A policy drafted by the San Francisco Police Department has sent a petition to the city’s Board of Supervisors which would allow police officers to deploy robots with the intent to kill suspects in situations where “risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD,” Engadget reports, citing Mission Local.

Where have we seen this one before?

According to Mission Local, the draft proposal has already received significant pushback from both within and outside of the Board – including supervisor Aaron Peskin, who initially resisted the idea until he inserted language which would completely neuter the death-bots.

“Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person,” he wrote, which the SFPD then removed in a subsequent draft.

The police force currently maintains a dozen fully-functional remote-controlled robots, which are typically used for area inspections and bomb disposal. However, as the Dallas PD showed in 2016, they make excellent bomb delivery platforms as well. Bomb disposal units are often equipped with blank shotgun shells used to forcibly disrupt an explosive device’s internal workings, though there is nothing stopping police from using live rounds if they needed, as Oakland police recently acknowledged to that city’s civilian oversight board. -Engadget

In short, if this proposal ever sees the light of day:

Revealing Twitter’s internal discussions surrounding the censorship of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 US election is “necessary to restore public trust,” according to new owner Elon Musk.

Musk was responding to a tweet by the recently-unbanned @alx, who said: “Raise your hand if you think @ElonMusk
 should make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election in the interest of Transparency.”

This is necessary to restore public trust

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2022

The Post had its Twitter account locked in October 2020 for reporting on the now-confirmed-to-be-real “laptop from hell,” which contains unprosecuted evidence of foreign influence peddling through then-Vice President Joe Biden – including a meeting between Joe and an executive of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma, in 2015.

The laptop contained caches of emails detailing business dealings with Burisma and state-owned CEFC China Energy Co, from which his firms received $4.8 million in wire transfer payments from its founder, Ye Jianming, according to a Senate report. -Daily Caller

Twitter had restricted any user from sharing links of the Post‘s coverage, both publicly or via direct message – while the social media giant also locked out former White House spox Kayleigh McEnany’s personal account, as well as former President Trump’s campaign account, for sharing the link.

In the ensuing years, the authenticity of the laptop has been confirmed by both the Washington Post and the New York Times, while CBS News authenticated the laptop on Monday.

Indeed: 

✋ https://t.co/KHFWshK9hz

— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) November 24, 2022

The US outbreak of avian influenza or bird flu is now the worst on record, with 50.54 million birds culled, US Department of Agriculture data showed on Thursday. 

Earlier this week, the outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in South Dakota resulted in tens of thousands of birds being culled to avoid spreading. This was enough to top the previous record of 50.5 million birds that died in the 2015 avian-flu outbreak. 

Readers have been well-informed this year about the devastating bird flu outbreak ravaging commercial poultry farms nationwide. Here’s the latest map of the epidemic spreading across the US. 

We cautioned at the start of this month of the “possibility of additional outbreaks” and noted ahead of Thanksgiving that supermarket egg prices were hyperinflating because a large swath of the nation’s egg-laying hens was wiped out. 

“The virus has mostly impacted turkey and egg operations, sending prices to all-time highs and contributing to soaring food inflation. While the spread slowed during the warmer months, it continued to fester and now risks further spread as cooling temperatures prompt more birds to migrate,” Bloomberg said. 

The outbreak began in February and has so far infected flocks of poultry and non-poultry birds across 46 states. 

“Wild birds continue to spread HPAI throughout the country as they migrate, so preventing contact between domestic flocks and wild birds is critical to protecting US poultry,” Rosemary Sifford, the USDA’s chief veterinary officer, said. 

Some experts have warned the highly pathogenic bird flu could easily continue spreading into 2023 and devastate even more commercial farms. This may only suggest egg prices are heading higher. 

In Georgia’s January 2021 runoff, control of the Senate was at stake. With Democrats already holding 50 seats plus Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, that won’t the the case with the Dec. 6 runoff pitting GOP challenger Herschel Walker against incumbent Raphael Warnock. 

Still, both parties are pouring millions into this race — because winning a 51st seat in Georgia would greatly ease Democrats’ rule over the Senate.

A tied Senate “slows everything down,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Associated Press. “So it makes a big difference to us.” 

That would be true right from the start of the next session of Congress. If Democrats are stuck on a 50-50 tie, Schumer will have to once again negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with the GOP’s Mitch McConnell, covering the composition of committees and rules for advancing legislation for a floor vote. Last time around, McConnell used that process to obtain assurances from Democrats that they wouldn’t kill the filibuster. 

In the current Senate, committees have an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. If Warnock wins, expect Democrats to have a two-seat majority on each committee. Tied committee votes necessitate extra steps on the Senate floor to advance nominations and legislation.  

A two-seat edge in the full Senate would dull the moderating power of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (WV) Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). Today, each one effectively holds a veto power over Democratic proposals, and has used it to frustrate the most ambitious proposals of the progressive left. With both facing reelection races in 2024, they’ll be motivated to continue showcasing moderation for their respective states. 

Fifty-one votes is all it takes to approve federal judicial nominations, so a Warnock win would free the Democrats to easily pump more leftist judges into the system. 

Perhaps nobody’s as excited about the prospect of 51 Democratic senators than Kamala Harris. The Senate math forces her to stay close to Washington so she can cast her tie-breaking votes. Indeed, she’s a handful of votes away from breaking a nearly two-century-old record set by Vice President John Calhoun.

Liberated from a beltway orbit, Harris would be free to travel the nation and the world, spewing her trademark word salads, empty blather and cringy cackles everywhere she goes. 

All Kamala Harris does is get her silk presses and cackle all day. Love that for her 🤣 pic.twitter.com/pWOmCAEZ07

— Skai (@skaijackson) November 14, 2022

Kamala Harris blunders her way through a speech. Trips into a new word salad: “there is such great significance to the passage of time” pic.twitter.com/f3nTOJFxGt

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 21, 2022

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

It appears that illegal pot growers are giving thanks this holiday for California lawmakers who legalized pot only to fuel demand for illegal cannabis due to massive taxes.

It is the same problem that I wrote about in New York’s program in an earlier Wall Street Journal column.

Politicians continue to pile on taxes as if they have no impact on pricing and demand. It just seems like free money if you ignore every economic metric and principle. 

Even with a recent recognition that they have killed their own market, California lawmakers are being criticized for offering too little too late in terms of tax relief.

Sgt. James Roy of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is quoted in Fox News as saying that “The illegal industry is competing with the legal industry and essentially putting them out of business.”

Why? As with bathtub gin after Prohibition, few people would prefer bootlegged products rather than the safer lawful alternatives. The only reason is economics — and the refusal of the California lawmakers to recognize basic rules of supply and demand. Not only is pot cheaper due to the massive taxes imposed on lawful businesses, but it is also being sent to the East Coast where similar price differentials are also fueling the illegal trade.

Despite being a relatively new industry, state and city officials imposed thick layers of regulations, charges, and taxes on the budding businesses. Some estimates put the taxes at 70 percent of current costs.

Even with a recent recognition that lawmakers strangled the industry, a temporary tax cut is not expected to be enough to make lawful businesses competitive. There remain a host of other taxes, required regulatory obligations, and even bars on claiming certain expenses used by other businesses. The result, according to one study, is that “the effective tax rate on marijuana in California ranges from $42 to $92 per ounce, depending on the jurisdiction, compared to an estimated wholesale production cost of $35 per ounce.”

So you have a high demand product that has been strangled out of the legal market by politicians who cannot resist adding their own taxes and demands on these nascent businesses. The result is a bonanza for illegal cannabis growers. The alternative was to show a modicum of restraint and allow this industry and market to stabilize and grow. It would then might produce greater revenue even with lower taxes. That, however, requires the one thing that is seemingly beyond our current political environment: restraint.

Major tax filing services, including H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer, have been covertly sending Facebook sensitive financial information when Americans file their taxes online, according to The Markup.

The data includes names, email addresses, income, filing status, refund amounts and college scholarship information – which is sent to Facebook regardless of whether a person even has a Facebook account – or with other platforms owned by Meta. The company can then be used to fine tune advertising algorithms.

It is sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel.

Of note, Intuit-owned TurboTax does use Meta Pixel, however the company did not send financial information – just usernames and the last time a device signed in. Beyond that, they have kept Pixel entirely off pages beyond sign in.

Each year, the Internal Revenue Service processes about 150 million individual returns filed electronically, and some of the most widely used e-filing services employ the pixel, The Markup found. 

When users sign up to file their taxes with the popular service TaxAct, for example, they’re asked to provide personal information to calculate their returns, including how much money they make and their investments. A pixel on TaxAct’s website then sent some of that data to Facebook, including users’ filing status, their adjusted gross income, and the amount of their refund, according to a review by The Markup. Income was rounded to the nearest thousand and refund to the nearest hundred. The pixel also sent the names of dependents in an obfuscated, but generally reversible, format. -The Markup

TaxAct, which services around three million “consumer and professional users,” also sends data to Google via the company’s analytics tool, however names are not included in the information.

“We take the privacy of our customers’ data very seriously,” said TaxAct spokeswoman Nicole Coburn. “TaxAct, at all times, endeavors to comply with all IRS regulations.”

H&R Block embedded a pixel on its site that included information on filers’ health savings account usage, dependents’ college tuition grants and expenses. The company similarly claimed in a very boilerplate statement that they “regularly evaluate[s] our practices as part of our ongoing commitment to privacy, and will review the information.”

While TaxSlayer – which says it completed 10 million federal and state returns last year – provided Facebook information on filers as part of the social media giant’s “advanced matching” system which attempts to link information from people browsing the web to Facebook accounts. The information sent includes phone numbers and the name of the user filling out the form, as well as the names of any dependents added to the return. Specific demographic information was also obscured, but Facebook was still able to link them to existing profiles.

Another tax filing service, Ramsey Solutions, told The Markup that the company “implemented the Meta Pixel to deliver a more personalized customer experience,” but that they “did NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being collected by Facebook from the Pixel.”

“As soon as we found out, we immediately informed TaxSlayer to deactivate the Pixel from Ramsey SmartTax.”

Harvard Law School lecturer and tax law specialist Mandi Matlock said the findings showed that taxpayers have been “providing some of the most sensitive information that they own, and it’s being exploited.”

“This is appalling,” she added. “It truly is.”

Read more here…

Authored by Conor Ryder via Kaiko.com,

The FTX collapse was perhaps the single biggest risk management failure in the history of finance. Today, we provide a crash course in basic risk and liquidity metrics which should be required reading for anyone managing crypto investments.

We’ve seen enough incidents over the last few months, let alone years, to conclude there is a complete lack of adequate risk management in crypto. Throughout the Terra collapse, crypto credit crisis, and spectacular implosion of FTX we have collectively witnessed the industry’s largest (and most opaque) firms become insolvent in an instant.

This begs the question: where were the basic financial risk controls that are mandatory in any other industry?

A neglect of proper risk and liquidity management in a market as volatile as crypto has proven to be a death sentence for any business or investor. Today, we will demonstrate why risk metrics such as VaR and expected shortfall, alongside CeFi and DeFi liquidity metrics, are an absolute necessity for any crypto firm in a post-FTX world.

Part 1: Risk Metrics

While commonplace (and required by law) in traditional finance, risk metrics have been neglected in crypto largely because most crypto businesses have been extremely profitable up until lately. When numbers go up, risk management gets swept under the carpet. But the industry’s inherent lack of transparency and regulation has also contributed to a culture of negligence that eschewed basic controls.

Below, we explore three basic risk metrics: Value at Risk, expected shortfall, and implied volatility. 

Value at Risk

VaR is a risk indicator to quantify the extent and probability of potential losses in a portfolio. It is particularly useful in risk management as it can essentially assign a cash value to a confidence level. These confidence levels usually range from 90% – 99%. For example, if the 95% daily VaR of my portfolio is $30k, it means that:

– My portfolio has a 95% chance of losing less than $30k over the next one day period.

– On average I will lose more than $30k one day out of 20 (5 days out of 100 = 5%).

VaR can be viewed as an acceptable loss, given a confidence level, which makes it a particularly useful metric for compliance purposes as well as capital requirement planning. Since the VaR for different confidence levels exhaustively describes the investment profitability, it can be used for investment management, allowing us to define limit-order levels to crystallize profits or cut losses. 

Kaiko’s VaR estimator can be applied to any cryptocurrency portfolio to accurately track VaR over time. Below, we have charted the Daily VaR of an equally weighted $200k portfolio of BTC and ETH.

Suppose I’m setting my risk budget for my portfolio, and I want a 95% probability of not losing more than $30k (-15%) each day. I would set my VaR confidence level to 95%, charted below, and monitor when my portfolio exceeds that $30k level. When the portfolio VaR exceeds that level I would look to de-risk my portfolio so that my Value-at-Risk is under that $30k threshold. We can see that in November as the FTX fallout began, VaR tripled in a matter of days to surpass the $30k max loss which would tell me to de-risk.

For a more conservative risk budget, perhaps for an exchange or lender, VaR at a 99% confidence level would be more appropriate. 99% VaR will impose stricter risk measures as the max loss is higher, due to the degree of certainty that it requires. We can see in the chart below that in times of higher volatility or returns, such as this time last year when the bull market came crashing to a halt, the max loss using 99% VaR was nearly double that using 95% VaR. This results in more stringent liquidity management being put in place, which will give businesses a better chance to remain solvent in volatile markets.

Expected Shortfall

Expected shortfall (ES) is another useful metric, and particularly relevant for a volatile asset class like crypto where investors want to try and quantify their losses in the worst of cases. While VaR estimates a max loss 95% of the time, expected shortfall quantifies the average loss in the 5% of times. ES answers the question: If VaR is exceeded, how bad will our losses be?

Distribution of returns in a crypto portfolio have historically had what are known as fat left tails, or black swan events, that alter the makeup of the return distributions. As we can see below, crypto markets exhibit more of the characteristics of chart 2. Both charts have the same VaR but result in different expected shortfalls: chart 2 losses are more extreme in the worst case scenario.

Charting the expected shortfall, or the average loss in the worst 5% of scenarios, for the same $200k portfolio above, we observe a decline in the average loss this year as crypto volatility generally eased. However, we can see expected shortfall spike during the recent FTX collapse, doubling in a matter of days. ES compliments VaR and gives risk managers a sense of how bad things may get in the worst of scenarios. This allows business to determine a risk budget, ensuring solvency during market crashes. 

Implied Volatility

Risk managers can also turn to the options market to get a better idea of how much risk is being priced into markets. Volatility is one of the criteria that makes up an option price, and by calculating how much volatility the market is pricing into an option, it is possible to come to a conclusion as to how much volatility to expect until the option expiration date. Using the December 2nd expiry date as an example, the market is pricing in implied volatility of 81% for ETH options until the end of the month, decreasing from 98% since mid-November. Implied volatility can be one of the most useful metrics risk managers monitor when looking to adjust the risk of the portfolio.

Part 2: Liquidity Metrics

Market Depth on Centralized Exchanges

Two of the black swan events this year, the collapse of Celsius and FTX, were directly related to liquidity issues surrounding stETH and FTT, respectively. Holders of either tokens could have seen that there was little to no liquidity available on spot markets and if everyone rushes to the exit at the same time, the price of the token crashes.

We saw this happen with stETH, which hit a discount of +6% as liquidity dried up on exchanges as Celsius rushed to liquidate their holdings amid record redemption requests for ETH.

FTT didn’t have many buyers apart from FTX themselves, and the bid side liquidity was not enough to support immense selling pressure of the token throughout the FTX scandal, despite Alameda’s best efforts to defend the price. Bid side liquidity within 2% of the mid price for FTT was only $6m pre-collapse. A fund engaging in adequate liquidity management would have flagged this and likely reduced exposure to FTT on the off-chance a rush to the exit happened.

Looking at some other tokens which could be relevant from a liquidity management perspective, DOT, the token of the Polkadot ecosystem, had very similar bid depth to FTT pre-crash. Post-crash, DOT only has about $4m of bid side support within 2% of the mid-price across 12 exchanges it trades on, meaning a wave of sell orders could quickly crash prices.

KCS is the native token of the Hong-Kong based exchange Kucoin. Kucoin is ranked 32 out of 42 exchanges in the latest Kaiko Exchange Ranking, largely thanks to a 42/100 score for Governance. According to recent proof of reserves releases from exchanges, the Block claims Kucoin holds nearly 20% of its reserves in its own token, KCS. Looking at 2% bid depth for KCS we can see there is only about $60k of bid side support for the token. A rush for the exit could see the KCS price crash and Kucoin taking a significant hit to their reserves.

Understanding liquidity is thus a vital component in a robust risk management framework. The valuation of a fund’s balance sheet is only as strong as its ability to efficiently liquidate their holdings.

DeFi Liquidity Data 

As centralized and decentralized markets become increasingly integrated, CEX market depth is no longer enough to fully understand a cryptocurrency’s liquidity

As mentioned earlier, staked Ether (stETH) played a large role in the liquidity issues faced by Celsius and Three Arrows Capital this summer. This caused market wide contagion at the time as investors scrambled to cash out of stETH and move into the more liquid ETH. In this case, the majority of liquidity for stETH wasn’t on centralized exchanges; rather, it was in DEX liquidity pools.

Diligent monitoring of the Curve stETH/ETH pool would have flagged a drop in the total value locked in real time as stETH made up over 80% of the pool at the height of the rush for liquidity. That allocation has improved slightly since, but remains quite imbalanced as stETH now makes up 67% of the pool.

Going forward, crypto firms will need to understand liquidity on both centralized and decentralized markets to be able to simulate large liquidations and price impact. 

Part 3: Exchange Due Diligence

The importance of exchange due diligence has never been more relevant than it is today. FTX was one of the most trusted names in all of crypto, but after Coindesk did a bit of digging the whole charade unraveled and FTX ended up insolvent. Not only did customers lose money, but many sophisticated hedge funds and trading desks had their funds stored on FTX and now have to explain that decision to investors.

It is vital that going forward, as part of a robust risk management process, that businesses do their due diligence on exchanges, monitoring everything from liquidity to governance. Kaiko is aiming to assist investors in this vetting process for exchanges with our Exchange Ranking, which is structured around six criteria with a proprietary scoring methodology internally developed and maintained by Kaiko’s Indices team. Over the next few months, we will incorporate proof of reserves and other transparency metrics into this ranking.

Conclusion

When liquidity is plentiful, risk management is less of a concern as most companies’ balance sheets look healthy and liquid. However, when a bear market hits, the tide goes out and we see who was swimming naked. Those with significant positions in illiquid tokens, such as FTT or stETH, have paid the price for not monitoring the liquidity of those positions and not accurately assessing the outsized risk of their positions should prices go down.

Risk management and crypto are two words that up until lately have rarely been mentioned in the same sentence. To quote the new CEO of FTX, John Ray III, he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information.”

If businesses investing in crypto are to survive going forward, risk management must play a central role in the investment process. Liquidity metrics, combined with traditional risk metrics such as VaR or Expected Shortfall will allow investors to survive bear markets like these and reap the rewards of survival come the next bull market.

*  * *

Learn more about Kaiko’s Value at Risk, Implied Volatility, and liquidity data.

California’s Air Resources Board has laid out a plan to ban all diesel-powered trucks that would cause inflationary ripples throughout the entire economy.

The plan would mandate that all new trucks operating around busy railways and ports be zero emission vehicles by 2024 – while all diesel trucks would be phased out by 2035, and eventually, banishing every truck and bus fleet from California roads by 2045, where feasible, according to SFGATE.

The proposed Advance Clean Fleets regulation first targets the busiest trucking areas in the state — around warehouses, sea ports and railways. The board says the pollution in these areas affects communities disproportionately.

“Many California neighborhoods, especially Black and Brown, low-income and vulnerable communities, live, work, play and attend schools adjacent to the ports, railyards, distribution centers, and freight corridors and experience the heaviest truck traffic,” wrote the board, which asserts that this type of pollution creates health risks for those communities.

Representatives from the trucking and construction industries were livid at a recent hearing on the issue – where over 150 public commenters voiced their opinions ranging from the state’s woefully inadequate grid, to a general lack of charging capacity to handle a massive shift to zero-emission vehicles so quickly (whose electricity would in part be generated by coal).

“The infrastructure cannot be established in the timeframe given,” said American Trucking Association representative Mike Tunnell. “Fleets will have to deploy trucks that cannot do the same job as their current trucks.”

Another speaker, construction company CEO Jamie Angus, pointed to logistical issues involved with charging electric vehicles.

“This will do damage to us. We don’t really understand how to charge these vehicles,” he said, adding “Those pieces of equipment go home with those men every day, so they’ll need to be charged from home? How do you compensate that person for that?“

On the other side of the fence, environmentalists – including the Sierra Club, argued in favor of an expedited timeline to rid California roads of internal combustion engines as quickly as possible.

Maybe they can also figure out how to solve the massive logistical and economic issues that would surely ensue, as well as what to do with all that lithium when the batteries eventually go bad?

Authored by Gavin O’Reilly via The Ron Paul Institute For Peace & Prosperity,

In the lead up to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the hosting of the tournament by the conservative Muslim state has been the source of much controversy in Western media.

On Thursday, less than 48 hours before the opening match between the host country and Ecuador, it was announced that alcohol would be prohibited from being sold in any of Qatar’s football stadiums. Controversy also arose on Monday afternoon when a plan for England captain Harry Kane to wear the rainbow-themed “OneLove” armband in his country’s match against Iran, was cancelled at the last minute due to an intervention from FIFA.

What has received virtually zero-coverage or criticism in the run up to Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup however, has been Doha’s instrumental role in fueling the 11-year long proxy war on Syria, a conflict that has led to thousands of deaths, an exacerbated refugee crisis, and the rise of ISIS.

In 2009, plans for the construction of a pipeline that would begin in the Qatari-managed North Dome gas field in the Persian Gulf, and which would then pass through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey on its way to Europe, were halted by the refusal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to take part, his close relationship with Russia being a deciding factor.

With the Arab Republic being a long-time opponent of the US-NATO hegemony, in which the Gulf States behind the pipeline play a key role, this refusal would act as a final straw for the regime-change lobby. A plan was quickly put in place to remove Assad from power.

To this end, the United States and a host of other countries would authorize a plan to provide arms, funding and training to Salafist militants in the hope that a sectarian conflict would topple Syria’s secular government, thus allowing a Western-friendly regime to be put in place.

Timber Sycamore, the official codename for this regime change operation, would officially erupt in March 2011, when protests in Damascus and Aleppo calling for government reform would rapidly escalate into violence that soon swept the entire country.

By 2013, the “Syrian Revolution” had seen vast swathes of the Arab Republic come under terrorist control, with Salafist groups from neighboring Iraq, itself having been destabilized following the 2003 US-led invasion, crossing over to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April of that year.

In order to counter this onslaught and avoid the same fate that had befell Libya following a similar regime change operation, a common defence agreement between Syria and key-ally Iran was enacted and the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah would launch a military intervention in June 2013, with Tehran being acutely aware that had Damascus fell, Iran would have been next in line for the regime-change lobby. 

Though this Iranian intervention would play a key role in repelling the Western-backed terrorists, what would perhaps be the most decisive factor in turning the conflict in Damascus’ favour would come in September 2015, when a Russian air campaign was launched in defense of the Arab Republic, allowing it to retake territories that had come under the control of the militants, such as the key city of Aleppo, liberated in December 2016.

Sensing that their regime change operation wasn’t going to plan, Washington’s Neocons would soon resort to desperate measures. In April 2017, a likely false flag chemical attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun was blamed on the Syrian government in the hope of triggering a US-led military intervention, something that almost came to fruition several days later when the then-Trump administration launched cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase.

Just stopping short of the full-scale intervention that had been hoped for, the same strategy would be carried out almost a year to the day later in the Syrian city of Douma, this time resulting in the United States, Britain and France launching airstrikes against government targets, again just stopping short of a military intervention that would have triggered a wider conflict between Russia and NATO.

We told you & told you again.

“Al-Qaeda is on our side in #Syria.” – email from policy advisor to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton (Feb 2012). pic.twitter.com/EcYlpdeAgm

— H. Sumeri (@IraqiSecurity) April 14, 2017

Despite Qatar being a key player in the geopolitical impact of the Syrian war via its arming and funding of the terrorists who carried it out, a situation that almost led to a third world war, Doha has come in for little to no criticism from the Western media for its involvement amidst the 2022 World Cup coverage, Qatar’s banning of alcohol, and rainbow armbands, being a seemingly more pressing issue.

Although today was the deadline for EU diplomats to determine the specifics of the Russian oil price cap, we pointed out earlier just how “great” discussions were going with Poland rejecting a proposed cap of $65 per barrel as being too soft, while Greece refusing to consider anything below $70.

EU oil price cap discussions going great: Poland rejected proposed price of $65 per barrel as being too soft, while Greece doesn’t want to go below $70.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 25, 2022

Meanwhile, amid the growing discord, in typical European fashion – where nobody has even looked at the math ahead of time – the entire concept of a price cap was clearly meaningless as explained in “The Ridiculous Reality Of The Russian Oil Price Cap Debate In One Picture.”

Which is why it wasn’t at all surprising that on Friday, European Union diplomats suspended talks on capping Russian oil prices, as Poland and the Baltic states objected to a proposal they consider too generous to Moscow.

Confirming none planned over weekend. Nonetheless a variety of EU sources still think a deal will come in the coming days.

— laurence norman (@laurnorman) November 25, 2022

As Bloomberg reports, diplomats had expected a deal to be done on Friday night but positions remained entrenched and the talks were postponed to Monday.

*EU DIPLOMATS POSTPONE OIL PRICE-CAP TALKS TILL AFTER WEEKEND

they need 48 hours to learn math

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 25, 2022

As previewed earlier this week, the bloc has been locked in a fight over how strict the Group of Seven-led price cap should be. Poland and the Baltic nations are outraged at a proposal to cap Russian oil prices at $65 per barrel limit, as the level is above the rates Moscow sells crude now, making the entire price cap discussion completely meaningless and purely an exercise in virtue signaling.

Poland is demanding additional sanctions, a review mechanism, and a price below the market level, according to a senior diplomat.

And as always happens when Europe has to reach a unanimous decision, with Poland and the Baltic states digging their heels in, the spat has laid bare the fundamental tension at the heart of the price cap idea. Countries are being forced to choose between two priorities that are almost impossible to resolve: trying to choke off revenue to Russia and avoiding potentially painful spikes in the oil price that could damage the global economy.

“If you put the price cap too high, it doesn’t really bite,” European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “Oil is the biggest source of revenue for Russian budget, so it’s very important get this right so it really has an impact on Russia’s ability to finance this war.”

On the other end of the spectrum from Poland are shipping nations like Greece, which favor a higher level that will help keep trade flowing, and boosting state revenues derived from quietly helping Russia break the oil embargo by turning a blind eye to an entire industry of ship-to-ship transfers that has taken Greece by storm.

The talks have been fraught because at $65, the cap is above the prices that Russia is already accepting for its crude from ravenous buyers such as China and India – a level which is heavily discounted to global benchmarks.

Such a “cap” would allow Moscow to argue that it’s business as usual; at the same time, the Kremlin had said it would refuse to sell oil to anyone signing up to the cap – but on Thursday appeared to hint it could soften its stance.

Still, Europe can only kick the can so long: the Dec. 5 deadline is looming, at which point EU sanctions on Russian oil are set to kick, and the disruption to the market will likely be greater if the price cap isn’t in place as all Russian oil exports would be suspended, unless of course Europe stops being a vassal state of the US State Department and decides to do away with the Russian sanctions entirely (for an objective assessment of who holds the upper hand in Europe, read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with “Putin has another gas shock for us: the deindustrialisation of Europe “.

The EU sanctions would bar access to insurance and services for any ship transporting Russian oil. The cap allows access to those services, but only if the crude is purchased below a certain price. The US proposed the price cap earlier this year as an alternative to EU sanctions that were so strict they risked shutting down swaths of production.

The US argued that a spike in prices caused by EU sanctions could eventually help Putin — as well as being ruinous for the global economy.

Oil prices have fallen in recent days, partly on signs a deal could keep Russian oil flowing, easing the pressure on the global market. Then again this is Europe, and anything that is seen as a consensus outcome will never happen…