90 Miles From Tyranny : Search results for ship

Locator map showing Iran with its capital, Tehran.

A Japanese-owned chemical tanker struck Saturday off the coast of India was targeted by a drone "fired from Iran," the Pentagon said in a statement, a sign of expanding risks to commercial shipping beyond the Red Sea.

The attack came amid a flurry of drone and missile strikes by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels on a vital Red Sea shipping lane. The attacks began after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, with the rebel group claiming to act in solidarity with Gaza.

Saturday's attack took place around 10 a.m. local time (0600 GMT) and caused no casualties aboard the vessel, the Pentagon statement said, adding that a fire had been extinguished.

The U.S. military "remains in communication with the vessel as it continues toward a destination in India," the statement said.

The drone strike occurred 370 kilometers off the coast of India, it said, adding that no U.S. Navy vessels were in the vicinity.

It was the first time the Pentagon has openly accused Iran of directly targeting ships since the start of Israel's war on the militant group Hamas, which is backed by Iran and is a designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., U.K, EU and others.

In an interview published Sunday, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron branded Iran a "malign influence" and pledged stepped-up deterrence toward Tehran.

"Iran is a thoroughly malign influence in the region and in the world -- there's no doubt about that," he told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

"You've got the Houthis, you've got Hezbollah, you've got the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq that have actually been attacking British and American bases, troops. And, of course, Hamas.

"So you've got all of these proxies, and I think it's incredibly important that, first of all, Iran receives an incredibly clear message that this escalation will not be tolerated."

The former British prime minister echoed accusations by the United States Friday that Iran is involved in attacks on commercial ships by Yemen's Houthi rebels, providing drones, missiles and tactical intelligence.

The Pentagon statement said the MV Chem Pluto ship is flying under a Liberian flag and operated by a Dutch entity even though it is owned by a Japanese company.

Ambrey, a maritime security firm, said the "chemical/products tanker ... was Israel-affiliated" and had been on its way from Saudi Arabia to India.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Dutch company operating the MV Chem Pluto "is connected to Israeli shipping tycoon Idan Ofer."

The Indian navy said it had responded to a request for assistance.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the strike.

Last month, an Israeli-owned cargo ship was hit in a suspected drone attack by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the Indian Ocean, according to a U.S. official.

The Malta-flagged vessel managed by an Israeli-affiliated company was reportedly damaged when the unmanned aerial vehicle exploded close to it, according to Ambrey.

The Red Sea attacks on shipping since the start of the Israel-Hamas war have prompted major firms to reroute their cargo vessels around the southern tip of Africa, despite the higher fuel costs of much longer voyages.

The United States has been joined by more than 20 countries, including the U.K., in setting up a multinational naval task force to...

Russia, a Chinese cargo ship and the sabotage of subsea cables in the Baltic Sea

Earlier this month, as the world’s attention was focused on the horror unfolding in Israel and Gaza, it was easy to miss the news that two subsea telecommunications cables and a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea had been damaged.

On the night of 7 October, the 77-kilometre Balticconnector gas pipeline and a separate but close-by subsea telecommunications cable stretching between Finland and Estonia were damaged in the Gulf of Finland. A week later, it emerged that, on the same night, another subsea telecommunications cable—connecting Estonia and Sweden—had also been damaged.

That might not seem particularly newsworthy. After all, subsea cables—despite facilitating around 95% of internet traffic, making them the physical backbone of our digital world—are notoriously vulnerable to damage. These fibre optic cables, often only the diameter of a garden hose, along with gas pipelines, zigzag all across the ocean floor, where they can suffer damage from storms, marine life, waves, earthquakes and accidental maritime vehicle activity. There are hundreds of such incidents each year.

This case, however, appears to have been no accident.

Finland, Estonia and Sweden soon announced that the gas pipeline and cables had likely been deliberately damaged and were being investigated as related incidents.

At the centre of the investigation was a Russian state-owned nuclear-powered cargo ship, the Sevmorput. Russia has long posed a threat to vital subsea cables in the region, particularly since the start of the Ukraine war. The threat has escalated since the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in September 2022. Indeed, earlier this year Russia announced that it could damage subsea cables in retaliation for Nord Stream and European countries’ support for Ukraine. In June NATO even set up a subsea cable taskforce because of the high threat of Russian sabotage in the region. And with Finland recently joining NATO—and Sweden in the process of joining—it’s highly likely that Russia damaged the cables in retaliation.

However, another vessel was also reported to be under investigation—a Hong Kong–registered cargo ship, the NewNew Polar Bear, that had been travelling with the Russian vessel.

Open-source tracking showed that both the Russian and Chinese vessels had been in the exact location at the exact time when each of three lines—the two subsea telecoms cables and the gas pipeline—was damaged.

This is where the mystery starts to get stranger.

On 20 October, Finland announced that the Chinese ship—not the Russian vessel—was the prime suspect for damaging the Balticconnector pipeline. Estonia and Sweden followed by saying that the Chinese vessel was also the prime suspect in both subsea cable incidents.

An investigation by Finland into the gas pipeline has since determined that the damage was indeed caused by the Chinese vessel. Finnish authorities have recovered its anchor from the site. The next phase of the investigation will be to determine—somehow—whether the damage was done intentionally, accidentally or as a result of poor maritime activity, and what the motivation was. After the revelation that the Chinese vessel was at fault for the gas pipeline damage, Estonia and Sweden reaffirmed that the subsea cable incidents were linked to the gas pipeline attack.

Unsurprisingly, both Russia and China have vehemently denied any involvement in damaging the cables. Russia, despite its history of threats to sabotage European subsea cables and its recent sabre-rattling over NATO expansion, has dismissed the accusations as ‘rubbish’. China, for its part, has agreed to provide information and called for an ‘objective, fair, and professional’ investigation, emphasising the Chinese vessel’s routine maritime activities. Central to this mystery is why a Chinese vessel would even be involved in damaging subsea cables in the Baltic Sea in the first place. Would China really take its ‘no-limits partnership’ with Russia to a whole new level?

Indeed, this is where the situation gets murkier still.

While initially the NewNew Polar Bear was reported to be operated by China’s Hainan Xin Xin Yang Shipping Company, an update to the ship’s paperwork while still in transit a few days ago has changed its operator’s name to Torgmoll, a Russian company specialising in maritime trade with China. Marine ownership and control are often opaque, and in some instances, downright shady. It’s possible that Russia chartered the vessel to conduct the sabotage, knowing it would test and complicate any European response if the vessel was registered in Hong Kong. Russia may have undertaken the sabotage with or without the knowledge of Beijing. Indeed, China may be involved, knowing that the murkiness of the situation makes it difficult to...

Biden DOJ Sues SpaceX For Preferring American Citizens Over Asylum Seekers and Refugees in its Hiring Practices

On Thursday, the Biden Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, accusing the company of discrimination for preferring American citizens over asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring practices.

In its 13-page complaint, the Justice Dept. alleges that SpaceX “routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).” The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division seeks to force SpaceX to give “fair compensation” to non-citizens that were not hired.

According to the suit, SpaceX falsely claimed that federal regulations related to export controls restricted the company to only hiring U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.

“Export control laws impose no such hiring restrictions,” the Justice Dept. said in a press release. “Moreover, asylees’ and refugees’ permission to live and work in the United States does not expire, and they stand on equal footing with U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents under export control laws. Under these laws, companies like SpaceX can hire asylees and refugees for the same positions they would hire U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

The vast majority of illegal aliens pouring over the border are believed to be economic migrants, rather than legitimate refugees who qualify for asylum.

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “Our investigation found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company.”

“Asylees and refugees have overcome many obstacles in their lives, and unlawful employment discrimination based on their citizenship status should not be one of them,” Clarke added. “Through this lawsuit we will hold SpaceX accountable for its illegal employment practices and seek relief that allows asylees and refugees to fairly compete for job opportunities and contribute their talents to SpaceX’s workforce.”

Export controls seek to prevent the flow of information and technology to certain sanctioned destinations by requiring companies doing business in the U.S. to apply for an export license to ship a covered product to a sanctioned country, such as North Korea.

In the course of its business, SpaceX works with certain goods, software, technology and technical data that are subject to export controls along with other regulations like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the Export Administration Regulations. The DOJ says that those laws and regulations “do not require SpaceX to treat asylees and refugees differently than U.S. citizens or green card holders.”

That runs counter to a 2020 post by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on X, the social media platform then known as Twitter, which read, “US law requires at least a green card to be hired at SpaceX, as rockets are considered advanced weapons technology.” Musk’s post was included in the DOJ’s lawsuit, as were references to SpaceX not being able to hire people without at least a green card due to ITAR.

The suit also lists numerous other instances in which SpaceX employees and hiring managers posted public announcements stating that the company could only hire U.S. citizens and green card holders. Data provided by SpaceX to the DOJ indicated that from September 2018 to May 2022, the company only hired one individual who identified themselves as an asylee during the application process out of more than 10,000 hires and did not hire any individuals who identified as refugees in their applications during that period.
SpaceX’s hiring practices are in line with The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where (other than in extremely rare exceptions) you MUST be a U.S. citizen in order to work as a civil service employee.

The Justice Dept. is seeking “fair consideration and back pay for asylees and refugees who were deterred or denied employment at SpaceX due to the alleged discrimination.” It’s also pursuing civil penalties that may be determined by the court and policy changes to ensure SpaceX complies with the Immigration and Nationality Act’s non-discrimination requirement in the future.

The DOJ Civil Rights Division’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section is requesting that asylees or refugees contact the division if they either applied to a job at SpaceX and were rejected; were discouraged from applying to SpaceX because they weren’t a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident; or were told by a recruiter or other SpaceX employee that the company could only hire U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke was known for pushing a radical, anti-white, and anti-police agenda before Joe Biden tapped her to lead the DOJ’s powerful civil rights division.

Clarke has shared “crackpot theories” about black supremacy, defended unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, partnered with anti-Semites, pushed Jussie Smollett’s absurd hate crime allegations, and called for defunding the police.

Her frivolous lawsuit isn’t the first time Musk has been targeted by the Biden regime.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last year charged Twitter (now X) with “deceptively using account security data to sell targeted ads,” a practice that predated Musk’s takeover over the platform.

During a House Judicial Committee oversight hearing last month, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) accused the FTC of trying to influence an independent assessment of Twitter’s privacy practices and “harassing” the platform to...

The Classic Psychology Text That Predicted Today’s Urban Decay

It’s a question that most Americans who follow the news ask themselves daily: “How can the residents of so many of the nation’s largest cities keep supporting local officials who tolerate the ongoing destruction of their communities?”

Why this May, for example, did the citizens of Chicago -- a city where 21,000 students cannot demonstrate a basic competence in reading, science, and math -- choose the teachers union-backed candidate, Brandon Johnson, for mayor? Especially when Johnson’s chief opponent, Paul Vallas, had promised the electorate sensible school reforms?

Why, a few years earlier, did San Franciscans elect a mayor, London Breed, whose obvious reluctance to crack down on criminal behavior has since forced the city’s largest mall to close, two of its best hotels to declare bankruptcy, and tens of thousands of high-earning taxpayers to move away?

Why has there been no serious movement to get New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to initiate proceedings to remove Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who refuses prosecute “low-level” crimes, all while promising to downgrade felony charges and to decriminalize resisting police arrest?

And why, in 2022, did Los Angelinos pick another progressive Democrat to be their next mayor, rather than the candidate who promised to finally do something about the city’s exploding homelessness problem?

In 1954, three academic psychologists -- Stanford University’s Leon Festinger along with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter -- described a very different kind of social dysfunction, but one that helps us understand why so many urban Americans refuse to demand saner government. As reported in the still-widely read college text When Prophesy Fails, Festinger and his colleagues followed the activities of a religious cult, whose leader claimed to have received messages from the planet Clarion. These communications warned of a massive flood that would engulf a wide area around Salt Lake City on December 21 of that year and promised that those who heeded the alert would be rescued by an alien spacecraft just before catastrophe struck.

As researchers specializing in what has come to be known as “cognitive dissonance” -- the tension between what one believes will happen and what really transpires -- the three psychologists saw the alien prophesy as a rare chance to observe people who were clearly committed to a very unlikely outcome. Some in the cult had already left their jobs so they could escape danger on the Clarion ship, while others had ended relationships, given away their savings, or sold their possessions. All the researchers had to do was to quietly infiltrate the group and record the responses to the failed prophecy.

Unsurprisingly, the cult members’ initial reaction to the anticlimactic events of December 21 was to wonder whether their leader had unintentionally misread the original alien messages. Maybe she had gotten the wrong day. Or perhaps even the year.

The interesting development was what happened later. For while some who had been loosely attached to the cult from the beginning started to drift away from the group, those with stronger beliefs became even more convinced of the initial prophesy, variously rationalizing the lack of a flood and even seeking out new converts. Some went to TV and newspaper reporters with periodic predictions of a rescheduled alien landing, while the leader herself kept trying to contact Clarion extraterrestrials right up until her death in 1992.

The lesson of Festinger et al’s 1954 study for our own time is that when people encounter information which contradicts their view of reality, many will adjust their thinking to logically accommodate what has happened. But those with stronger convictions will do the exact opposite, entertaining even the most far-fetched ideas to preserve some semblance of their original beliefs.

According to cognitive dissonance theory, it should come as no surprise that large numbers of city dwellers -- the bluest of all Americans, according to polls -- should react to the seeming failure of left-wing social programs by becoming even more progressive. In the case of crime, what might seem to someone from a small town in Iowa like an obvious reason to enforce existing law becomes for the urban liberal a reason to identify even more closely with the “plight” of those “involuntarily reduced” to wrongdoing. Or in the case of K-12 education, declining test scores are not a reason to raise academic standards, but to decry such solutions as “white propaganda” and to focus instead on teaching schoolchildren about racial and gender inequities.

The good news about this psychological explanation for urban decay is that it does offer some hope for an eventual reversal. It tells us that those city dwellers who continue to vote for increasingly irrational policies are doing so, not (as they say) because of a progressive vision they claim to be drawn to, but because of what they are trying to escape: growing evidence that their political beliefs are...

If Anybody Should Pay Reparations For Slavery, It’s The Democrat Party

If anyone should pay reparations to black Americans for the injustices of slavery, it should be the institutions that preserved slavery’s legacy.

The call for reparations attracts more supporters every day. Even Disney has joined the cause, weaving the issue of monetary payments to the descendants of slaves into a storyline on the “The Proud Family” series on the company’s streaming service. But what generated the most controversy was one episode in which the show’s protagonists perform a song entitled “Slaves Built This Country” after they discover the founder of their town was a slaveholder.

Setting their frustrations over racial injustice and hardship to music, the cartoon children sing that slaves “made your families rich from the southern plantation, to the northern bankers, to the New England ship owners, the Founding Fathers, former presidents, current senators.” Catchy though the song may be, the children leave out one prominent beneficiary of slavery, one in the best position to provide the reparations called for: the Democratic Party.

One may argue for or against reparations on many different grounds. At its heart, supporters for reparations say that freed slaves never received any kind of compensation for their hardship from their owners. Thus, the descendants of slaveowners owe financial restitution to the descendants of their slaves, which would alleviate income inequality and atone for slavery, America’s “original sin.” Opponents of reparations argue one group of people, who did not commit the original wrong, should not be forced to make restitution to a group who indirectly received the wrong. From this angle, reparations seem more like “legal plunder,” a term coined by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat. Such an act “takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.”

But if the supporters of reparations are right and that some restitution must be made, it becomes obvious who should do it: the Democratic Party. Indeed, it is an objective fact that the Democratic Party is intimately tied to slavery and segregation. The Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, himself a slaveowner, and Martin Van Buren, a New Yorker who owned at least one slave and exploited enslaved labor. More importantly, Van Buren’s plan gained the support of southern politicians for his policies in exchange for his support of the “peculiar institution” of plantation slavery. Such politicians became so numerous they had a name: doughfaces, since their characters lacked all substance.

This pattern continued through the end of the Civil War and the early 20th century. After the Civil War, Democratic politicians in the southern U.S. supported segregationalist policies that brutally infringed upon the rights and dignity of African-Americans.

As a result of this history, the Democratic Party should provide...

The Population Crash

The demographic Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. We may be thankful that some people on the ship are building lifeboats while there is still time.

In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book extrapolating global population growth data to predict a catastrophe as humanity’s demand for resources outstripped supply. The book became a bestseller and catapulted Ehrlich to worldwide fame. But today, just over a half-century later, humanity faces a different challenge. We are in the early stages of a population crash.

Ehrlich’s basic math wasn’t necessarily flawed. In 1968, the world population was 3.5 billion, and today the total number of humans has more than doubled to just over 8 billion. Anyone with a basic understanding of exponential growth can appreciate that if human population doubles every 50 years, within only a few millennia, an unchecked ball of human flesh would be expanding in all directions into the universe at the speed of light. Which means, at some point, Malthusian checks will apply.

But where extrapolation yielded panic, reality has delivered something completely different. Today population growth is leveling off almost everywhere on earth, and the cause of that decline started, ironically, back in the 1960s when Ehrlich wrote his book. The reasons for this are subtle, because the only ultimate determinant of population growth is the average number of children a generation of women are having, and the impact of that and other variables take decades to play out.

In the late 1960s, the United States, along with most Western nations, had just moved out of its baby boom years, that period from 1946 through 1964, when women were still having lots of babies. Having grown up during the Great Depression, followed by a world war, the choice to have large families may have been a response to the adversity these women and men experienced as they came of age. That theory is borne out by subsequent history.

Over the past 50 years, in a pattern that has been repeated around the world, as prosperity increased, the average number of children per woman of childbearing age has decreased. The chart below provides hard evidence of this correlation. Tracking data per nation, the vertical axis is the average number of children per woman. The horizontal axis is the median income. A clear pattern emerges. In extremely poor nations, birth rates remain at Ehrlichesque levels. But once a nation’s median income rises barely above poverty, at around $5,000 per year, the average number of children per woman drops below replacement level.

One may view this chart and conclude that if an average of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to keep a population stable, this cluster of nations averaging around 1.5 children per woman can’t be that bad. But that reasoning ignores basic math. At a replacement rate of 1.5 per woman, for every 1 million people of childbearing age living in a nation today, there will only be 420,000 great-grandchildren. This means that nation’s population will drop to 42 percent of what it is today in less than a century. And the numbers get worse very fast.

South Korea’s current fertility per woman, for example, is a dismal 0.81, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 66,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.

This collapse is just now becoming apparent in overall population numbers because it is only when a numerically superior older generation, the product of fecundity, begins to die that absolute totals begin to drop. As baby boomers, known to demographers as the “pig in the python,” reach the end of their lifespans, the consequences of the decade decline in birth rates will finally be reflected in dramatic downward shifts in total population. That process is...

Manufacturing In China And Exporting Globally "No Longer Viable": Kyocera

Kyocera, one of the largest chip component manufacturers in the world, believes China can no longer play its role as the global factory amid heavy sanctions from the United States, and the company has begun shifting production to other places, including Japan.

“It works as long as [products are] made in China and sold in China, but the business model of producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable,” Hideo Tanimoto, president of Kyocera, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Not only have wages gone up, but obviously, with all that’s happening between the United States and China, it’s difficult to export from China to some regions.”

Kyocera is building its first factory in Japan in almost 20 years.

On Oct. 7, 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced new export restrictions on chip manufacturing and advanced semiconductors in a bid to prevent American technology from being used in the development of the Chinese military.

Tanimoto admitted that the U.S. export controls were a reason why the firm cut down its operating profit forecast for the year by 31 percent. Kyocera commands a 70 percent market share globally in ceramic components used in chip-manufacturing equipment.

“If chip equipment makers stop shipments to China, our orders will be somewhat affected … They are now even [being] asked not to ship their non-cutting-edge tools,” Tanimoto said.

Back in 2019, when the Trump administration had imposed tariffs on China, Kyocera had moved the manufacturing of copiers for the U.S. market from China to Vietnam.

Moving Production Out of China

Many companies have moved production out of China or plan to do so. In April last year, for example, Apple began manufacturing its iPhone 13 in India at a site owned by Foxconn, its Taiwanese contract manufacturer. In addition, Apple is sending the production of iPads and AirPods to Vietnam.

Samsung shifted production to Vietnam back in 2019. The company has also decided to manufacture its flagship Galaxy S23 smartphones in India for local sale. Amazon has shut down its Kindle facility in China and now produces FireTV devices in India.

Footwear brand Dr. Martens has been reducing its manufacturing dependence on China. Since 2018, the company has shifted 55 percent of total production out of the nation.

“The big message is reducing reliance on China,” Dr. Martens’ chief executive Kenny Wilson said in November, according to the Financial Times. “You don’t want all of your eggs in one basket.”
Declining Investment in China

An analysis by Investment Monitor, a network of B2B websites, shows that greenfield foreign direct investments (FDIs) in China have been falling over the past few years.

Greenfield investment is a type of FDI whereby a parent company sets up a subsidiary in a different nation and builds its business from the ground up, including setting up production facilities, offices, distribution hubs, and so on.

In 2022, greenfield FDI levels into China had halved compared to 2019, according to...

Pfizer Responses to Project Veritas Expose

Once again, Babylon Bee knocks it out of the park. Never forget the power of humor when operating on Fifth generation warfare battlefield terrain.

By: Robert W Malone MD, MS

A Primer on Modern Crisis Management when you can control Google, Corporate Media, and have virtually unlimited Social Media assets

Just for the record-

An example of directed evolution with comparison to natural evolution. The inner cycle indicates the 3 stages of the directed evolution cycle with the natural process being mimicked in brackets. The outer circle demonstrates steps in a typical experiment. The red symbols indicate functional variants, the pale symbols indicate variants with reduced function. Source: Wikipedia, encyclopedia of the approved narrative.

You can now find Part 2 of this essay here.

Wow. What a whirlwind of a week. Still trying to catch my breath, never did make it over to my personal physician for an ECG and prescription to get my tachycardia under control. Delivered a talk/wake up/shock on the fifth gen warfare deployed on all of us over the last three years to 1,300 paying European attendees at a Stockholm conference exactly one week ago. Delayed getting back from Stockholm (via Frankfurt) due to Lufthansa’s ongoing slow decay and inability to adhere to their own flight schedules. Got Tuesday’s essay written on the plane, posted it from the airport on landing, and finally made it back to the farm by about 11:00 PM EST. Wednesday I drag my sorry rear end out of bed, get the obligate three cups downed and begin the day with an out-of-the-blue call from a mainstream New York investigative reporter (that you would recognize) seeking background information on what the heck is going on with the Florida Grand Jury investigations (which I know very little about - they are running a tight ship!). Of course I have to make a few calls to prepare for that before the 10:00 AM “on background only” discussion. Scheduled long format “Gray Matter” podcast recording at noon, requiring some background reading prior. And then, out of an otherwise cloudless blue sky, a lightning strike.

Project Veritas pings me, asks if I would review an embargoed video that they have prepared, and then allow them to record my reaction to the material via a Zoom call. The Zoom hit scheduled so tight that I can barely get through the embargoed material before we start. And boom. We launch the call and I am still reeling from what I have just viewed. Veritas uses a very tight, abrupt editing style, and they compress a half hour of my interaction/reaction with their reporters into a few moments of the most powerful comments. The investigative reporter who did the interview and captured the video is present but off screen. I am told he is a former Pfizer employee. I am told that the drop time for the resulting video product will be 8:00 PM EST, asked to participate in a Twitter Spaces discussion beginning at 9:00 PM EST, and asked to get other physicians to join. I push out alerts that Veritas has something big coming, and to watch for it, including a personal “heads up” text message to Tucker Carlson. Steve Kirsch calls trying to noodle whatever intel I will give him, but it is embargoed and I hold the line on that. The video drops early. The Twitter Spaces discussion goes big, north of 17,000 on-line live participants. Much ado over whether this is real or not. Among other things, another Pfizer whistleblower sends James O’Keefe a Pfizer org chart listing the young physician in question as having the role and title as advertised, and that gets posted in real time. The Twitter Spaces discussion keeps...

Sinking ship: U.S. manufacturing orders from China collapse

Manufacturing orders from China down 40% in unrelenting demand collapse

Shipping companies are already reacting with “blank” (canceled) sailings and reallocating cargo shipments (“vessel utilization”) to make sure they have full boats before they pull out of port. All this is raising hell with the logistic delivery schedules people waiting on the other side of the pond depend on.

…Carriers have been executing on an active capacity management strategy by announcing more blank sailings and suspending services to balance supply with demand. “The unrelenting decline in container freight rates from Asia, caused by a collapse in demand, is compelling ocean carriers to blank more sailings than ever before as vessel utilization hits new lows,” said Joe Monaghan, CEO of Worldwide Logistics Group.

U.S. manufacturing orders in China are down 40 percent, according to the latest CNBC Supply Chain Heat Map data. As a result of the decrease in orders, Worldwide Logistics tells CNBC it is expecting Chinese factories to shut down two weeks earlier than usual for the Chinese Lunar New Year — Chinese New Year’s Eve falls on Jan. 21 next year. The seven days after the holiday are considered a national holiday.

The shipping industry is feeling the bite as it spooled up with new ships coming online to address the pandemic shipping boom, just as that very business now falls precipitously away.

…″It seems to be a very bad time for the shipping industry. We have the combination of declining demands and overcapacity as new tonnage enters the market,” it wrote.

But what the collapse in demand signals for the larger picture is more the worrying aspect.

…Blank (canceled) sailings data shows the cut in vessel capacity on the transpacific route (China to the U.S.) continues at a significant pace. The 2M Alliance of Maersk and MSC has suspended almost half of its U.S. West Coast services for December. The Ocean Alliance (CMA CGM, Cosco Shipping, OOCL and Evergreen) and THE Alliance (Ocean Network Express, Hapag-Lloyd, HMM and Yang Ming Line) have cut overall vessel capacity by 40-50% up to Chinese New Year.

As a result, space for shippers is considered tight for cargo bound for the Pacific Southwest route and service reliability has declined, with carriers including MSC and Hapag-Lloyd rolling (not accepting) cargo on sailings in an effort to make up time. According to logistics managers, this is creating two weeks of delay. MSC said in its latest notice to clients, “ETAs are indicative and subject to change without prior notice.”

Supposedly some of it can be attributed to Chinese COVID restrictions – orders aren’t being placed because of the uncertainty – but the truth of the collapse in orders is that the U,S. economy is on very fragile ground at the moment, and that has greater implications for the world’s economy at large. As much as they hate us, as the old kids’ song says, we are the head bone they are all connected to. Steve Van Metre of Markets Insider Pro points out:

“…out of the U.S., demands for foreign-produced goods, particularly out of China, are dropping so much that it’s impacting the shipping industry, it’s impacting jobs in China. It’s having a massive impact. And that’s telling us what’s going on in the global economy right now – that demand is falling on its face.”

While U.S. firms like Apple are finally in the process of shifting some or all of their manufacturing out of China, none of that alleviates the present woes. Business friendly alternative countries such as Vietnam have been a favorite of manufacturers in...