Last August, we were the first to show how Russia was bypassing Europe’s so-called commodities embargo: it was selling LNG to China which was then re-selling it to Europe at a substantial mark up. And while we also frequently reported that Russia was using a similar sanctions bypass for oil, this time using India instead of China, few were willing to confirm as much: after all, it would seem very shortsighted if European consumers were paying an extra surcharge to India, while Russia was not suffering any adverse consequences from Europe’s laughable “sanctions.”

Not any more: on Friday, Bloomberg reported that for all of Europe’s fire and brimstone about an embargo (which has gotten decidedly quieter in recent months), “Russian oil is still powering Europe just with the help of India.“

As we reported at the time, last December the EU barred almost any seaborne crude oil imports from Russia. It extended the prohibition to refined fuels two months later. However, the rules didn’t stop countries like India from snapping up cheap Russian crude, turning it into fuels like diesel, and shipping it back to Europe at a big markup: as shown in the chart below, just the Brent to Urals price differential, a byproduct of the Russian sanctions, is about $25/bbl, almost a third of the price of a barrel of crude. The markups on Russian product are even greater when dealing with refined products such as gasoline or diesel.

In fact, India has become so good at reselling Russian oil to the same Europeans who refuse to buy it directly from Moscow for a much lower price, that the Asian country is on track to become Europe’s largest supplier of refined fuels this month while simultaneously buying record amounts of Russian crude, according to data from analytics firm Kpler.

In other words, Europe is still buying Russian oil, keeping Putin’s military machine well-funded, but because of the virtue signaling exercise of buying Russian oil though a mediator, the transaction ends up costing Europeans billions more than if they simply had purchased the oil directly.

pic.twitter.com/exdke9mX0p

— Derek J. Grossman (@DerekJGrossman) April 29, 2023

“Russian oil is finding its way back into Europe despite all the sanctioning and India ramping up fuel exports to the west is a good example of it,” said Viktor Katona, lead crude analyst at the firm. “With India taking in so much Russian barrels, it’s inevitable.”

As Bloomberg notes, “the development is double-edged for the EU. On the one hand, the bloc needs alternative sources of diesel now that it has cut off direct flows from Russia, previously its top supplier. However, it ultimately boosts demand for Moscow’s barrels, and means extra freight costs.” In other words, Europe achieves none of its embargo goals (i.e., keeping Russian oil out of the market, preventing Putin from using oil to finance the war in Ukraine), while being hit with far higher energy prices.

It also means more competition for Europe’s oil refiners who can’t access cheap Russian crude, and comes amid wider market scrutiny about where the region’s diesel imports are coming from.

Repsol SA’s CEO Josu Jon Imaz said on Thursday that Russian diesel is entering Europe illegally and called on authorities to clamp down on the activity. He wasn’t talking about the trade via India but flows of diesel that originated in Russia… which of course is the same thing.

Hilariously, a preliminary inquiry into the matter by Spanish authorities didn’t find evidence that Russian diesel was entering the country, a government official said Friday, adding that a probe is ongoing. Of course, nobody in Europe wants to admit that they are indirectly funding Putin, so expect many more such “discoveries” as all other countries try to find if they are importing Russian oil only to find that everyone but them is using it.

Meanwhile, Europe’s refined fuel imports from India are set to surge above 360,000 barrels a day, edging just ahead of those of oil exporting titan Saudi Arabia, Kpler’s data show.

And the cherry on top: Russian crude oil arrivals to India are expected to surpass 2 million barrels a day in April, representing almost 44% of the nation’s overall oil imports, according to Kpler data. India then quickly re-exports the oil or processes it first into diesel and gasoline, and then sells it to European customers.

More than half of Russia’s seaborne oil shipments were to the European Union and Group of Seven nations before the bloc began to cut purchases in response to the nation’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

Finally, the question of what the point is of continued Russian “sanctions” remains, as the IIF’s Robin Brooks explains in the following twitter thread, which once again makes clear that western sanctions against Russia have been a catastrophic failure… perhaps as was intended all along.

Evaluation of our sanctions policy

1. Only 2 questions matter. First, have our sanctions meaningfully curtailed Russia’s ability to wage war? Second, are our sanctions a deterrent to countries that may wage war in the future? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is: “No!”

2. Root problem is an infatuation with financial sanctions. These can be effective when used on current account deficit countries – Turkey in 2018 is an example – but they don’t work on current account surplus countries. This is a key point that cannot be emphasized enough.

3. Russia shows how our financial sanctions failed. We sanctioned some banks, including the central bank (red), but not all. This meant that all the cash from Russia’s current account surplus got routed through non-sanctioned Russian banks (blue). Putin still got all his cash…

4. So our financial sanctions did not prevent Putin getting all his cash in return for energy exports. All this cash just got routed through different banks than before. As a result, financial conditions in Russia eased back to pre-war levels, a big plus for Russia’s war economy.

5. We could have avoided this, but it would have required sanctioning ALL Russian banks. That’s the same as a trade embargo, since Putin no longer gets paid and stops exporting. This shows what’s needed to hurt c/a surplus countries: a trade embargo! Not financial sanctions…

6. Number one lesson from Russia is that our infatuation with financial sanctions must end. They don’t work on c/a surplus countries, unless we sanction all banks, in which case we’re just doing a trade embargo. We need to be doing trade embargos instead of financial sanctions…

7. Had we done a hard energy embargo on Russia, this would have come at a cost to the West, but Russia would have gone into financial crisis, making the war harder for Putin to fight. An embargo would have also scared other potentially hostile current account surplus countries.

8. It’s not too late. First, the West needs to end its focus on financial sanctions. Second, we need to start talking about hard trade-offs that are needed to confront c/a surplus countries. We need to stop giving them cash, which means we need to stop buying their stuff…

9. A footnote on the G7 oil price cap. The cap is recognition of the fact that Russia’s current account surplus needs to be cut. But – thanks to Greek shipping oligarchs – the cap was set at $60 and wasn’t binding. A mistake that can be fixed now by lowering the cap…

Authored by Stanley Ridgley via American Greatness,

Demand for Diversity Officers may have peaked and may even be on the wane.

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hustle is running its course and may soon be out of steam, but it’s not too late to collect your share of the loot.

This means you shouldn’t delay applying for one of the lucrative positions carrying the generic title of “DEI Officer.” 

While the typical DEI position requires no expertise of any sort, it does require a collection of attitudes toward your fellow men and women, an ability to utter shameless platitudes and clichés, and embrace a clearly identifiable and primitive Manichean worldview grounded in paranoia.

If you aim to become a promising candidate for a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) position, either in the corporate world or in academia, you can easily discover if you have the necessary self-conscious virtue by taking this five-minute employment aptitude survey.

Answer “Yes” to the following statements if you agree, and add or subtract the points assigned for each question based on your Yes answer.

Then score yourself by comparing your results with those in the chart at the end. Good luck!

1) I am not appreciated for my many talents. +3

2) I am inherently suspicious of others. +3

3) I believe that America is the land of opportunity. -3

4) I believe that I have access to truths denied to others. +5

5) I believe that I must work hard for my reward. -3

6) I believe in a world that is divided into oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited and that these groups are easily identified by the color of their skin.  +5

7) I believe that I can work to give in-groups preferential treatment while simultaneously saying that there are no racial or gender preferences at our institution. +3

8) I believe that I should bring my “authentic self” to work, irrespective of any other considerations. +5

9) I believe, like Frederick Douglass, that in America, one can pull oneself up “by the bootstraps” to succeed. -7

10) If I fail in my job, I immediately search for the reason in causes external to me, such as the “system” or the “unearned advantages” available to other people. +7

11) If people question me and ask for evidence for what I say, I immediately attack them for their “resistance” to the truth that I offer in my story.  +5

12) I believe that “indigenous” forms of knowledge such as the “medicine wheel” and the “talking stick” should be incorporated into our scientific discourse. +7

13) I always list my pronouns in my email signature and social media profiles. +3

14) I recognize that today’s “Diversity” office resembles the Soviet Union’s old Political Commissariat, where political ideologues occupied positions to report on the political reliability of those who actually worked to accomplish the mission. -10    BONUS POINTS:  If you know this but believe it’s a good thing.  +15

15) Anyone who disagrees with the lofty goals of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is guilty of “diversity resistance.”  +5

16) I believe that a doctorate in education, sociology, or gender studies is every bit as important and impressive as a doctorate in physics. +3

17) When people respond to my charges of “racism” in a particular company or university, with bothersome requests for evidence, examples, or proof, I complain of being attacked, invalidated, and dehumanized rather than taking the opportunity to prove my point.  +5

18) I believe that “stories” and “narratives” are just as important and as convincing as knowledge grounded in logic, reason, and the scientific method. +7

19) As women are 50 percent more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than men, this shows we need to do everything we can to support women in higher education. +3

20) I am familiar with the racialist statement “skinfolk aren’t always kinfolk,” and I look with suspicion at persons with whom I share the superficial characteristic of race but who disagree with me. +7

21) I routinely drop the word “systemic” into conversations. +3

22) I use the terms “white supremacy” and “white privilege” comfortably and un-ironically, without awareness that they are equivalent to scapegoat devil terms such as the bourgeoisie, or Kulaks, or International Jewry, or infidels to explain all the bad that happens. +5

23) I believe that the best method for advancing our knowledge and understanding of the physical world is logic, reason, and the type of inquiry we call the scientific method. -10

24) I believe that people like Ijeomo Oluo, Paulo Freire, Ibram Kendi, and Derald Wing Sue have important things to say about our society that get to the inner truth. +5

24) I don’t pay much attention to the fantasies, “stories,” and pseudoscience of Ijeomo Oluo, Paulo Freire, Ibram Kendi, and Derald Wing Sue. -7

25) I believe in something called “diversity science,” which substantiates the basic beneficial tenets of the diversity agenda. +5

26) I believe that “diversity science” is pseudo-scientific twaddle fabricated by off campus nonprofits and imported into universities and the corporate world. -10

27) The Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed inspires me to work for social justice, emancipation, and against oppression in all its forms.  +5

28) I know that Paulo Freire was a crypto-Maoist who borrowed almost all of his education theory from Mao Zedong’s murderous Cultural Revolution, which Freire greatly admired. -5 BONUS POINTS:  If you know this but believe it’s a good thing.  +15 .

29) I believe any disagreement with my worldview can be overcome with more “education.” +3

30) I divide society into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” “exploiters” and “exploited,” and I know that this is a primitive Manichean way of looking at society that resembles a medievalist world divided into “infidels” and “believers.”  +5 BONUS POINTS:  If you do this and believe it’s a good thing.  +5

31) I believe in “inclusion and belonging” as fervently as any member of Reverend Moon’s Unification Church believes in “peace and unity.” +3

32) I believe that I have attained “critical consciousness” and that those who disagree with my ideology are afflicted with “false consciousness” and must be taught to embrace a new belief system. +5

33) I believe that “critical consciousness” and “false consciousness” constitute a tautological contrivance that updates Karl Marx’s notion of “class consciousness” for race and gender sensibilities. -5  BONUS POINTS: I recognize that critical consciousness is the latest play on Plato’s cave allegory from his Republic of the 4th century B.C. -5  DOUBLE-BONUS POINTS:  If you know the foregoing and believe they are good things. +15 I don’t know who Plato is. +10

34) I believe that the poetry of Audre Lorde is profound, particularly her “master’s tools” line. +2

35) I recognize that Audre Lorde’s “master’s tools” line is pedestrian. -7

36) “Inclusion and belonging” sounds too close to a cult slogan for me to feel comfortable with it. -7

37) I believe that I should be called “Doctor” just like Jill Biden because I wrote a 120-page “dissertation” for my Ed.D. that explores my feelings about the education program I just completed, and which required zero research.  +7

38) I am thrilled—thrilled—that “I finally get to use my master’s degree” in educational leadership to bring people to critical consciousness.  +3

 *  *  *

Good candidate? You make the call!

+40 and above: Welcome aboard, commissar!  Get ready to Do the Work!

+39-30: Not the perfect package but you’re ready to share authentic stories, struggle against “supremacy,” and do some dismantling!

+29-20: A few more weeks of amplifying “marginalized voices” should bolster your score

+19-10: You’re not committed enough—time for a “difficult dialogue” and a “courageous conversation,” capped off with a “Brave Space”

+9-0: Hands behind your back—your struggle session is through that door.

-1 and below: Racist!

Moscow is furious after on Saturday Polish police reportedly raided a Russian school attached to the Russian embassy in Warsaw and took it over. School staff were then given hours to pack up their things and vacate the building, according to RIA Novosti, following local authorities bursting into the grounds using a crow bar.

Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina said the state was enforcing a court ruling over the building building which says it was “illegally leased by the Russian embassy for years.” Thus Poland is asserting that the building and school isn’t protected under diplomatic status, which Moscow disputes.

Russia’s foreign ministry blasted the “hostile actions” of Polish authorities which are a “blatant violation” of official Russian diplomatic property.

“Such an impudent step by Warsaw, which goes beyond the framework of civilized interstate communication, will not remain without our harsh reaction and consequences for the Polish authorities and Poland’s interests in Russia,” the ministry stated.

“We view these new hostile actions of the Polish authorities as a flagrant violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and an attempt against Russian diplomatic real estate in Poland,” it continued.

“Official Warsaw has been violating the law for many years: international legislation, bilateral agreements, domestic legislation. Behaves defiantly and unlawfully. What can be described in one word – provocation,” the ministry said, vowing a severe response.

Employees of the school at the Russian embassy in Poland, which was raided and seized by Polish police today, packing their things to the tune of “Farewell of Slavianka” pic.twitter.com/sjCD0KGGqL

— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) April 29, 2023

But Polish foreign ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina retorted that Warsaw authorities are fully within their rights and are enforcing Polish law.

“Our opinion, which has been confirmed by the courts, is that this property belongs to the Polish state and was taken by Russia illegally,” he said.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Billed as the most in-depth interview yet, the New York Times published a very long piece that contains some rather startling admissions, claims, and defenses from Anthony Fauci, the face of lockdowns and shot mandates.

The author and interviewer is David Wallace-Wells, who before (and now after) Covid specialized in writing about climate change, invokes every predictable trope.

So there was a sense in which this interview was a lovefest between the two.

Still it netted some interesting results.

Here are my top-ten picks of Fauci quotes.

1. Fauci: “Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries.”

This seems promising but one quickly realizes that there is an axiom among the people responsible for lockdowns. They were completely correct in their thinking. The problem was not enough centralization, prior planning, or resources.

Also there was too much disinformation and non-compliance, leading to a low vaccine uptake compared with other countries. The vaccines are the miracle and the greatest achievement of the pandemic, a point on which they admit no argument.

This is also the conclusion of a thing called The Covid Crisis Group (funded mostly by the Charles Koch and Rockefeller Foundations) which has released the new book Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report. There is no PDF. You have to buy it. The lead author is the well-known fixer Philip Zelikow, who wrote the 9-11 Commission report.

Included among the team is none other than Carter Mecher, who bears more responsibility for school closings than anyone else. Also there is Rajeev Venkayya, the one-time Bush administration official who is widely credited with having invented the very concept of lockdowns.

It’s their story and they are sticking to it.

2. Fauci on vaccine mandates: “Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.”

If you didn’t think you needed the vaccine or didn’t trust it, Fauci proclaims that you are responsible for divisiveness and anti-science feeling. The “independent streak” is called freedom, which for him is the real problem. The lesson for next time? Hard to know. Maybe he thinks the mandates should have been enforced with more energy.

3. Fauci on the economics of the lockdowns: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.

It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.”

There we go with the great divide between public health and real life, as if one does not impact the other. Public health cared not for economics — the science of human cooperation — and, sadly, the economists were too often unschooled on public health. The compartmentalization of speciality fields played into the haphazard totalitarianism we experienced.

But there’s more — a lot more. Read on to see Fauci’s other important quotes, and what they really mean.

4. Fauci on why he is not responsible for anything: “when people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy’ — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.”

He was merely deferring to a giant bureaucracy where no one takes responsibility either!

5. Fauci on how they should have locked down earlier: “We were not fully appreciative of the fact that we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus that was clearly spread by ways that were unprecedented and unexperienced by us. And so it fooled us in the beginning and confused us about the need for masks and the need for ventilation and the need for inhibition of social interaction.” Should they have shut down in February 2020? “We should have, probably, if we knew what we know now.”

Inexperienced in a textbook respiratory virus? It’s because they thought it was a bioweapon that could be handled like AIDS. Masks were the condoms. Lockdowns were the behavioral changes. Minimizing of cases was the metric of success. On every point, they were wrong.

Plus they didn’t even learn from the AIDS experience. It wasn’t the vaccines that cooled the crisis. It was the therapeutics innovated in clinical experience. Instead, Fauci shut down all efforts at early treatment to wait for the vaccines. Having done it earlier would have been even worse!

6. Fauci on the effectiveness of masking: “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work. But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know. At least he admits it. And yet the CDC is still suing for the legal right to impose masking on the whole population whoever it wants.

7. Fauci on not understanding the virus: “Herd immunity is based on two premises: one, that the virus doesn’t change, and two, that when you get infected or vaccinated, the durability of protection is measured in decades, if not a lifetime. With SARS-CoV-2, we thought protection against infection was going to be measured in a long period of time. And we found out — wait a minute, protection against infection, and against severe disease, is measured in months, not decades. No. 2, the virus that you got infected with in January 2020 is very different from the virus that you’re going to get infected with in 2021 and 2022.”

To be clear, nothing about herd immunity requires lifetime immunity and it certainly is not premised on unchanging virus. Indeed, it is astonishing that he claims they had no idea the virus would mutate.

It’s an established reality that such widespread and mostly non-deadly pathogens like this mutate, which is precisely why they cannot be eradicated through vaccination. Why must anyone have to explain virus basics to Fauci of all people?

8. Fauci on the huge age gradient of medically significant risk: “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85% of the hospitalizations are there.”

In fact, their solution was to shut down the whole of society for a virus that was mostly if not entirely a danger to the aged and sick. And to justify that, they absolutely did obscure the risk gradient, which is why most everyone was running around like their hair was on fire. The attempt was precisely to create population fear and panic, as Fauci said many times in private.

9. Fauci on whether the NIH funded the lab that leaked the virus. “ Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that N.I.H.-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins…. Well, I sleep fine. I sleep fine. And remember, this work was done in order to be able to help prepare us for the next outbreak. This work was not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world. And it was judged that this type of research was important.”

Once again, if the NIH had anything to do with funding the research that led to the virus, he is not responsible for that either. It was those pesky independent scientists. He has again thrown colleagues under the bus.

10. Fauci on gain-of-function research: “Some want to pass a law: All gain-of-function should be stopped. But if all gain-of-function stops, you will have no vaccines for flu. You will have no vaccines for any of the other diseases, because all of that manipulates a virus or a pathogen to gain a certain function to be able to make a vaccine.”

That’s a very hard claim. I asked ChatGPT about that and it quickly spat out the following:

“No, the flu vaccine does not require gain-of-function research. The development of flu vaccines typically involves studying the behavior of the virus and its strains, identifying the most common strains and predicting which one will be most prevalent in the upcoming season. The vaccine is then developed using inactivated or attenuated versions of the virus, which do not require gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research, which involves genetically modifying viruses to make them more infectious or deadly, is sometimes used for studying the flu virus, but it is not required for the creation of flu vaccines.”

If not for the flu vaccine, what is gain-of-function’s purpose? The creation of bioweapons and vaccines to confound them? The track record of this looks awful.

Fauci and his friends keep trying to close the book on the Covid epoch. They have settled on the messaging and are doing everything possible to tie it all up in a bow in hopes that everyone will move on. The mainstream media wants to move on too. Everyone guilty for the wreckage wants to do the same, particularly the elites in every sector that pushed for and celebrated the mass violation of human rights.

They are wrong. The book is not closed and will not be until we get honest answers.

Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a member of the AFL–CIO, but she’s perhaps best known as being the key advocate for shutting schools down during the onset of the Covid pandemic.

Weingarten was called to task this week on the Don Lemon-less CNN by senior political commentator Scott Jennings, who excoriated the union boss after she engaged in historical revisionism over her role in school shutdowns – insisting before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, that she had instead advocated for reopening schools as quickly as possible.

AFT President Randi Weingarten: “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.” pic.twitter.com/1qNL05VD3u

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 26, 2023

Not so fast, Randi…

“Speaking on behalf of millions of American parents, I had to teach them at home,” Jenning said. “My wife had to teach them at home. I am stunned at what you have said this week about your claiming to have wanted to reopen schools.” 

In 2020, Weingarten called attempts to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 “reckless, callous and cruel.”

What’s more, her union pushed aggressively for closures at the local level, while areas with high union influence remained closed much longer.

CNN‘s Jennings continued to shred Weingarten, stating: “I think you’ll find that most parents believe you are the tip of the spear of school closures. There are numerous statements you made over the summer of ’20 scaring people to death about the possibility of opening schools. And I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done to these kids.” 

“I have two kids with learning differences. Do you know how hard it is for them to learn at home and not in a classroom that was designed for them? And for you to sit in front of Congress and the American people and say, oh, ‘I wanted to open up them the whole time,’” I am shocked. I’m stunned. I’m stunned,” he continued. “And there are millions of parents who feel the exact same way.”

Watch:

.@ScottJenningsKY to @rweingarten: “I am stunned at what you have said this week…I think you’ll find that most parents believe you are the tip of the sphere of school closures…I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done…” pic.twitter.com/gVCDgpP3dN

— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) April 28, 2023

Additionally, the NY Post reported last week that one epidemiologist claimed Weingarten even “fudged a scientific study” that showed low levels of Covid transmission in schools in order to keep schools closed during the pandemic. 

Co-author of the study, Dr. Tracy Høeg, wrote on Twitter last week: “We saw remarkably low in school transmission & no known transmission to teachers.”

She added: “The fact the [CDC] was taking the advice of the [AFT] & not the scientists publishing on this topic in their own journal and without considering the data from Europe seems to have played a role in the massive error that left millions [of] US kids out of school unnecessarily.”

Weingarten had used the study “multiple times as evidence schools needed ‘layered mitigation’ to reopen”, she said during a congressional hearing. 

“The way Ms. Weingarten mentioned me in her testimony, one might have thought I was being consulted all along but this was not the case,” Høeg said, shredding the assumptions of the union leader.

“Despite the wording in [Randi Weingarten’s] written testimony, I consistently *disagreed* w/ what she & AFT were requesting in terms of mitigation to reopen schools & I’ve said that consistently (on social media, in op-eds, on news interviews) since our study was published.”

Meanwhile, Weingarten has doubled down on Twitter – and locked down replies from the general public!

Covid scared the nation, but we tried to do everything we could to reopen schools safely. It would have helped if Trump/DeVos helped instead of hectored. Now we must do everything we can to help kids learn & overcome the effects of the pandemic. https://t.co/waWT8BuCQh

— Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩‍🎓 (@rweingarten) April 28, 2023

Community notes to the rescue;

Then and now;

 

 

 

 

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Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is demanding that the FBI investigate the exploitation of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (IUAC) who may have been brought into the United States via child smuggling operations.

According to data from US Customs and Border Protection, approximately 345,000 minors have crossed into the United States unaccompanied since President Joe Biden took office, while a report from the NY Times suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with 85,000 of these minors.

“The Biden Administration is morally responsible for their fate. The President lifted Title 42 restrictions on unaccompanied children in early 2021,” wrote Hawley in a Friday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Reporting reveals that HHS loosened vetting processes for sponsors and retaliated against whistleblowers who raised these concerns. As a result, thousands of children have been handed over to modern-day slave traders.“

Hawley also threw Biden under the bus, noting that under his watch, lost minors are often forced into factory work under harsh conditions, denied food and education, suffer sexual violence, and fear for their lives.

“In a country that claims to value the rule of law and the protection of children, this is unconscionable,” Hawley added.

During a Senate Finance Committee hearing in late March, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra denied knowledge of the 85,000 figure.

“I have never heard that number of 85,000, I don’t know where it comes from and … so I would say it doesn’t sound at all to be realistic, and what we do is we try and follow up as best we can with these kids,” he said, adding “Congress has given us certain authorities. Our authorities end when we have found a suitable sponsor to place that child with. We try and do some follow-up, but neither the child or the sponsor is actually obligated to follow up with us.”

In addition to urging the FBI to mount a “full-scale” effort to locate the missing children and bring to justice the criminals who are holding them in modern-day slavery, Hawley also demanded a probe into HHS and the Department of Homeland Security.

“The FBI must also investigate HHS and the Department of Homeland Security for their role in facilitating the exploitation of these children, in violation of the law,” Hawley wrote.

“The pervasive maltreatment of migrant children plainly violates both the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits the abuse of underage workers, and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which designates human trafficking offenses as federal crimes,” Hawley wrote.

Hawley demanded a “full report” from the FBI priority by May 25. –Epoch Times

On Wednesday, an HHS whistleblower told officials that unaccompanied children have been “suffering in the shadows” of the US immigration system for almost a decade.

“I have to confess I knew nothing about their suffering until 2021 when I volunteered to help the Biden administration with the crisis at the southern border as part of operation Artemis,” said Tara Lee Rodas, who appeared as a witness at “The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children” hearing held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

Rodas said she was deployed to help HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) reunite UACs with adult sponsors in the United States.

“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with recruiting in home country, smuggling to the U.S. border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a sponsor—some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of transnational criminal organizations, some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income.”

In some cases, Rodas says she witnessed adult sponsors who were allowed to take in “10, 20, 30 and 40 children” without any concerns from HHS.

“I saw sponsors trying to simultaneously sponsor children from multiple ORR sites at one time. I saw sponsors using multiple addresses to obtain sponsorships of children, and I saw numerous cases of children in debt bondage—and the child knew they had to stay with the sponsor until the debt was paid,” she said.

The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wrote to Becerra and demanded answers.

“I am deeply concerned regarding the recent reports that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has mishandled unaccompanied migrant children by placing them with unvetted sponsors, leading to their exploitation and forced labor,” she wrote.

Authored by Lloyd Brown via AmericanThinker.com,

According to the media, Artificial Intelligence (AI), is the greatest thing since sliced bread. AI is so smart that some worry it could take over the world and rule mankind.

But skeptics have found AI chatbots to be more than a little left-wing.

Recently, I argued with one over the worn-out liberal claim that conservatives are fascists, a notion that the left continues to mouth even though it was well refuted by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism.

It was like pulling a tooth, but I got this crucial admission: “…conservatism and fascism are not the same thing.”

Here’s how the discussion went:

Me: What’s the difference between socialism and fascism?

AI: Socialism and fascism are two different political ideologies, although there can be some overlap in their policies and practices. Socialism is a political and economic system where the means of production are commonly owned and controlled by the state, or by worker cooperatives, with the goal of achieving greater equality and reducing societal inequalities. Socialism espouses the idea of collective ownership and distribution of resources. Fascism, on the other hand, is a far-right authoritarian political system that puts the nation and its interests above everything else, including individual rights and freedoms. Fascism advocates for a powerful government with a leader who has absolute power over the state and a strong military to maintain order and control. In summary, socialism aims at achieving economic and social equality, while fascism prioritizes the nation’s interests and gives the government absolute power.

Me: How can that be possible when the right, conservatives, oppose big government? Isn’t what you said total nonsense and liberal propaganda?

AI: I apologize if my previous response was unclear. I was attempting to provide an objective and neutral explanation of socialism and fascism. However, you are correct that conservatism is generally associated with small government and a free-market economy, which is in contrast to socialism. Conservatives generally believe in limited government intervention in the economy, low taxes, and individual freedom. Socialism, on the other hand, advocates for greater government involvement in the economy and the redistribution of wealth to create a more equitable society. While there may be some similarities between socialist policies and conservative policies in terms of their emphasis on protecting the interests of the common people, their approaches to achieving these goals are quite different. Regarding your comment about “liberal propaganda,” it is important to recognize that political ideologies and perspectives can be influenced by a variety of factors, and it is important to seek out diverse perspectives to form a more comprehensive understanding of issues.

Me: Conservatives value individual freedom, as you said. So if conservatives are right-wing, in what way is fascism right-wing if it puts the nation and its interests above everything else? If the left-wing, or liberals, are for big government, aren’t they the real fascists?

AI: Fascism is considered to be right-wing because of its authoritarian and nationalist tendencies. It is a political ideology that emphasizes the supreme authority of the state over individuals and groups, as well as the importance of the nation above all else. This means that individual liberties and freedoms are typically suppressed in the name of national unity and power. However, it’s important to note that conservatism and fascism are not the same thing. While conservatism does value individual freedom, it also places a high value on traditional values, limited government, and free-market capitalism. Fascism, on the other hand, seeks to achieve power through authoritarian means and has a strong tendency towards anti-democratic and anti-individualistic policies. Additionally, the idea that the left-wing or liberals are the real fascists is a common misconception. While some left-wing ideologies such as communism can be authoritarian, fascism is a distinctly right-wing ideology. It’s important to avoid oversimplifying political ideologies and to understand their complexities in order to have informed political discussions.

Notice that it was struggling with its answer at this point and beginning to ignore its own advice about “oversimplifying.”

Curiously, at that exact time, I got a notice that the ”socket” had failed and was advised to reload the page. When I did the discussion disappeared.

I had intended to bear down on the differences between fascism, socialism, and communism, which the bot already had conceded had similarities although it continued to insist that liberals were not fascists and fascism was “right wing.”

We must remember that artificial intelligence is artificial. It is programmed and he who writes the code is the master of its “thoughts.” My experience provides further evidence the code is not bipartisan.

But it was smart enough to reject the far Left’s claim that conservatives are fascists.

The war in Ukraine is so profitable for defense companies in the US and Europe that they’re having trouble finding thousands of skilled workers to satisfy a record influx of orders, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Part of the issue is that jobs in the defense industry require niche skills and security clearances – a problem compounded by a flood of defense companies trying to hire at the same time in an industry which has long struggled to meet recruitment goals.

“Our first priority is really to ramp up capacity, which, of course, means increasing staff,” according to Patrice Caine, CEO of French component maker Thales, which plans to hire 12,000 people this year to make submarine sensors, jets, and other military items. Caine described the situation as “tensions on some labor markets,” which they plan to deal with by outsourcing to ‘foreign engineering centers,’ as well as relying on corporate partners.

In 2022, global military spending rose 3.7% to a record $2.24 trillion – with European expenditures increasing at its steepest YoY rate in at least 30 years, according to data released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think tank.

The labor shortage among US defense contractors has been an issue since last year, when efforts to replace workers from pandemic furloughs were accelerated – and most companies failing to hit their recruitment goals. That said, hiring has improved in recent months according to the report.

In Europe, however, the problem may actually get worse – with European governments increasing military spending, causing weapons makers – particularly munitions manufacturers – to launch large recruitment drives.

Europe’s largest defense company, BAE Systems PLC, is hiring 2,600 this year for its apprentice and graduate training programs, and several thousand more for other roles. Missile maker MBDA wants to add 2,000 workers, equivalent to more than 15% of its workforce. Others including Saab AB, the Swedish maker of the Gripen jet fighter, and Rheinmetall AG, the German company that helps make the Leopard tank, also plan to hire thousands of new workers. -WSJ

“Defense companies are worried at the moment about recruitment,” according to ADS Group Chief Economist, Aimie Stone, citing competition for talent within the industry, along with a revived civil aerospace sector and an emerging space industry. According to Stone, ADS members had 10,000 job openings at the end of last year.

UK-based recruiter, Kieran Slaughter, says the defense industry has always posed recruitment challenges, as automakers and airplane manufacturers are competing for the same talent pool, tend to pay more, and don’t require security clearances – a process which can take 2-8 weeks in Europe, and several months in the US.

“Some candidates don’t want to wait around,” said Slaughter.

What’s more, many jobs in the defense industry are highly specialized – such as warhead engineers – which Colin McClean, a managing director at BAE Systems, says are a “rare commodity.”

US Navy shipbuilder, General Dynamics, was in one of the hardest-hit sectors during the pandemic. In 2022 it hired 24,000 staff – yet, due to attrition and retirements, its net head count was up only 3,400 to 106,500.

Another shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries, is focusing on recruiting from apprentice schools and community colleges, according to CEO Chris Kastner.

“If people choose the career, they stay,” he said. “There’s the high chance of attrition now with walk-in individuals.”

Lockheed Martin VP of enterprise performance, Paula Hartley, says the space is “a tough place sometimes to recruit people to,” referring to the company’s facility in Camden, Arkansas – located around 100 miles from the state capital – which employs around 1,000 staff and plans to hire another 200 to make Javelin missiles and Himars rocket launchers. Despite holding job fairs and recruiting farther afield with sign-on bonuses and pay raises, they still have open positions posted since January.

Saab, the Swedish manufacturer, has taken to posting billboards, online ads, holding student job fairs, and a social media campaign.

Today Saab delivers Sweden’s new SIGINT-ship HMS Artemis to the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration, FMV. Read the story here –> https://t.co/w1UeI3xAS8#proudshipbuilders pic.twitter.com/olKEmruNmG

— Saab (@Saab) April 28, 2023

Imagine what would happen if peace broke out?

Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It was a dream come true—or rather about to come true—when the Halls bought their forever home. It had everything they needed and more: five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a family room, a dining room, a roomy garage, good schools, and a good neighborhood. Sure, a fixer-upper, but they felt up to it. Prentiss Hall, a home improvement contractor, made it his life project, and everybody lent a hand—his wife, Tawanda, and six children, cousins, and friends.

“We were really excited,” Tawanda told The Epoch Times.

They negotiated the price down to $67,000—a bargain, perhaps, but the home demanded a daunting amount of “tender love and care.”

“The house had been sitting there for a while. I guess it had mold in it, and it needed new windows and doors and electric,” Tawanda said.

“The city made us get all kinds of permits to get the house up to code. So we went in there and just started working.”

It took about a year before they were able to move into the home in the quiet Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan. And it was several years before they felt “comfortable” with it, she said.

The result was worth it.

“It was a dream home. It was big enough … for our family to be there, we had plenty of rooms, big enough to have our holiday dinners, and everyone can come and be comfortable,” she said.

For a Detroit girl, it was nice to have a peaceful place to live, away from all the noise and hustle.

“We just hoped and planned to stay and grow and raise grandchildren and, you know,” she paused.

“But—,” her voice trailed into a sigh.

Shattered Dreams

Several years in, the Halls got into financial trouble. Tawanda’s handicapped brother and her sick mother moved in with them even as all their money still went into improving the house.

“We just had a lot of things happening at once,” she said. “Before I knew it, I was behind on all my taxes.”

Property tax on the 3,700-square-foot home ran over $5,000. In a few years, the debt ballooned to over $22,000, including interest and fees.

In February 2018, Oakland County foreclosed on the home.

The next month, the county put the Halls on a payment plan of $650 a month intended to allow them to get the house back. They prepaid a few months in advance and were told that they don’t need to worry about timely payments as long as they caught up on the payments by February 2019, according to court documents reviewed by The Epoch Times (pdf, pdf).

In June 2018, however, the county suddenly transferred the property to the city of Southfield, which had a preferential right to buy foreclosed properties for the price of the debt.

The Halls were informed they had to move out.

Four months later, the city gave the property to a private company, Southfield Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, for $1.

In early 2020, the house was put on the market and then sold for more than $300,000.

To the Halls’ shock, they learned they were not entitled to a single penny of that payout.

“I feel like someone stole from me and my family,” Tawanda said.

Less than a month later, Prentiss Hall passed away. Loss of the house put him under enormous stress, and his health deteriorated, she said.

Widespread Problem

Thousands of Americans have been put in a similar position—losing their homes and other properties over tax debts that only represented a small fraction of the property value.

In most of the country, such a practice is illegal. Local authorities are allowed to foreclose on properties over unpaid taxes, but they are required to sell them and return the owners everything above what they owe.

There are 12 states plus the District of Columbia that allow governments to keep the whole property and all sales proceeds: Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Alabama, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Arizona, and Oregon.

Another nine states have various loopholes, mostly allowing the government to keep such properties for public use (like in Alaska, California, Idaho, Nevada, Ohio, and Rhode Island). Montana allows the government to keep all proceeds from the sale of commercial properties, not residential ones. Texas allows governments to sell properties at a discount in some circumstances. Wisconsin allows governments to keep the properties, but if they sell them, excess proceeds go back to the original owners, according to Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a nonprofit that has been tracking and litigating the issue.

Between 2014 and 2021, this practice has cost homeowners over $860 million in home value—equity—spread over some 6,200 homes. But those are only the cases PLF was able to document by looking at the more populous counties in the 12 states and only at homes for which there was enough information available. For thousands more, there wasn’t enough information. And there are untold more the PLF hasn’t looked at yet.

Most of the lost equity was wasted by selling the houses at a deep discount. About $30 million actually ended up in government coffers, while another about $280 million was pocketed by private investors that buy property tax debt from governments and then foreclose on the homes and sell them, based on data from nearly 4,700 property sales.

Legal Battle

For PLF lawyer David Deerson, the issue boils down to theft.

“It’s true that the government can take your property with few limits, but one of the limits is, whatever it takes, it has to pay you for it,” he told The Epoch Times.

Governments have been defending the practice on “legalistic” grounds, in his view.

“It’s commonly understood that property rights are not created by the Constitution. They’re protected by the Constitution, but they’re created by other sources of law, such as state law.”

Thus, governments have argued property owners don’t own the value of a property in excess of a debt unless the specific state law says so.

“There can’t be a property right in equity because if you look at the way the statutes are written, they don’t provide you with a chance to get your equity back,” Deerson explained the argument.

PLF and a lineup of legal and advocacy groups across the political spectrum disagree.

“In every single other context you can possibly imagine, equity is treated as a property right,” he said.

In a divorce, equity in a home is treated as part of the wealth being divided. In a private foreclosure, the bank cannot take a penny beyond what it’s owed.

“Of course, they have to pay you back the surplus equity. Why? Because you have a property right to it,” Deerson said.

“Equity isn’t treated as a property right only if it’s the government itself trying to take it.”

In 2020, PLF secured a ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court that outlawed the practice of governments keeping extra proceeds from tax foreclosures in the state. That should have resolved Tawanda’s case, but the government has continued to litigate the issue in federal courts.

In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which covers Michigan, ruled the practice unconstitutional, but the state government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving the case pending.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court announced it would pick up a similar case in Minnesota, where a 94-year-old grandmother lost her condo over some $15,000 in unpaid taxes and fees. The local government sold the condo for $40,000, again keeping every penny.

PLF is in the process of arguing the case before the Supreme Court, with the first hearing scheduled for April 26.

The case, Tyler v. Hennepin County, could decide the fate of Tawanda Hall and thousands of others.

“I’m hoping that they can change the law because it’s unfair to a lot of families who put their lives into their homes,” Tawanda said.

‘Wrong’ Argument

While the issue may seem clear-cut, courts have been split on it for decades.

In Nebraska, for example, the state’s Supreme Court has affirmed the practice. So did, last year, the federal appeals court for the Eight Circuit, which covers several states that allow the practice—Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.

It was the split between the Sixth and Eight Circuits, both stemming from PLF cases, that likely prompted the Supreme Court to pick up the issue, according to Deerson.

He didn’t think the Nebraska Supreme Court was malicious in its ruling.

“We just think the court got it wrong,” he said.

Read more here…

“I, at least, think of myself as a moderate,” Elon Musk told Bill Maher during an appearance Friday night on the comedian’s HBO show.

Despite being decried by all asunder as a ‘far-right conservative operative’ or some such hyperbole, Musk said:

“I spent a massive amount of my life energy building sustainable energy, you know, electric vehicles, and batteries, and solar. It’s not exactly far-right.”

Musk made his opinion clear a year ago – he hasn’t changed, the world has…

pic.twitter.com/Q9OjlJhi7f

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2022

And somehow in all this divisive bullshit, ‘allowing’ free speech has become a virtue of the far-right, the enablers of violence, the fascists

“Free speech used to be a left or liberal value, and yet we see from the quote ‘left’ a desire to actually censor, and that seems crazy.”

“I think we should be extremely concerned about anything that undermines the First Amendment,” Musk said.

More explicitly regarding his acquisition or, and changes made at, Twitter, Musk said:

“My concern with Twitter was to that it is somewhat of the digital town square and it’s important that there be both the reality and perception of trust for a wide range of viewpoints.“

Maher responded that he does not tweet any more because “it’s too easy to get canceled” by a mob.

“Because you may be the mayor of tweet town now and I’m glad – I like it that the mayor likes my jokes – but the reason I don’t do it anymore is because the mob of mean girls is still there and that has not changed.

Like, it’s too easy to get canceled and I don’t even know what pisses them off: they’re so nuts, these kids.

I feel like I’m walking on a roof with a blind fold: I could fall off anytime, that was the most innocuous thing, but it’s like, you know, I said George Washington was a great president – oh how dare you,” Maher continued.

“You have to say, like, what does canceled mean? You know – I mean, yes, if people attack you on Twitter that’s one thing – but frankly that’s just going to increase engagement. So I would just ignore it,” Musk replied somewhat prosaically.

And so Maher stepped it up a little more:

“You have talked about this woke mind virus in really apocalyptic terms,” Maher asked Musk

 “I don’t – you should explain why you don’t think it’s hyperbole to say things like it’s pushing civilization towards suicide. First of all, what is the woke mind virus?”

Musk responded much more clearly this time:

“I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech,” Musk said.

“So, those are two of the aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous, is that it’s often very anti-meritocratic, and you can’t question things. Even the questioning is bad.”

Maher agreed, and asked Musk where he thinks this ‘woke mind virus’ originated from:

“I was trying to figure out where it’s coming from. I think it’s actually been a long time brewing, in that it’s – I think it’s been going on for a while, and the amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities is I think far beyond what parents realize,” Musk said.

Watch the full interview below: