Looking Backwards …
LB #1
As I look outside the window and watch the winter rains slowly steal the sunshine and fall colors away from the landscape it occurred to me that something else was reigning across the world. Chaos. ZeroHedge will be featured heavily today as chaos shaking the ship doesn’t seem to generate as much traditional news. This from ZeroHedge, “In a rare dangerous incident and close-call, European media reports have described that the crew of a Russian ship ‘fired’ upon a Germany army helicopter which was monitoring the vessel’s movements in the Baltic Sea.
“German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock announced increased surveillance in the Baltic Sea after a Russian ship fired at a Bundeswehr helicopter during a mission,” EuroNews writes.
The Bundeswehr helicopter was confirmed to have been on a reconnaissance mission at an unclear date and time, but the Russian ship – described in The Daily Mail as a warship – fired signaling ammunition in an apparent effort to warn the aircraft off.”
After the cutting of the internet cables by the Yi Peng 3 Chinese vessel a couple weeks ago that we wrote about, it seems that most of Europe is on a knife’s edge. The chaos doesn’t stop there though, let’s go to Romania.
From ZeroHedge, “Something unprecedented just happened in the NATO and EU member country of Romania – a top court on Friday annulled the first round of the country’s presidential election. Essentially there will now be a ‘do over’ election.
The Constitutional Court made the decision even as voting is still underway in the diaspora. “The electoral process for the election of the President of Romania will be resumed in its entirety, with the Government required to set a new date for the election of the President of Romania as well as a new calendar program for carrying out the necessary actions,” the court said in a statement.
The court decided “to annul the entire electoral process for the election of the President of Romania… to ensure the correctness and legality of the electoral process” – in a controversial ruling which has simply never happened. Calin Georgescu, the widely dubbed ‘far-right’ contender, came out on top in a first round of voting in a ‘shock’ outcome which left political opponents claiming Russian election interference.
Apparently the ‘smoking gun’ is related to mere social media posts on platforms like TikTok. “The Constitutional Court’s unprecedented decision — which is final — came after President Klaus Iohannis declassified intelligence on Wednesday that alleged Russia ran a sprawling campaign comprising thousands of social media accounts to promote Calin Georgescu across platforms like TikTok and Telegram,” The Associated Press details.”
If we don’t like the result, we will just say the election was stolen. Wow, I wonder where they got that idea. I’d just look at the last two US presidential elections before this one. What’s also very interesting about this and something that is quickly becoming true. The money spending, which goes into traditional channels was non-existent, but using social media the candidate was promoted and won the election. Legacy media has a real problem on their hands. They aren’t effective anymore. This shift toward social media has accelerated and no one is watching traditional media. I wouldn’t invest one single depreciating dollar into a traditional media company these days. They are the wooly mammoth and the newspaper…
LB #2
They might be overturning elections in Romania and shooting at helicopters in Europe, but South Korea just waded into the chaos and said oh yeah, hold my beer. The President on Tuesday declared martial law to eradicate pro-North Korea forces. Then this happened from ZeroHedge, “President Yoon Suk Yeol announced on local television that he would lift martial law hours after being rejected by South Korea’s National Assembly. This marks the largest flare-up in political turmoil in South Korea since full-scale martial law was declared in the spring of 1980.” It seems that the national assembly voted to flip flop that. That is certainly exciting, but wouldn’t the President have anticipated that? Of course, so what actually happened? As I always say, follow the money.
This from ZeroHedge, “South Korea sparked the early chaos in the markets with ‘martial law’ being initiated (then down-voted?). The initial headlines sent the Won reeling lower, KOSPI stocks dumped, Treasuries were bid and gold spiked. As the politics played out and they promised to run the printers…” There it is. This was a tweet that morning from the ZeroHedge account, “and there it is: just need a little martial law for BRRR. *S. Korea to provide unlimited liquidity to markets if needed.” The Brrr refers to the ongoing meme of Jerome Powell with a money printer and dollars spewing out of it and the caption is brr. It means that South Korea had themselves a financial scare, and they needed a reason to unleash unlimited liquidity into the markets aka break all the rules. The stronger dollar is causing chaos across the globe, and this is a good example. There were hundreds of thousands of protesters and yet the President wasn’t voted out of office because all of the legislators knew what had just happened. The global financial system just patched over another crack. This from Lee Ying Shan at CNBC, “The Bank of Korea said Wednesday that it would boost short-term liquidity and deploy measures to stabilize the FX market as needed, after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol lifted a surprise martial law declaration overnight.
The announcement came shortly after the BOK held an emergency board meeting, which started around 9 a.m. local time. In a statement issued after the meeting, the central bank said it will also make any special loans available to inject funds into the market, if needed.” If needed, you’re damned right they will.
LB #3
From one nation in Asia to the biggest nation in Asia. China has pushed back against the Biden administration. This from ZeroHedge, “The Biden administration’s new restrictions on China’s semiconductor industry have triggered a tit-for-tat response from Beijing, which announced an export ban on gallium, germanium, antimony, and other critical minerals with potential military applications to the US.
Bloomberg reports that the Chinese Commerce Ministry announced the new export controls on Tuesday morning, adding that tighter controls on graphite sales will also be seen.
“The US has generalized the concept of national security, and politicized and weaponized economic, trade and tech issues,” a ministry spokesperson said, adding, “It has abused export control measures and unreasonably restricted certain products’ export to China.” China’s dominance in the global mining and processing of rare earth materials is very alarming, as it produces 94% of the world’s gallium and 83% of germanium—critical metals used in the production of semiconductors, LEDs, and transistors. Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce has justified the export restrictions to protect national security amid the ongoing tech war… Data from the US Geological Survey shows that the US imports about half its supply of gallium and germanium metals from China.” The article also shows how many pounds of rare earth minerals are used in certain defense weapons: an F-35 fighter 920 lbs, and ship Arleigh Burke DDG-51 uses 5,200 lbs and a Virginia class submarine SSN-774 uses 9,200 lbs.
Now this is nothing that we haven’t discussed before but Bernadette Trump is coming and going to put more sanctions on China in theory. Last I checked we need planes, ships, and subs to be militarily dominant and it seems that we get about half of that ability from China. Thankfully, they aren’t as belligerent.
Looking Forwards…
LF#1
Bringing it back home in a truly disgusting story is Joe Biden. The lame duck Biden now serves one purpose and one purpose only. He is a shining beacon of why people shouldn’t serve their entire lives in the government. This from the ABC news team, “President Joe Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted on tax evasion and federal gun charges and is due for sentencing in December.
Despite the White House’s assurances last month that the president had no intentions of pardoning his son, the announcement came through on Sunday evening that he had pardoned him.” Joe is well within his rights to pardon his son, and frankly I suppose most fathers would do the same. The problem is that Hunter is a crack head, which is his problem. When the crackhead is being paid by Ukraine and China for access to daddy, it becomes an American problem. I don’t think history will think highly of Joe Biden. I don’t think anyone thinks highly of Hunter Biden.
LF#2
Let’s investigate a little more moral chaos. One of our most consistent themes has been when the greed of the elites goes on long enough and Marie Antionette tells poor people that are starving to eat cake, that is the end of whatever experiment the nation-state has going. This week the CEO of United Healthcare Brian Thompson was shot and killed by an assailant who fled on foot and hasn’t been apprehended. Deny, deny, defend is an adage to go by in the insurance world regarding claims. It is good business. Well, the killer had supposedly written on his shell casings deny, delay, depose. This would virtually eliminate all doubts that this wasn’t a brazen yet very targeted attack. When a CEO sits in a boardroom and makes a decision that may cause many people’s deaths by promoting policies to deny claims or deny a surgery and then defend that decision with an army of lawyers and wait for their customer to run out of legal defense money, there are crickets when it comes to outrage. The insurance company wins. They don’t pay out the claim, yet they have taken in premiums for years, which doesn’t seem right but might be legal. When a person who has been denied coverage which they paid for, and/or faced their legal teams and lost everything to blood sucking lawyer’s fees, and/or had someone die because of this policy, they might not react logically. This person might have been on the receiving end of those policies, and he killed the CEO. That might seem right, but it is certainly not legal. Oh C Thomas, the kid shot the executive at point blank range. Slow down there amigo, I don’t have a dog in the fight, but I would like to view the situation as clear as can be.
This from Daniella Genovese at Fox5 New York, “Democrats on a Senate subcommittee are accusing UnitedHealthcare Group of denying claims to a growing number of patients as it tried to leverage artificial intelligence to automate the process. In an October report, “How Medicare Advantage Insurers Have Denied Patients Access to Post-Acute Care,” Democrats on the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) released a report claiming UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization denial rate for post-acute care jumped from 10.9% in 2020 to 22.7% in 2022.
Denial rates for skilled nursing centers, in particular, “experienced particularly dramatic growth.” The number of denied claims in 2022 was nine times higher compared to 2019, according to the report… In December 2022, a UnitedHealthcare group explored how to use AI and “machine learning” to predict which denials of post-acute care cases were likely to be appealed and which of those appeals were likely to be overturned. Nearly a year later, in November 2023, the nation’s largest insurance company was hit with a class-action lawsuit accusing it and its subsidiary, NaviHealth, of relying on a computer algorithm to “systematically deny claims” of Medicare beneficiaries in nursing homes that had struggled to recover from debilitating illnesses.
The suit claimed the company illegally deployed “artificial intelligence (AI) in place of real medical professionals to wrongfully deny elderly patients care owed to them under Medicare Advantage Plans by overriding their treating physicians’ determinations as to medically necessary care based on an AI model.”
The suit also claimed the company knew this model “has a 90% error rate.”
I’ve been saying for a very long time now that AI should not be used in tasks requiring accuracy. Whether or not people need health care treatments should be the realm of a doctor not an inaccurate computer model. If this shooter changed the system, and shined a light on how insurance companies were enriching themselves and their shareholders by denying claims they shouldn’t, and people were dying does that change how we should look at the shooter?
I know one thing that has already changed. Bertha Coombs and Dan Mangan wrote for CNBC, “The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson led Centene, another big health insurer, to switch to a virtual investor day next week instead of a planned in-person event in New York. Thompson’s slaying also has spurred some major health companies, including UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, to remove photos of executives and board members from their websites.” Greed is one of the seven deadly sins and it would appear that it deadly is precisely the right word. I wonder if his last words were “let them eat cake?”
LF#3
Besides the moral and geopolitical, let’s go back to the little island just of the coast of Europe and discuss financial chaos for just a moment. This from Mike Shedlock over at Mishtalk, “The clean green energy fiasco has reached a new level of incompetence and waste. “It’s absurd that Britain pays Scottish wind farms to turn off when it’s windy, while simultaneously paying gas-power stations in the south to turn on,” said Clem Cowton, director of external affairs at supplier Octopus Energy Group.
I don’t believe we need an energy director to diagnose the complete absurdity of this arrangement.” You are right Mike. We just need to follow the money. The government money that is flowing to these money losing, politically connected, government subsidized trash cans of wasted capital are enormous and they need to be stopped at once. They will once the system has broken. When electricity prices spike and citizens get to see windmills standing unused yet their executives are well compensated for their failures…. I don’t think UnitedHealthCare will be the last uprising of the common folk against the elites that we will see. History doesn’t just rhyme, it also repeats.
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
The Dow Jones finished trading …at 44,642.
The 10-year Treasury bond is at …at 4.149%
The price of Brent Crude is … at $ 71.12 per barrel.
The price of gold is … at $2,654/oz.
The price of silver is … at $31.48/oz.
I leave you with this from the information superhighway, what’s the opposite of irony, wrinkly.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.