Authored by Hayden Ludwig via American Greatness,

New documents reveal the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s true purpose: Juicing Democrat registration in the states, thanks to data provided by ERIC.

In modern elections, the candidate who can turn out the bigger base is usually the winner. Put differently, the campaign with better voter data holds the trump card.

For more than a decade now, Democrats unquestionably have owned that trump card and used it to carve deep inroads into once solidly red states such as Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, while Republicans have looked on in bafflement. It’s no secret why the Left is winning elections despite shrinking in the polls: They register new voters in droves, and conservatives do not.

More than 160 million people cast a ballot in the 2020 election. Yet there may be as many as 60 million more eligible-but-unregistered individuals (EBUs) out there—people who could lawfully vote but may not until they register in their state. They’re typically hard to reach and politically disinterested. Yet the party that can tap into this electoral goldmine—that is, identify and reach these potential voters—would be unbeatable.

For years, that party has been the Democrats. It may soon be the Republicans. Here’s why.

Permanent Democratic Power

In 2010, the Supreme Court ushered in a torrent of new political spending through its Citizens United v. FEC decision. “Progressives” who were convinced that big business would back Republicans to the hilt saw doom written on the wall. To counter this Republican tide, groups such as the Brennan Center proposed adding “millions of new voters onto the rolls through a modernized registration system—starting in 2010.”

In short, they needed to balloon the Democratic Party’s ranks to survive a GOP onslaught—an onslaught that never came.

“Voter registration modernization” proved a euphemism for inserting operatives into state election machinery. But EBU data is protected behind layers of federal privacy laws and across multiple state agencies (e.g. motor vehicle departments) and thus not available to political groups. It was Pew Charitable Trusts, a powerful left-of-center funder, that discovered the back door.

Between 2010 and 2012, Pew incubated the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that billed itself as the solution to an entirely different problem presented to the states: Maintaining their voter rolls, which are notoriously inaccurate and constantly in flux. For a fee, ERIC would graciously warehouse states’ voter roll data and identify potential double voters using sophisticated data-matching software.

That’s the sales pitch, anyway. In truth, ERIC makes the removal of ineligible voters entirely optional and tedious, while mandating member states spend hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars to register new voters. Far from streamlining voter rolls, ERIC expands them, which is why non-ERIC states have cleaner rolls than their ERIC counterparts.

More furtively, ERIC would also gain access to invaluable data on tens of millions of EBUs—a database that no other group in the world has access to. But how to use it?

Project Get-Out-The-Vote

We know from public records requests that ERIC soon established a data-sharing agreement with a heretofore obscure nonprofit, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). Amazingly, the corporate leftist media continues to claim this inconvenient fact is “without evidence.”

ERIC and CEIR share a founder: David Becker, a partisan elections lawyer who previously worked for the far-left People for the American Way and the Justice Department’s voting rights arm. Becker is well known as a “hardcore leftist” who can’t “stand conservatives.” Yet Pew presented him as the nonpartisan face of its ERIC project.

Becker spent four years persuading nearly two-thirds of the states to join ERIC before departing to found CEIR in 2016. Yet until recently, Becker remained a nonvoting member of ERIC’s board, courtesy of a carve-out in ERIC’s bylaws made specifically for him to ensure continued oversight of the ostensibly “neutral” and state-led organization.

If ERIC is the face presentable to election officials, CEIR is Becker’s policy shop. The group was founded with seed capital from the Hewlett Foundation and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who routed the cash through Arabella Advisors’ massive “dark money” network.

More funding may have come from Pew, which continued to fund CEIR’s “sister” group, ERIC, for years. We know that CEIR’s other co-founder, Amy Cohen, led Pew’s Google-funded Voting Information Project, part of the “voter registration modernization” push. Yet strangely, Cohen never appears in CEIR’s disclosures as a paid employee, perhaps because her salary was paid by Pew.

CEIR supports vote-by-mail expansion and ever-earlier voting. It also pushes the lie that conservatives and Trump supporters are a threat to election workers while barring center-right reporters from its press conferences. Becker himself dismisses critics as “fueled by disinformation” because we “want our democracy to fail.”

CEIR received $70 million from Mark Zuckerberg in 2020, funds that drove Democratic turnout in Maryland and helped subsidize ERIC’s voter registration mandate in other states. Pennsylvania received $13 million, Michigan $12 million, New York $5 million, Georgia $5.6 million, and Arizona $4.8 million. How each grant was spent remains largely unknown, despite watchdog groups’ best efforts.

But CEIR’s founding documents reveal the truth about its origins. It was created to encourage ERIC membership and “work closely with ERIC” to register millions of new voters using exclusive EBU data in order to “turn non-voters into active participants” in future elections.

Imagine having a picture-perfect map of everyone—both registered and unregistered—living within your state’s borders. A campaign knows that an individual’s age, race, county of residence, and marital status are enough to strongly indicate how that person will vote. How difficult would it be to only target your own party’s likely voters?

Armed with this near-perfect picture of every person living in ERIC’s 32 member states—more than 200 million Americans—there is nothing stopping CEIR from doing it exactly that: registering only its preferred voters.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider that in 2020 alone, the left-wing groups funneled $434 million through a vast array of tax-exempt nonprofits, such as Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight in Georgia, that do nothing but register new Democrats. Virtually all of that money came from the Tides, Ford, Open Society, Wyss, and Buffett Foundations, among other donors supposedly engaged in charity.

These organizations would be near-worthless without EBU data, which is only available through ERIC. So where do they acquire it? The smart money would pin it on Becker’s CEIR.

CEIR operates virtually in the dark with little scrutiny from the “progressive” press, who are less interested in covering CEIR’s misdeeds than covering for them. Contrast that with the work of investigative reporters like Todd Shepherd of the right-leaning outlet Broad + Liberty. He recently reported that Pennsylvania transferred partial data profiles of hundreds of thousands of EBUs to CEIR in 2020. That information would have proved invaluable to partisan groups active in Pennsylvania that year. Yet CEIR refuses to say what it did with the trove of voter data.

But CEIR’s founding documents give us every reason to believe this is precisely what it’s doing. It’s up to Becker and Co. to convince the public that it isn’t misusing this priceless data, despite having the means, motive, and opportunity to do so.

A Right-Wing Wrecking Ball

So what can conservatives do to level the playing field?

A good axiom in warfare applies here: Turn your enemy’s strength into his greatest weakness. 

Japan famously turned many Pacific islands into impenetrable fortresses in World War II and dared U.S. forces to attack them. Instead, we sailed around them to take weaker targets and let the garrisons starve. After Rome’s devastating defeat at the hands of Hannibal’s mighty army in the Second Punic War, Rome divided its legions into smaller forces to cover more ground. Like wolves wearing out a bear, they could be everywhere while the Carthaginians could not. Hannibal lost. 

Likewise, we won’t defeat this powerful cabal in a single battle, but by nibbling it to death. The House should demand to know why the IRS refuses to strip these groups of their tax exemption for trespassing the law on biased voter registration campaigns. Conservative legislatures ought to hold hearings on out-of-state nonprofits running partisan registration drives in their jurisdiction. The states can tighten rules about who gets to register voters the same way they restrict ballot harvesting—either restricting it to family members or banning it altogether. Where there’s room for abuse, the Left will abuse the law.

Watchdogs and citizens can and should file complaints with the IRS and FEC against these groups. Conservatives are used to being attacked for their political views; very few leftists have ever faced the same kind of scrutiny. They can also demand 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) groups’ annual Form 990 disclosures, which reveal how much they took in and spent. (Here is a template and some guidelines.)

To date, nine states—Ohio, Florida, Missouri, West Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Iowa, Alabama, and Alaska—have left or are about to leave ERIC. Their leaders know that they don’t need ERIC to maintain good voter rolls because they already have the tools necessary for the job.

That leaves Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin for election integrity advocates to address.

The good news? In almost all cases, the decision to leave ERIC is entirely within the purview of the governor and secretary of state. Red states with a blue governor can look to the others on this list for legislation to leave ERIC without the governor’s consent.

Every one of these states to depart is one less state transmitting EBU data to the Left’s registration machine.

On today’s edition of “You Got Served: Shaq Style”, we present the curious case of NBA great Shaquille O’Neal and investors suing him, alleging that he “duped” them into the FTX collapse. 

The legendary basketball player is arguing that lawyers who tried to serve him with the lawsuit instead “tossed” the document in front of his car while he was driving out of the gates of his home, according to Bloomberg. 

Plaintiffs lawyers have now said that there have been “dozens of attempts” to try and serve him with the suit, including tracking him down at residences that he has in both Georgia and Texas, the report says. 

Those attorneys were told that Shaq lives in the Bahamas a month ago, so they instead tried to serve Shaq digitally, sending him a link via his social media and arguing “that should be good enough given his status as an active user of Instagram and Twitter”. The lawyers argued that he was “clearly aware of the suit”, Bloomberg wrote. 

Then on April 17, The Moskowitz Law Firm declared success, posting publicly on Twitter that they had served O’Neal: “UPDATE: Plaintiffs in the billion $ FTX class action case just served SHAQ outside his house. His home video cameras recorded our service and we made it very clear that he is not to destroy or erase any of these security tapes, because they must be preserved for our lawsuit.”

But Shaq’s lawyers saw things otherwise, asking the judge to dismiss the suit against O’Neal because lawyers missed their deadline to serve him. 

“Mr. O’Neal has not evaded service by failing to be at the residences where plaintiffs belatedly attempted service or by driving past strangers who approached his car,” his lawyers wrote. 

Moskowitz responded: “The video will show Mr. O’Neal finally being served, after many months of hiding, as he attempts to possibly injure the process server. We expected better from an officer of the law. Mr. O’Neal and his lawyers need to stop running and finally deal with these serious allegations.”

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,

Allies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis want Republicans watching Donald Trump from home tonight to remember that the former president is a loser. Ahead of his return to CNN, they warn that nominating Trump a third time won’t just cost the GOP the White House. It could hand Congress to Democrats.

That is the argument from Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC launched by former senior administration official Ken Cuccinelli and chaired by former Trump ally Adam Laxalt. In a polling memo shared exclusively with RealClearPolitics ahead of the Trump CNN townhall, they point to the last three election cycles to make the case that Trump is a net drag on the ticket.

The topline from WPA pollster Chris Wilson: “The data suggest that if Trump were to become the 2024 nominee, he will likely cost the GOP control of the House and multiple winnable seats in the Senate.”

It is a somber warning to the right ahead of a what promises to be an entertaining, no-holds barred brawl on the cable network the former president publicly says he hates the most. Trump knows how to make good television, Cuccinelli told RCP, predicting that there would be “plenty of entertainment value” when his former boss sits down with CNN in prime time, “but it comes with losses across the board. And he talks about coattails, he has negative coattails.”

Controversy has always been a feature of the Trump show. For the right, the entertainment value is unmistakable when he “owns the libs,” castigating Democrats and liberal journalists alike. But Cuccinelli likens that to an unhealthy binge, warning that while “it is fun to have the buzz, the hangover isn’t so great.” Viral moments in prime time, he warned, won’t comfort conservatives after an election that hands Democrats unified control of government: “The potential for more harm here is enormous.”

Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, dismissed that argument and suggested that the governor, who hasn’t yet declared a presidential bid, was too scared to make his own case in prime time. “Is this what candidates who are too chicken to do nationally broadcast town halls do with their time?” Miller asked before pointing RCP to a recent Washington Post-ABC News survey that showed Trump leading Biden, 44% to 38%, compared to DeSantis leading Biden, 42% to 27%.

Primary voters will hear plenty about electability once the race begins in earnest, and many are likely already familiar with warnings about the down ballot detriment of Trump. In the memo, Wilson points to analysis of the 2018 and 2022 midterms that shows how the former president’s endorsement had “a meaningful negative effect” in both of those contests by mobilizing “Democratic donors and voters” and reducing “general support for Republican congressional candidates.”

But the pollster and pro-DeSantis super PAC go farther. Never Back Down identifies 18 incumbent House Republicans in the memo who would likely lose, according to their analysis, if they run for reelection alongside Trump in 2024.

Wilson points to April studies by Public Opinions Strategies that showed a Trump nomination reducing the standing of a generic Republican congressional nominee by 10 points in Arizona and 8 points in Georgia. If that trend holds, applying those numbers to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index yields significant GOP losses that are enough to set Biden up with healthy majorities in the House and Senate going into a second term.

The list of Republican incumbents “likely to lose if Trump is on the ballot” includes Michigan Rep. John James, who narrowly won a congressional district that has been solidly Republican for at least two decades, and Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, who served as the former president’s interior secretary.

With Trump at the head of the Republican party again, Wilson reports that control of the Senate could be out of reach, with GOP candidates having to overcome an estimated 10-point swing for Democrats in battleground states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Some conservatives have blamed Trump for focusing on himself and his grievances at the expense of Republicans. He was still litigating the last general election, for instance, rather than rallying the base to support former Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the Georgia runoff. Had Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona not balked at changing the filibuster rules in the Senate, Cuccinelli said Biden would’ve had a free hand to implement even more of his agenda.

“But for those Democrats, Trump’s damage would have been permanent and far-reaching to a degree that it hasn’t even reached yet,” he said, arguing that Trump made possible Biden’s legislative success. “This was all self-inflicted by one person.”

Deny Trump the nomination for a third time, Cuccinelli insisted, make DeSantis the face of the Republican party instead, and the GOP has a banner year.

“No one else running, or looking at running, for president has a performance like DeSantis in supporting his team. No one can demonstrate that, or even make a case that they can perform that well,” Cuccinelli said of the governor’s reelection and Florida Republicans’ dominance in Florida. “He went from narrow legislative control to blow-out control.”

“If he even came close to replicating that at the national level,” he concluded, “it is a blow-out year in 2024 for Republicans at every level of government.”

Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon is set to be freed from jail pending trial after a court agreed to a €400,000 ($436,000) bail, according to a report in Montenegro news site Pobjeda. 

“…and like that, he’s gone”…

As CoinTelegraph’s Savannah Fortis reports, Montenegro has granted approval to the bail terms proposed by lawyers for Terra founder Do Kwon, who was charged with the criminal offense of document forgery under Montenegrin law.

According to the official document released by local authorities on May 12, the court has accepted the proposed bail offer for Kwon and Han Chang-Joon – Terraform Labs’ chief financial officer – of 400,000 euros ($436,000) each.

This is in addition to being put under house arrest instead of being taken into custody.

According to the documents, if the house arrest is compromised, the bail will be entered into a “special section” of the court’s working budget.

Additionally, the notice said it would be necessary to verify the authenticity of travel documents and identity cards, which were “allegedly” issued by the competent authorities of Belgium.

This update comes only one day after Kwon’s lawyers filed their request for such conditions to the Montenegrin authorities.

If the party is “unsatisfied” with the court decision, they have three days to repeal it.

Kwon and Chang-Joon were arrested by Montenegrin authorities in March 2023 at Podgorica airport for allegedly using false documents. The two had their passports confiscated in South Korea, their country of origin, in October 2022.

Interpol has wanted the Terraform Labs co-founder for his part in the Terra ecosystem’s $40 billion collapse in May 2022 that rocked the crypto industry.

The current criminal trial in Montenegro is anticipated to start on June 16.

Reports from May 10 revealed that South Korean authorities had frozen $176 million of Kwon’s personal assets as part of the ongoing criminal proceedings.

In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission has also brought civil charges against Kwon, accusing the executive of failing to “provide the public with full, fair and truthful disclosure as required for a host of crypto asset securities.”

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

The European Union is considering formally banning Russian crude flows via the Druzhba pipeline to Germany and Poland, which have already stopped importing Russia’s crude, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing documents it has seen.

The Druzhba pipeline is a key artery of oil supply from Russia to Europe. It has two branches – a northern one via Belarus to deliver oil to Belarus, Poland, Germany, Latvia, and Lithuania, and a southern one passing through Ukraine and sending oil to the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia.

Flows through the Druzhba pipeline are currently exempted from the EU embargo on imports of Russian crude oil by sea that came into effect on December 5. The EU has exempted pipeline oil flows to landlocked EU member states from the ban.

But Germany and Poland stopped imports of Russian crude via the Druzhba pipeline early this year, despite the exemptions made for pipeline crude flows. Germany and Poland have said they would halt imports of Russian crude via the Druzhba pipeline as of January 1, 2023.

Now the EU is weighing ending the exemption for the northern branch of Druzhba to Poland and Germany, as part of the next round of sanctions against Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, according to the documents Bloomberg has seen.

The pipeline flows via the southern branch to the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia would continue to be exempted from the EU embargo on imports of Russian oil.

The proposal for ending the derogation for Germany and Poland would be a symbolic move because Germany and Poland no longer import Russian oil.

But a formal ban will need to be endorsed by all 27 members of the European Union. Discussions in the EU on the proposal are still ongoing, and it could still change, according to Bloomberg’s sources. 

In the past month we have discussed on multiple occasions the unprecedented collapse in market breadth, driven by a record outperformance of a handful of tech names…

… which has seen the Nasdaq’s advance/decline line plunge to all time lows even as the Nasdaq is up more than 21% YTD…

… and where JPM recently observed that “Market Breadth Is The Weakest Ever” with Goldman’s David Kostin adding that there is elevated risk of a sharp market drawdown as a result of the collapse in market breadth.

Today, we get a new perspective on the market’s performance when normalized for the record collapse in breadth. According to SocGen it’s not so much a handful of stocks that has carried the entire market this year: it’s just one specific trade, Artificial Intelligence (which will soon spark hundreds of millions in margin-boosting layoffs across western countries).

As SocGen’s Manish Kabra writes, “the AI boom and hype is strong. So strong that without the AI-popular stocks, S&P 500 would be down 2% this year. Not +8%.”

Kabra reports that his update on SocGen’s AI sentiment news indicator keeps rising exponentially and more extended than when he first talked about it just a few weeks ago.

What is remarkable is that AI is nothing new: as a theme, Artificial Intelligence has been with us for decades (SocGen suggested being long SG Robotics and AI Equity as a secular theme last year), but what is going on now is unprecedented, and it is virtually impossible to fight against a very strong hype on a very short-term, and according to Kabra, what one can own is the defensive-Growth stocks with the top-20 most AI-held stocks within the top 15 AI ETFs.

Which brings us back to the topic of 2023’s record narrow leadership: The narrow performance is seen across the S&P 500 sectors with 8/11 broader sector groups seeing market-cap weighted indices outperforming equal-weighted indices. According to ScoGen calculations, the S&P 500 ex-AI boom stocks would be below 3800.

Yet despite this seemingly unsustainable collapse of market leaders, SocGen concludes that narrow leadership should continue: “We do see the narrow performance in the US equities to persist as the backdrop stays unfavorable for leveraged, Small-caps, Value stocks, and companies that have carried out unsustainable buybacks.“

More in the full note available to pro subs in the usual place.

Authored by Josh Hammer via The Epoch Times,

The past five weeks has seen a flurry of media activity, clearly coordinated, against the right-of-center U.S. Supreme Court.

• First, the outlet ProPublica began publishing a series of pieces “exposing” the well-known fact of Justice Clarence Thomas’ long-running friendship with billionaire real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, and alleging ethical improprieties pertaining to the justice’s purported failure to disclose certain information.

• Second, Politico alleged a conflict of interest for Justice Neil Gorsuch in an old real estate transaction in his native Colorado that involved the CEO of a major law firm.

• Third, Business Insider relied on a “whistleblower” to allege corruption on the part of Jane Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, due to her being a well-compensated legal recruiter.

• Fourth, The New York Times ran a lengthy and meandering front-page story about the at-times coziness between George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and some of the Court’s right-of-center justices.

Each and every one of these collusive “gotcha” pieces is left-wing disinformation at worst, and grossly misleading at best.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a Supreme Court justice having a long-running friendship with a wealthy political activist—and Justice Thomas did not actually fail to disclose anything for which extant canons of judicial ethics mandate disclosure, as The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto and others have painstakingly detailed. As for Justice Gorsuch, his stake in the underlying Colorado property was via a LLC, so he too did not skirt any mandatory disclosure rules. As for Jane Roberts, it is not exactly a state secret that prominent legal recruiters, and headhunters more broadly, can rake in lucrative commissions. And the Times’ polemic against Scalia Law is little more than a pitiful lament that the Left does not unilaterally control every single top-50 law school in America (although it is perilously close to doing so).

Nonetheless, despite these glaring factual omissions, misrepresentations and the misleading natures of these hit pieces, the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee still deemed it necessary to hold a hearing last week on “ethics reform.” To any reasonable observer not inebriated from that most potent stew of MSNBC chyrons and New York Times editorial headlines, it should be clear that Democratic elected officials are working hand in glove with the Beltway journalist establishment. That particular revolving door, after all, has a long and inglorious history.

It is incumbent upon sober elected officials, and the American people at large, to reject this obtuse, sprawling Democrat-media disinformation operation. The operation, for all its pompous bluster and ginned up faux hysteria, has one goal and one goal only: to delegitimize the U.S. Supreme Court, and to pave the way for ruinous policies that would irreparably damage, and ultimately destroy, that venerable institution.

In the year 2023, the Left has nearly completed its century-plus-long “march through the institutions”: The forces of wokeism and civilizational arson are now firmly ensconced in the corridors of power in Fortune 500 boardrooms, K-12 public school classrooms, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, and myriad other traditional centers of American cultural clout. The last remaining bulwark for the Right, and for the forces of civilizational sanity more broadly, is the political arena: Republicans currently occupy 26 out of the 50 governor mansions, and have 22 state-level “trifectas” of consolidated gubernatorial/state legislative control (compared with only 17 for Democrats). At the federal level, Republicans retain a slim majority in the House of Representatives and, most important, conservatives control the Supreme Court. In 2022, moreover, the Court had an impressively conservative term, most prominently including its ruling to devolve to the democratic process all regulation of the Left’s favored pagan sacrament, abortion.

The current disinformation operation thus amounts to one big, crass intimidation tactic—a flexing of muscle by what the late Andrew Breitbart famously called the “Democrat-media complex.” The goal is to browbeat the justices into ruling the Left’s way in this term’s marquee cases—including the potentially imminent end of America’s sordid affirmative action regime in the twin pending cases out of Harvard and the University of North Carolina—or else feel Democrats’ political wrath.

That wrath could come in numerous forms, including judicial impeachment, jurisdiction-stripping legislation, or, perhaps most harrowing, the ever-looming threat of court-packing.

Let us be clear: That is the end goal here. “Ethics reform” is simply a convenient smokescreen—and not a particularly clever one, at that.

Supreme Court justices do not typically make a habit of speaking for themselves, Justice Samuel Alito’s recent electric interview with the Journal notwithstanding. It is thus necessary for those of us who can speak up to do so, and to defend the integrity, independence and institutional durability of what Alexander Hamilton famously called, in The Federalist No. 78, the “least dangerous” branch of the federal government. With any luck, the Democrat-media complex’s disinformation operation will fail miserably.

The National Hurricane Center tweeted Thursday that the first storm of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season occurred well before the season even started. Forecasters said a reanalysis of a major winter storm moving up the US East Coast in January qualified as the first tropical cyclone of the year. 

In the statement released Thursday, NHC researchers said that the storm on Jan. 16, about 300 miles north of Bermuda, was designated a subtropical storm. 

NHC has determined that a subtropical storm formed in the Atlantic basin off the northeastern U.S. coast in mid-January 2023, and it will be designated as the first cyclone of the 2023 Atlantic season with ID AL012023.https://t.co/6idLKYJqjL pic.twitter.com/f047dch647

— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) May 11, 2023

Though this storm won’t be given a name retrospectively, it will still be included in the year’s total count for the hurricane season that begins on June 1. 

As a result, the next cyclone to form in the Atlantic basin this season will be AL022023, and advisories will be issued in AWIPS bin 2. If it begins as a tropical depression, it would be “Tropical Depression Two.” If it becomes a tropical storm, it would be named “Arlene.”

— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) May 11, 2023

A tropical system in January is rare but not unprecedented. Bloomberg pointed out:

Eight out of the last nine years have now produced storms before the official June 1 start of the six-month season. It’s also the second January storm since 2016, when Hurricane Alex formed far from land in the central Atlantic. Only 2022 failed to bring forth a pre-season system. 

As for the outlook this season, researchers at Colorado State University expect tropical activity to be slightly below average due to El Nino producing upper-level winds that help break apart hurricane formation in the Atlantic.

The bizarre spat between Wagner mercenary group and the regular Russian military chain of command has continued exploding into public view, now reaching a full-blown crisis for Moscow as the fate of the Bakhmut front hangs in the balance.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed Friday that the Russian army is abandoning its positions near Bakhmut. “This is not called regrouping, this is fleeing,” he said in audio statement posted to Wagner’s social media channels.

He additionally alleged that Russian troops “simply went fleeing” from positions around the north and south of the strategic Donetsk city. “The flanks are failing. The front is collapsing,” he added.

But the defense ministry (MoD) was quick to reject the new assessment from Prigozhin, who this week has been begging for more ammunition, while threatening to pull his forces if resupplies continue to be blocked or falter. The MoD said their are units being regrouped and progress is being made.

Prigozhin retorted that “Attempts by the defense ministry in the information field to sugarcoat the situation – it’s leading and will lead to a global tragedy for Russia.” Prigozhin has previously called the generals “clowns”. Further according to statements from the Wagner chief this week:

“Those territories that were liberated with the blood and lives of our comrades … are abandoned today almost without any fight by those who are supposed to hold our flanks.”

Earlier in the week, Prigozhin marred Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations with public and foul-mouthed criticisms of the country’s top military officials.

“Today they [Ukrainians] are tearing up the flanks in the Artemovsk [Bakhmut] direction, regrouping at Zaporizhzhia. And a counteroffensive is about to begin,” he said Tuesday. “Victory Day is the victory of our grandfathers. We haven’t earned that victory one millimetre.”

Without doubt Prigozhin has seen his political star rise following Wagner’s spearheading victory in places like Soledar. He’s also a personal friend (and formerly his chef) of President Putin, but many are starting to ask: how far can Prigozhin go with his blasting both military and political leadership?

At this sensitive moment where the tide of the Ukraine war hangs in the balance for the Kremlin (Bakhmut long being seen as a strategic ‘turning point’ in the east), how politically expendable is Prigozhin? How much can he get away with? He seemed to even reference Putin derogatorily as a “happy grandfather” who is ignorant of the real situation on the ground.

There are Western media reports that the Kremlin is preparing to take down or silence the Wagner chief…

“If it goes on like this, the official security forces will definitely stop it.”https://t.co/GQha2Uqn9q

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) May 10, 2023

The Washington-based hawkish Institute for the Study of War is posing this key question, among others:

It may seem surprising in a country where criticizing the military can potentially cost a person a spell in prison that Prigozhin gets away with strident criticism of Putin’s generals. But Putin presides over what is often described as a court system, where infighting and competition among elites is in fact encouraged to produce results, as long as the “vertical of power” remains loyal to and answers to the head of state.

But Prigozhin’s online tantrums to be crossing the line to open disloyalty, some observers say.

In a recent Twitter thread, the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War said, “If the Kremlin does not respond to Prigozhin’s escalating attacks on Putin it may further erode the norm in Putin’s system in which individual actors can jockey for position and influence (and drop in and out of Putin’s favor) but cannot directly criticize Putin.”

Speculation then centers on whether Prigozhin is politically expendable, whether his outbursts are a sort of clever deception operation — or, more troublingly for Putin, whether the system of loyalty that keeps the Kremlin running smoothly is starting to break down.

2/ #Prigozhin referred to a “happy grandfather” figure who “thinks that he is good” during a discussion of ammunition shortages and #Russia’s future prospects in #Ukraine.

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) May 10, 2023

Adding to the pressure on the Kremlin, Western headlines are beginning to take note that Prigozhi’s tirades are now seeming to take aim at Putin himself. One reads: “Humiliation for Vladimir Putin as boss of the Russian private military company goes into public meltdown.” How far can Prigozhin go?

Authored by Lipton Matthews via The Mises Institute,

Being perceived as anti–working class is a cardinal sin in American politics. Working-class people are seen as the unappreciated engine of American growth. Hillary Clinton discovered this lesson when she was criticized for calling Donald Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” But interestingly, expressing contempt for the upper class is quite tolerable.

Rich people are frequently ridiculed by comedians and depicted as snobs in popular culture. Shows like SpongeBob SquarePants and The Simpsons present affluent characters in an unflattering light. Such characters are seldom portrayed as virtuous entrepreneurs who are rewarded for delivering value. Usually, viewers are led to think that the rich are the source of all social ills.

Typically, negative depictions of working class or poor people would evoke controversy, but upward classism is tolerated. Sociologist Rainer Zitelmann has written extensively on upward classism and the rich in public opinion. Zitelmann’s research covers how rich people are viewed in Western countries, and his findings are unsurprising.

According to the results of Zitelmann’s study, rich people, like other minority groups, are often scapegoats who are blamed for social malaise. However, he observes that the perception of the wealthy is determined by education. In Germany, England, and America, better-educated people have a more favorable view of the rich. A possible explanation is that educated people have higher incomes and are connected to the rich, so their views are more realistic and less tainted by stereotypes.

Their education also makes it easier for them to appreciate the significance of the rich in creating value for society. Social enviers, by contrast, have warped perceptions of the rich. Zitelmann documents that such people assign negative traits to the wealthy. Because their views are shaped by a zero-sum mentality, envious people think that when some gain others must lose.

Ordinary people benefit tremendously from the inventions of the ambitious and intellectually gifted. The ingenuity of oilman John Davis Rockefeller made the American economy more productive in the nineteenth century, and today our lives are made more convenient by the efficiencies of tech companies like Amazon and Google. Without the traits of the rich, we would lack modern innovations.

But unfortunately, most people don’t differentiate the progressive rich who accumulate wealth by delivering value for society from those who increase their wealth by relying on government subsidies or political connections. Hence, we are primarily concerned with the value creators and their attributes that culminate in the formation of dynamic businesses.

In undertaking his study, Zitelmann found that the rich are high in conscientiousness and openness to experiences. Other studies assert that rich people have a great propensity for risk. Most rich people are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs suffer from high failure rates, so this indicates that people who excel in business are not just competent but also perseverant.

The average person is not as tenacious as entrepreneurs who establish dynamic businesses that positively transform living standards. Essentially, wealth is the reward for providing value to society. Instead of demonizing the rich, people ought to be thanking them for enriching society with useful skills.

However, when envy is pervasive in society, rich people downplay their success to thwart backlash. The downside of doing so is that success is vilified rather than embraced. Societal progress is driven by the passion of ambitious people, and it will come to a halt when the most competent people are demotivated to succeed.

Zitelmann noticed in his study that countries like America and England with a lower share of envious people have a relatively higher proportion of millionaires. This is expected because in less envious countries, the success of the rich motivates others to achieve. Economic studies corroborate Zitelmann’s conclusion that the zero-sum mentality of envious people saps industrial progress.

One study notes that economic equality fails to mitigate the effects of zero-sum thinking because the possibility of some people becoming more successful can reinforce zero-sum thinking. Redistributing wealth won’t prevent the value-destroying consequences of envious behavior.

The zero-sum mindset that fuels envy will only be diminished when societies promote economic freedom to afford more opportunities to generate wealth.

When people are free to prosper, they become less likely to engender a zero-sum approach to development and more appreciative of success because it’s now a greater possibility. Rather than wealth redistribution, the solution to envy is progress powered by economic freedom.