no established threshold for a melatonin overdose, officials have said. Most adult melatonin supplements contain a maximum of 10 milligrams of melatonin per serving, and some contain less.

Many people can tolerate even relatively large doses of melatonin without significant harm, officials say. But there is no antidote for an overdose. In cases of a child accidentally ingesting melatonin, doctors often ask a reliable adult to monitor them at home.

Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, with the Seattle Children’s Hospital at the University of Washington, told CNN that parents should speak with a doctor before giving their children the supplement.

“I also tell families, this is not something your child should take forever. Nobody knows what the long-term effects of taking this is on your child’s growth and development,” she told the outlet. “Taking away blue-light-emitting smartphones, tablets, laptops, and television at least two hours before bed will keep melatonin production humming along, as will reading or listening to bedtime stories in a softly lit room, taking a warm bath, or doing light stretches.”

In 2022, researchers found that in 2021, U.S. poison control centers received more than 52,000 calls about children consuming worrisome amounts of the dietary supplement. That’s a six-fold increase from about a decade earlier. Most such calls are about young children who accidentally got into bottles of melatonin, some of which come in the form of gummies for kids, the report said.

Dr. Karima Lelak, an emergency physician at Children’s Hospital of Michigan and the lead author of the study published in 2022 by the CDC, found that in about 83 percent of those calls, the children did not show any symptoms.

However, other children had vomiting, altered breathing, or other symptoms. Over the 10 years studied, more than 4,000 children were hospitalized, five were put on machines to help them breathe, and two children under the age of two died. Most of the hospitalized children were teenagers, and many of those ingestions were thought to be suicide attempts.

Those researchers also suggested that COVID-19 lockdowns and virtual learning forced more children to be at home all day, meaning there were more opportunities for kids to access melatonin. Also, those restrictions may have caused sleep-disrupting stress and anxiety, leading more families to consider melatonin, they suggested.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

How the tables have turned in the past decade.  If you were involved at the inception of the culture war around a decade ago then you probably remember an abrupt and distinct change in popular media from 2015 to 2016.  There was a surge of far-left and feminist propaganda in movies, television, commercials and even video games that was highly aggressive, perhaps even militant.  Some people spoke out at the time and questioned the motives behind the trend, only to be smacked down by angry mobs of activists and corporate journalists with accusations of “conspiracy theory” and “bigotry.”

In other words, their claim was that you were not seeing what you thought you were seeing.  There was no feminist agenda.  There was no gay or trans agenda.  There was no socialist messaging.  It was only in your head.

If there is one rule that encompasses all political endeavors, it is this:  If you have to hide your intentions and lie about your goals when trying to spread your ideology, then something is probably very wrong with your ideology.  This is exactly the problem inherent in the attempt to spread woke doctrine – Activists and provocateurs never ask anyone if they want to hear about woke ideas; they seek to force everyone to see and hear woke ideas, to the point that people cannot escape the messaging.

Even more insulting is the fact that even though most of these activists claim to be fans of the media they target, they are usually discovered to be frauds.  Woke ideologues have little sincere interest in nostalgia, movie making, video games, comic books, etc.  They only care about these properties because they see them as a vehicle to be co-opted, infected and dominated.  Leftists know well that if they control pop culture they can control the thinking of the next generation.

The explosion of this cultism was evident by 2016, which led to a rising counter-movement among independents and conservatives within pop-media communities including video games.  Gamergate was born, driven by the desire to call out the thought police taking over the games industry.

The movement would spark a firestorm among mainstream news platforms who sought to discredit them as monstrous misogynists and racists that were merely upset because they didn’t like “diversity in gaming.”  But there had always been diversity in games, so this accusation didn’t hold much water.  The real reason why leftists were furious over Gamergate was because they knew what it represented – organized push-back.  If this continued, the propaganda machine would eventually be exposed.  

Skip ahead to 2024, long after the frenzy over Gamergate has faded.  The truth has finally and officially been revealed after disclosures of a little-known company called Sweet Baby Inc.

Founded in 2018, Sweet Baby Inc is a media consulting firm based out of Montreal, Canada.  Many of the founding members of the company have direct ties to the same leftist propagandists that were outed by Gamergate years ago.  The group is also undeniably linked to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programming.  The Spread of DEI and the reason why such consulting firms have any market whatsoever is due exclusively to the global ESG loan scheme.

At the height of ESG, companies like Blackrock and Vanguard were throwing billions in low cost loans at any corporations willing to show their fealty to the woke cause.  The agenda is openly admitted now; the point is to use easy money to “force behaviors” (and narratives) onto the public consciousness.

Recent investigations by a host of independent outlets have discovered that Sweet Baby Inc. has been involved in some of the most blatant woke games of the past decade.  Anyone paying attention to trends might have noticed the exponential rise of a shrill and oppressive voice within the games world.  As it turns out, the progressive stranglehold on video games was not an unorganized affair perpetrated by random unrelated activists; it has been highly centralized and deliberate, using the “terror” of the mob as leverage to convince game developers to insert woke messaging into their products.

Beyond the lure of ESG subsidies, the consulting strategy works like this:  Woke “consultants” accuse developers of producing bigoted content and instigate leftist mobs of hundreds or thousands of people to harass them.  Then, the consultants offer their services to the developers that are under attack, telling them that all they need to do is hire the consulting firm and the mob will leave them alone.  In other words, it’s a protection racket.  

Once they are in the door, they sow fear in the minds of marketing teams with images of cancel culture hordes marching out to destroy their company.  The marketing team convinces the game makers to implant incessant woke narratives despite the fact that none of their customers want this.  In the end, the video game market is saturated with leftist-inspired propaganda.  All it takes is a handful of these consulting organizations to change the course of an entire industry.  Companies that used to be concerned with making great products and making their customers happy suddenly become nothing more than bullhorns for the progressive cause.

If you wanna see how much #SweetBabyInc lied in @Kotaku‘s PATHETIC ideological puff piece about how they don’t force diversity in games, see this clip from Sweet Baby Inc CEO herself explaining how they FORCE their opinions into games to “TAKE OVER” them: pic.twitter.com/AH9lIroWs7

— Johnny Massacre (@JohnnyMassacre) March 9, 2024

Sweet Baby Inc. has been using similar strong arm tactics for quite some time, but their most recent attempt to shut down a Steam page dedicated to compiling a list of games the consultants had a hand in was the straw the broke the camel’s back.  Instead of silencing dissent, the group triggered a hurricane that led to their exploits being discussed on every part of the internet.

This is very similar to the efforts by leftists to shut down the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, which was only ever guilty of reposting videos made by woke activists describing their crazed motives in their own words.  Sweet Baby Inc tried to shut down a page which only listed the video games they were involved in.  Why?  One can only guess, but it seems as if they didn’t want consumers to know they even existed.  

Luckily, the Streisand Effect went into effect and now the whole world is aware that these groups exist and what they are involved in.  Most importantly, however, is the vindication of those people (like Gamergate) that fought for years to prove that there was in fact a concerted leftist conspiracy within the video games industry.  They weren’t bigoted or “crazy,” they were right, and now everyone knows it.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“This trial will not yield to the election cycle.” Those words of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan last year made clear that she will not consider that Donald Trump will likely be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee in setting the schedule for his federal trial in Washington, D.C.

Most recently, in the federal prosecution in Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith declared that he will not consider himself bound by the Justice Department’s longstanding policy of not bringing charges or holding trials of candidates close to an election.

With the Supreme Court reviewing the immunity question (and a decision not expected until June), a nightmare scenario is unfolding in which Trump could be tried not just before the general election, but actually through November’s election.

Chutkan has insisted that her refusal to consider Trump’s candidacy is simply denying special treatment to the former president. But there is nothing typical about how she and others have handled the case. The fact that Chutkan was pushing for a March trial date shows just how extraordinary her handling has been.

In the D.C. courts, with thousands of stacked up cases, that would be a rocket docket for a complex case of this kind. There are roughly 770,000 pending cases in roughly 100 district courts around the country. The backlog of pending criminal cases in the federal court system increased by more than a quarter in the last five years. Even when defendants plead guilty, criminal cases average 10 months. If a trial is needed, it runs on average to two years, absent serious complications over classified or privileged material. Smith indicted Trump less than a year ago.

At every juncture, Smith has tried to expedite and spur the case along. This has included an attempt to cut off standard appellate options for Trump.

It seems as if the entire point is to try Trump before the election.

Smith has offered no reason, other than that he wants voters to consider the outcome of the trial.

It is a rare acknowledgement of a desire for a trial to become a factor in an election.

Judge Chutkan has shown the same determination. The judge was criticized for comments she made before any charges were brought that strongly suggested she thought Trump should be criminally charged. Chutkan told one defendant that he showed “blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” In another case, Chutkan told the defendant that it was unfair that he might go to prison but “the architects of that horrific event will likely never be charged.”

When asked to recuse herself, Chutkan denied the clear implication of her own words. She insisted that she has not expressly stated that “’President Trump should be prosecuted’ and imprisoned… And the defense does not cite any instance of the court ever uttering those words or anything similar.”

Of course, neither the court nor the prosecutors seem willing to apply a similarly deferential view of the meaning of Trump’s words within the context of the case. There, the implications are sufficient for that “one person” described earlier by the court.

Chutkan is now reportedly telling parties in other cases that she will be out of the country in August, and that defendants will have to delay any proceedings in light of her plans…unless she can try Trump. She told lawyers that she will stick with her schedule unless “I’m in trial in another matter that has not yet returned to my calendar.”

Given the apparent motivation of the trial court to try Trump before the election, the only other source of restraint would be the Justice Department itself. Smith, however, has insisted that he will show no such restraint, even if he tries Trump through the election.

In his filings in Florida, Smith insisted that the oft-cited Justice Department policy to avoid such proceedings within 60 days of an election would not be applied in Trump’s case. He insisted that, since everyone knows about the allegations, there would be no harm or foul in holding him for trial for the weeks before the election as his opponent, President Biden, is free to traverse the country campaigning.

Smith’s position was applauded by commentators who had previously invoked the rule to oppose charges that might have helped Trump before prior elections. Take Andrew Weissmann, who served as the controversial top aide to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Now an MSNBC legal analyst, Weissmann assured viewers that there was no problem trying Trump just before the election because this is just “an internal rule. It is not a law.”

He then added “Second, the rule does not apply! For anyone who has been at the Justice Department, this is such a red herring.” He insisted this is only meant to avoid some “covert cases” being tried “because you don’t want to influence the election when that person — the candidate — doesn’t have an opportunity to get to trial.”

However, when the issue was the possibility of Special Counsel John Durham charging figures in the Russia investigation before the 2020 election, Weissmann and Professor Ryan Goodman wrote a column not only invoking the rule but encouraging prosecutors to refuse to assist Durham.

I have previously written about the ambiguity of this rule and the selectivity of its applications. However, Weissmann and Goodman were adamant that such prosecutions would be dangerous. Even though no actual election candidate would have been charged, they invoked this Justice Department “norm” and declared, “The Justice Department should not take action that could distort an election and influence the electorate. If someone is charged immediately before an election, for instance, that person has no time to offer a defense to counter the charges. The closer the election, the greater the risk that the department is impermissibly acting based on political considerations, which is always prohibited.”

It is certainly true that these charges have been known for a while, but Trump may not have an ability to present a complete defense before the election. It is also clear that he will have to choose between campaigning for office and defending his liberty.

Moreover, this is the leading candidate for the presidency, and the opponent to the current incumbent. A 2023 poll found that a 47 percent plurality of Americans already believe the charges are politically motivated. That appearance will only worsen as the election approaches, a recognition that should force a modicum of restraint upon both the court and the prosecution. Finally, Smith is referencing the election as the reason to expedite the trial precisely because it may have an influence on voters.

The Trump trials are troubling precisely because they are being handled differently because of who the defendant is.

No one can seriously suggest that Judge Chutkan would be moving other cases or canceling trips in order to shoehorn them into the calendar this year, if it were not for the election and the name of the defendant. Such cases are, after all, notorious for taking years to work out complicated pre-trial matters.

Most citizens already see that reality. State prosecutors in New York and Georgia waited for years to charge Trump, then pushed for expedited schedules in order to try him before the election.

That brings us back to Judge Chutkan’s pledge to “not yield to the election cycle.” Yet the expedited effort of the court seems clearly motivated by the election cycle. She and Smith are depending on the election cycle as they struggle to pull Trump into court at the height of a presidential campaign.

It is a schedule conceived for the “one person” described by Chutkan in the earlier cases. As the calendar continues to shrink, claims of blind justice increasingly look like the blind pursuit of a specific person.

Israel has continued signaling that it is preparing to launch a major new operation against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon following months of tit-for-tat escalation. Some 80,000 Israeli residents whose homes are near the border have remained evacuated since October and November, and are essentially internally displaced. Because of this, pressure has mounted on Israeli leaders to do something that would allow their return, and ensure the security of Israel’s north.

Israeli media, particularly YNet News reported on Sunday that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is preparing “contingency plans” for a wide-scale attack on Lebanon. Israeli Army Northern Command head Major General Ori Gordin in a meeting with settler leaders from northern Israel stated, “We are preparing contingency plans to launch an attack in Lebanon. Our commitment, mine, is to change the security situation so that the residents can be returned home.”

YNet further unveiled plans to initiate the army’s “Operation Steady Anchor” which aims to protect civilians during the expected escalation in fighting. Hezbollah is widely estimated to possess over 150,000 rockets – some of which can likely reach Haifa and Tel Aviv.

The operation involves setting up dozens of mass shelters utilizing fortified abandoned buildings and underground parking garages. This is to protect civilians in the instance of a mass Hezbollah rocket barrage. The shelters will be equipped to allow families to take refuge anywhere from a few hours to up to several days.

In another key sign of Tel Aviv’s war preparations, the IDF has been conducing a logistics supply drill focused on its northern bases and positions, and in preparation for a Lebanon offensive This has included practice runs delivering ammo, equipment, water, and fuel to simulated “maneuvering forces” operating in southern Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Army Chief Herzi Halevi has reportedly ordered Brig. Gen. Chico Tamir, the former deputy commander of the northern corps, to draw up “several possible plans for a ground operation in Lebanon.”

Veteran Middle East war correspondent Elijah Magnier reports Monday from the Lebanese side that “Hezbollah (and allies) is training and preparing for a possible war with Israel above and below ground.”

Attacks by Hezbollah have continued to be daily, also amid Israeli return fire. On Sunday a major Israeli airstrike hit a home in south Lebanon’s Khirbet Selm, killing a family of five, including three Hezbollah members.

Last month, an op-ed in Foreign Policy predicted that a broader Israel-Hezbollah war is inevitable. “It is likely that there is going to be a war between Hezbollah and Israel within the next six to eight months,” wrote Steven Cook, senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

⚡ Hezbollah’s missiles above Kiryat Shmona. pic.twitter.com/fqOEG7oWrP

— War Watch (@WarWatchs) March 11, 2024

Cook said, “Still, it is not hard to imagine a moment at which the Iranians loosen the reins on their primary proxy. As Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah made clear in an early January speech remembering the life and work of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani—the IRGC Quds Force commander who the United States killed in a drone strike in early 2020—the Iranians have put significant time, energy, and resources into the development of so-called axis of resistance.”

A bigger war in Lebanon would very likely also spill over into Syria and Iraq as well, where US occupying forces have already come under frequent drone and rocket attack, though these instances have been less frequently in the last few weeks.

Authored by Russell Clark of the Capital Flows and Asset Markets substack

Being the reserve currency has enormous benefits. And in the entirety of financial history, the US is the first and only fiat reserve currency. Sterling, and any other reserve currencies derived their value from the ability to maintain their value to gold. With the two World Wars, the US came to be seen as the government most able to honour its commitments, and saw huge inflows of gold, but in the 1960s, gold started to flow back to Europe and elsewhere, and in essence, Nixon decided that higher interest rates needed to maintain the link to gold price was not worth the effort, and cut the link to gold price.

Moving from a gold based currency to a fiat currency has had enormous benefits for the US. First of all is that it no longer needs to ever run a current account surplus. That is it never needs to reduce consumption or imports, which is a huge political benefit. The norm since 1980 is for the US to have a current account deficit.

The US also does not need to balance the budget. The budget was balanced in 2000, but this was probably now seen as a tactical error on the part of the Democrats.

What I find most interesting about the transition from gold to US treasury backed financial system is how Asian nations, despite a long history of using gold, accepted this system. China and Japan have some of the largest foreign reserves in the world, but their holdings of gold are limited. Even India holds a relatively small amount of gold as foreign reserves.

Japan is the most interesting, where almost all of its foreign reserves are held as US treasuries. Unfortunately US treasury data on foreign holders only begins in 2000, but I have no reason not to believe the Japanese were big buyers in 1990s as well.

Why do the Japanese only buy treasuries? Well for most of the time since 1980, treasuries have been much better investments than gold. They offer an income stream, they are very liquid, and they have a natural pull to par, which means that there is never a need to book a loss – which will have powerful appeal to bureaucrats. From 1980 to 2000 long dated treasuries consistently outperformed gold, while from 2000 its has been far more of mixed bag.

Typically when people talk about reserve currency status, they talk about the size of the US economy or its military might, and basically imply that this can never end, so US dollar reserve status is forever. I think about the US dollar as a reserve currency I think it is something more akin to Microsoft, or Google. The product is not that good, the management is of debatable quality, but because everyone else uses it, its just too hard to switch. Given the infrastructure, and ease of using the US dollar for almost all financial transactions, why would anyone bother to use a different system? And even as US trade deficits exploded this just left more money for Asian exporters to recycle back into treasuries. The flywheel worked for all parties.

As pointed out in the last post, the US itself has started the process of creating a parallel financial system, by basically trying and failing to cut off Russian energy exports from the US financial system. For years the Russian wanted to price their oil in non-US dollar form, and made little headway, but the US basically did the job for them.

What would be the next step in the US dismantling the US centric financial system? For years I have wondered why the Hong Kong dollar has remained pegged to the US dollar. Why not just repeg to Chinese Yuan? Hong Kong could then sell large chunks of its foreign holdings, and reducing the scope of the US to influence trade in HK.

Of course changing from USD to peg to a CNY peg would be hassle for all the existing contracts and present financial and legal problems, which no doubt would fan more resentment of Beijing in Hong Kong. A far better solution for Beijing would be for the US government to begin sanctioning HK businesses, and changing the legal status of HK, a process that has begun under the Trump administration. All this involves doing is China integrating Hong Kong into its political system, and the US will predictably react. It is hard to see how this process could be reversed.

The problem for the US is that Russia has been cut off from the US financial system, and not imploded. That makes the fear of sanctions more tolerable. The Euro/Ruble exchange rate, which is as a good of as a measure for Russian economic health shows that the sanctions have had an effect, but not as dramatic as hoped. That is there is life after sanctions.

The political calculation for US attitude towards China is now very difficult. The more financial sanctions that it applies to China, the more it weakens the case for the US treasury as a reserve asset, but without applying sanctions, China has a chance to continue to grow to be the largest economy in the world. We can already see a change in behaviour in Asian governments. Vietnam has been a huge beneficiary of the move away from China. It now runs a huge trade surplus with the US. This is larger than Japan.

But we do not see Vietnam accumulating treasuries likes South Korea, Japan or China.

There is no guarantee that all this money will end up in gold. But whenever I see GLD/TLT trade well, I feel that the US is losing ground.

As mentioned previously, the US politically and culturally probably feels compelled to defend its position at the largest economy in the world. Can it do this without losing its special status as the reserve currency of the world? Without a political collapse in China, I doubt it.

By Benjamin PIcton of Rabobank

February non-farm payrolls superficially exceeded market expectations on Friday by printing at 275,000 against a consensus call of 200,000. We say superficially, because the downward revisions to prior months totalled 167,000 for December and January, taking the total change in employed persons well below the implied forecast, and helping the unemployment rate to pop two-ticks to 3.9%. The U6 underemployment rate also rose from 7.2% to 7.3%, while average hourly earnings growth fell to 0.2% m-o-m and average weekly hours worked languished at 34.3, equalling pre-pandemic lows.

Undeterred by the devil in the detail, the algos sprang into action once exchanges opened. Market darling NVIDIA hit a new intraday high of $974 before (presumably) the humans took over and sold the stock down more than 10% to close at $875.28. If our suspicions are correct that it was the AIs buying before the humans started selling (no doubt triggering trailing stops on the way down), the irony is not lost on us.

The 1-day chart for NVIDIA now makes for interesting viewing, because the red candle posted on Friday presents quite a strong bearish engulfing signal. Volume traded on the day was almost double the 15-day simple moving average, and similar price action is observable on the 1-day charts for both Intel and AMD. Regular readers will be aware that we have expressed incredulity in the past about the durability the AI thematic melt-up, so it will be interesting to see whether Friday’s sell off is just a profit-taking blip, or a genuine trend reversal.

AI equities aside, this week ought to be important for markets because the BTFP program expires today. That means that the Fed will no longer be loaning cash to the banking system in exchange for collateral pledged at-par. The KBW Regional Banking index has so far taken this in its stride and is trading 30% above the lows established during the mini banking crisis of this time last year, but the Fed’s liquidity facility was effectively an exercise in can-kicking that makes regional banks a sector of the market worth paying attention to in the weeks ahead. Even here in Sydney, regulators are warning of external risks posed to the banking sector from scheduled refinancing of commercial real estate loans following sharp falls in valuations.

Markets are sending signals in other sectors, too. Gold closed at a new record-high of $2178/oz on Friday after trading above $2200/oz briefly. Gold has been going ballistic since the Friday before last, posting gains even on days where 2-year Treasury yields have risen. Gold bugs are buying as real yields fall from the October highs and inflation breakevens creep higher. This is particularly interesting as gold ETFs have been recording net outflows; suggesting that price gains aren’t being driven by a retail pile-in. Are gold buyers now betting on a stagflationary outcome where the Fed cuts without inflation being anchored at the 2% target? The price action around the US CPI release tomorrow ought to be illuminating.

Leaving the day-to-day movements to one side, we are also seeing further signs of structural change at the macro level. The UK budget last week included a provision for the creation of a British ISA. That is, an Individual Savings Account that provides tax breaks to savers who invest their money in the stock of British companies. This follows moves last year to encourage pension funds to head up the risk curve by allocating 5% of their capital to unlisted investments.

As a Hail Mary option for a government cruising toward an electoral drubbing it’s a curious choice, but it’s worth highlighting as cash-strapped governments increasingly see private savings pools as a funding solution for their spending priorities.

Of course, the UK is not alone in making creeping moves towards financial repression. In contrast to announcements today of increased trade liberalisation, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has in the recent past flagged his interest in tapping private pension savings to fund state spending priorities, including defence, public housing and renewable energy projects. Both the UK and Australia appear intent on finding ways to open up the lungs of their economies, but government wants more say in directing private capital flows for state goals.

So, how far is the blurring of the lines between free markets and state planning likely to go? Given the immense and varied budgetary (and security) pressures that governments are facing, could we see a re-up of WWII-era Victory bonds, where private investors are encouraged to do their patriotic duty by directly financing government at negative real rates?

That would really light a fire under the gold market.

The Biden administration has released a proposed budget that would boost federal spending to $7.3 trillion next fiscal year. To pay for it, they plan to raise taxes on the wealthy and large corporations.

And while there’s virtually no chance of it passing given the current makeup of Congress (WSJ calls it ‘largely symbolic’), it will give Biden a steady supply of talking points to read off teleprompters across the land during his re-election campaign.

According to the White House, the 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, and raise taxes by a net of $4.9 trillion – a boost of roughly 7% in collections without any policy changes, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Other features of the proposed budget include:

• A boost in defense spending to $895 billion, up from $886 billion.

• Congressional approval for roughly $1.6 trillion in discretionary spending – slightly lower than the current year’s budget.

• This will be offset by $1.6 trillion in spending caps which were agreed to last year by House Republicans and the Biden administration, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

• Medicare taxes and drug pricing are also included, with tax increases on people earning more than $400,000 per year (which we all know is total bullshit). The plan will also significantly expand the number of drugs subject to government price negotiation, to 50 per year, up from 20, and it would extend a $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket prescription drugs under Medicare.

• Immigration and international aid: The Department of Homeland Security would receive an additional $8.7 billion under the proposal – much of which would plug a budget hole created by the ‘unexpected’ surge in migrants last year. $2.9 billion of it would fund longer term investments, including hiring more Border Patrol agents and asylum officers.

• Ukraine: Of course, the budget proposal also reiterates Biden’s supplemental request for $60 billion in emergency aid for his favorite country.

Other items of note: the budget calls for shoring up Social Security but does not specify a plan. It also calls for extending Trump-era tax cuts for most households after they expire in 2025, but does not detail how they should be paid for. It also calls on restoring the expanded child tax credit on a temporary basis.

Under his plan, families making less than $200,000 a year would be guaranteed subsidized child care, with the lowest income families paying nothing. The president proposed building or preserving more than two million housing units, and a series of tax credits to ease the high cost of purchasing a home. He calls for spending $12 billion to come up with strategies to reduce the cost of college, while expanding Pell Grants and offering tuition-free community college. And he again outlined a federal paid family and medical leave program. -WSJ

According to White House spox Olivia Dalton, the budget “invests in all of America to make sure everyone has a fair shot, we leave no one behind,” adding that congressional Republicans “have made their values clear in the meantime; they have repeatedly fought to slash critical programs that the American people rely on.”

House Republican leaders, meanwhile, said in a statement that “the price tag of President Biden’s proposed budget is yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility.”

The budget proposal comes less than eight months before Election Day and amid polls that show Trump with a narrow lead over Biden. As he shifts his focus to the general election, the president is expected to increasingly seek to draw a contrast with his presumed opponent, casting Trump as out of touch with voters’ priorities and a danger to democracy. Trump, in turn, has railed against the president, targeting his spending on issues such as clean energy.  -WSJ

According to Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Americans are “going to have a robust tax debate at the end of 2025.”

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Top Republicans from multiple House committees are sounding the alarm on a series of mysterious devices that appear to have been implanted into container cranes used throughout the U.S. port system by China.

The lawmakers say that numerous modems with no known function were uncovered from ship-to-shore (STS) cranes, which are used to unload cargo at the nation’s largest ports.

All of the cranes in question were manufactured by Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC), a subsidiary of the state-owned China Communications Construction Co.

Relatedly, the lawmakers noted that ZPMC’s manufacturing facility is located adjacent to China’s most advanced ship-making facility, where the regime builds its aircraft carriers and houses advanced intelligence capabilities.

In a letter (pdf) addressed to the president and chairman of ZPMC, the lawmakers demand to know the purpose of the cellular modems discovered on crane components and in a U.S. seaport’s server room that houses firewall and networking equipment.

“These components do not contribute to the operation of the STS cranes or maritime infrastructure and are not part of any existing contract between ZPMC and the receiving U.S. maritime port,” the letter said.

“The Committees have serious concerns that this proximity to the [Chinese military’s] main shipyard provides malicious CCP [Chinese Communist Party] entities, including its intelligence agencies and security services, with ample opportunity to modify U.S.-bound maritime equipment, exploit it to malfunction, or otherwise facilitate cyber espionage thereby compromising U.S. maritime critical infrastructure.”

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Vann, who leads the Coast Guard’s Cyber Command, told reporters last month that there were over 200 China-manufactured cranes operating across U.S. ports and regulated facilities.

At that time, Coast Guard cyber protection teams had assessed the cybersecurity or hunted for threats on 92 of those cranes, he said.

The discovery comes amid an ongoing congressional investigation into the operation of cranes manufactured in China and operating at U.S. ports.

Though the investigation is still ongoing, the committees identified serious concerns regarding ZPMC’s relationship with the CCP, particularly given the recent discovery of Chinese malware on vital infrastructure related to the port system.

As part of another cybersecurity investigation, some of the modems in question were also found to have active connections to the operational components of the STS cranes, suggesting they could be remotely controlled by a device no one previously knew was there.

Speaking to reporters last month, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Anne Neuberger said the cranes were designed to be serviceable from a remote location, which leaves them open to such exploitation.

“By design, these cranes may be controlled, serviced, and programmed from remote locations,” Ms. Neuberger said. “These features potentially leave [China]-manufactured cranes vulnerable to exploitation.

As such, the letter suggests that every U.S. seaport with ZPMC cranes could already be, or is at risk of being, compromised by the CCP.

Retired Army Col. John Mills told The Epoch Times that the cranes were effectively an extension of the CCP’s global cybercrime operation, which could be used during an invasion of Taiwan to sow chaos in the United States.

“Those container cranes are not cranes,” Mr. Mills said. “They’re IP endpoints on a worldwide intelligence collection system.”

To that end, he said that the cranes’ operational and safety features could likely be overridden remotely. This would allow the CCP to potentially trick one of the giant cranes into shifting its counterbalance in such a way that would cause it to crash into ships or containers in the nation’s busiest ports.

Complicating the issue all the more, he said, was the fact that the niche nature of the cargo cranes and their programming means it is unlikely a tailored cyber response to secure the systems will be created anytime soon.

To counter the threat in the long term, he added, the United States would need to ensure that it manufactured such vital equipment in its own territory.

“As things play out, they’re [the CCP] going to start initiating the hitting of target sets in cyber. The port cranes are a perfect example,” Mr. Mills said.

“This is the importance of making things here. If you want to reduce the Chinese threat, start making things here.”

“Effective immediately, I have been removed (banned) from the next 3 NXXT tournaments that I already signed up for and been approved to play,” wrote transgender golfer Hailey Davidson last week.

The message came after he/she was removed from the NXXT Women’s Pro Tour, who has now announced that participants must be “a biological female at birth” to participate in its events, according to Fox News and the NY Post. 

Davidson expressed his/her discontent because he/she was already crushing the woman’s field: “They changed their policy mid season, after me signing up already and being 2nd in Player of the Year race.” 

The tour faced massive backlash after Davidson won a tournament earlier this year that attracted significant media attention. 

NXXT GOLF CEO Stuart McKinnon said: “As we navigate through the evolving landscape of sports, it is crucial to uphold the competitive integrity that is the cornerstone of women’s sports.”

“Our revised policy is a reflection of our unwavering commitment to celebrating and protecting the achievements and opportunities of female athletes. Protected categories are a fundamental aspect of sports at all levels, and it is essential for our Tour to uphold these categories for biological females, ensuring a level playing field.”

Recall, we reported back in January that Davidson had stepped in to win a women’s tournament in Florida, bringing with him her “dreams of making it to the LPGA tour”.

30 year old Davidson, born a man, won the NXXT Women’s Classic at the Mission Inn Resort and Club near Orlando earlier this year. 

Davidson shot one over 73 and finished the three round tournament +4, which was enough to take the trophy. Davidson was three shots behind an actual woman the next best golfer before forcing a playoff and winning. 

NXXT said at the time: “The Tour’s mission is to prepare the world’s best young women professional golfers for a successful career on the LPGA Tour” and that the tour is focused on “elevating women’s golf”. 

The Post wrote that Davidson’s recent victory placed her first on the NXXT tour leaderboard with a leading score of 1320, 150 points ahead of her closest competitor. Since November, she has secured two top-2 finishes in the league’s five tournaments, along with seventh and ninth place results.

And it isn’t just bragging rights that Davidson won: he/she was entitled to $1,576.51 in prize money, which adds to her career total which currently stands at $5,801.89 over the course of eight events. 

To qualify for two exemptions to the Epson Tour, Davidson, transitioning from male to female, needed LPGA approval. Discussions began in 2016, but eligibility was granted in 2021 after undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy for over five years and completing gender reassignment surgery, as indicated in an October 2022 social media post.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Mandating COVID-19 vaccination was a mistake due to ethical and other concerns, a top government doctor warned Dr. Anthony Fauci after Dr. Fauci promoted mass vaccination.

“Coercing or forcing people to take a vaccine can have negative consequences from a biological, sociological, psychological, economical, and ethical standpoint and is not worth the cost even if the vaccine is 100% safe,” Dr. Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases clinical studies unit at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Dr. Fauci in an email.

“A more prudent approach that considers these issues would be to focus our efforts on those at high risk of severe disease and death, such as the elderly and obese, and do not push vaccination on the young and healthy any further.”

Employing that strategy would help prevent loss of public trust and political capital, Dr. Memoli said.

The email was sent on July 30, 2021, after Dr. Fauci, director of the NIAID, claimed that communities would be safer if more people received one of the COVID-19 vaccines and that mass vaccination would lead to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re on a really good track now to really crush this outbreak, and the more people we get vaccinated, the more assuredness that we’re going to have that we’re going to be able to do that,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN the month prior.

Dr. Memoli, who has studied influenza vaccination for years, disagreed, telling Dr. Fauci that research in the field has indicated yearly shots sometimes drive the evolution of influenza.

Vaccinating people who have not been infected with COVID-19, he said, could potentially impact the evolution of the virus that causes COVID-19 in unexpected ways.

“At best what we are doing with mandated mass vaccination does nothing and the variants emerge evading immunity anyway as they would have without the vaccine,” Dr. Memoli wrote. “At worst it drives evolution of the virus in a way that is different from nature and possibly detrimental, prolonging the pandemic or causing more morbidity and mortality than it should.”

The vaccination strategy was flawed because it relied on a single antigen, introducing immunity that only lasted for a certain period of time, Dr. Memoli said. When the immunity weakened, the virus was given an opportunity to evolve.

Some other experts, including virologist Geert Vanden Bossche, have offered similar views. Others in the scientific community, such as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists, say vaccination prevents virus evolution, though the agency has acknowledged it doesn’t have records supporting its position.

Other Messages

Dr. Memoli sent the email to Dr. Fauci and two other top NIAID officials, Drs. Hugh Auchincloss and Clifford Lane. The message was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, though the publication did not publish the message. The Epoch Times obtained the email and 199 other pages of Dr. Memoli’s emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. There were no indications that Dr. Fauci ever responded to Dr. Memoli.

Later in 2021, the NIAID’s parent agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and all other federal government agencies began requiring COVID-19 vaccination, under direction from President Joe Biden.

In other messages, Dr. Memoli said the mandates were unethical and that he was hopeful legal cases brought against the mandates would ultimately let people “make their own healthcare decisions.”

“I am certainly doing everything in my power to influence that,” he wrote on Nov. 2, 2021, to an unknown recipient. Dr. Memoli also disclosed that both he and his wife had applied for exemptions from the mandates imposed by the NIH and his wife’s employer. While her request had been granted, his had not as of yet, Dr. Memoli said. It’s not clear if it ever was.

According to Dr. Memoli, officials had not gone over the bioethics of the mandates. He wrote to the NIH’s Department of Bioethics, pointing out that the protection from the vaccines waned over time, that the shots can cause serious health issues such as myocarditis, or heart inflammation, and that vaccinated people were just as likely to spread COVID-19 as unvaccinated people.

He cited multiple studies in his emails, including one that found a resurgence of COVID-19 cases in a California health care system despite a high rate of vaccination and another that showed transmission rates were similar among the vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Dr. Memoli said he was “particularly interested in the bioethics of a mandate when the vaccine doesn’t have the ability to stop spread of the disease, which is the purpose of the mandate.”

The message led to Dr. Memoli speaking during an NIH event in December 2021, several weeks after he went public with his concerns about mandating vaccines.

“Vaccine mandates should be rare and considered only with a strong justification,” Dr. Memoli said in the debate. He suggested that the justification was not there for COVID-19 vaccines, given their fleeting effectiveness.

Julie Ledgerwood, another NIAID official who also spoke at the event, said that the vaccines were highly effective and that the side effects that had been detected were not significant. She did acknowledge that vaccinated people needed boosters after a period of time.

The NIH, and many other government agencies, removed their mandates in 2023 with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

A request for comment from Dr. Fauci was not returned. Dr. Memoli told The Epoch Times in an email he was “happy to answer any questions you have” but that he needed clearance from the NIAID’s media office. That office then refused to give clearance.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, said that Dr. Memoli showed bravery when he warned Dr. Fauci against mandates.

“Those mandates have done more to demolish public trust in public health than any single action by public health officials in my professional career, including diminishing public trust in all vaccines.” Dr. Bhattacharya, a frequent critic of the U.S. response to COVID-19, told The Epoch Times via email. “It was risky for Dr. Memoli to speak publicly since he works at the NIH, and the culture of the NIH punishes those who cross powerful scientific bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci or his former boss, Dr. Francis Collins.”