Earth’s surface is covered by 71% water, connecting every corner of the world, so it’s no surprise that 80% of global trade is carried by ship. But how does it all work?

This is part one of Visual Capitalist’s The Shipping Industry: Plotting a Course for the Future, a two-part series for their sponsor Seaspan Corporation about the current state and future of global maritime trade.

A Bird’s Eye View of Shipping

The shipping industry provides low-cost transportation options for a wide variety of goods and products, from raw materials to finished consumer products. Briefly, the process goes something like this:

1. Order received at overseas factory

2. Order placed in 20-foot container and transported to port

3. Cargo loaded onto a ship

4. Cargo crosses the ocean

5. Cargo arrives at destination

6. Cargo is offloaded

7. Cargo clears customs and makes its way to the customer

In 2022, nearly 11 billion tons of goods took a similar journey, according to data collected by the United Nations in their annual Review of Maritime Transport.

Now that we have some idea of how the process works, let’s take a closer look at some of the pieces that keep world trade flowing, starting with the global shipping fleet.

From Tanker to Titan

The first thing to know about the fleet is that it’s big. In 2022, it numbered 102,899 ships over 100 gross tons, including tankers, bulk transports, and containerships. And it’s growing, and not just in sheer numbers. 

Containerships in particular have been steadily growing in size since a converted WWII T2 tanker made history in 1956 by strapping 58 containers to its deck, as ship owners chased greater economies of scale. Today’s containerships can carry upwards of 20,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). 

Too Many Ships, Not Enough Cargo?

Ship-breaking on the other hand, the process of disassembling ships for parts and raw materials, has stalled. 

Over 2021 and the first three quarters of 2022, the number of containership breakdowns plummeted. With more newbuilds on the way and the World Trade Organization revising global trade growth projections downwards, there might not be enough containers to go around.

Port Volumes Are Up, but So Is Performance

And that could be good news for shipping prices, which hit record highs during the supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

At the beginning of 2022, the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index, which tracks ocean freight charges on a collection of routes, hit a record 5109.6, nearly five times the pre-pandemic average. 

Prices have since returned to Earth, as ports worked to clear their backlogs. Ports processed 857 million TEUs in 2021, up 7% year-over-year. The latest Container Port Performance Index, which tracks total hours per ship call, showed that 172 ports improved their scores in 2022.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, however, especially for North American ports. The bottom three ports on the Index were Long Beach, CA; Vancouver, BC; and Savannah, GA.

All I Ask Is a Tall Ship and a Star to Steer Her By

A lot has changed since 1902, when John Masefield wrote that oft-quoted line to describe the call of the sea. For example, the center of global trade has shifted eastward to Asia, where 9 of the 10 busiest container ports are located.

Seaspan, a worldwide leader in independent management and ownership, is getting ready for the next era of shipping by adding 58 new state-of-the-art vessels over this year and next.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, The Shipping Industry: Plotting a Course for the Future, where we look at how shipping companies like Seaspan are preparing for a low-carbon future.

Authored by Kanekoa The Great via Kanekoa News (emphasis ours),

In a groundbreaking revelation, it has come to light that Dr. Peter Hotez, an esteemed vaccine researcher, has been entangled in a web of funding, collaboration, and research with Chinese military scientists potentially involved in the development of COVID-19. The intricate tale weaves together key Chinese military virologists and culminates in the smoking gun evidence surrounding COVID-19’s notorious furin cleavage site.

At the center of this narrative lies Dr. Hotez, a distinguished professor at Baylor College of Medicine, who secured a substantial research grant (R01AI098775) from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) led by Dr. Anthony Fauci. This grant, amounting to over $1 million per year, supports Dr. Hotez’s project titled “RBD Recombinant Protein-Based SARS Vaccine for Biodefense,” with Dr. Shibo Jiang listed as a Principal Investigator.

Dr. Shibo Jiang, a professor at Fudan University, boasts an impressive academic background. After completing his Master’s degree from the People’s Liberation Army’s Guangzhou First Military Medical University (广州第一军医大学) and his Medical Doctor degree from Xi’an Fourth Military Medical University (西安第四军医大学微), he pursued postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in New York from 1987 to 1990.

Subsequently, he held various positions at the New York Blood Center’s Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute until 2010, including Head of the Viral Immunology Laboratory. Since then, he has served as a professor at Fudan University’s Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology in Shanghai, China.

During his time in the United States, Dr. Shibo Jiang also acted as a visiting professor at several prestigious People’s Liberation Army (PLA) universities, including the First and Fourth Military Medical University, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), and Southern Medical University (formerly known as the First Military Medical University). Despite his collaboration with the Chinese military, he received research grants totaling over $20 million from NIAID under Dr. Fauci’s leadership between 1997 and 2016.

Professor Jiang, a member of China’s renowned Thousand Talents Plan, actively collaborated with PLA scientists on numerous scientific papers supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the First Military Medical University, and the AMMS. However, concerns have been raised regarding the nature of these collaborations, as a 2020 FBI report indicates that such talent recruitment plans “usually involve undisclosed and illegal transfers of information, technology, or intellectual property detrimental to U.S. institutions.”

Together with Dr. Zhou Yusen, a distinguished PLA virologist and fellow AMMS alumnus, Professor Jiang co-invented multiple U.S. patents and published numerous scientific papers on SARS and MERS coronaviruses, often with the support of NIAID funds. Dr. Yusen, the former director of the PLA’s AMMS Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, filed the world’s first patent application for a COVID-19 vaccine in China on February 24, 2020, just a month after the country acknowledged human-to-human transmission.

Why do five publications funded by Dr. Peter Hotez’s R01AI098775 grant list Dr. Zhou Yusen as a co-author?

“Dr. Peter Hotez was deeply enmeshed with Chinese military scientists at the Wuhan lab. Read this article. Just… wow.”

–@RobertKennedyJr https://t.co/z1oR9EyOgh pic.twitter.com/aA3cIdrsCU

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 27, 2023

This discovery raises suspicions that the Chinese military may have been working on a vaccine even before officially notifying the World Health Organization about the outbreak.

Interestingly, concerns surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 virus intensify when examining the furin cleavage site. Dr. Richard Ebright, a respected molecular biologist, and laboratory director, highlights the unique nature of the furin cleavage, stating that:

“SARS-CoV-2 is the only member of the SARS-related betacoronavirus group that contains a furin cleavage site. The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site exhibits unusual codon usage, and the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site is located at a position that previously has been used to engineer coronaviruses having enhanced infectivity.”

Further compounding the intrigue, Dr. David Baltimore, a renowned US virologist and co-discoverer of reverse transcriptase, expresses his belief that the furin cleavage indicates a laboratory origin for the virus, stating, “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.”

With an esteemed career, a Nobel Prize, and extensive scientific expertise, Dr. Baltimore’s observations carry significant weight. Of additional concern is Professor Jiang’s expertise in inserting furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.

Moreover, Professor Jiang and Dr. Lanying Du, another prominent Chinese virologist funded by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Hotez’s R01AI098775 grant, have collaborated on various scientific papers with the PLA’s AMMS and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The untimely death of Dr. Yusen, who fell from the roof of the Wuhan Institute of Virology within three months of filing the patent, further fuels suspicions surrounding the origins of COVID-19.

Dr. Du, the widow of Dr. Yusen, published at the PLA’s AMMS before migrating to the United States, where she joined Professor Jiang at the New York Blood Center’s Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute. Remarkably, a U.S. Senate report reveals that the data referenced in Dr. Yusen’s patent could not have been generated as quickly as claimed, suggesting that he and his team may have started developing a COVID vaccine as early as November 2019.

Furthermore, at least five publications funded by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Hotez’s grant list Dr. Zhou Yusen, a People’s Liberation Army officer central to the COVID-19 origin controversy at the Wuhan lab, as a co-author. These findings raise concerns about the connections between Dr. Fauci, Dr. Hotez, Dr. Jiang, Dr. Du, Dr. Yusen, and the Chinese military scientists potentially involved in the origin of COVID-19.

Additionally, both Professor Jiang and Dr. Du have published scientific research for the AMMS, which was added to the U.S. government’s Foreign Entity Blacklist in 2021 due to its use of “biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses.” Dr. Hotez’s involvement in this complex situation becomes evident when examining his subcontracted funding for these scientists connected to the People’s Liberation Army and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, particularly in the field of artificially inserting furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.

During a February 2021 interview, Dr. Hotez discussed their collaboration, stating, “About ten years ago, we got approached by a group at the New York Blood Center led by Shibo Jiang and Lanying Du that had a pretty good idea for coronavirus vaccines.

Notably, in 2013, Professor Jiang and Dr. Du, along with their Chinese military colleagues, demonstrated the artificial insertion of a furin cleavage site similar to the one found in the COVID-19 virus. This study was funded by the Chinese government and a private Chinese biotech company, while Professor Jiang and Dr. Lanying also received funding from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Hotez.

A study published by Dr. Shibo Jiang, Dr. Lanying Du, Dr. Shi Zhengli, and Dr. Ralph Baric, an American scientist considered a pioneer in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, demonstrated the introduction of a human protease cleavage site into the spike protein of coronaviruses, enabling cross-species transmission to humans. Notably, this aligns precisely with the furin cleavage site found in the S1/S2 junction of SARS-CoV-2.

While Dr. Hotez criticizes congressional hearings on the origins of COVID-19, stating that they are “inviting fringe elements to testify and promote outlandish conspiracy theories,” even warning that investigation will “undermine the fabric of science in America,” it is crucial to examine the mounting connections between Dr. Hotez, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Jiang, Dr. Du, and Dr. Yusen with Chinese military scientists, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the suspicious furin cleavage site. This evidence demands a thorough investigation to uncover the truth about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, a truth that holds profound implications for people worldwide.

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After self-destructing in the name of signaling virtue, Bud Light is looking at a permanent loss of nearly 25% of its business, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Mitch Collett in a recent Barron‘s article.

“We believe recent underperformance implies a permanent reduction in ABI’s U.S. business,” writes Collett, referring to Anheuser-Busch InBev, the parent company of Bud Light. “Our proprietary survey data suggests these headwinds are likely to fade even if we do not expect the U.S. business ever to fully recover from its current challenges.”

Data gathered by Deutsche Bank suggests that 24% of Bud Light consumers no longer purchase the brand, while another 18% are buying less of it.

“Taken together, our survey data shows that Bud Light as a brand faces significant challenges—particularly with older consumers. However, we believe the forward-looking data sets imply that the challenges will at least partially fade,” wrote Collett, who actually upgraded shares of AB InBev to “buy” from “hold,” with a new price target of $65.92, up from $64.83.

That said, another analyst, Evercore’s Robert Ottenstein, said Bud Light will “permanently lose” between 15 and 20% of its volume, after which “declines will resume at about the average rate of the prior 10 years.”

“Budweiser will also see a similar pattern, with consumers lost in 2022 not coming back,” he continued in a note highlighted by Yahoo Finance in which quotes Collett as saying Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch are “at the end of the tunnel” of the controversy.

In May, HSBC downgraded the stock to “hold” over its “Bud Light crisis,” adding that there may be “deeper problems” at the company.

“Is ABI’s leadership getting the brand culture transformation right? It’s mixed,” he said. “At Ambev, we think the answer is ‘yes’; in the U.S., we think it’s ‘no.’ The way this Bud Light crisis came about a month ago, management’s response to it and the loss of unprecedented volume and brand relevance raises many questions.”

More via the Epoch Times;

Since its ill-fated promotional exercise in early April with Mulvaney, a transgender TikTok influencer, Bud Light has seen its weekly sales decline. Recent data from Bump Williams Consulting and Nielsen IQ show that for the week ending on June 10, Bud Light’s year-over-year sales have declined by 26.8 percent, representing the worst week so far.

And for the month of May, Constellation Brands-owned Modelo Especial was the No. 1-selling brand in the United States, outpacing Bud Light, which fell to No. 2, industry data show.

Bump Williams, chief of the eponymous consulting company, told the New York Post on June 21: “This was a tough week for Bud Light and other beer brands” that are owned by Anheuser-Busch, including Budweiser. Sales of Budweiser were down by 10 percent, Natural Light was down by 2.3 percent, and Michelob Ultra was down by 2.4 percent.

Anheuser-Busch’s CEO, Michel Doukeris, told investors last month that he believes that online “misinformation” was the primary reason for the sales numbers, and he asserted that it was just “one can” that was produced with Mulvaney’s face on it and appeared to deny that there was a partnership. However, Mulvaney posted on social media that there was a partnership.

The can drew the ire of multiple celebrities and conservative influencers on Twitter. Some suggested that consumers boycott the brand in a bid to send a message to corporations who may be pursuing a “woke” leftist agenda.

An executive with Anheuser-Busch recently spoke out about the boycott as he got an award during the Cannes Lions International Festival in southern France.

“It’s tough to see the controversial and divisive debates that have been happening in the U.S. in the last couple of weeks involving lots of brands and companies, including and especially Bud Light,” Anheuser-Busch’s global chief marketing officer, Marcel Marcondes, told the Cannes Lions International Festival, according to an Ad Age report. “It’s tough exactly because what we do is all about bringing people together.”

Marketing Pivot

With summer officially starting last week, Bud Light pivoted and launched a new promotional campaign. But that, too, was derided on social media, with some demanding that the company apologize for its promotional efforts with Mulvaney.

Responding to the latest ad, podcast host Liz Wheeler wrote on Twitter that the company was trying to whitewash the past two months of controversy.

“None of this is funny until & unless you apologize for using Dylan Mulvaney—a man pretending to be a woman—as your spokesperson. It’s insulting that you think an ad about summer will make us forget our principles. The boycott continues,” she wrote in a post.

Anheuser-Busch didn’t respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment by press time.

Authored by Jackson Elliott via The Epoch Times,

New Hampshire police arrested transgender state representative Stacie-Marie Laughton for distributing child sex abuse images.

A mug shot of Stacie-Marie Laughton, a transgender-identifying man. (Courtesy of Nausha, New Hampshire’s police department)

Laughton, a Democrat, was America’s first transgender state representative. Born male, he went through sex change procedures to resemble a woman.

This incident isn’t Laughton’s first brush with the law. Police arrested Laughton on Nov. 12, accusing him of violating a court order prohibiting him from posting on social media about another individual. According to court documents, prosecutors also seek to impose a suspended sentence of up to nine months he was given last year.

In that case, police accused Laughton of texting 911 “for no emergency or police related matter” a dozen times between May and July 2021. Prosecutors dropped nine of the 12 charges. On the others, courts ordered him to perform community service, participate in a peer support program and remain on good behavior.

A transgender flag sits on the grass outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on May 22, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

In 2012, Laughton, a New Hampshire state-level representative, was the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature.

But he never took his seat, resigning after a prior felony conviction raised questions about his legal ability to serve.

New Hampshire politicians can only run for office after “final discharge” from prison. When Republicans noted that Laughton was still outside prison only on condition of good behavior, he resigned.

In 2020, Laughton ran for office as a state representative and won. He won again in 2022.

But at the time of his most recent arrest, Laughton wasn’t in office in his third Hillsborough district. He resigned in December 2022 after facing stalking charges.

The Epoch Times reached out to Laughton for comment but received none by publication time.

On the Nausha, New Hampshire, police records website, the press release describing his arrest wasn’t available and displayed an error message.

An officer told The Epoch Times that the website had been hacked and had problems displaying criminal charges.

The police supplied records that referred to Laughton with female pronouns as they charged him with four counts of child pornography distribution.

“On Tuesday, June 20, 2023, Officers responded to a local facility for a juvenile matter. They spoke with reporting parties that indicated Laughton distributed sexually explicit images of children,” the police report reads.

Daycare Worker Arrested

The police also sent The Epoch Times a press release on the arrest of 38-year-old Lindsay Groves on child pornography charges.

“Due to the nature of the investigation members of the Homeland Security Investigations were notified,” the police press release reads.

Groves is a Hudson, New Hampshire, resident.

According to a press release by the Massachusetts Attorney General, authorities arrested Groves for taking sexually explicit pictures of children at Creative Minds, a daycare in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts.

Groves, a daycare employee, sent these pictures to “an individual with whom she was previously in an intimate relationship,” according to the press release. However, the press release never names this individual.

A mug shot of Lindsay Groves. (Courtesy of Nausha, New Hampshire’s police department)

“Due to Groves’s case now being investigated federally, I cannot comment on the connection between the two cases,” Sergeant John Cinelli of the Nashua Police Department told The Epoch Times.

However, New Hampshire city of Nashua police public information officer Sgt. John Cinelli told The Union Leader that Laughton’s arrest stemmed from the same investigation that led to Grove’s arrest.

In office, Laughton sponsored and cosponsored a range of bills that included legalizing marijuana, decriminalizing psychedelic mushrooms, and prohibiting anti-union activities by employers.

Along with Democrats Rep. David Cote and Rep. Fred Davis, Laughton won office in 2022 in his three-seat district with 26.4 percent of the vote.

Voters also chose Laughton in the 2012 state election and 2020 state election.

“Democrats in the State House will always work to protect a women’s (sic) right to an abortion, push to adopt domestic renewable energy so we can lower energy costs and fight to keep public money in public schools so every student in New Hampshire has the opportunity succeed,” Laughton’s House Democrats campaign page reads.

From Prison to Preaching

Recently, Laughton was ordained as a minister, according to his YouTube page.

GetOrdained.org shows Laughton affiliated with Buddhism, Methodism, New Age, Oneness Pentecostalism, Pentecostalism, Protestantism, Rastafarianism, Spiritualism, Tibetan Buddhism, Unitarian Universalism, and Universal Life Church.

It’s not clear what Laughton’s position on child transgenderism is. On his Facebook page, he links to a video from Caitlyn Jenner, a man who says he is a woman.

In the video, Jenner condemns the “radical rainbow mafia.”

“Government’s basically trying to take over our children,” Jenner said. “This is an issue between the parents, God, and their doctor.”

Caitlyn Jenner arrives at the Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Viewing Party on Sunday, in West Hollywood, Calif., on March 27, 2022. (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)

Experts and activists have voiced concern over men who enjoy dressing as women receiving access to children.

Jon Uhler, a therapist who treats sex offenders, said that in his experience if a man feels comfortable performing sexual dance in a skimpy women’s outfit for children, he’s likely extremely sexually deviant and “poses a significant risk to women and children.”

Some transgender-identifying men experience autogynephilia, a feeling of sexual arousal by thinking of themselves as female.

According to government surveys, nearly 3 percent of men experience this feeling, and increasing numbers of these men identify as transgender.

“Autogynephilia exemplifies an unusual paraphilic category called ‘erotic target identity inversions’, in which men desire to impersonate or turn their bodies into facsimiles of the persons or things to which they are sexually attracted.”

Democratic challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face voters tonight during a live town hall on NewsNation at 9pmET on affiliated broadcast television stations (due to be replay open on that site later in the evening).

Having flexed his muscles during the week, now is his turn to flex his policy mind – something he has been doing on various podcasts (mostly more right-leaning since the establishment left has done their best to discredit Kennedy at every stop).

He will take questions in front of a live audience comprised of voters in partnership with the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. Voters in the key states of South Carolina and New Hampshire can also question the candidate.

Kennedy’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination has garnered support from as many as 20% of Democrats, but Republicans viewed him more favorably at 40%, according to recent reports.

Polling this month from Quinnipiac University found that among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, 70% support Biden, 17% support Kennedy, and 8% support Marianne Williamson.

“This is a moment where RFK Jr., who first got a lot of attention for having a famous name, and then got a lot of attention for some pretty wild positions that he has taken on a number of issues – including vaccines, including the war in Ukraine, including the CIA – and he’s generated a lot of buzz. This is the moment where he is going to face, what I would submit, is probably the toughest test of his candidacy so far, which is answering real voter’s real, practical questions about his candidacy and doing it in front of a national television audience,” NewsNation Political Editor Chris Stirewalt told KOIN 6 News.

As Peter Barry Chowka notes, Kennedy has been attacked and largely shunned by the mainstream media but in at least a half dozen live interviews on FOX News, including the one with Tucker Carlson, he has expressed a message that suggests he could potentially draw support from across the political spectrum.

Kennedy, who declared his candidacy in April, is one of two Democrats (the other is self-help author Marianne Williamson) to challenge President Joe Biden for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

His comments, including describing the aim of his campaign as “end[ing] the corrupt merger of state and corporate power,” might resonate with a variety of constituencies.

Why is RFK Jr on NewsNation and not on a left-leaning mainstream media outlet?

Simple – here’s ‘fake-dossier-peddling’ Jake Tapper explaining that Kennedy should not have a platform its because of his “dangerous ideas”.

Here’s one colleague’s (unedited) take (that we thought worth sharing) on Tapper’s (and likely all of mainstream media’s) attitude and self-immolation:

“If RFK’s ideas are dangerous a real journalist would be able to draw attention to what RFK has wrong.  Jake Tapper just admitted he isn’t a journalist, and CNN does NOT disseminate objective information.

The real threat to democracy is Jake Tapper failing to do his basic job. Tappers job isn’t to preemptively draw conclusions about presidential candidates.

I don’t give a fuck what Tapper thinks, his job is objective arbitrator. If he wants to work on behalf of the “re-elect” Biden campaign he should have to declare that and we can stop pretending CNN does “news”.“

As AmericanThinker’s Thomas Lifson noted:

I think NewsNation is very smart to feature RFK, Jr. as it tries to establish itself as a full-fledged rival to CNNMSNBCFOXNEWSMAX.

RFK, Jr. already has a fan base that will want to tune in and see him, and I suspect most have never watched NewsNation.

They may like what they see and come back now that they have searched for and found it on their cable/satellite/streaming feed.

NewsNation is trying to establish itself in the middle of the political spectrum, accessible to both sides. Featuring RFK, Jr. is a good way to highlight that orientation.

Kennedy is also catching up to Newsom in the betting markets…

Where Kennedy stands on key issues…

(via NewsNationNow.com)

Vaccines

Kennedy pushes back against critics that say he has anti-vaccine views.

During a June 23 town hall hosted by WMUR-TV, Kennedy said if he were president, he would mandate pre-licensing safety trials for vaccines and “allow parents to make of their minds about whether they want to use vaccines for their children.”

“What I’ve said is I’m pro-science and pro-safety and we ought to subject vaccines…to at least the kind of rigorous placebo-controlled trials that are mandated for every other medicine,” Kennedy told WMUR.

Vaccines are tested extensively by manufacturers before the FDA issues a license.

A vaccine being developed for distribution in the United States goes through two separate research phases before an initial three phases of clinical trials, according to the Food And Drug Administration. Those trials test the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine. By the time it reaches the third phase of initial clinical trials, the vaccine is generally given to thousands of people, and researchers compare those who received the vaccine against those who received a placebo.

In some cases, the FDA requires additional post-market studies or clinical trials for continued research.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says immunization is the best protection against certain illnesses. Annually, tens of thousands of people get sick from diseased that could be prevented by vaccines.

Foreign Policy

Kennedy has made peace a priority when it comes to foreign policy, promising to “end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know what’s happening.”

He’s specifically vowed to end the war in Ukraine. His plan to stop the fighting includes offering to withdraw U.S. troops and missiles from Russia’s borders and convince Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.

“UN peacekeepers will guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions,” Kennedy said on his campaign website. “We will put an end to this war.”

Border

Kennedy visited the nation’s southern border earlier this month, calling it a “dystopian nightmare.”

The presidential candidate described seeing hundreds of people cross the border – a seemingly “hopeless” situation he said was “created by the federal government, that local people are being forced to hold the bag on.”

“It’s extraordinary,” Kennedy told NewsNation. “It’s kind of the best part of America and the worst part at the same time.”

During WMUR’s town hall, Kennedy said he’s “not a big fan of Trump” or his border wall. After speaking with officers patrolling the border, however, he said physical barriers are necessary in some areas with high-density populations and advocated doing more to keep migrants and U.S. citizens safe from cartels.  

Economy

Kennedy has said he will enact policies that favor “small and medium businesses” and break up “too-big-to-fail” banks and monopolies.

“When crisis strikes, bail out the homeowners, debtors, and small business owners instead,” Kennedy said on his campaign site.

He also believes healthcare is a key economic issue, and has vowed to make existing services available to all, including “alternative and holistic therapies that have been marginalized in a pharma-dominated system.”

One wonders just how long MSM can continue ignoring RFK Jr?

Authored by Michael Chamberlain via RealClear Wire,

“Disinformation and misinformation is the bona fide enemy of public health,” Dr. Anthony Fauci stated in a recent interview. But he also said, “We should embrace differences in opinion.”  

What if misinformation is coming from the public health officials themselves? And lately, government has not seemed to embrace differences in opinion, preferring instead to smother contrary opinions. The resulting erosion of trust in the officials in charge – less than half of Americans trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on COVID – could be more damaging than any “misinformation” found on social media. 

Far too often in recent years, when science gets in the way of the government’s agenda, science is disregarded, ignored, or undermined. The CDC, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have appeared to make policy decisions and public representations inconsistent with science — including their own science.  

Science is undermined when scientists and the institutions that apply science do not follow the findings of unbiased studies. And science is undermined when those institutions do not make a good faith effort to collect data and let the data dictate a conclusion. When “science” gets tunnel vision for a result, it ceases to be science. 

The Biden administration came into office promising to restore science as the driver of policy. Led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the administration adopted strict scientific integrity standards at federal agencies. So far, though, the results don’t comport with the rhetoric. 

After documenting a number of alleged violations of these standards, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed a scientific integrity complaint with OSTP. The complaint was based on our tracking of numerous instances of the government either ignoring scientific findings, manipulating data, or misrepresenting data to make the science conform to policy objectives.  

Each example is eye-opening. In one case, the CDC claimed that vaccinations offer higher protection from Covid-19 than a previous infection. This talking point, however, was based on data cherry-picked from a single state within a fifty-state study. So, the CDC’s talking points were possibly taken from an outlier, not the entire dataset. Worse, the cited study did not even make a comparison between those with immunity solely from vaccination and those with immunity from prior infection, as the CDC’s public statements claimed. Yet high-ranking officials at the CDC and other components of the Department of Health and Human Services touted these misrepresentations unequivocally.  

It’s not just misrepresentations to the public. Actual policy decisions undermined science. In August 2022, the CDC endorsed COVID-19 vaccinations for children aged six months to four years, saying that a “lower risk of symptomatic Covid-19 was observed with vaccination compared to placebo.” But it also noted that severe adverse events were “more common in vaccine recipients.” To make matters worse, the claim that vaccinated children were at lower risk of showing symptoms was based upon bad science. “You can inject [children] with it or squirt it in their face, and you’ll get the same benefit,” one high-level CDC official declared. So, the CDC made this recommendation without proof of its efficacy, while acknowledging that the children were at heightened risk of severe adverse events.

The prioritization of policy agendas over science is not isolated to the pandemic. Protect the Public’s Trust’s research indicates that the FDA appears to have breached its obligation to uphold scientific integrity in its decision-making about vaping. We believe that the FDA knowingly disseminated scientifically unfounded statements about vaping products that were contrary to the FDA’s own research. Also ignoring its own research, and without proper scientific justification, the FDA overruled its own scientists’ recommendations to authorize menthol vapes.  

The Biden administration often decries “misinformation” about anything contradicting its own narratives, but it appears to be one of the worst purveyors of misinformation. Citizens can’t trust a government that misrepresents the results of studies, or prevents the collection of, or even intentionally hides, data. The American public should expect that its science-based institutions and most prominent spokesmen follow the science and use the scientific method in reaching policy decisions. Unless these institutions and their leadership change course, public trust will continue to plummet.

On Saturday, a French fighter jet intercepted a small aircraft in southeast France. As the jet neared, the pilot began dumping bags of suspected cocaine from the plane, according to Agence France-Presse. 

The single-seater tourist plane flew in the remote Ardèche region when the pilot breached highly restricted airspace around a nuclear power plant. AFP said the French Air Force dispatched a Dassault Rafale to intercept the small aircraft that was “judged to be maneuvering suspiciously.” 

A military spokesperson said the fighter pilot “witnessed very erratic behavior in the cockpit (of the tourist plane), real agitation.” Over a few minutes, what happened next is like a scene from Tom Cruise’s film “American Made” when the actor portrayed cocaine smuggler Barry Seal. 

The fighter pilot said the man opened the plane door and tossed out packages. Investigators found 15 packages on the ground containing about 66 pounds (or 30kg) of ‘white power.’  

AFP said investigators are analyzing the white powder, and we’re sure the suspected trafficker, a Polish national with a past drugs offense, wasn’t dangerously flying around with baby powder…

Separately, the latest global cocaine trends were released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on Monday. They found a “prolonged surge in both supply and demand of cocaine, which is now being felt across the globe and is likely to spur the development of new markets beyond the traditional confines.” 

That may be why French authorities seized a record 156.7 tons of drugs last year. As for the ‘Polish’ version of Barry Seal… We can only imagine.

Here’s a clip from American Made.  

Authored by Aaron White via RealClear Wire,

If political rhetoric was subject to the same rigid labeling standards American manufacturers are expected to meet, liberals would have to call themselves something else.

The term was undoubtedly test-marketed to evoke the image of someone more broadminded and generally more tolerant of others’ points of view.

Does that describe any leftist you know?

When liberals claim to prize diversity above virtually any other commodity, they’re referring only to differences in things that don’t matter and, by their own admission, human beings are born to be. Things like race, gender and sexual orientation.

Opinions and actions, on the other hand, are fair game for the most soul-crushing forms of discrimination.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, you haven’t ventured onto a college campus or spent time on social media platforms, whose sole purpose is to quash viewpoints with which those in power disagree.

Less obvious to the naked eye, unfortunately, is perhaps the single-largest funding source for this toxic ideology — organized labor in general and government employee unions in particular.

Because the whole idea of collective bargaining is based on excusing a relative handful of union members from the forces of supply and demand with which unorganized workers must contend, it only follows that union leaders would be suspicious, at best, of America’s market-driven economy. But at least those representing workers in the private sector understand their demands must be tempered by the employer’s need to earn profits.

Government employee unions, however, recognize no such constraints.

Members of groups like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and teachers’ unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are paid by tax dollars funneled through public employees’ paychecks. Consequently, leaders of their unions have a vested interest in growing the size and scope of government, regardless of how that impacts the rest of us.

Unlike their peers in the real world, government union leaders know they aren’t dependent on the goodwill of millions of consumers, so they generally don’t care about whether their membership agrees with their stances. And if they don’t agree, they rely on bullying strategies to stop them from leaving and the overall size of government growing. So they focus on working with greedy politicians who can raise the taxes needed to advance a liberal agenda that has nothing whatsoever to do with workers’ pay or working conditions.

For example:

• At the height of the COVID pandemic, leaders of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) demanded the defunding of law enforcement and universal Medicare in return for returning to the classroom;
• The NEA used its 2020-21 annual conference to debate a pair of resolutions expressing the group’s public support for Palestinian statehood and condemn Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians;
• AFT President Randi Weingarten has used her union to wage a massive assault on the Second Amendment — including outright weapon confiscation — saying the U.S. must follow “what other great democracies” have done to ban guns;
• Under President Mary Kay Henry, the SEIU in 2022 partnered with the Green New Deal Network for a series of protests to present a united front on climate legislation as they urged Congress to pass President Biden’s bloated “Build Back Better” proposal before the midterms; and,
• Declaring that “racial, social and economic equality are top priorities for AFSCME,” the union in 2018 adopted Resolution 51, calling for, among many things, “bias training, which helps identify built-in prejudices.”

The Left has long accused conservative political candidates and causes of being funded by huge, faceless corporate interests — a notion thoroughly invalidated, incidentally, via such companies Anheuser-Busch, Target and Disney, whose recent missteps had nothing to do with profits and everything to do with the far-Left ideologies of their leaders.

But even if it were true that Wall Street uniformly skewed right while unions backed the Left, there’s an important distinction: However much the Kochs or the Waltons have spent on conservative legislation, at least it’s their money. Unions, meanwhile, confiscate billions of dues dollars every year from the paychecks of millions of government employees who think it’s being spent on representation and use it to underwrite a radical, leftist ideology perhaps half their members don’t even share. 

In theory, this should no longer be the case. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Janus v. AFSCME, affirmed that union membership and dues and/or agency fees could no longer be made mandatory, as they had been for public employees in nearly half the country for generations. But unions responded by adopting a laundry list of strategies intended to blunt the court’s unambiguous intent — everything from suppressing information about the ruling to filing lawsuits against members seeking to opt out of union affiliation and even forging workers’ names on membership documents.

Since Janus, government employee unions have lost nearly 800,000 members, taking with them billions in dues revenue that can never again be used to fund a machine that suppresses the rights of its own members in order to advance policies that rob the rest of us our God-given freedoms.

But they’re still kicking.

The struggle to expose labor’s unsavory role in the process is being waged battle by battle, but the war isn’t yet won.

Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation, a national public policy watchdog focusing on government employee unions. His first book, “Freedom is the Foundation,” was released this month.

Authored by Matt Lamb via The College Fix,

The 2022-23 school year saw 13 hate crime hoaxes and six questionable claims, according to a College Fix analysis.

Sports competitions continue to oddly be a source for race hoaxes, despite the omnipresence of phones that can capture alleged racial slurs.

Pennsylvania State University fans found themselves falsely accused of using racial slurs against Rutgers University’s men’s basketball team. “Further investigation into reported fan behavior at the Penn State versus Rutgers basketball game on [Feb. 26] has found that no apparent racial slurs were used by Penn State fans,” the university announced.

By now, it should be clear that claims of racial slurs at sports games are likely not true.

The hoax that attracted the most attention of them all began in August, when Duke University volleyball player Rachel Richardson claimed that someone at a game against Brigham Young University kept yelling the n-word at her. This is actually two hate crime hoaxes, because her godmother also claimed that someone yelled the word every single time the black volleyball player went to serve.

The hoax led the University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach to cancel a game against BYU, even after the hoax had been debunked. The University of Pacific canceled its game against BYU after the debunked hoax as well.

August was a busy time for hate crime hoaxes, as that is when a black female in a “head scarf” named Zaynab Bintabdul-Hadijakien was charged for an attack on the Black Cultural Center. UVA officials would not identify the suspect, and even a police report redacted her race, but The Fix dug around and found out she is a black female.

Even when a black Democrat at Harvard University stood accused of yelling a “homophobic slur” at a peer, LGBT students on campus blamed the pro-life club. This did not appear to be part of a rhetorical exercise, like when the president of MIT’s student government perpetrated two campus hate-crime hoaxes, hanging posters and chalking slurs against LGBTQ people, Latinos and other “marginalized communities,” to protest free speech.

He was not the only LGBT person who left slurs for others in his tribe. For example, a “non-binary” University of Connecticut student found “homophobic language” on a dorm room door – but the culprits were other LGBTQ students.

Other race hoaxes this school year include: the juvenile allegedly behind the bomb threats against historically black colleges and universities, a black man who trashed the University of Florida’s Institute for Black Culture sign, and the claim that white students surrounded a black female student at Sam Houston State University and poured water on her.

The university told The Fix in September 2022 that police were “unable to verify” the claim.

Race hoaxes are trickling down to the high school level as well, including the “White Power” graffiti left by Hispanic gangs at an Idaho high school and the two black students who circulated a “racist anti-Black caricature”at a high school in Sacramento, a common place for hate crime hoaxes.

Not confirmed, but seems questionable

The school year also saw questionable claims of hate crimes which were never confirmed or disproven.

Most recently, The Fix reported that Eastern Washington University police closed an investigation into the n-word written on a mirror in a dance studio on campus. The Black Student Union reported finding the word after class.

LGBT individuals at Harvard University claimed they received an email, echoing the language used by hoax perpetrator Jussie Smollett, that Cambridge was “MAGA Country.” Subsequent reporting by The Fix noted that the university quietly closed the investigation without telling anyone.

Similarly, American University would not divulge the race of the suspect who wrote “Black people suck.”

Black students at Grinnell College in Iowa claimed there had been “14 vehicles” vandalized, though students never reported it to the local police department. Campus safety was informed, however.

However, sometimes hate crimes, or at least hateful acts between two races or religions, do occur.

A black individual and two white friends wrote a racial slur on a black student’s dorm, although the police never charged anyone with a hate crime. Alston Willis was charged with harassment while the other individuals were given a warning for trespassing.

In a more serious crime, three black teens were charged with misdemeanor battery charges for assaulting a Chinese University of Wisconsin Madison student.

Finally, law enforcement closed an investigation into a racist letter allegedly sent to a University of Cincinnati Professor Antar Tichavakunda after he refused to answer questions from the police.

The scholar claimed he received a letter which advocated for America to be “ethnically cleansed” and claimed black people shouldn’t be in school because “schools are for human beings not black afterbirth.”

Special mention

While not exactly a campus hate crime in the sense that it was perpetrated by a student or professor or occurred at a school, special mention goes to the academics who rushed to blame a deadly attack on an LGBT club on the “right-wing” — however, the suspect, who recently pled guilty to five murder charges identifies as “non-binary.”

“I have no doubt in the coming days we will learn that the motive of the 22 year old young person who turned to violence was influenced by hateful rhetoric online and within right-wing media,” University at Buffalo Professor Ben Fabian commented soon after the shooting in a message to his peers.

That claim, like so many other hate crime allegations, has been debunked.

Anonymous US officials have pushed yet another massive claim regarding the weekend Wagner Group uprising in Russia–a claim which is being met with widespread skepticism on Wednesday, including a formal rejection from the Kremlin. 

The intelligence officials told The New York Times that at the highest ranks of Russia’s military command, a key general had foreknowledge that an armed Wagner uprising was coming. In particular, the report claims the top general overseeing the Ukraine operation had advanced awareness of the mutiny plot.

“A senior Russian general had advance knowledge of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to rebel against Russia’s military leadership, according to U.S. officials briefed on American intelligence on the matter, which has prompted questions about what support the mercenary leader had inside the top ranks,” NYT wrote.

And the anon US intel officials have taken the claims even further, suggesting potential active plotting and co-conspiracy within the defense ministry. “The officials said they are trying to learn if Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the former top Russian commander in Ukraine, helped plan Mr. Prigozhin’s actions last weekend, which posed the most dramatic threat to President Vladimir V. Putin in his 23 years in power,” said the report.

One initial and obvious inconsistency to this narrative is that Prigozhin has for months heaped negative statements and scorn not only on Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, but his invectives have targeted Gen. Surovikin and the entire top command ranks as well.

It’s kind of sad to see the times just launder these types of stories for the IC without any sort of skepticism. I don’t really read their natsec stuff unless I’m interested in what the DCI wants the public to know about. https://t.co/NVXocgRUaF

— Jack Murphy (@JackMurphyRGR) June 28, 2023

Within hours after initial publication Wednesday morning, the Times report pinned the following statement to the top of its report:

After this article was published, the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, issued a curt response and insisted on Wednesday that Russia’s army and people had unified around Mr. Putin.

For many Ukraine war observers, there are immediate red flags regarding the fresh claims, as it seems a deliberate attempt of US intelligence to sow distrust, paranoia, and further discord in the Kremlin. 

Assuming this is US intel officials’ intent, is it working? Financial Times correspondent Max Seddon has highlighted reports that Surovikin’s whereabouts are unknown…

Surovikin’s family haven’t seen him for three days and his security have also vanished, according to @aavst20551 https://t.co/bN7YDHrkzf

— max seddon (@maxseddon) June 28, 2023

Analyst Mark Galeotti points out the following, and explains the cause for skepticism in the wake of the US intelligence community’s (IC) claims…

“The New York Times, which often feels like the US intel community’s PR agency, is reporting that the IC suspects Gen Surovikin knew in advance about Prigozhin’s mutiny. Maybe so, but were I a cynic I’d wonder if this was an info op because Surovikin quickly issued a public appeal to Wagner mercs to stand down, making a clear statement that – contrary to previous suspicions he was close to Prigozhin – he was loyal to the Kremlin.”

“This might have helped cleanse his record and make him eligible to be re-appointed overall commander in Ukraine or even made Chief of the General Staff after Gerasimov (he had been the front-runner). This would, let’s be honest, not have been good for Ukraine: Surovikin is not a nice man but he is a dangerously competent general. As I say, this is just speculation, but suggesting complicity with Prigozhin’s treachery – to use Putin’s words – would seem a good way of helping derail his return.”