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Major Victory For Russian Army As Ukraine Forces Flee Eastern City

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Major Victory For Russian Army As Ukraine Forces Flee Eastern City

Following a year that saw little change in control of territory, the Russian army has secured a major victory in its war in Ukraine as Ukrainian forces have retreated from the eastern city of Avdiivka. 

Shortly after midnight Saturday in Ukraine, the country’s newly-installed top commander, General Oleksandr Syrsky, announced that he had ordered troops to evacuate the city. Surrounded in three directions by the Russian army, Ukrainian soldiers in the city found themselves in a rapidly-tightening noose. 

“Based on the operational situation around Avdiivka, in order to avoid encirclement and preserve the lives and health of servicemen, I decided to withdraw our units from the city and move to defense on more favorable lines,” said Syrsky in a Facebook post. 

While its authenticity can’t be confirmed, video circulating on social media purportedly shows Ukrainian armored vehicles executing a fiery but mostly orderly retreat: 

The capture of the city is the most significant triumph for Russia since it took Bakhmut last May. Situated nine miles northwest of the Russian-held city of Donetsk, Avdiivka was was briefly controlled by pro-Russia separatists in 2014 before Ukraine retook the city, which had a pre-war population of 32,000.  

Russia’s victory is a new step toward a principal objective announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin when he ordered the “special military operation” — taking control of the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. Together, the two territories comprise the heavily industrialized, coal-rich Donbas region, which has a majority Russian-speaking population. Russia has since expanded its territorial goals, and has taken huge swaths of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts, thus forming a land bridge to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. 

Red indicates Russian-controlled territory as of Feb. 16

Ukraine deployed one of its two specialized assault brigades — the 3rd Assault Brigade — to help cover the retreat. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, who leads Ukrainian forces operating in southeastern Ukraine, described the dismal scenario faced by his troops in Avdiivka, which he characterized as the “hottest” zone along the entire 600-mile-long battlefront:

“In a difficult battlefield situation, when only ruins and a pile of broken bricks remain from the fortification, our priority is to save the soldiers’ lives…The enemy launches massive bomb attacks day and night, and does not stop attacking simultaneously from several directions.”  He described Russia as “practically wiping the city from the face of the earth.” 

The fall of Avdiivka came a day after President Biden tried using the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny to pressure Congress into throwing billions more dollars into the war in Ukraine. “History is watching the House of Representatives,” said Biden. “The failure to support Ukraine at this moment will never be forgotten…The clock is ticking, and this has to happen, we have to help now.”

Then again, maybe it’s time to stop promoting the fiction that Ukraine has any hope of ejecting Russia from the approximately 20% of the country it has captured — and time to start earnestly pursuing a settlement that restores peace and ends a proxy war that has cost countless lives while only benefitting the military-industrial complex.  

Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/17/2024 – 11:05

Magnificent 7’s Blistering Risk-Adjusted Return Is A Warning

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Magnificent 7’s Blistering Risk-Adjusted Return Is A Warning

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The fabled Magnificent 7’s return adjusted for volatility is higher than other main assets, and is closing in on levels that have previously been associated with pullbacks.

The combination of high returns and low volatility is catnip for investors.

Making money is good, but if you can do so in a monotonically increasing way, then even better.

The Magnificent 7 today is blowing the competition out of the water not just in straight returns, but in risk-adjusted terms too.

Its vol-adjusted return is higher than the Nasdaq, the S&P, the Nikkei, US 60/40 and Bitcoin (whose adjusted return is so high not so much due to low volatility, but due to a stratospheric 130% return over the last year).

High risk-adjusted returns can be self-fulfilling for a time. Attractive metrics pull more money in, boosting returns, and doing so in a steady way, juicing the adjusted return further.

But when returns become stretched, they are typically associated with pullbacks.

Previous extreme risk-adjusted returns for the Magnificent 7 have occurred at price reversals.

Interestingly, today the risk-adjusted return is high, but not at historical extremes.

This suggests that, from this perspective, a notable pullback might not be imminent, yet one could be in the offing if the adjusted return keeps rising.

Risk-adjusted returns are often nothing more than a deep tide concealing the dignity of swimmers who have been remiss in donning their trunks.

They are boosted by falling volatility, but repressed vol typically explodes higher at some point. High risk-adjusted returns thus suddenly become very low ones.

They are thus a warning sign rather than a green light.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/17/2024 – 10:30

The ‘Liberal Gap’ Opening Up Between American Men & Women

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The ‘Liberal Gap’ Opening Up Between American Men & Women

According to conventional wisdom, how conservative or liberal someone is would largely be determined by their age.

However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, while this used to be the case, a major shift has taken place in the United States and elsewhere.

As of 2023, gender is a better indicator of U.S. political leanings – as seen in data collected by Gallup.

As of last year, 18 to 29-year-old men as well as women over the age of 65 in the U.S. were equally likely to describe themselves as liberal or very liberal.

A quarter in each group did so.

This is a far cry from the gap of around 10 percentage points that existed between the two groups in the late 1990s – when Gallup’s data begins – as well as in the early 2010s.

Back then, both young men and women were the leading liberals of the country, while older generations were less likely to label themselves as politically liberal.

Infographic: The ‘Liberal Gap’ Opening up Between U.S. Men And Women | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

The trend of liberalism took off among women, especially young and middle-aged women, in 2013, when Femen activists and HBO drama Girls were the feminist rage of the day.

The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016 and accompanying women’s marches as well as the #MeToo movement in 2017 seem to have fueled liberalism in these age groups initially.

However, liberal sentiment among females actually peaked in the 30-49 demographic in 2018.

It continued its rise in younger women until 2020 and 2021, but has slumped since then even when the Supreme Court overturned abortion precedent Roe v. Wade in 2022. Despite all this, liberalism in women is near the highest point it has ever been.

The story is much different for men, where the biggest increase in liberal sentiment in any age group was just 5 percentage points between 1999 and 2023. While older men became slightly more liberal, liberalism among young U.S. men between 18 and 29 years old gained by just 1 percentage point in a quarter century.

Author Susan Faludi has labeled this a backlash against feminism, which according to her research is a phenomenon that occurred before at times when women have made headway. Other feminist organizers also speak of polarization and a hardening of positions around feminism and the advancement of women.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/17/2024 – 09:55

The US Housing Market: Rent-Serfs & Artificial Scarcity

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The US Housing Market: Rent-Serfs & Artificial Scarcity

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Unleash the powers of unlimited credit and excess capital on a limited, essential resource such as shelter and this is what we end up with: artificial scarcity, rent-serfs and half-vacant neighborhoods owned by absentee landlords.

Ideologies sound wonderful in the abstract, but run aground in the granular real world. The dominate ideology in the world today isn’t a political ideology, it’s the ideology of the market: in this ideology, the market is presented as the ideal problem-solving mechanism, as the interplay of supply and demand and the free flow of capital and labor will automatically fill unmet demand with new supply and provide competition that increases quality and reduces costs.

Let’s consider how the market functions in the real-world U.S. housing market. Take a mixed-use neighborhood of single-family homes with a scattering of low-rise rental buildings. It’s desirable but still affordable to buyers and renters alike.

Enter the bubble economy, the global model for the past 30 years in which unlimited credit is dirt-cheap to corporations and financiers as central banks suppress interest rates to “bring demand forward” by making it cheaper to borrow money to buy assets and products.

This pumps up asset prices as low-cost capital sloshes around the world looking for low-risk cash flows to buy and places to park excess capital that will appreciate as global capital competes for the lowest-risk, most desirable assets.

Real estate in desirable, low-risk locales is an ideal place to park this excess capital. Global capital has no need to rent the flats and homes being snapped up for appreciation; indeed, renting the flats and homes is viewed as troublesome and not worth the hassle.

So global absentee owners start buying properties in the desirable neighborhood. These buyers have zero interest in the livability of the neighborhood or the residents; it’s strictly an investment based on the Prime Directive: maximize the return on capital by any means available.

To capital, properties in the neighborhood are commodities, interchangeable with millions of other properties around the world: we own flats in Zurich, Paris, Bangkok, Singapore, Barcelona and Miami.

Next, corporations discover rents in desirable neighborhoods generate profitable cash flow, so corporations start buying single-family homes and converting them from owner-occupied to rentals. These corporations act as a cartel, operating much like a monopoly as they all have the same access to unlimited credit and the same goal of maximizing return on capital.

Then the short-term rental market generates strong demand by investors large and small for vacation / AirBnB rentals, which are initially highly profitable: those with surplus equity / credit / capital hear of stupendous profits being raked in by absentee owners of short-term rentals, and they join the bidding war of global capital and corporations for homes and rental properties.

Now half the housing stock of the neighborhood is owned by absentee owners and corporations, all guided by a single raison-d’etre: maximize the return on capital by any means available. Now that 25% of the housing stock has been removed from owner-occupancy and long-term renter / residents to serve the short-term rental market, there’s a scarcity of homes to buy or rent.

Another 15% is empty by design, as the owners are overseas investors solely interested in owning real estate in the U.S. as a low-risk place to park some of their excess capital.

So 40% of the neighborhood’s housing stock has been removed from the market for residents, the equivalent of 40% of the housing burning to the ground.

This artificial scarcity enables the corporate owners to jack up rents to nose-bleed heights, and the few non-corporate owners of rentals quickly follow suit. Now the “market rents” are double what they were prior to the arrival of non-resident “market forces.”

As home prices soar, residents who work for a living cannot compete with the unlimited credit lines of corporations and overseas wealth, and so those seeking to own a home must look elsewhere farther afield, or give up the dream of owning a home and resign themselves to life as a rent-serf, barely able to pay the sky-high rents charged by corporations and absentee landlords.

Meanwhile, the conviviality and livability of the neighborhood has been destroyed. The short-term rentals are plagues, as non-resident visitors think nothing of hosting loud parties, ruining the lives of working neighbors. The neighborhood is now dominated by transients, empty dwellings and rentals crammed with people who can’t afford to rent their own flat.

With rents and home prices now unaffordable, the city is pressured to allow the construction of highrise condos by corporate developers. The handful of subsidized below-market rate condos are quickly snapped up, and the market-rate units are purchased by investors, to be left empty (a place to park excess wealth) or as short-term rentals.

The construction of the condo did nothing to alleviate the artificial housing scarcity as only the few subsidized units are affordable to wage-earning residents.

The destruction of the neighborhood is all perfectly logical within the confines of the market: capital was allocated to maximize profits by any available means, and so the market worked perfectly.

The problem with the market is the market doesn’t care about livability or the quality of life or the neighborhood as a social structure, for these are non-market factors. The market views places and people as commodities, interchangeable on a global scale: we own flats in Zurich, Paris, Bangkok, Singapore, Barcelona and Miami. They’re all commodities to be bought and sold to maximize the return on capital, nothing more and nothing less.

What’s missing in this distorted reduction of life to commodities is housing is fundamentally shelter, and an essential human need. Housing isn’t merely an asset that generates cash flow or an asset that serves as a place to park excess wealth. It is first and foremost shelter. But in the market, “shelter” has no meaning except as a source of demand that is no different from the demand generated by capital for cash flows, profits and low-risk places to park excess capital for appreciation.

This is how the U.S. housing market has been transformed by the tyranny of the market: unleash the powers of unlimited credit and excess capital on a limited, essential resource such as shelter and this is what we end up with: artificial scarcity, rent-serfs and half-vacant neighborhoods owned by absentee landlords solely interested in maximizing the return on their capital.

Here we see housing per capita in the U.S. has reached a new high–yet there’s a scarcity of housing. If this is mystifying, please consider the drivers of artificial scarcity.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/17/2024 – 09:20

Texas To Build Military “Base Camp” On Mexico Border To House 1,800 Soldiers

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Texas To Build Military “Base Camp” On Mexico Border To House 1,800 Soldiers

In the latest signal of his resolve to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Friday announced that the Lone Star State will build a military base along the Rio Grand at the border city of Eagle Pass. 

Spanning 80-acres, “Forward Operating Base Eagle” will house upwards of 1,800 Texas National Guard soldiers supporting Operation Lone Star, and will be expandable to house 2,300. Texas Maj. Gen. Thomas Suelzer said the camp will have 300 beds by mid-April, and will add another 300 beds every month after that. 

Texas National Guard soldiers stand in the backdrop of Friday’s press conference announcing the construction of Forward Operating Base Eagle (KXAN News)

“Before this effort here, they had been living in conditions that were atypical for military operations,” Abbott said at a press conference in Eagle Pass. “Because of the magnitude of what we’re doing, because of the need to sustain and actually expand our efforts of what we’re doing, it’s essential that we build this base camp for the soldiers.” As it is, soldiers are housed all over the area, varyingly living in hotels, tents and even some private houses. Some bear long commutes. 

“Illegal crossings are down and, coincidentally, razor-wire barrier is up,” said Abbott. “We will continue to muster the efforts are needed to make sure that Texas does the job that the United States Congress has mandated. The United States Congress has mandated for barriers to be built on the border. Biden is not building those barriers.”

Eagle Pass has been in the national spotlight in recent months, a flashpoint in the ongoing battle between Texas and the federal government over border security, including state authority to enforce immigration laws. Earlier this year, Texas seized control of a 47-acre park in the city, a park that has been a major avenue of illegal immigration. The Texans also began barring US Border Patrol agents and watercraft from the property, which they’ve used as a staging area for processing migrants.

The new base, located about 6 miles south of the park, will include a 700-seat dining facility, workout equipment, a recreation center and laundries, vehicle maintenance bays, weapons storage rooms and a helipad. Soldiers will have individual rooms.  

In January, the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could proceed with removing razor wire installed by Texas at the Eagle Pass border. However, a defiant Gov. Abbott not only slammed the order and barred federal agents from accessing the razor wire, he also added even more.

On Friday, officials said they will add more barriers extending to the north and south of Shelby Park, the recreational site seized by the state in January, add three fan boats to the river-patrol capacity, and expand drone and radar capabilities. Some 3,000 Texas troops are deployed along the 1,200-mile-long Mexican frontier.

In December, Texas enacted a law allowing state law enforcement to arrest immigrants who’ve entered Texas without authorization. Biden’s Justice Department quickly sued, arguing that the Texas law encroaches on federal border-management authority. 

Gallup recently found that, among Americans who disapprove of President Biden’s job performance, immigration is their top reason for giving him a failing mark. In the January poll, only 41% approved of Biden — the worst-ever showing for an incumbent at that time in his term.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/17/2024 – 08:45

Conspiracy Theory Debunker Finds Real Conspiracies

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Conspiracy Theory Debunker Finds Real Conspiracies

Authored by Doran Howitt via The Brownstone Institute,

The 2023 book Misbelief by Dan Ariely belongs to a genre I would label “debunking Covid conspiracy theories.” The book is meant to explore the thought process of people who subscribe to conspiracy theories, especially about Covid and the Covid vaccines. 

Thus I was surprised to encounter in the book two stories in which the author uncovered real conspiracies to hide information about Covid from the public. 

Ariely, a professor of psychology at Duke University, played a bit part in promoting Covid lockdowns around the world. By his own description, he worked 

…on projects related to Covid-19 with the Israeli government and a bit with the British, Dutch, and Brazilian governments as well…I was mostly working to try to get the police to use rewards to incentivize good mask-wearing behavior and observance of social distancing instead of using fines… (p. 4) 

The first genuine conspiracy he describes involved the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) manipulating data in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).

The second involved a newspaper editor-in-chief refusing to report about vaccine side effects observed by a hospital. The author reports these situations matter-of-factly, and even gives the conspirators the benefit of the doubt, saying maybe they did the right thing! 

Let’s look at the VAERS conspiracy (recounted on pp. 274-276). Ariely says he got this information directly from a person who works “in the information technology department of the FDA.” The agency, according to the story, determined that: 

…foreign powers, mostly Russian and Iranian, had found a way to spread disinformation using VAERS. So when the FDA identified cases that had clearly come from such sources, it removed them from the system…

Not only did it delete this data, but it did so silently. Ariely only found out by accident: Parents of vaccine-injured children maintained their own copy of the VAERS data, downloaded from the FDA site. They noticed that cases appearing in their downloaded data later disappeared from the government copy of the database, and they told Ariely about this. 

Supposedly the FDA tried to keep these actions secret because it “did not want to announce to the foreign powers that it was onto them,” the FDA employee told him. But to anyone reasonably well-versed in information technology, keeping such acts secret is an obvious mistake. The bad guys will figure out what is going on; the folks we are trying to protect are left in the dark about possible mischief affecting data they rely on. And that’s the most charitable assessment of their actions. It could be worse: the FDA might have removed valid information inadvertently (putting aside possible nefarious intentions at this point). How might that come about? 

Since we don’t have details as to how the FDA found this bad data, we need to speculate. Here is the easiest scenario to imagine. A straightforward way to detect computer sessions originating in Russia or Iran is by IP (internet protocol) address. Did the FDA personnel identify the supposedly bogus entries by this method? 

But there’s a flaw in that approach. Many computer users obfuscate their IP address for privacy reasons. Some popular browsers such as Tor and Brave do that automatically: each browser page gets detoured through servers in different locations. Those servers are located worldwide, including in Russia. Thus if a US-based individual using the Tor browser added an entry to VAERS, and the session was routed through Russia, the FDA might well have identified this incorrectly as misinformation. 

Compare how the world of open-source software deals with malware. These software publishers routinely make information about vulnerabilities public, so that user organizations can both protect themselves and evaluate what damage might have been done. A publisher may wait a few days or weeks while they fix a bug and get it distributed, but then they disseminate the details. 

A variety of US laws and regulations even require corporations to promptly reveal data breaches that happen to them. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission mandates that public companies report “cybersecurity incidents” within four days of determining that the incident has a “material” effect on a company’s business. 

VAERS is supposed to be a public resource. If FDA has a policy to remove entries, it should be transparent about its criteria, and make the data available for audit. Or it could just as easily have flagged the entries as “suspicious origin” and left them in the database. Then others could review their judgment and either confirm or dispute the classifications. 

Let’s look at the second conspiracy Ariely recounts (pp. 277-280): 

I was speaking with a doctor from a large health care organization…I couldn’t resist asking her what she thought about all the online chatter about unreported vaccine side effects. To my surprise, she agreed there was a problem. She said that she had observed a lot of side effects in her clinic that had not been reported and had been collecting such data from her patients…

Ariely at that point decided this was newsworthy. He met with the editor-in-chief of “a large newspaper,” told the editor about the situation, and suggested the editor get the doctor’s data and report about it. The reaction: 

The editor told me he suspected that I was correct about the underreported side effects.

However, he had no intention of publishing anything about them…because he suspected that the misbelievers would use the published information in an unethical way and distort it

I was disappointed that he did not publish the story, but I could see his point.

Ariely spends a few sentences philosophizing about what is the true responsibility of a newspaper – is it just to publish true information, or is it “to do this cost-benefit analysis for the society…?” But apparently he let the matter lie, acquiescing in real censorship of real information. 

The debunker has debunked his own debunking project. 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/17/2024 – 08:10

Russia Fired Over 24 North Korean Missiles at Ukraine In Recent Weeks: Kiev

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Russia Fired Over 24 North Korean Missiles at Ukraine In Recent Weeks: Kiev

Ukraine says Russia has fired at least 24 North Korean ballistic missiles at its territory in recent weeks, killing at least 14 civilians.

The Friday announcement was given by Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, who said this figure is based on Ukrainian intelligence data since Dec.30. Kiev is trying to spotlight the deepening relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang, also in hopes of more Western action like sanctions against both.

Via Reuters

But Ukraine is also spotlighting what it points to as the largely inaccurate nature of the North Korean missiles. “The accuracy of the missiles is questionable,” Kostin said.

He described that merely two of the missiles were “relatively” accurate, citing attacks on an oil refinery and an airfield. They appear to be ballistic missiles and have been observed making very large impacts (see below video).

“In total, between December 30, 2023 and February 7, 2024, the enemy launched at least 12 attacks on seven regions of Ukraine with this type of (North Korean) missile,” the prosecutor said.

Washington has over the course of the Ukraine conflict at various points accused North Korea of supplying the Russian military with additional artillery ammo. The two countries actually share a small border and large transfers are able to be made by train.

Late last month a senior Biden admin official said, “We are deeply concerned about the recent testing of weapons. We are deeply concerned about the growing relationship between Russia and the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] and what that might mean for Mr. Kim’s intentions.”

And this week CNN revealed the following:

The Biden administration is concerned enough that national security adviser Jake Sullivan raised the issue with the Chinese foreign minister during a January meeting, a senior White House official told reporters late last month.

If North Korea is able to use a tighter relationship with Russia to loosen China’s influence, officials fear, that could remove what some believe has been an important handbrake on Pyongyang’s nuclear testing program.

“I think [Kim] is constantly looking for some kind of an edge,” a senior defense official said.

While it has long been reported that hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds are being supplied from North Korea to Russia, potential Russian military reliance on North Korean ballistic missiles would be a new unexpected development.

Close US ally South Korea has recently asserted that Ukraine is a big “test site” for North Korean missiles and weaponry.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has predicted that the two countries are continuing to negotiate over the “significant quantities and multiple types” of weapons to use in Ukraine.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/17/2024 – 07:35

RFK Jr: The Wuhan Cover-Up & The Rise Of The Biowarfare-Industrial Complex

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RFK Jr: The Wuhan Cover-Up & The Rise Of The Biowarfare-Industrial Complex

Authored by Debbie Lerman via The Brownstone Institute,

The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race (Skyhorse Publishing, December 3, 2023) is a crucial book for understanding how the Covid catastrophe happened. 

I would even go so far as to argue that RFK, Jr.’s new book is the most important Covid chronicle to date, although it ends at the beginning of 2020, before most of us were even aware that a “novel coronavirus” was circulating among us. 

The book explains the CAUSES of the global disaster, which all happened before March 2020. Everything after that are the downstream EFFECTS of what The Wuhan Cover-Up exposes.

Here’s how RFK, Jr. summarizes those effects:

Everyone has now seen that pandemics are another way for the military, intelligence, and public health services to expand their budgets and their power. In 2020, public health, defense, and intelligence agencies weaponized a [Covid-19] pandemic, resulting in unprecedented profits to Big Pharma and the dramatic expansion of the security/surveillance state, including a systemic abandonment of constitutional rights—effectively a coup d’état against liberal democracy globally.

(Kindle edition, p. 385)

Putting Covid in the Biowarfare Context

Interestingly, in the publicity blurb on the book and in interviews about it, RFK, Jr. focuses on “the etiology of the gain-of-function research” and everything that led up to a virus being engineered in a US-funded lab in Wuhan by a group of Chinese and Western scientists.

At the core of this story is RFK, Jr.’s desire to warn readers about the dangers of gain-of-function research, which he shows in the book to be irrefutably a biowarfare – not a public health – endeavor.

But in the process of constructing the argument and supplying the proof for his dire warning, and for his assertion that this type of research should be stopped immediately and forever, RFK, Jr. provides what I find to be an even more compelling story.

The story in the Wuhan Cover-Up that interests me is the rise of the biowarfare-industrial-complex – the global behemoth comprising military/intelligence alliances, Big Pharma, Big Tech, academic and medical institutions, and NGOs – that both created the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 and ran the global response to it.

In this article, I will highlight key parts of The Wuhan Cover-Up that pertain to this storyline – which I believe are downplayed in its publicity materials and are one of the main reasons it has been practically banned from polite society: The book has been so heavily censored that I cannot find a single actual review on Google. Newsweek reported that independent bookstores do not want to carry it. 

A lot of the censorship has to do with mainstream animosity toward RFK, Jr’s presidential campaign. But the explosive content of the book, as reviewed in this article, is also likely a factor.

Top-Level Summary of the Rise of the Biowarfare Industrial Complex, as Told by RFK, Jr.

  • The biowarfare industry started to grow after WWII, when Western intelligence agencies imported Japanese and German scientists to help develop weapons against Communist enemies. This was, in fact, the first task of the newly formed CIA.

  • After 9/11, funding for bioweapons research exploded, and so did the power and reach of the military and intelligence agencies in charge of such research. The research, presented to the public as “pandemic preparedness and response (PPR),” encompassed mostly attempts to engineer deadly pathogens and simultaneously to create countermeasures to them, predominantly vaccines. 

  • So much money was pouring into PPR/bioweapons research that the public health agencies and academic institutions involved in government research all became dependent on it – or, perhaps more accurately, addicted to the money and power this type of research bestowed. Multinational public-private partnerships and “non-governmental organizations” (e.g., The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Wellcome Trust) were created to fund and promote the need for such research.

  • In the fall of 2019 an engineered pathogen from one of the bioweapons labs in China found its way into the population. All the military, intelligence, and public health officials from China, the US, UK, and other countries, with their pharma and academic partners, conspired to cover up the lab leak, while simultaneously preparing to unleash their countermeasures on the world.

How the Nature of Biowarfare Research Has Not Changed

As RFK, Jr. tells it, the history of today’s biowarfare industry starts after WWII, when German and Japanese scientists were secretly repatriated to assist the intelligence community and military in developing chemical and biological weapons programs. 

It is no coincidence, he argues, that many sinister features of those earlier programs carried forward to the present. These features include:

  • tight alliances with the pharmaceutical industry and the media; 

  • the complicity of academia and medical schools; 

  • the co-opting of journals; 

  • intense secrecy; 

  • pervasive experimentation on human subjects; 

  • liberal use of the word “volunteers;”

  • open-air testing on large unwilling populations; 

  • ethical elasticity; 

  • the normalization of lies; 

  • the use of microbiology to alter and weaponize bugs; 

  • the use of vaccine development as a mask for bioweapons research; 

  • the corruption of the entire medical establishment 

(p. 48)

Even just this list is enough to explain what happened with Covid: Take all these ingredients, add billions of dollars and multinational public-private partnerships involving top research institutions and thousands of scientists, and how could you not get a global disaster? 

Deep CIA-Biowarfare Ties

The Wuhan Cover-Up spends a lot of time documenting the correspondence between the rise of the CIA and the emergence of the modern biowarfare program. 

 RFK, Jr. writes:

…it’s worth reviewing the agency’s seventy-five-year preoccupation with bioweapons, pandemics, and vaccines. Bioweapons development was the CIA’s first love, and has remained its relentless passion. The CIA’s natal obsession with bioweapons pitted the agency against all the idealistic underpinnings of both American democracy and the healing arts of medicine. 

(p. 46)

An important related point emphasized in the book is that bioweapons research is not an obscure, niche industry. Rather, according to The Wuhan Cover-Up, it is a top national defense concern, driving the national security agenda:

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military and intelligence apparatus erected the biosecurity agenda as the new spear tip of American foreign policy. These agencies deftly replaced the fear of the Soviet monolith and creeping communism with a fear of infectious disease, which they have successfully stoked to justify vast expansions in power…

(p. 44)

Shockingly Broad Participation by Academics and Scientists

Because the biosecurity agenda – which focuses on biochemical and medical research – is so central to foreign policy and national security, it controls large swaths of research funding. Thus, as RFK, Jr. documents, it has come to encompass many top academic institutions and thousands of doctors and scientists:

Among the most alarming side effects of the federal preoccupation with bioweapons has been the systematic diversion of vast resources and armies of academic and government scientists away from public health and healing. 

(p. 46)

Today, some thirteen thousand death scientists labor on bioweapons technology on behalf of US military, intelligence, and public health agencies in some four hundred government and university bioweapons labs. 

(p. 83)

Moral Bankruptcy

When faced with Covid “conspiracy theories” – such as those put forth in The Wuhan Cover-Up – people often argue that so many doctors and scientists could not possibly have knowingly agreed to civilization-killing ideas like lockdowns and injections of unsafe medical products into billions of people. They must have believed they were actually saving humanity, right?

Wrong, according to RFK, Jr.:

History has shown again and again the bioweapons agenda’s awesome power to transform compassionate, brilliant, idealistic doctors into monsters. 

(p. 47)

They have, as a class, demonstrated thoroughly warped judgment and a reliable penchant for dishonesty and terrible ideas. 

(p. 87)

Bioweapons Research = Vaccine Research

Another crucial idea bearing on our understanding of the Covid response is that vaccine research is a primary concern for the biowarfare-industrial complex, although it is publicly presented as a public health endeavor.

The book quotes Professor Frances Boyle, author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, with this explanation:

You can’t use a bioweapon against your enemy without having in your possession an antidote with which to shield your own team from blowback. For this reason, bioweapons and vaccines are always developed in tandem with each other.

(p. 121)

Moreover, because vaccine research funding goes to both biodefense and public health agencies, they have become inextricably linked:

The military and public health agencies work in close coordination to develop vaccines for military applications, sharing information and working side by side in labs. Vaccine research often serves as a cover or rationale for illegal bioweapons development.

(p. 129)

From an Obsession of US National Security to a Tool of Globalism

As RFK, Jr. writes, after 9/11, Islamic terrorism became the focus of US national defense. After the anthrax attacks, the focus of antiterrorist activities coalesced around the need to predict, prevent, and create countermeasures to biological terrorism. 

This more reliable and terrifying enemy would soon replace the war against Islamic terror—justifying a “forever war” against germs. “Biosecurity,” a.k.a. Pandemic Preparedness and Response (PPR), provided a rationale for US presence in every developing nation.

(p. 149)

And, as further explained by RFK, Jr., the focus on bioterrorism, which first served the American imperialist impulse, then became incorporated into the program of globalism:

The emerging medical/military-industrial complex would soon be citing biosecurity as a pretext for centralized control, coordinated response among nations, a sprawling construction project for new US bioweapons laboratories, the archiving of every germ with weapons potential under the pretext of pandemic protection, the control of the media, the imposition of censorship, the erection of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure ostensibly needed to “track and trace” infections, universal digital IDs, digital currencies to reduce disease spread, and the ceding of power by national governments to the WHO—in short, globalism. 

(p. 149)

China Becomes a Dominant Biowarfare Research Player

Concurrently, China’s leaders were working on a mission to make China a world leader in science, research, and innovation. According to The Wuhan Cover-Up, the Chinese have been using the West’s march toward globalism to infiltrate “Western academia, businesses, media, cultural groups, and government agencies that speak the language of cooperation, globalism, and public health.” (p. 257)

As part of their infiltration process, the Chinese lavished funding on Western research institutions and scientific publishing houses. And because biomedical/biowarfare research was so central to Western governments and research institutions, the Chinese were able to eventually dominate that space as well.

Thus, the book explains, China was able to “co-opt US academic institutions and US public health agencies into performing backdoor bioweapons research for the Chinese military.” (p. 274)

Why Would the US Do Bioweapons Research in/for China?

This is, perhaps, the most oft-raised question in response to the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered bioweapon from a lab funded by the Chinese military, the US, and other Western governments.

As RFK, Jr. explains, with the Chinese as major funders of Western institutions, journals and projects related to biomedical research, this strange collaboration was not just unsurprising, but in fact, inevitable:

The Chinese campaign to co-opt leading scientists and the river of Chinese funding to researchers at US and British medical research universities and to the leading scientific journals had, by then, bought China powerful friends across the Western scientific establishment. 

(p. 280)

Furthermore, the interests of China intersect with the interests of major global corporations and NGOs that comprise the biowarfare-industrial-complex – many of which enriched themselves considerably through the Covid response. As RFK, Jr. writes:

There is a natural intersection of interests between Western business titans and a former communist government [the Chinese Communist Party] that has made itself the global model for seamlessly merging corporate with government power, and promoting business growth by suppressing democracy, labor, and human rights. 

(p. 572)

For its part, the US intelligence community has all kinds of reasons – all ultimately geared toward increasing its own power and influence – to engage in sensitive scientific research projects with the Chinese:

The deliberate transfer of our superior bioweapons knowledge to the Chinese—a potential enemy—makes little sense to citizens who think in terms of conventional rivalries between nations. Espionage was clearly among the complex motivations for the US intelligence community supporting Chinese bioweapons research in China. Knowing what the Chinese are up to is the mission of the US intelligence community. But quietly sharing cutting-edge technologies may also serve institutional self-interest. After all, the intelligence community expands its power by reporting the enemy’s expanding capabilities; more frightening capabilities abroad justify increased budgets and increased power at home. 

(p. 388)

Bioweapons expert Dr. Francis Boyle is quoted stating that:

Opportunities to expand institutional power and corporate profits always seem to trump patriotism and duty within the CIA’s bioweapons teams. Patriotism is a polite fiction among the bioweapons set.

(p. 383)

RFK, Jr. adds that the public health agencies, which are heavily involved in, and funded by, biowarfare research, share the CIA’s self-interested non-patriotism:

NIH and NIAID operate under the same perverse incentives that drive destructive conduct across the whole bioweapons field.

(p. 383)

A Convergence of Personal, Political, Financial and Global Interests

In the final chapters of The Wuhan Cover-Up, RFK, Jr. focuses on several key figures in the biowarfare-industrial-complex, including Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust (now at the WHO), Anthony Fauci of the NIH, and Bill Gates. 

RFK, Jr. uses these figures to show how the Covid pandemic emerged from the toxic stew of ethically compromised biowarfare research standards; military, intelligence, public health, and academic institutions/organizations dependent on biowarfare funding; the involvement of China and global interests in the booming business of “pandemic preparedness and response;” and, of course, the endless pursuit of political power and personal enrichment.

Here’s a great summary of how they all came together, through personal and institutional greed and power-mongering, to unleash the Covid catastrophe on the world:

The evidence suggests that instead of relentlessly protecting public health, Farrar exploited the pandemic to promote the venal financial agendas of his WEF [World Economic Forum] patrons, to transform Western democracies into surveillance states, to expand his personal power and paycheck, and to pander to high-level Chinese officials. Achieving these objectives required Farrar to hide [Covid’s] laboratory origins, a project in which he enlisted a cadre of his medical cartel cronies—those who, thanks to years of funding by Fauci, Farrar, and Gates, now occupy the highest echelons of virology in academia, the regulatory agencies, and pharmaceutical companies. 

(p. 539)

If for nothing else, I would recommend adding The Wuhan Cover-Up to your library as an invaluable resource on leading figures, organizations, and power brokers involved in the biowarfare-industrial-complex.

Conclusions and Comments

It was especially gratifying to me to read The Wuhan Cover-Up (all 600 pages of it), because it validated my own research, showing that the pandemic response was led by the national security/intelligence arms of government, not public health agencies. 

In fact, after reading the first few chapters – the ones that go into the history of chemical and biological warfare and the rise of the biowarfare-industrial-complex – I paradoxically felt an enormous sense of relief. 

Finally, we have a detailed account that shows – beyond what I would consider a reasonable doubt – that the entire Covid catastrophe was caused, and led, by a multinational military-intelligence-academic-pharma-tech-NGO cabal.

RFK, Jr.’s conclusion is that we should look to a future “in which the bio-elites are held responsible for their actions, people regain their rights, and the Constitution is restored to its intended preeminence.”

But how do we do that? 

I am afraid, based on the information in his own book, and the fact that RFK, Jr. himself is being censored and banned so extensively from the public square, that the solution to the problems he exposes is much more difficult and complex than just “holding the bio-elites responsible” which will somehow lead to people regaining their rights.

What we need to do is to shut down, or extract ourselves from, the global biowarfare-industrial-complex that is able to convince (or coerce?) our governments into declaring states of emergency over supposed pandemic threats, and then curtail civil rights and impose massive surveillance, censorship, and propaganda that would not be permitted in non-emergency situations. Not to mention garnering enormous wealth while forcing the world’s population to accept novel, untested, and potentially lethal medical “countermeasures.”

The Wuhan Cover-Up does a better job than any other book or article I have read at exposing the trends, forces, and institutions that brought us the Covid catastrophe – with hundreds of pages of notes and references. What’s frightening is that the enormity of the problem is beyond the scope of the book, not just to solve, but even to fully acknowledge.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/16/2024 – 23:40

Hotel Rooms Or Homes?

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Hotel Rooms Or Homes?

Even with Airbnb posting a net loss of $500 million in its fourth quarter of 2023, the past year was a success story for the short-term rental platform, which increased its annual revenue to roughly $10 billion and net income to $4.8 billion.

Nevertheless, as Statista’s Florian Zandt details below, the hotel business is still far more important regarding the revenue generated in the travel and tourism sector.

Infographic: Are Short-Term Rentals More Popular than Hotels? | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

As the chart above, based on Statista Mobility Market Insights data, shows, hotel accommodation has a larger revenue share in every one of the eight economies projected to generate the most revenue with cruises, package holidays, camping, hotels and vacation rentals.

Italy had the highest share of vacation rentals, which encompasses vacation homes and short-term rentals, in total market revenue with almost 16 percent. The relationship between Airbnb and the Southern European nation, in particular, is fraught. In November, Italian authorities seized 780 million euros from the online platform due to the suspicion of tax evasion. The case was settled in December with Airbnb agreeing to pay 576 million euros without admitting direct liability.

The tourism and travel industry in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan will continue to rely heavily on hotel bookings in 2024 according to Statista analysts, with between 54 and 62 percent of the corresponding total market revenue being provided by this segment. Germany has one of the lowest combined revenue share of hotels and vacation rentals, which can be attributed to the country’s inhabitants’ fondness for package holidays.

Overall, analysts forecast that revenue in all market segments will amount to $927 billion worldwide in the upcoming year.

The United States, China and Germany alone are projected to contribute almost half of this revenue.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/16/2024 – 23:20

How Progressive Policies Are Designed For Civilizational Suicide

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How Progressive Policies Are Designed For Civilizational Suicide

Authored by John D. O’Connor via American Greatness,

We all understand, in the timeless words of the poet Robert Burns, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Most Americans are accustomed to assessing the various failed initiatives of our country’s leaders as well-intended actions that turned out badly. The Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq wars, the 2008 financial meltdown, and the COVID pandemic overreaction, all in hindsight, can be viewed as simply the unfolding of human stupidity in the contingency of time.

In accordance, it is understandable that many are inclined to believe that our country’s current serious problems are, once again, merely the failed result of well-intentioned policies.

But what if, we ask, seemingly fumbled programs were intended to be the initial throes of civilizational suicide? What if apparent missteps were actually directed at the purposeful destruction of a prosperous, free, safe, and secure society?

As we examine the policies pushed by the Biden administration progressives regarding climate, national security, crime, and the border, we can rationally conclude that they are being purposely implemented to render our society unsuccessful, not successful, in its traditional aims, causing what could be the ultimate destruction of a thriving, liberal enlightenment society.

Let us begin with escalating climate mandates, now reaching gas stoves and tires, seeking the total elimination of fossil fuels. Because our mainstream media, more out of reflexive conformity than malevolence, constantly amplify climate alarmism, most Americans believe climate programs are designed in good faith to protect us from planetary disasters. Climate subsidies are aimed, they are led to believe, at increasing prosperity through good “green” jobs in emerging “green” industries, all part of the supposedly improved “Bidenomics” economy, however counterintuitive many think them to be.

When Biden, immediately upon assuming office, stopped issuing new drilling leases, canceled the Keystone Pipeline, and issued EPA regulations effectively shutting down multiple power plants in the near future, was he, however idealistically, trying to wean our country off of fossil fuels in favor of clean, “renewable” energy? If so, what could be wrong with that?

If the administration had calculated that lost energy from stifling fossil fuel sources could actually be replaced, these initiatives, even if overly optimistic, could be viewed as well-intended.

However, within the climate camp, it has been well known that fossil fuels, which power 82% of world energy needs, cannot conceivably be replaced by renewable energy to any substantial degree. So, as these policies take effect over the coming years, our hospitals and medical centers, relying on petroleum-based plastic furniture, fixtures, and equipment, energy-dependent stainless-steel implements, and high-power physical plants, will be hit hard. Health care costs will soar, while treatment will decrease to emerging society levels. Our food costs, already rising dramatically, will skyrocket as petroleum fertilizer, now tripling yields, becomes economically impractical. Housing costs, dependent on fuel-powered equipment and concrete and steel needing massive energy inputs to manufacture, will put homeownership out of reach for all but the rich and reduce housing to cramped, third-world levels. And, of course, transportation will become an expensive luxury for both people and products.

But isn’t this all meant well? For trusting, uncritical moderates and traditional liberals, yes. For the progressives pulling the strings, no.

Maurice Strong, the Canadian socialist responsible for steering the United Nations into the bureaucratic sinecures of the climate alarmist IPCC, has stated from the outset that his intention is the diminishment of the wealth of the Western industrialized nations, making them more like less-advantaged societies.

Although they tout their certainty, climate warriors conceal that for decades, their computerized GCMs (General Circulation Models) have overpredicted global warming by 300%. Well, they respond when confronted by the knowledgeable, the increased heat was swallowed by the oceans, or perhaps tamped down by those pesky aerosols. They know better, but gullible, well-intentioned believers do not.

Documents from a key IPCC research center in East Anglia, the GRU, reveal the fear of climate activists that the public will learn of the Medieval Warm Period and that its temperatures were warmer than today without any claimed assistance from carbon dioxide. Progressive climatologists, in essence, know they are pushing a canard.

Progressive border policies need little discussion. When Biden was elected, the country was led to believe that he would aim to control the southern border, but do so in a humane, non-Trump manner, no longer putting children in cages (which in truth and in fact were Obama-inspired).

Of course, to any rational observer, it is now clear that the massive invasion at our southern border was intended by progressives. The “great replacement” theory is not needed to prove this invasion intentional, obvious to any observer. Three-star New York hotels and thousand-dollar-a-month payments to migrants? Free health care? These are among the positive incentives to illegally migrate, revealing intentionality after the maligned Trump proved that the border was substantially controllable.

The intended result of mass migration is not just new Democratic voters; the most obvious result. It is, more significantly, a deliberately overwhelming burden on our social welfare system, heretofore supported sufficiently by taxes on a powerful economy. With more unemployment and more burdens on social welfare, the progress of the aspiring poor, primarily minorities, will be crushed. Our society is headed, as intended by progressives, to socialism, which, as Winston Churchill noted, has “as its greatest virtue the equal sharing of misery.”

Moving to national security, the tinderbox of the Middle East was not caused by Trump’s irrational temperament, which, in hindsight, has proven its deterrent value. Rather, putting Obama’s progressive policies on steroids, Biden both directly sent cash to Iran and also removed oil sanctions, giving the country financial power to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and, of course, Iran’s own depredations on U.S. troops. Biden’s special Iran envoy, the pro-Hamas Rob Malley, and other pro-Iran and pro-Hamas officials influence our Middle East policy to intentionally favor our enemies.

But what could be the progressive motive for Iran’s hegemony in the Middle East? Clearly, it is to cause the demise of “right-wing” leadership in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, all American allies, so that the region will be controlled by anti-American repressive regimes. Interestingly, progressives revealed their anti-democratic, authoritarian roots by supporting Mullahs who kill members of the LGBT community and subdue women. Again, Iran’s terrorism is not an unfortunate artifact of balanced statesmanship. Rather, it is intended to exterminate a democratic Jewish society and a Saudi regime seeking to modernize itself. In a remarkable exercise in projection, progressives at the same time deem Trump to be a Hitler stand-in.

Similarly, the cause of increasing crime in our cities is no mystery. Progressives applauded, not decried, the George Floyd mayhem, largely an exercise in looting. Beautiful cities such as San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, all run by progressives, have become dystopian hellholes.

So, sincere, well-meaning liberals should, but generally do not, see that they are being led like lemmings to the sea, toward civilizational suicide, by the progressives they have long trusted as being in the liberal leadership, not the socialist vanguard.

In the nineteenth century, the brilliant French observer of American culture, Count Alexis de Tocqueville, said that democratic despotism would be effectuated, if at all, not by overt state terror but by the infantilization of a trusting population.

The evidence is now clearly established that moderate liberals should face reality and reject the policies of the progressive vanguard, leading them into civilizational suicide.

*  *  *

John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/16/2024 – 23:00