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European Sanctions Blown To Bits: Draghi Says “Most Gas Importers” Have Opened Ruble Accounts With Gazprom

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2022

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/european-sanctions-blown-bits-draghi-says-most-gas-importers-have-opened-ruble-accounts

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Three weeks ago we reported that when faced with the actual, brutal consequences of its anti-Russian virtue signaling and harsh language, Europe’s fake united front promptly cracked crack as several European gas buyers quietly paid for supplies in rubles as Russia had demanded – in breach of Brussels sanctions – and we predicted that soon virtually everyone in Europe would follow in their footsteps and similarly bypass EU sanctions. Moments ago, one of the most powerful people in Europe – former Goldman partner and ECB head – Mario Draghi, confirmed just that.

Speaking during a press conference in Washington D.C. after his meeting with Joe Biden, Draghi said that European gas importers have already opened accounts in rubles with Gazprom.

The Italian PM was responding to a question asking if he is confident that Italy will be able to pay for gas without breaching sanctions and therefore gas flow to Italy won’t be affected.

“I’m actually quite confident, but for a silly reason. There is no official pronouncement of what it means to breach sanctions. Nobody ever said anything about whether rubles payments breach sanctions or not, how these payments are organized. So it’s such a gray zone here.”

Actually, it’s not a gray zone at all: on April 27, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen specifically warned companies not to bend to Russia’s demands to pay for gas in rubles: “companies with such contracts should not accede to the Russian demands,” von der Leyen said. “This would be a breach of the sanctions so a high risk for the companies.”

In other words, Draghi is either completely unaware of the current realty over the hottest topic in the world today, or is blatantly lying, and in the process demonstrating that the entire “united European front” against Putin is one giant farcical facade.

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This Sporting Life

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2022

The odds of getting a sports scholarship are less formidable for girls, but they are still long. While there is only one track and field scholarship for every 110 high school boys who compete, there’s one for every 64 girls. On the other hand, it tends to be easier to make a girl’s high school team since so many of the most coordinated girls prefer dance to sport.

Steve Sailer 

This Sporting Life

Say you have an athletic child in middle school: Specializing in which sport in high school would make it most likely for your son or daughter to earn a college scholarship? The new self-help book from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, which attempts to be “Moneyball for your life,” crunches the numbers on this and other intriguing topics.

The first question is whether your child has any particular genetic blessing from nature. Or would your scion have to make it on specialized nurture alone? For example, if your son is on track to grow to be more than seven feet tall, then basketball is of course a good bet: About one in seven of the tiny number of American men over seven feet make it to the NBA.

Stephens-Davidowitz has a clever way to estimate how genetically determined success is in different sports: What proportion of siblings at the highest level are identical twins? For example, the NBA has had ten pairs of twins in its history, with at least nine pairs being identical. Of all the fraternal twosomes in NBA history, 11.5 percent have been identical twins, a very high fraction. If one identical twin is good enough to make the NBA, it appears the other has over a 50 percent chance of making it too. The author guesstimates that genes determine 75 percent of basketball success.

“Offhand, fencing sounds like the easiest route to a college scholarship for a long-armed son, because practically nobody this side of Budapest knows much about swordplay.”

Not surprisingly, considering how dependent basketball success is upon height, which these days is overwhelmingly genetic in origin, that makes basketball one of the four sports where genes matter most.

The most genetically influenced sport is track and field, where an astonishing 22.4 percent of all Olympic same-sex siblings have been identical twins.

Next are wrestlers, where 13.8 percent of Olympic brothers have been monozygotic twins, followed by 12.4 percent of rowers, such as the 2008 Olympian Winklevoss twins who are jointly played by Armie Hammer in the movie The Social Network. When considering suing Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for what became Facebook, one suggests giving the Zuck an old-fashioned thrashing instead. After all, he reasons, “I’m 6′ 5″, 220 pounds, and there’s two of me!”

In contrast to twin-rich basketball, only 1.9% of major league baseball brothers have been identical twins. An identical twin of an MLB player has only a 14 percent chance of making the big time. According to Don’t Trust Your Gut, baseball skill is only about 25 percent genetic.

The latest baseball twins (and the first since Jose and Ozzie Canseco in the early 1990s) are relief pitchers Taylor and Tyler Rogers. Oddly, while Taylor is a conventional power-pitching lefty with a 96-mile-per-hour sinker, soft-throwing righty Tyler only made it to The Show by learning how to pitch submarine-style. His fastball averages merely 83 mph, but he has a weird slider that breaks up rather than down. Evidently, even identical twins aren’t always terribly similar.

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Rand Paul Blocks Senate Vote on $40 Billion Ukraine Aid

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2022

Paul wants to add text to the bill to create an inspector general for oversight of the billions being sent to Ukraine

antiwar.com

by Dave DeCamp

On Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blocked an effort in the Senate to hold a quick vote on the nearly $40 billion aid package for Ukraine that passed in the House on Tuesday.

“My oath of office is to the US constitution not to any foreign nation and no matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America,” Paul said on the Senate floor before blocking the vote. “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the US economy.”

Paul blocked the vote because he wanted to include text in the bill that would create a special inspector general for oversight of the billions being sent to Ukraine. He initially offered to include the oversight as an amendment, which would have been voted on separately, but he ultimately wanted to change the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) were hoping to get the legislation passed on Thursday night, demonstrating the bipartisan support for spending massive amounts of money to fund Ukraine’s war. Paul’s objection will set the vote back at least one week.

“The vast majority of senators on both sides of the aisle want it. There’s now only one thing holding us back the junior senator from Kentucky is preventing swift passage of Ukraine aid because he wants to add at the last minute his own changes directly into the bill,” Schumer said.

In the House, the $39.8 billion aid package passed in a vote of 368-57, with only Republicans voting against the legislation. The vote came as Americans are facing soaring gas prices, and over 8% inflation rates, a 40-year high. “Americans are feeling the pain [from inflation] and Congress seems intent only on adding to that pain by shoveling more money out the door as fast as they can,” Paul said.

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EU’s TERRIFYING Mass Surveillance Plan – w/ Matthew Green

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2022

A leaked document from the EU, proposing new regulation, describes the most sophisticated mass surveillance machinery ever deployed outside of China and the USSR. The proposal is for a new mass surveillance system that will read private text messages, not to detect CSAM, but to detect “grooming”. It would mandate scanning of encrypted messages for CSAM material. Once you open up “machines reading your text messages” for any purpose, there are no limits. Matthew Green, renowned security expert and cryptography professor, says: “Let me be clear what that means: to detect ‘grooming’ is not simply searching for known CSAM. It isn’t using AI to detect new CSAM, which is also on the table. It’s running algorithms reading your actual text messages to figure out what you’re saying, at scale.”

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Rising to the Bait – Again

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2022

By eric

How much more baiting will the Russians abide?

And will Americans tolerate it? Will they be fooled by it, if the bear takes the bait?

They will certainly be the ones paying for it, if he does.

Rising to the Bait – Again

$40 billion is still a great deal of money – even in the Biden Thing’s America. Except it’s not going to help Americans. Rather, the Biden Thing has taken $40 billion out of the pockets of Americans, to finance all-but-war with nuclear-armed Russia by arming and abetting Ukraine.

When the government – and the corporations that own the government – want war, they  usually get what they want.

Some 108 years ago, the government of Woodrow Wilson and the arms peddlers and financial interests behind Wilson wanted war with Germany – something few if any Americans wanted as they’d be the ones paying for it, in blood and treasure. To drag them into what was then styled the “war to end all wars,” Wilson’s government colluded with Britain’s government and the interests that owned both of them to arrange a pretext. A passenger liner called the Lusitania was loaded with war materiel and provocatively sailed into the war zone. The Germans rose to the bait. A submarine fired a couple or more torpedoes into the Lusitania’s flanks and she quickly sank – resulting in the drowning of about 1,198 “innocent civilians,” which they were.

But the governments of America and Britain weren’t.

They knew that, by goading the Germans into sinking Lusitania, they could feign outrage and cause Americans to actually be outraged. Sufficiently so as to drown out any voices who might raise a hand and ask why Lusitania, a passenger liner (loaded with war material from America meant to help Germany’s foe in the war) was sailed into the war zone, right in front of German subs.

Instead, Americans were roused to blood lust over “the hun” and sent to die (and kill) in a war that was as relevant to them as a wall phone is a to a Millennial.

Some twenty years after the “war to end all wars,” another war began. The government – and corporate interests – of the United States were, once again, extremely interested in getting Americans to fight in it. But – chastened by the carnage of the prior war – few Americans were interested.

How to fix that?

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The Disinformation of Misinformed Informers

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2022

This post has been fact checked by official fact checkers who are experts in disinformation.

Good Citizen

https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/the-disinformation-of-misinformed?s=r

Sources say there is far too much unapproved disinformation in the world today and it’s a tremendous threat to the approved disinformers.

Official sources say there is too much unofficial unapproved disinformation. Only official approved disinformation is allowed inside sources tell alphabet news networks.

Two officials with inside knowledge of unapproved disinformation tell alphabet news networks tonight that unofficial disinformation is a threat to the official informers’ disinformation monopoly.

Intel officials say that their disinformation monopoly is being undermined by people interested in honest information being peddled by unapproved disinformation sources.

Trusted sources are saying that Intel officials are worried that sources confirm that unapproved disinformation from people interested in honest information is the greatest threat to democracy. Alongside white supremacy of course. And the MAGA people.

Official inside intel sources who are to be trusted are saying that the third greatest threat to global security, energy security, chastity belt security, and your ability to buy baby formula is Russian disinformation. It’s the venomous pit viper of the disinformation kingdom. Unpredictable, poisonous, and potentially deadly if allowed to flow through a social body without the life-saving antidote provided by approved trust and safety profiled official fact-checkers.

The most trusted sources say that intel sources say that inside sources say those official informers and approved fact-checkers are completely and unapologetically always full of shit and the Good Citizens now know it.

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You’ve Been Flagged as a Threat: Predictive AI Technology Puts a Target on Your Back

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2022

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/youve_been_flagged_as_a_threat_predictive_ai_technology_puts_a_target_on_your_back

“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”—Milton Friedman

You’ve been flagged as a threat.

Before long, every household in America will be similarly flagged and assigned a threat score.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

If you’re not unnerved over the ramifications of how such a program could be used and abused, keep reading.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

Consider the case of Michael Williams, who spent almost a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Williams was behind the wheel when a passing car fired at his vehicle, killing his 25-year-old passenger Safarian Herring, who had hitched a ride.

Despite the fact that Williams had no motive, there were no eyewitnesses to the shooting, no gun was found in the car, and Williams himself drove Herring to the hospital, police charged the 65-year-old man with first-degree murder based on ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection program that had picked up a loud bang on its network of surveillance microphones and triangulated the noise to correspond with a noiseless security video showing Williams’ car driving through an intersection. The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.

Although gunshot detection program like ShotSpotter are gaining popularity with law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and courts alike, they are riddled with flaws, mistaking “dumpsters, trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, fireworks, construction, trash pickup and church bells…for gunshots.”

As an Associated Press investigation found, “the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots.”

In one community, ShotSpotter worked less than 50% of the time.

Then there’s the human element of corruption which invariably gets added to the mix. In some cases, “employees have changed sounds detected by the system to say that they are gunshots.” Forensic reports prepared by ShotSpotter’s employees have also “been used in court to improperly claim that a defendant shot at police, or provide questionable counts of the number of shots allegedly fired by defendants.”

The same company that owns ShotSpotter also owns a predictive policing program that aims to use gunshot detection data to “predict” crime before it happens. Both Presidents Biden and Trump have pushed for greater use of these predictive programs to combat gun violence in communities, despite the fact that found they have not been found to reduce gun violence or increase community safety.

The rationale behind this fusion of widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs is purportedly to enable the government takes preemptive steps to combat crime (or whatever the government has chosen to outlaw at any given time).

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Israel Murders Palestinian-American Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2022

by Kyle Anzalone 

https://libertarianinstitute.org/news-roundup/israel-murders-palestinian-american-journalist-shireen-abu-akleh/

Twitter/ @assaf_khuloud

Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed by Israeli forces outside of Jenin. A second reporter Ali Samoodi was shot and wounded. 

Samoodi, who was near Abu Akleh when she was murdered, reported they came under fire from Israeli occupation forces without warning. “They didn’t ask us to leave and they didn’t ask us to stop (filming). They fired at us. One bullet hit me and another hit Shireen. They killed her in cold blood,” he said. 

In videos showing the moments after Abu Akleh was shot, both Abu Akleh and a second journalist are wearing internationally recognized bulletproof vests marked “PRESS.” The video also shows the gunmen continuing to fire on the journalists after Akleh was shot. 

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Bill Clinton Makes a Pathetic Attempt to Retroactively Justify His Decision to Expand NATO

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2022

By

 Jeremy Kuzmarov

Bill Clinton Makes a Pathetic Attempt to Retroactively Justify His Decision to Expand NATO

ith the Ukraine war expanding and the threat of nuclear catastrophe rising, Bill Clinton has written an article in The Atlantic magazine trying to defend what many see as indefensible: his administration’s support for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in March 1999 into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic against a pledge by the Bush administration to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”

Clinton had been warned at the time by Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) that NATO expansion would result in “nothing but humiliation for Russia” and could provoke a new Cold War.

Yeltsin told Clinton: “How do you think it looks to us if one bloc [from the Cold War] continued to exist when the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia.”[1]

Clinton Archives Confirm the Need for NATO Enlargement - ICDS
Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton at a summit in Helsinki Finland in 1997. [Source: icds.ee]

A similar warning was issued by George F. Kennan, the father of the Cold War containment doctrine.

He wrote in an op-ed in February 1997 that NATO expansion would amount to a “strategic blunder of epic proportions” and the “most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era,” as it would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” and “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,”[2] which is exactly what happened.

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Contrary to What Some Economists Claim, the Fed Can’t Give the Economy a “Neutral” Rate of Interest

Posted by M. C. on May 11, 2022

The idea of the neutral interest rate is unrealistic. The Fed attempts to establish an interest rate that corresponds to the conditions of the free market. Obviously, this is in contradiction to the free market, since in a free market there is no central bank setting the interest rate.

Given the impossible goal that the Fed tries to reach, we do not expect Fed policy makers to become wise and all knowing with regard to the correct level of interest rates. A better alternative is to leave the economy alone.

https://mises.org/wire/contrary-what-some-economists-claim-fed-cant-give-economy-neutral-rate-interest

Frank Shostak

On April 19, 2022, at the Economic Club in New York, the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank president Charles Evans said the Fed is likely to lift by year end its federal funds rate target range close to the neutral range of between 2.25 to 2.50 percent. Furthermore, on April 21, 2022, Fed chairman Jerome Powell corroborated this by stating that the Fed wants to raise its benchmark rate to the neutral level.

By popular thinking, the neutral rate is one that is consistent with stable prices and a balanced economy. Hence, in order to attain economic and price stability, Fed policy makers should navigate the federal funds rate toward the neutral rate range. The Swedish economist Knut Wicksell in the late nineteenth century articulated this framework of thinking, which has its origins in the eighteenth-century writings of the British economist Henry Thornton.

One can assume that the current framework of central bank operations throughout the world is based to a large degree on Wicksell’s writings, which means the key to comprehending the rationale of central banks actions is understanding the writings of Knut Wicksell.

The Neutral Interest Rate Framework

According to Wicksell the neutral rate is (Wicksell labels the neutral rate as the natural rate):

A certain rate of interest on loans which is neutral in respect to commodity prices, and tend neither to raise nor to lower them. This is necessarily the same as the rate of interest which would be determined by supply and demand if no use were made of money and all lending were effected in the form of real capital goods. It comes to much the same thing to describe it as the current value of the natural rate of interest on capital.

In this way of thinking, the neutral rate of interest is defined as the rate at which the demand for physical loan capital coincides with the supply of savings expressed in physical magnitudes.1 Wicksell makes a clear distinction between the interest rate that is determined in financial markets and the neutral interest rate that is set without money. While the interest rate in financial markets is determined by demand and supply for money, the neutral interest rate is set by real factors. Thus, he wrote: 

Now if money is loaned at this same rate of interest, it serves as nothing more than a cloak to cover a procedure which, from the purely formal point of view, could have been carried on equally well without it. The conditions of economic equilibrium are fulfilled in precisely the same manner.

According to the neutral rate framework, the main source of economic instability is because the money market interest rate is not in line with the neutral rate. In the Wicksell’s framework, money only affects the price level. The effect of money on the price level is however not direct, as it operates via the gap between the money market interest rate and the neutral rate. The mechanism works as following: if the market rate falls below the neutral rate, investment will exceed saving implying that aggregate demand will be greater than aggregate supply.

Assuming that the excess demand is financed by the expansion in bank loans this leads to the creation of new money, which in turn pushes the general level of prices up. Conversely, if the market rate rises above the neutral rate, savings will exceed investment, aggregate supply will exceed aggregate demand, bank loans and the stock of money will contract, and prices will fall (on this topic, see this Fed working paper). Whenever the market rate is in line with the neutral rate, the economy is in a state of equilibrium and there is neither upward nor downward pressures on the price level.

According to Wicksell:

If it were possible to ascertain and specify the current value of the natural rate, it would be seen that any deviation of the actual money rate from this natural rate is connected with rising or falling prices according as the deviation is downward or upward.

Wicksell held that since the supply of real capital is limited while the supply of money can be regarded as elastic, there is no reason to assume that the money market interest rate would normally agree with the neutral real rate.2 Furthermore, Wicksell maintained that to establish whether monetary policy is tight or loose, it is not enough to pay attention to the level of money market interest rates, but rather one needs to contrast money market interest rates with the neutral rate. Thus if the market interest rate is above the neutral rate then the policy stance is tight. Conversely, if the market rate is below the neutral rate then the policy stance is loose. Thus, according to Wicksell, whenever the money market rate is matched with the neutral rate the economy is in a state of equilibrium and there are neither upward nor downward pressure on the price level. 

Can Real Interest Rates Be Identified?

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