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Authored by Mark Jeftovic via EasyDNS.com,

Soviet Era Ethos Stomps Privacy and Due-Process

Another doozy from the Canadian government.

Following along several other bills winding their way along the Road to Serfdom…

• Bill C-11 regulates the internet under the CRTC and paves the way toward institutionalized content moderation, the requirement for licenses to publish online, and regulation of user generated content (in Senate)

• Bill C-36 the Online Harms Bill sought to designate political dissent as “hate speech” and invoked penalties for criticizing politicians (not sure where this one is at the moment).

• Bill C-18 throws a funding lifeline to Canada’s flailing agitprop industry (a.k.a the mainsteam media), in that it will require tech platforms to pay licensing fees for content the media outlets post there (passed third reading in November). This bill will reward big media conglomerates like Bell, while freezing out small and independent organizations.

Here comes another one, Bill C-36: An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts, which passed first reading last June.

It’s been largely flying under everybody’s radar so far. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been actively raising awareness and Michael Geist had Brenda McPhail, their Director of the Privacy, Technology and Surveillance Program on his podcast last October.

We mentioned C-26 in AxisOfEasy #273 citing Gowling WLG’s coverage of it by Brent Arnold (Brent Arnold sits on the Internet Society Canada Chapter board, as do I, but I am writing this post from my role as easyDNS CEO, and not ISCC.)

The Government Hereby Grants Itself The Following Powers:

The new bill is ostensibly a cyber-security and critical infrastructure bill, but it is riddled with nebulous, open-ended terms, Kafka-esque secrecy provisions, onerous penalties and conspicuously absent of any semblance due process:

It effectively subjects Canada’s telecom and internet sectors to the whim of unelected bureaucrats and political functionaries.

Am I being bombastic? You tell me: given that the legislation that grants them the power to order a telecommunications service provider “to do or stop doing anything“. 

“Part 1 amends the Telecommunications Act to add the promotion of the security of the Canadian telecommunications system as an objective of the Canadian telecommunications policy and to authorize the Governor in Council and the Minister of Industry to direct telecommunications service providers to do anything, or refrain from doing anything, that is necessary to secure the Canadian telecommunications system. It also establishes an administrative monetary penalty scheme to promote compliance with orders and regulations made by the Governor in Council and the Minister of Industry to secure the Canadian telecommunications system as well as rules for judicial review of those orders and regulations.”

I guess it all comes down to what you mean by “anything”.

Speaking of anything, the government can deem “any” service or system a vital service or system – which then makes that entity subject to requirements, that…

(a) authorizes the Governor in Council to designate any service or system as a vital service or vital system;

(b) authorizes the Governor in Council to establish classes of operators in respect of a vital service or vital system;

(c) requires designated operators to, among other things, establish and implement cyber security programs, mitigate supply-chain and third-party risks, report cyber security incidents and comply with cyber security directions;

(d) provides for the exchange of information between relevant parties; and

(e) authorizes the enforcement of the obligations under the Act and imposes consequences for non-compliance.

Each one of these bullet points opens a can of worms unto itself,  combined they have the potential to effectively nationalize Canada’s information infrastructure.

The penalties for non-compliance are onerous: $1 million per day for individuals and $15 million /day for any other entity.

But wait, there’s more:

Under C-26, orders are filed in secret, telecommunications service providers (TSPs) can be ordered to cut off any user (including another TSP) while being barred from even informing the entity that it’s happening, let alone why.

The contents of said orders are secret and not even divulged to the target. I recommend listening to the Michael Geist / Brenda McPhail podcast above to understand the threat to Canadians’ privacy.

Me, sitting here with my easyDNS hat on, running an internet service provider, I’m dialled in on the due process aspects.

More accurately, the complete absence of due process. We’ve got twenty-five years experience of being told by various governments and their agencies to forgo due process and do things that would otherwise disrupt businesses, individual rights and even the network itself if we listened to them.

Being told to do or stop doing “anything” seems overly broad.

It gets worse:

Similar to previous legislation, there are provisions for warrantless entry into places of business, or private homes, to search, copy or remove anything they deem relevant – including documents or telecommunications equipment.

C-26 also permits the government to share data with foreign entities. Again, this is all done without any of the privacy safeguards most citizens think they have as a constitutional right, because this bill, and this government, mostly ignores that those rights exist.

Non-Hypothetical Example

Last year, around this time, the same government that is introducing this bill arbitrarily enacted bank account seizures, not only against protestors, but also targeting crowdfunded contributions to their fundraisers.

This was done under the aegis of the Emergencies Act, however the seizures started before the EA was even ratified in Parliament, and the list of fundraising contributors was largely sourced from a third-party spreadsheet that was hacked from a foreign crowdfunding platform.

Nevermind that the entire thing went away within a week – rationalized as “mission accomplished” (the reality was the measure sparked a run on banks and nearly blew up the Canadian financial system),

Not much mention of this in the MSM, oddly…

The 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act  made it clear that our government is perfectly willing to act unilaterally, without due process, in contravention of basic human rights to unbank people at whim.

Bill C-26 will give them a veneer of Soviet-era legislation to unperson you in the online realm.

What Can You Do?

While I said I’m not speaking with my ISCC hat on today, the Internet Society Canada Chapter is one of the civil society bodies that does its level best to bring informed, rational commentary and input to the policy making process. Membership includes a couple ex-CRTC commissioners and even a recent appointee to the Order of Canada.

Consider signing up as a member today and help us bring a clue to the process, or alternatively, get behind the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

You can also make your views known to your MP. They don’t care if they get your vote or not, so don’t even bother telling them you won’t vote for them. You have speak their language, e.g

“I know you don’t care about my vote – but I feel strongly enough about this issue to make the maximum allowable personal contribution to your opponent, and fund raise for them wherever I can”.

In my case they at least started replying to my emails after that.

Soaring rice prices is the latest example of persistent food inflation. The grain is responsible for feeding billions of people, and prices were relatively stable last year while wheat soared until now.

Since November, Thailand's white rice prices jumped to two-year highs, up 23% to $523 per ton. 

"Strong demand lies at the heart of the rally, with some importers buying more of the grain to replace wheat after the war in Ukraine disrupted supplies. Some consumers have also been stocking up ahead of festivals, while a strengthening Thai currency has helped push up dollar-denominated prices," Bloomberg explained. 

Thailand, the world's second-largest rice exporter, has seen increasing demand from Indonesia and Iraq, said Chookiat Ophaswongse, honorary president of the Thai Rice Exporters Association. 

"Iraq has been diligently buying our rice every month," said Ophaswongse, adding the Middle Eastern country was the largest buyer last year. 

However, as Thai rice gets more expensive, buyers in China and Malaysia are swapping for inexpensive alternatives. 

Expensive rice will pressure many of the world's households that rely on the grain. The problem with rice is that it's a staple, and rising prices could fuel discontent or, worse, food riots. 

What's more alarming is that the Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index, which tracks international prices of the top traded food commodities worldwide, remains at levels associated with triggering the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government protests across the Middle East in the early 2010s. 

The good news is that upside momentum in food commodity prices has dramatically slowed, if not reversed, in some cases, though the rise in rice prices is a concern because billions of people rely on the grain for survival.

... and China is shifting into a net food importer that might put upward pressure on food prices this year. 

Over the next ten years, climate change and its consequences will pose the greatest risk to the world.

That’s according to more than 1,000 leaders from academia, business and politics, who were asked to evaluate 32 global risks over a two-year and a 10-year horizon for the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Perception Survey.

However, as Statista;s Felix Richter points out, while the experts consider the cost-of-living crisis (i.e. inflation) the most pressing issue over the next two years, they don’t expect rising prices to pose a major threat 10 years from now, when the four most severe risks faced by the world are all predicted to be related to climate change.

The following chart nicely illustrates the difference between what experts consider short-term risks and which challenges will shape the world for years or even decades to come.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The 18th edition of the WEF’s Global Risks Report focuses on the risk of a potential “polycrisis”, which is a cluster of interdependent global risks with compounding effects.

Extreme climate events or geopolitical crises such as the war in Ukraine can for example lead to food, water or energy supply crises, which can in turn have massive ripple effects and eventually lead to political upheaval, social unrest and even mass migration.

"The world's collective focus is being channeled into the “survival” of today’s crises: cost of living, social and political polarization, food and energy supplies, tepid growth, and geopolitical confrontation, among others," Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the World Economic Forum finds, warning that “much-needed attention and resources are being diverted from newly emerging or rapidly accelerating risks to natural ecosystems, human health, security, digital rights and economic stability that could become crises and catastrophes in the next decade.”

Translation: Don't be distracted by your selfish focus on your own family's heating-and-eating needs; send money, pay your fair share, because we have a world to save from imminent destruction.

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Has World War III already begun?

That’s a serious question and deserves serious consideration by investors. A wave of analysts and commentators have warned that the war in Ukraine could spin out of control and escalate into World War III.

One variation on that theme is that the war could escalate into a nuclear war with tactical nuclear weapons deployed. Most point a finger at Russia as the party that will launch a nuclear strike out of desperation at a failing campaign in Ukraine.

Actually, the opposite is true.

The Russian campaign is not failing (it has been on hold for several months awaiting the right conditions to launch a winter offensive). You just don’t hear about it in the mainstream media, which is essentially a propaganda outlet for Ukraine.

And the party most likely to use nuclear weapons first is the U.S. in order to save face and destabilize Russia once Ukraine is on the brink of collapse.

Reality Check

Many people have a hard time believing that. They’ve been told that Putin is the devil incarnate and would probably like to destroy the world. We like to think that in modern times we’re sophisticated and above falling prey to propaganda. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

The fact is the U.S. did wage the only nuclear war in history from Aug. 6–9, 1945 and had a successful outcome. I’m not getting into the morality of it here, one way or the other. I’m just being objective.

Either way, another nuclear war could not be contained and it would be tantamount to World War III. It amounts to the same thing.

But my point is different. It’s not that we may be headed to World War III; it’s that we’re already there. The issue of when wars in general and world wars in particular begin and end is not as clear cut as many believe. There are many examples.

When Does a War Officially Begin? It’s Complicated

When did World War I begin? There were many precursors including the Agadir Crisis in Morocco (1911), the Italian-Turkish War (1911–12) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913).

Clearly, the First World War was in a countdown phase as early as 1911.

More specifically, did World War I begin with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914? The Austria-Hungary declaration of war on Serbia on July 28, 1914? Germany’s declaration of war on Russia on Aug. 1, 1914?

The fact is the beginning of World War I (then called the Great War) was a series of blunders. There were many other mistakes in addition to those just mentioned. Of course, the U.S. did not enter World War I until April 6, 1917.

The end of World War I was also a muddle. Most students recite Nov. 11, 1918, as the day the war ended. That’s not quite right. That is the day an armistice was signed and the shooting stopped. But an armistice is a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. The actual Versailles Treaty that ended the war was signed on June 28, 1919.

There’s nothing new about blurry lines on when wars begin and end. The Korean War stopped with an armistice signed on July 27, 1953, but it’s still technically not over; there has never been a peace treaty.

The most interesting case (and the one most pertinent to the war in Ukraine) is the beginning of World War II.

When Did World War II Really Begin?

Most Americans reflexively date this from Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. That’s the right date for U.S. entry, but of course, the war began on Sept. 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The U.K. and France declared war on Germany on Sept. 3.

Yet did World War II actually begin much earlier?

Japan invaded Manchuria on Sept. 18, 1931. They established a puppet regime there called Manchukuo led by Emperor Puyi (the infamous “Last Emperor” of China, and a descendant of the Qing Dynasty). This was followed by a full-scale invasion of China by Japan in 1937 and the horrific Rape of Nanjing in December 1937.

Of course, the European and Pacific theaters of World War II were different and geographically separated, but it is at least arguable that World War II began in China in 1931 or 1937 at the latest. I lean to that view personally.

And let’s not ignore the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) in which Germany bombed Guernica, Russia financed the Popular Front and mercenaries formed the International Brigades, including the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The spectacle of the U.S. and Russia fighting Germany on Spanish soil was a neat preview of World War II.

The influx of foreign fighters to the war in Ukraine offers a modern parallel.

The Case for the Start of World War III

So the case for fuzzy beginnings and endings of wars is clear. What’s the case for saying World War III has already begun based on the situation in Ukraine?

The first point is the number of nations directly involved. It’s nonsense to say that NATO members are cheering on Ukraine from the sidelines. Those countries are directly involved in supplying weapons, intelligence, money, ammunition and boots on the ground.

Polish troops are operating as mercenaries in Ukrainian uniforms. U.S. and U.K. special operators are inside Ukraine supplying intelligence, weapons training and help with logistics. (These special operators are often hired as contractors by the CIA and MI6 to disguise their connections to U.S. and U.K. intelligence.)

Poland and Lithuania are supplying sophisticated Leopard tanks to Ukraine. The U.K. is preparing to supply their most sophisticated tank — the Challenger II, as well. The U.S. is providing Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker armored vehicles.

The U.S. is also supplying HIMARS (long-distance guided missile artillery) and Patriot anti-missile batteries. The West is providing Ukraine with ammunition, cash, drones, satellite imaging, signals intelligence (SIGINT) and human intelligence (HUMINT).

Russia has been no slouch when it comes to enlisting allies and mercenaries. The Wagner Group, a privately owned mercenary army, has been on the front lines near Soledar and Bakhmut.

Russia is getting drones from Turkey and Iran. Fighters are arriving from Syria. China is providing financial support and offering technology that helps Russia to build its weapons and continue its missile attacks.

Up the Escalation Ladder

Physical warfighting has occurred in Poland (a misguided Ukrainian missile), Belarus (also a misguided Ukrainian missile), Russia (drone attacks on airbases inside Russia with nuclear weapons nearby) and Germany (the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines). There have also been naval battles on the Black Sea.

Of course, a long list of countries is providing support for Ukraine by participating in U.S.- and EU-led financial and economic sanctions.

The countries now directly involved in the war in Ukraine with weapons, money, intelligence, mercenaries or financial sanctions include the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Poland, Lithuania, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Japan, Romania, Belarus and Moldova. These countries span four continents. The economic ramifications are global. If this is not a world war, it’s not clear what is.

The Third World War is here. It may be at the 1937 stage rather than the 1941 stage. Let’s hope that status prevails. It likely will not.

Importantly for investors, this war is not close to a conclusion. It is far more likely to expand in terms of affected nations, financial sanctions and kinetic warfare.

The danger of escalation to a nuclear exchange is real and growing. Will anyone stop it before it’s too late?

Authored by Alastair Crooke,

The U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood...

It is the miscalculation of this era – one that may begin the collapse of dollar primacy, and therefore, global compliance with U.S. political demands, too. But its most grievous content is that it corners the U.S. into promoting dangerous Ukrainian escalation against Russia directly (i.e. Crimea).

Washington dares not – indeed cannot – yield on dollar primacy, the ultimate signifier for ‘American decline’. And so the U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.

The Biden Team cannot withdraw its fantastical narrative of Russia’s imminent humiliation; they have bet the House on it.

Yet it has become an existential issue for the U.S. precisely because of this egregious initial miscalculation that has been subsequently levered-up into a preposterous narrative of a floundering, at any moment ‘collapsing’ Russia.

What then is this ‘Great Surprise’ – the almost completely unforeseen event of recent geo-politics that has so shaken U.S. expectations, and which takes the world to the precipice?

It is, in a word, Resilience.

The Resilience displayed by the Russian economy after the West had committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia. The West bore down on Russia in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war – and with real military war as the follow-through.

Yet, Russia has survived, and survived relatively handsomely. It is doing ‘okay’ – maybe better, even, than many Russia insiders were expecting. The ‘Anglo’ Intelligence services however, had assured EU leaders not to worry; it’s ‘slam dunk’; Putin cannot possibly survive. Rapid financial and political collapse, they promised, was certain under the tsunami of western sanctions.

Their analysis represents an Intelligence failure on a par with the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But instead of critical re-examination, as events failed to provide confirmation, they doubled down. But two such failures are just ‘too much’ to bear.

So why does this ‘failed expectation’ constitute such a world-shaking moment for our era? It is because the West fears that its miscalculation might well lead to the collapse of its dollar hegemony. But the fear extends well beyond that too – (bad as ‘that’ would be from the U.S. perspective).

Robert Kagan has outlined how external forward motion and the U.S.’ ‘global mission’ is the lifeblood of American internal polity – more than any equivocating nationalism, Professor Paul suggests. From the founding of the country, the U.S. has been an expansionary republican empire; without this forward motion, civic bonds of domestic unity come into question. If Americans are not united for expansionary republican greatness, by what purpose Professor Paul asks, are all these fissiparous races, creeds, and cultures in America, bound together? (Woke culture has proved no solution, being divisive rather than any pole around which unity can be built).

The point here is that Russian Resilience, at a single stroke, shattered the plate-glass floor to western convictions about its ability to ‘manage the world’. After the several western debacles centred on regime-change by military shock-and-awe, even hardened neo-cons – by 2006 – had conceded that a weaponised financial system was the only means to ‘secure the Empire’.

But this conviction has now been upended – and states around the world have taken notice.

This shock of miscalculation is all the greater because the West disdainfully had taken Russia to be a backward economy, with a GDP on a par to that of Spain. In an interview with Le Figaro last week, Professor Emmanuel Todd noted that Russia and Belarus, taken together, constitute only 3.3% of global GDP. The French historian questioned therefore, ‘how then is it possible that these states could have shown such resilience – in the face of the full force of the financial onslaught’?

Well, firstly, as Professor Todd underlined, ‘GDP’ as a measure of economic resilience is wholly “fictional”. Contrary to its name, GDP measures only aggregate expenditures. And that much of what is recorded as ‘production’, such the over-inflated billing for medical treatment in the U.S.’ and (said, tongue in cheek) services such as the hundreds of economists’ and bank analysts’ highly-paid analysis, are not production, per se, but “water vapour”.

Russia’s resilience, Todd attests, is due to the fact that it has a real economy of production. “War is the ultimate test of a political economy”, he notes. “It is the Great Revealer”.

And what is it that has been revealed? It has revealed another quite unexpected and shocking outcome – one that sends western commentators reeling – that Russia has not run out of missiles. ‘An economy the size of Spain, the western media ask, how can such a tiny economy sustain a prolonged war of attrition by NATO without running out of munitions?’.

But, as Todd outlines, Russia has been able to sustain its weapons-supply because it has a real economy of production that has the capacity to maintain a war – and the West no longer does. The West fixated on its misleading metric of GDP – and with its normalcy bias – is shocked that Russia has the capacity to outpace NATO’s arms inventories. Russia was billed by western analysts as a ‘paper tiger’ – a label that now seems more likely to apply to NATO.

The import of the ‘Great Surprise’ – of Russian Resilience – resulting from its real economy of production vis á vis the evident weakness of the hyper-financialised western model scrabbling for sources of munitions has not been lost on the rest of the world.

There is old history here. In the lead-up to WW1, the British Establishment was concerned that they might lose the coming war with Germany: British banks tended to lend short-term, in a ‘pump and dump’ approach, whereas German banks invested directly in long-term real-economy industrial projects – and therefore were thought to be able to better sustain war materiel supply.

Even then, the Anglo élite had a quiet appreciation of the inherent frailty to a heavily financialised system for which they compensated by simply expropriating the resources of a huge Empire to finance preparation for the coming Great War.

The backdrop then, is that the U.S. inherited the Anglo financialising approach which it subsequently turbo-charged when the U.S. was forced off the gold standard by ballooning budget deficits. The U.S. needed to attract the world’s ‘savings’ into the U.S., by which to finance its Vietnam war deficits.

The rest of Europe from the 19th century outset had been wary of Adam Smith’s ‘Anglo-model’. Friedreich List complained that the Anglos assumed that the ultimate measure of a society is always its level of consumption (expenditure – and hence the GDP metric). In the long run, List argued, a society’s well-being and its overall wealth were determined not by what the society can buy, but by what it can make (i.e. value coming from the real, self-sufficient economy).

The German school argued that emphasizing consumption would eventually be self-defeating. It would bias the system away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much, or to employ so many. Hindsight suggests List was correct in his analysis.

‘War – is the ultimate test – and Great Revealer’ (per Todd). The roots to an alternative economic view had lingered on in both Germany and Russia (with Sergei Witte), despite the recent preponderance of the hyper-financialised Anglo-model.

And now with the ‘Great Reveal’, the focus on the real economy is seen as a key insight underpinning the New Global Order, differentiating it sharply in terms both of economic systems and philosophy from the western sphere.

The new order is separating from the old, not just in terms of economic system and philosophy, but through a reconfiguring of the neurons through which trade and culture travels. Old trade routes are being bypassed and left to wither – to be replaced by waterways, pipelines and corridors that avoid all the choke points by which the West can physically control commerce.

The north-east Arctic passage, for example, has opened an inter-Asian trade. The untapped oil and gas fields of the Arctic eventually will fill the gaps in supplies resulting from an ideology that seeks to end investment by western oil and gas majors in fossil fuels. The North-South corridor (now open) links St Petersburg to Bombay. Another component links waterways from northern Russia to the Black Sea, the Caspian and from thence to the south. Yet another component is expected to pipe Caspian gas from the Caspian pipeline network south to a Persian Gulf gas ‘hub’.

Look at it in this way, it is as if the neural connectors in the real economic matrix are, as it were, being lifted up from the west, and are being set down in a new location to the East. If Suez was the waterway of the European era, and the Panama Canal represented that of the American Century, then the north-east Arctic waterway, the North-South corridors and the African railway nexus will be that of the Eurasian era.

In essence, the New Order is preparing to sustain a long economic conflict with the West.

Here, we return to the ‘Egregious Miscalculation’. This evolving New Order existentially threatens dollar hegemony – the U.S. created its hegemony through demanding that oil (and other commodities) be priced in dollars, and by facilitating a frenetic financialisation of asset markets in the U.S. It is this demand for dollars which alone has allowed the U.S. to fund its government deficit (and its defence budget) for nothing.

In this respect, this highly financialised dollar paradigm possesses qualities reminiscent of a sophisticated Ponzi scheme: It pulls in ‘new investors’, attracted by zero-cost credit leverage and the promise of ‘assured’ returns (assets pumped ever upwards by Fed liquidity). But the lure of ‘assured returns’ is tacitly underwritten by the inflation of one asset ‘bubble’ after another, in a regular sequence of bubbles – inflated at zero cost – before being finally ‘dumped’. The process then, is ‘rinsed and repeated’ ad seriatim.

Here is the point: Like a true Ponzi, this system relies on constant, and ever more, ‘new’ money coming into the scheme, to offset ‘payments out’ (financing U.S. government expenditure). Which is to say, U.S. hegemony now depends on constant overseas dollar expansion.

And, as with any pure Ponzi, once ‘money in’ falters, or redemptions spike, the scheme collapses.

It was to prevent the world quitting the dollar scheme for a new global trading order that the signal was ordered to be promulgated, via the onslaught on Russia, to warn that to quit the scheme would bring U.S. Treasury sanctions upon you, and to crash you.

But then came TWO game-changing shocks, in close succession: Inflation and interest rates spiralled, devaluing the value of fiat currencies such as the dollar and undermining the promise of ‘assured returns’; and secondly, Russia DID NOT COLLAPSE under financial Armageddon.

The ‘dollar Ponzi’ falls; U.S. markets fall; the dollar falls in value (vis á vis commodities).

This scheme might be felled by Russian Resilience – and by much of the planet peeling away into a separate economic model, no longer dependent on the dollar for its trading needs. (i.e., new ‘money in’ to the dollar ‘Ponzi’ turns negative, just as ‘money out’ explodes, with the U.S. having to finance ever bigger deficits (now domestically)).

Washington clearly made a stratospherically bad error in thinking that sanctions – and the assumed collapse of Russia – would be a ‘slam dunk’ outcome; one so self-evident that it required no rigorous ‘thinking through’.

Team Biden thus has painted the U.S. into a tight Ukraine ‘corner’. But at this stage – realistically – what can the White House do? It cannot withdraw the narrative of Russia’s ‘coming humiliation’ and defeat. They cannot let the narrative go because it has become an existential component to save what it can of the ‘Ponzi’. To admit that Russia ‘has won’ would be akin to saying that the ‘Ponzi’ will have to ‘close the fund’ to further withdrawals (just as Nixon did in 1971, when he shut withdrawals from the Gold window).

Commentator Yves Smith has provocatively argued, ‘What if Russia decisively wins – yet the western press is directed to not notice?’ Presumably, in such a situation, the economic confrontation between the West and New Global Order states must escalate into a wider, longer war.

A lawsuit filed in federal court in Nevada alleges hotel operators on the Las Vegas Strip colluded to overcharge visitors for rooms through an algorithm designed to artificially inflate prices above competitive levels, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Caesars Entertainment, Treasure Island, Wynn Resorts Holdings, and MGM Resorts International were named in the suit for allegedly sharing a price algorithm to set hotel rates instead of making "independent pricing and supply decisions," according to the lawsuit, filed Wednesday.

The operator of the algorithm, Rainmaker Group Unlimited, a revenue management firm owned by Cendyn Group, was also named as a defendant for allowing "algorithmic-driven price-fixing … at the expense of consumers and in violation of antitrust laws." 

Two people, one from Washington state and another in Florida, filed the lawsuit. Both stayed in the defendants' hotel rooms and claimed the shared pricing data allowed hotel operators to "defy supply and demand dynamics." 

"Our antitrust attorneys have uncovered what appears to be an unlawful agreement in which Rainmaker collects and shares data between Vegas hotel competitors to unlawfully raise prices of hotel rooms," plaintiffs' attorney with Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman wrote in a statement. 

"What happens in Vegas will no longer stay in Vegas. We intend to expose the under-the-table deals perpetrated by these Vegas hotels, and we intend to hold them accountable," the attorney continued. 

The plaintiffs' lawsuit quoted confidential witnesses, a Rainmaker executive and two former employees, who estimated 90% of Vegas hotels use Rainmaker's algorithm. 

Rainmaker "collects confidential price information from each of the hotel operators, and then tells them, through use of various algorithms, how to price," the lawsuit alleged.

"The suit is the latest in a growing wave of antitrust cases to take aim at algorithmic models or data brokering services allegedly used to facilitate price coordination across an entire industry. The allegations echo dozens of recently filed suits hitting the country's top residential landlords with similar claims," Bloomberg said.