The financials of the parent company of the controversial website Pornhub were revealed in a Semafor report. This provides a rare glimpse into the money-making machine behind the world’s largest porn website. 

MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and other adult websites such as YouPorn, Redtube, and Brazzers, “anticipated making tens of millions of dollars in profits despite MasterCard and Visa refusing to process payments for certain websites including Pornhub, with operating margins of about 27% in 2021 and almost 30% in 2022,” Semafor said. 

The Visa and Mastercard ban dented earnings by as much as 40% in 2022. It noted if major credit cards started processing again, it would’ve increased 2022 revenue by as much as 40% to $455 million — slightly less than the $460 million it generated in 2018. 

Semafor said these figures were presented to investors before the takeover earlier this year. 

In March, MindGeek was purchased by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. No purchase price or where the funds came from was disclosed in any public domain. 

Meanwhile, several states have implemented age-verification laws for Pornhub users, while the website itself has prohibited the use of VPNs in Virginia. 

Data from website tracking firm Similarweb shows Pornhub’s US ranking has recently dropped from 8 to 9. 

What Semafor has revealed, besides all the legal issues MindGeek is in over sexually explicit videos of minors found on its websites, the company is still making money even though there are many concerns the platform is a danger to society.  

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

We can pretend an insanely over-leveraged, fragile status quo is rock-solid and will deliver the goodies regardless of anything short of an alien invasion or meteor-strike, but pretending will only take us so far.

I have the impression that changing the channels of “news”, “analysis” and “opinion” doesn’t modify the narrow band of what’s being offered. The bullish views are more or less all the same, and the occasional bearish counterpoint is equally bland. I keep changing channels but the program doesn’t vary.

This homogenization of opinion and analysis is so ubiquitous that it’s difficult to discern. That’s the point, of course; to present carefully pruned and curated “views” and “analysis” that stick to the same tired narratives of propaganda: the flavor changes and the talking heads / actors change, but the product remains the same: homogenized.

Like toothpaste, the virtually identical media product is packaged into supposedly competing “brands” to “differentiate” and “offer consumers more choices” to buy the same highly profitable product, engagement, i.e. addiction and derangement.

Fellow independent Mark St. Cyr and I discuss this homogenization and the forgotten value of experience in our recent podcast. The “marketplace” of ideas has been corporatized, i.e. reduced to a simulacrum / facsimile of competition, as the media and Big Tech have assembled quasi-monopolies of corporate cartels: a handful of global, politically powerful corporations control the entire media: the “news,” social media, etc.

The central state takes a keen interest in the power to control the “competing” narratives created by this corporate monopoly homogenization. Let’s not call it censorship–such an ugly word. Let’s call it “happiness,” a much more palatable and marketable slogan.

This homogenization serves to deliver the right mix of “happiness”: a bit of variation, colorizing the same old black-and-white narrative (Us vs Them), blend in a bit of spice (the latest conspiracy theory debunked), feature the car wrecks and riots, and then the ending wrap-up of puppies, kittens and kids.

Once again I’m reminded of this Houellebecq quote:

“I have the impression of being caught up in a network of complicated, minute, stupid rules, and I have the impression of being herded towards a uniform kind of happiness, toward a kind of happiness that doesn’t really make me happy.”

What’s been devalued isn’t just truly independent thinking–real-world experience has also been devalued. Mark and I both started out earning a living with hands-on skills–what was once known as “honest work” that created value you could actually touch and see.

In the rush to globalize, stripmine labor and rush poorly trained workers into the meat grinder–oops, I mean “productive labor force”–the kind of experience needed to truly understand how systems work and fix just about anything that goes awry has decayed. By specializing, segmenting and siloing tasks and skills into narrow bands of expertise, we’ve lost the kind of experiential knowledge that was once taken for granted.

This depth of experience can’t be rushed, packaged or commoditized. It has to be earned and learned the hard way, by making countless mistakes in the real world, learning from mentors and constantly advancing and practicing one’s skills. This level of experience is built on the foundation of pride in one’s work and the value one creates every day.

We also discuss the value of the old decentralized, middleman, family-owned biz model that was crushed by global corporate giants. As Mark notes, there used to be a phrase for the wholesaler / dealer middleman layer in the economy–“I have this guy, I know this guy”–for someone who really knew the field and could get the needed parts and supplies and could direct the small business owners to whatever fix-it was needed.

This layer of the economy has been decimated as it was deemed “inefficient” compared to vertically organized corporations. Nice, but this efficiency generates a second-order effect–extreme vulnerability and fragility once the specialized layers collapse and the system needs people who actually know more than their corporate slot.

Could family-owned enterprises served by localized wholesalers / jobbers actually become more effective than globalized, super-efficient corporations? Once the cracks start opening in globalization and a workforce homogenized into specialization, the hyper-efficient globalized model of doing business breaks down. This is currently considered “impossible,” for anyone pointing out the inherent fragilities of this maximizing-profit cartel-corporate system is, ahem, marginalized as an “unhappy” and therefore quickly deleted / demonetized influence.

We also discuss the value of thinking and acting in an entrepreneurial mindset of costs, benefits, risks, competition and constant learning / adaptation. This is the point of my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy: even if we’re an employee, we benefit from thinking about our career and livelihood in an entrepreneurial context, the core of which is creating value not just with our own work but by collaborating productively with others of the same mindset.

Taking control of one’s work and life is the heart of Self-Reliance. We can call this agency or entrepreneurial, the point is the same: stop buying into a system that no longer benefits you and start reducing your exposure to its intrinsic risks.

We also echo management guru Peter Drucker’s insight that enterprises don’t have profits, they only have costs. Fixed costs define the risk structure of enterprises and households alike; costs of production constrain what’s possible and what’s sustainable. What’s not sustainable will go away, regardless of what we’re told is “impossible.”

It won’t just be components that are on back-order: entire lifestyles will be out of stock. We can pretend an insanely over-leveraged, fragile status quo is rock-solid and will deliver the goodies regardless of anything short of an alien invasion or meteor-strike, but pretending will only take us so far.

Our podcast on Rumble:

*  *  *

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In a central bank decision that was a far more uncertain nailbiter than the Fed’s guaranteed 25bps hike, moments ago the BOJ revealed that in a unanimous vote it would keep rates at -0.1% and also keep the 10Y JGB yield target at 0%, but in an 8-1 vote (with Yakamura dissenting) said it would conduct yield curve control “with greater flexibility” (i.e. tweak it) by which it means that both the lower and upper bounds (but mostly upper) of yield control would be “references” not “rigid limits.”

What does that mean? Simple: while the BOJ is keeping the implied 10Y JGB target at 0.50%, it will allow the yield to rise as high as 1.0% (where it has a hard stop to buy all bonds that are for sale) but it also may not. This is how the BOJ explained it in its statement…

The Bank will continue to allow 10-year JGB yields to fluctuate in the range of around plus and minus 0.5 percentage points from the target level, while it will conduct yield curve control with greater flexibility, regarding the upper and lower bounds of the range as references, not as rigid limits, in its market operations.

The Bank will offer to purchase 10-year JGBs at 1.0 percent every business day through fixed-rate purchase operations, unless it is highly likely that no bids will be submitted.

In order to encourage the formation of a yield curve that is consistent with the above guideline for market operations, the Bank will continue with large-scale JGB purchases and make nimble responses for each maturity by, for example, increasing the amount of JGB purchases and conducting fixed-rate purchase operations and the Funds-Supplying Operations against Pooled Collateral.

… and visually:

So while everything else remains the same, going forward the BOJ will hard offer to purchase 10Y at 1.0% yield instead of 0.50% – which is where the target for the 10Y JGB remains – while leaving it to its discretion how much it will purchase at any one point between 0.5% and 1.0%.

Or, as Bloomberg’s Marc Cudmore puts it:

“so, wait, the target cap is still 0.5%, but the active cap is 1%? Huh? How does that work? Well, while the BOJ will no longer buy daily amounts of JGBs at a 0.5% yield, it will conduct nimble market operations to seek that target yield level. I.e. This theoretically means the BOJ could come in at any point to intervene to buy JGBs in order to lower yields to 0.5%. It might work a little like JPY intervention.

Realistically, how often will they do that, and in what manner? Well, that’s why investors are more excited by a BOJ press conference than they have been in years.”

Said otherwise, the BOJ was too scared to go ahead with explicit policy normalization and shift its 10Y target to 1%, so it is instead doing a half-assed job by implicitly moving the target to “test the waters” so to speak, and preserve the flexibility to revert if and when the bond market crushes it. But, as always happens, when a central bank does things half-assed and without a Draghi-esque “bazooka resolve”, the results is always catastrophic and this time won’t be any different.

Which means that we are about to see a whole lot more volatility in the JGB market as the market tests just how high the BOJ will allow yields to rise. And sure enough, at last check the 10Y was already yielding just north of 0.57% – or far above the previous YCC limit – ensuring that the BOJ has a lot of emergency bond buying ahead of it, just like in Dec/Jan when it tweaked YCC previously.

The rest of the statement was the usual compendium of excuses for why the BOJ will inevitably get everything wrong:

There are extremely high uncertainties for Japan’s economic activity and prices, including developments in overseas economic activity and prices, developments in commodity prices, and domestic firms’ wage- and price-setting behavior. Under these circumstances, it is necessary to pay due attention to developments in financial and foreign exchange markets and their impact on Japan’s economic activity and prices.

Japan’s recent inflation rates, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), are higher than projected in the April 2023 Outlook Report, and wage growth has risen, partly on the back of this year’s annual spring labor-management wage negotiations. Signs of change have been seen in firms’ wage- and price-setting behavior, and inflation expectations have shown some upward movements again. If upward movements in prices continue, the effects of monetary easing will strengthen through a decline in real interest rates, while on the other hand, strictly capping long-term interest rates could affect the functioning of bond markets and the volatility in other financial markets. Such effects are expected to be mitigated by conducting yield curve control with greater flexibility.

Meanwhile, there are also significant downside risks to Japan’s economic activity and prices, including the impact of a tightening of global financial conditions on overseas economies. If such downside risks materialize, the effects of monetary easing will be maintained through a decline in long-term interest rates under the framework of yield curve control.

Only 18% of the 50 economists polled by Bloomberg expected a YCC tweak at this meeting (in no small part due to Bloomberg’s own reporting on the matter), though half foresaw such a move no later than October. In addition, there was a widespread view that any change to the program would have to come as a surprise, as any foreshadowing might trigger a massive bond sell-off, complicating the move. Instead, the bond selloff has just been delayed to, well, right now.

Eslewhere, while the BOJ did admit that inflation was higher than it expected in April, and it also did hike its 2023 core CPI forecast to 2.5% from 1.8% previously, the central bank bizarrely slashed its 2024 core CPI forecast from 2.0% to 1.9%, as inflation’s effects “are expected to be mitigated by conducting yield curve control with greater flexibility.” suggesting that no more “tweaking” or whatever it’s now called will be required, and instead the current yield differentials for the world’s carry currency of choice will remain for the foreseeable future.

To summarize the revised forecasts:

Real GDP

• Fiscal 2023 median forecast cut to 1.3% from 1.4%.
• Fiscal 2024 median forecast maintained at 1.2%.
• Fiscal 2025 median forecast maintained at 1.0%.

Core CPI

• Fiscal 2023 median forecast raised to 2.5% from 1.8%.
• Fiscal 2024 median forecast cut to 1.9% from 2.0%.
• Fiscal 2025 median forecast maintained at 1.6%.

The continuation of the main policy settings will likely enable Ueda to argue that the new guidance on the band was a technical move aimed at improving the sustainability of its stimulus, rather than a step toward imminent policy normalization.

In kneejerk response to the half-pregnant YCC tweak, which will do nothing to reverse Japan’s inflation problem but will do everything to spark another bond market crisis, the USDJPY first spiked by 200 pips before reversing the entire move…

… but a far more significant move was observed in 10Y JGBs whose yields were spiked as high as 0.57% – the highest level since 2014…

… while 10Y JGB futs tumble…

… as the market immediately tests just far the BOJ will allow bonds and yields to move.

Knowing well it would kick the bond market hornets nest, the BOJ immediately announce it would widen its range for purchase of medium and long-term JGBs in Aug.

• Offers to buy 400b-750b yen of 3-5 year JGBs 4 times/month
• Offers to buy 450b-900b yen of 5-10 year JGBs 4 times/month
• Purchase amounts of other maturities unchanged

To summarize: with today’s “less hawkish than expected” YCC tweak (see below) all the BOJ has done is buy itself a few weeks of a stronger yen, until the 10Y yield rerates from 0.5% to 1.0% (still far below inflation), before yield differentials re-emerge as the dominant power in currency pairs. Meanwhile, as part of its half-assed attempt to control both the currency and rates, the repricing of the entire JGB bond market, the 2nd largest in the world, will send shockwaves not only in Japan but across the globe. In fact, at last check, the 10Y TSY yield was at 4.03%, right at session highs.

* * *

Commenting on the BOJ’s decision, Khoon Goh head of Asia research at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group said that the Bank of Japan’s decision to tweak their yield curve control was in line with what the market had anticipated, but probably not as hawkish as previously feared.

“The range that the 10-year JGB yield is allowed to fluctuate remains unchanged, but greater flexibility has been introduced at the upper and lower bounds of the range.”

“How far yields will be allowed to trade beyond those limits is uncertain, and something which the market will no doubt try to test”, and indeed the relentless selling in 10Y JGB has confirmed just that.

“But there is a hard limit of 1% as the BOJ will offer to purchase 10-year JGBs at that level every business day through fixed-rate purchase operations (up from 0.5% previously)” he said, adding that “market reaction has been very choppy as it is not a straightforward decision to digest. The yen is still gyrating, but risk assets have risen, as the tweak was not as bad as initially feared”

A somewhat more formal take came from former Bank of Japan assistant governor Kazuo Momma, who said that the central bank is making a little adjustment to the yield-curve control “because the exchange rate weakened before the meeting and there are risks it could decline further.” In other words, instead of buying the yen outright, the central bank has decided to cripple the bond market as well.

“My sense is that the hidden motivation for the BOJ is the exchange rate,” Momma, who is currently an executive economist at Mizuho Research and Technologies said on Bloomberg Television. A strict YCC may invite an undesirable weakening of the yen going forward, he said correctly.

“This is not the first step toward monetary policy normalization. I would characterize this as a mini-technical tweak not a tweak” Momma said adding that “this is not the time for the BOJ to send a message that this is the first step to policy normalization.”

Which is correct: the BOJ will never be able to normalize, instead the best it can hope for is to contain the collapse in the yen by keeping the market guessing, although after an initial period has passed, the selling in the yen will promptly resume.

Momma concluded that the press conference will be very important on how they convey the message on conducting YCC. “Changing the band would be sending a clearer message that they’re taking steps toward policy normalization but that’s the last thing they want.“

The problem with the BOJ is that what they want, and what they get, are usually two very different things.

The US housing market has remained surprisingly resilient price-wise despite 7% mortgage rates. The Fed continues pushing interest rates to 22-year highs to curb the multi-year inflation storm. In the luxury market, bidding wars for mansions in the Hamptons hit a record high in the second quarter, even as prices and sales cooled.

About 31% of the mansions that closed in the quarter had several offers, topping the previous high of 27% set a year ago, according to Bloomberg, citing new data from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. This was for homes priced at $4.4 million and above, representing about 10% of transactions. 

Justin Agnello, an East Hampton-based agent at Douglas Elliman, explained the continued bidding wars for luxury homes are because of a “lack of inventory.” He said if buyers “bring something to the market that’s really appealing, buyers are even more hungry for it.” 

Across all homes in the seaside playground for Wall Street’s centi-millionaires and billionaires, 21% of all homes sold in the quarter were over asking prices. One example is 37 Dune Road #C in East Quogue, a five-bedroom beach house that Douglas Elliman listed for $3.25 million. The agent on the deal told the buyer to expect a $3 million sale, but after a four-way bidding war, the house sold for $3.526 million. 

Strong demand for Hamptons single-family homes and condos persists even as the overall market in the beach community cools. Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman’s data showed the median sale price of a home in the area was around $1.45 million, a 9.4% decline in the second quarter versus the same quarter last year. 

The biggest issue is inventory as buyers during Covid, fleeing NYC and other major metro areas, along with record low borrowing costs, went on a buying spree, leading to an inventory shortage. The good news is the number of listings available in the quarter rose 6.6% to 955 versus 2Q22. 

Even with mounting macroeconomic uncertainty and the highest borrowing costs in decades, there’s still demand for Hamptons residential real estate even as the median prices in the second quarter are 71% higher versus 2Q22. 

The overall theme is that the lack of available homes on the market puts upward pressure on prices. We saw that this week with the latest Case-Shiller figures for America’s 20 largest cities. 

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

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that cases of dengue fever could reach record highs this year.

Dengue rates are rising globally, with reported cases since 2000 up eight-fold to 4.2 million in 2022, a WHO official said on July 21.

In January, the WHO claimed that dengue is the world’s fastest-spreading tropical disease and alleged it could be a “pandemic threat.”

The disease was found in Sudan’s capital Khartoum for the first time on record, according to a health ministry report in March, while Europe has reported a surge in cases and Peru declared a state of emergency in most regions.

About half of the world’s population is now at risk, Raman Velayudhan, a specialist at the WHO’s control of neglected tropical diseases department, told journalists in Geneva on Friday.

Cases reported to the WHO hit an all-time high in 2019 with 5.2 million cases in 129 countries, said Mr. Velayudhan via video link.

This year the world is on track for “4 million plus” cases, depending mostly on the Asian monsoon season. Already, close to 3 million cases have been reported in the Americas, he said, adding there was concern about the southern spread to Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru.

Argentina, which has faced one of its worst outbreaks of dengue in recent years, is sterilizing mosquitoes using radiation that alters their DNA before releasing them into the wild.

“The American region certainly shows it is bad and we hope the Asian region may be able to control it,” Mr. Velayudhan said.

Officials in the European Union said that as of June 8, 2023, some 2.1 million cases have been reported around the world, with 974 deaths.

“Dengue is occurring in urban areas where it did not exist before,” Coralith Garcia, associate professor at the school of medicine at Cayetano Heredia University in Peru, told Fox News this week. The virus is on the rise in Peru because “it’s so crowded that anything can happen,” she added.

“But Peru had the highest COVID mortality rate [in] the world and now we have several patients dying of dengue, confirming that the Peruvian health system is very weak,” Ms. Garcia said.

What Is Dengue?

Dengue fever can be caused by the dengue virus 1, 2, 3, or 4, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The illness is transmitted primarily via the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which the CDC says is active during the day.

The most common symptom of dengue is a fever with nausea, vomiting, rash, aches, and pains, including eye pain, muscle pain, and bone pain. Symptoms generally last between two and seven days, the CDC says.

There is no specific medicine to treat dengue, which is sometimes called breakbone fever. The CDC notes that most cases of dengue reported in the United States occurred in people who traveled elsewhere, although the isolated spread of dengue has occurred in Arizona, Hawaii, Texas, and Florida.

Most patients who contract dengue fever recover without hospitalization, said Dr. David O. Freedman, a former professor with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Read more here…

Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

Internal communications finding that virologists did not believe the conclusions they published in a prestigious journal has triggered scientists to circulate a petition calling for Nature Medicine to retract the influential “Proximal Origins” paper that denied the possibility of a lab accident in Wuhan, China, and misled the public during the pandemic’s first crucial years. Within days, the petition garnered over 1,300 signatures and set the hashtag #RetractProximalOrigins trending on Twitter.

The torrent of virologists’ internal communications became public following a House hearing earlier this month, during which Scripps Research’s Kristian Andersen submitted false testimony about the Nature Medicine paper. Last week, The Intercept published newly revealed documents finding that Andersen and his co-author, Robert “Bob” Garry of Tulane University, both lied to Congress during the House hearing about whether they had pending federal grants controlled by Anthony Fauci that could have been used as to influence them.

The NIH is clear about its process. “Council recommends an application for funding. NIAID makes the final decision,” the agency explains. “The main NIAID advisory Council must recommend an application for funding before we can award a grant, although the Institute makes the final funding decision,” the agency goes on.

The grant wasn’t finalized until May 21, 2020. In other words, it was on Fauci’s desk at the time of the conference call. Andersen’s lab announced the funding in a press release in August 2020, nine months after he claimed it was already finalized. The press release describes it as a “new $8.9 million grant.”

Many of the virologists’ internal emails and Slack messages began leaking onto Twitter, followed by a joint Public and Racket investigation. The messages showed scientists were deeply concerned that the COVID virus could have been engineered or leaked from a Wuhan lab, even as they publicly ridiculed such thinking as a “conspiracy theory.”

In one example, Andersen wrote his colleagues on February 1, 2020, in a private Slack message, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” 

That following day, Andersen added another private message to virologists, “The main issue is that accidental lab escape is in fact highly likely – it’s not some fringe theory.”

“Someone needs to lay out the science of all this before it gets out of hand (and creates more formal investigations),” emailed Andersen’s Nature Medicine co-author a week later.

After Andersen and colleagues published the Nature Medicine piece denying the possibility of a lab accident, Andersen tweeted that the paper failed to sway conspiracy theorists, likening people who questioned a Wuhan lab accident to those who denied the moon landing.

On Friday, The Telegraph published an article on the virologists’ communications, noting that one of the Nature Medicine authors feared the “shit show” that would result if they accused China of starting the pandemic. Nature Medicine told the paper that the journal would not retract the piece, which was intended to present a “point of view” on the issue rather than being a research study.

Subscribers to The Disinformation Chronicle can read the rest here…

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

China’s top housing official has stepped up rhetoric meant to revive the housing market. It comes after the Politburo removed “the housing is not for speculation” slogan from the readout of its meeting, which increased expectations for more support for the market. Unfortunately, there’s no panacea to end the crisis quickly.

Hang Seng futures pointed to a weaker opening Friday. Strong US data spurred a dollar rally and higher US Treasury yields, which may weigh on foreign inflows to China. A Nikkei report that the Bank of Japan may discuss changing the yield-curve control policy added to uncertainties.

On the China front, the news flow continues a pattern of traders going “long on the words, short on actions.” Top housing official on Thursday urged more support, including calling for homebuyers who had paid off previous mortgages to be considered as first-time purchasers, so that they could enjoy lower mortgage rates. (The so-called “recognizing houses but not loans” policy.）

None of the talking points are entirely new. In 2022, 57 cities have adopted the “recognizing houses” policy, according to Nomura, citing data from China Real Estate Information Corp. Altogether, nearly 300 cities issued almost 600 various easing measures last year, including lowering down payments and loosening purchasing restrictions.

If that hasn’t helped prop up the market already, one can be excused for having doubt that any incremental, piecemeal measures will do the trick.

In a report published in June, Nomura’s economists, including Lu Ting, listed a few reasons why investors should lower their expectations on the housing stimulus, even though more support is likely to come.

For starters, Beijing simply has no appetite for a policy bazooka when the priority is focused on security and sustainability. So forget about another round “shantytown renovation” programs. That scheme, which offered cash compensation for homes demolished in less-developed areas, helped turn around a housing downturn in 2015-2016, but it also helped fueled a real estate bubble in lower-tier cities.

Second, some easing measures will likely increase sales of existing homes, strengthening expectations of home price declines and delaying purchases.

It’s questionable that China will meaningfully ease restrictions in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Even if it does, easing in big cities may crowd out the demand for homes in low-tier cities, which have been the driver of commodity demand and construction activity over the past decade.

Smaller cities are still suffering from the overhang of the shantytown renovations, which have pulled forward home demand. These cities are facing high leverage, falling home prices and population outflows. Coupled with a large amount of unfinished projects and the withdrawal of private developers, a sustainable property rebound there is questionable.

Finally, the capability and willingness of Chinese households to borrow and buy homes may have been significantly reduced, even in large cities, once expectations that housing prices can only go up have been shattered.

All told, an “L-shaped” recovery in housing is all one can hope for.

A recently passed Florida law, known as Senate Bill 254, now makes transgender surgeries and hormone therapies with irreversible effects illegal for minors in the state while also requiring people to use bathrooms and locker rooms according to their biological sex.  Circumventing the often cited problem of narcissistic parents using their children as political fashion accessories, the law outlines the reality that minors do not have the capacity to consent and that sex change procedures should wait until they are adults.  It also sets a standard for dozens of states across the country seeking the stem to tide of destructive biological denial associated with far left ideology. 

Of course, not everyone is happy that state governments are coming to their senses and protecting children from mutilation – Some leftist parents say they must now “flee” places like Florida in order to “keep their children safe.” 

People are fleeing Florida in a state of panic and fear. pic.twitter.com/n4PPcL8FJe

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) July 27, 2023

Political mass migrations of Americans are now commonplace with millions upon millions of people leaving blue states in particular after their authoritarian covid policies inspired anger rather than compliance. 

And perhaps this is for the best – Certain social concepts simply cannot coexist and it’s better that leftists who exploit children as props for activism not live so close to conservatives and moderates that view this practice as abhorrent.  Certainly all sides come out happier (except maybe the unfortunate children being groomed), and surely the majority of Floridians are glad to see such people go.

Former President Donald Trump and a maintenance guy at Mar-a-Lago were charged with attempting to delete surveillance footage.

In a superseding indictment filed on Thursday, Trump and the worker charged under the Espionage Act, bringing the total number of counts Trump faces to 42.

It accuses Trump of acting with Carlos de Oliveira, the property manager of the hotel, and Trump’s other co-defendant Walt Nauta, with trying to delete the footage.

The indictment notes efforts from de Oliveira, 56, to determine how long security footage was stored on the Mar-a-Lago system. It says he later told another Mar-a-Lago employee that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted.”

The indictment also described de Oliveira and Nauta organizing their plans secretly, apparently walking among the bushes around the IT office where the security footage was managed. –The Hill

Meanwhile the president of a Ukrainian gas company allegedly paid the current US president $5 million dollars in connection with a quid pro-quo in which a prosecutor investigating said company – which employed the president’s son for $80k/month, was fired. Said Ukrainian oligarch also made several recordings of said shady dealings as an ‘insurance’ policy, for which no special counsel has been appointed.

Anyway…

De Oliveira has been summoned to appear in a Miami courthouse on Monday, where he’ll face charges of lying to investigators about allegedly moving boxes at the property, where he says he “never saw anything.”

The indictment also adds a thirty-second document to the tally for which Trump is facing charges of violating the Espionage Act, a top secret document on a presentation about military activity in a foreign country.

The superseding indictment comes as a Washington grand jury met in another special counsel probe into Trump’s efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. -The Hill

Trump responded following the new indictment, with his campaign calling it “nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him.”

“Deranged Jack Smith knows that they have no case and is casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt and to get someone other than Donald Trump to run against Crooked Joe Biden,” the statement continues.