Free Republic

Dr. Anthony Fauci - who offshored banned gain-of-function research to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to humans - has been accused by Congressional investigators of having 'prompted' the fabrication of a paper by a cadre of scientists aimed at disproving the Covid-19 lab-leak theory.On February 1, 2020, Fauci and his boss, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists participated in a conference call during which several of them warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China - may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.Three days after the call, four participants from the call...

How do you feel about religion?As Statista's Katharina Buchholz details below, depending on which country you are in, this question is more or less likely to be met with a shrug or even an objection to religious belief.In China, the highest percentage of people among the 56 countries and territories included in the Statista Global Consumer Survey is non-religious or atheist, the latter describing people rejecting the idea that there is a God.You will find more infographics at StatistaAmong European countries, Germany ranks high for the share of its non-religious and atheist population, which stands at around a third of...

What about the liquid assets? Well, the FT report goes on to notes that until Friday afternoon, Bankman-Fried was looking to sell the $472MM of Robinhood shares, the largest liquid asset listed for FTX Trading, in privately negotiated deals he was arranging on the messaging app Signal, according to an FT source. As a reminder, SBF acquired a 7.6% stake in Robinhood in May, a transaction which delayed (but did not halt) the company's collapse into oblivion. As part of the attempted firesale, Bankman-Fried was entertaining offers at a 20% discount to Robinhood’s VWAP price, or about $9 per share,...

What is the scale of the energy challenge?We got a very shocking sense of the staggering numbers involved in the existential, crippling European crisis earlier today when Norwegian energy giant Equinor echoed what Zoltan Pozsar said in March, warning that “European energy trading risks grinding to a halt unless governments extend liquidity to cover margin calls of at least $1.5 trillion." As Bloomberg put it, in its best non-Zoltan imitation, "aside from inflating bills and fanning inflation, the biggest energy crisis in decades is sucking up capital to guarantee trades amid wild price swings. That’s putting pressure on European Union...

Last week, Halliburton Co.'s CEO Jeff Miller warned hydraulic fracturing equipment is in short supply and could hamper fracking growth. Another oil/gas executive echoed the same warning this week and said bottlenecks could persist through 2023. "Availability of frac fleets is one of main bottlenecks impeding oil and natural as production growth for the next 18 months," Robert Drummond, chief executive officer of fracking firm NexTier Oilfield Solutions, told Reuters. Besides supply chain snarls, Drummond warned that capital constraints would make adding equipment to fields challenging. He said this imbalance could take several years to correct, adding that NexTier has...

The Biden administration will be terribly vexed to learn that the one company it hates the most, Exxon (we are confident the sentiment is mutual) reported record Q2 earnings (largely thanks to Biden's SPR release which has proven to be a risk-free arb black gold mine for the company) which smashed expectations and also reiterated guidance while maintaining its generous $30 billion buyback program. The biggest North American oil explorer followed European giants Shell Plc and TotalEnergies, as well as US peer Chevron in disclosing unprecedented results. Here are the Q2 details for the company which is reaping the rewards...

Just months after Elon Musk had a public spat on Twitter about what the true cost of “solving world hunger would be”, the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program is urging billionaires to “step up” and confront the global threat of food insecurity. The WFP boss had previously said “All we need is $6.6B—just .36% of the top 400 US billionaires’ net worth increase last year” in order to control a humanitarian crisis where in 42 million people in 43 countries face famine. Musk had previously offered $6 billion if the World Food Programme could provide him “open sourced...

NATO's number two largest military has just come out blasting Finland and Sweden's potential membership bid, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in televised comments to reporters describing the Scandinavian countries as safe havens for "terrorism". Turkey is "not favorable" regarding potential membership of Sweden and Finland to NATO, Erdoğan said as quoted in The Associated Press, citing concerns over political activities of backers of separatist Kurdish militants in both countries. "Sweden has become a home for PKK and other terror groups. We don’t view their NATO membership positively," he said according to a Turkish media correspondent's translation.Erdogan says Scandinavia countries have...

In Finland, an unhappy Tesla owner decided to blow up his Model S after learning it would need a new expensive battery pack. In the video on YouTube with English subtitles, Tuomas Katainen explains his 2013 Model S was in the shop for more than a month for service. When he heard back from the shop, they told him they couldn’t repair his car, and the only option was to change the entire battery cell. Katainen said the fix would’ve cost him upwards of €20,000 ($22,500). He told the dealership that was absurd, and he donated the car to a...

p>Since the beginning of the pandemic, one of the most common denominators in deaths and severe Covid is obesity.A vicious cycle...Pre-vaccine, 73% of those who died of (or with) Covid-19 were either overweight or obese - which tracks with the percentage of overweight and obese Americans.Distribution of deaths among adults hospitalized for COVID-19 in the United States from March to December 2020, by body mass index In addition to having generally poor circulatory health, an obese person is more likely to have other conditions that are risk factors for severe Covid, including low-level inflammation, diabetes and lung disease.A September 2020...

The value of these super-abundant follies will trend rapidly to zero once margin calls and other bits of reality drastically reduce demand.Inflation, deflation, stagflation–they’ve all got proponents. But who’s going to be right? The difficulty here is that supply and demand are dynamic and so there are always things going up in price that haven’t changed materially (and are therefore not worth the higher cost) and other things dropping in price even though they haven’t changed materially. So proponents of inflation and deflation can always offer examples supporting their case. The stagflationist camp is delighted to offer a compromise case:...

Disney-owned ESPN subscribers dropped precipitously in the last 12 months, shrinking another 10% to end fiscal 2021 on Oct. 2 with 76 million US households, according to a Friday SEC filing noted by Deadline.Within ESPN, college sports-oriented ESPNU fell from 62 million homes in 2020 to 51 million over the last year, while ESPN News slipped from 62 million to 50 million over the same period.The company said the drop - based on data from Nielsen, includes traditional Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs) such as Comcast and DirectTV, as well as most digital Over-The-Top (OTT) streaming packages.For reference, ESPN boasted...

Over the automotive industry’s 100+ year history, companies such as Ford, Chevrolet, and Mercedes-Benz have produced some truly iconic cars.Whether they’re designed for excitement, luxury, or just simple transportation, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu notes that these vehicles offer a set of features that make them highly desirable to consumers. The most successful models will undergo numerous revisions over time, sometimes sticking around for many decades.To learn more, this graphic from Alan’s Factory Outlet lists the 35 vehicles with the longest production runs of all time. Here are the top 10 below.As we can see, successful models come in many shapes...

Not for the first time, Pete Buttigieg is vowing to do something about America's "racist" interstate highway system. As absurdly silly as it might be for the Biden-tapped US Transportation Secretary to be prioritizing tackling supposedly racist roads, it was perhaps the question itself from a reporter that reached new asinine depths - made all the more laughable given the "seriousness" of the lengthy exchange related to last week's bipartisan infrastructure bill which passed through Congress.This was a real question by CNN (who else?) White House correspondent April Ryan during a Monday press briefing... amid Biden admin plans to "deconstruct...

Biden Finally Admits Dems Don’t Have The Votes To Raise Corporate Taxes For ‘Build Back Better’ Agenda After weeks of negotiations at the White House and on Capitol Hill, it appears the Democrats are hardly any closer to passing President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda (which, remember, has been split into two bills, a “bipartisan” infrastructure bill and another to finance a massive expansion of the social safety net). To make matters worse (for America, not the Democrats), the Washington Press Corp reported last night that Democratic moderate Kyrsten Sinema, who has helped to plunge Biden’s agenda deeper into chaos,...

Beyond Meat Implodes After Reporting Catastrophic Q3 Sales Confirming yesterday’s observation that the market is quick and merciless to punish any and all stocks that miss expectations this quarter, moments ago (former growth stock) Beyond Meat plunged 14% after reporting preliminary net revenue for third quarter of about $106 million, missing the estimate of $134.3 million by about 30%, and a huge disappointment to the company’s prior guidance which was $120 million to $140 million. As Bloomberg notes, while the Company’s previous third quarter guidance anticipated a sequential decline in net revenues, the deceleration was far larger than anticipated. The...

As the World Health Organization and other China puppets struggle to assemble a 'natural origin' theory for COVID-19, the CCP has been going to great lengths to quash non-sanctioned investigations that may instead point to a lab escape from research facilities which made international headlines in 2015 for dangerous 'gain-of-function' research - by which they were manipulating coronaviruses to better infect humans.'Batwoman' Shi Zhengli, known for bioengineering bat coronaviruses, was criticized over dangerous 'gain-of-function' experimentsAnd while mainstream news outlets spent the better part of 2019 flatly rejecting lab-origin evidence as 'debunked conspiracy theories' - which earned ZeroHedge a temporary Twitter...

“I’m not in the transitory-inflation crowd. The private sector is allocating all the money to the fast-growing software, eating-the-world companies. It’s not allocating money to companies that actually make things and provide other kinds of services that people find less exciting, meaning there are shortages of these things now.”These comments from Greenlight Capital’s founder David Einhorn in a recent RealVision interview, while addressing the broader "transitory vs permanent" inflation debate, are especially apt in describing the transformation taking place in the energy sector where the recent ESG mania has deprived legacy fossil-fuel companies of much needed capital (not just growth...

In some ways, we sympathize with Neel Kashkari's fake "concern" about the unprecedented wealth inequality that has emerged in the US in recent years and which has resulted in a slow, methodical and relentless destruction of the US middle class ... or rather make that precedented because there was another time when the top 0.1% had amassed as much wealth and it was just before the Great Depression.After all, who hasn't seen charts such as these showing the tremendous divergence in income earned by America's Top 1% at the expense of the middle and lower classes:Or that the top 10%...

It appears as though California's plans to become an environmental and socialist utopia are running face first into reality.The latest dose of reality came this week when the state, facing triple digit temperatures, began to "fret" about pressure on the state's power grid as a result of everybody charging their electric vehicles all at once.The state's power grid operators have been telling residents to "relieve pressure" from the grid by charging their EVs at off-peak hours, Newsweek wrote. Twice last week the California Independent System Operator (ISO) told residents to conserve energy voluntarily, including asking to charge their EVs at...