As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, according to UN Food and Agriculture Organization data reported by website Our World in data, the United States and Australia are the top of the global meat-eating league with more than 120 kg consumed per capita in 2020.
Countries which top 100 kg of meat consumed per person and year also include Mongolia, Argentina, Spain and Serbia. While wealthier countries tend to eat more meat, the status of meat in local cuisine also plays a major role in consumption patterns.
The least meat in the world is eaten in Africa as well as in South Asia – due to meat being unaffordable for many in the regions, cultural factors or a mix of both. India was actually the country with the fourth lowest meat consumption in the survey, behind Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bangladesh. The economic and supply struggles in conflict regions are also visible on the map, with very little meat consumed in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. This also applies to North Korea.
Studies, like this landmark release by Nature in 2018, have found that Western countries would have to reduce their meat intake by 90 percent to limit climate change to acceptable levels.
To ensure that nutritional needs continue to be met with reduced meat production, the survey recommends increasing the consumption of beans and other pulses to create a climate-friendly protein supply… or insects!
The head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) Protection forces released a statement this week suggesting that nefarious officials in the United States developed and deployed COVID-19 for “offensive purposes” and may be plotting a new pandemic.
The United States government officially claims that its scientists study pathogens in biolabs around the world to develop preventative measures to potential viruses, but Moscow does not buy that.
Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov said that the United States may have played a role in inflicting the COVID-19 pathogen on the world and may be working to create another biological crisis.
“We do not rule out the United States may use so-called defensive technologies for offensive purposes, as well as for global governance by creating crisis situations of biological nature,” Kirillov warned.
According to the Russian State media outlet RT, Moscow believes there was collusion between Big Pharma and USAID through the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based non-government organization run by Peter Daszak, to develop new strains of coronavirus.
“The intermediary organization EcoHealth Alliance has played a key role in implementing projects to study this pathogen. Since 2015, the organization’s researchers have been involved in studying a diverse population of bats, searching for new coronavirus strains and mechanisms for animal-to-human transmission. Over 2,500 bats have been studied,” Kirillov stated.
The general brought up the troubling fact that the World Health Organization, Gates Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University conducted the Event 201 drills in New York on October 18, 2019, just two months before the first COVID-19 cases were officially reported in China. The ostensive purpose of the exercise was to practice the steps that would be taken during a coronavirus outbreak, but many people believe it was a “practice run” for the pandemic.
“The fact that the pandemic unfolded exactly according to this scenario, as well as the implementation of EcoHealth Alliance’s projects, gives rise to questions as to whether COVID-19 was in fact an intentionally man-made disease and whether the US may have had a hand in this incident,” Kirillov said.
Kirillov also expressed deep concern that the Biden regime’s new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy is up to no good.
🚨MUST WATCH!🚨
Russian Chief of Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Protection, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, on Zvezda today:
“They (US) have a policy of global biological control. They understood that by creating artificial biological crises, they can rule the world.”… pic.twitter.com/fnq5hudjEr
“The United States’ next step, aimed at pushing ahead with its strategic plans for establishing global control over the biological situation, was the creation of the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. This new agency is expected to be responsible for charting a course and coordinating actions to combat known and unknown biological challenges, including pathogens that might trigger another global emergency,” Kirillov said.
The Biden regime announced the creation of the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) last month, saying it will “Coordinate the Administration’s domestic response to public health threats that have pandemic potential, or may cause significant disruption, and strengthen domestic pandemic preparedness. This includes ongoing work to address potential public health outbreaks and threats from COVID-19, Mpox, polio, avian and human influenza, and RSV.”
Biden tapped Major General (ret) Paul Friedrichs to serve as the Director of OPPR and Principal Advisor on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. The White House said “Friedrichs’ unparalleled experience makes him the right person to lead this office.”
He is currently Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council (NSC). Maj. Gen. (ret) Friedrichs previously served as Joint Staff Surgeon at the Pentagon, where he coordinated all issues related to health services, provided medical advice to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and served as medical adviser to the Department of Defense (DoD) Covid-19 Task Force.
Kirillov commented on shocking documents recently uncovered by Russian special forces that allegedly reveal the U.S. Army’s bioweapons research activities in Ukraine.
“The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases has been involved in U.S. medical programs in Ukraine,” the general said. “Representatives of the project actively led projects code-names UP-1 and UP-8. As part of these projects, the possibility of using arthropods to spread rickettsia, tick-born encephalitis virus, as well as causative agents of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever and also hantavirus was studied,” he said.
I feel like I’m in the twilight zone.
Russia just publicly accused Deep State actors and Big Pharma of manufacturing the Covid pandemic to take over the world.
They even listed Obama, Clinton, Biden, and Soros, of being the main “Ideologists” behind the plot.
“Russia’s Defense Minister believes that Washington is preparing to establish biological control—using defensive technologies for offensive purposes to create biological crisis conditions and situations,” RT reported.
The list of diseases that have attracted the attention of US specialists includes anthrax, tularemia, and various coronaviruses, Kirillov told a media briefing. Some of these pathogens are listed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “high-priority” threats that can be used as “bioterrorism agents.”
“There is a clear trend: pathogens that fall within the Pentagon’s area of interest, such as Covid-19, avian influenza, African swine fever, subsequently become a pandemic, and American pharmaceutical companies become the beneficiaries,” the general claimed.
The Russian news outlet reported there was added concern in Russia regarding former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, especially after Democrat presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview that Fauci shifted his risky experiments offshore to places like Wuhan China, and Ukraine to evade a 2014 moratorium on gain-of-function research in the U.S.
Moscow requested an international probe into the United States’ international biolabs at the UN last October, but their motion was turned down by the UN Security Council, with the US, UK, and France voting against it.
Europe Braces For $3 A Pill ‘Poor Man’s Cocaine’ To Flood Streets After Gulf Crackdown
Bloomberg has described that what’s been dubbed “poor man’s cocaine” at as little as $3 a pill is threatening to proliferate across the Middle East and into Europe. It’s long been part of the underground party scene in what are otherwise strict Sharia law Arab Gulf countries, but that’s poised to change after authorities have prioritized its eradication.
“Europe is bracing for the possible influx of a drug that’s hooked the Middle East as political shifts and crackdowns in the Gulf spur producers in Syria and Lebanon to tap new markets,” a fresh report warns.
But while acknowledging that the synthetic stimulant Captagon has been popular for years in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, Bloomberg blames the Assad government and allied militias for its now rapid spread.
“Selling for around $3 to $25 per tablet, the amphetamine-type pill captagon is primarily produced and trafficked by individuals and groups tied to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and his ally the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, according to the US State Department and Treasury, the UK’s Foreign Office as well as independent researchers,” Bloomberg writes.
Saudi Arabia and Gulf allies have reportedly recently urged President Assad to stem the flow of Captagon from Syria as part of restored diplomatic ties, also at a moment Damascus has been re-embraced by the Arab League.
The drug was produced in the 1960s in the Germany, and in its medical form typically treats ailments like attention deficit disorders and narcolepsy.
It is certainly ironic and dubious that the West now widely blames the Assad government for the proliferation of Captagon, given that for much of the last decade it was anti-government insurgents known to be the heaviest users. At one point the pill even became known as “the drug of jihad”.
Reuters has previously detailed, “It was discontinued but an illicit version of the drug continued to be produced in eastern Europe and later in the Arab region, becoming prominent in the conflict that erupted in Syria following anti-government protests in 2011.”
The same report noted its prominence on the anti-Assad or “rebel” side. “The illicit version – also nicknamed ‘the drug of jihad’ or ‘poor man’s cocaine’ – is thought to be made of a mix of fenethylline, caffeine and other fillers. It generates focus and staves off sleep and hunger,” Reuters wrote.
Saudi Arabia seizes 8 million Captagon pills as it courts Syria’s Assad to clamp down on the trade.
It has also been seen widely in war-torn places like Libya and Sudan, favored among militants precisely as an energy-booster which staves off natural cravings.
As for pro-Assad networks allegedly being deep in the current Captagon trade, this is a trend likely fueled by Washington having for years sanctioned Syria to hell. Currently the US-led sanctions on the Syrian government are among the most brutal and far-reaching in the world, unleashing runaway inflation, hunger, and lack of electricity — and the trend in the MENA region has been that wherever poverty and political instability persists, the Captagon trade ratchets up.
Currently, anti-Assad activists who are attempting to thwart Gulf-Damascus rapprochement are harping on the issue in order to argue that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and other Arab states must resist normalization with the Syrian government.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is under pressure to deliver on her electoral pledge to curb illegal immigration after embarrassing figures published this week by her country’s interior ministry revealed more than 100,000 migrants have landed on Italian shores so far this year.
A total of 101,386 migrants landed on Italian islands or the mainland between Jan. 1 and Aug. 16, more than double the 48,000 who arrived in the same period last year, and almost triple the 34,556 landings recorded in 2021.
With migrant activity in the Mediterranean showing no sign of slowing down, the right-wing Italian government runs the very real risk of overseeing a record number of arrivals in a single year, surpassing the 180,000 arrivals recorded at the peak of the migrant crisis in 2016.
The Italian government’s attempts to restrict the movement of NGO-operated rescue vessels in the Mediterranean have failed to stem the flow of illegal immigration into the country, and the Italian island of Lampedusa has once again been saturated with new arrivals.
Regional politicians are now sounding the alarm, including hardline President of Veneto Luca Zaia of the League party, who in a recent interview with local media called on just 10 percent of new arrivals to be allowed to stay in the country.
“I’m seeing worrying numbers. Veneto is already hosting 9,000 migrants… Italy cannot be the cushion of Europe and welcome all of Africa,” he warned.
Opposition lawmakers have sensed the opportunity to take the government to task on its immigration failures, following the Italian right’s years on the sidelines hurling insults at centrist and center-left administrations over their inability to tackle the issue.
“For years, Meloni and Salvini taunted us every summer for the number of migrant arrivals,” said former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
“Now that arrivals have doubled, they try to divert attention and pretend not to see,” added the president of the left-wing Five Star Movement.
“They’re always shouting ‘close the ports’ and ‘the gravy train for migrants is over’ and ‘Italians first,’ but the right is demonstrating a manifest failure in its management of immigration,” claimed Stefano Bonaccini, the governor of Emilia Romagna in the country’s north.
Meloni’s administration, despite pledging a hardline approach, has in reality advocated a far more internationalist approach to the migration issue than many expected. In a bid to distance herself from initial comparisons to far-right administrations from the 19th century, Meloni has opted to pursue European cooperation over nationalistic attitudes as much as possible.
Italy backed down from its opposition to the European Union’s proposed Migration Pact earlier this year and announced its intention to ease restrictions on legal migrants wishing to live and work in the country.
“When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”
– Mike Thomas, sports editor
What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.
In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a mountain of bread-and-circus distractions, economic worries, environmental disasters, power plays, power grabs, police raids, indictments and circus politics.
The Maui wildfires. The Trump indictments. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The looming 2024 presidential election. The Ukraine-Russia conflict.
In the midst of this pile on of woes, worries and semi-manufactured crises falling with sledgehammer-like frequency, monopolizing the media narrative and eclipsing all other news, it’s difficult to stay focused on what’s really going on, and yet something is brewing.
Pay attention.
Caught up in the partisan boxing match that is politics today, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real.
The indictments against Trump, the investigation of Hunter Biden, and the chatter of the political classes aren’t real; they are more sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end.
As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited:
“Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation… Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.”
So what is real?
What’s real is the $5,000 fine and five-year jail sentence that could be levied against anyone found driving an illegal immigrant in their car in the state of Florida.
What’s real is what happened in Marion, Kansas, on Fri., Aug. 11, 2023, when police raided the office of the Marion County Record, blowing past the constitutional safeguards intended to safeguard the freedom of the press.
Are you starting to get the picture yet?
The manufactured media spectacles, piled on one after another, have a very real purpose, which is to distract us from the government’s constant encroachments on our freedoms.
In the larger scheme of things, these individual incidents—the police raid of a small-town newspaper, a state ban on who gets to be inside your car, an outrageous fine for feeding the destitute, a politician’s use of an enemies list to silence critics—might easily go unremarked, yet they are all part of the police state’s tendency to pile on: pile on the distractions, pile on the retribution, pile on the show of force in order to completely eviscerate anything that even remotely resembles opposition.
The police state has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on anyone who even questions its authority, let alone challenges its chokehold on power.
“We the people”—the proverbial nails to the police state’s heavy-handed tactics—will be hammered into compliance, intimidated into subservience, and terrorized into silence.
It doesn’t matter which party dominates in Congress or the White House: all of us are in danger from these fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics.
In this way, anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.
Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the prison walls holding the American people captive become ever more inescapable.
The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.
Yet the winner has already been decided.
As American satirist H.L. Mencken predicted almost a century ago:
You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.
China Launches War On Yuan Bears With 1000+ pip Fixing Gap Vs Estimates
Earlier, when discussing China’s recent surge in FX outflows, we said that while promoting growth remains a priority for Beijing, the PBOC is expected to follow up with more measures to slow the depreciation trend in the yuan, such as more significant countercyclical factors in the daily CNY fixing, cutting FX deposit reserve requirement ratio, and/or adding FX forward sales reserve requirement.
Of course, China can just keep doing what it has been doing now for several weeks, but never to the extent it just moments ago when the PBOC delivered its strongest ever pushback against a weaker yuan via its daily reference rate, as it sought to restore some confidence in a Chinese market that has seen an unprecedented collapse in confidence – not to mention prices – spooked by disappointing (and disappearing) data and heightened credit risks.
The Chinese central bank set its yuan fixing at 7.2006 per dollar compared to the average estimate of 7.3047. The gap – an unprecedented 1,041 pips – was the largest gap to estimates since the poll was initiated in 2018.
The offshore yuan extended gains to 0.2% after the fixing…
… which was also set at a stronger level to the previous day for the first time in six sessions…
“At this juncture, the PBOC might want to put a stop in the trend,” of a weaker yuan, said Kiyong Seong, lead Asia macro strategist for Societe Generale SA. “On a temporary basis, it’s possible the actions by policy makers can discourage more bearish betting.”
As discussed earlier today, as part of China’s escalating support for the embattled yuan in recent days – which has so far failed to yield any notable results with the currency hitting an all time low yesterday…
… Beijing told state-owned banks to step up intervention, while the central bank said it will resolutely prevent excessive adjustment in the yuan.
That “request” came as the yuan touched on 7.35 per dollar, a level that Beijing has been paying close attention to as a line in the sand. The yuan traded around the 7.29 level offshore on Friday.
“Going ahead, further measures such as potential cut to the foreign-exchange reserve-requirement ratio following the PBOC’s pledge to prevent overshoooting may prompt yuan bears to trim their short position,” said Ken Cheung, FX strategist at Mizuho.
Still, as Bloomberg notes, the problem for China is that yuan bears had latched on to the fact that the fixing itself had been progressively weaker over the past weeks, regardless of its gap to estimates, and taken that as a sign the PBOC is ok with a slow depreciation in the currency. Of course, dismal economic data, plunging housing prices coupled with a spreading crisis in the property and shadow banking sector, and the biggest FX outflow in one year, have also hammered sentiment and led to further currency selling.
“The PBOC has persisted in setting the fixings much stronger than expected, with the largest counter-cyclical factor since late last year, but they have been allowing the yuan to adjust,” Australia & New Zealand Banking Group strategists including Mahjabeen Zaman wrote in a note Thursday. “This is a sign that the authorities are prioritizing the need to support growth at the expense of the currency.”
China’s currency has tumbled over 5% against the dollar this year amid a disappointing economic recovery and broad dollar strength. Adding insult to injury, while traditionally an FX decline of this magnitude would boost exports, those have also languished and in July plunged the most since the covid crash.
Meanwhile, an unexpected PBOC rate cut earlier this week to re-ignite growth have just intensified the focus on the widening US-China yield gap and added more pressure to the yuan.
“The authorities are preparing to draw a line in the sand and defend the currency from further weakness,” said Khoon Goh, head of Asia research at Australian & New Zealand Banking Group in Singapore. “But for a more sustained rebound in the yuan, we really need to see US 10-year bond yields come down from current high levels.”
So the Fed never counted on Biden’s Dept of Commerce, Labor, Census Bureau, etc, coming up with the most creative seasonal adjustments in history and making the economy “grow” at 5.8%, so EMs (and DMs) are about to croak
Time for an emergency CB session at Centralbahnplatz 2
And that, as we explained yesterday, is unlikely to happen as long as the Biden admin keeps putting seasonally adjusted lipstick on the pig that is the US economy at least until the Nov 2024 election. So to all the EMs and DMs out there, condolences: your economies are about to get it because Biden has to get reelected.
Imagine if the United States treated China in the same way it does us?
What if American companies simply ignored Chinese copyrights and patents, and stole Chinese ideas, inventions, and intellectual property, as they pleased and with impunity?
What if the American government targeted Chinese industries by dumping competing American export products at below the cost of production—to bankrupt Chinese competitors and corner their markets?
What would the communist Chinese government do if a huge American spy balloon lazily traversed continental China—sending back to the United States photographic surveillance of Chinese military bases and installations?
How would China react to American stonewalling any explanation, much less refusing to apologize for such an American attack on Chinese sovereignty?
Envision a U.S. high-security virology lab in the Midwest, run by the Pentagon, allowing the escape of an engineered, gain-of-function deadly virus.
Instead of enlisting world cooperation to stop the spread of the virus, the American government would lie that it sprung up from a local bat or wild possum.
Washington would then make all its relevant military scientists disappear who were assigned to the lab, while ordering a complete media blackout.
America would forbid Chinese scientists from contacting their American counterparts involved in the lab, despite the deaths of more than 1 million Chinese from the American-manufactured disease.
And what if during the first days of the pandemic Washington had quietly prevented all foreign travel to the United States, while keeping open one-way direct flights from America to major Chinese cities?
How would Beijing respond if American biotech company warehouses were discovered in rural China with unsecured vials of deadly viruses and pathogens?
Would China be angered that it was never notified by an American company that it had left abandoned COVID and HIV viruses and malaria parasites in its facilities—along with rotting genetically engineered dead rats littering the floors with hundreds more lab animals abandoned in laboratory cages?
What would Chairman Xi Jinping have done if American-made fentanyl was shipped in massive quantities to nearby Tibet on the Chinese border? And what if it would be deliberately repackaged there as deceptive recreational drugs and smuggled into China, where it annually killed 100,000 Chinese youth, year after year?
What if 10,000 Americans this year illegally crossed the Indian border into China and disappeared into its interior?
What if an allied Asian nation—such as South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan—went nuclear. And what if, in North-Korean style, it serially blustered to send one of its nuclear missiles into the major cities of China?
What if almost monthly China discovered an American military operative teaching incognito at a major Chinese university or among the ranks of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army?
Would China object if an American femme fatale agent was sleeping with a high-ranking Chinese official of the Chinese communist politburo?
Or what if one of the chauffeurs of its top ranking Chinese officials was a nearly two-decade-long American agent?
What would be the Chinese reaction if there were 350,000 American students attending schools all over the Chinese nation, with perhaps 3,000-4,000 of them actively engaged in national security espionage on behalf of the United States?
These “what-ifs” could be expanded endlessly. But they reflect well enough the great asymmetry in the bizarre Chinese-American relationship.
Obviously, China would not tolerate America treating it as it does the Americans.
Why then does the imbalance continue?
Do naïve Americans believe that the more China is indulged, the more it will respond in kind to American magnanimity?
Does the United States believe that the more China is exposed to our supposedly radically democratic and free culture, the sooner it will become a good democratic citizen of the global community?
Are we afraid of China, because it has four times our population, and believes its economy and military will overtake ours in a decade?
Are we terrified that its ruthless Chinese government is completely amoral, utterly ruthless, and capable of anything?
Or are our political, cultural, and corporate elites so compromised by their lucrative Chinese investments and joint ventures, that they prioritize profits over their own country’s national security and self-interest?
And did the Biden family—including President Joe Biden himself—in the past receive millions of dollars from Chinese energy and investment interests?
Did Hunter Biden’s quid pro quo decade of grifting result in millions in Chinese money filling the Biden family coffers—all in exchange for the current Biden and past Obama administrations going soft on Chinese aggression?
No one seems able to explain the otherwise inexplicable.
But one way to get along with China, and to regain its respect is to deal with it exactly the way it deals with the United States.
Anything less, and America will continually be treated with even more Chinese contempt—and eventually extreme violence.
The Hits Just Keep On Coming: China Suffers Biggest FX Outflow Since July 2022
And the hits just keep on coming for China.
With its economy on the verge of a Japanification vicious loop, where record debts, lead to distressed selling, repayment of debt, contraction in the money supply, falling asset prices, a wave of bankruptcies, surging unemployment, a slowing economy, spiking unemployment and a crisis of confidence, which then leads to money hoarding and deflation…
… China is now also facing a sudden surge in FX outflows: according to Goldman’s preferred gauge of FX flows, China’s net outflows were around $26bn in July, the fastest pace of outflows since September 2022, in contrast to US$6bn inflows in June. While there was net buying of equities in both Southbound and Northbound of the stock connect in July, and on net basis small inflows through the Stock Connect channel, the goods trade FX conversion ratio declined and related inflows slowed in July, while services trade deficit widened. In addition, cross-border RMB transfers showed net outflows in the month.
Here are the key points from the latest data:
1. In July, China experienced $25BN in net outflows via onshore outright spot transactions,and $14BN inflows via freshly entered and canceled forward transactions. Another SAFE dataset on “cross-border RMB flows” showed outflows of US$16bn in the month. Goldman’s preferred FX flow measure therefore suggests a total US$26BN outflows in July, in comparison with US$6BN inflows in June. This was the biggest net outflow since Sept 22.
2. The current account showed broadly balanced flows as goods trade related inflows declined meanwhile services trade related outflows rose: There was a net inflow of $18BN related to goods trade in July, lower than the $36bn in June. Goods trade surplus conversion ratio declined to 22% in July vs 50% in June on the back of continued currency depreciation. The services trade deficit was $11BN, more negative than US$8bn in June as outbound tourism continued to recover. The income and transfers account showed outflows of $6BN in July, smaller than $8BN in June.
3. SAFE stated that foreigners continued to buy RMB assets on a net basis in July. Stock Connect flows showed net buying of $7BN of equities through northbound and $2BN net buying through southbound, which implies $5BN inflows through the Stock Connect channel, vs $3BN inflows in June. Foreigners’ holding of RMB bonds data are not released yet though.
4. PBOC cut policy interest rates on August 15th, which added depreciation pressures on the currency. Promoting growth remains the priority, and the PBOC is expected to follow up with more measures to slow the depreciation trend in the next few weeks, such as more significant countercyclical factors in the daily CNY fixing, cutting FX deposit reserve requirement ratio, and/or adding FX forward sales reserve requirement.
With China’s currency the weakest it has ever been, and with FX outflows accelerating sharply, one can’t help but remember the panic observed after the August 2015 devaluation, which not only shocked global markets but woke bitcoin from its long slumber as billions in Chinese savings scrambled to the safety of offshore bank accounts via one of the few still open cracks in China’s great monetary firewall. How long until we get a rerun?
A great new country music song comes out, by a completely unknown performer, and takes the #1 spot in charts. The mainstream press decries the artist and song as “far-right.”
An exciting movie based on a true story of child trafficking blasts forward to earn more than the expected blockbuster. The mainstream press denounces the film as “far-right.”
An insurgent campaign in Argentina by an economist rocks the election primaries. The candidate wants to crush the central bank and level state bureaucracies that interfere with freedom. The press universally decries him as “far-right.”
[ZH: And Milei punches back]
“Argentinian Trump” Presidential candidate Javier Milei leaves reporter in STUNNED silence— WATCH
REPORTER: “Why do you call Leftists shit?”
MILEI: “BECAUSE THEY ARE SHIT!”
REPORTER: 😧
MILEI: “If you think differently they will kill you!”
Your favorite newspaper covers facts that matter with tremendous accuracy. It’s called The Epoch Times. But your social circles says this paper is “far right.”
You get the message? Anything that rocks the boat these days is called “far-right. The point of the phrase is to recall Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, maybe even Torquemada and Attila the Hun, and conjures up images of shock troops, black boots, goose stepping, and the darkest forms of intolerance and coercion.
It’s all rather strange because each of the above is not about any of that. They are about the opposite. They are calling for ending oppression, curbing government, revealing the truth behind official lies, draining the swamp, ending corruption, and restoring freedom and dignity to the people against the elites.
What in the world is this “far-right” thing the press has going on? It is designed to broadcast the message that anything that is not conventional or left-of-center is necessarily flirting with some dark interwar catastrophe. That is to say, it is a smear.
The smear is so habitual at this point that it probably can’t be stopped. No journalist gets in trouble for deploying it. It cannot be challenged with defamation law, though it probably should be.
In fact, the phrase “far-right” is so opaque, unfalsifiable, and still damaging that it is flung around with abandon by anyone threatened by the slightest change in society’s relationship to the state and its allied interest groups.
Permit me a brief examination of the roots.
If looking to the roots of right and left, historians often consider France. On the right side of the parliament sat the monarchists, established business interests, the ecclesiocrats, and champions of the Ancien Régime. On the left sat the reformers, the liberals, the free traders, the republicans, and the proponents of religious liberty.
Is this where we get the idea? Not really. America didn’t really deploy the concepts of right and left in national parlance until the 20th century. Here the influence was not France, at least not directly, but Germany, especially the 19th century political debates between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the rise of Otto von Bismarck. It was during this time, particularly in the 1880s and 90s, that U.S. elite intellectuals frequently traveled to Germany to study under the fashionable gurus of the time.
We are not talking about American popular culture but intellectual culture, a world set apart but ultimately decisively influential over the commanding heights of civilization itself. The U.S. Ivys were all invaded rather dramatically by a Prussian spirit: historicist, elitist, and thoroughly statist.
Here is where we find the origin of American Progressivism. It was a Prussian/German import. And what was German politics and philosophy about in that period? The poet of the entire German intellectual scene was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a philosopher who came to prominence in the 1820s for his forecast of the inevitable return of the German empire and the unity of society, church, and state.
At least that’s what the old Hegelians wanted, and Bismarck was their champion. They wanted a giant welfare state, a central bank, a powerful military empire, society organized as a unified family, an economically self-sufficient nation, and a state with overweening power to dominate the social order. In music, the leader was of course Richard Wagner: nationalistic, romantic, idealistic, and fundamentally statist. This was the right, or, one might say, the far-right (and yes anti-Semitism and racism were part of that).
The left was more complicated because it was split between the old liberals as represented by champions of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johannes Brahms, who had nothing to do with Hegelianism, and the rise of the Marxists, on the other. The Marxists were the successors to the French socialists who appropriated Hegel to weave into the cockamamie economics a deterministic view of history, which ended up being called dialectical materialism.
It’s a wonder this gibberish ever caught on but there is something strange about the Hegelian virus and the German academic mind. As Ludwig von Mises wrote, it utterly wrecked German academia for a century and a half. More than that, it had a profound impact on 20th-century politics. Marxism spread from Russia to China to Latin America, and Nazism engulfed Europe and painted the map brown.
Do you see where this is going? The Hegelians broke into two large branches: left for the Marxists and right for the nationalists, who ended up following Hitler to the doom of the entire project. That is a more precise way to understand the left and right as it came to be understood in the U.S. context from the turn of the 20th century and forward.
Indeed, the American Progressives were themselves split into left and right, with the left pushing great scientific planning over economic life and the right wanting to deploy national power in war and unifying society in a single familial model that forced women not to work and large-scale industry to replace agriculture.
In other words, in this parlance, left and right were both versions of statism, a basically insane confidence that experts with power, resources, and intelligence will improve the whole over what essential freedom would yield. They are two flavors of the same poison, both accusing each other of various forms of evil.
It’s always the same thing: confidence that intellectuals can outsmart everyone else in the peoples’ evaluation of their own problems, risks, issues, faith, and solutions. The heck of it is that it is never true. And this truth invalidates centuries of dangerous ideological fantasies which invalidate both left and right.
So when the media complains that people doing normal things and making justifiable complaints against the system as it is are “far-right,” what they are really confessing is their own ideological commitments. They are leftists in what they imagine to be a grand ideological struggle against the right. In this struggle, they want no one to be independent.
The tragedy comes when people take the bait. They believe that because the left is so nuts, they themselves must associate with the right. I’m telling you that none of this is necessary. You can be independent. You can reject both flavors of top-down rule.
Freedom is an idea that has always stood apart from the insane ravings of the intellectual class. It’s a cry for plain freedom itself, which is part of the normal human moral intuition. It requires no ideological structure. It just is what it is. And in this, it is neither left nor right.
And that’s okay. But apparently, this desire to be left alone and not be manipulated by elites is so unfamiliar these days that everyone’s aspiration for freedom itself is conscripted into an ideological tribe. The best strategy for resistance is to trust those instincts and follow your gut. You have every right to be free, and also to like the latest song, movie, to follow media with facts and truth, and to celebrate the resistance.
We are today battling all the powers that be. That doesn’t make us left or right but rather normal and hopefully free at some point in the distant future.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Resignation Calls Mount After Maryland Superintendent Public Records Destroyed In Test Score Scandal
The nation’s fourth most funded school system has a grade rigging scandal and now a cover-up. There are mounting calls for Maryland Governor Wes Moore and the State Board of Education to remove Maryland State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury for a Maryland Public Information Act violation.
Investigative journalist Chris Papst from Fox45 News’ Project Baltimore published a damning report (read: here) on Feb. 6 about how 23 Baltimore City Schools, with zero students, among those tested, scored proficient on the state math exam. The story went viral, forcing the state to cover up the education blunder.
In a public records request, Papst’s team found metadata for 98 text messages sent or received by Superintendent Choudhury in the first quarter of this year — around the time the state changed the grades that no longer can be seen.
Papst believes these text messages hold the answer to why the state government made the statistical cover-up. However, Choudhury’s text on the taxpayer-funded cell phone was automatically set to delete just after 30 days — something a government watchdog group has called foul while a local community group has called for Choudhury’s resignation.
“Most people would take a look at this circumstance and say it’s a cover-up,” said Adam Andrzejewski, the founder of Openthebooks.com, a non-partisan government watchdog group, told Papst.
The public records expert said the deleted text messages are a “big problem.” He said this is grounds for the superintendent to resign.
Here’s where the cover-up is very obvious:
Project Baltimore filed the initial public records request on Apr. 10. At that time, according to the metadata of the 98 text messages, there were 12 texts that were not yet 30 days old. According to state law, as soon as the public records request was filed, those documents should have been preserved. But they were not. Those 12 text messages were also deleted.
98 text messages GONE. @MdPublicSchools State Superintendent’s taxpayer-funded phone set to AUTO-DELETE texts in 30 days. But 12 texts were NOT 30 days old when we filed a PIA for them. They too are gone. Criminal investigation?@Project_Bmore@FOXBaltimorehttps://t.co/Xkik0GxCRL
Papst said, “The State Board recognizes that text messages cannot be deliberately deleted after they are requested as part of a PIA [Maryland Public Information Act] request.”
“This needs to be investigated immediately as record concealment or destruction of the public record,” said Andrzejewski. He added, “Those records belong to the people.”
Calls mount for Governor Moore and the State Board of Education to remove the top school board official.
