- Team Biden’s energy crisis coverup (and midterm elections)
- “Climate czar” Kerry banks on future energy technology
- Can Musk withstand the “network swarm”?
- Lame-duck Congress could pass DST legislation
- Amnesty for COVID… More readers on curtailed copy… and More!
Usually it takes the mainstream more time to start catching up with us than this.
Last night at 7:00 p.m. EST, Jim Rickards went live with his summit titled Emergency Election Briefing – Road to Ruin.
The topic: An effort by the Biden administration to cover up a looming energy crisis — far worse than the mainstream was letting on — just long enough to get past Election Day. (You can watch the replay right now at this link.)
This morning, 13 hours later, Bloomberg posted the following story…
“Heating oil delivered to New York is the priciest ever,” it says. “Retailers in Connecticut are rationing it to prevent panic buying. New England’s stockpiles of diesel and heating oil — the same product, taxed differently — are a third of normal levels. Natural gas inventories are also below average. A Massachusetts-based utility is imploring President Joe Biden to prepare emergency measures to prevent a gas shortage.
“Add some cold to the mix, and in the best-case scenario, Northeast consumers will shoulder the highest energy bills in decades this winter.”
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail…
OK, “Rising Serpent” is engaged in a bit of hyperbole there… but maybe not much.
That was yesterday during a stop in New York, by the way. During a campaign swing through California on Friday, the president said of coal- and oil-fired electric power plants, “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”
We’re tempted to say that sounds great in theory, but even the theory doesn’t bear out. Like it or not, wind and solar aren’t capable of providing steady, reliable “baseload” power to keep the grid running smoothly — not with available technology, anyway. That’s why only a few weeks ago, Californians were told not to charge their electric vehicles between the hours of 3:00–8:00 p.m.
And that won’t change until someone somewhere comes up with a dramatic improvement in battery-storage technology. As the president’s own “climate czar” John Kerry said last year, “I am told by scientists that 50% of the reductions we have to make to get to net zero [carbon emissions] are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have.”
Comforting, huh? But yes, by all means, let’s rush through the transition to renewables before they’re ready for prime time.
But what’s the president going to do? He can’t suddenly walk back the centerpiece promise of his presidential campaign.
“I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel,” he said in September 2019.
All he can do is cover up the consequences in time for the midterm elections tomorrow.
But that only goes so far. As we see this morning, the mainstream already is starting to catch on. Once we get past Election Day and winter sets in, the full scope of the truth will become apparent — and the U.S. economy will grind to a halt.
While the mainstream is only now figuring it out, Paradigm’s own Jim Rickards is one of the very few who understand all the catastrophic consequences. And he’s the only analyst who’s devised a way to invest around the devastation that’s coming.
Play it right, and you could 15X your money in the next 90 days. Click here to watch the replay and learn how.
The stock market is off to a “meh” start for the new week.
At last check, the Dow is looking perky — up two-thirds of a percent or 210 points to 32,613. The S&P 500 is up a third of a percent at 3,783. The Nasdaq is barely in the green at 10,487.
Among the notable names are Apple — down a little over 1% after announcing that China’s zero-COVID policy is crimping production of high-end iPhones so badly that shipments will be fewer than expected. Meanwhile, Facebook parent Meta is up 6.6% after rumors that the company will start cutting thousands of people from the payroll this week. (Nothing like a little cost-cutting to give your share price a temporary bump.)
Crude is up another 50 cents to start the week at $93.12 — that’s a four-week high. Precious metals are little moved on the heels of Friday’s big gains — gold at $1,679 and silver at $20.83.
Bonds are selling off, pushing rates higher; the 10-year Treasury is back to 4.19%.
So much for the “new and improved” Twitter.
There’s an ungodly amount of bandwidth expended by traditional media on every development pertaining to Elon Musk’s new plaything. We won’t waste your time regurgitating it.
What caught our eye, however, is this: While Musk immediately gave the heave-ho to most of the “woke” C-suite as soon as he took over the company… he retained Yoel Roth, the “head of safety & integrity.”
Roth has not been shy about wearing his politics on his sleeve over the years — for instance, decrying “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE” two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
In addition. Musk has gone out of his way to describe Twitter’s outreach to leaders of outfits like the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP…
Perhaps Musk took these steps to forestall brand-name advertisers from abandoning Twitter — in which case, it’s not working.
On Friday, Musk took to his own platform to decry “a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.”
The activists, meanwhile, celebrated…
What to make of it all?
In one way, as we mentioned in 2020, it’s nothing new. Brand advertisers have always been leery about hawking their wares in proximity to “controversial” content. A generation ago, several regular advertisers on the sitcom Ellen — including Chrysler and JCPenney — sat out the episode where Ellen DeGeneres’ character came out as a lesbian.
But something is definitely new now, and it too is something we started to notice in 2020.
It’s something that John Robb — spotlighted earlier this year in The 5 — calls the “network swarm.” It’s a bottom-up social media frenzy so intense that brand advertisers fear running afoul of it.
We all witnessed it firsthand after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Multinational corporations didn’t wait for orders from Washington or Brussels to shut down their Russian operations. Frequently they did so on their own — “self-sanctioning,” it was called — to appease the Twitter hordes for whom Putin was the new Hitler and 2022 was the new 1938.
And make no mistake — Robb believes Twitter is the epicenter of the network swarm, far more than Facebook or any other platform.
During a recent podcast interview with our acquaintance Scott Horton, Robb wished Musk the best in his stated aim to stand up to the swarm… but he doesn’t hold out much hope.
Now they tell us: “Permanent Daylight Saving Time Will Hurt Our Health, Experts Say.”
As we mentioned here last March, the Senate has passed legislation that would put an end to twice-yearly time change (good) while placing the country on year-round daylight saving time (very bad. We tried it during the last energy crisis in 1974 and everyone hated it).
The lame-duck House could still conceivably pass the bill before year-end.
Now CNN has put out an entire article dissing the notion of year-round DST. “Making the time change permanent would make the chronic effects of any sleep loss more severe, not only ‘because we have to go to work an hour earlier for an additional five months every year but also because body clocks are usually later in winter than in summer with reference to the sun clock,’ according to a statement from the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms.
“‘The combination of DST and winter would therefore make the differences between body clocks and the social clock even worse and would negatively affect our health even more,’ the authors concluded.”
Alas, it appears the Senate fell under the sway of all the special interests we described during the time change last year — oil companies, golf courses, home improvement, convenience stores, even candymakers. More’s the pity…
“Regarding Ms. Oster’s article, we should forgive her,” a reader asserts.
(If you’re not up to speed on the Establishment’s plea for a “pandemic amnesty,” we tackled it last Thursday.)
“However, forgiveness does not mean we should forget and move on. Justice demands recompense for those that are harmed. Without forgiveness, justice often morphs into revenge, which is not productive and is often harmful to the person seeking revenge. I’ll also point out that if someone asks forgiveness and repents of what they have done, justice can be tempered with mercy.”
The 5: The problem in a nutshell…
But we’ll continue to hope that accountability can be achieved peaceably.
On that score, we see a workers-rights lawyer from the Buffalo area named Ben Carlisle is attempting just that. “I just had my first hearing before a workers’ compensation judge on a claim for an employer-mandated vaccine injury,” Carlisle tweeted on Friday.
“The judge found sufficient evidence to proceed. Trial set for January. You can’t sue Pfizer, but you can bring a claim against your employer.”
To be continued…
The same reader pivots to another topic: “Regarding the writer complaining about your marketing strategy, I think you’ll find there are a lot more of us who agree with the writer than you might think. We just learn to recognize and delete your marketing emails.
“We don’t bother to complain because we know that works for you, but it is very annoying. I’ve actually deleted nonmarketing emails from you because I didn’t recognize they were something directed to me as a subscriber.
“I do have a suggestion that might help. Create short-copy versions of your marketing and send those to subscribers. Save the long copy for those not currently subscribed to one of your services. The technical aspect of that is fairly easy to accomplish. I have responded in the past to service upgrades that were short copy, so I know that works for me. The short copy to subscribers that I’ve seen tends to be personalized and gets my attention. It’s usually direct and to the point. I think that would work well for existing subscribers.”
The 5: To no small degree, we do that already. We definitely tailor a different message to a customer who’s already familiar with our work versus a “cold” prospect.
We’ve long since resigned ourselves to the fact we’re never going to please everyone. The best we can hope for is to gather sufficient data from our marketing efforts to keep current customers happy while continuing to bring in new ones. It’s a balancing act, and one that requires constant recalibration.
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
