Authored by Ciaran Lyons via CoinTelegraph.com,

A New York attorney has been blasted for using ChatGPT for legal research as part of a lawsuit against a Columbian airline.

Steven Schwartz, an attorney with the New York law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, was hired by Robert Mata to pursue an injury claim against Avianca Airlines.

Mata claims he sustained the injury from a serving cart during his flight with the airline in 2019, according to a May 28 report from CNN Business.

However, after a judge noticed inconsistencies and factual errors in the case documentation, Schwartz has admitted to using ChatGPT for his legal research, according to a May 24 sworn affidavit.

He claims that this was his first time using ChatGPT for legal research and “was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

In an April 5 court filing, the judge presiding over the case stated:

“Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations.”

The judge further claimed that certain cases referenced in the submissions did not exist, and there was an instance where a docket number on a filing was mixed up with another court filing. 

Extract of Steven Schwartz's affidavit on May 24. Source: courtlistener.com

Schwartz said he also regrets having trusted the artificial chatbot without conducting his own due diligence. The affidavit noted:

“[Schwartz] Greatly regrets having utilized generative artificial intelligence to supplement the legal research performed herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity.”

In recent times there has been an ongoing debate regarding the extent to which ChatGPT can be integrated into workforces.

However, reports indicate that the intelligence levels of ChatGPT are rapidly advancing.

But developers are skeptical about whether it has the potential to replace humans altogether. 

Blockchain developer Syed Ghazanfer said while he favors ChatGPT, he is doubtful that it has the communication skills to completely replace human workers.

“For it to replace you, you have to communicate requirements which are not possible in native English. That’s why we invented programming languages,” he said.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

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

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

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

John Cleese is refusing to yield.

A recent example of this misreporting !

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

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023

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

I have, of course, no intention of doing so

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

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023

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

Untrue, for a very good reason

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

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authored by Lia Onely via The Epoch Times,

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

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

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

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

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

The MOH did respond to a request for comment.

Freedom of Information Request

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They said the purpose was “to improve surveillance.”

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

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

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

‘False Presentation’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cardiac Arrest Data

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

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

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

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in December 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Both scenarios are very serious,” he added.

Vaccines Saved ‘Millions Around the World’: MOH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ranking Internet Heavyweights

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

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

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

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

The Allure of Generative AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Methodology

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

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

• Free and fair elections

• Rule of law

• Alternative sources of information and association

• Freedom of expression

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

Which Countries Have Declined the Most?

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

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

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

Countries Becoming More Democratic

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

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

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

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

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Revival of the Heartland “Belt”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Greater Eurasia Partnership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authored by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute,

If legacy news corporations fail to report that large majorities of the American public now view their journalistic product as straight-up propaganda, does that make it any less true?

According to a survey by Rasmussen Reports, 59% of likely voters in the United States view the corporate news media as "truly the enemy of the people." This is a majority view, held regardless of race: "58% of whites, 51% of black voters, and 68% of other minorities" — all agree that the mainstream media has become their "enemy."

This scorching indictment of the Fourth Estate piggybacks similar polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official "truth."

Drawing attention to the divergence between the public's perceived reality and the news media's prevailing "narratives," independent journalist Glenn Greenwald dissected the Harvard-Harris poll to highlight just how differently some of the most important issues of the last few years have been understood. While corporate news fixated on purported Trump-Russia collusion since 2016, majorities of Americans now see this story "as a hoax and a fraud."

While the news media hid behind the Intelligence Community's claims that Hunter Biden's potentially incriminating laptop (allegedly containing evidence of his family's influence-peddling) was a product of "Russian disinformation" and consequently enforced an information blackout on the explosive story during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election, strong majorities of Americans currently believe the laptop's contents are "real." In other words, Americans have correctly concluded that journalists and spies advanced a "fraud" on voters as part of an effort to censor a damaging story and "help Biden win." Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to return the Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting totally discredited "fake news."

Similarly, majorities of Americans suspect that President Joe Biden has used the powers of his various offices to profit from influence-peddling schemes and that the FBI has intentionally refrained from investigating any possible Biden crimes. Huge majorities of Americans, in fact, seem not at all surprised to learn that the FBI has been caught abusing its own powers to influence elections, and are strongly convinced that "sweeping reform" is needed. Likewise, large majorities of Americans have "serious doubts about Biden's mental fitness to be president" and suspect that others behind the scenes are "puppeteers" running the nation.

Few, if any, of these poll results have been widely reported. In a seemingly-authoritarian disconnect with the American people, corporate news media continue to ignore the public's majority opinion and instead "relentlessly advocate" those viewpoints that Americans "reject." When journalists fail to investigate facts and deliberately distort stories so that they fit snugly within preconceived worldviews, reporters act as propagandists.

Constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley recently asked, "Do we have a de facto state media?" In answering his own question, he notes that the news blackout surrounding congressional investigations into Biden family members who have allegedly received more than ten million dollars in suspicious payments from foreign entities "fits the past standards used to denounce Russian propaganda patterns and practices." After Republican members of Congress traced funds to nine Biden family members "from corrupt figures in Romania, China, and other countries," Turley writes, "The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined 'Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.'"

Excoriating the news media's penchant for mindlessly embracing stories that hurt former President Donald Trump while simultaneously ignoring stories that might damage President Biden, Turley concludes:

"Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story."

Americans now evidently view the major sources for their news and information as part of a larger political machine pushing particular points of view, unconstrained by any ethical obligation to report facts objectively or dispassionately seek truth. That Americans now see the news media in their country as serving a similar role as Pravda did for the Soviet Union's Communist Party is a significant departure from the country's historic embrace of free speech and traditional fondness for a skeptical, adversarial press.

Rather than taking a step back to consider the implications such a shift in public perception will have for America's future stability, some officials appear even more committed to expanding government control over what can be said and debated online. After the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the wake of public backlash over First Amendment concerns, halted its efforts to construct an official "disinformation governance board" last year, the question remained whether other government attempts to silence or shape online information would rear their head. The wait for that answer did not take long.

The government apparently took the public's censorship concerns so seriously that it quietly moved on from the collapse of its plans for a "disinformation governance board" within the DHS and proceeded within the space of a month to create a new "disinformation" office known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which now operates from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although ostensibly geared toward countering information warfare arising from "foreign" threats, one of its principal objectives is to monitor and control "public opinion and behaviors."

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi concludes of the government's resurrected Ministry of Truth:

"It's the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets."

If it were not jarring enough to learn that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has picked up the government's speech police baton right where the DHS set it down, there is ample evidence to suggest that officials are eager to go much further in the near future. Democrat Senator Michael Bennet has already proposed a bill that would create a Federal Digital Platform Commission with "the authority to promulgate rules, impose civil penalties, hold hearings, conduct investigations, and support research."

Filled with "disinformation" specialists empowered to create "enforceable behavioral codes" for online communication — and generously paid for by the Biden Administration with taxpayers' money — the special commission would also "designate 'systemically important digital platforms' subject to extra oversight, reporting, and regulation" requirements. Effectively, a small number of unelected commissioners would have de facto power to monitor and police online communication.

Should any particular website or platform run afoul of the government's First Amendment Star Chamber, it would immediately place itself within the commission's crosshairs for greater oversight, regulation, and punishment.

Will this new creation become an American KGB, Stasi or CCP — empowered to target half the population for disagreeing with current government policies, promoting "wrongthink," or merely going to church? Will a small secretive body decide which Americans are actually "domestic terrorists" in the making? US Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone after traditional Catholics who attend Latin mass, but why would government suspicions end with the Latin language? When small commissions exist to decide which Americans are the "enemy," there is no telling who will be designated as a "threat" and punished next.

It is not difficult to see the dangers that lie ahead. Now that the government has fully inserted itself into the news and information industry, the criminalization of free speech is a very real threat. This has always been a chief complaint against international institutions such as the World Economic Forum that spend a great deal of time, power, and money promoting the thoughts and opinions of an insular cabal of global leaders, while showing negligible respect for the personal rights and liberties of the billions of ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab has gone so far as to hire hundreds of thousands of "information warriors" whose mission is to "control the Internet" by "policing social media," eliminating dissent, disrupting the public square, and "covertly seed[ing] support" for the WEF's "Great Reset." If Schwab's online army were not execrable enough, advocates for free speech must also gird themselves for the repercussions of Elon Musk's appointment of Linda Yaccarino, reportedly a "neo-liberal wokeist" with strong WEF affiliations, as the new CEO of Twitter.

Throughout much of the West, unfortunately, free speech has been only weakly protected when those with power find its defense inconvenient or messages a nuisance. It is therefore of little surprise to learn that French authorities are now prosecuting government protesters for "flipping-off" President Emmanuel Macron. It does not seem particularly astonishing that a German man has been sentenced to three years in prison for engaging in "pro-Russian" political speech regarding the war in Ukraine. It also no longer appears shocking to read that UK Technology and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan reportedly seeks to imprison social media executives who fail to censor online speech that the government might subjectively adjudge "harmful." Sadly, as Ireland continues to find new ways to punish citizens for expressing certain points of view, its movement toward criminalizing not just speech but also "hateful" thoughts should have been predictable.

From an American's perspective, these overseas encroachments against free speech — especially within the borders of closely-allied lands — have seemed sinister yet entirely foreign. Now, however, what was once observed from some distance has made its way home; it feels as if a faraway communist enemy has finally stormed America's beaches and come ashore in force.

Not a day seems to go by without some new battlefront opening up in the war on free speech and free thought. The Richard Stengel of the Council on Foreign Relations has been increasingly vocal about the importance of journalists and think tanks to act as "primary provocateurs" and "propagandists" who "have to" manipulate the American population and shape the public's perception of world events. Senator Rand Paul has alleged that the DHS uses at least 12 separate programs to "track what Americans say online," as well as to engage in social media censorship.

As part of its efforts to silence dissenting arguments, the Biden administration is pursuing a policy that would make it unlawful to use data and datasets that reflect accurate information yet lead to "discriminatory outcomes" for "protected classes." In other words, if the data is perceived to be "racist," it must be expunged. At the same time, the Department of Justice has indicted four radical black leftists for having somehow "weaponized" their free speech rights in support of Russian "disinformation." So, objective datasets can be deemed "discriminatory" against minorities, while actual discrimination against minorities' free speech is excused when that speech contradicts official government policy.

Meanwhile, the DHS has been exposed for paying tens of millions of dollars to third-party "anti-terrorism" programs that have not so coincidentally equated Christians, Republicans, and philosophical conservatives to Germany's Nazi Party. Similarly, California Governor Gavin Newsom has set up a Soviet-style "snitch line" that encourages neighbors to report on each other's public or private displays of "hate."

Finally, ABC News proudly admits that it has censored parts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s interviews because some of his answers include "false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines." Essentially, the corporate news media have deemed Kennedy's viewpoints unworthy of being transmitted and heard, even though the 2024 presidential candidate is running a strong second behind Joe Biden in the Democrat primary, with around 20% support from the electorate.

Taken all together, it is clear that not only has the war on free speech come to America, but also that it is clobbering Americans in a relentless campaign of "shock and awe." And why not? In a litigation battle presently being waged over the federal government's extensive censorship programs, the Biden administration has defended its inherent authority to control Americans' thoughts as an instrumental component of "government infrastructure." What Americans think and believe is openly referred to as part of the nation's "cognitive infrastructure" — as if the Matrix movies were simply reflecting real life.

Today, America's mainstream news corporations are already viewed as processing plants that manufacture political propaganda. That is an unbelievably searing indictment of a once-vibrant free press in the United States. It is also, unfortunately, only the first heavy shoe to drop in the war against free speech. Many Chinese-Americans who survived the Cultural Revolution look around the country today and see similarities everywhere. During that totalitarian "reign of terror," everything a person did was monitored, including what was said while asleep.

In an America now plagued with the stench of official "snitch lines," censorship of certain presidential candidates, widespread online surveillance, a resurrected "disinformation governance board," and increasingly frequent criminal prosecutions targeting Americans who exercise their free speech, the question is not whether what we inaudibly think or say in our sleep will someday be used against us, but rather how soon that day will come unless we stop it. After all, with smartphones, smart TVs, "smart" appliances, video-recording doorbells, and the rise of artificial intelligence, somebody, somewhere is always listening.

Authored by Jessica Mao and Olivia Li via The Epoch Times,

Recently, there is a growing trend of people informing on others secretly in Chinese society, with multiple high profile incidents occurring in succession. Current affairs analysts point out that the culture of reporting others to the authorities is a typical product of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideology, and breeds a lack of trust between people.

On May 13, famous Chinese stand-up comedian Li Haoshi used a Chinese military slogan to commend his adopted stray dogs in two of his performances in Beijing.

The slogan he used, to “have good conduct and capable of winning battles,” was originally Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s words when he set a goal for the People’s Liberation Army.

An audience member reported on him, saying that he had insulted Chinese soldiers.

Beijing then police arrested Li, saying that they had opened an official investigation into his performance. Li and the comedy firm he worked with were suspended from future performances and heavily fined.

On May 19, the Kunlun Institute, a self-proclaimed independent Chinese research institute, republished an old article from 2021 on its official website, criticizing Chinese painter and sculpture artist Yue Minjun for engaging in an “organized and orchestrated campaign of insulting the military and opposing the Chinese Communist Party” with an art museum in Shunde, Guangdong.

In the article, Kunlun’s guest commentator, Yang Zhaoyou, posted several paintings featuring Chinese communist soldiers and others. Each of the characters has an absurdly exaggerated smile, and some of them even had horns on their heads. These characters are based on ordinary soldiers, police officers, communist model soldier Lei Feng, and communist leaders such as Mao Zedong, Stalin, and Karl Marx.

The article said these characters are “not to be insulted” and the author “strongly requests the relevant authorities to investigate this organized insult” to the military and the CCP.

After the article was published, some Chinese social media users also launched attacks against Yue Minjun but others felt that the criticism of Yue was too far-fetched.

In another incident on May 22, a Chinese netizen reported in an online post that a teacher at Lanzhou University, when lecturing in a classroom, publicly discredited the CCP’s propaganda of the Korean War, which the Chinese regime refers to as “The War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.”

According to two pictures in the teaching slides, the teacher presented the opposite view of what the CCP depicts as “aiding North Korea and defending our motherland.”

Totalitarian System Controls People’s Minds through Informants

Former Capital Normal University professor Li Yuanhua told The Epoch Times that authoritarian rulers are afraid of public opinion and often get increasingly paranoid about controlling people. Under communism in China, people are not allowed to think and express themselves freely, and rulers control people’s thoughts through informants and mutual supervision.

“When words are crimes, it is actually tantamount to strengthening authoritarianism, and strengthening authoritarianism means that the authoritarians lack the self-confidence to rule, and have to resort to more controls to solidify their power,” Li said.

Li believes that the continued development of this trend will have an erosive effect on people’s minds, and that there will be a lack of genuine trust between people. Even if they have ideas, people are afraid to express them for fear that they will be reported or ratted out by others.

Product of Communist Culture

New Zealand-based political commentator Ye Zhiqiu told The Epoch Times that the practice of informing on others is a typical product of culture under communist rule, which has two distinctive features.

“One is that it does not distinguish between right and wrong, but only emphasizes political stance,” he said. “In other words, those who are reported and denounced are reported not because they have broken the law or violated social morality, but simply because their words and deeds do not conform to the views and stance propagated by the CCP. This phenomenon is also a product of decades of the CCP’s brainwashing education, which has ultimately led to intolerance of dissenting voices.”

“Another significant feature of this phenomenon—the most serious problem—is that it usually occurs among acquaintances. The informants often report on people they know well, which destroys trust,” Ye said, adding that the CCP’s long-term brainwashing education makes people lose their humanity, leaving only the so-called communist party spirit.

He believes that there needs to be a basic trust between people in order for society to operate normally.

“But under communist rule, especially during the Cultural Revolution, even husbands and wives could inform on each other, and children were encouraged to report their parents’ behavior to the authorities. This eventually led to the dire consequence that people in society became enemies of each other and lost trust in each other, which made society very deformed. This is exactly what the CCP wants, because when people guard against or even fight against one another, it is difficult for them to unite and effectively join forces against the CCP,” Ye said.

The 30yr fixed mortgage rate is back above 7% for the first time since early March. Housing affordability is the worst in decades. Those still searching for a beach home but don't want to pay Hamptons or South Florida prices have other options that are still considered "affordable." 

A new report via Realtor.com reveals the top ten most affordable beach towns for homebuyers this summer. To find these affordable homes, Realtor analysts used listing data for every home put on the market in the past year located within a one-mile radius of each beach." 

"We then selected the most affordable beach towns by price per square foot. Only locations with at least 50 properties within a mile of the water in the past year were included," they said. 

Topping the list as the most affordable beach home community in the US is Gulfport, Mississippi, with an average median home price of around $225,000 within 1 mile of the beach. The median price per square footage within 1 mile of the beach was $144. 

Second on the list is Newport News, Virginia, with average home prices within 1 mile of a beach around $220,000 and the median price per square foot around $150. 

"The city is perched on the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula, where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay near its mouth to the Atlantic Ocean," Realtor said. 

The rest of the list includes:

3. New London, Conn.

4. Grand Isle, La.

5. Corpus Christi, Texas

6. Atlantic City, NJ.

7. Navarre, Fla.

8. North Beach, Md.

9. Crescent City, Calif.

10. Shirley, N.Y.

Most of the affordable beach towns can be found in the South, Mid-Atlantic, or Northeast regions. However, Northern California also has one reasonably priced beach town. 

Affordability challenges persist, with the mortgage rates back above 7%. 

The beach towns listed above are gems of affordability. 

America's descent toward lawlessness is most visible at retail stores in progressive metro areas. The latest incident occurred at a Lululemon store in Atlanta. Three masked men pillaged the store while two employees wearing overpriced yoga pants were fired by corporate for calling the police to report the robbery. 

Local media outlet WXIA said Jennifer Ferguson, the former assistant manager of the Peachtree Corners Lululemon, and Rachel Rogers, a former employee at the store, encountered the men in "masks and hoodies" who "swiped" as much merchandise as they could before sprinting out the door.

"No, no, no, you can march back out," Ferguson said in a video that caught the entire robbery. One of the robbers told her, "Chill, b-tch, shut your ass up." 

New York Post said the thieves had robbed the store several times because Lululemon has a "zero-tolerance policy" on chasing or physically engaging with a robber. Although both employees did not physically try to stop the masked men, they called the police to report the theft. 

"We are not supposed to get in the way. You kind of clear path for whatever they're going to do.

"And then, after it's over, you scan a QR code. And that's that. We've been told not to put it in any notes, because that might scare other people. We're not supposed to call the police, not really supposed to talk about it," Ferguson told WXIA. 

In a Facebook post, the assistant manager's husband, Jason Ferguson, said, "My wife was terminated from her job at Lululemon for 'breaking employee handbook policy' of not interfering with a burglary." He continued:

Lululemon representatives held a zoom call a few days after the incident to learn what Jenn knew about the policy. Then, a few days later, they scheduled a follow-up zoom call where they terminated her citing the company's "zero-tolerance policy" in these situations. No warning. No coaching. No additional training. Just. Fired. Georgia being an at-will employment state, employers can do that whenever they wish. That is their right. But it doesn't make it right. Especially in this situation.

Jason Ferguson said the regional manager told his wife and the other former employee that calling the police would "look bad for Lululemon." 

Lululemon appears to have an open-invite policy for thieves, which puts its employees in harm's way. Not intervening physically is probably smart because who wants to die over expensive yoga pants made in Southeast Asia? However, terminating employees for simply calling the police is upside-down clown world stuff. We hope Lululemon fixes these broken policies and puts more effort towards protecting employees and improving work conditions. 

The Children's Minnesota hospital system awarded state Rep. Leigh Finke an award last week after authoring a bill designed to promote child sex changes, the Daily Caller reports.

Finke, a transgender individual, authored Minnesota's HF146, the so-called "trans refuge" bill, which would prevent the enforcement of out-of-state laws that would remove a child from parents who cross state lines to administer transgender medical interventions, such as hormones or puberty blockers.

"The law protects access to gender affirming care for Minnesotans and for those traveling to Minnesota from other states," said Children's Minnesota in a statement.

The legislation was signed into law on April 27 by Gov. Tim Walz (D).

Finke was also the author of a bill that would strip anti-pedophile language from the state’s existing anti-discrimination law. The law currently excludes sexual attraction to children from its list of legally protected sexual orientations, but Finke’s bill would remove language specifying that exclusion, which activists have argued could lead to pedophilia being interpreted as a protected sexual orientation.

Republican state Rep. Harry Niska later proposed an amendment to the bill that would clarify that pedophilia is not a protected class, which was adopted unanimously. -Daily Caller

We are pleased to announce that Rep. @leighfinke is this year’s recipient of the Children’s Health Hero award. Children’s Minnesota presents the award annually to legislators who champion child health issues at the Minnesota Capitol.https://t.co/lkzQHUjrDq

— Children's Minnesota (@childrensmn) May 24, 2023

According to Children's Minnesota, it's "the only health system in the state that cares exclusively for children" via two hospitals and 25 other facilities for primary care.

Meanwhile, similar "trans refuge" legislation has been passed in California, after states like Utah and Florida passed legislation to restrict sex change procedures on children.

"I am extremely honored to be presented the Health Hero Award from Children’s Minnesota. At a time when young children are exploring who they are, and where they fit in society, we need to advocate and fight for their right to discover those identities with dignity and compassion," said Rep. Finke.

Or maybe wait till they're 18, when society deems people to be adults capable of making major decisions for themselves?

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

A bill to decriminalize hallucinogenic mushrooms cleared the California Senate May 24, reaching the halfway point in the state’s effort to legalize the drug, despite increasing opposition by law enforcement and many citizens.

Senate Bill 58 was introduced in December by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who said criminalizing drug use and possession does nothing but fill up prisons with people who are addicted.

“We shouldn’t be criminalizing people for personal use of these non-addictive substances,” Wiener said in a May 24 statement.

If passed, the bill would allow the cultivation, transfer, and transportation of fungi or other plant-based materials that can be used as ingredients for the drugs, according to the bill text.

Psilocybin is found in a variety of mushrooms and can be produced synthetically. The bill would only allow plant-based psychedelic drugs for use by people 21 years old and older.

Ingesting the drug can cause sensory perception changes, including auditory and visual hallucinations. The drug’s effects after ingestion can begin within 20 to 90 minutes and can last up to 12 hours in some cases, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Several law enforcement associations, local California governments, and organizations are opposed to legalizing the substance, including the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, the City of Beverly Hills, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, California Statewide Law Enforcement Association, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, Concerned Women for America, and many others.

The California District Attorneys Association opposed the measure, expressing concern that legalizing the drugs for recreational use is not grounded in scientific evidence.

“While we are sympathetic to proponents who argue that the veteran population might benefit therapeutically from exploration of these substances, these drugs are Schedule I controlled substances for a reason,” the association said, according to a Senate analysis of the bill. “They have no federally accepted medical use and have a high probability of misuse.”

The California Contract Cities Association was also against legalization and was concerned about public safety risks associated with the cultivation and transportation of the materials.

“This means that more hallucinogenic drugs would be able to move across local jurisdictions in far greater numbers with insufficient oversight or accountability from local agencies,” the cities association wrote in a Senate analysis. “This is very worrisome from the perspective of local decision-making authorities like our member cities.”

Support for the bill includes the Hippie and a Veteran Foundation, Initiate Justice, the Alameda County Democratic Party, the California Association of Social Rehabilitation Agencies, and the California Public Defenders Association. The cities of West Hollywood and Eureka are also in favor of the bill.

Clinical trials are underway to study its use for treating depression and other mental health disorders, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

The association determined in a 2020 study that while research is still preliminary, psychedelics show promise for treating conditions including treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder but the drugs were not ready for use as a treatment.

Psychedelic mushrooms are still illegal under U.S. federal law. The Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated psilocybin, the substance found in psychedelic mushrooms, as a “breakthrough therapy,” speeding up the development and review of the drug to treat serious conditions.

Preliminary clinical evidence indicates that the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapy in clinical studies, according to the FDA.

Local measures to deprioritize the policing or prosecution of conduct related to hallucinogens have passed in Oakland and Santa Cruz. Ann Arbor, Michigan, Denver, and Washington, D.C., have also passed similar measures.

Oregon and Colorado have passed similar measures to decriminalize psilocybin and legalize it for supervised use.

The legislation is a stripped-down version of a bill proposed by the same senator in 2021. That bill, which would have legalized plant-based and synthetic psychedelics—such as MDMA, LSD, and ketamine—failed to pass.

In Wiener’s San Francisco district, rampant drug use has contributed to runaway homelessness throughout the city. The city passed a motion in 2022 calling for law enforcement to deprioritize investigations and arrests of adults found in possession of psychedelics.

Last month, dozens of residents and advocates protested at San Francisco City Hall against open-air drug markets and unsafe streets. Rally organizer Ricci Wynne told The Epoch Times data showed that the most prominent issues in San Francisco stem from drug use and drug dealing.

Bud Light is offering a massive Memorial Day weekend discount: $2.99 for an 18-pack of Bud Light or Budweiser, bringing the price per can down to just pennies. This aggressive pricing strategy is an attempt by the brewer to stimulate demand as an ongoing boycott dents sales for the sixth consecutive week. 

Twitter handle Ramp Capital spotted the promotion on Saturday that reads, "Easy To Enjoy Memorial Day Weekend ... Get Up To $15 Back Via Rebate On The Purchase Of One (1) Budweiser, Bud Light, Budweiser Select, Or Budweiser Selection 55' 15-Pack Or Larger." 

Before taxes plus the rebate, an 18-pack of beer costs around 17 cents per can. Ramp Capital said, "17 cents per beer is cheaper than water." 

The rebate follows Anheuser-Busch's disastrous partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney which sparked a boycott by conservatives. Then when Anheuser-Busch pulled support from Mulvaney, it unleashed a boycott among the trans community.

According to Fox News, citing new data from trade publication Beer Business Daily, Bud Light sales volumes for the week ending May 13 plunged 28.4%, following a 27.7% decline the week before. 

The boycott hasn't been limited to just Bud Light. Other Anheuser-Busch products, such as Budweiser Red, recorded a 14.9% decline for that week, and Michelob Ultra fell 6.8%. 

On the flip side, Business Daily said beer drinkers gravitated to Bud Light's competitors, sending sales of Coors Light up 16.9% and Miller Lite up 15.1%. 

Beer Business Daily analysts pointed out more discounting is likely throughout the summer as Bud Light and Budweiser sales stumble and wholesalers are left with rising inventories due to lackluster demand. 

"This could be a promotional summer the likes we haven't seen since after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, where there was so much beer inventory backed up in the trade that it initiated the price war of all price wars," Beer Business Daily said.

Since Bud Light's promotion with Mulvaney on TikTok and the resulting boycott, investors have penalized Anheuser-Busch with a $19 billion wipeout in market cap.  

Bud Light's marketing blunder isn't ending anytime soon. And along the way, other companies like Target and North Face have yet to learn from Bud Light.

Jeffrey Epstein may (not) have killed himself but the questions surrounding his life (and death) continue to swirl and on Friday, none other than billionaire JPM CEO Jamie "That's why i'm richer than you" Dimon was questioned under oath for hours by lawyers in two lawsuits in which the largest US bank was accused of knowingly benefiting from Epstein’s sex-trafficking; Dimon, of course, denied any involvement with the financier’s accounts. According to Bloomberg, Dimon finished his deposition Friday and the deposition will not continue into a second day.

JPM spokeswoman Patricia Wexler said Dimon repeatedly confirmed that he never met or emailed Epstein and was not involved in decisions about his account.

“There are millions and millions of emails and other documents that have been produced in this case and not one comes close to even suggesting that he had any role in decisions about Epstein’s accounts,” Wexler said.

Despite the bank downplaying Dimon's involvement, JPMorgan had insisted that details of the deposition not be made public, Doe’s lawyer Brad Edwards said. Since the bank commented, he challenged it to release the full transcript of the testimony “rather than mislead anyone.”

“Then, the world can put their comment in context and decide for themselves what they thought of Mr. Dimon’s testimony as a whole,” he said.

While the bank’s lawyers had previously fought efforts to have Dimon questionedd, arguing he had no involvement in Epstein’s 15-year relationship with JPMorgan, the failed. Lawyers for Jane Doe and the US Virgin Islands, who are suing the bank separately for aiding Epstein’s sex trafficking, had the option of asking a federal court judge to extend Dimon’s deposition into Saturday.

JPMorgan has denied claims it knew of Epstein’s sex trafficking but decided to keep him on as a client anyway between 1998 and 2013. It has filed its own lawsuit against former executive Jes Staley, claiming he should be held liable for any damages awarded against the bank as he vouched for Epstein.

The nearly nine-hour deposition of JPMorgan's Mary Erdoes which took place two months ago, and whose details were finally revealed, delivered more fireworks.

When Erdoes, who leads the bank’s asset and wealth management division, learned a court had affirmed Jeffrey Epstein’s status as a sex offender likely to harm more victims, she had a terse response.

“Oh boy,” Mary Erdoes wrote in a 2011 email to a fellow executive at JPMorgan Chase, where Epstein was a client for 15 years.

It was at least the sixth time Erdoes had been alerted to Epstein’s criminal or civil legal trouble for sex crimes, according to the WaPo. She had also been informed as early as 2006 that JPMorgan flagged suspicious activity on his accounts.

Erdoes’s statements shed new light on the actions of JPMorgan’s highest-ranking officials while Epstein’s conduct faced legal and public scrutiny.

The Washington Post obtained the transcript of the deposition, much of which has been unreported until now.

Officials from the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned a private island and gaudy mansion, and attorneys for his victims claim the bank was complicit in funding Epstein’s long history of abuse and child sex trafficking. A complaint filed last month by the U.S. Virgin Islands cites Erdoes’s deposition as evidence that JPMorgan knew of accusations against Epstein years before the bank severed ties with him.

Not until 2013 did the bank end its business relationship with Epstein, identifying the financier’s routine and massive cash withdrawals as the reason for terminating the relationship.

JPMorgan has rejected the allegations in the lawsuit and expressed regret for its past association with Epstein.

“We all now understand that Epstein’s behavior was monstrous, and his victims deserve justice — but these suits are misplaced as we did not help him commit his heinous crimes,” JPMorgan spokeswoman Patricia Wexler said in a statement.

He is, of course, a monster now that he is dead and can't reveal who else may be a monster. Previously he was just a well-paying client.

The deposition transcript shows Erdoes said she had been made aware of Epstein’s convictions for sexual offenses, his status as a high-risk sex offender, and public allegations of abuse of minors and human trafficking. But she said she didn’t think it was her responsibility to remove him as a client, launch an inquiry into his accounts or refer them to compliance officials. JPMorgan has a separate process for dealing with client-related legal issues, she said.

Jes Staley, Erdoes’s supervisor and one of Epstein’s close friends, did investigate the allegations against Epstein by asking the financier about them, according to records read during the deposition. JPMorgan in a statement said it was “unfair for The Post to draw these kinds of conclusions without context for the relevant processes at JPMorgan, the tens of millions of clients, and the many professionals involved.”

U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. is set to give a deposition on June 6. JPMorgan in a filing Thursday accused government officials on the islands of shielding Epstein from law enforcement officials in exchange for political donations. Attorneys for the U.S. Virgin Islands called the claim “an obvious attempt to shift blame away from JPMorgan Chase.”

Deutsche Bank, where Epstein took much of his wealth after leaving JPMorgan in 2013, recently agreed to pay $75 million to settle a similar suit.

The lawsuits against the investment banks concern the extent to which various people in Epstein’s orbit are accused of enabling the sprawling sex trafficking operation that led to his arrest in 2019, or at least looking the other way — and profiting — when they should have intervened (although how would they when Epstein had sexual dirt on everyone).  U.S. Virgin Islands attorneys say JPMorgan “knowingly facilitated, sustained, and concealed” Epstein’s human trafficking network, while profiting from deals and clients Epstein brought into the bank.

Of course, JPMorgan has denied any wrongdoing and said the claims in the U.S. Virgin Islands complaint are meritless. The company has also sued Staley, accusing him of acting on his own to advance Epstein’s interests.

In her deposition, Erdoes said that it was the responsibility of the bank’s legal team to exert controls on Epstein’s accounts and that Staley communicated with him about the bank’s periodic concerns.

“The process by which those things work is that legal risk, compliance, including supervisory management … have a natural process they go to when they have things like this that get alerted to them,” she said, only in this case clearly every single process failed.

That is a fair description of how most major banks’ compliance systems should work, said Eric Chaffee, a professor at the University of Toledo College of Law. But he added that after repeated unexplained suspicious transactions and public reports of criminal behavior, bank officials have a legal responsibility to step in.

“When you have a lot of red flags come up, it’s one of those things where the senior executives certainly have some obligation to be talking to each other and figuring out what’s going on,” Chaffee said. “Ultimately, there does come a point where the bank, the financial institution, becomes outright complicit in regard to the crime.”

Especially when the "client" has dirt on the highest ranking people in said financial institution, and all others for that matter.

Going back to Erdoes deposition, on more than 100 occasions she said she did not recall details of her role helping supervise Epstein’s accounts, some of which date back two decades. She described Epstein’s crimes as “allegations” even though he pleaded guilty to procuring a child prostitute in 2008 and was declared a Level 3 sex offender — the most serious designation — by a New York state appeals court in 2011.

Asked in the March 15 deposition whether she believed Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019, was engaged in sex trafficking, Erdoes said, “I don’t know what to believe.”

Epstein first opened accounts at JPMorgan in 1998, and became one of the bank's most important clients.

Through his own accounts and the ones he managed for former Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, Epstein “generate[d] one of the largest annual revenue flows of private clients in the private bank,” reads a JPMorgan due diligence report from 2003, when the private bank was considerably smaller, cited in the deposition. (Wexner severed ties with Epstein in 2008, and later said Epstein misappropriated $46 million of the Wexner family’s money.)

A 2006 internal bank report referenced Epstein’s routine cash withdrawals several times a month in amounts ranging from $40,000 to $80,000, adding up to more than $750,000 a year.

By 2008, Epstein had $121 million in accounts with JPMorgan, records read during the deposition show. But Epstein, a self-described money manager, sought to bring the bank more business, according to legal filings, and profit from fees associated with the work.

Throughout that period, according to filings, Epstein benefited from the friendship and internal advocacy of Staley, who preceded Erdoes as head of JPMorgan’s wealth management unit.

Staley, who became the head of British bank Barclays in 2015, described a “profound” friendship with Epstein, according to court records. He resigned from Barclays in 2021 after U.K. regulators launched an investigation into his relationship with Epstein.

Why was he "profoundly" friendly with Epstein? Simple: text messages and emails entered into evidence by the U.S. Virgin Islands suggest “albeit cryptically, that Mr. Staley had sexual encounters” with Epstein’s trafficking victims, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York wrote in a May order in the U.S. Virgin Islands case.

In a 2006 email exchange with Staley that was read during the deposition, Erdoes described a Palm Beach Post article about Epstein being accused of soliciting minors as “so painful to read.”

Staley responded: “I went and saw him last night. I’ve never seen him so shaken. He adamantly denies the ages.”

Not the charges... the ages. Because one can obviously confuse a 14-year-old with a 34-year-old.

Staley’s departure from JPMorgan in 2013 allowed Erdoes to end the bank’s relationship with Epstein, she said in the deposition. “There was no one there to vouch for Mr. Epstein,” Erdoes said.

Meanwhile, in a legal filing last month, Staley’s attorneys said JPMorgan’s claims amount to “provocative media fodder,” but “never explain how an employee [Staley] who is not alleged to have had decision-making authority over Epstein’s accounts — and who is not alleged to have seen any of the suspicious account activity that other JPMorgan employees ignored — caused the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries.”

Around that time, she said, she became aware that Epstein’s regular withdrawals were in cash. At the time, Erdoes said, she did not see Epstein’s criminal history and the withdrawals as related.

“Never at the time was that something that I was connecting in my mind with anything to do with any of the allegations of what he may or may not have done,” she said, because of course it wasn't her - or anyone's job - to connect the dots as long as the pedophile client kept paying millions in fees and being vouched for by the largest US bank .

Wexler said the firm “did not know that such transactions could have had anything to do with a sex trafficking operation.” And yet they did.

During the deposition, Erdoes also said that it was not her responsibility to initiate internal investigations or flag concerns about Epstein’s behavior that arose from legal developments or news reports about his convictions or suspected trafficking. Instead, she said repeatedly that it was the job of the bank’s legal and compliance officers to vet the information.

“My responsibility is not to do something with every piece of news media that comes out on our client base,” she said later.

Internal JPMorgan records referenced in the U.S. Virgin Islands complaint show that bank employees flagged Epstein’s copious cash withdrawals as early as 2006.

In a 2010 internal email also cited in the complaint, risk management officials surfaced “allegations of an investigation related to child trafficking.” In 2011, according to the filings, JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering compliance director requested re-approval from JPMorgan’s general counsel of the bank’s relationship with Epstein “in light of the new allegations of human trafficking.”

Erdoes later in the deposition appeared to say the bank’s policies were hazy when encountering a client accused but not convicted of certain crimes. “I don’t know what the proper process is when it’s an allegation,” she said.

Only it wasn't merely an "allegation", as everyone knows by now.

At least five Targets in multiple states received bomb threats Friday over company executives pulling the Pride collection section because of mounting boycotts, leading to multiple stores being evacuated as police and the FBI searched for explosive devices.

"Target is full of [redacted] cowards who turned their back on the LGBT community and decided to cater to homophobic right wing, redneck, bigots, who protested and vandalized their store," reads a threatening email sent to several Target locations in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, Cleveland 19 News reports.

"We won't stand idly by as the far right continues to hunt us down. We are sending you a message, we placed a bomb in the following Targets. We will continue to bomb your Targets until you stop cowering and bring back your LBGT merchandise. "

One shopper told 19 News, "I know a lot of people around here are not a fan of LGBT that kind of stuff me personally I mean it's whatever. I never thought someone would go as far as a bomb threat." 

In Utah, local media outlet KUTV said, "Bomb threats were made to Target stores in Layton, Salt Lake, Taylorsville, and Provo." 

On Thursday, one day before the bomb threat was made, we reported a Fox News insider confirmed Target stores across the South and rural America removed controversial LGBT-themed products ahead of June Pride month to avoid further backlash. Some products ranged from "tuck-friendly" swimsuits for transgender people to gender-fluid coffee mugs. The insider said the reasoning behind such an abrupt move is "to avoid the kind of backlash Bud Light has received in recent weeks."

As we noted last week...

Corporations have freedom of speech under the First Amendment but have to understand if their political ideologies don't align with customers, then the people also have freedom of speech to voice their opinion. That's why corporations should probably stay out of identity politics or risk pissing off both sides, because what Target did by moving pride products to the back and scaling down the section will likely spark outrage in the trans community. 

And the Target bomb threat comes after California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a diehard progressive, tweeted, "CEO of Target Brian Cornell selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists is a real profile in courage."

"This isn't just a couple of stores in the South. There is a systematic attack on the gay community happening across the country," Newsom said. 

CEO of Target Brian Cornell selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists is a real profile in courage.

This isn’t just a couple stores in the South. There is a systematic attack on the gay community happening across the country.

Wake up America.

This doesn’t stop here.… https://t.co/1vRgukaT0g

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) May 24, 2023

Did Newsom's tweet incite the radical left's attack on Target? 

And congrats to Target's executives who have managed to anger conservatives and progressives. 

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Your bogus economic dogma of "growth via the wealth effect" created the demographic karma that will bring down the status quo.

What happens when you bleed your workforce while enriching those who already own assets with one bubble after another, all in the name of "fostering growth"? To answer this, let's modify a felicitous phrase: Sorry Our Demographic Karma Ran Over Your Economic Dogma.

The Demographic Karma is young people can no longer afford houses, healthcare or children and so the birthrate plummets and the workforce shrinks to the point that the bloated, heavily indebted status quo collapses under its own weight.

Demographic-economic chartist CH summed it up very succinctly in a recent Tweet:

@Econimica: Asset/RE bubbles (of assets primarily held by elderly/institutions) must be maintained to avoid a banking/economic crash...but the price will be the ongoing collapse of families/births...saving the present at the expense of the future (again).

This dynamic of Demographic Karma crushing Economic Dogma is global, as evidenced by this Tweet about China's demographic collapse and bubble-economy:

@fuxianyi: Chinese policymakers now face a dilemma: if the real-estate bubble does not burst, young couples will be unable to afford to raise two children. But if the bubble does burst, China's economy will slow, and a global financial crisis will erupt.

The Economic Dogma holds that inflating one speculative credit-asset bubble after another is wonderful because each bubble produces a "wealth effect" in which those who inherited assets or bought assets in the past are greatly enriched by the bubble. Feeling wealthier, they then borrow and spend more freely.

This Economic Dogma--that bubbles are excellent pathways to "growth"--is a form of "trickle down" economics in which the wealthy borrowing and spending more "trickles down" to the middle class and working class.

As the charts below show, this theory is baseless and bankrupt: the rich get richer and richer and everyone else gets poorer and poorer with each bubble. What's "growing" is wealth and income inequality as the demographic consequences of this soaring inequality collapses the social contract.

Let's go through the chart deck.

1. The US workforce is fully employed. Many expect a recession and AI will slash employment and create a pool of unemployed seeking work at low wages, but this isn't how it works. As I'll explain in a future post, the mismatches between the work employers need done and the skills and willingness of the workforce to do the work for the offered wage mean the unemployment rate can be high but workers are still scarce.

2. The expectation that US population and the workforce will ceaselessly expand is not guaranteed, especially if immigration declines. What is guaranteed is the population of retirees will continue rising.

3. Wages' share of the national income has declined for 45 years as the gains of the economy were shifted from labor to capital.

4. The top 1%'s share of wealth soars to new heights in every speculative credit-asset bubble.

5. The middle class's share of wealth plummets in every speculative credit-asset bubble and only gains ground when bubble pop. (We all know what happens when bubble pop: the Federal Reserve fraks out and creates trillions of dollars in stimulus that then flows into the pockets of the wealthy via the next bubble.)

6. Household net worth has skyrocketed far above inflation and the growth of the economy (GDP). As the charts above show, this wealth flowed disproportionately to the top 1%.

7. Thanks to the Fed's latest bubble--The Everything Bubble--housing affordability is at an all-time low. Put another way, the ratio of median income to housing prices is at an all-time high.

8. To stave off the inevitable karmic consequence of extreme wealth inequality--social disorder--the federal government has borrowed and blown tens of trillions of dollars on "fiscal stimulus" to buy the complicity of the 90% left behind.

So sorry Our Demographic Karma Ran Over Your Economic Dogma. Your bogus economic dogma of "growth via the wealth effect" created the demographic karma that will bring down the status quo.

*  *  *

My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

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Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Gross Domestic Income (GDI) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are two measures of the same thing. But they radically differ in outlook...

GDP and GDI data from the BEA, chart by Mish

Yesterday the BEA released the second estimated of first-quarter 2023 GDP. The GDP rose from +1.1 percent to +1.3 percent. And personal consumption expenditures (PCE) rose from +3.7 percent to +3.8 percent.

The BEA does not release GDI in the advance estimate, but does in the second estimate. 

GDI was -2.3 percent in the first quarter of 2023, and -3.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022.

That's recession territory, but GDP isn't.

GDP and GDI Details

• Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2023 according to the "second" estimate released by the BEA. In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 2.6 percent.

• The updated estimates primarily reflected an upward revision to private inventory investment.

• The increase in real GDP reflected increases in consumer spending, exports, federal government spending, state and local government spending, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by decreases in private inventory investment and residential fixed investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

• Real gross domestic income (GDI) decreased 2.3 percent in the first quarter, compared with a decrease of 3.3 percent (revised) in the fourth quarter. 

Corporate Profits

• Profits from current production (corporate profits with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments) decreased $151.1 billion in the first quarter.

• Profits decreased of $60.5 billion in the fourth quarter.

• Profits of domestic financial corporations decreased $25.4 billion in the first quarter, compared with a decrease of $59.0 billion in the fourth quarter. 

• Profits of domestic nonfinancial corporations decreased $109.3 billion, compared with a decrease of $22.9 billion. 

• Rest-of-the-world profits (net) decreased $16.4 billion, in contrast to an increase of $21.4 billion.

Average of GDP and GDI Also Signals Recession

The average of real GDP and real GDI, a supplemental measure of U.S. economic activity that equally weights GDP and GDI, decreased 0.5 percent in the first quarter, compared with a decrease of 0.4 percent (revised) in the fourth quarter.

The BEA discusses the average of GDP and GDI because that is what the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) uses as an input to determine recessions.

Even if one averages the numbers, a recession is possible if not likely.

But the NBER is so delayed on its determination.

By the time the NBER releases a recession announcement, it will be clear which one of these sets of numbers is wrong.

[ZH: Mish is not alone in pointing this huge discrepancy out as former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Jason Furman recently explained in a brieft Twitter thread]

New data out indicates that the economy contracted at a -0.5% annual rate in Q1, the fourth quarter of the last five with negative growth.

This is based on average of GDP (+1.3% in Q1) and GDI (-2.3%) which is generally more reliable than either one individually.

— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) May 25, 2023

He continued:

Can't know where the negative growth comes from because the expenditure numbers (consumption, investment, etc.) sum to the 1.3% growth. So if that's wrong then one of the components is wrong.

Is why I wish the BEA was more Bayesian in formulating a single number w/ best info.

Reported consumption growth was very strong at 3.8%. Non-residential fixed investment up 1.4%. Inventories subtracted 2.1pp from the growth rate (as measured on the product side), a factor that is likely to be temporary.

On the income side, corporate profits fell for the third straight quarter and are down 2.8% over the last year.

BUT, this reflects a huge loss for the Fed. Taking that out profits down a little in Q1 and up 7.0% in the last quarter.

I have to say, I find all of this a little confusing and want to think more about it and read what others have to say. The numbers are telling wildly varying stories about the truth in the economy. And then that truth itself has some strange aspects to it (like the Fed losses).

If I truly believed the average of GDP + GDI (and I mostly do believe it) then one could reasonably describe the economy as having been in recession for some time, but a very very strange recession with strong employment gains and low unemployment--so a productivity decline.

Revisions

A recent GDP revision was in the direction of GDI. 

Given that heading into recessions, most revisions tend to be negative, and positive out of recessions, there is no strong reason to pooh-pooh GDI. 

Real Disposable Income is Flat, But Real Spending Jumps 0.5 Percent

Earlier today I noted Real Disposable Income is Flat, But Real Spending Jumps 0.5 Percent

Also note Trade Deficit in Goods Jumps 17 Percent as Imports Surge and Exports Plunge

The latter report sent the GDPNow forecast down from 2.9 percent to 1.9 percent for the second quarter of 2023.

*  *  *

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Via AntiWar.com,

The US-led anti-ISIS coalition is building a new military base in Syria’s northern province of Raqqa, The New Arab reported, citing a source close to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The US backs the SDF and keeps about 900 troops (officially at least) in eastern Syria, allowing the US to control about one-third of Syria’s territory. The report said there are currently about 24 US-led military sites spread throughout eastern Syria.

While the US says it’s in Syria to fight ISIS, the presence is part of Washington’s economic war against Damascus, which includes crippling economic sanctions.

ISIS also holds no significant territory, and the Syrian government and its allies would continue to fight the remnants of the terror group if the US withdrew.

But the construction of a new base demonstrates the US plans to continue the occupation indefinitely. In March, the House voted down a resolution introduced by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) that would have ordered President Biden to withdraw from Syria. The legislation failed in a vote of 103-321, with 56 Democrats and 47 Republicans voting in favor of the bill.

The House also recently voted to maintain sanctions on Syria after an earthquake killed thousands of Syrians. Only two members of Congress voted against the legislation.

The US could come under pressure to withdraw from Syria and lift sanctions on the country as more and more regional countries are normalizing ties with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Matt Gaetz speaks his mind on Syria:

"900 Americans were sent to this hellscape with no definition of victory, with no clear objective, and purely existing as a vestige to the regime change, failed foreign policies of multiple former presidents." pic.twitter.com/Jc7UAYcaPq

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 8, 2023

Saudi Arabia spearheaded an effort to bring Syria back into the Arab League despite US objection.