Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have previously discussed how comedians have been objecting that woke activists are killing comedy. The complaint is that a group of perpetually pissed off, humorless people are remaking the world in their own image.

It began with college campuses where comedians are now saying are dead as venues since you cannot safely make any joke that insults any group other than white straight males or Christians or conservatives. Others have objected to hate speech laws limiting comedians, particularly after some comedians have been prosecuted for “malicious communications” or insulting groups or religious figures. Six out of ten students view offensive jokes as hate speech. This week, however, activists appear to have met their match in a legend of comedy who has opposed the cutting of  a scene from the movie The Life of Brian. 

No, activists are not upset with the endless jokes about Italians, Christians, and Jews. It is the scene involving a man who wants to become a women and have a child. 

John Cleese is refusing to yield.

A recent example of this misreporting !

A few days ago I spoke to an audience outside London.
I told them I was adapting the Life of Brian so that we could do it as a stage show ( NOT a musical ). I said
that we’d had a table-reading of the latest draft in NYC a year ago…(tbc) https://t.co/VPWJGdUZtJ

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023

..and that all the actors – several of them Tony winners – had advised me strongly to cut the Loretta scene.

I have, of course, no intention of doing so

So someone in the audience had called a journalist and misreported me. Amazingly none of the British media called to check

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023

Similarly, there are reports that ” Bright Side ” is going to be cut

Untrue, for a very good reason

We don’t want to upset Eric and it’s his only contribution to the Life of Brian script

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023

In The Life of Brian, the scene involves “Stan” who announces that he wants to be a woman named Loretta and have babies. 

Activists objected that it made fun of transgender people and demanded that it be cut from the film.

The scene shows Stan declaring “I want to be a woman… It’s my right as a man. I want to have babies… It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.” After Cleese’s protest, the character snaps, “Don’t you oppress me!”

Some reported that Cleese had agreed to cut the scene. However, Cleese tweeted out a correction of the “misreporting.”

What is interesting is that Rob Reiner is reportedly working on the reboot. Reiner is known as someone who is a champion of the left in Hollywood. This may be an inauspicious start for the reboot effort.

Cleese is not alone in raising this alarm. Comedians including Chris Rock blamed the range of “unfunny TV shows” on the fact that “everybody’s scared to make a move”. Ricky Gervais objected that the BBC is now paralyzed in fear of offending anyone.  Jennifer Saunders that people now “talk themselves out of stuff now because everything is sensitive.”

The same complaint has been made in the age of woke advertising that funny commercials seem increasingly rare as oppose to corporate virtue signaling.

The director of the classic comedy Airplane! observed that humor is being squeezed out of Hollywood and the movie today would have virtually every joke removed. David Zucker called it the “death of creativity.”

They are now set upon by a legion of humorless people who seek to reduce the world to their own narrow range of acceptable levity or irony.  These comedy giants are set upon by an Army of Lilliputians who have contributed little to culture beyond chilling artists and writers into obedient silence or compulsive comedy criteria.

Of course, Cleese could always use the line from Bryan’s mother: “He’s a very naughty boy! Now, piss off!”

Authored by W.J. Astore via BracingViews.com,

The best way to honor sacrifice is to seek an end to war and militarism

I was asked for a few words about Memorial Day. Here’s what I came up with:

On Memorial Day, we honor those who died in the service of our country. Let us do everything we can as a people and a nation to stop war and all its brutality. 

A peaceful future without war and all its awfulness is the best way to honor our troops, even as we cherish the memory of the heroes who gave their all.

Too often, Memorial Day is reduced to sales events, barbecues, and the like.

It is, of course, a solemn occasion to remember the sacrifice of American service members. To honor the dead. To cherish their memory.

Yet one can also focus too narrowly on the veneration of the dead, using euphemisms like “the fallen” and speaking of how troops willingly “gave” their lives for their country.

The best antidote to this is a short video by Andy Rooney for “60 Minutes” (when that show still had some principles and bite). Rooney, who’d served in World War II, knew of what he spoke.

His goal was to end war, to save the living, to make a better world.

If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to watch it and to reflect on his sad and wise words.

Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via GoldSwitzerland.com,

Below, we look at simple facts in the context of complex markets to underscore the dangerous direction of Fed-Speak and Fed policy.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

It’s true that, “the Devil is in the details.”

Anyone familiar with Wall Street in general, or market math in particular, for example, can wax poetic on acronym jargon, Greek math symbols, sigma moves in bond yields, chart contango or derivative market lingo.

Notwithstanding all those “details,” however, is a more fitting phrase for our times, namely: “Keep it simple, stupid.”

The Simple and the Stupid

The simple facts are clear to almost anyone who wishes to see them.

With US debt, for example, at greater than 120% of its GDP, Uncle Sam has a problem.

That is, he’s broke, and not just debt-ceiling broke, but I mean broke, broke.

It’s just THAT simple.

Consequently, no one wants his IOUs, confirmed by the simple/stupid fact that in 2014, foreign Central Banks stopped buying US Treasuries on net, something not seen in five decades.

In short, the US, and its sacred bonds, just aren’t what they used to be.

To fill this gap, that creature from Jekyll Island otherwise known as the Federal Reserve, which is neither Federal nor a reserve, has to mouse-click money to pay the deficit spending of short-sighted and opportunistic administrations (left and right) year after year after year.

Uncle Fed, along with its TBTF nephews, have thus become the largest marginal financiers of US deficits for the last 8 years.

In short, the Fed and big banks are literally drinking Uncle Sam’s debt-laced Kool aide.

The Fed’s money printer has thus become central to keeping credit markets alive despite the equal fact (paradox) that its rate hikes are simultaneously gutting bonds, banks and small businesses to fight inflation despite the stubborn fact that such inflation is still here.

The Inflation Narrative: Form Over Substance

My view, of course, is that the Fed’s war on inflation is a headline optic rather than policy fact.

Like all debt-soaked and failing regimes, the Fed secretly wants inflation to outpace rates (i.e., it wants “negative real rates”) in order to inflate away some of that aforementioned and embarrassing debt.

But admitting that is akin to political suicide, and the Fed is political, not “independent.”

Thus, the Fed will seek inflation while simultaneously mis/under-reporting CPI inflation by at least 50%. I’ve described this as “having your cake and eating it too.”

All that said, inflation, which was supposed to be transitory, is clearly sticky (as we warned from the beginning), and even its under-reported 6% range has the experts in a tizzy of comical proportions.

Neel Kashkari, for example, is thinking the US may need to get rates to at least 6% to “beat” inflation. James Bullard is asking for more rate hikes too.

But what these “go higher, longer” folks are failing to mention is that rate hikes make Uncle Sam’s bar tab (i.e., debt) even more expensive, a fact which deepens rather than alleviates the US deficit nightmare.

The War on Inflation is a Policy that Actually Adds to Inflation

Ironically, however, few (including Kashkari, Bullard, Powell or just about any economic midget in the House of Representatives) are recognizing the additional paradox that greater deficits only add to (rather than “combat”) the inflation problem, as deficit spending (an economy on debt respirator) keeps artificial demand (and hence) prices rising rather than falling.

Furthermore, these deficits will ultimately be paid for with more fiat fake money created out of thin air at the Eccles building, a policy which is inherently (and by definition): INFLATIONARY.

In short, and as even Warren B. Mosler recently tweeted, “the Fed is chasing its own tail.”

Inflation, in other words, is not only here to stay, the Fed’s “anti-inflationary” rate hike policies are actually making it worse.

Even party-line economists are forecasting higher core inflation this year:

The Real Solution to Inflation? Scorched Earth.

In fact, the only way to truly dis-inflate the inflation problem is to raise rates high enough to destroy the bond market and the economy.

Afterall, major recessions/depressions do “beat” inflation—along with just about everything and everyone else.

The current Fed’s answer to combatting the inflation problem is in many ways the equivalent of combatting a kitchen rodent problem by placing dynamite in the sink.

Meanwhile, the Rate Hikes Keep Blowing Things Up

Buried beneath the headlines of one failing bank (and tax-payer-funded depositor bailout) after the next, is the equally dark picture of US small businesses, all of which rely on loans to stay afloat.

But according to the U.S. Small Business Association, loan rates for the “little guys” have reached double digit levels.

Needless to say, such debt costs don’t just hurt small enterprises, they destroy them.

This credit crunch is only just beginning, as small enterprises borrow less in the face of rising rates.

Real estate, of course, is just another sector for which the “war on inflation” rate hikes are creating collateral damage.

Homeowners enjoying the fixed low rates of days past are naturally remiss to sell current homes only to face the pain of buying a newer one at much higher mortgage rates.

This means the re-sale inventory for older homes is shrinking, which means the market (as well as price) for new construction homes is spiking—serving as yet another and ironic example of how the Fed’s alleged war on inflation is actually adding to price inflation…

In short, Fed rate hikes can make inflation rise, and equally tragic, is that Fed rate cuts can also make inflation rise, as cheaper money only means greater velocity of the same, which, alas, is inflationary…

See the Paradox?

And that, folks, is the paradox, conundrum, corner or trap in which our central planners have placed us and themselves.

As I’ve warned countless times, we must eventually pick our poison: It’s either a depression or an inflation crisis.

Ultimately, Powell’s rate hikes, having already murdered bonds, stocks and banks, will also murder the economy.

Save the System or the Currency?

At that inevitable moment when the financial and social rubble of a national and then global recession is too impossible to ignore, the central planners will have to take a long and hard look at the glowing red buttons on their money printers and decide which is worthing saving: The “system” or the currency?

The answer is simple. They’ll push the red button while swallowing the blue pill.

Ultimately, and not too far off in our horizon, the central planners will “save” the system (bonds and TBTF banks) by mouse-clicking trillions of more USDs.

This simply means that the deflationary recession ahead will be followed by a hyper-inflationary “solution.”

Again, and worth repeating, history confirms in debt crisis after debt crisis, and failed regime after failed regime, that the last bubble to “pop” is always the currency.

A Long History of Stupid

In my ever-growing data base of things Fed-Chairs have said that turned out to be completely and utterly, well…100% WRONG, one of my favorites was Ben Bernanke’s 2010 assertion that QE would be “temporary” and with “no consequence” to the USD.

According to this false idol, QE was safe because the Fed was merely paying out dollars to purchase Treasuries is an even swap of contractually even values.

What Bernanke failed to foresee or consider, however, is that such an elegant “swap” is anything but elegant when the Fed is marred by an operating loss in which its Treasuries are tanking in value.

That is, the “swap” is now a swindle.

As deficits rise, the TBTF banks will require more mouse-clicked (i.e., inflationary) dollars to meet Uncle Sam’s interest expense promise to the banks (“Interest on Excess Reserves”).

In the early days of standard QE operations, at least the Fed’s printed money was “balanced” by its purchased USTs which the TBTF banks then removed from the market and parked “safely” at the Fed.

But today, given the operating losses in play, the Fed’s raw money printing will be like like raw sewage with nowhere to go but straight into the economy with an inflationary odor.

Bad Options, Fluffy Words

Again, the cornered Fed’s options are simple/stupid: It can continue to hawkishly raise rates higher for longer and send the economy into a depression and the markets into a spiral while declaring victory over inflation, or it can print trillions more fiat dollars to prop the system and neuter/debase the dollar.

And for this wonderful set of options, Bernanke won a Nobel Prize?

The ironies do abound…

But as a famous French moralist once said, the highest offices are rarely, if ever, held by the highest minds.

Gold, of course, is not something the Fed (nor anyone else) can print or mouse-click, and gold’s ultimate role as a currency-insurer is not a matter of debate, but a matter of cycles, history and simple/stupid common sense. (See below).

Markets Are Prepping

In the interim, the markets are slowly catching on to the fact that protecting purchasing power is now more of a priority than looking for safety in grossly and un-naturally inflated “fixed income” or “risk-free-return” bonds.

Why?

Because those bonds are now (thanks to Uncle Fed) empirically and mathematically nothing more than “no-income” and “return-free-risk.”

Meanwhile, hedge funds are building their net short positions in S&P futures at levels not seen since 2007 for the simple reason that they foresee a Powell-induced market implosion off the American bow.

Once that foreseeable implosion occurs, get ready for the Fed’s only pathetic tools left: Lower rates and trillions of instant liquidity—the kind that kills a currency.

In Gold We Trust

The case for gold as insurance against such a backdrop of debt, financial fragility and openly dying currencies is, well: Simple stupid and plain to see.

Few on this round earth see the simple among the complex better than our advisor and friend, Ronni Stoeferle, whose most recent In Gold We Trust Report has just been released.

Co-produced with his Incrementum AG colleague, Mark Valek, this annual report has become the seminal report in the precious metal space.

The 2023 edition is replete with not only the most sobering and clear data points and contextual common sense, but also a litany of entertaining quotations from Churchill and the Austrian School to The Grateful Dead and Anchorman …

Ronni and Mark unpack the consequences of a Fed that has raised rates too high, too fast and too late, which is, again a fact plain to see:

Needless to say, hiking rates into an economic setting already historically “debt fragile” tends to break things (from USTs to regional banks) and portends far more pain ahead, as both history and math also plainly confirm:

In a debt-soaked world fully addicted to years of instant liquidity from a central bank near you, Powell’s sudden (but again too late, too much) hiking policies will not “softly” restrain market exuberance nor contain inflation without unleashing the mother of all recessions.

Instead, the subsequent and sudden negative growth of money supply will only hasten a recession as opposed to a “softish” landing:

As the foregoing report warns, the looming approach of this recession is already (and further) confirmed by such basic indicators as the Conference Board of Leading Indicators, an inverted yield curve and the alarming spread between 10Y and 2Y yields. 

Self-Inflicted Geopolitical Risks

The report further examines the geopolitical shifts of which we have been warning(and writing) since March of 2022, when Western sanctions against Russia unleashed a watershed trend by the BRICS and other nations to seek settlement payments outside of the weaponized USD.

One would be unwise to ignore the significance of this shift or underestimate the growing power of these BRICS (and BRICS “plus”) alliances, as their combined share of global GDP is rising not falling…

As interest in (and trust for) the now weaponized USD as a payment system declines alongside a weakening faith in Uncle Sam’s IOUs, the world, and its central banks (especially out East) are turning away from USTs and turning toward physical gold.

Again, I give credit to the In Gold We Trust Report:

See a trend?

See why?

It’s fairly simple, and for this we can thank the fairly stupid policies of the Fed in particular and the declining faith in their prowess in general:

Myths Are Stubborn Things

Many, of course, find it hard to imagine that a Federal Reserve based in DC and within the land of the Great American dream (and world reserve currency) could be anything but wise, efficient and stabilizing, despite an embarrassing Fed track record that is empirically unwise, inefficient and consistently destabilizing…

Myths are hard to break, despite the fact the myth of MMT and QE on demand has been a failed experiment and is sending the US, as well as the global, economy toward a reckoning of historical proportions.

But the messaging of “Keep calm and carry on” from Powell is calming in spirit despite the fact that it hides terrifying math and historically confirmed consequences for the fiat money by which investors still wrongly measure their wealth.

But as Brian Fantana of Anchorman would tell us, trust the central planners.

“They’ve done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works every time.”

As for us, we trust the kind of data Ronni and Mark have gathered and that barbarous relic of gold far more than calming words and debased, fiat currencies.

As history reminds, when currencies die within a backdrop of unsustainable debt, gold in fact does work—and every time.

Authored by Lia Onely via The Epoch Times,

Zero healthy individuals under the age of 50 have died of COVID-19 in Israel, according to newly released data.

“Zero deceased of 18–49 years of age with no underlying morbidities,” the Israel Ministry of Health (MOH) said in response to a formal request from an attorney.

Officials noted that the statement only applies to COVID-19 deaths where the MOH conducted an epidemiological investigation and had received information about the underlying diseases.

“Zero is a very, very clear number, and cannot be subject to interpretation,”  Yoav Yehezkelli, a specialist in internal medicine and medical management, and former lecturer in the Department of Emergency and Disaster Management at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told The Epoch Times.

“Why were all the extreme measures of school closures, vaccination of children, and lockdowns needed?” he added.

The MOH did respond to a request for comment.

Freedom of Information Request

The information was sparked by a freedom of information request filed by attorney Ori Xabi, who has been filing several such requests as he seeks to obtain information from the MOH regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and COVID-19 policies.

Xabi asked to know the average age of people who died of COVID-19, segmented by vaccination status at the time of death; how many COVID-19 patients with no underlying morbidities under the age of 50 died; and the annual number of cardiac arrest cases between 2018 to 2022.

According to the MOH response, the average age of vaccinated COVID-19 patients who died was 80.2 years. The average for the unvaccinated was 77.4 years.

The MOH emphasized that the data they have about the underlying diseases of patients is partial since it relies on information provided by the patients or their relatives, if they chose to do so. And then, only in cases in which the MOH conducted an epidemiological investigation.

Therefore “the available information does not necessarily reflect the health status of the patient” the MOH wrote adding that they do not have access to the patients’ medical records.

It is not clear why the MOH responded to Xabi’s request using only cases where the MOH had conducted an epidemiological investigation, and which was limited to deceased patients where the families had cooperated, since in 2020 the MOH told the Israeli Knesset—the Israeli parliament—that they use an intelligence system that provides the MOH with extensive information about deceased patients that included “underlying diseases.”

A document (pdf) from the Knesset Research and Information Center, dated June 7, 2020, stated that the MOH provided data to the Special Committee for the New COVID Virus about COVID-19 deaths—298 by that day at 4:30 p.m.—at the request of Yifat Shasha-Biton, a member of the Knesset, and the chair of that committee.

The ministry’s intelligence system has data on gender, age, district of residence, and the underlying diseases of the deceased, according to the document. The system showed that about 94 percent of the deceased were 60 years or older and that there were no deceased with zero underlying diseases.

In addition, on May 4, 2020, the Medical Directorate of the MOH in a letter (pdf) issued instructions to the heads of the hospitals and the medical departments of the Health Maintenance Organizations—national health care organizations—on how to fill out COVID-19 death notices, directing them to include underlying diseases.

In a December 22, 2020 letter (pdf) the Medical Directorate to the managers of the hospitals stated that for every COVID-19 patient who died during the acute phase or due to complications of the illness later, or people who were positive for COVID-19 who died, a death notice and a summary of the case “must be sent to the COVID war room of the MOH.”

They said the purpose was “to improve surveillance.”

“It’s a bit naive” for the MOH to say they do not have the full data and access to the death certificates said Yehezkelli, who was also a founder of a team that advises the MOH’s director general.

Yet this response from the MOH is meaningful, said Yehezkelli as “it finally reveals the truth.”

A health worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a pregnant woman at Clalit Health Services, in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Jan. 23, 2021. (Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

‘False Presentation’

Studies and other data, including a study led by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis, show that COVID-19 mortality, even with the original variant, was largely age-dependent.

“It was definitely a disease that actually only endangered the elderly,” Yehezkelli said.

Over the age of 60, mortality doubled every 5 years while under that age mortality was negligible, and “now we really see that it was zero under the age of 50, at least.”

The MOH’s response showed that the average age of the COVID-19 deceased is about 80 years of age, which also indicates that “this is a disease of the elderly, almost exclusively,” said Yehezkelli.

“That only means that what we were told for 3 years was not true,” he said.

There may not have been many young people who got seriously ill, yet the MOH had emphasized cases of pregnant women hospitalized in critical condition and young healthy people who died because of COVID-19. It was not the true situation, he said.

“They created a false presentation of a very severe epidemic that affects the entire population and therefore the entire population should also be vaccinated, regardless of age,” said Yehezkelli.

If we are talking about people under the age of 50 that means that no pregnant women actually died of COVID-19, he said.

The justification given for vaccinating pregnant women, young people, and children was that they too are affected by COVID-19.

It was known back then that this was not the case “and we now see it clearly,” Yehezkelli said, asserting that the MOH has “lost the public’s trust” by making a “false presentation” of the dangers of COVID-19.

Cardiac Arrest Data

In response to Xabi’s recent FOI, the MOH provided the number of cardiac arrest cases from 2018 to 2020. They added, “The information for the years 2021–2022 does not exist in the office.”

The MOH explained that “The registration of the causes of death of deceased persons is carried out, in accordance with the notification of death,” by the Central Bureau of Statistics, adding “the data for the years 2021–2022 have not yet been transferred to the Ministry of Health.”

A study published in April 2022 that analyzed the dataset of the Israel National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) found a 25 percent increase in EMS calls due to cardiac arrests among 16- to 39-year-olds between January–May 2021.

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in December 2020.

Retsef Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, was one of the researchers of the study.

The MOH objected to the findings of the study in a post on Twitter where they said that “there is no connection between the EMS calls that were analyzed in the study and the COVID vaccines.”

In a MOH webinar on Oct. 8, 2021, about the effectiveness and the safety of the COVID vaccines, Dr. Sharon Elroy-Pries, the head of Public Health Services at the Israel MOH said regarding Levi’s study: “This is one of the biggest fake news I have seen.”

“The National Center for Disease Control did a very comprehensive analysis—including of the data of that study, [which were] EMS calls,” she said adding that “there was nothing. No more [cases of] heart attacks. No more calls to the ER.”

She continued by saying that “in the mortality data from the beginning of 2021, you don’t see an increase in mortality except for COVID mortality. That is, if we look at excess mortality in the State of Israel we see it precisely at the peaks that were peaks of [COVID] morbidity in the State of Israel.”

“When you remove the … morbidity from COVID at all ages, one sees either the same mortality rate as in previous years, or less,” she said, adding “there is no increase in heart attacks here.”

Sharon Alroy-Preis, the head of Public Health Services at the Israel Ministry of Health at the Health Committee meeting to discuss special powers to deal with COVID-19 in Jerusalem on Feb. 6, 2023. (Dani Shem Tov / Knesset)

In a February 2023 meeting of the Health Committee of the Knesset for extending the COVID special powers law, Elroy-Pries reiterated that the MOH does have access to COVID mortality data.

“COVID has killed over 12,000 people in the State of Israel,” she said at the meeting, explaining further that this figure is known since “from the beginning of the epidemic, the Medical Directorate received people’s death certificates.”

When asked about whether there is an increase in cardiac arrest cases in Israel among young people, Elroy-Pries said, “We do not see an increase in the death of young people,” adding “We’re checking it. We’re looking for it.”

Levi said to The Epoch Times that the MOH attacked him personally and the EMS, and asked “If they don’t have data for 2021 and 2022 [according to the FOI], then how can they know that they don’t have an increase [in cardiac arrests]?”

When the MOH says things that are contrary to science, said Levi, or are “contrary to the facts on a regular basis, you must ask yourself the question: are they doing it because they didn’t bother to read the science, or are they doing it even though they … read the science.”

“Both scenarios are very serious,” he added.

Vaccines Saved ‘Millions Around the World’: MOH

The MOH did not reply to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Yet about 2 hours after sending the request on May 25, the agency posted on its Twitter account a statement regarding Xabi’s FOI.

“Following the manipulation that has been taking place in recent days regarding one of the Ministry of Health’s [reply to] Freedom of Information requests, we will clarify that the answers to the requests submitted under the Freedom of Information Law are, naturally, answered directly to the specific question that was asked.

“In this case, the ministry was asked about mortality data and underlying diseases. The Ministry of Health ‘does not have’ access to the medical file [of patients], therefore information is only based on cases where an epidemiological investigation was carried out and the person or his family answered the question [regarding underlying morbidities]. Therefore, this is very limited information. This was of course clearly written in the answer [to the FOI].

“We will clarify: So far, 356 young people (18–49 years of age) have died of COVID.

“Of these, only about half have documentation of an epidemiological investigation (184 deceased).

“And only 7.5% (27 deceased) included an answer to the question regarding underlying diseases. The answer was provided based on this information.

“The Ministry of Health is committed to maintaining the health of all citizens and making the information available in the Ministry transparently. This is how we acted [so far] and will continue to act.

“We must not forget that the COVID epidemic has so far killed more than 12,500 people in Israel, caused severe and critical morbidity, and post-COVID symptoms that accompany some of those recovering to this day.

“The vaccination campaign began in the midst of a third lockdown that resulted from an increase in morbidity and mortality and the opening of the economy was made possible thanks to the activation of the green passport, which its purpose was to reduce the risk of infection in mass events.

“The vaccines have saved thousands of people in the state of Israel and millions around the world—the attempt to rewrite history is dangerous.”

Following an administrative appeal filed by Xabi and colleagues, the MOH committed to publishing all-cause mortality segmented by vaccination status and age by the end of this month.

This appeal is an ongoing case that followed a FOI request submitted to the MOH on Oct. 10, 2021, which was not answered within the time frame according to Israeli law, and the data provided by the agency during a number of hearings since has been incomplete.

In the vast realm of the internet, a handful of websites have emerged as global giants. Mainstays like YouTube and Facebook capture billions of users and shape our online experiences. But occasionally, new waves of innovation can shake up this list, which is exactly what’s happening now with generative AI.

Using data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb, Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley delves into the top 25 websites based on their most recent traffic numbers.

Ranking Internet Heavyweights

In 2023, web properties owned by Alphabet and Facebook dominate the top 25 list as they have for many years now. In fact, when Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are combined, they make up three-quarters of the top 25 list’s total traffic.

Here’s the complete top 25 websites list as of April 2023:

The 25 websites above combine for a staggering 192 billion monthly visits.

Most of the websites on this list are based in the U.S., but a few such as Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia), also make the cut. Interestingly, the three adult websites on this list–XVideos, PornHub, and XNXX–are based outside the U.S.

The Allure of Generative AI

A year ago, Bing ranking as one of the world’s top websites wasn’t on many people’s bingo cards. But, Microsoft’s also-ran search engine has benefitted immensely from the generative AI boom taking place—making it a legitimate contender in the search engine category that has been firmly dominated by Google for years.

Of course, the most remarkable story this year is the meteoric rise of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools. OpenAI’s web traffic has shot up over the course of the year, rising from about 20 million per month in the fall of last year to 1.8 billion in April 2023.

In fact, OpenAI’s website traffic is growing so fast, that it may soon surpass giants like TikTok and Amazon.

The rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT shows just how quickly a company can rise to prominence if their tech offering is compelling enough. Whether that popularity can be sustained over the long term remains to be seen.

Authored by Paul Sperry via American Greatness,

Government ethics watchdogs say the president’s friendship poses a potential conflict of interest. How has massive foreign aid been used, and who has benefited from it?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn’t the only one demanding more military assistance from Joe Biden to protect Kiev from Russian forces. So, too, is a close Biden friend and financial backer, who owns several luxury car dealerships around the Ukrainian capital.

By sending billions of dollars in weapons and other military aid to help defend Ukraine, Biden also is securing the investments of millionaire car magnate John Hynansky, a Ukrainian American and longtime supporter of the president.

Over the course of Biden’s political career, Hynansky and his family have contributed more than $100,000 to his campaigns, Federal Election Commission records show. Hynansky family members have been guests at the White House, and Hynansky has floated hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to Biden family members, property records show. Hynansky’s son, Michael, who helps run his car empire, lent the use of his Lear jet to Biden when he was a senator.

Since Russia started shelling the area around Kiev in February 2022, the U.S. government has spent $77 billion to help Ukraine rebuild and repel future attacks.

Government ethics watchdogs say the president’s friendship poses a potential conflict of interest that demands a full accounting of how the massive foreign aid, which includes open-ended humanitarian and economic assistance, has been used and who has benefited from it. On the military side, moreover, billions of dollars have gone to unspecified areas, such as “security,” “intelligence,” and “training.” In the past, Hynansky has supplied the police cars and ambulances in several regions of Ukraine.

The Biden Administration helped Hynansky’s team in Ukraine prepare for the invasion, including placing calls to his top executive in Kiev 13 days in advance of Russian tanks crossing the border. It has sent billions of dollars to help rebuild war-torn cities where Hynansky operates the largest share of the country’s car showrooms and service centers specializing in Porsches, Jaguars, Land Rovers, and Bentleys, among other non-American brands he imports. 

The president’s close relationship with Hynansky illustrates larger ethical questions that have long surrounded Biden and his family members, who often have financial interests directly affected by policies he endorses. While serving as President Obama’s point man in Ukraine in 2015,  Biden demanded the firing of a prosecutor investigating a natural gas company, Burisma, that was paying his son Hunter $80,000 per month to serve on its board.

The connection between Joe Biden and Hynansky’s business ventures dates back to 2009, when the then-vice president made his first visit to Ukraine. In a speech in Kiev to government officials, Biden singled out Hynansky for praise, noting that he had just had breakfast with “my very good friend, John Hynansky.” (The previous year, Hynansky had contributed more than $33,000 to the Obama-Biden ticket primarily through the Obama Victory Fund, according to FEC records.)

Within months of his hobnobbing with the vice president and local officials in the Ukrainian capital, Hynansky scored his first international development loan from the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, or OPIC, a federal body whose board was appointed by President Obama. Hynansky used the $2.5 million to break ground on a new headquarters and massive distribution center outside Kiev that prepares 8,000 cars for sale every year. In 2012, Hynansky landed another $20 million in OPIC funding to expand his dealership facilities, federal records show, helping him corner roughly 25 percent of the luxury car market in Ukraine.

Hynansky is politically connected in Kiev as well as Washington. President Zelenskyy also calls Hynansky a good friend and in recent years has bestowed state awards on him. Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko also is close to the prominent Wilmington businessman.

In August 2021, Hynansky secured a $24 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to expand its Ukraine operations into electric vehicles, including building new Renault and Volvo dealerships in Lviv. The U.S. is a founding member of EBRD and provides 10 percent of its capital. The Biden Administration has been pushing such “green” deals. “In the near future, we intend to increase our presence on the Ukrainian market,” Hynansky’s top official in Ukraine, Petro Rondiak, said at the time. 

The White House did not respond to queries about the president’s relationship with Hynansky.

Though Biden is silent about his actions in Ukraine as they concern Hynansky and his businesses there, he has repeatedly denied that his son’s Burisma dealings influenced his official actions in Ukraine—which included handing over more than $50 million in U.S. support to assist the Ukrainian energy industry, an aid package Biden personally announced in Kiev the month before Burisma hired his son in 2014.

Republicans are investigating whether those funds were intended to help his son’s business interests in Ukraine. Less explored is whether U.S. tax money has also been used to protect or boost Hynansky’s Ukrainian investments.

Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, a Washington watchdog group. said that in dealing with Ukraine, Biden increasingly is drawing suspicion he may be putting his own political fortunes ahead of the national interest. 

This article was adapted from a RealClearInvestigations article published April 26.

The end of World War II in 1945 was a turning point for democracies around the world.

Before this critical turning point in geopolitics, democracies made up only a small number of the world’s countries, both legally and in practice. However, over the course of the next six decades, the number of democratic nations would more than quadruple.

Interestingly, as Visual Capitalist’s Freny Fernandes details below, studies have found that this trend has recently reversed as of the 2010s, with democracies and non-democracies now in a deadlock.

In this visualization, Staffan Landin uses data from V-DEM’s Electoral Democratic Index (EDI) to highlight the changing face of global politics over the past two decades and the nations that contributed the most to this change.

The Methodology

V-DEM’s EDI attempts to measure democratic development in a comprehensive way, through the contributions of 3,700 experts from countries around the world.

Instead of relying on each nation’s legally recognized system of government, the EDI analyzes the level of electoral democracy in countries on a range of indicators, including:

• Free and fair elections

• Rule of law

• Alternative sources of information and association

• Freedom of expression

Countries are assigned a score on a scale from 0 to 1, with higher scores indicating a higher level of democracy. Each is also categorized into four types of functional government, from liberal and electoral democracies to electoral and closed autocracies.

Which Countries Have Declined the Most?

The EDI found that numerous countries around the world saw declines in democracy over the past two decades. Here are the 10 countries that saw the steepest decline in EDI score since 2010:

Central and Eastern Europe was home to three of the countries seeing the largest declines in democracy. Hungary, Poland, and Serbia lead the table, with Hungary and Serbia in particular dropping below scores of 0.5.

Some of the world’s largest countries by population also decreased significantly, including India and Brazil. Across most of the top 10, the “freedom of expression” indicator was hit particularly hard, with notable increases in media censorship to be found in Afghanistan and Brazil.

Countries Becoming More Democratic

Here are the 10 countries that saw the largest increase in EDI score since 2010:

Armenia, Fiji, and Seychelles saw significant improvement in the autonomy of their electoral management bodies in the last 10 years. Partially as a result, both Armenia and Seychelles have seen their scores rise above 0.5.

The Gambia also saw great improvement across many election indicators, including the quality of voter registries, vote buying, and election violence. It was one of five African countries to make the top 10 most improved democracies.

With the total number of democracies and non-democracies almost tied over the past four years, it is hard to predict the political atmosphere in the future.

Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

Insurance company Lloyd’s of London has announced its exit from a net-zero alliance for insurers – the sixth such organization to have pulled out from the initiative within a week.

The Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA), convened by the United Nations, seeks to commit group members, composed of the world’s leading insurers and reinsurers, to fighting climate change. As part of this, members have to transition their insurance and reinsurance underwriting portfolios to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. On Friday, Lloyd’s of London quit the NZIA. This took the total number of members who have quit NZIA this week alone to six, which represents a fifth of the organization’s total of 30 members. Since March, a total of 10 members have quit NZIA.

The exodus of major insurance companies has raised questions about NZIA’s viability. None of the six firms that quit this week have made it clear why they left the initiative.

The insurance firms are said to have decided to pull out due to concerns about getting embroiled in disputes about net-zero initiatives in the United States. On May 15, attorneys generals from 23 American states sent a letter to 28 insurance companies asking for information about potential violations of antitrust laws.

Violating Antitrust Laws

In the letter, state AGs asked the firms to provide information regarding their membership in climate associations like the NZIA and the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance (NZAOA), which is also sponsored by the United Nations.

“The insurance companies that are involved with this net zero program are, quite frankly, out on a plank, and they’ve sawed it off,” Robert Bork Jr., president of the Antitrust Education Project, said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

“The Sherman [Antitrust] Act is pretty explicit about restraint of trade, which is exactly what they’re doing here by denying insurance to companies that they think aren’t doing the right thing when it comes to climate change and getting to a net zero future.”

Just days before quitting, Lloyd’s Chief Executive John Neal had indicated that the NZIA could end up as a failure.

“There are five objectives, and you have 12 months to meet one of them and 36 months to meet three of them. NZIA need to have another look at what their objectives are, or the alliance will fall apart,” Neal said to Reuters.

On Wednesday, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) admitted that four of the insurance firms that quit NZIA had done so due to “recent discussions within the United States.”

The ESG Push

Initiatives like the NZIA and NZAOA are part of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda that push a range of leftist, progressive ideologies like gender equity and climate change onto corporations.

ESG is based on the idea that companies should be socially responsible and work intently to resolve perceived issues like racism, sexism, pollution, and climate change.

As such, firms are compelled to enact policies to achieve such objectives, which can include reducing carbon emissions and cutting down funding or not giving insurance to businesses that fail to meet carbon emission targets.

By forcing companies to prioritize ideological issues, the ESG agenda risks making these firms lose focus on their business priorities, including making profits. This can have negative consequences for businesses, investors, and the economy as a whole.

Republicans have been fighting the ESG push from Democrats led by the Biden administration. In March, the Republican-controlled House approved a measure to block Biden’s new rule that permitted including social justice and climate change principles as criteria for pension investments.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said that in allowing people’s pension funds to be used for ideological purposes, the Biden administration is “giving away the basic rights of American citizens to give more power to the radical left.”

“If you put money into a retirement plan, you expect to get the best return you can get; you expect that whoever is running it is a fiduciary to get the best return possible. What the Biden administration is saying is ‘no, you don’t have to do that … if you have some social agenda, you can focus on your social agenda.’”

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

President Xi Jinping telling President Putin at the end of their summit last March in Moscow that we’re now facing “great changes not seen in a century” directly applies to the new spirit reigning across the Heartland.

Cue to the China-Central Asia summit last week in Xian, the former imperial capital, where Xi solidified the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from Western China in Xinjiang to its western neighbors and then all the way to Iran, Turkiye and Eastern Europe.

Xi in Xian particularly stressed the complementing aspects between BRI and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), once again showing that all five Central Asian “stans”, acting together, should counter-act the proverbial external interference via “terrorism, separatism and extremism”.

The message was stark: these hybrid war strategies are all integrated with the attempt by the Hegemon to continue fostering serial color revolutions. The purveyors of the “rules-based international order”, Xi implied, will go no holds barred to prevent ongoing Heartland integration.

The usual suspects in fact are already spinning that Central Asia is falling into a potential trap, fully captured by Beijing. Yet this is something Kazakhstan’s “multi-vector diplomacy”, coined way back in the Nazarbayev years, would never allow.

What Beijing is developing, instead, is an integrated approach via a C+C5 secretariat with no less than 19 separate channels of communication.

The heart of the matter is to turbo-charge Heartland connectivity via the BRI’s Middle Corridor.

And that, crucially, includes technology transfer. As it stands, there are dozens of industrial transfer programs with Kazakhstan, a dozen in Uzbekistan, and several in discussion with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. These are extolled by Beijing as part of “harmonious Silk Roads”.

Xi himself, as a post-modern pilgrim, detailed the connectivity in his keynote speech in Xian: “The China-Kyrgystan-Uzbekistan highway that runs across the Tian shan Mountains, the China-Tajikistan expressway that defies the Pamir Plateau, and the China-Kazakhstan crude oil pipeline and the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline that traverse the vast desert – they are the present-day Silk Road.”

The Revival of the Heartland “Belt”

Xi’s China is once again mirroring lessons from History. What’s happening now brings us back to the first half of the first millennium B.C., when the Persian Achaemenid empire established itself as the largest to date, stretching from India in the east and Central Asia in the northeast to Greece in the west and Egypt in the southwest.

For the first time in history, territories that spanned Asia, Africa and Europe were brought together; and that led to a boom in trade, culture and ethnic interactions (what BRI defines today as “people to people exchanges”).

That’s how we had the Hellenistic world first getting in touch with India and Central Asia – as they set up the first Greek settlements in Bactria (in today’s Afghanistan).

By the end of the first millennium B.C. all the way to the first millennium A.D. an immense area from the Pacific to the Atlantic – encompassing the Han Chinese empire, the Kushan kingdom, the Parthians and the Roman empire, among others – formed “a continuous belt of civilizations, states and cultures”, as Prof. Edvard Rtveladze of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan defined it.

This, in a nutshell, is at heart of the Chinese concept of “belt” and “road”: the “belt” refers to the Heartland, the “road” refers to the Maritime Silk Road.

So slightly less than 2,000 years ago, that was the first time in human history that the borders of several states and kingdoms were immediately adjacent to each other along no less than 11,400 km, from east to west. No wonder the fabled Ancient Silk Road – actually a maze of roads -, the first transcontinental thoroughfare, emerged at the time.

That was a direct consequence of a series of political, economic and cultural whirlwinds involving the peoples of Eurasia. History, in the high acceleration 21st century, is now retracing these steps.

Geography, after all, is destiny. Central Asia was traversed by countless migrations of Near Eastern, Indo-European, Indo-Iranian and Turkic peoples; was the focus of serious intercultural interaction (Iranian, Indian, Turkic, Chinese, Hellenistic cultures); and criss-crossed virtually all major religions (Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Christianity, Islam).

The Organization of Turkic States, led by Turkiye, is even engaged in rebuilding the Turkic identity overtones of the Heartland – a vector that will be developing in parallel to the influence of China and Russia.

That Greater Eurasia Partnership

Russia is evolving its own path. A key debate was held аt a recent Valdai Club session on the Greater Eurasian Partnership when it comes to the interaction between Russia and the Heartland and neighbors China, India and Iran.

Moscow regards the concept of a Greater Eurasian Partnership as the key framework for achieving much desired “political cohesion” in the post-Soviet space – under the imperative of indivisibility of regional security.

This means, once again, maximum attention towards serial attempts of provoking color revolutions across the Heartland.

As much as in Beijing, there are no illusions in Moscow that the collective West will take no prisoners in regimenting Central Asia to the Russophobic drive. For over a year now Washington for all practical purposes already addresses the Heartland in terms of threats of secondary sanctions and crude ultimatums.

So Central Asia matters only in terms of the evolving hybrid war – and otherwise – against the Russia-China strategic partnership. No fabulous trade and connectivity prospects under the New Silk Roads; no Greater Eurasia Partnership; no security arrangements under the CSTO; no mechanism of economic cooperation like the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Either you’re a “partner” in the sanctions dementia and/or a secondary front in the war against Russia, or there will be a price to pay.

The “price”, set by the proverbial Straussian neocon psychos currently in charge of US foreign policy, is always the same: proxy war via terror, to be provided by ISIS-Khorasan*, whose black cells are ready to be awakened in selected backwoods of Afghanistan and the Ferghana valley.

Moscow is very much aware of the high stakes. For instance, for a year and a half virtually every month a Russian delegation arrives in Tajikistan to implement, in practice, the “pivot to the East”, developing projects in agriculture, health care, education, science and tourism.

Central Asia should have a leading role in BRICS+ expansion – something supported by both BRICS leaders Russia and China. The idea of a BRICS + Central Asia is being seriously floated from Tashkent to Almaty.

That would imply establishing a strategic continuum from Russia and China to Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Africa and Latin America – spanning the logistics of connectivity trade, energy, manufacture production, investment, technological breakthroughs and cultural interaction.

Beijing and Moscow, each in their own way, and with their own formulations, are already setting the framework for this ambitious geoeconomic project to be viable: the Heartland back in action as a protagonist in the forefront of History, just like those kingdoms, merchants and pilgrims of nearly 2,000 years ago.

By Charlie Zhu, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analyst

Three things we learned last week:

1. A town builder’s last-minute bond repayment reignited fears over a potential default by such issuers. Investors are watching out for the first missed payment by a local government financing vehicle, something regional authorities are trying hard to avoid. The possibility has recently increased, as a weakening fiscal situation means authorities are less able to provide support.

Research from GF Securities Co. shows there were 73 cases of shadow-banking defaults in the first four months, already a full-year record since data became available in 2018.

“Missing payments in shadow banking are a signal that debt risks in a certain region have become more prominent,” GF analysts led by Liu Yu wrote in a report.

Yields on Kunming Dianchi Investment Co.’s note due in December surged to over 20% last week, as two holders said they didn’t receive payments until after business hours for a note due this month. Premiums of three-year AA rated LGFV bonds widened to the most since March, and investors cited local-debt worries as one of the reasons behind a decline in Chinese stocks.

China’s LGFVs had 13.5 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion) of bonds in total outstanding as of end-2022, or almost half of the nation’s non-financial corporate notes, data from Moody’s Investors Service show.

Steps by authorities “to lower LGFV debt risks will not fully resolve long-term issues,” and their refinancing ability depends on investors’ confidence in government support, especially in weaker provinces, Moody’s analysts led by Ivan Chung wrote in a report.

2. With the financial strength of both town builders and their sponsors deteriorating, investors became more pessimistic about China’s demand for raw materials. Copper dived below $8,000 a ton while iron ore breached $100, unwinding gains since Beijing ended its Covid Zero policies late last year.

At the London Metal Exchange’s annual Asian event in Hong Kong, participants reported lackluster activity and said that any market optimism from the National People’s Congress in March had evaporated.

The selloff in Chinese stocks also extended, with the benchmark CSI 300 Index erasing all of its gains for the year. Now, even bulls are rethinking their calls, with Citigroup Inc.’s global allocation team cutting its overweight rating on China to neutral.

3. Luckily, positive developments on China-US bilateral relations helped to alleviate some of the pessimism. Soon after President Joe Biden said he expected ties with China to improve “very shortly” after a spat over an alleged spy balloon earlier this year, top commerce officials from the two countries agreed to strengthen communications. The meeting served as a sign that Beijing and Washington are trying to prevent their relations from worsening further.

It remains to be seen though if China’s decision to bar Micron Technology Inc. from supplying critical infrastructure leads to another round of tension. Some analysts see this as an opening shot by Beijing to retaliate, while US lawmakers want to react with putting more Chinese firms on a blacklist.