Today’s News 10th January 2021

  • The Origins Of America's Secret Police
    The Origins Of America’s Secret Police

    Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    “Know Thyself,
    Nothing to Excess,
    Surety Brings Ruin”

    – inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

    Many are aware of the Apollo at Delphi inscription and associate it as words of wisdom, after all, the Temple at Delphi was at the center of global intelligence. Kings, emperors, statesmen, generals from all quarters of the ancient world would travel to the Temple with a very generous payment in gold in hopes that the wisdom of the great god Apollo would be bestowed on them and give strength and power to their particular cause.

    One of the most famous prophecies made by the Cult of Delphi, according to the ancient historian Herodotus, was to King Croesus of Lydia. King Croesus was a very rich king and the last bastion of the Ionian cities against the increasing Persian power in Anatolia. King Croesus wished to know whether he should continue his military campaign deeper into Persian Empire territory and whether he should seek a military alliance in such a feat.

    According to Herodotus, the amount of gold King Croesus delivered was the greatest ever bestowed upon the Temple of Apollo. In return the priestess of Delphi, otherwise known as the Oracle, (some poor young girl selected once a year with the “right attributes”) would spout nonsensical babble, intoxicated by the gas vapours of the chasm she was conveniently placed over. The priests would then “translate” the Oracle’s prophecy.

    King Croesus was told as his prophecy-riddle, “If Croesus goes to war he will destroy a great empire.” Croesus was also told to ally himself with the most powerful Greek state, and he chose Sparta. Croesus was overjoyed and thought his victory solid and immediately began working towards building his military campaign against Persia. Long story short, Croesus lost everything and Lydia was taken over by the Persians. The Spartans never showed up.

    It turns out the prophecy-riddle was not wrong, but that Croesus mistook which great empire would fall.

    There is likely a great deal of truth in this story. And the words inscribed at the Temple of Apollo “Know Thyself, Nothing to Excess, Surety Brings Ruin” becomes more a foreboding to anyone who dares enter such a Temple in search of wisdom and power; those who are “worthy” of the god Apollo will have the wisdom to solve the riddle of their prophecy and will prevail, those unworthy of Apollo’s “good graces” will fail and be ruined.

    It’s a nice story, but it is in fact, a brilliant cover for a global intelligence racket.

    The Cult of Delphi was indeed the nerve center of military and political intelligence that had no “allegiance” to any state or empire, but rather was able to use intel that they collected with their network of spies, along with intel they were given by those foolish enough to layout their plans (and their gold) to them. The priests of Delphi would then decide thereupon what information needed to be shared with what target to fit their purpose, a “prophecy” that they shaped, like moving pawns on a chessboard.

    The question for those who dared visit the Cult of Delphi was thus not so much about having enough wisdom to solve the veiled prophecy, but rather, ‘What kind of pawn are you to the priests of Apollo?’

    The Morals and Dogma of the Scottish Rite

    Those who seek wisdom and power have tended to also have an interest in the realm of “secret knowledge.” After all, who wouldn’t want a fast track toward their desires? Who wouldn’t want to believe that their destiny is to be rich, privileged and powerful? Who wouldn’t want to believe that they were chosen out of a few to hold special qualities (one could say supernatural) that make them superior to the majority?

    The Scottish Rite was formally organized in the U.S. in 1801, as a group of Tory partisans on the losing side of the American Revolution. One of the principal men involved from the very beginning was a British general by the name of Augustine Prevost. Prevost had conquered Charleston, South Carolina, and set up a secret police apparatus there which became the Scottish Rite headquarters, after the British Army left. (1)

    The Scottish Rite would come to rule over American Freemasonry during the nineteenth century and Albert Pike is recognised as the source of this success.

    In 1859, Pike was elected “Sovereign Grand Commander” of the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction. In 1871, “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” (the anti-bible of the Rite) was first published by its author Albert Pike, former General of the Confederate Armies during the Civil War.

    Why am I bringing this all up when the focus of this paper is on the origins of America’s secret police?

    Because the man credited for building the FBI into the massive domestic intelligence apparatus that it is today was J. Edgar Hoover, who happened to be a 33rd degree mason of the Scottish Rite, which he was “coroneted” in 1955 after 35 years of membership.

    Why is this relevant for the purpose of this paper? If one is to understand what constitutes the “Morals and Dogma” of such a membership, to which Hoover entered the inner most circle, it will become clear that not only does the Rite act as an opposing church to Christianity, but that pledging one’s allegiance to this secret society is understood as coming before all else in this material world, including government and country.

    For this reason I think it apt to share a few quotes…

    Writing about top-down organization, Pike wrote the following in his book Morals and Dogma:

    The Blue [or lower] Degrees are but the outer court … of the Temple. Part of the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is intentionally misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall understand them, but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands themTheir true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry. . . .” [emphasis added]

    These are the very same techniques used by the Cult of Delphi with the understanding that the “true explication” of the “symbols” will only be understood by those supposedly worthy of them, i.e. “the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry.”

    How does one know if one is a Prince of Masonry? Those who are foolish enough to have complete faith in the magic of the occult will give an honest attempt to understand such symbols, however, the truth of the matter is those who are chosen for their “understanding” and thus moved closer to the inner “sanctum”, are merely chosen for their usefulness as an instrument for “a higher will.” While this person might be a pawn who plays the determining role in a checkmate, they remain, nevertheless, just a pawn.

    Pike would also write in his Morals and Dogma:

    “Men are but the automata of Providence, and [Providenae] uses the demagogue, the fanatic, and the knave . .. as its tools and instruments to effect that of which they do not dream, and which they imagine themselves commissioned to prevent …”

    Here it becomes clear that the majority of mankind are considered by the Rite as instruments of Providence, and that to do the will of such Providence justifies that the Rite treat mankind as such. I will address shortly what sort of providence they are speaking of.

    Pike goes on to explain the Rite’s main guide to the universe, as:

    Magic is the science of the ancient magi.. Magic unites in one and the same science, whatsoever Philosophy can possess that is most certain, and Religion of the Infallible and the Eternal. It perfectly … reconciles these two terms… faith and reason … those who accept [magic] as a rule may give their will a sovereign power that will make them the masters of all inferior beings and of all errant spirits; that is to say, will make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World….”

    Again, we see the concept that only a select few will be chosen to be able to decipher and use magic, and that thereby justifies their dominion “that will make them masters of all inferior beings…[and] make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World.”

    Pike wrote the above quote to instruct “Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret”- gentlemen of the 32nd Degree.

    At this point, it is clear that to truly hold this view of oneself, humankind and the “laws of the universe” means that one is in direct conflict with the idea of democracy towards a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

    Lastly, I will share a quote from 1889 while Pike was in France, expressing his views of God and what is to be considered “the Good”:

    “The Masonic religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian Doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay (the God of the Christians) whose deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of man, barbarism and repulsion to science, would Adonay and his priests calumniate him?

    `Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also God. For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two Gods…the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.”

    This quote, as per historian Anton Chaitkin, is available in French and English in the Albert Pike vertical file at the library of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction at 1733 16th St. NW, Washington D.C.

    In later years, the body of Albert Pike would be interred inside the Washington DC Temple’s walls. A few feet away, they built a complete replication of the office and desk of their second most honored member, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

    It should also be known that much of the FBI is implicated in the Scottish Rite. For instance, there are certain Washington lodges which have a disproportionately high number of FBI agents in them such as the Alexandria Lodge.

    [For more information on this refer to historian Anton Chaitkin’s “Treason in America”.]

    The Seat of Government

    On Dec. 17, 1906, Teddy Roosevelt promoted his Navy Secretary, Charles J. Bonaparte, to become Attorney General. Bonaparte lost no time and told Congress that the Department of Justice must be given “a force of permanent police… under its control.”

    On May 27, 1908, Congress reacted by prohibiting all Executive departments from using Secret Service agents as policemen, including the Justice Department. During this period only the Treasury Department had the authority to use Secret Service men.

    To get around this block from Congress, on July 26, 1908, Attorney General Bonaparte, on Teddy Roosevelt’s instructions, ordered the creation of an investigative agency within the Department of Justice; which later became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    It was the start of what would become an unelected oligarchy, in direct opposition to the rule of self-government.

    In the midst of this, a 22-year-old J. Edgar Hoover was first recruited, the year was 1917. Just out of law school, he was put in charge of the Department of Justice’s War Emergency Division’s Enemy Alien Bureau, and was quickly immersed in the wildly lawless wartime counterinsurgency of the First Red Scare (1917-1920).

    Anton Chaitkin writes of this period in his paper “Hoover’s FBI and Anglo-American Dictatorship”:

    “Attorney General Palmer created a General Intelligence (or “Radical”) Division in the Bureau of Investigation, and appointed Hoover its head. Military Intelligence and Hoover’s agents working together as a single secret service now built up a network of civilian vigilante spies, informers and provocateurs.

    These auxiliaries were then set loose in the “Palmer Raids,” a war on unions, radicals, civil rights advocates, teachers, and immigrants from November 1919 to January 1920. This initial descent into a police state was, however, deeply opposed by the American population, and sparked popular protests and outrage.”

    Edgar Hoover was well fitted as Palmer’s deputy, in overseeing the political mass arrests, deportations, lynchings, terror propaganda, and witch-hunts. Hoover would put a Southern White Masonic unit inside the Bureau itself, called the Fidelity Chapter. And insist that his agents refer to the Bureau, and his office, as “The Seat of Government”. (2)

    In 1922, Walter Lippmann put forth in his incredibly influential book “Public Opinion,” that a dictatorship was of the utmost necessity to correct the crisis America was now facing, and that it could no longer afford to delude itself with the idea of a Constitutional system. Lippmann argued that the general public was incapable of exercising reasoned judgment. He claimed the people could only think in “stereotypes” such that they are led to believe in “villains and conspiracies.”

    Thus, to overcome such “ignorance,” Lippmann declared that the consensus must be generated not by the ill-educated people, but rather “engineered” by an elite class of “experts”, using “propaganda.” This elite class was in turn to guide the national government from within its every department, forming a permanent dictatorship, its governing members appointed, not elected, to serve for life. A “soft” dictatorship so to speak.

    When the Great Depression hit (1929-1933), Hoover blamed the general lawlessness on inefficient, corrupt local politicians and police. What was the solution? More power to “the Bureau.”

    Presidents Come and Go But One Thing Remains Constant

    While campaigning for the Presidency, Franklin Roosevelt installed his close friend Thomas J. Walsh as the 1932 Democratic convention chairman.

    Montana Senator Walsh “knew where the bodies were buried” so to speak.

    The reason for this was that in 1921, Thomas J. Walsh had led the battle at the Senate hearings on the Justice Department’s illegal practices. During the hearings he confronted Palmer and his deputy Hoover with evidence that they had perpetrated “an orgy of terror, violence and crime against citizens and aliens….”

    Walsh remained in the Senate as J. Edgar Hoover’s dedicated enemy.

    Franklin Roosevelt won the election on November 8, 1932; he was to take office in March. On February 15, 1933, a low-level Italian Freemason named Giuseppe Zingara shot at President-elect Roosevelt. He missed and ended up killing the Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.

    On February 26, Franklin Roosevelt announced his appointment of Senator Thomas J. Walsh as U.S. Attorney General. On March 1, the New York Times reported Walsh’s pledge that “he would re-organize the Department of Justice when he assumes office, probably with an almost completely new personnel.

    It is said that Walsh had declared that one of his first acts would be to oust J. Edgar Hoover.

    Walsh was found dead the next morning, while on a train to Washington, D.C. for Roosevelt’s March 4 inauguration and his own swearing-in.

    Starting in July 1933, a group of American Legion officials paid by J.P. Morgan’s men asked Marine Corps General Smedley Butler to lead a coup d’état against President Roosevelt. When General Butler had gathered enough evidence he went to J. Edgar Hoover for action. Hoover refused to take any action stating that there was no evidence a federal criminal statute had been violated. General Butler had no choice but to broadcast the coup plot to the American people in order to subvert the fascist takeover.

    Franklin Roosevelt was entirely aware that the growing power of the federal bureau was a terrible threat, and had rapidly become an abhorrent opposing force to the president’s authority. It is for that reason that Franklin Roosevelt made the decision to centralise U.S. intelligence under his own control, which was to be created and guided by Colonel Donovan under the newly created OSS.

    It was no secret that Colonel Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover were entirely opposed to each other. In fact, Donovan was up there with Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Robert Kennedy on Hoover’s most despised list.

    Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945. WWII was officially over on Sept 2nd, 1945. The OSS would be dissolved three weeks later on Sept 20th, 1945. The CIA was “officially” created two years later, purged of its FDR patriots. Donovan vied for leadership of the CIA and was denied. Instead Truman assigned him the task of heading a committee studying the country’s fire departments. (For more on this refer to my paper)

    Following this the FBI continued to conduct witch hunts through Congressional committees, President Truman, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and the young California Congressman Richard M. Nixon.

    On November 22nd, 1963 President Kennedy was brutally murdered in the streets of Dallas, Texas in broad daylight.

    On November 29th, 1963 the Warren Commission was set up to investigate the murder of President Kennedy.

    The old Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana (an ally of FDR) was a member of that Warren Commission. Boggs became increasingly disturbed by the lack of transparency and rigour exhibited by the Commission and became convinced that many of the documents used to incriminate Oswald were in fact forgeries.

    In 1965 Rep. Boggs told New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy. (4) It was Boggs who encouraged Garrison to begin the only law enforcement prosecution of the President’s murder to this day.

    Nixon was inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan 20th, 1969. Hale Boggs soon after called on Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell to have the courage to fire J. Edgar Hoover. (5)

    It wasn’t long thereafter that the private airplane carrying Hale Boggs disappeared without a trace.

    Jim Garrison was the District Attorney of New Orleans from 1962 to 1973 and was the only one to bring forth a trial concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. In Jim Garrison’s book “On the Trail of the Assassins”, J. Edgar Hoover comes up several times impeding or shutting down investigations into JFK’s murder, in particular concerning the evidence collected by the Dallas Police Department, such as the nitrate test Oswald was given and which exonerated him, proving that he never shot a rifle the day of Nov 22nd, 1963. However, for reasons only known to the government and its investigators this fact was kept secret for 10 months. (6) It was finally revealed in the Warren Commission report, which inexplicably didn’t change their opinion that Oswald had shot Kennedy.

    Another particularly damning incident was concerning the Zapruder film that was in the possession of the FBI and which they had sent a “copy” to the Warren Commission for their investigation. This film was one of the leading piece of evidence used to support the “magic bullet theory” and showcase the direction of the headshot coming from behind, thus verifying that Oswald’s location was adequate for such a shot.

    During Garrison’s trial on the Kennedy assassination (1967-1969) he subpoenaed the Zapruder film that for some peculiar reason had been locked up in some vault owned by Life magazine. This was the first time in more than five years that the Zapruder film was made public. It turns out the FBI’s copy that was sent to the Warren Commission had two critical frames reversed to create a false impression that the rifle shot was from  behind.

    When Garrison got a hold of the original film it was discovered that the head shot had actually come from the front. In fact, what the whole film showed was that the President had been shot from multiple angles meaning there was more than one gunman. (7)

    When the FBI was questioned about how these two critical frames could have been reversed, they answered self-satisfactorily that it must have been a technical glitch…

    Today there are those who continue an attempt to discredit the work of Jim Garrison for the crime of challenging the absurd narrative of the Warren Commission. However, anyone who bothers to read the Warren Commission report, would soon discover it to be a mess of contradictions, fallacies and outright fabrications. Not only an absurd sham but ultimately complicit in one of the most disgraceful cover-ups in American history.

    When will the American people realise that the biggest threat to American freedom is not from without but from within its very own walls, where it has been prominently residing for the last 112 years…

    [In a following article I will be addressing the central role of H.G. Wells and Walter Lippmann in British-American Intelligence which will subsequently be followed by an expose on the role of CIA Godfather Allen Dulles and the real reason Americans were manipulated into entering the Vietnam War.]

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 23:30

  • Food Price Inflation Accelerates For Seventh Consecutive Month
    Food Price Inflation Accelerates For Seventh Consecutive Month

    Is it time to worry about food inflation?

    The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index rose for a seventh consecutive month in December, led by dairy products and vegetable oils. 

    The FAO Food Price Index averaged 107.5 points last month versus 105.2 points in November. 

    The benchmark, which tracks global food prices of cereals, oilseeds, dairy products, meat, and sugar, averaged 97.9 points for 2020, a three-year high, and a 3.1% rise from 2019 levels. 

    The global food index was still down 25% from its historical high reached in 2011. 

    Vegetable oil prices saw the most significant jump, up 4.7% month-on-month in December after surging more than 14.0% in November. The index was up 19.1% in 2020 over the prior year. 

    FAO explained that soaring vegetable oil prices are due to “ongoing supply tightness in major palm oil-producing countries. International trade was affected by a sharp hike in export duties in Indonesia. International prices for soy oil rose in part due to prolonged strikes in Argentina that impacted both crushing activity and port logistics.” 

    Cereal prices rose 1.1% from November and for all of 2020 averaged 6.6% over the prior year. The reason for the increase is that export prices for wheat, maize, sorghum, and rice all rose last month due to growing condition concerns in North and South America and the Russian Federation.

    Earlier this week, we highlighted drought conditions materialized in Argentina resulted in corn (maize) prices trading in Chicago surging to 6-1/2 year highs. 

    Rome-based FAO said the dairy index increased 3.2% on the month, but for the year, it was flat compared to 2019. 

    The meat index increased 1.7% last month, while its average this year was 4.5% below that of 2019. 

    Everyone’s favorite permabear, SocGen’s Albert Edwards, who, unlike Goldman Sachs, is starting to worry about soaring food inflation, writes FAO Food Price Index been surging over the last few months.

    With the FAO food index continually rising, Edwards notes that “annual inflation in cereals reached 20%, the highest annual rise since mid-2011 when the Arab Spring was in full flow! (see chart below).”

    Edwards makes his feelings clear on who ultimately was to blame for the global tidal wave in food inflation back in 2011: “Despite Ben Bernanke’s denials that the Fed’s QE policies caused rampant food price inflation in 2011 (link), many economists such as myself believe that was absolutely the case.”

    Edwards summarizes his concerns best with the following statement: “even in the richest country in the world, food poverty has become a real problem during this pandemic.”

    This leaves us with the next imminent food inflation crisis as central banks are mindlessly injecting a record $1.4 billion in liquidity into capital markets every hour.

    Soaring food inflation may result in social-destabilization; the question is where will it start?  

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 23:00

  • Escobar: The Assange Saga – Practicing Real Journalism Is Criminally Insane
    Escobar: The Assange Saga – Practicing Real Journalism Is Criminally Insane

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    Synchronicity is definitely fond of mirror wonderwalls. The Julian Assange saga seemed to have entered a new chapter as he was, in thesis, on his way to – conditional – freedom this past Monday, only one day after the first anniversary of the start of the Raging Twenties: the assassination of Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani.

    The fate of the journalist the Empire seeks to terminate was just juxtaposed to the fate of the warrior/diplomat the empire already terminated.

    Two days later, Julian Assange was de facto re-incarcerated exactly as the Empire was hit by an “insurrection” which, whenever instigated in that distant “Third World”, is celebrated in Exceptionalistan as “people power”.

    The invaluable Craig Murray, from inside Westminster Magistrates Court No. 1 in London, meticulously presented the full contours of the insanity this Wednesday.

    Read it in conjunction with the positively terrifying judgment delivered on Monday in the United States government case against Julian Assange.

    The defining issue, for all those who practice real journalism all across the world, is that the judgment affirms, conclusively, that any journalist can be prosecuted under the US Espionage Act. Since a 1961 amendment, the Espionage Act carries universal jurisdiction.

    The great John Pilger memorably describes “judge” Vanessa Baraitser as “that Gothic woman”. She is in fact an obscure public servant, not a jurist. Her judgment walks and talks like it was written by a mediocre rookie hack. Or, better yet, entirely lifted from the US Department of Justice indictment.

    Julian Assange was – at the last minute – discharged on theoretically humanitarian grounds. So the case had, in effect, ended. Not really. Two days later, he was sent back to Belmarsh, a squalid maximum security prison rife with Covid-19. So the case is ongoing.

    WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnnson correctly noted, “It is unjust and unfair and illogical when you consider her ruling of two days ago about Julian’s health in large part because he is in Belmarsh prison (…) To send him back there doesn’t make any sense.”

    It does when one considers the real role of Baraitser – at a loss to juggle between the imperatives of the imperial agenda and the necessity of saving the face of British justice.

    Baraitser is a mere, lowly foot soldier punching way above her weight. The real power in the Assange case is Lady Emma Arbuthnot, forced out of a visible role because of very compromising, direct ties she and her husband Lord Arbuthnot maintain with British intelligence and military, first revealed by – who else – WikiLeaks.

    It was Arbuthnot who picked up obscure Baraitser – who dutifully follows her road map. In court, as Murray has detailed in a series of searing reports, Baraitser essentially covers her incompetence with glaring vindictiveness.

    Baraitser discharged Julian Assange, according to her own reasoning, because she was not convinced the appalling American gulag would prevent him from committing suicide.

    But the key issue is that before reaching this conclusion, she agreed and reinforced virtually every point of the US indictment.

    So at this point, on Monday, the “Gothic woman” was performing a contortion to save the US from the profound global embarrassment of prosecuting a de facto journalist and publisher for revealing imperial war crimes, not United States government secrets.

    Two days later, the full picture became crystal clear. There was nothing “humanitarian” about that judgment. Political dissent was equaled with mental illness. Julian Assange was branded as criminally insane. Once again, practicing journalism was criminalized.

    There are reasons to believe though, that a United States government appeal may fail. A British High Court would be reluctant to overturn a judgment where Baraitser actually established findings of fact: a direct correlation between the state of the American gulag, and the extreme danger to Assange’s health if he’s thrown inside this system.

    As it stands, it didn’t even matter that Assange’s defense offered a full package to obtain bail, from home arrest to the use of an ankle bracelet. Baraitser’s notion that the British security state would not be able to prevent his “escape” wearing an ankle bracelet in the middle of a total, police state-style lockdown does not even qualify as a joke.

    So Julian Assange is back to suffering a perverse, interminable rewrite of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.


    The US government’s legal strategy before the High Court convenes in April is basically to try to prove its American gulag is competent enough to prevent a suicide – even though the ultimate aim of this post-truth Inquisition seems to be the termination of Julian Assange inside the penal system. That goal doesn’t even require a supermax prison in Colorado. Belmarsh will do.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 22:30

  • Nearly Half Of Republicans Approve Of Capitol Riot
    Nearly Half Of Republicans Approve Of Capitol Riot

    The U.S. Capitol building was stormed by an angry pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6. Overall, five people died as a result of the riot – one woman shot as she tried to break into a room of lawmakers, three people who died of medical emergencies in the crowd and one Capitol Police Officer who later died due to head injuries sustained from an attack by a rioter.

    The attack occurred during the early moments of Congress counting all electoral votes in a largely ceremonious declaration of President-elect Biden as the incoming successor to Trump. Continued claims of election fraud from Trump over the last two months, parroted by a minority of Republicans in the House and Senate, led to a few lawmakers objecting to certain swing states’ electoral votes.

    At times during the attack, Capitol Police either nonchalantly allowed rioters to get closer to the Capitol or outright encouraged the mob to gather right at its doors and windows. Several videos show sections of police using little or no force in stopping the mob, with some standing to take selfies. Three of the four Capitol Police Board members have since resigned.

    According to a recent YouGov survey, while a majority of Americans oppose the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, 45 percent of Republicans say they’re in support of the riot and believe it’s justified. That’s roughly 33 million voters across the country…

    Infographic: Nearly Half of Republicans Approve of Capitol Riot | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As YouGov notes, the partisan difference in support could be down to differing perceptions of the nature of the protests.

    While 59% of voters who are aware of the events at the Capitol perceive them as being more violent than more peaceful (28%), the opposite is true of Republicans. By 58% to 22%, Republicans see the goings on as more peaceful than more violent.

    Democrats are swiftly moving to draft articles of impeachment against Trump before his term ends in less than two weeks. The party is also hoping to implement the 25th amendment, which would have two-thirds of Congress vote to remove Trump from office and install Vice President Pence for the remainder of the term. Both appear unlikely to gain enough Republican support, but huge cracks within the GOP are emerging following the Capitol attack as anger builds across both parties.

    Those on both sides of the dispute are at odds in their descriptions of those currently occupying the US Capitol.

    About half (52%) of voters agree with the “extremist” label, the most commonly selected of all the terms we put to respondents (but the split between Republicans and Democrats is vast). Nearly as many (49%) think “domestic terrorists” is an appropriate title, and 41% consider them “criminals.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 22:05

  • Chinese Communist Party Says Biden A "New Window Of Hope"
    Chinese Communist Party Says Biden A “New Window Of Hope”

    Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,

    Beijing is looking forward to a new U.S. administration after Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden represented a “new window of hope” for the Sino–U.S. relationship.

    Wang made the remarks last week in an interview with Chinese state-run media Xinhua and China Media Group. He also expressed hopes that the incoming U.S. administration will “return to a sensible approach,” according to a government transcript.

    He took a swipe at the Trump administration, saying that in recent years, the United States has tried to “suppress China and start a new cold war.” The Chinese regime has frequently used this rhetoric, especially during the 2018–2019 trade war, to criticize the administration’s China policies.

    He also accused U.S. policymakers of having “serious misconceptions” about China and called on the United States to “respect” China’s social system.

    Wang concluded his interview by saying that the two countries could resolve their differences “as long as the United States can draw lessons from the past and work with China in the same direction.”

    The Trump administration has confronted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on a range of issues, including unfair trade practices, espionage, malign influence in the United States, security threats posed by Chinese technology, and its human rights abuses against religious minorities and Hong Kong residents.

    Biden’s critics have expressed concerns that an administration under him would be soft on China, and Chinese state-run media have openly stated their preference for Biden.

    Most recently, China’s state-run media Global Times, in an article published on Jan. 5, used the sudden decision by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) not to delist three Chinese telecom companies as a sign that a more “flexible” administration under Biden would be more friendly toward Beijing. The NYSE has since reversed course again, saying on Jan. 6 that it would go ahead with delisting them.

    “Chinese experts translated the move as a voice of reason from some in Wall Street and US political circle [sic], who wish the incumbent US president won’t hamstring the incoming Biden administration in making decisions related to China,” the article stated.

    It also cited a Chinese professor who said U.S. politicians and businessmen would prefer “flexibility” under Biden over Trump’s “boundless style of bullying.”

    On Dec. 31, 2020, the NYSE announced that it would begin the process of delisting China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom, in compliance with Trump’s executive order, as the three companies were found by the Pentagon to have ties to the Chinese military.

    In a commentary article published in the Chinese-language Epoch Times last month, Zhong Yuan, a researcher focused on China’s political system, explained that the CCP preferred a Biden presidency because he would implement a policy of engagement with Beijing.

    The CCP’s favorable stance toward Biden was reflected in an opinion article published by Xinhua on Dec. 19, 2020, according to Zhong. The article stated that the Trump administration had left behind “a mess” and considered what his successor should do.

    Zhong said there was an urgency for the CCP to start working with Biden because there’s internal division within the Party about how to handle deteriorating Sino–U.S. ties. Zhong said the division was evident in another Xinhua opinion article published in December 2020, that denounced “certain people” for spreading “favorable comments” about the United States.

    The division threatened the position of Chinese leader Xi Jinping within the Party, Zhong said, and was likely the reason Chinese state-run media took up the position of supporting Biden.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 21:40

  • Connecticut Surpasses New York In COVID Vaccinations; Israel Remains Global Leader
    Connecticut Surpasses New York In COVID Vaccinations; Israel Remains Global Leader

    Connecticut Gov Ned Lamont is showing Gov Andrew Cuomo the error of his attention-seeking ways. While Lamont has been more than comfortable playing a supporting role in the alliance of northeastern governors led by Cuomo, Bloomberg pointed out in a recent piece that tiny Connecticut had surpassed the neighboring Empire State by taking a different, significantly looser approach to vaccinating its most vulnerable residents.

    As we reported yesterday, after enduring a torrent of criticism, Cuomo has finally reversed his strategy for vaccinating New Yorkers in a truly “equitable” manner, after discovering that his tight restrictions and hefty penalties was forcing hospitals to slow the pace of vaccinations to a crawl. 

    After finally relenting, Cuomo said the other day that New York would start scheduling vaccination appointments for seniors, teachers and first responders, as well as New Yorkers 75+.

    Bloomberg’s vaccination tracker shows New York has administered just 38% of the shots it has received from the US government as of Jan. 7. Connecticut has worked through 46% of its supply.

    Connecticut has given 3.26 doses per 100 people in the state, while NY has given 2.46 doses per 100 people.

    High-risk hospital workers (emergency room and intensive-care staff) were first in line in the Empire State, while other health-care personnel such as independent doctors were set to be vaccinated later, though Cuomo opened vaccination to them Monday.

    Cuomo on Friday said the guidelines were designed to protect the people treating coronavirus patients, but they ultimately caused frustration among some health-care workers. Jana Dehovitz, a pediatrician in Brooklyn, unsuccessfully tried to get vaccinated for weeks. She said she was frustrated hearing stories of politicians and specialists at large health systems who don’t see patients receiving their shots.

    “Are they going to come see our patients for us since they’ll be protected?” Dehovitz said. She got the first of a two-course shot Thursday.

    Of course, the US rollout has fallen short of projections set months ago by Operation Warp Speed. While the initial round of shots through early January has been doled out primarily via hospitals, the next phase will draw more on pharmacies and health clinics (ie places where vaccines are more traditionally administered) and will broaden the pool of people eligible to get the shots).

    Source: WSJ

    As the chart above shows, Israel is leading not only the US, but most of Europe and the Middle East as well. Still, we look forward to watching CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the medi

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 21:15

  • Twitter Allows 'Hang Mike Pence' To Trend After Banning Trump For "Inciting Violence"
    Twitter Allows ‘Hang Mike Pence’ To Trend After Banning Trump For “Inciting Violence”

    Authored by Matt Margolis via PJMedia.com,

    The hypocrisy of left-wing Big Tech companies is astounding.

    A day after Twitter banned President Trump “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the social media company let “Hang Mike Pence” trend on its platform.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Twitter eventually noticed the term trending and blocked it and variations from trending.

    “We blocked the phrase and other variations of it from trending,” a Twitter spokesperson told Fox News.

    “We want trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter.”

    Healthy discussions, like this tweet from Kathy Griffin, featuring her infamous photoshoot with a severed Trump head effigy.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    While the phrase “Hang Mike Pence” apparently began trending because of a viral video from the Capitol riot showing protesters chanting the phrase, many believed Twitter letting the phrase trend at all was hypocritical following the company justifying banning Trump over bogus allegations that he incited violence.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 20:50

  • Record Investor Euphoria Is Now Literally Off The Chart
    Record Investor Euphoria Is Now Literally Off The Chart

    The past few months can best be characterized as a period of unprecedented market optimism and sheer euphoria, and we have done just that with several recent articles…

    … and so on. But whereas in the recent past, the euphoria was always bounded by the upper limit reached during the insatiable buying spree of the dot com bubble, the first week of the year is when we went off the chart. Literally.

    As the latest Citi Panic/Euphoria model shows, this week’s Panic/Euphoria jumped to a record 1.83 versus an upwardly revised 1.69 in the prior week. 

    What does this mean? It’s simple: as Citi chief economist Tobias Levkovich writes when looking at market returns following previous euphoria extremes, there is now a “100% historical probability of down markets in the next 12 months at current levels.”

    “Nasdaq Volume as % NYSE (though volatile), retail money market funds, margin debt, AAII & II bullishness, put/call premiums and NYSE short interest ratio all contributed to the elevated reading” according to Citi.

    And just to make it extra confusing, in the same report Levkovich writes that “the normalized earnings yield gap analysis is 1.56 standard deviations below its 40-year average, yielding an 88% probability of higher markets in a year’s time, based on history.” So… 100% probability the market will be lower and 88% probability it will be higher: brilliant.

    It wasn’t just Citi stunned by the record market euphoria: in his latest Flows and Liquidity report, JPM quant Nick Panigirtzoglou took a break from bashing bitcoin (well not really, more on that in a subsequent post, suffice to say anyone who listened to him and sold last Friday has missed out on 35% gains in the past week), and instead muses at the resilience of the market, driven by – what else – investor euphoria, to wit:

    This week’s Democratic sweep added more fuel to risk markets and pushed US government bond yields to new highs. Neither the violent scenes from Capitol Hill nor the potential negatives from a Democratic sweep, i.e. tax rises and stricter regulations, managed to unsettle risk markets this week. Risk markets exhibited similar resilience in December. At the time, neither the lack of any new policy impulse by the Fed, pension fund rebalancing flows nor fears about the UK variant of the virus managed to unnerve risk markets.

    What, according to JPM, explains this remarkable resilience of equity and risk markets more generally since December? The answer is simple: central banks, or rather liquidity, “which appears to be reverberating once again in an intense manner via retail investors, in a repeat to Q2 of last year.” Panigirtzoglou points to retail investors’ activity, especially that of younger cohorts, and says that as the “anticipation of further US stimulus checks”, or stimmies as they are better known…

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    … “this force is likely to be sustained over the coming weeks”, JPM says and points to several indicators of euphoric retail trader activity including record call option trading both on exchange, which is forcing yet another gamma-squeeze (or as JPM puts it “To the extent this accumulation of long call options by retail investors continues, it could eventually result in a rise in vol via the delta-hedging of accumulated short call option positions by dealers taking the other side, similar to last August”)…

    … as well as off.

    To quantify the latter, JPM looks at the six main OTC market venues used by retail brokers: Virtu Americas LLC, Citadel Execution Services, G1 execution services, Two Sigma Securities LLC, Wolverine Securities LLC and UBS Securities LLC. The chart below shows the aggregate share to OTC transaction routed to different market venues (destination flow) by retail brokers, again as percentage of total US equity market volume. After slowing during the third quarter, US retail activity has “rebounded strongly in November.

    And this chart is only through November: one can only imagine that we will need a bigger chart for the December print here too.

    In summary, JPM concludes that the record euphoria is due to “the liquidity force” – i.e., central banks and the latest round of fiscal stimulus – which “appears to be reverberating once again in an intense manner via retail investors, in a repeat of Q2 of last year. Given  the anticipation of further fiscal support (e.g. additional US stimulus checks of $1400 to get to the original proposal of $2000), this force is likely to be sustained over the coming weeks.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 20:25

  • DOJ Warns Over Fake 'Pardons' Post That Tricks DC Protesters Into Doxxing Selves
    DOJ Warns Over Fake ‘Pardons’ Post That Tricks DC Protesters Into Doxxing Selves

    The Justice Department has issued a memo warning people not to fall for an online scam designed to trick Trump supporters who ‘stormed the capitol’ on Wedensday into doxxing themselves and admitting guilt over any crimes ‘you think you need to be pardoned for.’

    In a post circulating over social media, someone going by the name “Rosalind” who claims to be from the “WH Office of Pardon Attorney” says that President Trump is “strongly considering PARDONING all of the patriots who #stormthecapitol,” and that all one needs to do is provide their name, city, and “what crimes you think you need to be pardoned for and the briefest explanation of why you think you need the pardon (Eg: trespassing -entered the capitol; theft – stole art from the capitol; assault; etc. etc.)

    “Please be advised that the information circulating on social media claiming to be from Acting Pardon Attorney Rosalind Sargent-Burns is inauthentic and should not be taken seriously,” the Just department said in a Saturday statement, adding “The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney does not have a social media presence and is not involved in any efforts to pardon individuals or groups involved with the heinous acts that took place this week in and around the U.S. Capitol.

    We have to wonder who, or what entity, started this obvious trap – and who fell for it?

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 20:00

  • California Reports Record COVID Fatalities; UK 1st In Europe To Top 3MM Deaths: Live Updates
    California Reports Record COVID Fatalities; UK 1st In Europe To Top 3MM Deaths: Live Updates

    Summary:

    • California sees record deaths
    • Nevada suffers deadliest week yet
    • US sees record 310K new cases
    • NJ reported nearly 20K new cases
    • CA reports 50K cases
    • UK, Germany daily deaths top 1K
    • UK tops 3MM cases
    • UK deaths top 80K
    • Portugal reports 9K+ cases
    • Japan may extend emergency order
    • China moves to expedite vaccinations

    * * *

    Update (1930ET): It’s late in Europe, and well into the evening on the East Coast of the US, and we’ve already seen a fair number of startling COVID-19-related headlines on Saturday.

    While cable TV news “analysts” won’t shut up about the “coup” at the Capitol this week also having the potential to become a “super-spreader” event, California, where the latest surge in the virus has filled hospitals and morgues, has reported its worst day for deaths yet on Saturday.

    Arizona, meanwhile, surpassed 10K deaths total after reporting another 98 new deaths on Saturday alone.

    In the South, North Carolina and Virginia reported a record number of new infections.

    Nevada ended its deadliest week with more than 300 fatalities, almost 100 more than the previous week. While the state reported 56 deaths on Saturday, just below the record 60 on Wednesday, the total deaths for Clark County reached 3,450,

    As we noted earlier, as deaths soar across western and central Europe, the UK has become the first country in western Europe to report more than 3MM  coronavirus cases, as it grapples with the “mutated” strain.

    * * *

    Yesterday, we reported on speculation about a new hyper-infectious COVID-19 strain that could be circulating around the US. Well, mere hours after CNN shared the evidence gleaned from a Jan. 3 report from the White House coronavirus task force, members of the committee are insisting it was inaccurate. Another example of ‘Fake News’ reported by CNN, we suppose. But we digress…

    As of Saturday morning, the the coronavirus outbreak in the US and Europe showed no signs of abating over the last 24 hours, as the US reported another record jump in new cases, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

    NJ reported nearly 20K probable COVID-19 cases and CA reported over 50K cases, with both states greatly influencing the large uptick in today’s total cases. In NY, 18.8K new cases were reported, with hospitalizations at a near-record 8.6K. To try and hasten the pace of vaccinations as NY falls further behind, Cuomo has again expanded the list of who is eligible, with all people 75 and older now able to receive the vaccine.

    16 states in total reported their highest hospitalization numbers this week.

    Germany’s death toll has topped 1K for a 4th-straight day, prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to try to hasten the pace of vaccinations. Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron is promising to have 100K of the country’s most vulnerable people vaccinated by the end of the weekend. That’s up from 80K as of Friday afternoon. Across the US more than 7MM people have been vaccinated.

    In terms of infections, the US continues to outpace Europe, and the UK is outpacing all of its Continental peers.

    Even China is intensifying is vaccine rollout plan as new lockdowns rattle Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province (situated in the northeast near Beijing). Data from trials in Brazil and Indonesia shows vaccines from SinoPharm are 78% effective, according to the Brazil trial data.

    Here’s some more COVID-19 news from overnight and Saturday morning:

    Osaka and its surrounding prefectures asked Japan to expand a state of emergency to the western cities in an effort to contain the latest Covid-19 outbreak, while Tokyo’s new daily infections keep above 2,000 cases on Saturday (Source: Reuters).

    Israel Police will adjust the deployment of lockdown barricades throughout the country in an attempt to reduce traffic congestion, the police announced Saturday afternoon. According to the changes, the police will deploy blockades starting at 0900 and will remove them between 1530 and 18000. However, Police Traffic Division patrol vehicles will continue to patrol the country’s highways, regardless of the deployment of the barricades (Source: Jerusalem Post).

    Portugal on Saturday reported 9,478 new confirmed coronavirus cases in a day, less than the record 10,176 announced on Friday, taking the total to 476,187. The total number of deaths rose by 111 to 7,701, following a record daily increase of 118 on Friday. The government has said it may tighten restrictions on movement next week (Source: Bloomberg).

    Iran reported a dip in both the number of daily Covid-19 deaths and new cases with 82 fatalities and 5,924 new infections in the last 24 hours (Source: Bloomberg).

    Poland posted a 20% day-to-day leap in reported Covid cases to 10,548 on Saturday. Overall toll breached 31,000 mark with 438 new deaths reported, as country has vaccinated almost 189,000 people (Source: Bloomberg).

    * * *

    In the UK, meanwhile, the number of total cases has topped 3MM as hospitalizations and new daily cases remain at record levels. Deaths, meanwhile, topped 1K again, driving the total death toll north of 80K.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 19:36

  • The Liberal-Left Has Gone Fully Illiberal
    The Liberal-Left Has Gone Fully Illiberal

    Authored by Jenin Younes via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    Over ten months, I have watched with incredulity as the liberal-left has unquestioningly and unequivocally embraced policies, ostensibly to manage the coronavirus pandemic, that are not only illiberal but authoritarian. With each passing day, those on the left-liberal side of the political spectrum display greater acceptance of increasingly oppressive measures.  Maybe I should have been prepared. 

    With more and more frequency during the past years, I have found myself departing from my cohorts’ consensus during various discussions arising from current events, particularly insofar as they pertained to civil liberties issues. More disturbing than the substantive disagreement was the utter lack of regard for difference of opinion among many of my peers. 

    Nevertheless, I did not anticipate that the left would soon abandon all pretense of concern for liberal values, which are widely understood to consist of tolerance, open-mindedness, and protection of individual rights and dignity (As a preliminary matter, I am using the term “liberal-left” broadly, to describe: individuals who so identify, the Democratic Party and politicians, and center-left news outlets such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN. I am aware that there is diversity of opinion, but believe it is fair to characterize the overarching left-liberal view as one that accepts the efficacy and morality of lockdowns, masks, and forced human separation).

    At this point, those of us unfortunate enough to live in blue and purple states, as well as in many other parts of the world, have been deprived of our basic liberties for nearly a year. We cannot freely associate with other people, operate our businesses, send our children to school, or travel to many places without having to isolate for two weeks, which often translates into visiting loved ones becoming a practical impossibility. College students are imprisoned in dorm rooms for weeks because they or someone they interacted with tested positive for the virus (I will leave the topic of the unreliability of these tests for another day). They are expelled, harshly punished, and shamed for attending parties and socializing in groups. It is no surprise that, condemned for engaging in the most natural activities for those their age, suicidal ideation, depression, and drug usage have skyrocketed in this demographic. Children are forbidden from playing with one another or forced to do so while muzzled. 

    These oppressive policies, which at face value constitute grotesque violations of civil rights and liberties, are enacted and enforced primarily by Democratic politicians, not least among them the governors of New York, Michigan and California: Andrew Cuomo, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom, respectively. For the most part, these pandemic management strategies are lauded by their constituents and center-left publications alike. To the extent they are criticized from the left, it is usually for failing to enact the measures sooner or enforcing them more stringently. 

    Particularly chilling is a piece published in the New York Times on January 4, 2021, “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom,” by Li Yuan. Notably, this article appeared not in the opinion pages, where arguably it could defensively be printed, but in the news section, and accordingly can be deemed representative of the Times’s views. It is worth pointing out that the Times’s influence cannot be overstated: it is the journalistic arm of the Democratic establishment and informs the consciousness and values of the urban professional class. One can be fairly certain that the beliefs of most doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors will reflect the ideas propagated in the paper.

    The premise of Ms. Yuan’s piece is that the post-enlightenment values that until recently were considered non-negotiable in most Western democracies– freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom of assembly – are dispensable. 

    That is because, according to Ms. Yuan, China has triumphed over the virus, needless to say by trampling on these very rights, and in doing so allowed for a different set: the freedom to live a normal life (“the West may find it has to work harder to sell its vision of freedom after China has made its model seem so attractive”). 

    Who is to say which rights are more important? the article queries.

    Ms. Yuan next speculates that “[t]he global crisis could plant doubts about other types of freedom” as “[n]early half of voting Americans supported a president who ignored science and failed to take basic precautions to protect their country. Some Americans assert that it is their individual right to ignore health experts’ recommendations to wear masks, putting themselves and others at increasing risk of infection.”

    These are an astonishing set of assertions: they appear to call into question the importance of democracy itself, and more vaguely the rights of Americans to make their own decisions about their health and to question and dissent from government mandates. Perhaps I am naïve, but I was under the impression that in a free society, people are at liberty to evaluate the evidence for any proposition — especially one as personal as whether or not to wear a face-covering – to assess the risk, and to act accordingly. 

    It is deeply troubling that neither Ms. Yuan nor the New York Times appear to recognize the danger in allowing “experts” to dictate our every move (never mind the faulty premise underlying this, as the science supporting mask usage as a means of curbing coronavirus spread is at best incredibly shoddy). More disturbing, evidently the rights of the individual are no longer sacrosanct; rather, they may be subverted for the betterment of society.   People should not be forced to choose between leading a normal life (i.e. socializing, attending school, earning a living, going to restaurants, and experiencing the arts) and possessing fundamental civil liberties.  Both are absolute, immutable features of a liberal democracy.

    Conveniently, the article fails to mention that China’s willingness to sacrifice the individual in furtherance of the communal good has led to the creation of concentration camps for Uighur Muslims, that include, among other horrors, torture and forced sterilization. Amnesty International’s China 2019 page opens by observing that: “[t]he human rights situation continued to be marked by a systematic crackdown on dissent.  The justice system remained plagued by unfair trials and torture and other ill-treatment in detention. China still classified information on its extensive use of the death penalty as a state secret.” 

    Likewise, Human Rights Watch’s [HRW] webpage states that:

     China’s government sees human rights as an existential threat. Its reaction could pose an existential threat to the rights of people worldwide. At home, the Chinese Communist Party [CCP], worried that permitted political freedom would jeopardize its grasp on power, has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state and a sophisticated internet censorship system to monitor and suppress public criticism. Abroad, it uses its growing economic clout to silence critics and to carry out the most intense attack on the global system for enforcing human rights since that system began to emerge in the mid-20th century.

    If China eradicated the virus — and there is widespread agreement that the CCP’s coronavirus data cannot be trusted — it did so using the same tactics that are violative of human rights discussed above by HRW and Amnesty International (incidentally, the Times itself recognized that a mere ten months ago). That the Times and Ms. Yuan apparently consider it appropriate to gloss over that reality is nothing short of astounding. 

    On the other hand, Ms. Yuan’s article is simply a more express admission than many of the paper’s more subtle suggestions that liberal values are overrated and ought to be abandoned in favor of virus suppression policies that do not bother with such annoyances as human rights. A recent Op-ed argues that doctors who question the efficacy of masks and social distancing should have their licenses revoked. Another heavily insinuates that speech deemed a danger to the Republic should be illegal. Ms. Yuan’s article also bears striking resemblance to various recent, albeit slightly more nuanced, pieces in, for instance, the Economist and the New Yorker, implying that perhaps we should look to China and adopt its virus management strategy.

    Many in the scientific and medical community have similarly expressed admiration for China’s approach. At a September press conference, Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, offered his “congratulations” to the Chinese for bringing the virus under control. Gregory Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic, observed that China’s success could be attributed, in part, to a compliant population and a government that “can put bigger constraints on individual freedoms than would be considered acceptable in most Western countries.”

    Apparently, some members of the New York legislature agree that the CCP’s model should be emulated. Lawmakers in the state are contemplating a bill that would permit the State to forcibly detain individuals who might be carrying an infectious disease. It is not difficult to imagine a near-future in which people like me, who refuse to abide by inhumane, nonsensical, and never-ending dictates, end up behind bars as potential pathogen carriers.

    Likewise, in a fashion that would make leaders of the CCP proud, critics of lockdown and mask policies are silenced by the media and educational institutions. For example, a tenured professor at New York University is currently under investigation after a student reported him and petitioned for him to be fired because he suggested — in a course on media propaganda, no less! — that students read studies finding that masks do not provide protection from the coronavirus, in addition to those reaching the opposite conclusion. 

    Not only have the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which rejects the lockdown approach to coronavirus management, been personally and professionally persecuted, but they have faced significant efforts to silence them, leading one writer to observe that “their critics want them removed from the public sphere. This has all the characteristics of a modern high-tech witch-hunt.” Keep in mind that these are three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists, from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford Universities. There are countless stories of scientists and others who have been censored on social media platforms for departing from the prevailing wisdom on the seriousness of the coronavirus or appropriate and effective methods for managing it.

    A free, liberal society fosters open discussion and debate. It does not silence and punish those who offer opinions that depart from the consensus, however inconvenient those ideas may be to the people in control. It does not use state power to lock people in their homes for the crime of existing in a world along with pathogens. Nor does it prevent them from seeing family and friends, educating their children, and earning a living. It certainly does not contemplate imprisoning people in detention camps because they could carry a pathogen.

    Maybe I was naïve to be so startled by Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, and its thesis that we should remake our conception of freedom in the image of China’s. In retrospect, it was the natural next step in the creeping authoritarianism that I witnessed for about a decade and has crescendoed in the last year. It is as close to an express concession as I have seen thus far that the liberal-left has entirely abandoned the tenets of liberalism.  

    Even Neil Ferguson, whose wildly inaccurate Imperial model spurred lockdowns in the West, was surprised that the public acquiesced to China-style virus suppression measures. In a recent interview, he observed that “people’s sense of what is possible…changed quite dramatically between January and March.” At first, scientists in the U.K. presumed that “locking entire communities down and not permitting them to leave their homes…would not be an available option in a liberal Western democracy…and then Italy did it. And we realized we could.” 

    That the liberal-left appears untroubled by the grotesque violations of civil rights and liberties we have witnessed over the past ten months tells us all we need to know. Human rights are negotiable under this new ideology. I am not certain what this political theory should be called – perhaps left-wing authoritarianism – but it bears no resemblance to liberalism whatsoever. To the extent we have not gone quite as far as China in violating human rights in the quest to suppress the virus, the consensus on the liberal-left is plain: we have not gone far enough.

    One of the particular features of tyrannical regimes is that most people remain unaware of their true nature until they have solidified their grip on power. It is far easier to acquire and maintain control over a population that at least initially believes the governing force is benevolent. 

    Pick up a history book if you believe that in the near future the pandemic will be declared over and normal life will resume. Even well-intentioned individuals have difficulty surrendering power once they have had a taste. Nothing about the actions of leaders such as Governors Cuomo, Whitmer and Newsom, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, ought to lead people to believe that life will ever be the same unless we refuse to accept this erosion of our civil rights and liberties. 

    Each day, I hope that my friends on the liberal-left will wake up and see what is happening before their eyes, before it is too late.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 19:35

  • U-Haul Reveals 2020 Migration Trends As Pandemic And Taxes Take Toll
    U-Haul Reveals 2020 Migration Trends As Pandemic And Taxes Take Toll

    A new report has found that Tennessee posted the largest net gain of U-Haul trucks than any other state in 2020, making it U-Haul’s top growth state for the first time. 

    Growth rates are determined by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a state versus leaving that state in a given year. U-Haul keeps tabs on more than two million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions annually, allowing the company to observe migration trends, according to the report published by U-Haul

    “Tennessee’s influx of do-it-yourself movers during a turbulent year marked by the coronavirus pandemic means that a state other than Florida and Texas tops the growth rankings for the first time since 2015 when North Carolina led the way,” the report said. 

    Texas and Florida were the top two other destinations. For three consecutive years, Texas had the largest net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks before Florida displaced it for the number one spot last year. 

    Before the pandemic, Americans fled liberal-run states and metro areas because of high taxes to conservative states that were business-friendly, such as Texas and Florida. The pandemic certainly amplified the exodus. 

    Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia made up the rest of the top ten states with a net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks.

    On the flip side, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Oregon were the top five states with the most significant net loss of U-Haul trucks. 

    Jeff Porter, U-Haul Company of Nashville president, said his company is “seeing a lot of people from California move (to Tennessee) because they’re attracted to our lifestyle.” 

    Porter pointed out, “Tennessee has no income tax and is very business-friendly. There are plenty of jobs. People and companies are taking note.”

    He noted, “Nashville is ever-growing, and even the era of COVID-19 isn’t slowing that. We saw movement before the virus hit, but I think the situation has pushed a lot more people away from the West Coast to our state.”

    “Arrivals of one-way U-Haul trucks into Tennessee jumped 12%, while departures rose only 9% over 2019, with that disparity catapulting it up the charts. Arrivals accounted for 50.6% of all one-way U-Haul traffic in Tennessee, which ranked No. 12 among growth states a year ago,” the report said. 

    “The best thing about Tennessee is the southern hospitality. People are decent to one another,” said Clay McQuade, U-Haul Company of Knoxville president. “I believe the draw to Tennessee is the rural atmosphere.”

    Full List: States Ranked By Migration Growth 

    U-Haul migration trends are useful data to show how higher taxes and the pandemic are shifting Americans from liberal-run states to more friendly conservative states. 

    In July, we noted some people in Illinois waited nearly three weeks for a U-Haul truck as the pandemic plus the state’s dire fiscal situation resulted in an exodus of residents. 

    Compound high taxes, the pandemic, decimation of the local economy, plus soaring violent crime, New Yorkers have been fleeing the metro area by the tens of thousands. 

    “Long lines were seen outside of a number of U-Haul stations in the neighborhood across Saturday and Sunday, with moving vehicles lining residential streets and discarded furniture stacked on sidewalks left by locals seeking pastures new,” reported the Daily Mail.

    We have never seen such a sudden mass exodus away from major cities in modern American history. U-Haul’s report offers a unique insight into migration trends that are overwhelmingly benefiting conservative states while liberal ones plunge into socio-economic turmoil.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 19:10

  • Beijing Pushes Back Against Trump Administration Efforts To Halt Slave Labor In Xinjiang
    Beijing Pushes Back Against Trump Administration Efforts To Halt Slave Labor In Xinjiang

    When push came to shove, the NYSE showed Americans just how badly the globalists depend on China, when it resisted an executive order to delist Chinese telcos.

    The exchange’s embarrassing flipflop comes as the Trump Administration does what it can to hammer the CCP for its persecution of Muslims in Xinjing. Yet, as Trump and liberals finally come together to champion the cause of human rights, Americans who have demanded the US do whatever it can to protect Hong Kongers, the people of Taiwan and Muslims in Xinjiang are suddenly being drowned out by tech giants, including Twitter, Facebook, Apple but also Shopify, having accused Trump of “glorifying violence”.

    Amid all the chaos of the past week, one of Trump’s most trusted national security advisors, Matt Pottinger, resigned, Just days after he delivered a presentation reiterating all the evidence he has seen to suggest that China unleashed the virus upon Wuhan on purpose.

    So, with Trump administration officials (including Pottinger) abandoning ship to protect their own careers, Beijing is once again pushing back, imposing new punitive measures that will again force foreign companies to choose between acquiescing to Beijing, or Washington.

    Here’s more from the NYT:

    China fired back at the Trump administration on Saturday with new rules that would punish global companies for complying with Washington’s tightening restrictions on doing business with Chinese companies.

    China’s Ministry of Commerce said that the rules, which went into effect immediately, were intended to counter foreign laws that “unjustly prohibit or restrict” people or companies in China from doing normal business. It said its measures were necessary to safeguard China’s national sovereignty and security and to protect the rights of Chinese citizens and entities.

    It’s likely that China’s measure could force Joe Biden to back off many of his predecessors’ efforts to force China to abide by international standards on everything from labor laws (ironic, considering China is a officially Communist) to unfair state subsidies, to corporate auditing standards.

    As the NYT explains, the US under Trump has passed myriad new restrictions and other punitive measures intended to isolate China, blaming the country’s abuses like the ones mentioned above.

    But now, Beijing is taking things one step further by enabling companies to sue in Chinese courts (essentially a guaranteed win).

    Trump administration prohibited the sale of American technology to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and other firms. It also issued rules that punish companies for their ties to the Chinese military and for their involvement in Beijing’s surveillance and suppression of mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s far northwestern region of Xinjiang.

    The new rules released on Saturday would allow Chinese officials and companies to strike back at those who comply with those U.S. limits. The Chinese measures allow government officials to issue orders saying that companies do not have to comply with certain foreign restrictions.

    Chinese companies that incur losses because of another party’s compliance with those laws can sue for damages in Chinese courts, according to the Commerce Ministry’s notice. Such a case would be likely to result in a victory for a Chinese plaintiff, since China’s courts are ultimately answerable to the Communist Party.

    Fortunately for the US, during his time in office, Trump never caved to China’s threats to retaliate against US business, knowing that there’s plenty that China buys from the US that it absolutely needs – everything from microchips to software, a fact that gives the US more built-in leverage, which Trump was happy to exploit. Economics wonks who closely monitor the bilateral trade numbers might be quick to point to the growing trade deficit with China as evidence that Trump failed in his efforts to pressure China with his trade war.

    But as we pointed out a few days ago, it appears Beijing is using inflated numbers to overstate exports, a classic way of getting capital into a country with capital controls.

    As recent reports have shown us, companies from around the world sell products that involved the forced labor of Uygher Muslims essentially forced to work for free (either that, or they get shipped off to a reeducation camp). Instead of trying to hide this, Beijing is celebrating it, twisting the truth via the state-controlled media, which recently touted the forced sterilization of Uygher women.

    Now, Beijing is once again about to force Washington and others to call its bluff by essentially reviving its threats to create an “unreliable entities” list. Trump didn’t fall for it, but after spending the last year in his basement, can we trust Joe Biden to stand his ground?

    Or is this where all those payments to Hunter Biden will finally pay dividends for Beijing?

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 18:45

  • America's Recline & Flail Goes On
    America’s Recline & Flail Goes On

    Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

    Let the good times roll
    Let them knock you around
    Let the good times roll
    Let them make you a clown

    – Good Times Roll, by The Cars

    America’s Recline and Flail Goes On

    The storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on Wednesday was a wacky and wild escapade.  But it shouldn’t be a surprise.  These things happen when a nation’s in decline.  And, as Wednesday demonstrated, America’s recline and flail goes on.

    More telling is the fake outrage by politicians to score political points and justify additional control over the populace.  Chuck Schumer compared it to Pearl Harbor, calling it a date “in American history that will live forever in infamy.”  President-elect Joe Biden characterized it as “one of the darkest days in the history or our nation” and “an unprecedented assault on our democracy.”

    Schumer and Biden conveniently overlook the irony of their statements.  They may be accurate.  But only for reasons they never intended.  Lost in the ruckus was any candid consideration of election counting shenanigans.  This is the real assault on democracy that will forever live in infamy.

    But, again, proper perspective must be maintained.  A fraud election should come as no surprise.  These things happen when a nation’s in decline.  We don’t like it.  But these are the facts.

    At the same time, the nation’s leaders have little clue what’s going on.  Schumer.  Pelosi.  McConnell.  All the clowns in Congress.  They think that with that ogre Trump out of the way, they can let the good times roll again.  They know not what they face.

    How wealth is created and naturally dispersed is complex and multifaceted.  Attempts to explain it, like attempts to explain the development of the human embryo, are generally lacking.  Nonetheless, for amusement and the benefit of members of Congress who may be reading, the following rough attempt is extended.

    Where All Roads Lead

    Countless factors influence an economy’s vitality.  The fundamentals include sound money, respect for private property, and the rule of law.  These are followed by technological advancement, demographic trends, and the level of international trade.  Interest rates, the credit cycle, and public and private debt levels are also significant factors.

    When a nation’s population is young, its money sound, and its institutions fresh, there are greater prospects for economic growth.  People are relatively free to do what they want, so long as they don’t threaten or commit violence against another person or another person’s property.

    But as with spring and then summer, there’s also fall and then winter.  Life first grows and flowers.  Later it decays and dies.

    Over time, the size of government grows and laws and regulations become more and more restrictive.  Then corporate lobbyists arrive on the scene and things really devolve.  The practice of inserting pay to play arrangements into legislation becomes commonplace.

    As a nation’s population ages and the reach of government increases the economy stagnates.  Pension programs become top heavy.  Public and private interests become entrenched.  Barriers to entry multiply.  Legacy costs pile up and institutions decay into disrepair.

    Indeed, economic decline and the stagnation of incomes are the result of many different factors.  Though all roads lead back to aging populations, bloated government, fake money, and extreme public and private debt levels.  GDP growth of 6 percent was common many decades ago.  Now, under the weight of all the excess, 3 percent is as good as it gets.

    Let The Good Times Roll

    The confluence of these unfavorable circumstances cannot be reversed.  There’s no policy prescription to magically restore health and vitality.  The progression must run its course.  Promises must be broken.  Institutions must fail.  Governments must default.  Currencies must collapse.

    Of course, those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo will do everything they can to resist.  Insiders will use money games and currency devaluations to stretch things out.  Politicians will use government policies to try and abate circumstances beyond their control.

    Presently, in the United States all means for preserving the status quo are on the table.  The Federal Reserve, for instance, creates credit from thin air and loans it to the Treasury via bond purchase.  The Treasury, in turn, shovels the money to defense contractors and other preferred service providers – like the big banks.

    The Fed also uses its credit creation machine to suppress lending rates.  Zombie companies use the cheap credit to rollover their debt.  And when that doesn’t cut it, the Fed directly purchases corporate debt.

    These policies stand the economy on its head.  They concentrate wealth into the hands of the insiders to the detriment of workers.  After several decades of this madness the workers and the growing population of the unemployed stick their hands out and demand they be filled too.

    Wealth disparities and the resulting discontent spark cries for redistribution schemes.  Thus, the Treasury tosses some bread crumbs in the form of stimulus checks to citizens and noncitizens alike.  Before long, stimulus checks become a constant.  And the population is dependent on the benevolent hand of government for sustenance.

    Mad economic policies, like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and universal basic income (UBI), are dreamed up to justify the insanity.  The government gives money to zombie companies, goes the rationale.  Why can’t it give money to actual zombies too?

    Make no mistake, these are policies of desperation.  They’re a last ditch effort to preserve the status quo and let the good times roll.  But for who?

    Not you!

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 18:20

  • "This Was A Coordinated Attack": Parler CEO Speaks Out After Amazon Boots From AWS, Vows To Rebuild 'From Scratch'
    “This Was A Coordinated Attack”: Parler CEO Speaks Out After Amazon Boots From AWS, Vows To Rebuild ‘From Scratch’

    Update (2210 ET): Parler CEO John Matze has issued a statement (emphasis ours):

    Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.

    We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.

    This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.

    #speakfreely

    * * *

    Update (2130 ET): And so the hammer has come down late on Saturday, when Amazon officially kicked Parler off its cloud Web hosting service, AWS according to Buzzfeed. The suspension means that once the ban takes effect on Sunday, the website – which as of this moment is still up – will be offline until it finds someone else to host it.

    * * *

    Update (2100 ET): As expected, Apple removed Parler permanently from its app store on Saturday. “[T]here is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” the iPhone maker said, according to CNN which adds that Apple notified Parler of its decision in a message that said it had violated the company’s app store terms.

    “The processes Parler has put in place to moderate or prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content have proved insufficient,” Apple told Parler. “Specifically, we have continued to find direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action in violation of Guideline 1.1 – Safety – Objectionable Content.”

    Apple’s notice said Parler’s responses to an earlier warning were inadequate, including Parler’s defense that it had been taking violent rhetoric on its platform “very seriously for weeks” and that it had a moderation plan “for the time being,” according to Apple.

    A search for the Parler app as of 8pm showed that the app was no longer there, with the search query returning recommended substitutes:

    “Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety,” Apple said in a statement to CNN Business. “We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”

    Apple’s decision follows a similar move by Google to drop Parler from the Google Play Store, and after Amazon (AMZN) has come under pressure by its own employees to stop hosting Parler’s website on Amazon Web Services.

    John Matze, Parler’s CEO, wrote in a message on his platform that Apple “will be banning Parler until we give up free speech, institute broad and invasive policies like Twitter and Facebook and we become a surveillance platform by pursuing guilt of those who use Parler before innocence.”

    “They claim it is due to violence on the platform,” Matze wrote of Apple, whom he also accused of being a “software monopoly,” a particularly relevant attack right now given an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple from Fortnite maker Epic Games. “The community disagrees as we hit number 1 on their store today.”

    Matze promised to share “more details about our next plans coming soon as we have many options.”

    * * *

    Earlier:

    A coalition of Amazon corporate employees have demanded that the Seattle-based megacorp kick Parler off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform unless ‘posts inciting violence’ are removed, which would force the Trump-friendly Twitter competitor to find another host.

    According to CNBC, an employee advocacy group – Amazon Employees for Climate Justice – said in a Saturday tweet that AWS should “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.”

    More via CNBC:

    Pressure has been mounting for Amazon to stop hosting Parler on AWS after other tech giants took action against the social media app in the wake of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot earlier this week. Google on Friday removed Parler from its app store for Android users, Google Play Store. BuzzFeed News reported on Friday that Apple has threatened to pull Parler from its App Store.

    Parler, which launched in 2018, has emerged as a popular platform for President Trump’s allies in the last year by billing itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social media services like Twitter and Facebook. –CNBC

    To justify censoring Parler, critics have pointed to posts calling for ‘firing squads’ – like one from attorney Lin Wood (who some say handed the Senate to the Democrats by openly calling for Georgians not to vote in the runoff election unless the GOP candidates backed Trump’s election fraud claims).

    In 2019, Amazon pulled the plug on their AWS partnership with Twitter alternative GAB over user posts. CEO Andrew Torba essentially blamed the CIA – claiming that a “PSYOP campaign started back in early December” in which newly created accounts were “popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence.”

    Torba’s letter continues:

    After this week, it’s clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.

    Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims. I’ve recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you’ll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading. 

    Meanwhile, Parler has jumped to the #1 app in Apple’s app store.

    Parler saw approximately 210,000 installs globally on Friday 1/8, up 281% from approximately 55,000 on 1/7, according to data from the analytics service Sensor Tower. “In the U.S., the app saw approximately 182,000 first-time downloads on 1/8, up 355% from about 40,000 installs on 1/7. Since Wednesday, the app has seen approximately 268,000 installs from across U.S. app stores,” a press rep from Sensor Tower wrote in an email. -TechCrunch
    And as conservatives scramble to download the app before it’s deplatformed at yet another social media giant, we now have to wonder if they’ll even be able to find a new home among a collusive constellation of big-tech – at least one of which used to value the phrase ‘think different.’

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 17:55

  • Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities
    Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities

    Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

    The riots, political turmoil, and other banana republic embarrassments seem to be ending – for now. So let’s get back to examining the real problems of this hyper-leveraged, dangerously-complex world. Like how big cities might soon be obsolete:

    Pretend it’s 2019 and you’re living in a major US city. You, your spouse and two kids have a fairly nice (though admittedly very expensive) apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood, and life is pretty good. There’s a park nearby, dozens of great restaurants within walking distance, and plenty of interesting friends. And of course your high-paying jobs are right there.

    Then comes 2020. A pandemic causes your mayor to panic and lock down the city. There go the park, friends, and restaurants. And before the horror of this new normal has a chance to sink in, civil unrest explodes and turns your once-iconic neighborhood into a Mad Maxian war zone of burned-out cars and boarded up storefronts.

    If it was just you, you might stick it out. But with a family, this life is now untenable. So you look into moving, preferably to somewhere semi-rural where neither a lockdown nor riots will ever be a problem and the kids can actually play outside. Maybe it’s time to indulge your fantasy of working remotely from a homestead in a gorgeous place.

    But you immediately hit a technological speed bump: Broadband Internet, which up to this point had seemed both ubiquitous and a basic human right, isn’t available on the homesteads you now covet. The only option out there is low-tech, unreliable, molasses-slow satellite Internet that, if the reviews are to be believed, is worse than nothing at all.

    You realize that if you want to keep doing your work at a high level, you’ll have to stay urban, or at best suburban, with all the health and safety risks that that now implies. Big cities and their burbs, it seems, will live on for a while as necessary places for sophisticated professionals to do their thing.

    Then Elon Musk, of all people, announces that SpaceX, his privately held space launch company, is going to blanket the sky with thousands of low-orbit satellites to create a global broadband network, and the roll-out has begun.

    Early reviews are better than good:

    SpaceX Starlink Broadband Beta Testers “Amazed” By Its Speed

    Photos are starting to leak from SpaceX Starlink beta users, who are trying the satellite broadband service in remote areas for the first time. So far, the beta testing appears to be going far better than that of full self-driving.

    One beta tester shared his experience on Reddit after he brought his Starlink equipment to a remote forest in Idaho. There, he said he was able to achieve 120Mbps download speeds and access the Internet at lightning-fast speed.

    He wrote that the service “works beautifully.” He continued: “I did a real-time video call and some tests. My power supply is max 300w, and the drain for the whole system while active was around 116w.”

    At his house, he said he got 135Mbps download speeds when the dish was at a ground-level spot with “limited obstruction.”

    “Given all the obstructions for this connection at the moment, I am amazed at how well it works. Streaming, low-latency video conferencing, and gaming are all completely accessible with this service. Even for the beta, it appears as though they’ve under-estimated Starlink’s capabilities, so I am excited to see it mature.”

    This isn’t as fast as an urban gigabit fiber connection, but it’s more than adequate for Zoom calls, shared coding projects and the like. And since these are beta-test results, it’s a safe bet that the final product will even better.

    The advent of Internet-everywhere couldn’t come at a worse time for some of the cities that are already seeing big outmigration. As Wolf Richter just reported, rents are already plunging:

    “Exodus” Havoc: Rents Plunge in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle, Other High-Cost Cities

    In the exodus cities, rents continued plunging in December. For example, in San Francisco, the median asking rent for one-bedroom apartments fell 1.5% from November and is now down 28% from June 2019; in New York City and in Seattle, rents fell about 2.5% for the month and are down 21% from July 2019.

    Rents are depicting the massive shifts playing out in the US housing market, brought about by the Pandemic and by working from anywhere and perhaps by a general urge to rethink things.

    San Francisco rents in breath-taking downward spiral.

    San Francisco remains the most expensive rental market in the US only because rents are also plunging in New York City. The median asking rent in December for 1-BR apartments dropped another 1.5% from November, and by 24% year-over-year, and by 28.5% from June 2019, to $2,660, according to data from Zumper’s Rent Report. In terms of dollars, the drop since June 2019 amounted to $1,060 a month.

    This does not include the widely advertised incentives of “two months free,” or getting popular, “three months free,” which cut effective rents for the first year by an additional slice:

    For 2-BR apartments in San Francisco, the median asking rent dropped by 2.0% in December from November, and by 22% year-over-year, to $3,500. Since June 2019, it has plunged by 27%, or by $1,300 a month, not including the incentives.

    These are median asking rents in apartment buildings, including apartment towers. There are now reports of vacancy rates of 30% in luxury apartment towers in San Francisco, with landlords advertising “three months free.”

    The financial implications of the emptying of big cities are immense. The list of cities and states that were already lurching towards bankruptcy via their wildly underfunded public sector pensions was already growing. And a federal bailout was already looking imminent before the chaos of 2020.

    Now it’s a lock that in 2021 we’ll be faced with the choice of multiple municipal bankruptcies — which would threaten a national second Great Depression — or a multi-trillion-dollar federal bailout that threatens a currency crisis.

    The next few weeks of relative peace are looking like a very temporary reprieve.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 17:30

  • Washington "One-China" Policy Dead As Pompeo Lifts Restrictions On US-Taiwan Relations
    Washington “One-China” Policy Dead As Pompeo Lifts Restrictions On US-Taiwan Relations

    The embattled Trump administration has just nuked the decades long US recognition of the “One China” policy status quo in what surely constitutes the biggest shot across Beijing’s bow after months of anti-China escalation.

    Despite the globe’s attention focused on the Capitol protest chaos and Democrats readying a charge to impeach under Pelosi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday announced this absolute bombshell, namely that he’s now lifting “self-imposed restrictions” on the relationship between the United States and Taiwan. He announced in an official statement:

    Today I am announcing that I am lifting all of these self-imposed restrictions. Executive branch agencies should consider all “contact guidelines” regarding relations with Taiwan previously issued by the Department of State under authorities delegated to the Secretary of State to be null and void.

    The US will no longer act in accord with viewing the island in context of a single sovereign China when it comes to relations with Taiwan as has kept the unsteady “peace” for decades.

    His statement began by describing the complex impediments restraining US action which have been in effect since at least the 1980’s (since 1979, and outgrowth of Carter’s Taiwan Relations Act) regarding the official ‘One China’ doctrine which he’s just effectively declared null and void:

    Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and reliable partner of the United States, and yet for several decades the State Department has created complex internal restrictions to regulate our diplomats, servicemembers, and other officials’ interactions with their Taiwanese counterparts. The United States government took these actions unilaterally, in an attempt to appease the Communist regime in Beijing. No more.

    Crucially the shock announcement comes just ahead of U.S. Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft’s controversial visit to Taipei, which Beijing has already slammed as a “crazy provocation”.

    China had further already warned this week that Washington will pay a “heavy price” should it move forward with sending Kelly on the official visit.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Pompeo’s full statement continued:

    Additionally, any and all sections of the Foreign Affairs Manual or Foreign Affairs Handbook that convey authorities or otherwise purport to regulate executive branch engagement with Taiwan via any entity other than the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) are also hereby voided. The executive branch‘s relations with Taiwan are to be handled by the non-profit AIT, as stipulated in the Taiwan Relations Act.

    The United States government maintains relationships with unofficial partners around the world, and Taiwan is no exception. Our two democracies share common values of individual freedom, the rule of law, and a respect for human dignity. Today’s statement recognizes that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship need not, and should not, be shackled by self-imposed restrictions of our permanent bureaucracy.

    This is sure to create more transition chaos with a mere week-and-a-half left till Biden’s inauguration.

    The timing of it will also be a huge factor in determining Beijing’s response, given it may look to Biden for assurances that he’ll roll back whatever “damage” Trump’s dumping of the longstanding ‘One China’ has done on the way out the door. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 17:00

  • ABC News Calls For "Cleansing" Of Trump Supporters
    ABC News Calls For “Cleansing” Of Trump Supporters

    Authored by Kipp Jones via The Western Journal,

    As part of the Democratic Party, establishment media and Washington swamp campaign to tear down the legacy of President Donald Trump this week, the political director for ABC News called for a “cleansing” of Trump’s movement.

    Rick Klein, who is the rudder on the corrupt ABC News political coverage ship, must have been feeling awfully emboldened Thursday after Democrat Joe Biden was officially certified as the country’s next president. Perhaps a little too emboldened, as is evident by what he said on Twitter.

    “Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else,” Klein said in a tweet, which he later deleted.

    Thank the good lord for screen shots.

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    But this was no mere slip-up of a lone network employee on social media. ABC News published a piece in which Klein echoed his message. His views are apparently shared by others at the legacy media outlet.

    Thursday on the website’s political analysis page “The Note,” Klein and Mary Alice Parks, ABC News deputy political director, co-wrote a piece that called for a similar “cleansing” of the Trump movement before it was later stealthily edited to change that vague and dark language, Fox News reported.

    Pointing to Wednesday’s Capitol incursion as a reason to use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office or impeach him, Klein and Parks wrote, “Even aside from impeachment and 25th Amendment talk, Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part.”

    “Cleaning up the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.”

    That last section originally read, “Cleansing the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.”

    ABC News and Klein cleaned up their creepy genocidal language, but the veil is off, and we know who they are. We know that these people want.

    The majority of the establishment media wants a one-party state where every man, woman and child knows his or her place. Trump’s awakening of the GOP base and others is a threat to that, and it became even more threatening after he began successfully courting Democratic voters last year.

    Leftists have used words such as “reconciliation” and “re-education” with regard to how to deal with us since the election. Now ABC News has called for a “cleansing” of the political movement the president created.

    While for most of us that movement equates to a robust economy, individual liberty, national sovereignty and a strong military, the hateful establishment media always viewed it as a threat to the status quo.

    The actions of a relatively small number of Trump supporters at the Capitol on Wednesday have given these people what they view as a valid reason to delegitimize every one of the tens of millions of Americans who voted against the corrupt Washington and media establishment.

    Rogue conservatives roaming the halls of Congress is exactly what the corporate media wanted. Remember, this is the same establishment media that joined Democrats in inciting or excusing violence for a great deal of last year, and even before that.

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    Save for the late Peter Jennings, ABC News has always been awful. The network never attempted to hide its bias during the election or during the four years when Trump was called “illegitimate” and a Russian plant. Klein was silent as fake news stories led the coverage for four years, and he never denounced Biden for going around talking about punching people — but now the mask is off.

    Klein and his colleagues want to put us all in a corner and shame us over the D.C. spectacle, which 99.9 percent of us were not a party to. We can’t ask valid questions about election integrity if we’re all too afraid to show our faces, and maybe that’s the point. The Klein message highlights the depths of the establishment media’s desperation to make us go away and fall in line. No thanks.

    It was the corporate media and its sponsors, Democrats, and those who threw bricks and molotov cocktails for months on end who brought shame to our republic, not Trump or the movement he has led. That’s an inconvenient fact that is being written over in a mad dash to turn the president’s legacy into ash by attempting to portray him as a man who simply spent four years inciting a riot.

    It’s a lie, just like all the others. Let the dust settle and don’t be shamed.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 16:30

  • Kim Jong Un Orders More Tactical Nukes Be Made For Readiness Against "Archenemy" US
    Kim Jong Un Orders More Tactical Nukes Be Made For Readiness Against “Archenemy” US

    Kim Jong Un has begun ratcheting up anti-US rhetoric with less than two weeks to go before the Biden inauguration, calling America his country’s “principal enemy” on Saturday.

    “Our external political activities must focus on controlling and subjugating the United States, our archenemy and the biggest stumbling block to the development of our revolution,” Kim said, according to official KCNA news agency.

    “The real intention of its policy toward the DPRK will never change, whoever comes into power in the US,” he added during an address to the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.

    But more importantly, he announced that he no longer considers himself bound by the self-imposed moratorium on testing nuclear devices weapons and long-range ballistic missiles.

    According to a paraphrase of his bellicose speech:

    At the congress, Kim called for the improvement of the country’s nuclear arsenal to include solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles that can be launched from land and sea, and accurately hit targets at a range of up to 9,320 miles, putting the U.S. mainland in reach.

    He also ordered the development of miniaturized nuclear weapons, tactical nukes, military surveillance satellites and hypersonic aircraft.

    The incoming Biden administration is not expected to respond unless he actually puts any of this in action, particularly testing of banned strategic weapons.

    Biden previously referred to Kim as a “thug” on the campaign trail, to which the North Korean leader responded by calling Biden a “rabid dog”. 

    Meanwhile, Biden has characterized that his approach will be a slower, “principled diplomacy” – suggesting such high stakes media-centric summits that was Trump’s style is out the door.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/09/2021 – 16:00

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Today’s News 9th January 2021

  • Luongo: Tiananmen Avoided In D.C. As Trump Era Ends
    Luongo: Tiananmen Avoided In D.C. As Trump Era Ends

    Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

    Her name is Ashli Babbitt.

    On January 6th, 2021 the Trump Era of U.S. history ended. Nothing will be the same after the events on Capitol Hill. There is no going back. That much is obvious.

    The shock of those events wasn’t Trump calling a rally of his supporters to the Capitol or that they were seething with anger over what is clearly a stolen election.

    The shock was that they “aimed to misbehave” after coming to the realization that the America they thought they lived in no longer existed.

    I’ve said many times in 2020 that this election was the last chance to keep a lid on their anger. It was, in their minds, their last non-violent way of choosing the rules they lived under.

    As long as the results looked even remotely fair they would be willing to accept them and make the best of it. That’s the contract right?

    But they would not accept fraud.

    Because fraud is theft. And theft is force. Theft is ultimately violence.

    So everyone clutching their pearls today over the ‘violence’ of January 6th needs to remember that violence is baked into this story at every level.

    In fact, the worst pearl clutchers are the ones whose power is most threatened, i.e. Congress, and the cowards unwilling to stand next to those facing them down.

    Her name is Ashli Babbitt.

    Because as George Washington almost certainly didn’t say …

    Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, – it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action

    Force was on display fully at the capitol but it wasn’t coming from the people. It was coming from Congress who knowingly certified a fraudulent election hiding behind their cowardice and corruption.

    And the people called them out on it.

    The most moving thing I saw all day was thousands of people singing the national anthem as they tried to get into the Capitol building.

    After certifying the election Vice President Mike Pence said,

    “To those who wreaked havoc in our capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins. And this is still the people’s House.”

    No Mike, violence won. Rule by men won. And standing proud while taking your thirty pieces of silver only further ensures that violence will keep winning.

    Her name is Ashli Babbitt.

    But violence is now inevitable. And the first shots were fired. Not by the people but by those agents of force themselves, the government.

    During the George Floyd riots our current rulers could barely bring themselves to denounce the very real violence in Minneapolis, Portland, Atlanta, etc.

    BLM and Antifa vandals burned down whole city blocks, beat people indiscriminately and destroyed the lives of the very black people they were supposed to be protesting for.

    They were brave freedom fighters. Whoever said protests were supposed to be polite, right Chris Cuomo?

    If you want to be heard by people who aren’t listening then you have to make a lot of noise to get their attention.

    So, the idea that hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised conservatives shouldn’t gather and say no to a blatant fraud is laughable. In the end, their main crime was a little disorganized mayhem inside the Capitol building.

    Denouncing that as ‘insurrection,’ as alleged in the circulating articles of impeachment against Trump, are equally laughable.

    It’s also indicative of just how thin the veneer of their power is. Because the people who came to D.C. to protest knew exactly who their enemies were — Congress, the media and the police who turned their backs on them.

    What’s clear is that January 6th was on the ‘white board’ of The Swamp that if things got out of control, or were allowed to, they were prepared for the protest to turn ugly enough to warrant unbridled use of military force.

    It failed.

    Her name is Ashli Babbitt.

    Because during the height of the commotion the Pentagon refused a request for the National Guard to be brought in.

    Things had to get far worse than what happened for that step to occur.

    When sifting through the wreckage of these events, breaking into the Capitol and wandering around isn’t really all that dangerous.

    Was it a little embarrassing? Yes.

    Did it warrant at any point lethal force? No.

    If it did the cops in the building wouldn’t have been standing around for the most part chatting amiably with the ‘insurgents.’

    What they wanted another Fort Sumter where the rebels panicked and fired the first shot. They wanted unbridled violence to erupt as the madness of crowds took over.

    That never really materialized. And so, no justifiable massacre ensued.

    What did happen was the opposite.

    They fired first. They lost their cool. It was a wholly unjustified shooting by a U.S. Capitol Police Officer.

    He just panicked and shot an unarmed woman climbing through a window.

    Her name was Ashli Babbitt.

    In any version of reality there was no imminent threat to him, just like the antics around the Capitol posed no imminent threat to the U.S. or Congress.

    No riot happened, however, because the protestors believe in something greater than power, unlike the feckless jackals of Congress trying to hound Trump into exile.

    Even Antifa agent provocateurs couldn’t incite a riot. They were pulled down off the building by the MAGA folks who ultimately chanted ‘Stop the Steal’ a lot between refrains of the Star Spangled Banner, which D.C. police stepped on like it was a nuisance.

    These are people who showed discipline in equal measure to their righteous anger. The Powers That Be never thought these people could be provoked to even the level seen on January 6th.

    But I remind you that quiet men, men of character, take a lot to rile to overt anger. Our leaders and the commies who think they are winning today mistake temperance for weakness.

    But when you take everything else away from them, what comes next you will have invited.

    We got only a taste of the anger and resolve of the folks showed up to support their man Trump. And today they realize just how bad things actually are. They understand it now in their bones how deeply flawed the Myth of America is.

    That myth, as I talked about recently, is a powerful one, not without its merits. Trump fed that myth because, I think, he believes in it. But it is still a myth and one which will have to be updated.

    Trump, I think, understands this and knows that this is not about him. His message and the way he handled the past four years was that they are scared of the people, not him.

    His job, as he saw it, was to give us the courage to stand up to these horrific people, see them for what they are and afford them zero respect. That’s the legacy of the Trump Era.

    And that’s why they hate him so much. Because we were never supposed to find out just how much they hate us.

    In the coming weeks Pelosi, Schumer and the rest will double down on control. They have to, having staked out the moral high ground now. That was the trap Trump set for them, nothing more.

    They will enter the Biden Era passing new insane laws, pushing for gun control, persecuting and silencing these ‘deplorable’ people. All the while they will think that these edicts will insulate them from their anger.

    But it won’t. Because they shot first. They took the bait. And they committed the ultimate sin.

    Her name is Ashli Babbitt.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 23:45

  • Alien Debris Was Discovered In 2017, Harvard Astronomy Professor Claims
    Alien Debris Was Discovered In 2017, Harvard Astronomy Professor Claims

    A Harvard professor is officially making the argument that in 2017, scientists found the “first sign of intelligent life outside Earth”.

    Avi Loeb, a Harvard University professor, is releasing a book called “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” that explains why he thinks an object that came close to Earth in 2017 could be of alien origin. 

    Hawaiian scientists in 2017 saw  “an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have been from another star,” the book says. In the book, Loeb makes the argument that the object was actually “space junk” from another galaxy. The object was called “1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua”.

    “There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization,” the book says, according to Yahoo

    NASA described the object as “the first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system, this interstellar interloper appears to be a rocky, cigar-shaped object with a somewhat reddish hue.”

    Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate said when it was discovered: “For decades we’ve theorized that such interstellar objects are out there, and now – for the first time – we have direct evidence they exist. This history-making discovery is opening a new window to study formation of solar systems beyond our own.”

    Publisher Houghton-Mifflin says: “In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake…”

    “In Extraterrestrial, Loeb takes readers inside the thrilling story of the first interstellar visitor to be spotted in our solar system. He outlines his controversial theory and its profound implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. A mind-bending journey through the furthest reaches of science, space-time, and the human imagination, Extraterrestrial challenges readers to aim for the stars—and to think critically about what’s out there, no matter how strange it seems.”

    Anne Wojcicki, CEO and cofounder of 23andMe, said the book “convinces you that scientific curiosity is key to our future success.”

    Loeb is a professor of science at Harvard, with a doctorate in physics and is also chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy.

    His book will be released January 26, 2021. 

    “Your new book is called ‘The End of the World’. Now, can you tell us when it’s going to be – or do we have to buy the book?”

     

     

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 23:25

  • Wednesday's Other Story: Taibbi
    Wednesday’s Other Story: Taibbi

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    Just before the madness at the Capitol broke out Wednesday, news came from London. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who seemed Monday to be the luckiest man alive when a judge denied an American request to extradite him, was now denied bail on the grounds that he might “fail to surrender to court to face” the inevitable U.S. appeal. He goes back to legal purgatory, possibly a worse outcome than extradition, which might be the idea.

    We sell politics in American media as a soap opera, and the personalities make for lively copy, but properly following the bouncing ball means watching institutions, not characters. Where are armies, banks, central banks, intelligence services, the press? Whose money is talking on the floor of the House and the Senate? How concentrated is financial and political power? How do public and private institutions coordinate? When they coordinate, what are their collective aims? How transparent are they or aren’t they? How accountable?

    Assange became a celebrity at a time when popular interest in these questions was at its zenith in the United States. Eight years of the Bush administration inspired profound concern about the runaway power of the state, especially a new secret state-within-a-state the Bush administration insisted 9/11 gave them the moral mandate to build.

    Our invasion of Iraq had been a spectacular failure — unlike pictures of returning coffins, that couldn’t be completely covered up — and Americans learned about grotesque forms of war profiteering. These included the use of mercenaries to whom the taxpayer unknowingly paid lavish sums, to commit horrific war crimes like the Nissour Square Massacre, also known as “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday.”

    One of Donald Trump’s most indefensible (and bizarrely, least commented-upon) acts was the pardon of the four Blackwater guards who shot and killed those seventeen Iraqi civilians, including women and children. The New York Times story covering the Blackwater pardon spent just four paragraphs on the case, sticking it below apparently more outrageous acts like the pardon of George Papadopoulos.

    “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday” took place in 2007, by which time we were bombing and kidnapping all over the world, disappearing people off streets like the Bogey Man of fairy tales. Detainees were taken to secret prisons where, we later learned, efforts by prisoners to starve themselves out of their misery were thwarted by a diet of raisins, nuts, pasta, and hummus rocketed up the back door through “the widest possible tube.”

    Even years later, one Gitmo prisoner would waive his right to appear in court because “rectal damage” made it too painful to sit. We made mistakes in who we selected for this treatment, grabbing people with no connection to anything for torture, as films like Taxi to the Dark Side documented. However, Americans seemed to lose interest in these policies once the Iraq misadventure came to a sort-of end, and a new president was elected.

    The rise of Wikileaks introduced an uncontrollable variable into our drift toward authoritarianism. The WMD episode had shown again that our press, the supposed first line of defense against abuses, could not be relied upon. For every expose like Abu Ghraib, there were a hundred stories that either went uncovered or advanced official deceptions.

    Wikileaks anticipated a future in which the press would not only be pliant accomplices to power in this way, but where information itself would be tightly controlled by governments using far-reaching and probably extralegal new technological concepts, deploying misleading excuses for clampdowns.

    One of the first Wikileaks document dumps involved the Thai government’s blacklist of Internet sites, which was billed as a way to stop child pornography but had in fact been used to remove as many as 1200 sites critical of the Thai royal family, among other things. “The Thai system was used to censor Australia reportage about the imprisoned Australian writer Harry Nicolaides,” Assange noted, in 2009.

    Wikileaks also released the Camp Manual for Guantanamo Bay, which among other things revealed that children as young as 15 were being held, along with 900+ other files about a place essentially closed off to even theoretical press review. Another early dump involved the Minton report, about toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast by the firm Trafigura, which in yet another preview of a future of information control had obtained a court order to prevent The Guardian from printing.

    In the 2010 Collateral Murder video, an Apache helicopter crew falsely claims to have encountered a firefight and lights up a Baghdad street, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters employees. Somehow even more disturbing than the killing is the dialogue captured between pilots and base. They’re laughing in parts, saying things like, “Just fuckin’ once you get on ‘em, just open ‘em up,” “All right, hahaha, I hit em,” and “Hey, you shoot, I’ll talk.”

    For all the talk about the madness of Donald Trump — and I wrote one of those pieces — this was something more dangerous, i.e. institutional insanity. We were factory-producing sociopathic murder, by air, in a process that would become more depersonalized. As early as 2011 we learned the Pentagon was working on a software-based system for identifying and eliminating targets by drone, in an effort to remove the potentially complicating variable of human conscience. The implications of this are the stuff of sci-fi movies: outsourcing feeling, judgment, and responsibility to machines, which incidentally would eventually use similar software to determine how much about these questions could be disclosed to human audiences.

    Collateral Murder came out when Americans were also learning about serious corruption at home. After the 2008 financial crash, the Obama administration made historic decisions to reorganize the economy through a series of bailouts and interventions that not only rewarded the worst actors, but super-concentrated power in the hands of newly merged financial institutions. The most significant decisions were made in secret, including at a remarkable post-crash meeting of financial leaders at the Fed whose lurid story would be reinvented as heroic fairy tale in Too Big To Fail.

    Wikileaks would go on to release financial secrets as well, including the draft charter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and, far more damaging, eighty pages of transcripts of paid speeches Hillary Clinton to Wall Street banks, where again the most damaging revelations were lingual. Clinton was shown admitting she was “far removed” from ordinary life because of the “economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy,” while speaking to Goldman, Sachs about the importance of developing “a middle class that can buy the products.”

    By 2016 Assange had been peeled away from many public supporters. A long campaign of surveillance and multiple scandals dimmed his star, with lowlights including the issuance of a Swedish arrest warrant over an alleged sexual assault. People will argue about whether or not he brought this fate on himself. To me it’s irrelevant: the issue, again, is the institution, not the person. The institutional concept of an unregulated leak site has always been the target in this story, far more than Julian Assange.

    Even if one stipulates that every piece of negative news ever written about Assange is true, his story is still primarily about the closing of an informational loophole during a time of ambitious efforts to throw a net of secrecy around the expansion of executive power. It was big news in the Bush years when an American named Jose Padilla was whisked away as an enemy combatant. In the Obama years, the pushed envelope was the first droning without trial of an American, al-Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki. Was he the most sympathetic victim? Maybe not, but the widened principle mattered. And there was the matter of his sixteen-year-old son, whom we also killed. These decisions took place in an increasingly large space exempt from public review of any kind.

    When Assange disappeared into the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, there were already discussions about bringing him to the United States to face treason charges. This was a death penalty offense, the Brookings Institution noted, not worrying at the oddness of charging a foreigner with such a crime. Long before 2016, when Assange lost the support of most liberals for good through the release of the Podesta and DNC files, politicians like Joe Biden were calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist,” language that ought to have raised serious questions given the practices revealed in Collateral Murder, and cases like al-Awlaki’s: we kill terrorists, after all.

    Assange isn’t there yet, but he’s on his way, a health wreck. As Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi explained in our interview on Useful Idiots this week, Assange has not been outside since 2012. He seems destined to end up sharing the fate of those Gitmo prisoners in head-bags whose condition was one of the first Wikileaks scoops: kept in a kind of legal nowhere forever, unable even to escape through suicide.

    Like the Blackwater pardon, the Assange prosecution was simultaneously one of Trump’s worst and least-commented-upon acts. This was a real act of authoritarianism, not some piddling conspiracy with Giliuanis and Stones, but an act made in full cooperation with the awesome power of the American state. We’ll learn a lot about the Biden administration’s real attitude toward Trump’s “authoritarian” leanings by their handling of the case. It should tell people something that the same Obama White House that prosecuted eight leakers under the Espionage Act hesitated to go there with Assange. They understood the implications.

    When interviewed about the case in 2019, former Attorney General Eric Holder was asked if a publisher should be charged criminally. “If you are acting in a pure journalistic sense, no,” he said. “You look at the leaker you don’t look at the journalists.” However, he said, “if you’re acting at the behest of a foreign power, you are in a fundamentally different position.”

    The Assange indictment, however, is not about working with a foreign power, but entirely about Collateral Murder-era actions. Seventeen of the eighteen counts are Espionage Act charges that criminalize the obtaining, possessing, and publishing of “national defense information”:

    The last count is about the alleged offer to help Manning crack a security hash. Given that each of the Espionage Act counts carries a potential ten-year sentence, this case is about making not just the release, but even the solicitation of material like Collateral Murder punishable by life sentence.

    You don’t have to like Julian Assange to grasp the gravity of this. The application of the Espionage Act in this fashion means that reporting going forward will only be legal when not really damaging. This is the outcome Nixon wanted in the Pentagon Papers case (“Goddamn it, somebody’s got to go to jail on that!”). It makes the reporter on the next My Lai or Abu Ghraib a potential criminal or unperson.

    In conjunction with the widespread recent crackdowns on other kinds of speech by tech platforms, the continued exile of other transgressors like Snowden, and the rehabilitation of people like former CIA chief John Brennan, who committed perjury about these issues in the congressional chamber whose violated sanctity so infuriated America this week, it’s an enormous power grab — not a temporary one like the Capitol occupation, but a permanent, far-reaching assertion of institutional dominance.

    In our discussion with Maurizi this week, she talked about having her phone seized and its contents stolen by yet another American mercenary firm, as part of a sweep apparently done to every visitor to Assange in the embassy years. “They secretly unscrewed my phone,” she said, adding that data and pictures from her sim card were downloaded, her conversations with Assange recorded. “And they knew I was a journalist,” she said.

    Even though at least one of the affected journalists visiting the embassy was from the Washington Post, there was almost no reaction here at all. We’ve become inured to these violations. The authoritarian behaviors that freaked people out in the Bush and early Obama years have become as invisible as air to most Americans, who, lucky for many, mostly stopped following that bouncing ball the moment Trump arrived. Now Trump is on his way out, but the lockdown era is just beginning. You’ll forgive me if I’m more scared of that than the other thing.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 23:05

  • Nissan Source Code Leaked Online After Servers Infiltrated Using Default "Admin" Password
    Nissan Source Code Leaked Online After Servers Infiltrated Using Default “Admin” Password

    As if Nissan didn’t have enough issues with its plunging sales, the company’s source code for its North American mobile apps and internal tools has now leaked online.

    The leak came as a result of the company misconfiguring one of its own Git servers – which Nissan inadvertently left exposed online with its default username and password, according to ZDnet

    The server was left with a default username and password combo of admin/admin, ZDnet reported. Was Solarwinds123 already taken as a password?

    Tillie Kottmann, a Swiss-based software engineer, learned about the leak from an anonymous source and analyzed the data on Monday. Kottmann told ZDnet that the leak included source codes for:

    • Nissan NA Mobile apps

    • some parts of the Nissan ASIST diagnostics tool

    • the Dealer Business Systems / Dealer Portal

    • Nissan internal core mobile library

    • Nissan/Infiniti NCAR/ICAR services

    • client acquisition and retention tools

    • sale / market research tools + data

    • various marketing tools

    • the vehicle logistics portal

    • vehicle connected services / Nissan connect things

    • and various other backends and internal tools

    Photo: ZDnet

    A rep for Nissan said: “We are aware of a claim regarding a reported improper disclosure of Nissan’s confidential information and source code. We take this type of matter seriously and are conducting an investigation.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 22:45

  • Iraq Court Issues Arrest Warrant For Trump Over Militia Leader Killing
    Iraq Court Issues Arrest Warrant For Trump Over Militia Leader Killing

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    An Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant for President Trump for the killing of Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was killed in a US drone strike alongside Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani last January.

    Al-Muhandis was the leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a group of mostly Shia state-sponsored militias that was formed in 2014 to fight ISIS.

    Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and the late Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (right)

    The Iraqi warrant comes after Iran issued a “red notice” to Interpol for President Trump and dozens of other US officials for the killing of Soleimani. It was the second time since June that Iran requested the international police agency arrest Trump for the assassination, but the request has not been acted on.

    According to Middle East Eye:

    The Baghdad court issued the warrant for Trump’s arrest under Article 406 of the Iraqi penal code, which provides for the death penalty in all cases of premeditated murder, according to the judiciary.

    “The investigation procedures are continuing to find out the other participants in the execution of this crime, whether they are Iraqis or foreigners,” the court said.

    Sunday, January 3rd, marked the one-year anniversary of the US assassination of Soleimani and al-Muhandis. Leading up to the day, US military officials were warning of Iranian or “Iranian-backed” attacks on US forces in Iraq. But the day came and went with no violence, although protesters took to the streets of Baghdad, demanding the US pull out of Iraq.

    After al-Muhandis and Soleimani were killed, Iraq’s parliament voted unanimously to expel US forces. Currently, the US is in the process of drawing down troops in Iraq. By January 15th, there are expected to be 2,500 US troops left in the country.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 22:25

  • China Power Demand Hits Record As Polar Vortex Split Pours Arctic Air Into Region
    China Power Demand Hits Record As Polar Vortex Split Pours Arctic Air Into Region

    The Beijing meteorological station recorded one of the coldest temperatures in decades this past week, sending power demand through the roof. 

    Lei Lei, the chief forecaster for Beijing meteorological station, told China Daily that the first cold wave in 2021 features a “dramatic temperature drop,” “significant wind-chill effect,” and “prolonged period of low temperature.”

    On Jan. 7, Beijing recorded the coldest day since the 1960s while cities such as the eastern port city of Qingdao recorded the lowest temperature in history, according to Reuters

    China’s State Grid reports peak power load hit record highs in at least nine provincial grid systems in northern China. These areas are considered China’s industrial belt, where a manufacturing recovery is underway. 

    “The (latest) historic peak load came as extremely cold weather increased demand for electricity-powered heating facilities, which account for 48.2% of total load,” an official from the State Grid was quoted by Reuters. 

    China has spent the last several years swapping out coal-burning power stations for electricity-fueled heating devices as part of a green energy campaign to combat air pollution in northern regions. Power demand has been so high because of the severe cold that state-backed China Huaneng Group had to fire up a coal plant earlier this month to meet surging electricity demand. 

    Last month, China imported a record volume of liquefied natural gas as heating fuel demand soared for tens of millions of households. 

    According to Goldman Sachs, colder temperatures may increase the probability of COVID-19 outbreaks. This week alone, China implemented travel restrictions in Hebei, a province neighboring Beijing after a spike in coronavirus cases. 

    A possible theory behind the wicked cold weather in China could be sudden stratospheric warming pushing colder air into Asia. 

    If SSW theory is correct, this would mean a weakening polar vortex would also bring colder air into Europe and the US. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 22:05

  • The Capitol Riot Wasn't A Coup. It Wasn't Even Close
    The Capitol Riot Wasn’t A Coup. It Wasn’t Even Close

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    On Wednesday, a mob apparently composed of Trump supporters forced its way past US Capitol security guards and briefly moved unrestrained through much of the capitol building. They displayed virtually no organization and no clear goals.

    Five people reportedly died during the events – one apparently unarmed female protester died of a gunshot wound, three other protesters “suffered medical emergencies” that resulted in their deaths (one crushed, one heart attack, and one stroke); and a police officer died from a blood clot on his brain reportedly triggered while physically engaging with protesters.

    [ZH: Here is one ‘terrifying scene’ from the clashes as ‘rioters’ began their ‘coup’]…

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    Yet, the media response has been to act as if the event constituted a coup d’etat. This was “A Very American Coup” according to a headline at The New Republic. “This is a Coup” insists a writer at Foreign Policy. The Atlantic presented photos purported to be “Scenes From an American Coup.”

    But this wasn’t a coup, and what happened on Wednesday is conceptually very different from a coup. Coups nearly always are acts committed by elites against the sitting executive power using the tools of the elites. This isn’t at all what happened on Wednesday.

    What Is a Coup?

    A gang of disorganized, powerless mechanics, janitors, and insurance agents running through the capitol isn’t a coup. And if it was a coup attempt, it was so far from anything that might hope to succeed as a coup that it should not be taken seriously as such.

    So how do we know a coup when we see one?

    In their article “Global instances of coups from 1950 to 2010: A new dataset,” authors Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne provide a definition:

    A coup attempt includes illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.

    There are two key components of this definition. The first is that it is illegal. Powell and Thyne note this “illegal” qualifier is important to include “because it differentiates coups from political pressure, which is common whenever people have freedom to organize.”

    In other words, protests, or threats of protest don’t count as coups. Neither do legal efforts such as a vote of no confidence or an impeachment. 

    But an even more critical aspect of Powell’s and Thyne’s definition is that it requires the involvement of elites.

    This can be seen in any stereotypical example of a coup d’etat. This generally involves a renegade military detachment, military officers, and others from within the state apparatus who can employ knowledge, skills, influence, coercive tools gained through membership in the regime’s elite circles.

    The attempted coup in Japan in 1937, for example, was carried out by more than 1,500 officers and men of the Japanese imperial army. They nonetheless failed, likely because they miscalculated the amount of support they enjoyed among other officers. More recently, in the 2009 Honduran coup, the bulk of the Honduran Army turned on the president Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile. That was a successful coup. More famously, Chile’s 1973 coup was successfully led by Agusto Pinochet, the commander-in-chief of the Army, and this enabled him to shell the Chilean executive palace with military hardware.

    Contrast this with nameless MAGA-hat-wearing flag wavers, and the inappropriateness of the term “coup” in this case should be blatantly obvious. With real coups, power is seized by a faction of the elite which has the ability to take control of the machinery of state indefinitely. Although some of Trump’s critics claim he was somehow responsible for Wednesday’s mob, it is clear that Trump was not coordinating or directing any sort of military operation through Twitter posts. There was no plan for holding power. Had those who invaded the capitol building managed to take control of the building for a time, there’s no reason to think this would somehow translate into control of the state. How would it? The real coercive power remained well ensconced within an apparently undivided military apparatus.

    Moreover, it has been clear for years that the permanent technocracy which controls the day-to-day execution of federal administrative power (i.e., “the deep state”) has long been committed to undermining the Trump administration—from high ranking FBI agents, to military diplomats, to Pentagon officials. From where would Trump draw the necessary cooperation from elites to overturn more than 200 years of established norms in transfers of presidential power? In any case, the Biden administration is likely to be better for the state’s elites than the Trump administration. There is no reason for any group of them to contemplate a coup against Biden.

    Thus, if any of Wednesday’s capital rioters thought they were about to bring about a coup by smashing some windows in the capitol, they were engaging in thoroughly amateurish thinking. It’s unlikely, however, that more than a few of the rioters thought there was a coup d’etat afoot. It’s more likely most of them simply wanted to dramatically display their displeasure with the federal regime and to signal they weren’t going to placidly submit to whatever the American bureaucracy decided to dish out.

    Nonetheless, we should not be surprised that the media has rushed to apply the term to the riot. This phenomenon was examined in a November 2019 article titled “Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?,” by Leiv Marsteintredet and Andres Malamud. The authors note that as the incidence of real coups has declined, the word has become more common, but with modifiers attached.

    Examples of these modifiers include “soft,” “constitutional,” “parliamentary,” and “slow-motion.” Numerous critics of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, for example, repeatedly called it a “soft coup.” The authors note this is no mere issue of splitting hairs, explaining that “The choice of how to conceptualize a coup is not to be taken lightly since it carries normative, analytical, and political implications.”

    Increasingly, the term really means “this is a thing I don’t like.” But the term’s use paints the non-coup participants as criminals poised to seize power illegally. By applying this term to the acts of a disorganized group of Trump supporters with no base of support among state elites, the pundits know exactly what they’re doing.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 21:45

  • Rapes, Robberies Fall In Los Angeles While Homicides Reach Highest In Decade
    Rapes, Robberies Fall In Los Angeles While Homicides Reach Highest In Decade

    Crime in Los Angeles went “absolutely haywire” in 2020 according to Capt. Paul Vernon, head of the LAPD Compstat crime-tracking division.

    According to the Los Angeles Times, robberies, rapes and small-scale property crimes were down on the year, while killings, shootings and auto robberies spiked.

    After years of sustained declines, homicides reached the highest level in a decade, while shootings were up by around 40%. Robberies, however, were down 17%, while rapes fell 25%. The city exceeded 300 homicides in a single year for the first time since 2009, something which takes Chicago about  six months to achieve. In December, Los Angeles saw 14 killings and 45 shootings in one week, vs. four killed and 17 shot in 2019. The Times estimated that there were 349 homicides in 2020, a 38% boost over 2019. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js“You can only make inferences [based on] what’s happening and what’s not happening,” said Vernon, who analyzed shifts in major crimes on a 2020 timeline of significant events and concluded that COVID-19, and the ensuing lockdowns had a major impact on these trends starting in March.

    I cannot say enough that cops count, police matter, the presence of our officers in communities makes a difference,” said LAPD Chief Michael Moore in a statement to the Times.

    Between January and February, gun violence was above the trend vs. the first two months of 2019, while other crimes were in-line. After the lockdowns began, however, the numbers “radically” changed, according to the Times, with property crimes, street robberies, sexual assaults and other violent offenses falling significantly. As Summer began, however, shootings and killings spiked, increasing as time went on. Perhaps stir-crazy Californians were sent over the edge? Critics of the police suggest that increasing funding for social services for the poor, homeless, mentally ill and addicts would go a long way towards helping.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 21:25

  • U Alabama Under Investigation For Possible Ties To Wuhan Lab
    U Alabama Under Investigation For Possible Ties To Wuhan Lab

    Authored by Wyatt Eichholz via Campus Reform,

    The U.S. Department of Education has requested information from the University of Alabama regarding alleged undisclosed ties between the university and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

    “It appears that UA has failed to report an alleged partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China,” a letter sent to UA President Stuart Bell on Dec. 22 stated.

    “The WIV, owned by the Chinese government’s Academy of Sciences, includes a maximum biocontainment laboratory (“MCL”) that may be closely linked to the origin and/or spread of the Chinese COVID-19 virus,” the letter continued.

    The investigation was initiated in light of the fact that the University of Alabama is listed as an international partner on the Wuhan Institute’s official website.

    “The UA reference on the Wuhan Institute of Virology website was brought to our attention earlier this year,” the university said in a statement provided to Campus Reform.

    “At that time, we reviewed any possible related institutional records to determine the basis for the reference. We found no ties or connection between UA and WIV, and no reason for UA to be listed on the website.”

    “University officials reached out to WVI to question the reference and requested the UA reference on the website be removed, but never received a response,” the statement continued. “We have relayed this information to the Department of Education.”

    The Department of Education’s letter requested that UA provide any documents with information relating to the Wuhan lab to the department within 30 days. The request cited Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, a law concerning the financial relationships between U.S. universities and foreign sources.

    “Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. § 1011f) requires institutions of higher education (IHEs), including the University of Alabama (UA), to fully report statutorily defined gifts, contracts, and/or restricted and conditional gifts or contracts from or with a foreign source to the U.S. Department of Education (Department),” the letter explained.

    An Education Department spokesman declined to provide additional information, saying, “As a policy, we don’t comment on matters involving Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 until a letter has been posted on our website.”

    The Wuhan Institute of Virology could not be reached for comment. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 21:05

  • China Threatens US With "Heavy Price" For "Crazy Provocation" Of Top Ambassador's Trip To Taiwan
    China Threatens US With “Heavy Price” For “Crazy Provocation” Of Top Ambassador’s Trip To Taiwan

    China is warning the United States to be ready to pay a “heavy price” should it move forward with sending its Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft on an official trip to Taiwan next week.

    “We wish to remind the United States that whoever plays with fire will burn himself,” the Chinese mission to the UN said in a statement. “The United States will pay a heavy price for its wrong action,” 

    “China strongly urges the United States to stop its crazy provocation, stop creating new difficulties for China-U.S. relations and the two countries’ cooperation in the United Nations, and stop going further on the wrong path.”

    Beijing demanded that the visit be canceled, saying China “firmly opposes” the provocative action, and suggested strongly it would be seen as a violation of the ‘One China’ policy.

    Craft will visit officials in Taipei from January 13 to 15, which will “reinforce the US government’s strong and ongoing support for Taiwan’s international space,” according to a US diplomatic statement.

    A series of lower level administration officials visited the island last year, also at a tense moment that US weapons sales to Taiwan were being brokered and finalized, which Beijing also condemned. 

    But this upcoming trip will be arguably the highest profile and most visible figure under the Trump administration to go to Taipei thus far.

    Chinese state media has also been busy underscoring that the continuing US delegations are a violation of Chinese sovereignty, also while continuing military exercises in and near the Taiwan Strait.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 20:45

  • Children's Hospitals Grapple With Wave Of Mental Illness
    Children’s Hospitals Grapple With Wave Of Mental Illness

    Authored by Carmen Heredia Rodriguez via Kaiser Health News,

    Krissy Williams, 15, had attempted suicide before, but never with pills.

    The teen was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 9. People with this chronic mental health condition perceive reality differently and often experience hallucinations and delusions. She learned to manage these symptoms with a variety of services offered at home and at school.

    But the pandemic upended those lifelines. She lost much of the support offered at school. She also lost regular contact with her peers. Her mother lost access to respite care — which allowed her to take a break.

    On a Thursday in October, the isolation and sadness came to a head. As Krissy’s mother, Patricia Williams, called a mental crisis hotline for help, she said, Krissy stood on the deck of their Maryland home with a bottle of pain medication in one hand and water in the other.

    Before Patricia could react, Krissy placed the pills in her mouth and swallowed.

    Efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States have led to drastic changes in the way children and teens learn, play and socialize. Tens of millions of students are attending school through some form of distance learning. Many extracurricular activities have been canceled. Playgrounds, zoos and other recreational spaces have closed. Kids like Krissy have struggled to cope and the toll is becoming evident.

    Government figures show the proportion of children who arrived in emergency departments with mental health issues increased 24% from mid-March through mid-October, compared with the same period in 2019. Among preteens and adolescents, it rose by 31%. Anecdotally, some hospitals said they are seeing more cases of severe depression and suicidal thoughts among children, particularly attempts to overdose.

    The increased demand for intensive mental health care that has accompanied the pandemic has worsened issues that have long plagued the system. In some hospitals, the number of children unable to immediately get a bed in the psychiatric unit rose. Others reduced the number of beds or closed psychiatric units altogether to reduce the spread of covid-19.

    “It’s only a matter of time before a tsunami sort of reaches the shore of our service system, and it’s going to be overwhelmed with the mental health needs of kids,” said Jason Williams, a psychologist and director of operations of the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

    “I think we’re just starting to see the tip of the iceberg, to be honest with you.”

    Before covid, more than 8 million kids between ages 3 and 17 were diagnosed with a mental or behavioral health condition, according to the most recent National Survey of Children’s Health. A separate survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found 1 in 3 high school students in 2019 reported feeling persistently sad and hopeless — a 40% increase from 2009.

    The coronavirus pandemic appears to be adding to these difficulties. A review of 80 studies found forced isolation and loneliness among children correlated with an increased risk of depression.

    “We’re all social beings, but they’re [teenagers] at the point in their development where their peers are their reality,” said Terrie Andrews, a psychologist and administrator of behavioral health at Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Florida. “Their peers are their grounding mechanism.”

    Children’s hospitals in New York, Colorado and Missouri all reported an uptick in the number of patients who thought about or attempted suicide. Clinicians also mentioned spikes in children with severe depression and those with autism who are acting out.

    The number of overdose attempts among children has caught the attention of clinicians at two facilities. Andrews from Wolfson Children’s said the facility gives out lockboxes for weapons and medication to the public — including parents who come in after children attempted to take their life using medication.

    Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., also has experienced an uptick, said Dr. Colby Tyson, associate director of inpatient psychiatry. She’s seen children’s mental health deteriorate due to a likely increase in family conflict — often a consequence of the chaos caused by the pandemic. Without school, connections with peers or employment, families don’t have the opportunity to spend time away from one another and regroup, which can add stress to an already tense situation.

    “That break is gone,” she said.

    The higher demand for child mental health services caused by the pandemic has made finding a bed at an inpatient unit more difficult.

    Krissy Williams, pictured with her brother, lives with schizophrenia. The disruption to her school and health services caused by covid-19 worsened her mental health. In October, she tried to take her own life. (Patricia Williams)

    Now, some hospitals report running at full capacity and having more children “boarding,” or sleeping in emergency departments before being admitted to the psychiatric unit. Among them is the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Williams said the inpatient unit has been full since March. Some children now wait nearly two days for a bed, up from the eight to 10 hours common before the pandemic.

    Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio is also running at full capacity, said clinicians, and had several days in which the unit was above capacity and placed kids instead in the emergency department waiting to be admitted. In Florida, Andrews said, up to 25 children have been held on surgical floors at Wolfson Children’s while waiting for a spot to open in the inpatient psychiatric unit. Their wait could last as long as five days, she said.

    Multiple hospitals said the usual summer slump in child psychiatric admissions was missing last year. “We never saw that during the pandemic,” said Andrews. “We stayed completely busy the entire time.”

    Some facilities have decided to reduce the number of beds available to maintain physical distancing, further constricting supply. Children’s National in D.C. cut five beds from its unit to maintain single occupancy in every room, said Dr. Adelaide Robb, division chief of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

    The measures taken to curb the spread of covid have also affected the way hospitalized children receive mental health services. In addition to providers wearing protective equipment, some hospitals like Cincinnati Children’s rearranged furniture and placed cues on the floor as reminders to stay 6 feet apart. UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital in Pittsburgh and other facilities encourage children to keep their masks on by offering rewards like extra computer time. Patients at Children’s National now eat in their rooms, a change from when they ate together.

    Despite the need for distance, social interaction still represents an important part of mental health care for children, clinicians said. Facilities have come up with various ways to do so safely, including creating smaller pods for group therapy. Kids at Cincinnati Children’s can play with toys, but only with ones that can be wiped clean afterward. No cards or board games, said Dr. Suzanne Sampang, clinical medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at the hospital.

    “I think what’s different about psychiatric treatment is that, really, interaction is the treatment,” she said, “just as much as a medication.”

    The added infection-control precautions pose challenges to forging therapeutic connections. Masks can complicate the ability to read a person’s face. Online meetings make it difficult to build trust between a patient and a therapist.

    “There’s something about the real relationship in person that the best technology can’t give to you,” said Robb.

    For now, Krissy is relying on virtual platforms to receive some of her mental health services. Despite being hospitalized and suffering brain damage due to the overdose, she is now at home and in good spiritsShe enjoys geometry, dancing on TikTok and trying to beat her mother at Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. But being away from her friends, she said, has been a hard adjustment.

    “When you’re used to something,” she said, “it’s not easy to change everything.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 20:25

  • New Hyper-Infectious "Mutant" COVID Strain May Already Be Spreading In US
    New Hyper-Infectious “Mutant” COVID Strain May Already Be Spreading In US

    Despite scientists’ insistence that mutated strains of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus had little significance, so-called “variants” discovered in the UK and South Africa have been found to be more infectious than the original. And while vaccine makers insist that their jabs will be just as effective against these hyper-infectious strains, the reality is there isn’t much data to comfortably back up these assertions.

    And while the world waits to see just how effective the various coronavirus vaccines will be in practice, members of Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force have warned that dangerous mutant strains that have yet to be isolated might already be spreading across the US.

    A report sent by the WH task force to various US states dated Jan. 3 warns of the possibility of a “USA variant”, which might explain Thursday’s record-breaking tally of new deaths (more than 4K).

    “This fall/winter surge has been at nearly twice the rate of rise of cases as the spring and summer surges. This acceleration suggests there may be a USA variant that has evolved here, in addition to the UK variant that is already spreading in our communities and may be 50% more transmissible,” the report said.

    The task force called for “aggressive mitigation…to match a much more aggressive virus” – which of course includes more restrictive lockdown measures and mandatory mask-wearing.

    “Without uniform implementation of effective face masking (two or three ply and well-fitting) and strict social distancing, epidemics could quickly worsen as these variants spread and become predominant.”

    Once again, we feel justified in asking: are these warnings legitimate, or is this just another ‘white lie’ cooked up by Dr. Fauci and the White House task force to scare Americans into compliance?

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 20:05

  • Trump Tweets From POTUS Account, Twitter Then Immediately Deletes It
    Trump Tweets From POTUS Account, Twitter Then Immediately Deletes It

    Update (2100ET): At 8:29pm ET, Trump – having been suspended from his personal twitter account  – decided to use the official twitter account of the US president, @POTUS, saying that “Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my accounts from their platform to silence me – and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me.” Trump then said that “Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long.”

    Trump, who has yet to create his own Parler account, continued: “We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”

    “We will not be SILENCED! Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely” the president boomed.

    He concluded with an all caps “STAY TUNED!”

    Just moments later, twitter deleted all of the above tweets from the @POTUS account. The last remaining tweet on that account which at 33.4 million has a little over a third of Trump’s original 88 million followers, is from December 23.

    The deletion was followed by a tweet from none other than Trump’s nemesis, Hillary Clinton, who gloated that Trump’s account has indeed been deleted as she urged him to do just before she lost the 2016 election to him.

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    Shortly after, Trump also tweeted using his campaign, @TeamTrump account. Literally 10 seconds later the account was suspended.

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    The deletion was confirmed by the TeamTrump social media director:

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    According to VOA reporter Steve Herman, a twitter spokesperson said that “As we’ve said, using another account to try to evade a suspension is against our rules. We’ve permanently suspended the @TeamTrump account.”

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    There was more: just before 10pm, Trump campaign digital director Gary Coby tweeted Dan Scavino to use his account for Trump… and was suspended moments later:

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    Trump’s son, Donald Jr., – whose twitter account has surprisingly not been banned yet – tweeted “Free Speech Is Under Attack! Censorship is happening like NEVER before! Don’t let them silence us. Sign up at DONJR.COM to stay connected!”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The night is not over yet, and as the great purge continues, nobody knows how many more voices will be silenced.

    And while we wait, it appears that America’s most popular talk show host in history, terminal cancer patient and close friend of Donald Trump, did what so many others will do in the coming days, and nuked his own account.

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    * * *

    Update (2000ET): As the purge accelerates, color us not so completely stunned that Google has just suspended Parler from its Play Store:

    “In order to protect user safety on Google Play, our longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence.

    All developers agree to these terms and we have reminded Parler of this clear policy in recent months.

    We’re aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.

    We recognize that there can be reasonable debate about content policies and that it can be difficult for apps to immediately remove all violative content, but for us to distribute an app through Google Play, we do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content.

    In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues.”

    – José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson.

    President Trump’s son, Don Jr, summed things up quite succinctly:

    We are living Orwell’s 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and what’s left is only there for a chosen few.

    This is absolute insanity!

    So the ayatollah, and numerous other dictatorial regimes can have Twitter accounts with no issue despite threatening genocide to entire countries and killing homosexuals etc… but The President of the United States should be permanently suspended.

    Mao would be proud.

    “Red Wedding” anyone?

    *  *  *

    Update (1830ET): With a post published on its blog, accompanied by a tweet from Twitter’s “Twitter Safety” account, the social media company has officially caved to pressure from a growing chorus of leftists, and agreed to permanently ban President Trump from twitter.

    It’s the capstone of a long day of growing censorship of Trump and conservative voices across the web, from Shopify to Apple (which as we noted below is trying to shadowban Parler).

    Here’s Twitter’s statement:

    Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump

    After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.

    In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action. Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.

    However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.

    The below is a comprehensive analysis of our policy enforcement approach in this case.

    Overview

    On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump tweeted:

    “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

    Shortly thereafter, the President tweeted:

    “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

    Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks. After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.

    Assessment

    We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    This determination is based on a number of factors, including:

    • President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.
    • The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.
    • The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.
    • The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.
    • Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

    As such, our determination is that the two Tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.

    Twitter shares dropped in after-hours trading on the news.

    Trump Campaign Adviser Stephen Miller tweeted immediately after (and we suspect will not be long before he is also suspended indefinitely) that “Big Tech wants to cancel; all Trump supporters.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    * * *

    Update (1705ET): Big tech is on a cancel crusade today – with Twitter suspending General Michael Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell and various other pro-Trump accounts (see below).

    Meanwhile, Apple is set to remove Twitter competitor Parler from its app store unless they enact a series of draconian crackdowns on free speech.

    Via BuzzFeed

    Apple has given Parler, the social network favored by conservatives and extremists, an ultimatum to implement a full moderation plan of its platform within the next 24 hours or face expulsion from the App store.

    In an email sent this morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Apple wrote to Parler’s executives that there had been complaints that the service had been used to plan and coordinate the storming of the US Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Wednesday. The insurrection left five people dead, including a police officer.

    We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property,” Apple wrote to Parler. “The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”

    Apple said that “to ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store,” Parler was required to submit an update and a “requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of the message,” which was sent on Friday morning. Apple said if it did not receive an update from the company within that time frame, the app would be removed from the App store.

    An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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    Now, the Washington Post reports that hundreds of Twitter employees demanded in a Friday letter that the company permanently suspend President Trump’s account over Wednesday’s ‘storming’ of the US Capitol, after police simply let protesters into the building.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    In an internal letter addressed to chief executive Jack Dorsey and his top executives viewed by The Washington Post, roughly 350 Twitter employees asked for a clear account of the company’s decision-making process regarding the President’s tweets the day that a pro-Trump mob breached the U.S. Capitol. Employees also requested an investigation into the past several years of corporate actions that led to Twitter’s role in the insurrection,” writes the Post.

    “Despite our efforts to serve the public conversation, as Trump’s megaphone, we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th,” reads the letter. “We request an investigation into how our public policy decisions led to the amplification of serious anti-democratic threats. We must learn from our mistakes in order to avoid causing future harm.”

    *  *  *

    Update (1625ET): Twitter has suspended both General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first National Security Adviser, and attorney Sidney Powell, as part of a crackdown on accounts engaging in ‘harmful activity.’

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    More purgings:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Check back for updates…

    *  *  *

    Cancel culture is back with a vengeance, after Reddit banned yet another pro-Trump forum, /r/DonaldTrump, from the public square in yet another example of leftist technocrats using outlier groups of extremists – in this case, the Capitol ‘raid’ – to justify their actions, while having given their own side a pass during four years of violence and incendiary rhetoric.

    “Reddit’s site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals. In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies and to offer support or resources as needed,” a Reddit spokesperson told an undoubtedly giddy Axios, who added “We have also taken action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the U.S. Capitol.

    In June, Reddit banned /r/The_Donald – one of the site’s largest political communities, right as the 2020 election began to heat up.

    The company’s Friday ban-hammer comes on the heels of several other platforms taking actions against Trump or his supporters. As Axios notes:

    • Twitch and Snapchat disabled Trump’s accounts.
    • Shopify took down two online stores affiliated with the president.
    • Facebook and Instagram banned Trump from posting for at least the next two weeks, and faced calls to boot him permanently, including from former First Lady Michelle Obama and high-ranking Hill Democrats.
    • Twitter froze Trump out of his account Wednesday before reinstating him Thursday once he deleted problematic tweets.
    • YouTube says it’s accelerating its enforcement of voter fraud claims against President Trump and others based on Wednesday’s events.
    • TikTok is removing content violations and redirecting hashtags like #stormthecapitol and #patriotparty to its community guidelines.

    Meanwhile, Facebook has removed the ‘Walk Away’ campaign from its platform and has banned founder Brandon Straka and his team – which had over 500,000 people who shared their testimonial videos about leaving the Democratic party.

    And in what’s got to be the icing on the cancel cake, Lehigh University just revoked a 33-year-old honorary degree given to President Trump in 1988, after the school’s board of trustees voted to do so on Thursday following the violence in the Capitol. 

    It seems like these institutions were just waiting for the right excuse…

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 20:01

  • Enough With The Outrage
    Enough With The Outrage

    Authored by John Hinderaker via PowerLine blog,

    Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot.

    You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

    You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples.

    Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded. Here is a video reminder:

    I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

    Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. Kamala Harris, for example, said about the riots in June:

    They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

    This was after 12 people had been killed in Democrat-sanctioned rioting, and billions of dollars in destruction committed. Have any Democrats denounced Black Lives Matter for its role in the riots? Not one. Has any Democrat denounced Antifa? Not that I know of, and some, like Keith Ellison, have specifically endorsed Antifa’s political violence.

    Democratic Party journalists have joined the party’s politicians in excusing riots. The New York Times, for example, published an admiring profile of Antifa. The Washington Post, likewise, has carried water for Antifa.

    The litany could go on for a long time. Yesterday’s assault on the Capitol was outrageous, but let’s not forget that last time out-of-control demonstrators interrupted business at the Capitol, shouted down senators and pounded on the doors of the Supreme Court, it was Democrats objecting to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

    And speaking of assaults on capitols, did any Democrats object when leftists occupied the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison for four months, destroying property, impeding public business and violently assaulting conservatives? Not a peep.

    Minnesota’s capitol has come under attack, too–or at least, Republicans who tried to gather there. In March 2017, Antifa Democrats besieged the state Capitol:

    On March 4, Antifa members…flooded the Capitol building to disrupt local Trump supporters who were gathering in conjunction with the national March 4 Trump movement.

    Many Antifa members attempted to conceal their identity by covering their faces with bandanas and goggles. [T]he rioters used mace, tasers, smoke bombs, and firecrackers on members of the pro-Trump rally, and punched others in the face.

    One of those arrested and prosecuted for carrying out this criminal violence was Linwood Kaine, son of Senator and Vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine. Yawn. Democrats couldn’t be bothered to criticize rioting by their own supporters, let alone their own family members.

    And let’s not forget James Hodgkinson, even though every reporter in America apparently has. Hodgkinson was the Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer who tried to assassinate the entire House Republican baseball team and very nearly succeeded, inflicting grievous and permanent injuries on Congressman Steve Scalise. Hodgkinson was not the usual 20-something loner, he was a middle-aged union official who was not insane, but just full of hate. His Facebook page was festooned with over-the-top attacks on Republicans, taken directly from speeches by Bernie Sanders and every other prominent Democrat.

    Sanders issued a one or two line statement distancing himself from his volunteer’s would-be murder spree. But neither Sanders nor any other Democrat wondered whether Hodgkinson’s attack was related to their own crazed conspiracy theories (Russia hoax, etc.) and other lies that they routinely direct against Republicans.

    This could go on and on, but the point is obvious: Democratic Party politicians and reporters have no standing to complain about political violence (let alone mostly peaceful protests) until they get their own house in order.

    Today we are awash in ritual denunciations of President Trump, based on yesterday’s riot. Democratic House members have introduced new articles of impeachment, which I assume charge him with responsibility for the disorder. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have urged Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, alleging that President Trump is disabled or incompetent so as to remove him from office.

    These initiatives are ridiculous on their face. Trump will be out of office in a matter of days, long before any such “remedies” could be implemented, even if they were even remotely warranted. What is going on, obviously, is not an attack on Trump, but on his legacy. The Democrats–aided and abetted by some Republicans, unfortunately–are trying to discredit the president so thoroughly that not just his personality, or unjustifiable acts like his apparent encouragement of those who “wouldn’t stand for” the Democrats’ widespread voter fraud are denounced, but, far more important, his many accomplishments in office.

    Trump was, despite his flaws, a very good president. He has impressive achievements to his name, almost all of which the Democrats want to reverse, to the great prejudice of the American people. This is what Chuck Schumer et al. are trying to achieve–a comprehensive repudiation of Trump’s positive legacy.

    Tax cuts? Discredited! An America-First foreign policy? Discredited! Enforcing the immigration laws, which is the president’s constitutional duty? Discredited! Stopping the China sellout? Discredited! Standing up to Russia? Discredited! Supporting the Israelis? Discredited! Cutting back on unproductive federal regulations? Discredited! Encouraging U.S. energy production and independence? Discredited! Objecting to political correctness and cancel culture? Discredited! Standing up for America as a positive force in world history? Discredited!

    It is blindingly obvious that in the last days of the Trump administration, the Democrats are laying the groundwork for a comprehensive repudiation of the considerable achievements of the last four years, tying them all to Trump’s sometimes-unfortunate personality, and in particular to yesterday’s riot, which was small beer compared with countless riots that the Democrats have either cheered on or indulgently tolerated.

    What is important for conservatives is not to defend Donald Trump’s personality, still less the events of the last 24 hours, but rather to defend, aggressively, the solid achievements of an administration that surmounted four years of hysterical and dishonest obstructionism by the Democrats. It is unfortunate that some Republicans, joining in the Democrats’ hyena troop, do not seem to understand this.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 19:45

  • "Sudden Stratospheric Warming" May Trigger Wild Winter Weather For Northeast 
    “Sudden Stratospheric Warming” May Trigger Wild Winter Weather For Northeast 

    Readers, some troubling developments in the Arctic may impact weather conditions in the US and Europe. In about a week, from late December to early January, temperatures miles above the Arctic have soared. This means that the polar vortex could be splitting in two and may produce wild winter weather in the weeks ahead, according to CBS

    The massive spike in temperatures is happening miles above the North Pole. The sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event, experts say, could produce significant winter events across the Northern Hemisphere. 

    This could mean parts of the US and Europe may soon experience paralyzing snowstorms and frigid temperatures. 

    SWW involves warming temperatures 50,000 to 100,000 feet above the Arctic that disrupts the Arctic stratosphere, known as the polar vortex. 

    Last winter, there was limited disruption as the cold air was limited to the Arctic, which resulted in less snow for Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states. But happening now, the SWW is weakening the polar vortex as it wobbles and can split off into two, pushing colder air into the US, Europe, and Asia. 

    CBS News Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli tweeted an image to illustrate what is happening in the Stratosphere right now. He said, “polar Vortex, which typically would be near the North Pole and very cold (purple) is displaced south and split as the Sudden Stratospheric warming occurs.” 

    Weather models suggest the first round of colder temperatures will occur over Europe and eastern Asia through mid-January. Then the US by late month. 

    “Along with a gradual building of cold air over the coming weeks in the East, the jet stream setup will provide many opportunities for snowstorms. While many will not materialize, with a prolonged pattern favorable for extreme winter weather, the odds are that pieces of the puzzle will come together for a couple of memorable winter storms,” CBS News said. 

    Dr. Judah Cohen, an expert of SSW events at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, expects extreme winter weather from the SSW could last for at least a month. 

    “Following an SSW, the period of increased risk of cold air outbreaks and snowstorms usually lasts from four to eight weeks. It is not cold and snowing continuously, but rather it is episodic,” Cohen explained.

    BAMWX’s Kirk Hinz outlined earlier this week that “we are starting to see a change in the forecast atmospheric pattern drivers ahead that *could* lead to a more favorable pattern for wintry risks beyond Jan ~15th.” 

    Breaking down the risk for more wintery weather, Hinz showed Jan. 13 to Jan. 20 is a timeframe when increased probabilities of snowstorms from Ohio Valley, Mid Atlantic, and Northeast areas could materialize. 

    Commodity desks tend to look at weather models a couple of weeks out. If an SSW event is underway and colder temperatures are ahead – this could be beneficial for natgas prices. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 19:25

  • Nearly Half Of U.S. Voters Believe Health Officials Have Been Misleading With COVID Data
    Nearly Half Of U.S. Voters Believe Health Officials Have Been Misleading With COVID Data

    Submitted by Planet Free Will

    Nearly 50% of U.S. voters believe that public health officials have been misleading when providing data on the coronavirus pandemic, a recent Just the News Daily poll shows. According to the poll, forty-eight percent of voters believe public health leaders have “misrepresented the data” to build support for certain policies while 34% of respondents say officials “reported the true facts” on the pandemic. 

    The remaining 18% were unsure one way or the other. 

    As Just the News notes:

    Official study and management of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated massive amounts of epidemiological data such as transmission rates, death rates, and other virological information. Many analysts and commentators have argued that public officials have offered misleading interpretations of these data over the course of the public health crisis.

    The data comes in the wake of Dr. Anthony Fauci admitting he lied to Americans to manipulate their acceptance of a Covid-19 vaccine.

    Fauci admitted in December that he intentionally deceived the public on what percentage of the population will need to be immunized to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 and bring a return to normalcy.

    “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci said. 

    “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85,” he added.

    Fauci ultimately admitted he doesn’t know the exact number of vaccinated Americans that could result in herd immunity.

    Also likely adding to the mistrust in public data, the World Health Organization admitted last month that the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test – which was once hailed as the gold standard of COVID testing – can produce large numbers of false positives.

    PCR test results have been used by states and countries to justify the lockdown and social distancing policies that have lead to the decimation of small business and mental health.

    The FDA has recently joined the WHO in admitting that there is a notable risk of false results from the standard PCR-Test.

    “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alerting patients and health care providers of the risk of false results… with the Curative SARS-Cov-2 test,” the FDA announced on Monday.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 19:05

  • "Chilling Video" – Miami Ambush Caught On Camera As Multiple Shooters Wound Six 
    “Chilling Video” – Miami Ambush Caught On Camera As Multiple Shooters Wound Six 

    The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting downturn in the economy has unleashed a socio-economic bomb across many metro areas. Small and medium-sized companies have shuttered operations, the labor market continues to deteriorate, and violent crime is surging.

    All of this has led to a mass exodus of city dwellers from metro areas, escaping inner cities for quiet suburbs, or better yet, rural communities. 

    As a reminder of why people are fleeing metro areas in droves, CBS Miami released a security video of an intense shootout near Northwest 25th Avenue and 36th Street.

    Miami Police said six people were injured in the incident when multiple shooters ambushed them. 

    The full video shows three people exiting a gray Dodge Charger approach the Honda, and then begin to unleash a hail of bullets. 

    “It’s a very chilling video,” Miami Police Officer Kenia Fallat.

    “When the barrage of bullets took place, they just started running for their lives,” said Fallat.

    Police tell CBS Miami they have no suspects nor a motive behind the shooting. 

    One of the shooters appears to fire a semi-automatic or even an automatic rifle judging by the large muzzle flashes – this type of urban warfare is generally found on the streets of a third world country – not the United States. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 18:45

  • Insurrection
    Insurrection

    By Philip Marey, Senior US strategist at Rabobank

    Summary

    • Yesterday, Trump supporters stormed Congress. The ever increasing polarization of US politics and society has reached a level that poses a serious threat to the stability of the country.

    • The question is now: is this the culmination of the civil unrest in the United States, or is this just another warning signal that the country is heading toward something worse?

    • If we look at the underlying mechanism of polarization, it appears to be self-reinforcing. New events or information will be interpreted through two different filters.

    • What’s more, economic policies aimed at income redistribution will not appease Trump supporters. It’s not the economy, it’s identity.

    • If the US does not find an off-ramp from this route of increasing polarization, we are only going to see a further escalation of civil unrest.

    Introduction

    Yesterday, Trump supporters stormed Congress as it was debating the ratification of the Electoral College votes. Television showed images that we are used to see in some former second or third world countries. Commentators talked about insurrection, sedition, coup, and even civil war. Meanwhile, President-Elect Biden was explaining on television that America was better than this. Finally, Trump tweeted a video calling for his supporters to go home, but stressed again that the election had been stolen. Today, he stated that there would be a peaceful transfer of power on January 20. However, according to CNN some cabinet members are talking about invoking the 25th Amendment.

    As we noted last year in Civil unrest, in a polarized society trust in institutions is vulnerable. We explained how the polarization in the US is a process that has been decades in the making. No matter who had won the elections, the turbulence in US politics and society was not likely to pass. The ever increasing polarization of US politics and society has reached a level that poses a serious threat to the stability of the country.

    The question is now: is this the culmination of the civil unrest in the United States, or is this just another warning signal that the country is heading toward something worse?

    Polarization

    Last summer, in our special Civil unrest, we addressed the protests against COVID-19 measures and against racism. We argued that they reflected a lack of trust in US institutions that has been growing since the mid-1960s. We also noted that trust in institutions is especially vulnerable in a polarized society. We showed that since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the US political system had become increasingly polarized. At present, political affiliation has become part of someone’s identity. This explains the extreme hostility between the two parties and especially their hard core supporters. However, from a dynamic perspective this poses a problem. How do we get out of this hostile environment? Some would argue that Americans will be shocked by the insurrection in Washington DC and the country will come together after President Biden takes office. However, Trump supporters seemed euphoric rather than shocked. We should not ignore that many Americans are living in one of two very different worlds. Either you are a Democrat and watch the mainstream media, or you are a Trumpist living on alternative facts. The first group will be shocked, the second emboldened by the insurrection. Invoking the 25th Amendment will only reinforce the Trumpists’ view that the elections were stolen. New events or information will be interpreted through two different filters. This will only reinforce polarization.

    Economy or identity?

    Then there are economists who think this is just a reflection of economic inequality. Four years of income redistribution by a Biden administration would bring back white blue collar workers to the Democratic Party or at least appease them. However, this policy will not work because it is based on the wrong diagnosis. Our statistical analysis in Economy or identity? showed that the data do not support this economic hypothesis. Based on county-level variations in voting behavior, economic conditions and demographic features, we actually found that in 2016 economic factors led to an increased vote for Hillary Clinton. Instead, demographics explained the Trump vote. Therefore, economic policy will not bring back the Trump voters. They have moved to the Republican Party for the same reason that many Southern Democrats changed party affiliation after the Civil Rights Act. Therefore, it is unlikely that Biden’s economic policies will appease the Trump supporters. This is not about economics, although that may be difficult to understand for economists. Americans are living in two different worlds, but they have to find a way to live together in one country. This requires a bipartisan approach aimed at alleviating the anxieties that come with changing demographics. Obviously, this is quite a challenge in this era of extreme polarization.

    Conclusion

    The question was: is this the culmination of the civil unrest in the United States, or is this just another warning signal that the country is heading toward something worse? If we look at the underlying mechanism of polarization, it appears to be self-reinforcing. And it will not be stopped by economic policies that redistribute income. Americans will have to find a way to live together in one country. If the US does not find an off-ramp from this route of increasing polarization, we are only going to see a further escalation of civil unrest.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 18:25

  • Raoul's Framework for 2021 and Beyond
    Raoul’s Framework for 2021 and Beyond

    Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal returns to the Daily Briefing to share with Ash Bennington his updated thesis for the new year. Raoul argues that the prevailing narrative around reflation is a “one-sided bet” (short bonds, short dollars, long commodities, and long equities) that offers little upside, remains vulnerable to the risk of shutdowns, leaves a lasting scar on the labor market that will take years to recover from, and causes a spike in the U.S. dollar, which would serve as a “wrecking ball” for a host of reflation risk assets. Instead, Raoul prefers bonds, a sprinkling of puts on the S&P 500, and of course crypto, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum. Raoul and Ash reflect on the tremendous rally in Bitcoin and discuss how Metcalfe’s law applies to it and Ethereum. They also discuss the implications of the rise in COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations and how those factors will affect markets and the economy. In the intro, editor Jack Farley reports on the latest jobs numbers and reviews price action in Tesla, gold, and silver.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 18:07

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Today’s News 8th January 2021

  • France's 'Unwinnable War': Macron Seeks Exit Strategy From Mali After 8 Years Of Fighting
    France’s ‘Unwinnable War’: Macron Seeks Exit Strategy From Mali After 8 Years Of Fighting

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    Eight years into France’s campaign in Mali, Paris is looking for an exit strategy and is expected to announce a troop drawdown soonaccording to a report from AFP.

    “[France] faces tough choices over how to keep pursuing Islamist extremists without becoming bogged down in a potentially unwinnable war.

    …Anxious to avoid becoming mired in a long Afghan-style conflict, Paris is preparing to announce a withdrawal of the 600 additional troops it deployed to the Sahel last year.”

    Via Reuters

    There are approximately 5,100 French troops stationed in Africa’s Sahel region. France is preparing to announce the withdrawal of 600 troops soon, and President Emmanuel Macron is considering bringing more home before the next presidential election in Spring 2022.

    The news comes at a time of heightened violence in the region. French airstrikes reportedly hit a wedding in central Mali on Sunday. Local sources said up to 20 wedding guests were killed.

    Over the past 10 days, five French soldiers have been killed in Mali, bringing the total number of French troops killed in the conflict to 50.

    France began its war against Islamist militants in the region in 2013.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    French hawks argue a withdrawal from the Sahel is untenable since the al-Qaeda-linked militants are stronger than ever. Paris is also fighting the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, a branch of ISIS that did not exist in the region before France’s intervention.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 02:00

  • Why One Conservative Is Proud Of Yesterday's Raid On Capitol Hill
    Why One Conservative Is Proud Of Yesterday’s Raid On Capitol Hill

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    There is a simple rule that one needs to understand when examining the plight of conservatives and liberty advocates in history, and it is this:

    Conservatives are not allowed to take action to stop the abuses against them. Whenever they do, they are summarily chastised as villains, or their accomplishments are twisted into something that is “shameful”. They are only meant to sit idle like punching bags waiting around for others to take out their frustrations on them.

    The protest at the Capitol Building this week was no exception, but before I get to that I need to address a propaganda meme which is making the rounds in the liberty movement right now: The notion that the whole event was “staged”.

    The assertion is that the raid on the Capitol was some kind of theater designed to “make conservatives look bad” as well as “give Congress an excuse to pull back from their opposition of the electoral vote count.”

    I have to say that this is a very clever propaganda ploy, as it accomplishes a couple of subtle but important manipulations.

    First, by claiming that the storming of the capitol was staged to make conservatives look bad, this impplies that the action is something to be ashamed of.

    Second, by claiming that the action was designed to disrupt the opposition process to the electoral vote count, the suggestion is that the electoral vote count matters.

    New Flash, folks! Congress wasn’t going to do jack about the electoral college. They were going to listen to themselves talk for several long hours and accomplish very little. This is what politicians do. It is terribly naive to expect them to do anything else. Concerns about ballot fraud are NEVER going to be addressed by an independent investigation and Congress has no intention of doing anything about this. The very idea that the protest somehow sabotaged the last chance to “stop the steal” is idiotic.

    By extension, there is no concrete evidence so far that the raid was staged. None. Police pulling back from the line because of an angry crowd is not evidence. Cops pulled back from angry crowds of BLM protesters all summer long; does that mean this was some kind of elaborate scheme to make BLM look bad? Or, did they just make themselves look bad?

    I understand that this assertion taps into the conspiracy brain of the average liberty movement person, but that is kind of the point, isn’t it?

    It is not surprising that this type of disinformation campaign is being planted into the greater discussion. As noted, the establishment DOES NOT want conservatives to take action independently, and they know that unlike far-left extremists we actually care about the image of our movement. So we are faced with a two pronged attack:

    The mainstream media and the political left accuses conservatives of “shameful” behavior bordering on “terrorism”. At the same time, rumors are spread within the liberty movement that the whole thing was a “false flag”, thereby reinforcing the dishonest claim that the protest was shameful and not something we should be engaged in.

    The entire thrust of this psyop is to convince us to never engage in protest action or direct action again, or we might “look bad”.

    Frankly, who cares at this point? No matter what we do we are going to be painted as the villains by the media, so the only thing left is direct action. There is only one way the corruption within our own government is going to be stopped, and it’s not through diplomacy or voting.

    The election does not matter. Trump does not matter. At least, not in the grand scheme of things. Whoever sits in the White House is irrelevant to the bigger problem at hand; and Trump staying in the White House does not change the fact that conservatives are going to have to unify and aggressively defend our freedoms to change our dysfunctional system and remove influencing globalists from power.

    Trump’s own cabinet is LOADED with banking elites, members of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as numerous globalists. Bottlenecking the conservative response and putting all our eggs in the Trump basket is foolish. The raid on the capitol, on the other hand, actually means something.

    It sends a message, first and foremost, that we are not going to sit idle anymore; that we are not going to tolerate further government overreach. Conservatives and even moderates are fed up. We have endured numerous trespasses by state governments during the lockdowns. We have lost our businesses and our jobs. For the past year we have witnessed the social justice cult burn down neighborhoods, hijack city streets and loot with impunity while leftists claim they are the “victims”, and now conservatives are being called terrorists because we protest. We have had enough, and the events in Washington are just the beginning of our response.

    Rather than being ashamed, we should be proud of what happened. Consider this for a moment – What did the protesters actually do that was so terrible? Stroll into the chambers of congress? How dare they! Some minor property damage? At least they didn’t burn the place down like Antifa would have done. Destroying Nancy Pelosi’s name plaque? That’s just funny.

    The media and the political left is acting like these people committed an atrocity against humanity, but they did NOTHING WRONG, and some were shot by law enforcement in the process.

    Now, juxtapose the media’s response to the conservative capitol protest getting aggressive to the media response when BLM and Antifa lunatics protested.

    Black Lives Matter spent the better part of the past year burning neighborhoods to the ground, destroying private businesses and attacking innocent people in the streets. BLM and Antifa attempted to take over large swaths of Seattle and Portland, declared the areas “autonomous zones”, then started randomly handing out firearms. The media calls it “peaceful protesting” and leftist politicians proclaim the actions righteous and just.

    Even now leftists are trying to argue that the BLM and Antifa protests were a model of peaceful action when compared to the events in the capitol.

    Does this look peaceful to you:

    So, endless violent action is peaceful action when leftists do it, but limited aggression by conservatives is the same as terrorism?

    Trump tweeted that conservatives should remain peaceful because we are the party of “law and order”. This is inaccurate and misleading. We do not blindly worship the law or law enforcement, we respect the law as long as it is rooted in our founding principles. What we value is our inherent freedoms and the Bill of Rights, and when these things come under threat it is perfectly justifiable to act, and if peaceful measures don’t work then non-peaceful measures are all that is left.

    We don’t have the luxury of caring about the mainstream narrative anymore. The propaganda is telling us to “stay in our lane”, shut up, sit down and watch America be dismantled piece by piece. My rule is, whatever the establishment clearly wants us to do, we should do the opposite. The narrative surrounding the events in the capitol makes it obvious that they do NOT want conservatives to leave their homes and take matters into our own hands. Doing the opposite is the only thing that makes sense.

    *  *  *

    If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/08/2021 – 00:05

  • You Can Now Buy A Tiny Bulletproof Home For The Apocalypse 
    You Can Now Buy A Tiny Bulletproof Home For The Apocalypse 

    Whether it is the apocalypse or the US’s more immediate socio-economic collapse, sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, demand for doomsday bunkers has exploded. While only the ultra-wealthy can afford luxury doomsday condos buried hundreds of feet below the surface in old missile silos, millennials, who are mostly broke, have very little options to protect themselves from surging violence across major metros – until now. 

    Already popular among the millennial generation are tiny homes, no thanks to the Federal Reserve who has unleashed a massive housing bubble this year, sending affordability to decade lows. 

    This has allowed Argentina-based tiny homebuilder Grandio, to design and build prefab concrete tiny homes that cost around $75,000, and also these homes are bulletproof. 

    “We are only in the early stages of our sales and marketing activities, but the interest we are getting from prospective buyers and partners is outstanding with requests flowing in every day,” Jose Martin, an architect at Grandio, told Business Insider

    Martin said much of the inquiries for the tiny bulletproof home are coming from North America – comes at a time when the pandemic has unleashed a socio-economic bomb across major metros as hundreds of thousands of people living in cities rush to rural areas to escape the chaos. 

    In November, WSJ noted that tiny home sales are increasing as people look for refuge during the coronavirus pandemic. 

    Besides doomsday bunkers, it appears tiny bulletproof homes could be the next big trend as America, in less than one year, has transformed into a chaotic mess because of the virus pandemic. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 23:45

  • How An Austrian And British Malthusian Brainwashed A Generation Of Americans
    How An Austrian And British Malthusian Brainwashed A Generation Of Americans

    Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The creation of false opposites has been a long-standing obstacle to human progress.

    From the ancient pleasure-seeking Epicureans who argued against the logic-heavy Stoics of ancient Rome to the war of “salvation through faith vs works” that schismed western Christianity, to the chaotic emotional energy driving the Jacobin mobs of France whose passions were only matched by the radical Cartesian logic of their Girondin enemies; humanity has long been manipulated by oligarchs who knew how to set the species to war against itself. Although these operations have taken many forms, the desired effect has always been the same: divide-to-conquer bloodbaths which drowned out the saner voices of Cicero (executed in 44 BCE), Thomas More (executed in 1535 CE), or Jean Sylvain Bailly (executed in 1793 CE).

    Today’s polarization across the Trans-Atlantic world has reached a fevered pitch with the “right wing conservatives” shouting for liberty and less government while left wing liberals call for more government and top-down reforms of the system (with Great Reset technocrats laughing in the background).

    Everyone with half a brain should be able to sense that the danger of civil war and economic meltdown hang over our destinies like a sword of Damocles, but instead of hearing calls for restoring the SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN traditions of American System banking that author Ellen Brown recently documented in her powerful new essay, we find only feuding sects that assert we must EITHER have top-down centralized planning OR bottom-up free markets laissez faire policies devoid of any government intervention.

    To the degree that this false debate continues the overtones of France’s 1789-94 bloodbath will be heard growing louder with every passing day.

    Keynes vs Hayek: A False Dualism

    In this first of a three-part series, I will argue that the source of this confusion among Americans was first concocted in London during the height of the depression, centering on the figures of two London-based Malthusian hedonists. One was top-down economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and the other played the role of his supposed opponent in the form of “bottom up” advocate Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992).

    To put it another way, these two fundamentally anti-republican ideologues whose lives were each devoted to the hereditary systems of empire constructed a widely publicized debate that asserted two opposing economic theories, either 1) government must spend arbitrarily to create jobs OR 2) government must cut budgets, end social safety nets and public services and let the strong survive leaving each unit of society to its own (supposedly) self-regulating passions.

    The constants among both apparent opponents (who remained friends throughout their lives) were that 1) neither believed that INTENTION or MIND should govern economic policy (Keynes believed in arbitrary “make work” which could not differentiate between the qualitative difference of a $100 paycheck to a digger of random holes vs $100 paycheck to an engineer building a dam), and 2) both believed equally in the universal validity of Malthus’s population theories, and of Bernard Mandeville’s satanic belief that personal vice creates public virtue. Both theories have underpinned British imperial grand strategy for over two centuries.

    It is also important to hold in mind that this 1932 debate emerged at a time that the world government agenda driven by the Bank of England and League of Nations were on the ascendency. This operation, in which both Keynes and von Hayek were thoroughly enmeshed, demanded fascist regimes control the world under a “scientifically managed” bankers’ dictatorship.

    One month after the London Times October 17, 1932 publication began to print arguments from proponents of both schools on how to best end the depression, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the U.S. presidency.

    With his presidential victory, a specific form of economic planning was restored to the republic that had nothing to do with either school of Keynes or Hayek and everything to do with something uniquely embedded in the U.S. Constitutional traditions that petrified the hereditary empires of Europe’s old nobility.

    In the years leading up to his victory, FDR had worked closely with a grouping of bipartisan American congressmen and senators to revive a form of political economy which involved the paradoxical coexistence of increased government involvement together with massive increase in entrepreneurism, and private sector growth. The fact that FDR is attacked by communists for being a capitalist shill while being simultaneously attacked by capitalists for being a communist shill to this very day is a sign of this ongoing confusion and a testament to the effectiveness of British intelligence propaganda.

    The systemic inability for modern Americans to resolve the ‘FDR paradox’ today is due entirely to a sleight of hand pulled by the very same imperial power that has never forgiven the USA for declaring its independence in 1776.

    What Ben Franklin Created

    When Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790) had orchestrated his life-long project of establishing a new nation on this earth founded upon the principle of the sanctity of the individual (enunciated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence) and the sanctity of the General Welfare (as outlined in the Constitution’s 1787 pre-amble), he and his leading co-thinkers demonstrated a profoundly philosophical understanding of the political economy and also nature of true freedom which citizens must re-learn – quickly.

    In order to give practical meaning to the ideals of individual (bottom up) freedom and national (top down) collective well-being enshrined in America’s founding documents, a new system of political economy was created by Franklin and his closest followers among the founding fathers.

    This new system did not arise ex nihilo but was itself based upon the greatest traditions of French dirigisme of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), and earlier Cameralist schools of economic planning which grew out of the creation of the first modern nation states of France’s Louis XI and England’s Henry VII. For the first time in history (at least since the short-lived effort by Charlemagne in the 8th century), the idea of “money”, “value”, “profit” were tied not to the passive capital off which feudal landlords fed parasitically, or bounty to be looted, but rather the improvement of the lives of people from whom the legitimacy of government was recognized to originate.

    Throughout the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin became a leading American force for this school of thought which was outlined in his 1729 On the Necessity for a Paper Currency. In this influential essay, the young scientist argued for a system of finance, colonial scrip, and value governed by the growth of manufacturing and full spectrum economics. In his essay Franklin battled the British establishment who argued that the colonies should forever remain agrarian, backward and cash cropping, saying:

    “As Providence has so ordered it, that not only different Countries, but even different Parts of the same Country, have their peculiar most suitable Productions; and like wise that different Men have Genius’s adapted to Variety of different Arts and Manufactures, Therefore Commerce, or the Exchange of one Commodity or Manufacture for another, is highly convenient and beneficial to Mankind.”

    Some of Franklin’s leading protégé’s who carried this tradition into the 19th century included the first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), John Jay (1745-1829), Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), Robert Morris (1734-1806), Isaac Roosevelt (1726-1794) (great-great grandfather to Franklin Roosevelt) and later Henry Clay (1777-1852), John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Matthew Carey (1760-1839). Matthew Carey’s son Henry C. Carey (1793-1879) became a leading economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln.

    All of these figures defended the right of the young republic to develop “full spectrum economics” in order to gain true independence from the City of London.

    Henry C. Carey’s Seminal works that rallied the nation’s patriots to the cause of the American System included The Principles of Political Economy (1840), How to Outdo England Without Fighting Her (1865), Unity of Law (1872) and more. It was in The Harmony of Interests (1856) that Carey famously foretold of the emerging global fight between open vs closed systems that would define the post Civil War decades:

    “Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

    What did the “American System” Do?

    While the British System of laissez fair free trade demanded that governments do nothing, regulate nothing and plan nothing in order for the magical creative animal spirits of the self-regulating markets to “do their thing”, the American System took a very different approach.

    By applying protectionism, national banking, internal improvements and public credit, the American System was driven by the idea that “value” was located not in money or any material thing existent in the ephemeral “now” but rather in the development of the creative powers of mental activity of the people. Lincoln outlined this concept beautifully in his powerful “On Discoveries and Inventions” (1858) and this principle governed the creation of the Greenbacks when private bankers made every effort to cripple the Union’s access to credit needed to win the war.

    Using protection, all nations have the right and even duty to prevent the cheap dumping of foreign goods by imposing a tariff upon imports, thus ensuring that local production be favored. Dumping was an old practice of economic warfare which the British had honed since the 17th century crushing its colonies’ efforts to build up local manufacturing on countless occasions (and continues to be a key element of economic warfare masquerading behind the veneer of globalization in our current age).

    As demonstrated in the LPAC documentary 1932, whenever American System-followers in Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, Spain and France applied protection, rail, and dirigiste credit, prosperity, independence and abundance flourished. Whenever these policies were abandoned, those nations were crippled and manipulated into wars by foreign interests.

    Between 1880-1930, this system was led by nationalist forces affiliated with President Garfield (1831-1881), President Ulysses Grant (1822-1885), Governor William Gilpin (1813-1894), President McKinley (1843-1901), Secretary of State James Blaine (1830-1893), and President Warren Harding (1865-1923). Each time it began to take hold the system was derailed by timely assassinations and it was only able to emerge once more in 1932.

    How Franklin Roosevelt Revived the American System

    With Roosevelt’s entry into office, the British Empire (using its Wall Street lackies) that had intentionally orchestrated the Great Depression in 1929 had realized that the American System was coming back to life for the first time in decades.

    While Warren Harding’s short-lived presidency saw a few noble attempts to resurrect the McKinley-Lincoln traditions of the republican party, his convenient “death by oyster poisoning” in 1923 ensured that the revival of the American System would not succeed. Over Harding’s dead body, free trade, bank deregulation, and speculation ran rampant throughout the “roaring twenties” led by Andrew Mellon, the Morgan dynasty and their puppet Calvin Coolidge. This decay turned the once-productive industrial economy of America into a casino of bubbles built on unpayable debts and over-extended broker call loans that went up in smoke in 1929.

    The “solution” that the financial oligarchy provided to the world in anticipation of the fear and starvation unleashed by the planned meltdown of the banking system was a novel economic miracle solution called “fascism”. This system soon swept the world from Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain. Within Britain, Canada and the USA, Wall Street/London sponsored fascist movements arose with lightning speed offering to solve all financial woes “and put food on the table” for millions of traumatized citizens. In a world of fear and instability, the masses were proving all too willing to ignore Ben Franklin’s sage advice by giving up their liberties to achieve a bit of security.

    It was within this context that Franklin Roosevelt’s call to kick the money changers out of the temple and declare war on the abuses of Wall Street was an unexpected breath of fresh air for millions of suffocating citizens. With FDR’s sabotage of the 1933 London Conference, the empire gasped as their carefully laid plans for world government run by local fascist enforcers were going up in smoke. Wall Street’s assassination plot in February 1933 and a military coup plot in 1934 failed, as the Pecora Commission shone the light of truth upon the abuses of those bankers that created the great depression.

    After putting dozens of leading bankers in prison, prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora described the operation years later: “Under the surface of the governmental regulation of the securities market, the same forces that produced the riotous speculative excesses of the ‘wild bull market’ of 1929 still give evidence of their existence and influence. Though repressed for the present, it cannot be doubted that, given a suitable opportunity, they would spring back to their pernicious activity.”

    In Washington, a bi-partisan network of patriotic statesmen representing the Lincoln-McKinley-Harding traditions rose to prominence and shaped in large measure the policies which came to be known as the New Deal together with associated bank reforms of the Glass-Steagall, national credit, protectionism, and large-scale megaprojects known as the “four corners” vision (Tennessee Valley authority/Rural Electrification, Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee dam/Colorado River development, and St Lawrence Seaway).

    Much like the Belt and Road Initiative today, these large-scale macro projects governed the tens of thousands of smaller state, county and municipal “micro” projects within a top-down dynamic.

    The Keynesian Myth

    Even though today’s popular narrative has asserted that FDR’s New Deal was a Keynesian innovation managed by the nebulous “Brain Trust”, the reality is that Keynes believed that FDR was a buffoon and FDR believed the Fabian eugenicist could only be considered a detached ivory tower mathematician but not a competent economist.

    In her autobiography, FDR’s Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins recorded the 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her: “I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal stated he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.”

    The ‘American System’ Caucus

    Those forgotten forces who have been nearly written out of history were American statesmen who had battled against the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, stood up to the police state apparatus begun by Teddy Roosevelt’s FBI in 1908, and against America’s turn towards imperialism with the death of McKinley. They were the men who risked much to stand up against the League of Nations World government schemes launched in 1919, and against the Wall Street/CFR takeover of U.S. foreign and internal policy.

    Senator George Norris showcasing the web of controls managed by the Wall Street oligarchs

    These names which should be celebrated today, interfaced closely with FDR and his allies Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace. Some of their names include Senator Robert Lafollette Jr (R-Iowa) (1895-1953), Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY) (1877-1953), Sen. Peter Norbeck (R-SD) (1870-1936), Sen. Edward Costigan (D-Colo.) (1874-1939), Senator George Norris (R-Neb) (1861-1944) and Rep. William Lemke (R-N.D.)(1878-1950). These were a few of the leading men that some historians have dubbed “the American System Caucus”, and while this article doesn’t leave room for their story, rest assured that more will be said about them in a future installment.

    While it would be a lie to say that there was no such thing as a “Brain Trust” or that Keynesian economists and Rhodes Scholars were not to be found among this group, the idea that this was the “cause” of the New Deal is a pure fiction.

    Taking Back Control of Credit Policy

    While surgery was begun on the cancerous financial system and unpayable debts depriving the nation of the credit needed to commence a reconstruction policy of the physical economy (over 50% of U.S. industrial potential was destroyed and unemployment hit 25%), Franklin Roosevelt’s long time ally Harry Hopkins worked with Harold Ickes to provide emergency work for over 3 million people in the first months under the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration.

    Although FDR could not destroy the private Federal Reserve that had taken control of U.S. monetary policy 30 years earlier, he was able to impose his own man (Marinner Eccles) onto it in 1934, forcing the beast to start obeying national law for the first time ever. Despite this maneuver, Wall Street oligarchs continued to sabotage FDR’s recovery by constricting credit, refusing to purchase treasury notes at strategic moments, or even speculating against the U.S. dollar itself. To get around these manipulations, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was brought online to function as a surrogate national bank channeling billions of dollars into small and medium businesses, industrial growth, and infrastructure projects.

    Psy Ops vs the New Deal: The Rise of the Austrian School

    Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Mellon-Morgan-Rockefeller interests ran a multifaceted psychological war against the population. After their coup plans failed due to Gen. Butler’s brave whistleblowing in 1934, these groups created a think tank calling itself the “American Liberty League”. The irony of the word “Liberty” used by an organization whose controllers sponsored fascism before and even during WWII should not be lost on anyone.

    Through powerful oligarchs like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, the Morgans, the Warburgs, the Duponts, and the Rockefellers, the Liberty League controlled the majority of mainstream media outlets, radio stations, and publishing houses in the USA, at the same time they co-ordinated with the newly re-organized FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. These groups worked hard to paint FDR as a Keynesian who only created inflationary “make work jobs” without any concrete intention for the future productive powers of labor. Through this sleight of hand, FDR’s enemies were able to invent a straw man that they could then refute by promoting the anti-Keynesian model known as the “Austrian School” that had formerly grown out of the British System inspired theories of Carl Menger (retainer for the Habsburg empire) and his aristocratic disciples Ludwig von Mises, Friedrick von Hayek, Frank Knight, and Sir John Claphan.

    By 1940, the American Liberty League formerly disbanded. However with FDR’s death its cabal of controllers spawned dozens of new think tanks that were enmeshed with the Council on Foreign Relations and Mont Pelerin Society mothership founded in 1947 by von Hayek and a group of eugenics-loving oligarchs whom we will encounter in a following report..

    Over the coming decades, the Liberty League morphed into hundreds of new think tanks which began with the American Enterprise Association (AEA) [later American Enterprise Institute] founded by Liberty League leader Raymond Moley and sponsored by General Mills, Chemical Bank and Bristol Meyers.

    Other think tanks built up by this network over the years included the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, Mises Institute, Manhattan Institute etc… which would set the groundwork for the later “conservative revolution” of the 1970s. This “Austrian School” revolution would spring to life once the 1945-1971 Keynesian perversion of Bretton Woods ended with the 1971 floating of the dollar off of the fixed exchange rate gold reserve system.

    Under this post-1971 era, a new god of the “markets” would replace the old god of “the state” and a new ethic of post-industrial consumerism would replace the former system of Keynesian controls that defined the post-WWII era. Those anti-Keynesian leaders of the American System tradition such as Henry Dexter White, Franklin Roosevelt, Wendell Wilkie, Sumner Welles, and Harry Hopkins were taken out of power through various means between 1945-1946 as the Anglo-American establishment regained control over U.S. foreign and internal policies. This Keynesian takeover destroyed the positive potential of the Bretton Woods Institutions which were designed originally to internationalize the New Deal via the creation of cheap credit for global development and win-win cooperation.

    In our next installments, we will look more deeply into the sordid minds and political operations controlling the figures of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 23:25

  • Russia Unironically Chastises US As "Not Up To Modern Democratic Standards"
    Russia Unironically Chastises US As “Not Up To Modern Democratic Standards”

    Russia has joined the ranks of foreign governments expressing official “concern” for the stability of the US political system after Wednesday’s Capitol chaos.

    Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters Thursday that the whole episode and surreal images coming out of DC lays bare fault lines in American democracy, according to Russian media.

    Akin to Chinese state media, now busy having a field day over calling out Washington’s hypocrisy and ‘double standards’, Zakharova mocked the “archaic” American electoral system and underscored the fragility of the United States.

    “The electoral system in the US is archaic and does not meet modern democratic standards, creating opportunities for numerous violations, and American media has become an instrument of political struggle,” she said. Zakharova expressed Russia’s desire that “the friendly American people will experience this dramatic moment in their own history with dignity.”

    Putin has not personally weighed in, but senior Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachyov along with some others have made bold statements. Kosechyov, who is chair of the Russian upper house’s foreign affairs committee, posted a statement on Facebook saying:

    “The losing side has more than enough grounds to accuse the winner of falsifications – it is clear that American democracy is limping on both feet.”

    He added: “I say this without a shadow of gloating. America no longer charts a course and therefore has lost all rights to set it – and even more so to impose it on others.”

    Getty Images

    Meanwhile, all the predictable hot takes on how this was somehow 3-dimensional chess master Putin’s game plan all along are rolling in….

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Indeed for Pelosi all roads are perpetually leading to Putin, apparently.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 23:05

  • Prediction Consensus: What The 'Experts' See Coming In 2021
    Prediction Consensus: What The ‘Experts’ See Coming In 2021

    Authored by Nick Routley via VisualCapitalist.com,

    Making predictions is a tricky business at the best of times, but especially so after a year of upheaval. Even so, that didn’t stop people from trying their hand at reading the crystal ball. If anything, the uncertainty creates a stronger temptation for us to try to forecast the year ahead.

    Out of the thousands of public 2021 predictions and forecasts available, there are plenty of one-off guesses. However, things really get interesting when a desperate majority of experts begin to agree on what might happen. In some ways, these predictions from influential experts and firms have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophesies, so it’s worth paying attention even if we’re skeptical about the assertions being made.

    This year, we more than doubled the number of sources analyzed for our 2021 Predictions Consensus graphic, including outlooks from financial institutions, thought leaders, media outlets, consultancies, and more.

    Let’s take a closer look at seven of the most popular predictions:

    ESG reaches a tipping point

    It seems like only recently that the term ESG gained mainstream traction in the investment community, but in a short amount of time, the trend has blossomed into a full-blown societal shift. In 2020, investors piled a record $27.7 billion of inflows into ETFs traded in U.S. markets, and that momentum only appears to be growing.

    Fidelity, among others, noted that climate funds are delivering superior returns, which makes ESG an even easier sell to investors. Nasdaq has tapped ESG to be “one of the hottest trends” over the coming year.

    China has a strong 2021

    Financial institutions that issue predictions generally hedge their language quite a bit, but on this topic they were direct. The world’s most populous country has already left the pandemic behind and is back to business as usual. Of the institutions that mentioned a specific number, the median estimate for GDP growth in China was 8.4%.

    A souring outlook on SPACs

    Much like any hot trend, once enough people get on the bandwagon the mood begins to sour. Many experts believe that special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are going to enter that phase in 2021.

    SPACs had a monster year in 2020, raising $82 billion in capital. That’s more funds in one year than in the last 10 years combined. Of course, now that these 200+ companies are flush with capital, they’ll need to find a target. Scott Galloway argues that SPACs “are going to vastly underperform over the next two to three years” since there aren’t enough good opportunities to satisfy that level of demand.

    Brands must be authentic and values-driven

    Over the past few years, brands have become increasingly values-driven. In their 2021 predictions, experts see this trend being pushed even further.

    Millennials, which are now the largest generation in the workforce, are shaping society in their own image, and the expectation is that companies have an authentic voice and that actions align with words. This trend is augmented by the transparency that the internet and social media have enabled.

    Being a “values-driven” company can mean many things, and often involves focusing on a number of initiatives simultaneously. At the forefront is racial inequality and diversity initiatives, which were a key focus in 2020. According to McKinsey, nine out of ten employees globally believe companies should engage in diversity and inclusion initiatives. When the chorus of voices grows loud enough, eventually actions must follow.

    A great rethinking of office life is underway

    The great work-from-home experiment will soon be approaching the one-year mark and a lot has changed in a short amount of time.

    Even firms that were incredibly resistant to remote work found themselves in a position of having to adapt to new circumstances thanks to COVID-19. Now that the feasibility of at-home work has been proven, it will be tough for companies to walk things back to pre-pandemic times. Over 2021, millions of companies will begin reengineering everything from physical offices to digital infrastructure, and this has broad implications on the economy and our culture.

    Individuals and employers start taking wellness seriously

    The past year was not good for our collective mental health. In response, many companies are looking at ways to support employees from a health and wellness standpoint. One example is the trend of giving teams access to meditation apps like Headspace and Calm.

    This focus on wellness will persist, even as people begin to return to the office. As commercial leases expire in 2021, companies will be re-evaluating their office needs, and many experts believe that wellness will factor into those decisions.

    Lastly, this trend ties into the broader theme of values-driven companies. If brands profess a desire to impact society in a positive way, employees expect actions to extend inward as well.

    Big Tech backlash continues

    Among experts, there’s little doubt that the Big Tech backlash will bleed over into 2021. There is a divergence of opinion on exactly what will happen as a result. There are three general themes:

    1. Regulators will admonish and threaten Big Tech publicly, but nothing concrete will happen.

    2. Facebook will be broken up into parts (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp)

    3. Companies will proactively change their business practices and look for ways to settle quickly

    Aside from the thread of regulatory action, the tech sector is facing a bit of an identity crisis. Silicon Valley is grappling with the reality that the center of gravity is shifting. Pitchbook notes that Bay Area will fall below 20% of U.S. deal count for first time, and there have been very public departures from the valley in recent months.

    Faced with pressure from a number of different angles, the technology sector may have a year of soul-searching ahead.

    The Elephant in the Room

    COVID-19 is the one factor that impacts nearly every one of these 2021 predictions, yet, there were few predictions–and certainly no consensus from experts–on vaccine rollouts and case counts. It’s possible that the complexity of the pandemic and the enormous task of dealing with this public health crisis makes it too much of a moving target to predict in specific terms.

    In general though, expert opinions on when we’ll return to a more “normal” stage again range from the summer of 2021 to the start of 2022. With the exception of China, most major economies are still grappling with outbreaks and the resulting economic fallout.

    It remains to be seen whether COVID-19 will dominate 2022’s predictions, or whether we’ll be able to look beyond the pandemic era.

    The Good Stuff: Sources We Like

    Of the hundreds of sources we looked at, here were a few that stood out as memorable and comprehensive:

    Bloomberg’s Outlook 2021: This article compiled over 500 predictions from Wall Street banks and investment firms.

    Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Big 2021 Predictions: Swisher and Galloway combine their deep understanding of the technology ecosystem with frank (and hilarious) commentary to come up with some of the most plausible predictions of 2021. From Robinhood to Twitter, they cover a lot of ground in this interview.

    Crystal Ball 2021: Fortune’s annual batch of predictions is always one to watch. It’s comprehensive, succinct, and hits upon a wide variety of topics.

    John Battelle’s Predictions 2021: John Battelle has been publishing annual predictions for nearly two decades, and this year’s batch is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated. His predictions are thoughtful, credible, and specific. It’s also worth noting that Battelle circles back and grades his predictions – a level of accountability that is to be praised.

    Like this feature? An expanded look at 2021’s predictions will be shared with our VC+ audience later this month.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 22:45

  • A Glimpse Of China's Mysterious Stealth Bomber Shown In Video
    A Glimpse Of China’s Mysterious Stealth Bomber Shown In Video

    The evolution of the pandemic and economic crash and President Trump’s’ push for deglobalization by slapping China with tariffs resulting in the fracturing of supply chains have heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing. 

    In response to soaring tensions, China has rapidly modernized its forces with stealth fighters and hypersonic weapons. 

    Late last year, China was expected to unveil the Xian H-20 supersonic stealth bomber, effectively doubling its country’s striking range. 

    However, that didn’t happen, but this week, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force gave the first glimpse of the stealth bomber’s design in the service’s 2021 recruitment video released on Tuesday, according to Global Times.

    “In the closing minute of the video, an unknown aircraft rendered in computer-generated imagery enters the stage. It is covered in a white blanket and only the front outline can be seen, which suggests that the aircraft boasts a flying wing design with two intakes on the back of the plane. It has no visible tail wings and no winglets on the tips of the wings,” Global Times said. 

    Mysterious Stealth Bomber (clip from video) 

    The only view of the mysterious plane, likely the H-20, without a cover, is the aircraft’s view from a reflection on the googles of a pilot’s helmet.

    Mysterious Stealth Bomber In Reflection Of Pilot’s Googles (clip from video)

    Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military analyst, told the Global Times that the newly released video featuring an aircraft similar to US’ Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit suggests the plane is likely the H-20.

    “This could mean that China has achieved a generation-leaping development in bomber planes and become in possession of a world-class strategic stealth bomber,” Dongxu said.

    With a range of 5,300 miles and internal weapon bays, which could carry hypersonic missiles, the H-20 would likely have striking capabilities to hit many US bases in the Pacific Ocean. 

    Courtesy of BofA is a map of US military bases and presence in the Pacific Ocean and, specifically, in proximity to China. 

    Now it’s only a matter of time before China releases the H-20 at some future airshow to show the world its next-generation bomber as Beijing could become the world’s top superpower by the end of the decade. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 22:25

  • A Dollar Correction Could Spoil The Party
    A Dollar Correction Could Spoil The Party

    By Ye Xie, macro commentator at Bloomberg Markets Live

    There’s a growing risk of the dollar correcting higher. The nominal yield advantage of the U.S. has steadily increased relative to other G-10 currencies in recent months, accelerated by the expectations of further government spending now that the Democrats control Congress and White House.

    The yield difference between the U.S. and Germany has increased to the highest since the U.S. lockdowns in March. Even China’s yield advantage versus the U.S. is narrowing.

    Rate differentials haven’t been a prominent driver for exchange rates lately, but if more spending leads to U.S. economic outperformance, the dollar could move to the right side of the “smile curve,” where stronger growth means a higher dollar.

    To finance the twin U.S. deficits, foreign investors need to be compensated either by higher yields or a weaker dollar. The former reduces the need for the latter.

    A weaker dollar is part of the reflation trade that has benefited everything from equities to commodities. A corrective move in the dollar could spoil the party.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 22:05

  • Singapore Police Access COVID Tracing App Data For Criminal Investigations
    Singapore Police Access COVID Tracing App Data For Criminal Investigations

    In another instance where conspiracy theory becomes fact, a coronavirus tracing app in Singapore can now be used by the police to track citizens for criminal investigations, according to Channel News Asia

    In June, Singapore rolled out a mandatory COVID-19 tracing program that would identify people who had come in contact with virus carriers. The private data is managed by the government’s health department and stored on a server for 25 days. All data is encrypted to restrict access by third-parties.

    At the time, we said tracing apps would “usher in a massive surveillance state” where “no one is safe from the government.” 

    And indeed, that is the case in Singapore. About 80% of the country’s 5.6 million people have downloaded TraceTogether. The government told people that mass adoption of the app would allow the country to reduce social distancing restrictions. 

    However, as Channel News Asia points out, Singapore Police Force can now access TraceTogether location data for criminal investigations. 

    “The Government is the custodian of the TT (TraceTogether) data submitted by the individuals and stringent measures are put in place to safeguard this personal data,” Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan told Parliament on Monday. 

    A privacy statement on the app originally said the data collected would only be used “for contact tracing purposes.” Immediately after Tan’s comments to Parliament, the privacy statement was updated. 

    It now reads, “Authorized Police officers may invoke the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) powers to request users to upload their TraceTogether data for criminal investigations.” 

    As countries rushed to develop tracing apps in 2020 under the guise of mitigating the spread of the virus, it appears the apps are nothing more than surveillance tools for the government to track their citizens, well, at least, in Singapore. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 21:45

  • Turley: I Hate Federal Commissions, But Americans Need One To Look Into The 2020 Election
    Turley: I Hate Federal Commissions, But Americans Need One To Look Into The 2020 Election

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Below is my column in USA Today on the need for a federal commission on the 2020 election. While I opposed the challenge and the call for the ten-day commission, I do believe that a real commission is warranted.  Indeed, the violence yesterday only further shows the deep divisions in this country over these lingering questions. However, there must be the commitment to a real commission – not another placebo commission…

    Here is the column:

    I hate federal commissions. I have always hated federal commissions. Federal commissions are Washington’s way of managing scandals. They work like placebos for political fevers, convincing voters that answers and change are on the way.

    That is why it is so difficult for me to utter these words: We need a federal election commission. Not the one proposed by some Senate Republicans. And not like past placebo commissions. An honest-to-God, no-holds-barred federal commission to look into the 2020 presidential election.

    With the challenge to the certification of election votes, some Republican members of Congress are calling to delay the proceedings for 10 days and impanel a commission to “audit” the results. There is precedent for such a commission. Just not good precedent. Indeed, citing the Electoral Commission of 1877 as a model of good constitutional process is like citing the Titanic as a model of good maritime navigation. The commission was an utter disaster.

    The 1876 election commission

    The commission was formed after the contested 1876 presidential election of Democrat Samuel Tilden and Rutherford Hayes. Tilden won the popular vote and was just one vote short of the electoral votes needed to win the White House. The election was marred by open fraud, including South Carolina certifying a vote of 101% of the eligible voters.

    As a compromise, the commission was formed and consisted of 15 members: five Supreme Court justices and five members from each chamber of Congress. The key was that it was supposed to be composed of seven Democrats, seven Republicans and one independent. However, in a move that seemed calculated to secure his vote for Tilden, the Illinois legislature then moved to appoint the independent, Justice David Davis, to the Senate. If they wanted to buy his vote, it was a colossal failure when Davis decided to take the seat and leave the commission. He was replaced by a Republican, and the commission voted along strictly partisan lines to install Hayes, not Tilden.

    In many ways, the Electoral Commission was a model for most federal commissions, which are designed for good politics and not good government.

    An example is the 9/11 Commission, which was stacked with reliable allies to guarantee that no one — and no party — would be blamed for the negligence leading to up to the attacks.

    The commission spent two years and millions of dollars. It went to almost a dozen countries, interviewed more than 1,000 people and archived over 2.5 million pages of documents. The result was a report that blamed no one specifically and since concluded that Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were “not well served,” in the words of the commission’s chairman, by the FBI and CIA.

    You see, if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Despite showing that the attacks could have been prevented under existing laws and powers, the budgets and powers of both agencies were then massively increased.

    That is not what we need. There are three reasons why the need for a real commission is needed:

    ►First, and most important, this was an unprecedented election in the reliance of mail-in voting and the use of new voting systems and procedures. We need to review how that worked down to the smallest precincts and hamlets.

    ►Second, possibly tens of millions of voters believe that this election was rigged and stolen. I am not one of them. However, the integrity of our elections depends on the faith of the electorate.

    Roughly 40% of that electorate have lingering doubts about whether their votes actually matter. Most of the cases challenging the election were not decided on the merits. Indeed, it seems they haven’t even been allowed for discovery. Instead, they were largely dismissed on jurisdictional or standing groups or under the “laches” doctrine that they were brought too late. Those allegations need to be conclusively proven or disproven in the interests of the country.

    ►Third, there were problems. There was not proof of systemic fraud or irregularities, but there were problems of uncounted votes, loss of key custodial information and key differences in the rules governing voting and tabulations.

    We have spent billions to achieve greater security and reliability after prior election controversies. Indeed, we had a prior election commission that failed to achieve those fundamental goals.

    The importance of having a commission

    A real commission will take a couple years to fully address these allegations. It will be meaningless if it’s stacked by the same reliable political cutouts used historically in federal commissions. It should be formed on a commitment of absolute transparency with public hearings and public archiving of underlying material before the issuance of any final report. That way, the public at large can analyze and contribute to the review of this evidence.

    There is one other task for Congress. It should rescind and replace the Electoral Count Act passed after the Hayes-Tilden election. It is one of the worst conceived and crafted federal laws on the books. The constitutionality of that act has long been challenged, including some who argue that Congress has nothing but a purely ceremonial role in opening state certifications and counting them. 

    Courts are likely to recognize that Congress has a more substantive role, particularly when rivaling sets of electors are presented or there is clear evidence of fraud. However, the validity of such electoral votes should be left largely to the courts in challenges in the given states. That is why the current challenge is unwarranted. There is no serious basis to challenge the validity of the electoral votes certified by the states.

    The main challenge, however, remains the same: Whether Congress can appoint a real federal commission without rigging the result by appointing partisan members. In 1877, to quote from a speech of Ohio Sen. Allen Granberry Thurman, “It was perfectly clear that any bill that gave the least advantage, ay, the weight of the dust in the balance, to either party, could not become the law of the land.”

    Nothing has changed. The stakes are too high to allow even a dust particle to tip the difference on the ultimate findings. The dust-free option requires a dependent, not independent, commission. Otherwise, the public will be the loser.

    So, let’s have a commission, but let’s make it a real one.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 21:25

  • Second Cabinet Member Quits: Betsy De Vos Resigns As Trump Education Secretary
    Second Cabinet Member Quits: Betsy De Vos Resigns As Trump Education Secretary

    One by one, Trump’s cabinet members are starting to fall like flies, and just a few short hours after Elaine Chao, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, became the first cabinet member to resign citing the “entirely avoidable” storming of the Capitol building by pro-Trump supporters, late on Thursday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos became the second cabinet member to resign, the WSJ reported.

    “We should be highlighting and celebrating your Administration’s many accomplishments on behalf of the American people,” Mrs. DeVos wrote in a letter to the president.

    “Instead we are left to clean up the mess caused by violent protesters overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people’s business. That behavior was unconscionable for our country. There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”

    She added: “Impressionable children are watching all this, and they are learning from us.”

    Her full resignation letter is below:

    While a number of Democrats have called for invoking the 25th Amendment, and one Republican joined Thursday, there did not yet appear to be serious talk among administration officials for the move.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 21:21

  • December Payrolls Preview: Brace For A Very Ugly Number
    December Payrolls Preview: Brace For A Very Ugly Number

    In its preview of tomorrow’s December payrolls report, Newsquawk reminds us that while further fiscal support for Americans has now been rubber-stamped by lawmakers, it was done so after the payroll survey period and will therefore not be reflected in the employment situation report. Which is why nobody should expect any upside surprises in tomorrow’s report, and if anything, it may well be the Trump admin’s “kitchen sink” as “finely-tuned government data” is finally allowed to catch up to reality, potentially resulting in a catastrophically bad number.

    To be sure, labor market metrics have generally erred on the weaker side in the month: initial jobless claims jumped in the BLS reference week, and PUA assistance also rose, though continuing claims data fell. ADP’s gauge of private payrolls disappointed to the downside on the back of weakness in services employment, auguring poorly for the official BLS data (it is worth noting that the ADP has tended to report weaker numbers than the BLS of late).

    Manufacturing and services sectors are also diverging at the employment level: ISM reported a rise in manufacturing employment in the month, but a fall into contractionary territory for services jobs. Meanwhile, Challenger reported that US employers’ planned job cuts also rose in the month.

    In its unusually downbeat forecast, Goldman estimates a -50,000 print, after +245k in November and +610k in October, and also 150,000 below consensus As Goldman writes, the broad-based resurgence of the coronavirus and related business restrictions are consistent with a further deceleration in job growth, and most of the Big Data employment signals we track indicate an outright decline in December. Additionally, while continuing jobless claims declined during the payroll month, much of the drop reflected the expiration of program eligibility (as opposed to reemployment). Taken together, layoffs in leisure and hospitality and other virus-sensitive services categories temporarily halted the employment recovery that began in May, and as a result private payrolls tumbled by 100k in December according to Goldman; the worst month since the covid crisis first broke out.

    That’s the bad news. The good news is that President-elect Biden has pledged further fiscal support for Americans after Democrats managed to secure control of Congress, and this might limit downside for markets if Friday’s data disappoints. Conversely, as Newsquawk accurately points out, Fed talk about tapering asset purchases has picked-up recently, and this may only get louder in the event of a big beat (which however won’t happen).

    Here is what Wall Street expects:

    • Nonfarm Payrolls exp. +100k (range: -400k to +530k, prev. +245k);
    • Unemployment Rate exp. 6.7% (range: 6.5-7.2%, prev. 6.7%);
    • U6 Unemployment (prev. 12.0%);
    • Participation Rate (prev. 61.5%);
    • Private Payrolls exp. +100k (prev. +344k);
    • Manufacturing Payrolls exp. +20k (prev. +27k);
    • Government Payrolls (prev. -99k);
    • Average Earnings M/M exp. +0.2% (prev. +0.3%);
    • Average Earnings Y/Y exp. +4.4% (prev. +4.4%);
    • Average Workweek Hours exp. 34.8hrs (prev. 34.8hrs).

    Some more observations from Newsquawk:

    ADP: The December data from payroll processor ADP disappointed expectations, printing -123k against an expected +88k; it was the first decline since April. The report noted that as the impact of the pandemic on the labor market intensified, job losses were concentrated in retail and leisure and hospitality. Analysts at Pantheon Macroeconomics observed that the Homebase employment data for small firms always hinted that the ADP consensus might have been on the optimistic side, though the numbers were ultimately a bit stronger than the Homebase numbers for October and November. “That gap has now closed,” Pantheon writes, “the underlying story here is the impact on the services sector from the patchwork of anti-COVID measures imposed across the country in Q4, alongside people choosing to reduce their social interactions in the face of soaring infections.” The consultancy also points out that ADP’s data has been weaker than the official BLS numbers in every month since April, though the size of the errors has diminished. “Still, we see good reasons to think that Friday’s official payroll number will be better than ADP, and above zero,” it said, reminding us that ADP’s model includes lagged official payroll numbers as well as information from firms using ADP’s services, and accordingly, the cooling of the NFP data in November will have weighed on the December ADP; “that doesn’t rule out further downward pressure on the official data in December after COVID restrictions tightened further, but we still think it likely that Friday’s private sector jobs number will be about +150K,” it adds.

    JOBLESS CLAIMS: Initial jobless claims data that coincides with the BLS employment report survey period saw weekly claims rise to 892k from 862k, and the four-week moving average to 814k from 778k the previous week. However, continuing claims data fell in the survey week to 5.32mln from 5.51mln. Wells Fargo said the rise was a bad omen for the December jobs report; the bank said that renewed restrictions and individual efforts to stem the spread of COVID were bearing down on the labour market. It was the second straight weekly rise, during a week where claims usually drop; however, the non-seasonally adjusted Pandemic Unemployment Assistance rose by 40K. Since then, however, the situation appears to have brightened, after lawmakers struck a deal on stimulus ¬– but still too late to be reflected in the December payrolls data, however.

    MANUFACTURING SURVEYS: The manufacturing ISM report for December saw the employment sub-index rise back into expansionary territory (above 50.0), printing 51.5 from 48.4. ISM said that only three industries (Fabricated Metal Products, Computer & Electronic Products, Chemical Products) of the six big sectors expanded. That said, it noted that continued strong new-order levels and an expanding backlog indicate potential employment strength for the first quarter of 2021, and panellist comments indicated that significantly more companies are hiring or attempting to hire than those reducing labour forces. (NOTE: ISM says that an employment index above 50.8 percent, over time, is generally consistent with an increase in the Bureau of Labor Statistics data on manufacturing employment).

    SERVICES SURVEYS: The employment sub-index within the December services ISM disappointed to the downside, printing 48.2 and entering contractionary territory (from the prior 51.5) following a run of three months in expansion. The outcome was not entirely unexpected, given the ADP’s payrolls report hinted at weakness in the services sector (the ADP reported that services sector payrolls declined by 105k in the month), with the resurgence of the pandemic towards the end of the year weighing. The services sector job losses primarily stemmed from the arts, entertainment, rental, mining, accommodation, food services sectors; four industries, however, reported employment growth (management of Companies and support services, wholesale trade, utilities, finance/insurance). The ISM report noted that respondents said “less staff needed in restaurants due to restrictions” and “we had to reduce our workforce even further.” Analysts note, however, that this sub-index too has tended to understante the BLS data recently.

    JOB CUTS: Challenger reported that US-based companies were planning 77,030 job cuts in December, rising from the 64,797 mark in November, and significantly above the 32,843 reported in December 2020. The consultancy said that the jump in Q4 saw the fewest job cuts of the year (222,493, down from the 497,215 in Q3), though that is a lot higher than the 127,687 reported in Q4 2020. Challenger said that in the final months of the year, companies that may have survived the initial impact of the pandemic in March and April determined staffing adjustments based on increasingly difficult market conditions: “while some segments were up, such as warehousing, shipping, financial, and some manufacturing segments, many others were hurt considerably, chief among them Hospitality, Entertainment, and Leisure.” According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, disposable personal income decreased by $218 billion in November and consumer spending decreased 0.4%, and Challenger said that “as the economy continues to shed jobs with hundreds of thousands of initial jobless claims each week, consumer spending will continue to drop. Retail and leisure activities will suffer further, especially before widespread vaccinations give Americans confidence to spend money, and companies the ability to create more jobs.”

    ARGUING FOR A WEAKER-THAN-EXPECTED REPORT:

    • The third wave of Covid. The public health situation deteriorated further in December, with the pace of new coronavirus infections and hospitalizations both elevated and rising. As shown in Exhibit 1, by the December survey week, restaurant seatings on Opentable had fallen back to July levels—a time when leisure and hospitality payrolls were 0.85mn lower than in November. Business restrictions and lower demand for these and other services categories also will weigh heavily on tomorrow’s report, more than offsetting gains in less-sensitive categories.

    • Big Data. High-frequency data on the labor market is generally consistent with a decline in payrolls in December, with a median decline of 160k across seven measures. Of those that Goldman tracks, only the Google Mobility measure is consistent with an above- consensus report (and admittedly, it has been one of the more accurate measures during the crisis).

    • ADP. Private sector employment in the ADP report fell by 123k in December, below consensus expectations and consistent with a decline in the official measure. The report text highlighted weakness in the leisure and hospitality sector, consistent with virus effects.
    • Job availability. The Conference Board labor differential—the difference between the percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hard to get — fell into contractionary territory (to -0.2 in December from +6.9 in November and +7.1 in October).
    • Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas rose by 49% in December after falling by 6% in November. They remain 143% above their December 2019 levels.

    ARGUING FOR A STRONGER THAN-EXPECTED REPORT:

    • Education seasonality. A rise in education employment (public and private) is expected, as virtual schooling reduces the scope for seasonal downtime for support staff. Some of the janitors and support staff who normally stop working in December had already left the workforce due to school closures. Reflecting this, education payrolls are expected to decline by less than the BLS seasonal factors anticipate, resulting in a 50-100k reported rise across private, state, and local education categories.

    NEUTRAL/MIXED FACTORS:

    • Employer surveys. Business activity surveys declined on net in December, and the employment components of survey trackers declined but are still in narrowly-expansionary territory (non-manufacturing -1.0pt to 50.1; manufacturing -0.1pt to 54.2).
    • Census hiring. The 2020 Census has already wound down, with only 6k temporary workers left on payroll during the November report. Accordingly, only a modest decline in this category is expected in tomorrow’s report (around -3k).

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 21:12

  • Peter Schiff: Congress Is The Real Threat, Not Protests
    Peter Schiff: Congress Is The Real Threat, Not Protests

    Via SchiffGold.com,

    Somewhat lost in the chaos of the DC protests was the fact that Democrats won both Georgia Senate runoff races. That effectively gives the Democrats control of both houses of Congress. In his podcast, Peter Schiff made the case that Congress is the real threat to America, not the protesters who broke into the Capitol building.

    Peter said he thinks that Trump’s threat to veto the spending bill unless Congress upped the stimulus checks to $2,000 was a key reason the Democrats won.

    That put Senate Republicans in an untenable position where they were the only thing standing between voters and a $2,000 check.”

    Rep. Nancy Pelosi immediately seized on the opportunity that Trump handed her and called for a vote in the House on the bigger stimulus. But Sen. Mitch McConnell blocked the move.

    That opened up a great window of opportunity for president-elect Joe Biden because he was basically able to frame the Georgia election as a referendum on those checks. Biden actually bribed the electorate, the voters, by basically saying, ‘Hey, if you want your $2,000 check, you need to vote Democrat. If you vote Republican and the Senate stays in Republican hands, you’re not going to get your $2,000 because those greedy Republicans won’t sign on to the legislation.’”

    So Georgians voted Democrat. And they’re almost certainly going to get $2,000

    But what is that $2,000 going to buy? Probably not very much.”

    The bottom line is now the Democrats are going to be able to get a lot of things done that they wouldn’t have been able to do had the Senate stayed in Republican hands. You can almost certainly count on tax increases on corporations and “the rich,” and more regulations. As Peter put it, “Democrats will keep their promises when it comes to making government bigger and more expensive.”

    None of this is good for the market. In fact, after the presidential election, the markets rallied on the belief that the Republicans would hold the Senate and serve as a firewall against an all-out Democratic Party agenda. And yet the stock market rallied again after it became clear that the Democrats would take the Senate. The Dow was up 437 points and set a record. The S&P 500 set another record. And the Russell 2000 was up by nearly 4%. This despite protesters storming into the US Capitol building.

    Why was the market up? This is clearly bad news. The only thing that a Congress controlled by the Democrats means is corporate earnings will almost certainly be lower with higher taxes and more regulations, and the economy will be weaker than it would have been had the Republicans been in a position to hinder the Biden agenda.

    But as Peter put it, “Who gives a damn?” The only thing that matters to this market is that there will be more spending and bigger deficits. And that means the Federal Reserve will have to print more money to finance the deficits.

    That is the reason the stock market is up. It is money printing. It is inflation that is driving the stock market.”

    Meanwhile, Treasuries got clobbered. The yield on the 10-year rose back above 1%. That sounds low and it is in absolute terms. But compared to yields as low as 40 basis points earlier this year, 1% is a pretty big gain.

    So, even though we’re low in relative terms, we’re much higher than we used to be. And what’s more important is the trend. We could see an explosive move up in interest rates. Now, the only reason we may not see an explosive move up in interest rates is because the Federal Reserve doesn’t let it happen. Because the Federal Reserve interferes in the bond market by printing even more money to buy even more bonds to prevent rates from rising.”

    Inflation is driving this market. And the irony is that the Fed will have to create more inflation in order to prevent inflation from pushing interest rates up.

    They’re literally fighting fire with fire. Bond prices are falling because investors are worried about inflation. And so the Fed creates more inflation to prevent bond prices from falling and now investors have even more to worry about. This is the Catch-22. This is the situation that’s going to unravel.”

    So, why isn’t gold getting a big boost? It’s an inflation hedge.

    Gold did have a strong rally on the first trading day of the year. But it was down in the aftermath of the Georgia Senate runoff. Peter said he thinks that is primarily a function of risk-on sentiment. Investors are focused on the surging stock market, not worrying about safe-haven. Rising interest rates may have also put some drag on the gold market. People often equate rising interest rates as bad for gold, especially if you think the Fed is about to hike short-term rates.

    Traders are overlooking the fact that the Fed is not going to raise rates. It doesn’t matter what’s happening to inflation. The Fed’s not going to fight it. It doesn’t matter what’s going on with long-term rates. The Fed is not going to raise short-term rates. The other factor that the markets are overlooking is that even though long-term rates are rising, these are nominal rates. The inflation rate is rising faster than interest rates. So, even though nominal rates are rising, real rates are falling. That is bullish for gold.”

    In this podcast, Peter also talked about some of the economic data that came out, and he offers some thoughts on bitcoin and the DC protests.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 20:50

  • Capitol Police Chief Resigns Amid Torrent Of Criticism, Reports Of Officer's Death
    Capitol Police Chief Resigns Amid Torrent Of Criticism, Reports Of Officer’s Death

    After releasing a statement earlier Thursday afternoon condemning the riotous behavior and revealing that the officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, Steven Sund, the chief of the Capitol Police, has just resigned.

    Sund’s resignation will go into effect on Jan. 16, meaning he will be gone before any potential unrest tied to Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. A police spokeswoman said Thursday that the department’s union called for a “change at the top.”

    According to NBC News, officers are “frustrated and demoralized” with how a lack of leadership undermined the response to the mob, said Gus Papathanasiou, the union chairman. Papathanasiou laid the blame on a failure of planning by Sund and the rest of the Brass, while praising officers on the ground for their work.

    “We prioritized lives over property, leading people to safety,” Papathanasiou said in his statement. “Not one Member of Congress or their staff was injured. Our officers did their jobs. Our leadership did not. Our Law Enforcement partners that assisted us were remarkable.”

    The statement didn’t quite call for Sund’s resignation.

    In his statement earlier, Sund commended officers earlier Thursday, calling their actions “heroic” and slammed the chaos that erupted as “criminal riotous behavior.”

    Earlier, in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show, former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer slammed his successor’s handling of the incident as a “failure” and added that it “raises a lot of questions.”

    Finally, CNN reports that a Capitol Police Officer – presumably one of the 14 who was injured in yesterday’s violence – has died.

    A US Capitol Police officer has died from events stemming from Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol, three sources confirmed to CNN.

    The police officer is now the fifth person to die as a result of the day’s violence. One woman was shot and killed by Capitol Police as the crowd breached the building and three others suffered medical emergencies that proved fatal.

    Rioters on Wednesday breached the Capitol building and the Senate chamber, ransacked the offices of Pelosi and other Capitol offices, and a laptop was stolen from the office of Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley.

    Authorities have already arrested nearly 70 people in connection with Wednesday’s chaotic ransacking of the Capitol building, and presumably anyone responsible for the officer’s wounds and/or the killing of the officer who died Thursday will be high on prosecutors’ list for arrest and prosecution. Aside from Babbitt, three others died of medical emergencies during yesterday’s unrest.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 20:30

  • Kamala Harris Called Riots "A Movement" Last Summer, Said "They Should Not" Stop
    Kamala Harris Called Riots “A Movement” Last Summer, Said “They Should Not” Stop

    Authored by Matt Margolis via PJMedia.com,

    Violence is never the answer to resolving conflict, but it’s hard not to see the hypocrisy of the left when they act surprised or condemn what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

    In June 2020, in the aftermath of the nationwide rioting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, Kamala Harris even gleefully predicted that the rioting wouldn’t end, telling Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show,” that they shouldn’t end.

    “They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop,” she told him.

    “This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”

    The protests Kamala Harris spoke of were responsible for an estimated $1 – $2 billion in property damage between May 26 and June 8, 2020, and dozens of deaths, including that of retired Minneapolis police officer, David Dorn.

    What would happen if Trump said of the protestors who stormed the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, “They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”

    But Trump never said anything like that. In fact, Trump urged his supporters to go home.

    “I know your pain, I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”

    Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t condemn the BLM riots that plagued cities nationwide like Portland, Minnesota, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, and Kenosha until polling suggested that they needed to.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 20:10

  • "We'll See You In Court": Sen. Josh Hawley Blasts 'Orwellian' Simon & Schuster Over Canceled Book
    “We’ll See You In Court”: Sen. Josh Hawley Blasts ‘Orwellian’ Simon & Schuster Over Canceled Book

    Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) responded Thursday afternoon to an announcement by publisher Simon & Schuster that it would no longer publish his planned book, after the GOP lawmaker led objections to Congress’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

    “After witnessing the disturbing, deadly insurrection that took place on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., Simon & Schuster has decided to cancel publication of Senator Josh Hawley’s forthcoming book,” the publisher said in a statement, adding “We did not come to this decision lightly.”

    “As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.

    Hawley responded in a Thursday statement via Twitter, saying “This could not be more Orwellian. Simon & Schuster is canceling my contract because I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to redefine as sedition.”

    “Let me be clear, this is not just a contract dispute. It’s a direct assault on the First Amendment. Only approved speech can now be published. This is the Left looking to cancel everyone they don’t approve of. I will fight this cancel culture with everything I have. We’ll see you in court.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 19:50

  • Trump Tweets For The First Time Since Suspension, Says "New Administration Will Be Inaugurated On Jan 20"
    Trump Tweets For The First Time Since Suspension, Says “New Administration Will Be Inaugurated On Jan 20”

    Almost exactly 12 hours after his Twitter account was suspended for 12 hours (with the caveat that a permanent suspension would follow if he did not follow twitter’s terms of service), Trump returned to his favorite social network and in a 2:41 min video condemned Wednesday’s Capitol riots while effectively conceding, saying that he would focus on ensuring a smooth transition to the Biden administration and that “a new administration will be inaugurated on Jan 20.”

    Trump began by saying he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem” in the “heinous attack on the Capitol.” Saying that “the demonstrations who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy” he slammed “those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction” saying they “do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

    Proceeding next to the outcome of the election, Trump said that “we have just been through an intense election and emotions are high. But now tempers must be cooled and calm restored. We must get on with the business of America.”

    “My campaign vigorously pursued every legal avenue to contest the election result. My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote. In so doing I was fighting to defend American democracy”, a statement which  we doubt Congress Democrats will agree with. Trump then went on to say that “we must reform our election laws to verify the identity and eligibility of all voters and ensure faith and confidence in all future elections.”

    Which brings us to Trump’s technical concession: “Congress has certified the results. A new administration will be inaugurated on Jan 20. My focus now turn to ensuring the smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment now calls for healing and reconciliation.”

    Trump then turned his attention to the covid pandemic, saying that “defeating this pandemic and rebuilding the greatest economy on earth will require all of us working together. It will require a new emphasis on the civic values of patriotism, faith, charity, community and family. We must revitalize the sacred bonds of  love and loyalty that bind us together as one national family.”

    The president concluded with yet another implicit concession, but left off in a somewhat cryptic fashion: “To the citizens of our country, serving as your president has been the honor of a lifetime. And to all of my wonderful supporters, I know you are disappointed but I also want you to know that our incredible journey is only just beginning.”

    And now we wait to see if and when Twitter will nuke this video too.

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 19:32

  • Chicago Schools Chief: Half Of Teachers Pressured By Teachers’ Union Didn’t Show Up For Work
    Chicago Schools Chief: Half Of Teachers Pressured By Teachers’ Union Didn’t Show Up For Work

    By Epoch Times,

    Nearly half of the teachers in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) district didn’t show up when they were ordered to return for in-person instructions after the winter break, a district official said. Janice Jackson, the CEO of the public school district serving some 340,000 students, said in a Tuesday press conference that a little more than 60 percent of all school-based staff have returned to classrooms as expected. That accounts for about half of teachers and three-quarters of assistant and support staff.

    Jackson said the number of employees who didn’t return was “significant, considering the fact that they were pressured” by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which has been urging teachers and staff to stay out of classrooms since the early days of the CCP virus pandemic.

    CPS has informed those who were expected to return but didn’t that their absence was not excused, Jackson said, noting that the district has an “absent without leave policy,” through which “individuals who are refusing to report to work and who will be considered absent without leave will face progressive discipline.”

    “We have sent notices to staff who did not return to ensure that our expectations are clear, and we are optimistic that more staff will report to work in the coming days,” she said. “If staff choose not to attend and support the students who are relying on them, we will handle those on a school-by-school and case-by-case basis.”

    Jackson noted that the all-remote learning is failing many students across the city, especially those from black and Latino families.

    “We cannot sit back and allow a generation to just falter because of made up reasons around why we can’t do reopening,” she said. “A year from now, there’s going to be a reckoning around what happened to those students that have been sitting at home, not being properly served because many of them have families who have to be essential workers.”

    The CTU on Wednesday criticized CPS’s plan of sending public school teachers back for in-person instructions for the first time during the pandemic, arguing that doing so puts teachers’ health in danger.

    “We are here this morning to underscore for the public how absolutely callously CPS has treated educators who have requested accommodations or leave,” CTU Deputy General Counsel Thad Goodchild said during a press conference, reported Chicago Sun Times.

    Goodchild said that CPS is forcing employees to report to work, even though they have family members with health conditions.

    “This is effectively telling employees that they must either go without a paycheck, move out of their homes or risk the lives of their medically fragile relative,” he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 19:30

  • A Bizarre Discrepancy Is Blowing Up The Trade "Data" Between US And China
    A Bizarre Discrepancy Is Blowing Up The Trade “Data” Between US And China

    Earlier today, the Census Bureau announced that in December, the US trade deficit jumped to a whopping $68.1 billion, an increase of $5 billion in one month and just inches of the all time biggest trade deficit recorded in the depths of the global financial crisis.

    Yet while troubling, and a clear testament that the US is losing the trade war with China or whoever, this wasn’t the big news. The really big news is that when one focuses on just the trade between the US and China, the bilateral balance has been trending in the wrong direction, helped as one would expect by the effects of COVID-19 (yes, this is yet another way that China has benefited from unleashing the covid pandemic on the world). As Stephen Gallo noted, China’s merchandise exports to the US, as a share of total exports, ended 2019 at 13.6%, but they were back to 17.6% as of November 2020.

    In short, after the US made some headway in its trade war with Beijing, all that progress and more is now gone as Chinese net exports are steamrolling ahead… thanks to covid!

    Yet as we first pointed out last month, while the trade surplus with the US according to China Customs data indeed hit a record high, US Bureau of Economic Analysis data shows something quite different, and this discrepancy is shown the chart below:

    This is, to say the least, strange: after all data is data, and when one using the same nominal amount of trade exports and imports between the two countries engaging in trade, one should – in theory at least – end up with the same trade surplus (and respectively deficit) number.

    Alas, as the chart above shows, not only has that has not been the case for the past two decades, but curiously, after years of US data showing a larger bilateral deficit with China than the Chinese data shows a surplus with the United States (largely due to the so-called Hong Kong port effect which explains much of the discrepancy), this has reversed in the past few months when China’s reported exports to the United States have significantly exceeded reported U.S. imports (the exact opposite of the established pattern). This can be seen clearly in the chart below which is a zoomed in portion the bilateral trade balances shown above:

    This phenomenon which has escalated drastically in recent months, was first pointed out by former Treasury official Brad Setser who pointed out the data discrepancy in an October blog post , writing that “there is no doubt there is a gap. In July 2018, China said it exported $41.6 billion to the United States, and the United States reported importing $47 billion from China. In July 2019, China said it exported $38.9 billion to the United States (down because of the tariffs), and the United States reported importing $41.4 billion from China. And in July 2020, China said it exported $43.7 billion to the United States, while the United States only reported importing $40.7 billion from China.”

    As a result, as Setser adds, “the answer to a lot of politically-salient questions—for example, is the bilateral trade deficit with China larger or smaller now than in 2016?—hinges on whether you use the U.S. or the Chinese data. “

    If you look at the Chinese data, its current monthly surplus with the United States is at an all-time high for the months of July and August, topping its pre-trade war peaks by substantial margins

    In the U.S. data, the July deficit with China and Hong Kong (adding in Hong Kong reduces the size of the deficit as the United States runs a surplus with HK) is only just above its 2016 levels.

    Fast-forwarding two months to the latest December data only shows that this divergence has accelerated with the latest Chinese data showing yet another record surplus for the month of November.

    To be sure, and as one can easily see in the charts above, the gap between China’s reported exports to the United States – red line – and reported U.S. imports – blue line – plus the larger deficit when reported from the U.S. side than the surplus on the Chinese side, has been a long-standing pattern. It reflects the previously discussed role of Hong Kong in U.S.-China trade, because as Setser explains, “a lot of what China records in its data as an export to Hong Kong historically has ended up in the U.S. data as an import from China, and a lot of what the United States reports as an export to Hong Kong has historically ended up in the Chinese data as an import from the United States.”

    What is novel here is the change in the pattern – the long established and well-understood discrepancy between the import and export side data has gone away.    

    The puzzle, as Setser wrote, “is why the sign on the discrepancy looks to be flipping.” There are two possible explanations which immediately come to mind.

    Chinese exporters might be overstating their exports, in general and to the United States. Overstating exports is a classic way of getting capital into a country with capital controls.

    However, a simpler explanation is that the US tariffs have created a strong incentive for firms importing into the United States to go to some lengths to understate their imports from China. Thus, U.S. imports from China are now likely under-counted (which by implication holds the bilateral trade deficit down).

    As Setser concludes, while “mapping one country’s import data to a partner’s export data” is a dull but exercise, “sometimes it yields interesting results. A similar exercise back in 2015—the Chinese current account surplus stopped tracking the goods balance—led me to look at whether the reported increase in tourism imports in the Chinese data was matched by a rise in the number of actual tourists (it wasn’t) and ultimately produced quite a good Fed paper.” We are confident that economists looking at the growing discrepancy in trade data between the US and China will soon be busy coming up with their own theories, even if the real answer why this most critical trade relationship in a world where the US-China trade war has been the overriding theme for much of the past 4 years, will likely remain a mystery.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 19:15

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Today’s News 7th January 2021

  • 79% Of Brits Supported Latest Nationwide Lockdown?!
    79% Of Brits Supported Latest Nationwide Lockdown?!

    As England and parts of Scotland have been put back into full lockdown mode in response to the recent escalation in the COVID-19 pandemic, a YouGov survey has revealed the public’s opinion on the latest countermeasures.

    As Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, a majority, 79 percent, say they support a nationwide lockdown to some degree, with a small majority, 51 percent, stating that they do so strongly.

    Infographic: Support for a UK national lockdown | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In his announcement of the new rules, prime minister Johnson warned that the coming weeks would be the “hardest yet”. Key to the decision has been the increase in pressure on the health service in recent weeks, with record numbers of Covid-19 patients currently in UK hospitals. The lockdown is due to be in place until 15 February at the earliest.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 01:00

  • What To Expect In 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation, & More Tyranny
    What To Expect In 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation, & More Tyranny

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

    – George Orwell, Animal Farm

    What should we expect in 2021?

    So far, it looks like this year is going to be plagued by more of the same brand of madness, mayhem, manipulation and tyranny that dominated 2020.

    Frankly, I’m sick of it: the hypocrisy, the double standards, the delusional belief by Americans at every point along the political spectrum that politics and politicians are the answer to what ails the country, when for most of our nation’s history, politics and politicians have been the cause of our woes.

    Consider: for years now, Americans, with sheeplike placidity, have tolerated all manner of injustices and abuses meted out upon them by the government (police shootings of unarmed individuals, brutality, corruption, graft, outright theft, occupations and invasions of their homes by militarized police, roadside strip searches, profit-driven incarcerations, profit-driven wars, egregious surveillance, taxation without any real representation, a nanny state that dictates every aspect of their lives, lockdowns, overcriminalization, etc.) without ever saying “enough is enough.”

    Only now do Americans seem righteously indignant enough to mobilize and get active, and for what purpose? Politics. They’re ready to go to the mat over which corporate puppet will get the honor to serve as the smiling face on the pig for the next four years.

    Talk about delusion.

    It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

    A perfect example of how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life has become in the America: while President Trump doles out medals of commendation and presidential pardons to political cronies who have done little to nothing to advance the cause of freedom, Julian Assange rots in prison for daring to blow the whistle on the U.S. government’s war crimes

    You’d think that Americans would be outraged over such abject pandering to the very swamp that Trump pledged to drain, but that’s not what has the Right and the Left so worked up. No, they’re still arguing over whether dead men voted in the last presidential election.

    Either way, no matter which candidate lost to the other, it was always going to be the Deep State that won.

    And so you have it: reduced to technicalities, distracted by magician’s con games, and caught up in the manufactured, highly scripted contest over which beauty contestant wears the crown, we have failed to do anything about the world falling apart around us.

    Literally.

    Our economy—at least as it impacts the vast majority of Americans as opposed to the economic elite—is in a shambles. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our government has been overtaken by power-hungry predators and parasites. And our ability—and fundamental right—to govern our own lives is being usurped by greedy government operatives who care nothing for our lives or our freedoms.

    Our ship of state is being transformed into a ship of fools.

    We stand utterly defenseless in the face of a technological revolution brought about by artificial intelligence and wall-to-wall surveillance that is re-orienting the world as we know it. Despite the mounting high-tech encroachments on our rights, we have been afforded a paltry amount of legislative and judicial protections. Indeed, Corporate America has more rights than we do.

    We stand utterly powerless in the face of government bureaucrats and elected officials who dance to the tune of corporate overlords and do what they want, when they want, with whomever they want at taxpayer expense, with no thought or concern for the plight of those they are supposed to represent. To this power elite, “we the people” are good for only two things: our tax dollars and our votes. In other words, they just want our money.

    We stand utterly helpless in the face of government violence that is meted out, both at home and abroad. Indeed, the systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—has done more collective harm to the American people and their liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting.

    We stand utterly silenced in the face of government and corporate censors and a cancel culture that, in their quest to not offend certain viewpoints, are all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. In this way, political correctness has given way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule.

    We stand utterly locked down in the face of COVID-19 mandates, restrictions, travel bans and penalties that are acclimating the populace to unquestioningly accede to the government’s dictates, whatever they might be (as long as they are issued in the name of national security), no matter how extreme or unreasonable.

    We stand utterly intimidated in the face of red flag laws, terrorism watch lists, contact tracing programs, zero tolerance policies, and all other manner of police state tactics that aim to keep us fearful and compliant.

    We stand utterly indoctrinated in the collective belief that the government—despite its longstanding pattern and practice of corruption, collusion, dysfunction, immorality and incompetence—somehow represents “we the people.”

    Despite all of this, despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to overthrow our republic and enslave the citizenry in order to expand their power and wealth.

    It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

    If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do not rely on politicians that promise to fix what is wrong but instead do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” are the hope for a better year. Not Trump. Not Biden. And not the architects and enablers of the American Police State.

    Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In that scenario, no one wins.

    There’s a meme circulating on social media that goes like this:

    If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

    Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering. So before you get too caught up in the circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles that keep us distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, first ask yourself: who’s really shaking the jar?

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 00:10

  • American Airlines Is Ending Support For Emotional Support Animals
    American Airlines Is Ending Support For Emotional Support Animals

    American Airlines is finally ending the literal circus that was becoming “emotional support animals” at airports and in airplanes nationwide. Hopefully, other airlines will follow suit.

    Back in the day, there were seeing eye dogs, sheep herding dogs and cadaver dogs that were specially trained and that was it. Every good doggo was an “emotional support animal” for its owner, which is one of the best parts of having a pet: they can calm you down, they can bring joy into your life and they can be your best friend.

    But if you don’t know someone that has wrapped their dog up in a military style pet-vest with the words “emotional support animal” written on it lately – as if their “specially trained” dog’s key goal is to somehow psychoanalyze you and offer you written notes on the “anxiety” you feel from capitalism or the patriarchy, versus simply eating, sleeping, farting and crapping – then you haven’t been paying attention. 

    It has become an epidemic across the U.S. – people using the “emotional support” excuse to gain access for their pets on flights and in airports – where they would usually not be welcome. And once the floodgates for emotional support dogs opened up, Americans starting carting around emotional support squirrels, emotional support clowns, emotional support peacocks and entire emotional support zoos with them as they traveled. 

    But American Airlines appears to have finally seen enough. The airline has made a policy change that “matches a new Department of Transportation regulation that says airlines aren’t required to treat emotional support animals as service animals,” according to CNN. The rules come into effect on January 11. 

    At that point, American Airlines says it will “will no longer authorize new travel for animals that do not meet that definition, such as emotional support animals.”

    Emotional support animals are supposed to be “prescribed by mental health professionals to provide comfort and support, but unlike service animals, they are not required to have training in specific tasks.”

    Jessica Tyler, president of cargo and vice president of airport excellence for American said: “We’re confident this approach will enable us to better serve our customers, particularly those with disabilities who travel with service animals, and better protect our team members at the airport and on the aircraft.”

    Among the airline’s concerns was that “passengers were fraudulently passing off their pets as the more loosely defined and fee-free category of emotional support animals”. 

    What gave it away, guys? Was it the peacock?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:50

  • China's "Unrestricted War" On The United States
    China’s “Unrestricted War” On The United States

    Authored by Doug Dodge via AmericanThinker.com,

    In 1999 Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui wrote a book called Unrestricted Warfare.  In this book, these officers, who were both active-duty officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) discussed the lessons learned from the Gulf War action in 1990.  The book was published by the PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House in Beijing, which suggests official approval by the PLA Command. 

    Liang and Xiangsui recall the CNN broadcast of the dead American soldier in Mogadishu and how that broadcast caused an American pullout of Somalia, changing the world’s strategic situation. 

    This and other examples caused these officers to postulate another type of warfare they called unrestricted warfare, which crossed all of the spectrums of society and involved no rules.  The authors listed 15 types of new warfare to be used in order to avoid the standard military conflict.

    One of these new types of warfare is called New Terror Warfare (Xiangsui, 1999), where modern technology is used to cause terror, with a lessor emphasis on violence and a greater emphasis on terror.  The book specifically mentions the Aum Shinrkiyo Cult’s attempt to use sarin in Tokyo as an example of causing terror without a lot of violence.  An example of this might be the Wuhan Virus, which came from China and has been used to cause terror throughout the world.  This virus has resulted in lockdowns of countries, people demanding others wear masks at all times, and huge violations of American citizens’ constitutional rights. 

    Another new type of warfare is drug warfare, which is described as making huge profits by spreading health and social disasters in other countries. According to the New York Times, China is the largest producer of fentanyl coming into America.  The US Drug Enforcement Administration states that China and Mexico are the primary source countries for fentanyl.

    A third type of new warfare is listed as smuggling warfare, which is described as throwing the markets into confusion and attacking economic order. This warfare is being conducted, along with the drug war, by the use of counterfeit articles from China being shipped to the United States.  For example, the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) seized 500,000 counterfeit masks being sent from Shenzhen, China to the United States for people to use to try and stop the spread of the Wuhan Virus.

    A fourth type of new warfare is listed as economic aid warfare, described as bestowing favor in the open and contriving to control matters in secret. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is seen as an example of this warfare, where China aids other countries in return for those countries owing China, what exactly is owed is not known to the public. 

    A fifth type of new warfare is cultural warfare, which is described as leading cultural trends along in order to assimilate those with different views.  This is encapsulated by China’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement.  The Black Lives Matters movement is a movement that is admittedly Marxist in its leanings and is attempting to force everyone to bow to it or face their wrath. 

    Another type of new warfare is media warfare, which is described as manipulating what people see and hear in order to lead public opinion along. American media outlets, which are owned, co-opted by or indebted to China, have been distorting the story about the Wuhan virus.  The American media has been refusing to acknowledge the origins of the virus.  Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted to lying to Americans in order to manipulate their behavior.  Dr. Fauci has connections to China, including the funding of the lab where the Wuhan virus was being studied.  The media is also involved in covering up other scandals, such as the Hunter Biden money scandal

    In Unrestricted Warfare, the authors specifically state, “the goal should be to use all means whatsoever… to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.”   Obviously, the Chinese are actively engaged in various types of warfare against the United States, as shown by the examples cited.  The United States needs to decide to fight back and force the Chinese government to cease its offensive actions against us or face the consequences.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:30

  • "Vagina Mountain" Sculpture Fuels Culture War In Brazil
    “Vagina Mountain” Sculpture Fuels Culture War In Brazil

    A massive concrete sculpture that looks like a vagina in Brazil has fueled a cultural war between leftists and conservatives on social media. 

    The handmade 108-foot concrete sculpture, called “Diva,” was unveiled last week by artist Juliana Notari on the hillside of a former sugar mill in Pernambuco, a state in northeast Brazil. 

    Notari wrote in a Facebook post that the hillside vagina was intended to spark “dialogue with issues that refer to gender issues from a female perspective combined with a cosmopocentric and anthropocentric western society.” 

    “Currently, these issues have become increasingly urgent. After all, it is by changing perspective of our relationship between humans and humans and nonhuman, that will allow us to live longer on that planet and in a less unequal and catastrophic society,” she said, referencing the intolerant climate that Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency has created in Brazil. 

    Notari said it took “almost 11 months” of hard work by more than a dozen people to erect the “33 meters high, by 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep, covered by armed concrete and resin” hillside vagina. 

    Before long, it appears she succeeded at stirring up social media attention as tens of thousands of comments flooded the post. By Wednesday morning, 27,000 comments and 15,000 shares were seen. 

    “The sex organ wasn’t created to be admired, let alone be called art,” wrote one Facebook user. “It’s tasteless and unnecessary and there’s no meaning. You did this because you knew there would be criticism and that’s what you wanted, publicity.”

    “With all due respect, I did not like it. Imagine me walking with my young daughters in this park and them asking … Daddy, what is this? What will I answer?” another commenter said. 

    Someone asked: “Why did only men work to create your art ?” 

    A commentator called the sculpture “Vagina Mountain.” 

    Bolsonaro has long criticized liberal-designed art, and last year, he attempted to unsuccessfully freeze funding for movies with LGBTQ themes.

    The Western world appears locked in a culture war. This is the most evident in the US (read: here). 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:10

  • Capitol Declared 'Secured'; Woman Shot During Standoff Has Died; Confirmation Process To Resume Tonight
    Capitol Declared ‘Secured’; Woman Shot During Standoff Has Died; Confirmation Process To Resume Tonight

    Summary:

    • 100s of Pro-Trump protesters clashed with police after the president’s speech
    • A number of protesters breached security at The Capitol and are inside the building
    • The Capitol has been evacuated
    • VP Pence has been escorted from the Chamber to a secure location
    • 1000s are peacefully protesting outside’
    •  President Trump urges protesters (via Tweet) to “Stay peaceful”
    • Washington DC Mayor orders 6 pm citywide curfew
    • DoD refuses to call DC official for National Guard deployment
    • Federal Protective Service, Secret Service Deploying To Capitol
    • President Trump Orders National Guard To Capitol To Restore Order 
    • Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan Sends State Troopers To Capitol To Restore Order 
    • FBI Has Been Deployed To The Capitol 
    • President Trump Calls On Supporters To “Go Home” 
    • FBI SWAT Team Enters Capitol Building 
    • US Officials Say The Capitol Building Is Now Secure 

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    Update (2034ET): Trump supporters are still out in the streets despite the curfew. National Guard members are holding the line around the Capitol complex. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1904ET): Breaking moments ago, BNO reports the Capitol is back on lockdown due to a “security threat” within the building. 

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    Update (1820ET): According to House majority whip, James Clyburn, one of the top Democrats in the House, despite the 6 pm curfew in Washington, the process to certify Joe Biden as the next US president will continue tonight.

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    Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed this, and said that they have decided to proceed with the Electoral College vote tally “tonight at the Capitol once it is cleared for use.”

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    Meanwhile, as seen in the next clip, the National Guard has now arrived at the Capitol

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    * * *

    Update (1800ET): The Capitol was finally secured Wednesday evening, hours after supporters of President Trump raided the facility. Protesters walked the halls of the Capitol complex as encounters with police led to the shooting death of a woman. 

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    Update (1740ET): Hours after the Capitol building was raided by hundreds of Trump supporters, Reuters is now reporting the facility is “now secure.” 

    • US OFFICIALS SAY THE US CAPITOL BUILDING IS NOW SECURE

    Additional headlines from Reuters details how police are pushing protesters away from the Capitol. 

    • POLICE HAVE CLEARED PROTESTERS OFF OF STEPS OF U.S. CAPITOL -LIVE VIDEO
    • POLICE DEPLOYED AT U.S. CAPITOL ARE DRIVING PROTESTERS AWAY FROM BUILDING -REUTERS WITNESS

    *  *  *

    Update (1733ET): Trump supporters unleash hell on camera equipment owned by major media outlets – this reminds us of the printer scene from the movie “Office Space.” 

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    Update (1722ET): Capitol buildings in Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Colorado, and California have been shut down, or have implemented increased security measures this evening following the events that unfolded in Washington, D.C., today. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1647ET): DC Mayor Muriel Bowser speaks at a press conference Wednesday evening about the events that unfolded this afternoon on the Capitol building. She says a citywide curfew will start at 1800 ET and continue through 0600 ET Thursday. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1631ET): As evening falls, NBC’s Leigh Ann Caldwell reports the FBI SWAT team has entered the Capitol building. 

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    Update (1620ET): In a prerecorded video published on Twitter, President Trump calls on his supporters to leave the Capitol building. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1610ET): President-elect Joe Biden delivers a statement on today’s chaos at the Capitol. 

    Biden calls on Trump’s supporters to end their assault on the Capitol: “This is not dissent… it borders on sedition. And it must end now.”

    *  *  *

    Update (1602ET): Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has tweeted that he is “sending troopers to assist the Metropolitan Police Department and the United States Capitol Police.” 

    Hogan also said: “All Americans should be outraged by this attack on our nation’s Capitol. This is a heinous and violent assault on the heart of our democracy. I will not stand for this, and neither should any American.”

    *  *  *

    Update (1542ET): President Trump has ordered the National Guard to Capitol grounds to restore order. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1533ET): Several media outlets are reporting one person was shot on Capitol grounds about 30 minutes ago. 

    AP is reporting one person was shot; CNN is reporting a woman was shot in the chest on Capitol grounds. 

    Apparent gunshot victim being rushed out of the Capitol building. 

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    We are awaiting more information. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1520ET): Within the past hour, President Trump has tweeted again, this time urging “everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful.” 

    Trump continued: “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” 

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    Update (1512ET): More views of protesters on the Senate floor. 

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    Additional views from inside the Capitol.

    Just wow!

    Trump supporter stealing a podium? 

    Man walking with large Confederate flag in Capitol building. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1508ET): Here’s a stunning view of protesters using a window washing platform to get to higher floors of the Capitol. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1455ET): “Officers have drawn their firearms inside the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives after supporters egged on by the president breached the Capitol,” tweeted Reuters’ Brad Heath. 

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    Update (1444ET): DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has ordered a citywide curfew starting at 1800 ET following the chaos at the Capitol. Also, reporters are saying tear gas has been deployed while President Trump urges supporters to remain peaceful. 

    “Lawmakers have been told to get ready to put on gas masks and have retrieved gas masks from under the seats. There is banging on the door to the chamber,” Bloomberg’s Emma Kinery tweeted. 

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    Moments ago, President Trump urged protesters to “support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement.”

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    *  *  *

    Update (1434ET): Trump supporters have breached the Capitol building. The mob is now inside the building. Security at the Capitol building has failed. 

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    Following President Trump’s address to supporters at a rally in Washington on Wednesday afternoon, a group of demonstrators marched to the US Capitol and reportedly breached several layers of security barricades around the building.

    Just before 1300 ET, a group of Trump supporters “toppled the barricades, storming through them to the grassy fields leading to the Capitol,” according to WaPo

    Inside the Capitol, Congress is meeting to certify the electoral college votes for President-elect Joe Biden

    Amid the unfolding chaos, staff in the Cannon House Office building to evacuate, according to a notice obtained by Bloomberg. Madison office building staff have also been told to evacuate. 

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    Demonstrators are becoming increasingly violent towards police.   

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    Trump supporters are attempting to break police lines at the Capitol. 

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    “Whoa: Trump supporters going at it with the police on the steps of the Capitol as Congress counts the Electoral College ballots inside,” HuffPost’s Philip Lewis tweeted.

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    Representative Haley Stevens tweeted that she is “sheltering in place in my office.” She said the building next to her is being “evacuated.” 

    Stevens wrote: “I can’t believe I have to write this.” 

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    Here are more views outside of the Capitol. The Daily Dot’s Zachary Petrizzo said police are now firing tear gas into the crowd. 

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    Apparently, the crowd outside the Capitol is increasing in size. 

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    CNN’s Kaitlan Collins has just tweeted the “US Capitol is now on lockdown.” 

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    Protesters are now at the steps of the Capitol. 

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    Protesters have made it to the doors of the Capitol. 

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    Protesters have made it inside the Capitol building. 

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:05

  • South Korean Warship Now Patrolling Persian Gulf After Iran Seized Tanker
    South Korean Warship Now Patrolling Persian Gulf After Iran Seized Tanker

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    A South Korean warship sailed into the Persian Gulf on Tuesday after Iran seized a South Korean-flagged tanker in the waters.

    South Korea’s defense ministry said the destroyer Choi Young was operating near the Strait of Hormuz. “It is carrying out missions to ensure the safety of our nationals,” South Korean Defense Ministry spokesperson Boo Seung Chan said of the destroyer.

    South Korean Navy’s Chungmugong Yi Sun Sin class destroyer Choi Young, via The Drive/RIMPAC

    South Korea has approximately 300 members of an anti-piracy unit that have been operating in the region since last year and are reportedly on board the Choi Young destroyer.

    According to The Drive, among its weapons systems include the following

    The primary armament on these ships are Mk 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) arrays, with each of the destroyers having a total of 64 cells. These can be loaded with a mixture of U.S.-made Standard Missile 2 Block IIIA surface-to-air missiles or South Korean-designed Hyunmoo-3 land-attack cruise missiles, as well as the Korean Anti-Submarine Rocket (K-ASROC), also known as the Red Shark, an anti-submarine weapon that has a homing torpedo as its warhead. We don’t know what the Choi Young‘s exact loadout is on this deployment.

    Officials in Seoul insist that the situation with Iran will be resolved diplomatically, despite the deployment of the warship.

    South Korea is sending a delegation to Iran to negotiate the release of the tanker ahead of a planned visit to Tehran next week.

    Iranian media first reported the seizure of the South Korean tanker Hankuk Chemi on Monday. The ship was carrying about 7,200 tons of chemicals and sailing from Saudi Arabia to the UAE.

    Iranian officials said the ship was seized for violating environmental protocols and polluting the waters of the Gulf, but some suspect it is related to the $7 billion of Iranian funds South Korea has frozen due to US sanctions.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 22:50

  • China Makes It Harder For US Spy Satellites To Spot Hypersonic Missiles
    China Makes It Harder For US Spy Satellites To Spot Hypersonic Missiles

    China’s transporter erector launcher (TEL), which carries and fires DF-17 hypersonic missiles, has received a stealth camouflaged cover that makes it more challenging for the US and allies to identify via reconnaissance satellites, according to state-run newspaper Global Times

    TEL is a ground-based vehicle with an integrated prime mover (tractor unit) that can carry and elevate a DF-17 into a firing position. 

    The upgraded TEL was spotted in a video celebrating the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force last week and was published initially on the Chinese website 81.cn. 

    According to the video, the camouflaged missile transporter has a hypersonic missile encased inside a shell as it traverses desert terrain. 

    Shanghai-based news website eastday.com said the TEL is an upgraded version specifically for hauling DF-17s. 

    The PLA debuted the DF-17 during a military parade in late 2019. At the time, the TEL hauling the DF-17 had no cover and the entire missile was exposed. 

    Camouflaged missile transporters come as DF-17s are being fielded at military installations in Southeast China. 

    The missiles have already been deployed in the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, which are in striking range of Taiwan. 

    Beijing’s increased militarization of its southeast coast is very suggestive of preparations for an invasion. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 22:30

  • Iran Uses Its Grip On Strait Of Hormuz To Fight Back US-imposed Sanctions
    Iran Uses Its Grip On Strait Of Hormuz To Fight Back US-imposed Sanctions

    Submitted by South Front,

    Iran has found an original way of dealing with sanctions and limitations imposed on it by the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign launched by the Trump administration.

    On January 4, the Navy of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps detained a South Korea-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz over an alleged environmental pollution issue. The chemical tanker HANKUK CHEMI was inbound to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. Ahead of the incident, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations naval authority reported that an “interaction” between Iranian authorities and a merchant vessel in the Strait of Hormuz led the ship to alter its course and proceed into Iranian waters.

    Following the incident, the South Korean Defense Ministry said that it will send its anti-piracy Cheonghae unit, normally based in the Gulf of Aden, along with helicopters to the Persian Gulf. The 302-strong Cheonghae unit operates a 4,500-ton destroyer, a Lynx anti-submarine helicopter and three speed boats.

    The deployment of this unit is a rather a symbolic move than a practical step that should allow to protect South Korea-flagged ships in the region as Iranian forces have an overwhelming dominance there and using its conventional and asymmetric capabilities can even challenge the US military in the event of a limited military confrontation there.

    Two days before the seizure of the tanker, Iran said a South Korean diplomat was due to travel to the country to negotiate over billions of dollars in its assets now frozen in Seoul. The total amount of Iranian money blocked in South Korea is up to $8.5 billion and Tehran declared its readiness to barter its money for deliveries of a variety of goods and commodities, including raw materials, medicine, petrochemicals, auto parts, home appliances.

    Apparently, Iran thinks that South Korea needs some additional motivation to go contrary to the will of its Big Brother and accept the Iranian proposal.

    Another important diplomatic achievement was made by Qatar, which is known as not only a Turkish ally, but also the Gulf monarchy that has constructive relations with Iran. On January 4, Saudi Arabia lifted the 4-year air, sea and land blockade that it together with the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt and Bahrain imposed on Qatar. In June 2017, the blockading countries accused Qatar, among other things, of supporting terrorism and of being too close to Iran. They severed economic and diplomatic ties with Doha and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on it. Qatar rejected all the allegations and refused to comply with a long list of demands announced by the blockading countries. So, now the anti-Qatari coalition is in retreat. The main factors that contributed to this scenario are the following:

    • a deep crisis faced by Saudi Arabia due to the failed intervention in Yemen and its oil war adventure;
    • the UAE-Saudi tensions that reached a new level due to the declining power of the Saudi Kingdom;
    • the growth of the influence of Iran and its popularity among the population of the Middle East due to the public rapprochement of the Gulf monarchies with Israel;
    • the stern stance of Qatar itself that used the blockade to develop alternative alliances and strengthen relations with Turkey, Iran and even Russia to contain the pressure it faced.

    The Israeli-aligned Gulf monarchies will likely try to use the lifting of the blockade to convince Doha to officially join the US-led pro-Israeli coalition. However, even if Qatar does this under the pressure of the United States and with hopes of restoring economic relations with its neighbors, this does not mean that Doha would change its de-facto regional strategy as the previous years already demonstrated that the national-oriented approach is much more useful in times of crises than empty hopes on large revenues from Israeli love.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 22:10

  • C-SPAN Reinstates Journalist Steve Scully After He Was Caught Lying About Being Hacked
    C-SPAN Reinstates Journalist Steve Scully After He Was Caught Lying About Being Hacked

    It seems it’s only “cancel culture” when the mob wants to cancel someone on the right.

    We say that because there appears to be no outrage after C-SPAN announced that “never Trumper” Steve Scully would be keeping his job at the network after an embarrassing incident last October where Scully admitted he lied about his Twitter account being hacked. 

    The network wrote on January 5: “Steve Scully, who was placed on administrative leave in mid-October for Twitter-related controversies in conjunction with the second presidential debate, is returning to duty at C-SPAN beginning this week. His initial assignments will be off-air producing for C-SPAN television and resumption of his work on C-SPAN Radio’s ‘Washington Today’ program and ‘The Weekly,’ a podcast/interview program.”

    “We view October’s events as a singular episode in an otherwise successful 30- year C-SPAN career. And while it was appropriate in October for Steve to be immediately relieved of his duties leading our 2020 election coverage, we reiterate our belief that now, having completed a three-month administrative leave, he can continue to contribute to CSPAN’s mission,” C-SPAN wrote in a statement January 5.

    C-SPAN had suspended Scully indefinitely after he admitted to lying about his Twitter feed being hacked following an awkward incident in which he appeared to accidentally tweet an intended private message to former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci.

    Scully’s suspension came on the day he was set to moderate the now-canceled second presidential debate, which was to be ‘a career highlight for the 30-year C-SPAN veteran’ (and former Biden staffer).

    In October 2020, after Scully tweeted “@Scaramucci should I respond to Trump,” Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chairman for the Commission on Presidential Debates relayed Scully’s lie that his Twitter account was hacked. C-SPAN similarly issued a statement, confidently claiming “Steve Scully did not originate the tweet and believes his account has been hacked.”

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    Shortly after Scully’s ‘hack’ lie was peddled across the MSM by prominent voices, former Hillary Clinton staffer Yashar Ali noted that the C-SPAN veteran had previously blamed hacks twice before.

    Following that revelation, Scully apologized for lying. Via AP:

    Scully said that when he saw his tweet had created a controversy, “I falsely claimed that my Twitter account had been hacked.

    He had been frustrated by Trump’s comments and several weeks of criticism on social media and conservative news outlets about his role as moderator, including attacks directed at his family, he said.

    These were both errors in judgement for which I am totally responsible for,” Scully said. “I apologize.

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    Scully acknowledged that he let his C-SPAN colleagues down, along with fellow news professionals and the debate commission.

    “I ask for their forgiveness as I try to move forward in a moment of reflection and disappointment in myself,” he added.

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    C-SPAN at the time said: “He understands that he made a serious mistake,” adding “We were very saddened by this news and do not condone his actions.”

    They left out “we look forward to re-instating him as soon as Joe Biden is elected president”. 

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    Regardless, it seems like lying is a pre-requisite to be a journalist nowadays anyway. Enjoy your second act, Steve, and good luck keeping those pesky hackers at bay.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 21:50

  • Meet The Censored: Mark Crispin Miller
    Meet The Censored: Mark Crispin Miller

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    Mark Crispin Miller, author and longtime New York University professor, has unconventional views. Even work he’s done that’s won mainstream praise is unconventional, upon close examination. If you came of political age during the Iraq war years, you probably remember him for The Bush Dyslexicon, a witty, challenging book that took a deep dive into the speech patterns of George W. Bush.

    .

    Unwrapping the thought processes behind famed “Bushisms” like “The question is, how many hands have I shaked?”, Miller found a metaphor for the broad illogic under American society. However, that book’s central idea — that “we Americans have been tricked out of our democracy by a vast and very smart conspiracy of stupid talkers” — was too rich for some mainstream commentators.

    Crispin Miller argued that when people like Donald Rumsfeld told us that “victory” in Iraq may not come “in a month or a year or even five years,” that in fact even fighting forever might be a “victory, in my view,” the joke was not that this message was garbled by Bush, but rather that it was conveyed clearly by “producers, anchors, editors, journalists, and pundits,” who were “fatally dyslexic in doping out the very spectacle it presents to us.” Presenting madness as sanity required a brokenness of mind that just happened to come of the president’s mouth as laugh lines.

    Since then, Crispin Miller has become known for blogging about official deceptions, and his attentions are often focused in directions that make even hardened skeptics like me nervous. On MarkCrispinMiller.com, he posts headlines like, “The Official Story of 9/11 is Based on a Gigantic Lie” and “‘Rogue’ Chinese virologist presents ‘smoking gun’ evidence that SARS-COV-2 was created in a lab.’” As noted in the interview below, he once suggested a student read Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, a book that inspired a $450,000 defamation award to the parent of a Sandy Hook victim.

    At the same time, his observations about the nature of media in America remain poignant and rare in a country whose citizens are trained to believe that propaganda is something only other people consume. Crispin Miller tries to undo those thinking patterns via a course in propaganda at NYU that, he says, urges them to evaluate material independently, and is what got him in trouble.

    There’s a paradox in the way we consume information in the U.S. Our country does not (yet?) insist that official lies remain accepted as truths forever. Even the U.S. Naval Institute is now allowed to write lengthy tracts about how “high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public” in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and it’s accepted that similar lies were told about everything from WMDs to the pretext for the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Even the Zero Dark Thirty account of how we supposedly killed and captured Osama bin Laden was a mess, with then-chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan saying initially that bin Laden used his wife as a human shield, only to have the government retract the claim shortly after.

    While already-proven deceptions are fair game, the penalties for those who raise the first questions grow higher all the time. The term “conspiracy theorist” is now applied equally to people like Alex Jones and Sy Hersh, whose objections to the story of bin Laden’s capture have been effectively memory-holed, as have his oft-denounced reports on reported chemical attacks in Syria (the subject of numerous recent whistleblower accounts claiming official deception).

    Additionally, the term “conspiracy theory” is now often wrapped in accusations of bigotry. In fact, the spreading of conspiracy theories is understood to be a key element of racist movements. There’s obviously some truth to that, as theories about Jews in media or disease-ridden immigrants are among the most common form of the genre. However, it shouldn’t follow that because racists spread conspiracy theories, all people who investigate conspiracies are racist.

    That faulty syllogism now means that the person who tries to take on an entrenched official story not only risks being called crazy, but a racist, sexist, Assadist, etc. The latter charges, if they stick, lead to an expanding array of consequences, from removal from the Internet to job loss. This effect has heightened during the pandemic, a period when we’ve been encouraged to forget how often conventional wisdom about Covid-19 has shifted:

    Crispin Miller’s recent troubles stem from being a skeptic about mask use. He points out that until 2020, studies were unenthusiastic about their benefits in stopping the transition of respiratory illness, and even the CDC only recently changed its mind on the issue. When he broached the subject in class, a student responded critically on Twitter:

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    Criticizing Crispin Miller for sending links to a site that in turn linked to The Charlie Kirk Show, Zero Hedge, Technocracy News, Global Research, “and more,” the student went on to tag the University leadership and wrote, “I hope they take immediate steps to relieve him of these duties.”

    Crispin Miller’s department responded by promising, “We have made this a priority and are discussing next steps.” This in turn led to a now-standard cancelation ritual. A denunciation letter from academic colleagues asked the school to complete a review of Miller’s “intimidating tactics, abuses of authority, aggression and microaggressions, and explicit hate speech, none of which are excused by academic freedom and First Amendment protections.”

    The faculty letter began with complaints about Crispin Miller’s blog, which they said includes “direct mockery and ridicule of trans individuals” and a “characterization of transgender surgery as a eugenic form of sterilization.” They went on, however, to say that no matter how “damaging” these very “visible” views may be to the department, he has a “right to his opinions” that we “must uphold.”

    The signatories then shifted and argued that by mentioning that tweeting student, Crispin Miller moved out of the realm of mere damaging opinion, and into the crime of creating an “unsafe learning environment.” Through this bait-and-switch, the opinions on the blog that colleagues only a few paragraphs before said must be upheld, were now re-entered as part of the argument against him.

    The letter says Crispin Miller through his blog “used his position of authority to intimidate students who choose to wear masks and abide by NYU policy,” which implies but does not exactly say he was telling students not to wear masks. Crispin Miller insists he did not do the latter, and notes that he wears a mask “in discharge of his professional duties.”

    Near the end, the signatories wrote:

    We support the queer, transgender, and non-binary members of the NYU commüñity. We support those in our community who are Black and Indigenous people of color, and immigrants, and who come from marginalized and historically underrepresented communities, particularly those who have been targets of ongoing and systemic racism and violence. We unequivocally condemn white supremacy, anti-trans/nonbinary bias, and any hate speech.

    With this language, protesting faculty moved the Crispin Miller issue from a technical violation of campus mask policy, or even just an accusation of unsound or “non-evidence-based” teaching, and into an argument that positioned him additionally as a defender of white supremacy. This double-whammy construction has become a regular part of the accusatory formula in such cases.

    Crispin Miller responded with a petition to defend his academic freedom that so far has gained over 26,000 signatures, as well as a lawsuit against academic colleagues for libel and defamation, charging among other things that the letter by faculty members, in espousing their liberal credentials, led “any reasonable reader to falsely believe that plaintiff holds regressive views, opposing social equality for insular minority groups and espousing hatred toward them.”

    I disagree with a lot of things Mark has written over the years, but he’s exactly the kind of person whose teaching style tends to benefit college students: a smart person who thinks for himself and challenges students to do the same. By encouraging the school to sack him over a complaint, Crispin Miller’s colleagues are telling students that it’s faster to eliminate or suppress unpleasant ideas than find successful arguments against them. This feels like the opposite of teaching.

    Katie Halper and I interviewed Mark for Rolling Stone’s Useful Idiots podcast. An abridged transcript of the interview is included below:

    MT: What happened?

    MCM: I’ve been teaching at NYU since 1997. Media studies is my field basically. And one of the courses I’ve taught every year, every semester, really, and sometimes even more than that, is a course on propaganda…

    I began the course, as I always do, by making clear that my approach to the subject of propaganda is not to treat it as some ancient thing where we look at the Nazis, we look at the Bolsheviks, maybe we talk about World War I, maybe we talk about McCarthyism, right?

    We definitely look at those earlier examples, but the focus of the course, the mission of the course is to try to teach students how to recognize it in real-time, make an effort to assess its claims impartially, even if you agree with them, and then see if you can discern the hallmarks of a propaganda drive, because it always comes disguised as news or entertainment or something like that. Figure out who’s behind it, and what its purpose is.

    And I make this abundantly clear, it is a difficult thing to do, intellectually difficult. It can even be socially and psychologically difficult to be skeptical, to that degree. So I said, as I always do, we would naturally focus on some of the things that are going on now. For example, look at the way we’re meeting. We’re meeting via Zoom. This is an eloquent testimony to the success of the whole COVID crisis propaganda. And propaganda does not have to be—

    MT: False?

    MCM: Right. Pejorative… Nefarious, as you said. A campaign to get you to wear your seatbelt in a car, that’s propaganda, but propaganda it is anyway. And so we would want to deal with it. For example, we might want to look at the mask mandates. I would encourage you to look at a body of very interesting scientific studies, eight randomized controlled studies conducted over the last 15 years or so among healthcare professionals of the effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses, because the consensus of those studies, and those are the most rigorous kind of scientific study, randomized controlled studies. The consensus is that they’re not really effective. I would encourage you to read those…

    I also think you should read more recent studies finding otherwise. And I gave some guidance as to how a layperson can assess the soundness of scientific studies because I mean, I’m not a scientist, right? And they’re not scientists, most of them. I said, for example, there are scientific reviews of these studies. You can find them. In some cases, there’s actual press coverage of very public objections to studies. And you’ll want to look at the universities where these studies were done and see if they have financial arrangements with big pharma companies or get money from the Gates Foundation, because this might suggest some kind of conflict of interest. I said, all this. I want to add, I said pointedly, “I am not telling you not to wear masks.” NYU has a strict rule. I observe the rule. This is an intellectual exercise, or would be, if you did it.

    The following week, or maybe a little later, a student emailed me and asked to join late. And as I always do, I said sure, the more the merrier. And she joined us. And the second day she was there, she had spoken up at one point the first day about Edward Bernays’s book, Propaganda, which we were discussing. The next day, the mask thing came up again. So that little bit resumed. And she didn’t say anything. That was on a Thursday.

    Early the next week, I get a call from my department chair asking me, in a kind of accusatory tone, if I had discouraged them from wearing masks, or did I have them read something that suggested they don’t work? Whatever he asked me, I said, “Well, this is what I said, this is what happened.” And he said, “Oh, well, I’m going to have to tell the Dean’s COVID task force,” or whatever it’s called. I said, “Okay, what’s up?” And he told me that a student had gone on Twitter and demanded that I be fired.

    MT: Do you suspect that there are views that you’ve held previously that your colleagues disagree with, and that this has become a pretext? And if so, what might those things be?

    MCM: First of all, I think my colleagues are sincerely outraged by some of my views or what they think my views are. Now see, if they were in my class, I could actually engage them in a conversation about some of the things they think I said. One of the things they claim in their letter is that on my website I’ve denied Sandy Hook happened. On my site, Markcrispinmiller.com, anyone can do a search on Sandy Hook, and they’ll see that it doesn’t come up once. I don’t mention it.

    What they’re referring to, and what incensed them, apparently, [was] that in a class, in a propaganda class… someone mentioned Sandy Hook, which was the first in the series of school shootings that have been so high profile in this last decade. Columbine was much earlier, and that was very different. I said, “There is some very interesting research on Sandy Hook that is troubling and very challenging, and I dismissed it out of hand until I read it. And I have to say, there’s something to it. And so if you’re interested in this, you might read it.” And I mentioned this book, a collection of essays. That was my denying that Sandy Hook happened.

    So clearly, a student in the class reacted in precisely the way I urged them to try not to act in the class, i.e. just heard me say that about Sandy Hook, and went and told some of my colleagues, “He’s denied Sandy Hook occurred.” And then they all said, “See? Typical. He’s denied Sandy Hook…” So that’s an example of what I take to be their sincere discomfiture with my engaging precisely the sort of subject that most academics and journalists and others are, sort of, trained to avoid, because you get in trouble if you talk about them.

    But the whole course, as your question implies, is about that. We can always easily spot the propaganda that we don’t agree with. You ask any liberal, what’s propaganda? They’ll say, “Oh, Fox. Fox News.” You ask any conservative what’s propaganda? They’ll say, “MSNBC.” They’re both right. Both are propagandistic, but what they can’t see is the propaganda that they agree with because they think it’s just information. They think it’s just the truth.

    MT: Isn’t the academic world struggling with whether the appropriate way to go about teaching is to encourage kids to read everything and discover things for themselves, or to just give them the right texts and tell them to avoid the wrong texts? There’s a school of thought that believes strongly that some things are just aren’t worth reading, versus the traditional notion that a student should read everything, even things that are horrible.

    Katie Halper: Even Mein Kampf…

    MCM: Calling it a school of thought I think is dignifying it because it’s not thought at all. It’s thoughtlessness, the school of thoughtlessness. And it’s not a school, therefore, because you’re not teaching anybody anything except groupthink, and that’s what’s happening. It’s very oppressive.

    It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s like going to school during the Cultural Revolution or Gleichschaltung, which was the Nazi term for streamlining. It’s when they made all the cultural institutions, they Nazified them all. Of course, there was stuff you couldn’t read. It would be a crime to read it or even bring it up, and it’s kind of like that now. Many of the people who’ve been attacked by their colleagues, as I have, tend to be toward the right. Scott Atlas was attacked by the Stanford faculty for working under Trump on health policy, and Alan Dershowitz has been attacked by the Harvard faculty for his legal advice to that effort after the election…

    But as my case shows, you don’t have to be on the right to be attacked this way. I’ve heard from many people, professors at other schools, who’ve had their slings and arrows, had those shots at them, risked getting fired. Some have been fired. And they’re long-time left people, but… the left today is… not the left that I remember, that I have long considered myself part of, which is antiwar, which is about rectifying grotesque income inequality, strengthening the working class, certainly civil rights… Those are, I see them as left issues. Many of them are also libertarian issues. So what the left has now become is a pro-censorship army. It wants censorship, so the left has changed immensely, and I think that I’m sort of a casualty of that.

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 21:30

  • Trump Supporters Swarm Governor's Mansion In Washington State
    Trump Supporters Swarm Governor’s Mansion In Washington State

    On Wednesday afternoon, supporters of President Trump breached the gates at the Governor’s Mansion in Olympia, Washington. 

    According to local news KING 5, “hundreds of protesters gained access to the property, with flags, signs, and megaphones.” 

    KING 5 reporters were on scene and confirmed Gov. Jay Inslee was home as protesters, some armed, were at his doorstep. 

    The Daily Beast’s Shauna Sowersby said, “protesters are now standing outside of Gov. Jay Inslee’s mansion on the Capitol campus chanting, “open the gates!” Some are banging their flags on the metal gates.” 

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    Sowersby captured the moment when protesters broke through the security gate and stormed the grounds of Inslee’s mansion. 

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    Protesters swarmed the front yard of the mansion.

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    They were met by police officers in riot gear at the front door of the home. 

    Near Inslee’s mansion, a Fox News reporter shoved a Trump supporter. We assume the Trump supporter will be watching One America News Network from now on.

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    The incident at Inslee’s mansion follows a chaotic afternoon at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building, gaining access to the Senate floor. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 21:10

  • Senate Rejects Ted Cruz's First Objection To Electoral College Certification
    Senate Rejects Ted Cruz’s First Objection To Electoral College Certification

    Update (2305ET): The Senate voted down Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) first objection to the Electoral College certification process, lodged against Arizona. While over a dozen senators had pledged to object, just six ended up voting yes following Wednesday’s violence in the U.S. Capitol; Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Roger Marshall (R-KS.) and John Kennedy (R-LA) joined Cruz in objecting according to Axios.

    *  *  *

    Wednesday’s historic protest at the Capitol (described by some far-left outlets like Buzzfeed as a legitimate act of domestic terrorism) is working out for both of America’s establishment political factions, the Nancy Pelosi-led Democrats, and the establishment GOP. Only in the modern bifurcated media environment could Thursday’s protest be described as both a “coup d’etat” and a peaceful, non-violent demonstration (though, to be fair, one woman died after being shot in the chest).

    In reality, however, it was neither. And now that it’s over (instead of setting up an anarchist commune, the pro-Trump protesters mostly dispersed after they felt their point had been made), we’re starting to see how Wednesday’s protest has created a critical opportunity for Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Congressional leadership: it has given them a way out.

    Following reports from NBC News that some Republicans were reconsidering their decision to support a challenge to the election, the Hill is reporting that many senior Republicans are “hopeful” their colleagues have changed their minds.

    But we probably won’t know for certain how many lawmakers have changed their minds until the day of the big vote.

    “There’s gonna be probably 30 or 40 more minutes of debate, and one vote,” Rand Paul said. “I just don’t think there’s going to be another objection. I think it’s over at that point.”

    Paul says he expects the Senate will vote on the objection to Arizona’s Electoral College votes on Wednesday evening, but didn’t expect Republican senators to object to the results from Georgia or Pennsylvania as previously planned.Congress has already returned to continue with the debate and votes.

    When the Hill tried to contact them, spokespeople for Sens. Josh Hawley and Kelly Loeffler, who were expected to object to vote tallies in Pennsylvania and Georgia, respectively, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

    Whatever happens, the public will know soon enough. But there’s nothing like a failed “coup” to ratchet up the pressure on an increasingly isolated Trump.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:57

  • Peter Schiff Exposes America's Dysfunctional Economy
    Peter Schiff Exposes America’s Dysfunctional Economy

    Via SchiffGold.com,

    Peter Schiff appeared on the Lions of Liberty podcast with Marc Clair to look back at the Trump economy and ahead to what the Biden years might bring. Along the way, Peter and Marc talk about the stock market bubble, Peter’s move to Puerto Rico, the looming dollar collapse, and bitcoin.

    The Trump economy will probably be most remembered for the surging stock market. The president constantly pointed to record stock values as a measure of his success. But Peter reminds us that we also had a strong stock market in the last couple of years of the Obama presidency. In fact, Trump ran a campaign attacking that stock market bubble. He promised he was going to fix Main Street by addressing the trade deficit and the budget deficit, rebuilding America’s manufacturing economy, and draining the swamp.

    And none of it happened. Instead, all Trump is doing is pointing to the stock market bubble, which is now bigger than the one he inherited, and claiming a successful presidency based on the stock market. Meanwhile, the budget deficits he’s leaving to Biden are far greater than the ones he inherited from Obama. The trade deficits he’s leaving Biden are much bigger than the ones he inherited from Obama. In fact, the trade deficit with China has never been larger. So, to the extent we were losing on trade before Trump, we’re losing even bigger than ever with Trump — and this is even before COVID.”

    Of course, it wasn’t all bad.

    Trump did deliver promised tax cuts. But he also increased spending.

    Trump made government a bigger burden on the economy than it was before. He just changed the way that burden is borne by the public. Instead of paying for government with income taxes, we’re paying for it through inflation. The government is printing more money and taking the purchasing power. I mean, the dollar is just beginning to fall.”

    Ultimately, everything Americans buy will become more expensive thanks to the inflation created to finance the huge expansion of government during the Trump years.

    Of course, Peter doesn’t think things will improve with Biden in the Oval Office. In fact, he said Trump has left the Republican Party in a weak position to act as the opposition to the Biden agenda. And what is that agenda? Grow government more substantially and pay for it with bigger deficits and more money printing.

    Republicans didn’t object to the bigger deficits when Trump policies produced them. They didn’t object to larger deficits when they were cutting taxes on the rich. So, how would they object to bigger deficits for all these social programs that are going to benefit the middle class and the poor? At least that’s the Democratic rhetoric. So, I think it’s going to be difficult for the Republicans to really have the type of roadblocks in front of Biden that they did successfully erect in front of Obama.”

    Peter also noted that the far-left “Bernie Sanders-AOC wing” of the Democratic Party is far more popular than it was when Obama was in office. Even though Biden is a more mainstream Democrat, he will have to make some concessions to the far left for political reasons. Peter said he thinks we may well see a federal $15 an hour minimum wage, implementation of some aspects of the Green New Deal, and perhaps even a move toward student loan forgiveness, “Medicare for All” or a universal basic income.

    Marc followed up with a key question: how can we protect our wealth given what is likely coming down the pike? For one thing, Peter recommends avoiding the US stock market. But he doesn’t suggest keeping your wealth in cash.

    If the choice was between US cash and US stocks, I’d hold my nose and buy US stocks. Because I think at the end of the day, the biggest losers are going to be the people who hold cash. And the worst thing you could do with your cash is buy bonds. So, it’s going to be the bondholders who suffer the most, not the stockholders. But I think that foreign stocks, emerging markets will dramatically outperform the US stock market over the next five to 10 years. In fact, over the next one year.

    And you know, the only way the US or the Federal Reserve, the US government, could prevent the stock market from crashing, which it should do because it’s so overvalued, but the only way to save the stock market is to sacrifice the dollar. And that is what they’re doing. They’re keeping on printing money and keeping rates artificially low to prevent the air from coming out of these bubbles. They don’t want stock prices to crash. They don’t want real estate prices to crash. So instead, the dollar is going to crash.”

    In effect, the real value of stocks and real estate will come down. But you can’t see that when you’re measuring it in dollars because the dollar loses value faster than your stocks.

    If I keep shrinking the value of the dollar, it makes it look like your stock portfolio is growing. But if you then take your stock portfolio and measure it in gold — how many ounces of gold can I afford with the stock portfolio? — that’s where you’ll see the falling value of your stock, or your real estate, or whatever you happen to have.”

    Peter said ultimately, he thinks we will see a major macroeconomic transition as the world moves away from the dollar as the reserve currency.

    The dollar is going to collapse and that is going to turn the world upside down, because now Americans can’t live beyond their means anymore. Americans can only consume if they produce. Americans can only borrow if they save. And our dysfunctional economy is so screwed up now from all these years of having the benefit of being the issuer of the reserve currency that we’re no longer going to be able to function in a different world where we have to pull our own weight.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:50

  • Israeli Airstrikes Rock Damascus At Moment All Eyes Are On US Capitol
    Israeli Airstrikes Rock Damascus At Moment All Eyes Are On US Capitol

    At a moment international media and political leaders are focused on watching the mayhem unfolding on Capitol Hill, Israel has again attacked Syria, hitting southern Damascus with a series of airstrikes Wednesday night

    This is the third such Israeli attack in three weeks, during which Syrian air defenses were active and said to have intercepted some of the inbound missiles. 

    Via Arab News

    State-run SANA said the strikes were launched from the direction Golan Heights region, and that many missiles were successfully intercepted.

    According to The Jerusalem Post

    An alleged Israeli airstrike targeted locations in southern Syria as explosions were heard in the skies over Damascus on Wednesday night, according to Syrian state media SANA.The strikes were launched from the Golan Heights, a Syrian military source told SANA, claiming that most of the incoming missiles were intercepted by Syrian air defenses.

    While it’s likely that Israel already had the targets in mind – given also such attacks have become almost “routine” – it appears the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intentionally conducted the operation at a moment the world’s eyes are fixated on watching events unfold in Washington D.C.

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    Casualties are as yet unknown, with the extent of damage further unconfirmed. During a prior Christmas Eve attack on the Syrian countryside there were multiple casualties reported. 

    Israel has long claimed its attacks are primarily against Iranian troop positions and weapons smuggling operations connected to Hezbollah.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:30

  • South Carolina Legislation Looks To Ban Mandatory Vaccines
    South Carolina Legislation Looks To Ban Mandatory Vaccines

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    Lawmakers in South Carolina have pre-filed a bill proposing a ban on mandatory coronavirus vaccines.

    WCNC News reports that four state reps. have proposed the legislation to ensure that people may opt out of vaccination and not be discriminated against for doing so.

    The proposal states that those refusing the vaccine would not face “adverse employment action” or any form of societal restrictions for doing so.

    The legislation will also state that vaccines “may be provided only to those individuals who agree to vaccination.”

    Currently in the state it is legal for employers to mandate vaccinations. This legislation would overturn that.

    The proposed bill, which has been referred to the Committee on Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs, is being sponsored by one Democratic representative, and three Republicans. They are Reps. Steven Long, R-Spartanburg, Leola Robinson, D-Greenville, Mike Burns, R-Greenville, and Sandy McGarry, R-Lancaster.

    Rep. Burns told reporters “We want people to be able to go to their jobs, go to schools, go about their business, and not be mandated to do something that they feel is not in the best interest health-wise for themselves.”

    “There should be no negative consequences for those opting out of the vaccine,” Rep. Burns added.

    Representative Stephen Long said that the legislation was proposed following concerns from multiple constituents that “vaccine cards” could be introduced, effectively segregating society.

    “Taking a vaccine should be a personal, private choice, and requiring ‘vaccine cards’ to board planes, attend school, etc is a very dangerous idea,” Rep. Long urged.

    “I encourage everyone to speak with a physician about the benefits and risks of taking a vaccine, but it should never be mandatory,” Long added.

    The proposal could progress through to committee next week, according to reports.

    There has been much hype around potential ‘COVID passports’, especially concerning the fact that employers are currently allowed to mandate vaccination in many states.

    Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases stated that mandatory vaccinations are still ‘on the table’, and that he is “sure” that institutions such as hospitals and schools will mandate all who work there to be vaccinated.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:10

  • Hank Paulson Returns To Wall Street To Run 'Climate-Focused' PE Fund
    Hank Paulson Returns To Wall Street To Run ‘Climate-Focused’ PE Fund

    Since overseeing the near-destruction of the global financial system, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has kept a low profile, appearing in public every now and then to laugh in the face of worsening economic inequality – “We made it wider!” – or bemoan the deteriorating US-China bilateral relationship.

    But from here on out, the public might be seeing and hearing more from the septaugenarian who once ran Goldman Sachs, before he was tapped to run the Treasury Department by President George W Bush.

    As NYT editor and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin reported on Wednesday, Paulson has been tapped by – of all people – U2 frontman Bono to lead a new climate-focused investment fund at private equity firm TPG Capital. The 74-year-old will now return to the private sector for the first time since leaving Goldman in 2006.

    Here’s more from the NYT:

    This past fall, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, got a call from Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono. The musician-activist-investor had an idea and “an ask”: Bono, who helped found TPG’s $5 billion Rise funds focused on “impact investing,” told Mr. Paulson that the investment firm wanted to create an even bigger platform to focus exclusively on combating climate change — and he wanted Mr. Paulson to run it.

    Mr. Paulson, who has spent the last 12 years since leaving his post at the Treasury away from the private sector running his nonprofit institute and working on climate change initiatives, demurred.

    “He told me, ‘My dance card is full,’” Bono said of the call. “I thought he’d be amazing,” Bono added, but said he’d been warned by Mr. Paulson’s associates, “There’s just no way.”

    This week, after months of calls and meetings that followed with Jon Winkelried, TPG’s co-chief executive – Mr. Paulson’s friend and former colleague when he ran Goldman Sachs – Mr. Paulson will become the executive chairman of a new global fund, TPG Rise Climate.

    But why tap Paulson for such a role? As it turns out, the former Treasury Secretary has dedicated himself to combating climate change via various nonprofits over the past decade or so. Paulson and TPG co-founder Jim Coulter said their goal with the fund is to “to make investments in climate that are as profitable as any other kind of investment.”

    Paulson plans to dedicate roughly 50% of his time to this new role. Right now, he’s focused on meeting with power players around the world to try and drum up some investment for the fund. But given all the hype around ESG investing, we suspect Paulson won’t have much trouble recruiting investors.

    Unsurprisingly, when prodded to offer up an example of a successful ESG investment, Paulson pointed to Tesla. But unless Paulson plans on dumping the fund’s money in OTM $TSLA calls, he will need to find some other ESG-focused companies who are still in the early stages of running their business.

    The early returns from TPG’s existing Rise funds — $2 billion of which are in climate-related investments — appear to suggest that socially responsible investing can be just as profitable as other approaches. Mr. Coulter said that with the reduction in the cost of solar energy — for example, bringing it to parity with the cost of building a new gas plant in some places in the United States — the opportunity to make attractive new investments has fundamentally changed. He said he was seeing similar opportunities in electric vehicles and the energy grid that powers them, in agriculture and in consumer packaged goods.

    In the public markets, investors are throwing money at companies like Tesla and others that have positive environmental, social and governance models. However, there is not enough of a pipeline of climate-focused businesses ready to go public, Mr. Paulson said: “We need more high-quality investment opportunities from private equity investments that have the potential to become scalable public companies.”

    Asked by Sorkin to explain why he thought Paulson would be best suited to lead such a fund, Bono explained that his years of work combating global poverty and AIDS have taught him that sometimes you need “the unusual suspects” to come in and do things differently.

    Bono said of his new partnership with Mr. Paulson, “My work on global poverty and then the AIDS fight taught me that we don’t just need the usual suspects, we need some ‘unusual suspects,’ if you like, and some unexpected partnerships in the conversation as well.”

    And just like that, Paulson has become the most important ESG investor in the world. Now, all he needs to do is hire Greta Thunberg as chief analyst.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 19:50

  • Medical Errors And The Cult Of Expertise In The Age Of COVID
    Medical Errors And The Cult Of Expertise In The Age Of COVID

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    Ever since the covid panic began in February of this year, medical personnel such as doctors and nurses have been treated to a level of hero worship generally reserved for the government’s soldiers and cops. We were told they were heroically slaving away to treat covid victims. And although many of these nurses were apparently spending their time choreographing TikTok videos and dancing in hospital hallways, we were assured by government officials and their obedient allies in the media that medical staffers are the new model for self-sacrifice and civic virtue. 

    Yet in the two decades leading up to 2020, researchers were repeatedly alarmed by the extent to which medical errors were a persistent problem in American clinics and hospitals. Beginning at least as early as 1999, an increasing number of studies suggested that perhaps nearly a hundred thousand patients per year were dying due to medical errors.

    Numerous articles appeared in mass media outlets suggesting that medical training was insufficient, that systems devised by hospitals were error prone, and that malpractice was not as rare as doctors would have us believe. 

    Not surprisingly, politics also intervened. Many outlets took the apparent prevalence of medical errors to prove that more government regulation and government funding were necessary. Others noted problems in how government agencies count deaths. 

    But then the covid panic happened. Not surprisingly, concerns over medical competence have receded into the background, and medical personnel have instead been treated to a status of near apotheosis, with the opinion of every run-of-the-mill nurse or physician on everything from racism to “essential businesses” being of the utmost gravity. 

    Moreover, with a focus on the maximization of counting covid deaths, it is likely we’ll see fewer deaths due to medical errors in official counts. And lobbying groups devoted to representing doctors and nurses are likely to use the current political situation to their own advantage. As has long been the case with police and soldiers, the medical profession is pressing the “never question us, we’re experts” line. The actual record, however, suggests the level of “expertise” ought to receive more scrutiny. 

    How Many Deaths Are Caused by Medical Errors? 

    After years of growing discussion on the topic, Johns Hopkins University in 2016 released a study concluding that “medical errors” were the third leading cause of death:

    Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.

    A death caused by a medical error is defined as a death caused by poorly skilled staff, errors in judgment, a preventable adverse effect, or systemic problems such as computer malfunctions or mix-ups over medication.

    The Hopkins study concluded that the methods of reporting deaths in the United States are inadequate to account for the full role of medical errors. 

    The Hopkins statistic was widely reported in the media, such as in this 2018 article at MSNBC. MSNBC even notes that other studies have reported medical errors as the cause of over four hundred thousand deaths per year. 

    Closer to 100,000 per Year?

    Since then, some researchers have expressed dismay and disbelief over the notion that deaths caused by medical errors could be so numerous. For example, researcher and medical doctor David Gorski insists that many who believe the Hopkins number of 250,000 are no better than “quacks.”

    Gorski suggests that only fifty-two hundred deaths per year result from medical errors. But in this Gorski relies on a very narrow definition of medical errors as the overwhelming and obvious cause of death. He nonetheless admits that more than 108,000 deaths per year are cases in which “adverse effects of medical treatment” (i.e., medical errors) are “contributory.”

    Gorski’s number of fifty-two hundred is likely little more than wishful thinking. While 250,000 may be on the high end, it’s unlikely medical errors are nearly as rare as Gorski hopes.

    In this study published in 2020 at the National Institutes of Health, for example, the authors take for granted that “[m]edical errors in hospitals and clinics result in approximately 100,000 people dying each year.”

    And it is also widely assumed, as noted in this study by the Washington Medical Commission that “Medical errors remain vastly underreported.” After all, medical personnel are often reluctant to report errors so as to avoid potential legal problems or sanctions from supervisors.

    But while some doctors insist they’re being unfairly targeted, others have been sounding the alarm for years. Today, a commonly accepted number is between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand deaths per year.

    These are not small numbers. A total of one hundred thousand medical-error deaths makes medical errors among the top cause of deaths. If the current covid-19 pandemic plays out like previous pandemics, the total number of deaths will be much lower in 2021 than 2020’s official total of approximately 350,000. But deaths due to medical errors will continue to number around a hundred thousand year after year after year. 

    Covid and Medical Errors

    Gorski slams the practice in which cases where medical errors were only contributing factors in deaths are potentially counted as deaths due to medical errors. The debate has long been over how much medical errors must contribute to death before they are reasonably counted as the cause of death.

    In 2020, however, look for the final tally to show that counting medical errors has been swept aside in the mortality documentation in favor of attributing more deaths to covid-19.

    After all, it is now common practice to count any death in which covid-19 was a contributing factor as a death due to covid. That is, anyone who dies “with covid” is reported to be a death caused by covid.

    A nurse gave a covid patient the wrong medication, which led to a severe adverse reaction? That’s a covid death. A doctor mixed up two covid patients and administered inappropriate treatment to both? That’s two covid deaths right there.

    In other words, unless steps are taken to ensure accurate recording somewhere, if covid deaths are being overreported, we can expect medical-error deaths to be underreported.

    Seizing a Political Advantage

    Meanwhile, trying to take advantage of the current goodwill showered on medical personnel, many medical professionals are seeking additional legal protections from malpractice suits. Reuters reports:

    State chapters of the powerful American Medical Association and other groups representing healthcare providers have been pressing governors for legal cover….More than half a dozen emergency room doctors and nurses told Reuters they are concerned about liability as they anticipate rationing care or performing unfamiliar jobs due to staff and equipment shortages caused by the outbreak.

    Yet, there is no reason to assume covid treatments will make doctors and nurses easy targets. States already have standards in place which require plaintiffs to show that medical personnel “negligently deviated from the reasonable standard of care.” The fact that a doctor made a mistake is not enough to make a malpractice lawsuit successful.

    Thus, some attorneys who represent victims of medical error and negligence worry that covid will be used as an excuse to further shield healthcare workers from legitimate lawsuits:

    Joe Belluck, a New York lawyer who brings medical malpractice cases, said he’s concerned the coronavirus crisis could be used to enact a wish list of changes sought by doctors, hospitals and the medical industry to curb unrelated lawsuits.

    Given the way that medical personnel have been treated by media and government personnel in the age of covid-19, it’s not hard to see how this current state of hero worship could be employed to ram through legislation favored by longtime rent-seeking special interest groups like the AMA.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 19:30

  • Iran Showcases Suicide Drones During Large-Scale UAV Combat Exercise
    Iran Showcases Suicide Drones During Large-Scale UAV Combat Exercise

    Iran is conducting two day large-scale drone exercises in Semnan province and in coastal waters which started Tuesday, involving hundreds of domestic built UAVs, and notably including suicide drones

    According to the Iranian Army chief overseeing the combat exercises, Admiral Mahmoud Mousavi, naval drones will fly from warships in the country’s southern waters, while suicide UAVs will additionally conduct long-range sorties.

    Via Reuters, Iran state media

    Underscoring the nature of the exercise as a ‘show of strength’ at a moment US forces are in the region, including the USS Nimitz carrier strike group which days ago was called back to its Mideast area of operation after it was initially pulled out, Mousavi emphasized that “the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the able and most powerful countries in the field of drone production.”

    State media described that it was the first exercise of its kind in terms of extent and the variety of drones deployed for the combat simulations.

    “UAV combat operations including air interception and destruction of aerial targets using air-to-air missiles, destruction of ground targets using bombs and pinpoint missiles, as well as widespread use of suicide drones, are among the measures that will be carried out in the operational part of this exercise,” Adm. Mousavi described further.

    The commander added, “The flight of naval drones from a vessel in southern waters of the country, long-range flight of pinpointing suicide drones to destroy vital targets in the depths of enemy’s soil will be one of the drone combat exercise plans.”

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    Official footage showed what are commonly called Kamikaze drones crashing into targets to deliver munitions after previously circling above. These deadly advanced drone types were recently deployed by Azerbaijan during the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

    On Sunday the Pentagon reversed its decision to remove the USS Nimitz carrier from the Gulf region, reportedly after President Trump intervened to rescind prior orders that it would return to the US. Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said in a statement: “Due to recent threats issued by Iranian leaders against President Trump and other government officials, I have ordered the USS Nimitz to halt its routine redeployment.”

    Washington is now likely closely monitoring Iran’s drone activities in and near the Persian Gulf, and will likely view the two-day exercises as a potential provocation, particularly if any drones circle near US vessels.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 19:10

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Today’s News 6th January 2021

  • This Is Why The New Mutant COVID Strain That Is Ravaging South Africa Has Scientists Extremely Worried…
    This Is Why The New Mutant COVID Strain That Is Ravaging South Africa Has Scientists Extremely Worried…

    Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

    Over the past couple of weeks, the new coronavirus strain known as “Super COVID” has been racing through the UK and making headlines all over the globe, but scientists insist that the new mutant COVID strain in South Africa is potentially much more dangerous.

    Just like “Super COVID” in the UK, there is evidence that the South African strain spreads faster, and South Africa’s health minister has warned that there is “anecdotal evidence” of a “larger proportion of younger patients with no co-morbidities presenting with critical illness”.  But the biggest reason why health authorities are so concerned about this particular strain is because it has mutated so dramatically that the current vaccines that have been developed may not work against it.  The following comes from a Reuters article entitled “UK scientists worry vaccines may not protect against S.African coronavirus variant”

    UK scientists expressed concern on Monday that COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out in Britain may not be able to protect against a new variant of the coronavirus that emerged in South Africa and has spread internationally.

    Both Britain and South Africa have detected new, more transmissible variants of the COVID-19-causing virus in recent weeks that have driven a surge in cases. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday he was now very worried about the variant identified in South Africa.

    Even though the UK is the epicenter of the “Super COVID” outbreak, the British are so alarmed by the South African strain that they have banned all flights from South Africa.  In an interview with the BBC, Hancock admitted that he is “incredibly worried” about what is happening in South Africa right now…

    “I’m incredibly worried about the South African variant, and that’s why we took the action that we did to restrict all flights from South Africa,” he told the BBC’s “Today” program.

    “This is a very, very significant problem … and it’s even more of a problem than the U.K. new variant.”

    As the Daily Mail recently explained, the vaccines that have already been developed are designed to get the body to identify COVID’s “spike protein”, and if this does not happen they will not work properly…

    Covid vaccines – including the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford University/AstraZeneca jabs currently being rolled out across Britain – work by training the body to spot the virus’s spike protein.

    If the spike mutates so much that it becomes unrecognizable then it could render vaccines useless or make them less potent.

    Scientists are telling us that the new mutant strain in South Africa has a total of eight changes to the spike protein, and Dr. John Bell of Oxford University is calling them “pretty substantial changes”

    Dr. John Bell of Oxford University said Sunday the variant identified in South Africa was worrisome in this regard, however.

    “They both have multiple, different mutations in them, so they’re not a single mutation,” he told Times Radio. “And the mutations associated with the South African form are really pretty substantial changes in the structure of the (virus’ spike) protein.”

    At this moment, we do not know if the current vaccines will be rendered useless by this new mutant strain or not.

    But it is being reported that early tests have shown that at least one of the mutations appears to have made the virus more resistant to antibodies

    One, called E484K, is particularly alarming, Dr Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, told the Wall Street Journal.

    When he and his team tested antibodies from donated plasma or lab made ones against that mutated bit of the virus variant, the immune cells were less effective.

    Of course much more testing needs to be done, and those tests are being conducted right now.

    According to a top official in the UK, scientists may be able to come to some sort of a conclusion in a couple of weeks

    Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, said in response to a question from POLITICO on December 30 that this work can take 12 to 14 days, and that it may be a couple of weeks before scientists can give “a solid steer” on whether the vaccines will be effective on new variants.

    So it may be a while before we know for sure if the current vaccines will be effective against this frightening new mutant strain in South Africa or not.

    But what we do know is that this new strain is rapidly becoming dominant in large portions of South Africa

    The variant, 501.V2, is more infectious than the original COVID-19 virus and has rapidly become dominant in South Africa’s coastal areas. It is expected that the variant will quickly become dominant inland in Johannesburg, the country’s largest city, and the surrounding Gauteng province, he said.

    If it is becoming dominant there, there is a good chance that it will become dominant as it spreads elsewhere as well.

    In recent days, two cases of the South African strain have been confirmed in the UK, and there have also been cases detected in Finland, Switzerland and Australia.

    Then on Monday, a case popped up in Austria

    On Monday, Austria announced that it had discovered one case of the South African mutation in a 30-year-old woman who returned from a trip on Dec. 6.

    And officials in Japan just announced that a case has been identified in their country

    Japan on Monday detected a coronavirus variant found in South Africa, the government said, the first such discovery in a nation that has already identified more than a dozen cases of another variant that is spreading rapidly in Britain.

    So it appears that the cat is already out of the bag.

    A whole host of nations have already put travel restrictions in place to try to keep this deadly new strain from spreading more widely.

    But so far the U.S. is not among them.  In fact, testing is not even required for people traveling to the U.S. from South Africa.

    Just like we have seen with “Super COVID”, it is probably just a matter of time before the South African strain spreads all over the planet.

    And if the current vaccines will not work against it, that will put scientists back to square one in fighting this pandemic.

    Of course there are tens of millions of people in the United States that will never take any COVID vaccine under any circumstances.  Many are deeply concerned about the potential long-term effects of these experimental mRNA vaccines, and there is still so much that we do not know about them.

    These are such troubled times, and the “perfect storm” that started in 2020 is only going to get worse in 2021.

    Scientists thought that the new vaccines would give them the upper hand in dealing with this pandemic, but that may not be the case after all.

    And as COVID continues to mutate, it is inevitable that there will be even more surprises for our health authorities in the months ahead…

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 02:00

  • Catastrophe Is All Around Us
    Catastrophe Is All Around Us

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    As a naturally optimistic person, it vexes me that the word catastrophe has echoed in my mind since early March 2020. It’s the word the great smallpox eradicator Donald Henderson used in his 2006 prediction of the consequences of lockdown, a word that wasn’t around then. His masterful article addressed the idea of travel restrictions, forced human separation, business and school closings, mask mandates, limits on public gatherings, quarantines, and the entire litany of brutality to which we’ve been subjected for nearly a year, all summed up in the word lockdown. 

    Dr. Henderson warned against it all. This is not how you deal with disease, he said; at a minimum society needs to function so that medical professionals can do their work. Diseases are managed one person at a time, not with grand central plans. That was the old wisdom in any case. Under the influence of vainglorious modelers, ideological resetters, and politicians hoping to make names for themselves, most of the world tried the lockdown experiment anyway. 

    Here we are nearly a year since I wrote my first article warning that governments presumed themselves to possess the quarantine power. They could use it if they wanted to. I didn’t expect they would. I wrote this piece as a “for your information” public service just to let people know how terrible governments could be. 

    I had no idea that quarantines would be only the beginning. At this point we know what we did not know then. They are capable – by they I mean even governments in presumably civilized countries with functioning democracies – of the unthinkable, and they are capable of persisting in the unthinkable for an appalling amount of time. 

    Now the lockdowns are our life in the US, unless you are lucky enough to live in Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, South Carolina, and perhaps a few other places. Here in these outposts of what we used to call civilization, life seems normal. Our readers in these states don’t even think about the virus much, and they read my articles and find them overwrought, like I’m describing life on another planet. 

    The US seems to have two economies, one open and one closed. You see the difference on social media: people at the beach, malls, living life more or less normally. Meanwhile, in the lockdown states, businesses are shuttered, people are demoralized, fights over masks are breaking out in stores, the arts are wrecked, and multitudes are still cowering in their homes. The unemployment differences between the two reveal exactly what’s going on. 

    We are experiencing what is a migratory demographic shift that could compare to 19th century legend. From what is being reported by U-Haul and other moving companies, people are fleeing from closed to open. Reports United Van Lines: “Among the top inbound states were South Carolina (64%), Oregon (63%), South Dakota (62%) and Arizona (62%), while New York (67%), Illinois (67%), Connecticut (63%) and California (59%) were among the states experiencing the largest exoduses.” And this all happened since the summer when it became unbearably obvious that the bastards were not going to stop tormenting their people. 

    Moving, however, is not a panacea. Normal life seems to be breaking down. The government mails are running 2 to 3 weeks behind. Companies can’t even close their books because the tempo of life has dragged to a crawl. Tech support takes many hours on hold. Accountability for failure to deliver on services seems to be evaporating. Groceries experience sporadic shortages in unpredictable ways. We no longer know the rules and yet fear breaking them. 

    Health care is not functioning normally, with non-Covid patients hurled out too soon while positive tests land you in ICU whether you need it or not. (My own 81-year-old mother was hospitalized with a serious condition and then thrown out because she didn’t test positive for SARS-CoV-2). Vaccine administration has been mostly chaos because society is not functioning normally. Weddings and funerals are still out. We are being socialized to treat everyone, including ourselves, as nothing but pathogenic disease vectors. 

    The hatred and threats of violence in online venues are out of control. Society has never been more angry or divided in my lived experience. Tech giants are still censoring dissent, trying to force everyone to believe the pronouncements from the World Health Organization even though they change week to week, as if they are working hard to realize Orwell’s vision of the future. The blue check marks and people with access daily advocate trampling on the rights of those who can’t live their lives online. 

    The mainstream media that most people once trusted continues to pretend as if this catastrophe is a result of the pandemic rather than the pandemic response. Just look at the number of headlines that begin “Pandemic Has Caused….” and then fill in the blank with any one of the many terrible things happening now: a third of restaurants bankrupt, opioid deaths, alcoholism, suicide ideation, female unemployment, demoralized and abused children missing a whole year of schooling, loved ones separated by borders, murder rates soaring, vaccinations missed, cancer screenings forgone, and so on. It’s all the pandemic, they say. 

    Why won’t the media name the lockdowns as the culprit? It’s not just denialism. The implication is that we had no choice but to shatter life as we know it. Lockdown is just what one does in a pandemic. It’s utterly not. Nothing like this has ever taken place, never in history. This remains an egregious attack on fundamental rights, liberties, and the rule of law. The results are all around us. That the news media refuses to name the reason feels like gaslighting, except that we know they are lying, they know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying. It’s just an unwritten rule in journalism now: never name the lockdowns (unless you bury it in the 13th paragraph of an otherwise boring article). 

    And even after a full year, the public remains mostly deeply ignorant of the age/health gradient of Covid-19 fatalities, even though we’ve known this since February of last year! According to the CDC – even conceding the accuracy of testing and exigencies of fatality classification – it’s 99.997% for 0-19 years, 99.98% for 20-49 years, 99.5% for 50-69 years, and 94.6% for 70+ years. It’s nursing homes that have been a main vector for disease outcomes. The threat to school-age kids approaches zero. The more information we get the more normalized the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen seems, a respiratory and flu-like illness we have seen become pandemic before it became endemic just like another dozen times in the last hundred years. We didn’t shut down society, and, for that reason, we managed them just fine. 

    Is it that numbers like the above are just too abstract to mean anything to people? More likely, the numbers mean something but that meaning is overwhelmed by the nonstop panic porn one sees on the media each day. People can no longer distinguish these various terms that media pundits throw around to signal how terrible this disease is: outbreaks, cases, outcomes, deaths, spread, infection rates, hospitalizations – it’s just a huge and blurry blizzard of terrible. 

    Citing a bit of reality-based data cannot make a dent in the pathological Munchausen Syndrome that has been unleashed. Primal fear has swamped rationality for the better part of 10 months. So people douse themselves in sanitizer for fear of the enemy they cannot see, and presume everyone else is trying to infect them. They put up with attacks on their rights under the belief that it is for their own good. 

    The fiscal and monetary policy response has been equally egregious, all premised on the idea that money printing and spending – it all goes together these days – can possibly be a substitute for private investment and actual people buying and selling things. That combined with continued protectionist measures in the last days of the Trump administration make for the worst combination of policy malpractice in generations, or perhaps ever. The pain of recovery will be monstrous. 

    Many of us spend a good part of our days poring over the latest research, which reveals their terrible toll of the lockdowns, the inescapable horror that it is the lockdowns not the pandemic that has done this. It shows the absence of any relationship between lockdowns and lives saved. It shows that a significant number of excess deaths are due not to disease but to drug overdoses, depression, and suicide. It shows the tremendous problems with PCR testing, the nondriver of “asymptomatic transmission,” the incredible proliferation of disease misclassification, and the absurdity of the idea that political solutions can intimidate and arrest a virus. 

    We do all this research every day, and then turn on the TV to find the nation’s top medical spokesman (a certain Dr. Fauci of fame and fortune) knows nothing and cares nothing for any of the research. He is a performance artist who just likes being on TV, being fawned over while he advocates the permanent overthrow of our rights and liberties. And yet even his colleagues and others in the profession, who know his long-running racket very well, dare not call him out for fear of losing grant money, being ostracized within their institutions, and trolled on Twitter. He is a scary man with the power to make or break careers, so rather than take the risk, others just shake their heads and turn the channel.

    Sheer cowardice explains most of the dearth of dissent. It’s easy to forget how cravenly careerist people become when they are afraid. Most people would rather lie or be silent than risk facing disapproval of friends and colleagues. Cancel culture makes this worse. Doctors who dare talk about natural immunities or the talisman of masks and distancing find themselves investigated by medical boards. Academics who speak out are accused of encouraging superspreaders, blasted by colleagues including students. It’s way beyond witch hunts at this point. As a result, you can easily get the impression that everyone agrees with the desperate need to dismantle civilization as we know it. 

    None of this is sustainable. When it was “14 days to flatten the curve,” I feared for the future of investment, public confidence in government, lost revenue for small and medium-sized businesses, and their permanent shock that would come from the realization that government can and will do something this horrible. Another two weeks went by and we were writing furiously to warn the world of the deadly consequences of this course. April 13 came and AIER released the most strongly worded editorial then in print: we need complete liberation now. The Wall Street Journal followed and said the same two days later. 

    In those days, the prevailing theory of the virus was that you cannot stop it but you can slow it down. Tall or short, the area of the curve is the same. Why prolong the pain? The talking point at the time was to preserve hospital capacity. But over time, this plausible idea mutated into a full suppressionist agenda. Slow the spread became stop the spread. It was a small step until the “experts” defaulted to a medieval view of disease: run away! Actually, that’s too flattering: it was a gradeschool view of cooties that became the new and thoroughly fake science. 

    Then we arrived at the current moment in which professional virus fighters, having failed miserably to suppress the virus, have turned against the public, blaming those who do not comply with complete enthusiasm. Fauci says some version of this daily on TV: if everyone would just comply, we won’t have to lock down anymore. Unless morale improves, the beatings will continue. 

    After two weeks, there was still time to undo major parts of the damage of lockdowns. After 10 months, not so much. There will be loss of life for many years to come plus population-wide psychological, social, and economic damage. The catastrophe has not been averted. It is far worse than any of us could ever have imagined at this time last year. The world has shifted and drastically, and the pain and suffering are unspeakable. Our governments are the pathogens that have done this to us. They were aided and abetted by fake news, fake experts, fake intellectuals, fake science, and a fake view of life. 

    At this late date, we’ve lost confidence in most of what we used to trust and think was normal. Despair is taking over. Many of those who were willing to fight in the spring and summer have given up, tired of writing, tired of protesting, tired of yelling. The attempt to demotivate the opposition is working. This is a huge error. 

    What, then, is the path to the future? We can stay on the present catastrophic course or we can reverse it. The sooner governments wise up and stop hurting everyone like this the sooner the healing can begin. It will take years, decades, but a version of the rule of medicine from the ancient days pertains: first stop doing harm. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 00:05

  • Assange "Free To Return Home" If Released By UK, Says Australian PM
    Assange “Free To Return Home” If Released By UK, Says Australian PM

    Australia remains a key nation among the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance comprised also of Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States – which is why the Tuesday statement of Prime Minister Scott Morrison on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is so significant. 

    Morrison said that Assange is “free to return home” to Australia once legal challenges against him are resolved. This came a day after a UK judged blocked the US extradition request, citing the extreme health risk he would face in America’s federal supermax prison system.

    The US is set to appeal the ruling. The next immediate step is Assange’s bail hearing where his legal team will seek his temporarily release from London’s Belmarsh prison, set for Wednesday.

    “Assange’s lawyers will request that he be temporarily released from the maximum-security Belmarsh prison, in southeast London, during a hearing at the Westminster Magistrates Court in the capital that will begin at 10:00 GMT,” Al Jazeera writes.

    Morrison told a local Australian broadcaster Tuesday, “Well, the justice system is making its way and we’re not a party to that. And like any Australian, they’re offered consular support and should, you know, the appeal fail, obviously he would be able to return to Australia like any other Australian.”

    “So, yes, it’s just a straightforward process of the legal system in the UK working its way through,” he added. But in Assange’s case the chances are high that Washington would cook up new charges which could be used to press Australia to extradite him assuming he did ever risk making his way back to Australia, where he’s a citizen. It’s extremely unlikely that he would ever travel to another “Five Eyes” country regardless of such “assurances”, short of all US charges being dropped.

    Previously Morrison has been on record as saying he won’t intervene to help Assange in anyway while the US was pursuing him on espionage related charges. “Assange must face the music like any other Australian in hot water overseas,” he once said.

    Currently Australian opposition politicians are pushing Canberra to bring pressure on the Trump administration to drop all charges, as The Guardian details

    The Australian government is facing calls from its own Coalition backbench and the opposition Labor party to press the Trump administration to end the pursuit of Julian Assange after a British court ruled out the WikiLeaks co-founder’s extradition to the United States.

    With the US government signaling it plans to appeal the court’s ruling, the Coalition backbencher George Christensen and the South Australian independent senator Rex Patrick were among Assange supporters who saw a presidential pardon from Donald Trump as the best way to bring an end to the saga.

    There have also been US domestic calls among Trump’s own base for a pardon. But with the London court now ruling not to extradite, the pressure has perhaps been taken off Trump a bit to pursue what in his mind might be a politically costly decision, despite pardon for whistleblowers like Assange and Snowden remaining popular among the US public.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:45

  • Los Angeles County Is Riskiest Area In The US: FEMA
    Los Angeles County Is Riskiest Area In The US: FEMA

    Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,

    Los Angeles County has been named as the riskiest county in the United States, according to a new Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) index that examines 18 types of natural disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, floods, volcanoes and tsunamis.

    Of the more than 3,000 U.S. counties surveyed, Los Angeles County ranked highest in FEMA’s National Risk Index, which looks at how often natural disasters strike, how many people and how much property are in harm’s way, how socially vulnerable the population is, and how well the region is able to recover.

    The index also lists three counties in the New York City area—Bronx, New York County (Manhattan), and Kings County (Brooklyn)—in the top 10 riskiest U.S. counties, as well as Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, St. Louis, and Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California.

    In contrast, FEMA has named Loudoun County, a Washington, D.C. outer suburb, as having the lowest risk of any county. Three other Washington suburban counties rank among the lowest risks for larger counties, along with suburban Boston, Long Island, suburban Detroit and Pittsburgh.

    FEMA’s Mike Grimm said that although the ranking may seem “counterintuitive,” the degree of risk isn’t based solely on the frequency of natural disasters but it also considers how devastating the toll would be on a region.

    Therefore, two New York City counties, Philadelphia, St Louis, and Hudson county in New Jersey have been named among FEMA’s top five most dangerous counties for tornadoes. Meanwhile, Oklahoma county in Oklahoma, which has been struck by more than 120 tornadoes in the past seven decades, has been placed in 120th place on the list.

    A tornado in the top five would be “a low frequency, potentially high-consequence event because there’s a lot of property exposure in that area,” University of South Carolina Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute’s director, Susan Cutter, told The Associated Press.

    “Therefore, a small tornado can create a large dollar loss.”

    While Oklahoma is twice as likely to be struck by tornadoes than New York City, New York has higher damage potential due to the higher population and property value.

    “It’s that risk perception that it won’t happen to me,“ Grimm said.

    “Just because I haven’t seen it in my lifetime doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

    list of tips published on FEMA’s website urges Americans to take steps to prepare for potential natural disasters.

    It includes creating an emergency plan, an emergency kit, keeping pantries stocked, learning about disaster planning within the community, signing up for emergency alerts, checking insurance policies, taking personal inventories, protecting valuables, planning for pets, and growing emergency funds to budget for possible natural disasters.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:25

  • China Arrests US Lawyer During "Massive Crackdown" In Hong Kong
    China Arrests US Lawyer During “Massive Crackdown” In Hong Kong

    Update 11:00pm ET: In what would be a shocking development, Bloomberg reports that during its “massive crackdown” purging countless local activists and politicians, the Hong Kong police – i.e. China – has arrested American Lawyer, John Clancey, using as a pretext the National Security Law, which everyone warned China would use as strawman to crack down on Hong Kong citizens and activists. Well, it now appears that the emboldened Beijing – which is delighted by the ascent of pro-China pushover Joe Biden to the White House  – is also using that law to arrest American citizens.

    • H.K. ARRESTS AMERICAN LAWYER JOHN CLANCEY, COLLEAGUE SAYS
    • CLANCEY ARRESTED UNDER NATIONAL SECURITY LAW: COLLEAGUE

    In response, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken sent out a harshly worded tweet, warning China that the “Biden-Harris administration will stand with the people of Hong Kong and against Beijing’s crackdown on democracy.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    We eagerly await to see just what the Blinken Biden administration will do, besides tweeting angrily in China’s general direction, to secure release of an American citizen unjustly arrested by Chinese proxies in Hong Kong.

    *  *  *

    Earlier: “Massive Crackdown”: Hong Kong Police Arrest Dozens Of Politicians & Activists

    2021 is less than a week old and already Beijing is ramping up its efforts to suppress what’s left of the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong. Right now, China hawks are preoccupied right now by a number of issues: the disappearance of Jack Ma (note: CNBC claims the Alibaba founder is just “laying low”), Beijing’s refusal to allow international investigators inside the Wuhan Institue of Virology and, finally, the CCP’s abusive treatment of China’s Uyghur Muslim minority.

    Now, less than two months after the last 19 members of the HK LegCo’s pro-democracy opposition quit en masse over Beijing’s demands that they swear a loyalty oath to uphold the new national security law and the supremacy of the CCP, Hong Kong police have rounded up dozens of pro-democracy activists. The arrests – described by western journalists as a “massive crackdown” – essentially confirm what many feared: all pro-democracy activists who haven’t escaped Hong Kong will likely face arrest and imprisonment.

    According to various media reports, police are rounding up dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    With at least two student leaders – including Joshua Wong – already heading to prison, Wednesday’s arrests mark the biggest crackdown under the new national security law, according to the NYT, one former opposition lawmaker was participating in a live video chat when he got the knock at the door.

    A twitter account run by Wong’s supporters claimed that his house was raided during the sweep with the arrests.

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    Another six former LegCo members were among those who were arrested.

    The alleged offenses also underscored government officials’ efforts to weaken any meaningful opposition in the city’s political institutions. Among those arrested were at least six former Legislative Council members, a number of district councilors — a hyperlocal elected position dominated by pro-democracy figures — and several activists. They included figures who had called for aggressive confrontation with the authorities and those who had supported more moderate tactics.

    According to social media pages belonging to some of those arrested, the activists were accused of trying to “subvert state power”. The charges were tied to their participation in the informal LegCo vote held over the summer.

    An informal primary election for the LegCo held in July delivered an uncomfortably large margin of victory to the pro-Democracy candidates. It’s widely believed this vote deeply bothered Beijing, possibly prompting it to accelerate its crackdown on HK, which once functioned as a that once functioned as an autonomous city state. With its political independence now in tatters, any pro-democracy activists who haven’t already left the city will probably be on the next train or plane out – unless they’re detained first.

    But an even bigger question: With Beijing’s crackdowns growing increasingly brazen, how will American institutions like the NBA continue to justify doing business in China?

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:18

  • Marines Step Up Training For China With Island Exercises Off Japan's Mainland
    Marines Step Up Training For China With Island Exercises Off Japan’s Mainland

    Given ongoing US tensions with Beijing especially in the South China Sea region, the United States Marines are increasingly returning to the branch’s original mission of amphibious warfare reminiscent of the island campaigns of WWII in the Pacific.

    It’s being reported this week that this is precisely the type of training being conducted in islands of the Japanese mainland. “The Marine Corps is stepping up training in Japan for island-based conflict in the Western Pacific, putting it at the leading edge of a pivot by the US to face the military challenge from China,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

    Illustrative, US Marine training, Getty Images

    The report details that a new emphasis on small-scale, rapid deployments will make US troops and positions harder to locate. This is very different from the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ environment which saw massive deployments and large-scale occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    The report quoted  Lt. Col. Neil Berry, commander of the third battalion-Eighth Marine Regiment, based out of Camp Lejeune, N.C. as saying, “We’re trying to get away from tents, from computer screens, because, 1.) it’s very stationary and, 2.), it has a huge electromagnetic signature.”

    The WSJ detailed further what the island training looks like in practice:

    At one of a series of recent exercises, a few dozen Marines faded into long grass after touching down in two CH-47 Chinook helicopters, followed by Japanese soldiers arriving in two Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Their simulated mission: avoiding detection and recapturing a port on an island inside the range of much of the enemy’s missiles and artillery.

    The report added: “The exercise reflected a new emphasis on small, dispersed troop units and command centers, which are intended to be harder to locate and destroy.”

    Thus in addition to simulating the type of small militarized island environment as exists among contested island-chains in the South China Sea (also built up through the PLA’s series of man-made islands), the Marine Corps is preparing to evade detection by China’s advanced radar and technological capabilities. 

    Over the past year especially, the US has stepped up both aerial patrols and US Navy sail throughs of the region, also near and through the disputed Taiwan Strait, in “freedom of navigation” exercised aimed at signaling Beijing. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:05

  • Epidemiologist Says Influenza Cases Are Being Counted As COVID-19
    Epidemiologist Says Influenza Cases Are Being Counted As COVID-19

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Top epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski says that the massive drop in influenza cases can be attributed to the fact that many are being falsely counted as COVID-19 cases.

    Wittkowski, former Head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University, cautioned that, “Influenza has been renamed COVID-19 in large part.”

    According to CDC figures, the cumulative positive influenza test rate from late September into the week of December 19th was just 0.2%, compared to 8.7% from a year before.

    According to Wittkowski, this is because many flu infections are being incorrectly labeled as coronavirus cases.

    “There may be quite a number of influenza cases included in the ‘presumed COVID-19’ category of people who have COVID-19 symptoms (which Influenza symptoms can be mistaken for), but are not tested for SARS RNA,” Wittkowski told Just the News.

    Those patients may “also may have some SARS RNA sitting in their nose while being infected with Influenza, in which case the influenza would be ‘confirmed’ to be COVID-19,” he added.

    Wittkowski challenges the notion that masks and social distancing have resulted in a drop in flu cases, asserting that flu and COVID-19 viruses are “more similar than people want to acknowledge.”

    “People know everybody is wearing masks and distancing, and so people want to come up with things that are good about it,” he said.

    In places like California and Pennsylvania where mask wearing is most common, COVID-19 cases have continued to skyrocket.

    As Just the News notes, “Data indicate that more than nine out of every 10 Americans in most states are wearing masks in public regularly; those numbers have been above 80% since the early fall. Yet average positive COVID-19 tests have multiplied by nearly seven times since the spring peak.”

    *  *  *

    New limited edition merch now available! Click here. In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 22:45

  • Chinese Soldiers Outfitted With Digital Combat Device That Has "Self-Destruction Mode"
    Chinese Soldiers Outfitted With Digital Combat Device That Has “Self-Destruction Mode”

    New Delhi Television has revealed that Chinese soldiers in the Tibet Military Region will soon be equipped with new digital systems embedded in their combat gear. 

    Chinese soldiers will be outfitted with satellite antennas on the helmets, new night-vision goggles, and a digital control terminal on the arm. They will also receive advanced body armor, a new navigation device, personal radio, camera module, audio converter, information processing, and power supply module. 

    While the upgrades sound nothing out of the ordinary, there was mention that the new combat gear would be outfitted with “self-destruction mode.” 

    More importantly, this system is equipped with a self-destruction device. If a soldier is seriously injured but does not want to be captured, activating the self-destruction device will not only maintain the dignity of the soldier, but the enemy will not be able to obtain any information about this system. The Lu media report bluntly wrote, “Another self-destructive method is in the battalion-level command post. If the commander finds on the screen that the individual soldier is farther away from other troops, but the order cannot be contacted. If you’re a soldier, it will also initiate self-destruction.” -NDTV 

    There was mention that self-destruction mode could even be triggered remotely by the commander, allowing the soldier to “maintain military dignity” and prevent information leakage.

    Many netizens were outraged that soldiers would be outfitted with exploding bombs that could be donated by superiors. Some netizens said: “Isn’t this stuff a human bomb?”

    Netizens also said: “This is too ruthless. Keep away from the team and be detonated by the commander. This is a typical control technique for future operations. They are afraid of soldiers running away, pretending to be dead, and rebelling.”

    Another netizen said: “In the past, the Communist Army asked each soldier to keep a grenade for himself. Before he was captured, it sounded and died with the enemy. It was also called ‘Glorious Bomb'”.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 22:25

  • Vietnamese Woman Dubbed Early "Super Spreader" Starts Her Own Line Of Hygiene And Self-Care Products
    Vietnamese Woman Dubbed Early “Super Spreader” Starts Her Own Line Of Hygiene And Self-Care Products

    “Every challenge is an opportunity in disguise,” the old saying goes. For Vietnamese heiress and jet-setter Nga Nguyen, her recent “challenge” was being dubbed a Covid super-spreader after she caught the virus in March 2020 during fashion week in Europe. 

    Her subsequent travel habits, as she spread the virus across the world, made international news while she was recovering – with many outlets dubbing her as a “super spreader” and vilifying her.

    So she did what anyone would do on the precipice of a global pandemic with the media constantly at your door: she started her own line of hygiene and self-care products. 

    “I was at the hospital but I wasn’t on a ventilator and I was conscious. I was blessed to get very good treatment and I was very impressed by all the sanitising products that they used, and that made me think that I should use my personal experience to start a line,” she told the South China Morning Post

    She named her line N.G.A., which stands for Never Go Alone, and partnered with a friend based in California to create formulas and scents online. She also has two other team members: one based in Nigeria and another based in Milan. She hired British design studio Layer to design her packaging. 

    Nguyen prattled on: “Before this happened to me, I never focused on hygiene products – they were always an afterthought. You obviously have wipes in the kitchen and stuff like that but I wanted to turn hygiene products into something beautiful that you celebrate. Most sanitisers are sticky and don’t feel good on your skin and you have to wash your hands afterwards. I wanted to create something like a perfume but that also disinfects.”

    She continued: “I was always struggling to find my own entrepreneurial project. I’ve always loved fashion but I didn’t feel I was good at designing and then I had so much time without travelling and even though I felt weak physically, mentally I was very alive and had all these ideas.”

    “The pandemic has taught us about self-awareness and well-being. Taking care of yourself is the new normal because in three years there could be another virus, so you have to improve your hygiene and protect yourself and wear a mask,” she said.

    She also peppered in the requisite “saving the world” comments – in case there’s any ESG self-care SPACs looking for a company: “You can never please everyone. I’m doing this because I want to help other people and I plan to add philanthropic elements into the project going forward.”

    She concluded: “You think of the darkest moments and live with more purpose, also because you know who your real friends are. I wake up every day and I walk 10,000 steps before 10am and I created a routine for me that’s very effective in order to prepare for the new normal.”

    We were able to capture never before seen footage of her interview for those that would like to hear more about the details:

     

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 22:05

  • Investing Legend Turns Apocalyptic: Bursting Of This "Great, Epic Bubble" Will Be "Most Important Investing Event Of Your Lives"
    Investing Legend Turns Apocalyptic: Bursting Of This “Great, Epic Bubble” Will Be “Most Important Investing Event Of Your Lives”

    Authored by Jeremy Grantham via GMO,

    Waiting For The Last Dance – The Hazards of Asset Allocation In A Late-stage Major Bubble

    Executive Summary

    The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.

    These great bubbles are where fortunes are made and lost – and where investors truly prove their mettle. For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward sucking investors in.

    But this bubble will burst in due time, no matter how hard the Fed tries to support it, with consequent damaging effects on the economy and on portfolios. Make no mistake – for the majority of investors today, this could very well be the most important event of your investing lives. Speaking as an old student and historian of markets, it is intellectually exciting and terrifying at the same time. It is a privilege to ride through a market like this one more time.

    *  *  *

    “The one reality that you can never change is that a higher-priced asset will produce a lower return than a lower-priced asset. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can enjoy it now, or you can enjoy it steadily in the distant future, but not both – and the price we pay for having this market go higher and higher is a lower 10-year return from the peak.”

    Most of the time, perhaps three-quarters of the time, major asset classes are reasonably priced relative to one another. The correct response is to make modest bets on those assets that measure as being cheaper and hope that the measurements are correct. With reasonable skill at evaluating assets the valuation-based allocator can expect to survive these phases intact with some small outperformance. “Small” because the opportunities themselves are small. If you wanted to be unfriendly you could say that asset allocation in this phase is unlikely to be very important. It would certainly help in these periods if the manager could also add value in the implementation, from the effective selection of countries, sectors, industries, and individual securities as well as major asset classes.

    The real trouble with asset allocation, though, is in the remaining times when asset prices move far away from fair value. This is not so bad in bear markets because important bear markets tend to be short and brutal. The initial response of clients is usually to be shocked into inaction during which phase the manager has time to reposition both portfolio and arguments to retain the business. The real problem is in major bull markets that last for years. Long, slow-burning bull markets can spend many years above fair value and even two, three, or four years far above. These events can easily outlast the patience of most clients. And when price rises are very rapid, typically toward the end of a bull market, impatience is followed by anxiety and envy. As I like to say, there is nothing more supremely irritating than watching your neighbors get rich.

    How are clients to tell the difference between extreme market behavior and a manager who has lost his way? The usual evidence of talent is past success, but the long cycles of the market are few and far between. Winning two out of two events or three out of three is not as convincing as a larger sample size would be. Even worse the earlier major market breaks are already long gone: 2008, 2000, or 1989 in Japan are practically in the history books. Most of the players will have changed. Certainly, the satisfaction felt by others who eventually won long ago is no solace for current pain experienced by you personally. A simpler way of saying this may be that if Keynes really had said, “The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent,” he would have been right.

    I am long retired from the job of portfolio management but I am happy to give my opinion here: it is highly probable that we are in a major bubble event in the U.S. market, of the type we typically have every several decades and last had in the late 1990s. It will very probably end badly, although nothing is certain. I will also tell you my definition of success for a bear market call. It is simply that sooner or later there will come a time when an investor is pleased to have been out of the market. That is to say, he will have saved money by being out, and also have reduced risk or volatility on the round trip. This definition of success absolutely does not include precise timing. (Predicting when a bubble breaks is not about valuation. All prior bubble markets have been extremely overvalued, as is this one. Overvaluation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for their bursting.) Calling the week, month, or quarter of the top is all but impossible.

    I came fairly close to calling one bull market peak in 2008 and nailed a bear market low in early 2009 when I wrote “Reinvesting When Terrified.” That’s far more luck than I could hope for even over a 50-year career. Far more typically, I was three years too early in the Japan bubble. We at GMO got entirely out of Japan in 1987, when it was over 40% of the EAFE benchmark and selling at over 40x earnings, against a previous all-time high of 25x. It seemed prudent to exit at the time, but for three years we underperformed painfully as the Japanese market went to 65x earnings on its way to becoming over 60% of the benchmark! But we also stayed completely out for three years after the top and ultimately made good money on the round trip.

    Similarly, in late 1997, as the S&P 500 passed its previous 1929 peak of 21x earnings, we rapidly sold down our discretionary U.S. equity positions then watched in horror as the market went to 35x on rising earnings. We lost half our Asset Allocation book of business but in the ensuing decline we much more than made up our losses.

    Believe me, I know these are old stories. But they are directly relevant. For this current market event is indeed the same old story.

    This summer, I said it was likely that we were in the later stages of a bubble, with some doubt created by the unique features of the COVID crash. The single most dependable feature of the late stages of the great bubbles of history has been really crazy investor behavior, especially on the part of individuals. For the first 10 years of this bull market, which is the longest in history, we lacked such wild speculation. But now we have it. In record amounts. My colleagues Ben Inker and John Pease have written about some of these examples of mania in the most recent GMO Quarterly Letter, including Hertz, Kodak, Nikola, and, especially, Tesla. As a Model 3 owner, my personal favorite Tesla tidbit is that its market cap, now over $600 billion, amounts to over $1.25 million per car sold each year versus $9,000 per car for GM. What has 1929 got to equal that? Any of these tidbits could perhaps be dismissed as isolated cases (trust me: they are not), but big-picture metrics look even worse.

    The “Buffett indicator,” total stock market capitalization to GDP, broke through its all-time-high 2000 record. In 2020, there were 480 IPOs (including an incredible 248 SPACs2) – more new listings than the 406 IPOs in 2000. There are 150 non-micro-cap companies (that is, with market capitalization of over $250 million) that have more than tripled in the year, which is over 3 times as many as any year in the previous decade. The volume of small retail purchases, of less than 10 contracts, of call options on U.S. equities has increased 8-fold compared to 2019, and 2019 was already well above long-run average. Perhaps most troubling of all: Nobel laureate and long-time bear Robert Shiller – who correctly and bravely called the 2000 and 2007 bubbles and who is one of the very few economists I respect – is hedging his bets this time, recently making the point that his legendary CAPE asset-pricing indicator (which suggests stocks are nearly as overpriced as at the 2000 bubble peak) shows less impressive overvaluation when compared to bonds. Bonds, however, are even more spectacularly expensive by historical comparison than stocks. Oh my!

    So, I am not at all surprised that since the summer the market has advanced at an accelerating rate and with increasing speculative excesses. It is precisely what you should expect from a late-stage bubble: an accelerating, nearly vertical stage of unknowable length – but typically short. Even if it is short, this stage at the end of a bubble is shockingly painful and full of career risk for bears.

    I am doubling down, because as prices move further away from trend, at accelerating speed and with growing speculative fervor, of course my confidence as a market historian increases that this is indeed the late stage of a bubble. A bubble that is beginning to look like a real humdinger.

    The strangest feature of this bull market is how unlike every previous great bubble it is in one respect. Previous bubbles have combined accommodative monetary conditions with economic conditions that are perceived at the time, rightly or wrongly, as near perfect, which perfection is extrapolated into the indefinite future. The state of economic excellence of any previous bubble of course did not last long, but if it could have lasted, then the market would justifiably have sold at a huge multiple of book. But today’s wounded economy is totally different: only partly recovered, possibly facing a double-dip, probably facing a slowdown, and certainly facing a very high degree of uncertainty. Yet the market is much higher today than it was last fall when the economy looked fine and unemployment was at a historic low. Today the P/E ratio of the market is in the top few percent of the historical range and the economy is in the worst few percent. This is completely without precedent and may even be a better measure of speculative intensity than any SPAC.

    This time, more than in any previous bubble, investors are relying on accommodative monetary conditions and zero real rates extrapolated indefinitely. This has in theory a similar effect to assuming peak economic performance forever: it can be used to justify much lower yields on all assets and therefore correspondingly higher asset prices. But neither perfect economic conditions nor perfect financial conditions can last forever, and there’s the rub.

    All bubbles end with near universal acceptance that the current one will not end yet…because. Because in 1929 the economy had clicked into “a permanently high plateau”; because Greenspan’s Fed in 2000 was predicting an enduring improvement in productivity and was pledging its loyalty (or moral hazard) to the stock market; because Bernanke believed in 2006 that “U.S. house prices merely reflect a strong U.S. economy” as he perpetuated the moral hazard: if you win you’re on your own, but if you lose you can count on our support. Yellen, and now Powell, maintained this approach. All three of Powell’s predecessors claimed that the asset prices they helped inflate in turn aided the economy through the wealth effect. Which effect we all admit is real. But all three avoided claiming credit for the ensuing market breaks that inevitably followed: the equity bust of 2000 and the housing bust of 2008, each replete with the accompanying anti-wealth effect that came when we least needed it, exaggerating the already guaranteed weakness in the economy. This game surely is the ultimate deal with the devil.

    Now once again the high prices this time will hold because…interest rates will be kept around nil forever, in the ultimate statement of moral hazard – the asymmetrical market risk we have come to know and depend on. The mantra of late 2020 was that engineered low rates can prevent a decline in asset prices. Forever! But of course, it was a fallacy in 2000 and it is a fallacy now. In the end, moral hazard did not stop the Tech bubble decline, with the NASDAQ falling 82%. Yes, 82%! Nor, in 2008, did it stop U.S. housing prices declining all the way back to trend and below – which in turn guaranteed first, a shocking loss of over eight trillion dollars of perceived value in housing; second, an ensuing weakness in the economy; and third, a broad rise in risk premia and a broad decline in global asset prices (see Exhibit 1). All the promises were in the end worth nothing, except for one; the Fed did what it could to pick up the pieces and help the markets get into stride for the next round of enhanced prices and ensuing decline. And here we are again, waiting for the last dance and, eventually, for the music to stop.

    EXHIBIT 1: BUBBLES – GREAT WHILE THEY LAST

    Housing bubble as of 11/30/2011, Tech bubble as of 2/28/2003
    Source: S&P 500 (Tech bubble); National Association of Realtors, U.S. Census Bureau (Housing bubble)

    Nothing in investing perfectly repeats. Certainly not investment bubbles. Each form of irrational exuberance is different; we are just looking for what you might call spiritual similarities. Even now, I know that this market can soar upwards for a few more weeks or even months – it feels like we could be anywhere between July 1999 and February 2000. Which is to say it is entitled to break any day, having checked all the boxes, but could keep roaring upwards for a few months longer. My best guess as to the longest this bubble might survive is the late spring or early summer, coinciding with the broad rollout of the COVID vaccine. At that moment, the most pressing issue facing the world economy will have been solved. Market participants will breathe a sigh of relief, look around, and immediately realize that the economy is still in poor shape, stimulus will shortly be cut back with the end of the COVID crisis, and valuations are absurd. “Buy the rumor, sell the news.” But remember that timing the bursting of bubbles has a long history of disappointment.

    Even with hindsight, it is seldom easy to point to the pin that burst the bubble. The main reason for this lack of clarity is that the great bull markets did not break when they were presented with a major unexpected negative. Those events, like the portfolio insurance fiasco of 1987, tend to give sharp down legs and quick recoveries. They are in the larger scheme of things unique and technical and are not part of the ebb and flow of the great bubbles. The great bull markets typically turn down when the market conditions are very favorable, just subtly less favorable than they were yesterday. And that is why they are always missed.

    Either way, the market is now checking off all the touchy-feely characteristics of a major bubble. The most impressive features are the intensity and enthusiasm of bulls, the breadth of coverage of stocks and the market, and, above all, the rising hostility toward bears. In 1929, to be a bear was to risk physical attack and guarantee character assassination. For us, 1999 was the only experience we have had of clients reacting as if we were deliberately and maliciously depriving them of gains. In comparison, 2008 was nothing. But in the last few months the hostile tone has been rapidly ratcheting up. The irony for bears though is that it’s exactly what we want to hear. It’s a classic precursor of the ultimate break; together with stocks rising, not for their fundamentals, but simply because they are rising.

    Another more measurable feature of a late-stage bull, from the South Sea bubble to the Tech bubble of 1999, has been an acceleration of the final leg, which in recent cases has been over 60% in the last 21 months to the peak, a rate well over twice the normal rate of bull market ascents. This time, the U.S. indices have advanced from +69% for the S&P 500 to +100% for the Russell 2000 in just 9 months. Not bad! And there may still be more climbing to come. But it has already met this necessary test of a late-stage bubble.

    It is a privilege as a market historian to experience a major stock bubble once again. Japan in 1989, the 2000 Tech bubble, the 2008 housing and mortgage crisis, and now the current bubble – these are the four most significant and gripping investment events of my life. Most of the time in more normal markets you show up for work and do your job. Ho hum. And then, once in a long while, the market spirals away from fair value and reality. Fortunes are made and lost in a hurry and investment advisors have a rare chance to really justify their existence. But, as usual, there is no free lunch. These opportunities to be useful come loaded with career risk.

    So, here we are again. I expect once again for my bubble call to meet my modest definition of success: at some future date, whenever that may be, it will have paid for you to have ducked from midsummer of 2020. But few professional or individual investors will have been able to have ducked. The combination of timing uncertainty and rapidly accelerating regret on the part of clients means that the career and business risk of fighting the bubble is too great for large commercial enterprises. They can never put their full weight behind bearish advice even if the P/E goes to 65x as it did in Japan. The nearest any of these giant institutions have ever come to offering fully bearish advice in a bubble was UBS in 1999, whose position was nearly identical to ours at GMO. That is to say, somewhere between brave and foolhardy. Luckily for us though, they changed their tack and converted to a fully invested growth stock recommendation at UBS Brinson and its subsidiary, Phillips & Drew, in February 2000, just before the market peak. This took out the 800-pound gorilla that would otherwise have taken most of the rewards for stubborn contrariness. So, don’t wait for the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys to become bearish: it can never happen. For them it is a horribly non-commercial bet. Perhaps it is for anyone. Profitable and risk-reducing for the clients, yes, but commercially impractical for advisors. Their best policy is clear and simple: always be extremely bullish. It is good for business and intellectually undemanding. It is appealing to most investors who much prefer optimism to realistic appraisal, as witnessed so vividly with COVID. And when it all ends, you will as a persistent bull have overwhelming company. This is why you have always had bullish advice in a bubble and always will.

    However, for any manager willing to take on that career risk – or more likely for the individual investor – requiring that you get the timing right is overreach. If the hurdle for calling a bubble is set too high, so that you must call the top precisely, you will never try. And that condemns you to ride over the cliff every cycle, along with the great majority of investors and managers.

    What to Do?

    As often happens at bubbly peaks like 1929, 2000, and the Nifty Fifty of 1972 (a second-tier bubble in the company of champions), today’s market features extreme disparities in value by asset class, sector, and company. Those at the very cheap end include traditional value stocks all over the world, relative to growth stocks. Value stocks have had their worst-ever relative decade ending December 2019, followed by the worst-ever year in 2020, with spreads between Growth and Value performance averaging between 20 and 30 percentage points for the single year! Similarly, Emerging Market equities are at 1 of their 3, more or less co-equal, relative lows against the U.S. of the last 50 years. Not surprisingly, we believe it is in the overlap of these two ideas, Value and Emerging, that your relative bets should go, along with the greatest avoidance of U.S. Growth stocks that your career and business risk will allow.

    Good luck!

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 21:55

  • China's New Defense Law Gives Military More Control Of War Powers
    China’s New Defense Law Gives Military More Control Of War Powers

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    A new amendment to China’s defense law gives more control of the military to Beijing’s Central Military Commission (CMC), a defense body that oversees the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and is chaired by President Xi Jinping.

    The amendment came into effect on January 1st and weakened the role of China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, in formulating military policy. According to The South China Morning Post, the new legislation adds “disruption” and “development interests” as grounds for the deployment of troops.

    President Xi Jinping visits the Central Military Commission in 2017, via AP.

    Since CMC’s leadership is made up of China’s military brass, the new amendment gives more control of war powers to the PLA. Zeng Zhiping, a military law expert and former PLA colonel, explained to the Post how the new amendment works.

    “The CMC is now formally in charge of making national defense policy and principles, while the State Council becomes a mere implementing agency to provide support to the military,” Zeng said.

    And further according to South China Morning Post:

    The legislation also specifically stresses the need to build a nationwide coordination mechanism for the mobilization of state-owned and private enterprises to take part in research into new defense technologies covering conventional weapons, as well as the non-traditional domains of cybersecurity, space and electromagnetics.

    He compared the new policy to other countries that have more civilian control over their militaries. “Even in the US, the civilian-led defense ministry plays a more important role than their military top brass, the joint chiefs of staff,” he said.

    The new law could allow China’s PLA to deploy more quickly to confront the US, whose warships are frequently sailing in waters near China’s coast. In 2020, the US stepped up its military presence in the region by increasing US Navy transits of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. US military surveillance flights have also increased in the region.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 21:25

  • Is China About To Devalue The Yuan: Local Banks Start Dumping Yuan
    Is China About To Devalue The Yuan: Local Banks Start Dumping Yuan

    In our market wrap note yesterday, we said that the Chinese Yuan surged to its strongest against the dollar since June 2018, rising above 6.50, and was now “at a critical level that has prompted volatility-inducing devaluations in the past.”

    This was only the latest time in the past few weeks we have speculated that the recent surge in the dollar has put Beijing in the very unpleasant position of being forced to decide just how it will let some steam out of the soaring yuan, which is rapidly becoming a lead deflationary anchor dragging down the broader Chinese economy.

    We didn’t have long to wait to get a very clear signal that Beijing is now actively contemplating a devaluation. In fact, it took just a few hours for China’s yuan to abruptly erase its overnight advance in a move early on Tuesday, when big state banks were seen suddenly dumping the yuan for the first time in years.

    The yuan erased a gain of about 0.5% within an hour in late morning trade, and was at 6.4577 per dollar as of 2:21 p.m. in Shanghai. As Bloomberg first reported, the move came as a few big Chinese state banks actively offloaded the currency against the greenback after the yuan hit 6.43. Bloomberg was also kind enough to provide a translation for the cheap seats: “while the lenders could be taking profits on long-yuan positions, they could also be acting on behalf of the authorities to rein in the appreciation.”

    For those who are confused about the significant of what just happened, all Chinese banks are effectively state-owned entities (SOEs), and everything they do is with the explicit preapproval of Beijing, which knows very well that the entire global community is scouring its market for signals such as this. This is important because Chinese banks always start intervening in FX when Beijing is seeking to telegraph to the world that it is now displeased with the strength of its currency, and any further gains will not be tolerated.

    In other words, a sighting such as this, is usually a clear and present signal that a far more aggressive devaluation is imminent.

    To be sure, while the recent plunge in the dollar has sent most emerging-market currencies higher recently, the yuan has also been bolstered by China’s fundamentals. The country’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic has been solid, and China is attracting strong capital inflows chasing the yuan’s wide yield premium over the rest of the world. The currency is now trading near a two-year high. Which however, is not at all what Beijing wants as it is scrambling to extend its export trade-driven rebound: after all, the stronger the yuan, the less competitive the country’s products on the global trade arena.

    Pointing out the obvious, Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior emerging-markets strategist at Credit Agricole CIB said that “the pace of gains has been unsustainable and probably unacceptable to policy makers,” adding that he “wouldn’t be surprised if this correction was driven by agent banks buying the dollar.”

    Translation: this is a mini state-mandated FX intervention. And if the yuan continues to rise – read, the dollar continues to tumble – then the mini intervention will mutate into a maxi devaluation.

    That said, Beijing doesn’t have to go all August 2015 on the yuan, as China has several other tools at its disposal which increase in order of severity – starting with weaker fixings and ending with relaxation of capital curbs (and allowing bitcoin to trade again) – if it wishes to slow the rally. Just late last year, the authorities made it cheaper for traders to bet against the currency and allowed onshore investors to buy more overseas assets. That move, however, did not have much impact against a US currency that has been sliding at a spectacular fashion.

    As such, this is Beijing’s official warning to the Fed: stop what you are doing, or the trade war will rapidly transform into a currency war as well.

    Which is paradoxical, because looking ahead, the yuan will likely be supported by a potentially more stable relationship between Beijing and Washington under Joe Biden’s staunchly pro-China administration. Liu Li-gang, chief China economist at Citigroup Inc., said he expects the Chinese currency to appreciate to 6 per dollar by end-2021, a level unseen since 1993. Needless to say, Beijing will not be happy if Liu is right.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 21:05

  • Save The Date! January 6th Is America's "Rendezvous With History"
    Save The Date! January 6th Is America’s “Rendezvous With History”

    Authored by Ben Garrison via GrrrGraphics.com,

    Wednesday, January 6 is a red letter day. I’m sure many have the date circled on their new calendars. Probably in red ink. Soon it could be circled in fire. 

    It’s a protest day for many Trump supporters. They’ll be in Washington D.C. to help the president in his quest for justice. The election was blatantly stolen by the Democrat Socialists. The evidence is overwhelming, but the corporate media, the courts, and many in Congress are content to be led by a corrupt and demented swamp and basement-dwelling pedophile, China Joe Biden.

    The big question is, will Vice President Mike Pence come through for Trump and challenge the electoral votes in key states? Will he stop the steal? We will all soon know, but I have my doubts. If Pence sides with Biden, then he’ll go down in history as the second Benedict Arnold. Trump should then initiate the Insurrection Act and arrest them all for attempting a coup. After all, they were aided by China and other foreign operatives. Trump should hand Pence a second envelope that says, “You’re Fired.” I hope I’m wrong about Pence, but I have my doubts about him. If he proves me wrong and sides with the president, I’ll be delighted.

    January 6th can be a turning point in US history. It can be the day when patriots take not just a stand, but real action against the globalists who want a ‘great reset,’ which means America will live under a totalitarian system similar to communist China.

    We don’t want a ’new normal’ that’s being forced upon us by tyrants. We want the regular constitutional normal. We The People want our Republic back.

    Make America Great Again!

    *  *  *

    Join us on SubscribeStar- a great way to support cartoons with a monthly donation- Free Speech alternative to Patreon click to view!

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 20:45

  • What Is Behind Saudi's Shocking Decision To Cut 1MM Bpd In Oil Output Today? Goldman Explains
    What Is Behind Saudi’s Shocking Decision To Cut 1MM Bpd In Oil Output Today? Goldman Explains

    The first monthly OPEC+ meeting to decide on the group’s production ended with an unexpected, in fact shocking two-month agreement:

    1. Saudi announced an unexpected and unilateral production cut of 1 mb/d in February and March,
    2. Russia and Kazakhstan will instead increase output modestly to meet seasonal needs while
    3. other producers will remain at their January levels.

    Of the three, the Saudi decision to cut production by 1 million barrels came as a shock to the market, sending oil sharply higher.

    What has behind it? As Goldman’s commodity strategist Damien Courvalin explains, despite this bullish supply agreement, Saudi’s decision “likely reflects signs of weakening demand as lockdowns return, with our updated 1Q21 balance actually weaker than previously.”

    That said, Saudi’s action and the prospect for a tight market in 2Q21, as the rebound in demand stresses the ability to restart production, will likely support prices in coming weeks, leading Goldman to reiterate its bullish oil view. As a result, the bank continues to recommend a long Dec-21 Brent trade (currently trading at $52/bbl vs. its $65/bbl forecast) and expect sustained backwardation and lower implied volatility. Courvalin also notes that “fundamentals do matter, but we see the recent recovery in refining margins and product cracks as premature and the best way to express the expected weakness in near-term oil demand.”

    Here are more details from the Goldman note:

    The most significant decision was Saudi’s pre-emptive measure to reduce output in the face of renewed lockdowns with OPEC+ production now expected below our prior forecast by 1.45 mb/d in February and 1.85 mb/d in March. Saudi’s decision surprised as global demand beat expectations in December on shallower and shorter EU lockdowns and resilient jet demand. Further, by allowing Russia to increase production, Saudi undermined its efforts since April to have every producer implement similar cuts, with the Kingdom solely taking a fiscal hit. Finally, by lifting prices to their highest levels since last March, Saudis risk extending the ongoing recovery in shale production, as WTI spot prices now at $50/bbl can allow for higher activity and positive free cash flows (although such a response would likely take time to materialize with producers cautious of further OPEC surprises).

    This, according to Courvalin, leaves a large expected slowdown in global oil demand as the most rational explanation for Saudi’s cut, likely signaled through its term contract to Asian consumers where infections are rising quickly (Korea, Japan, South-East Asia).

    Meanwhile, Goldman’s high-frequency indicator of oil demand (or lack thereof) suggests that the return of more aggressive lockdowns is already weighing on demand, and the bank is reflecting these headwinds in its balance, taking down January and February oil demand to 92.5 mb/d from an upward revised December demand level of 93.5 mb/d.

    Separately, and from a geopolitical perspective, the transition to a likely less supportive US administration may also have led Saudi to adopt a more supportive stance towards other Middle East producers, as illustrated in both today’s unilateral cut and restoration of ties with Qatar.

    As a result of today’s announcement, Goldman’s updated Q1 2021 balance is weaker than previously although, with prospects for a tighter market in 2Q21 as the Saudi announcement hints. This new OPEC+ path and the bank’s demand downgrade lead the bank to forecast a 1Q21 0.25 mb/d surplus vs. a commensurate deficit previously (only half offset by a tighter December). Importantly, OPEC+ March production level will still be low just as global demand starts rebounding sharply driven by warmer weather and rising vaccinations. This points to the group potentially struggling to ramp-up output quickly enough, with estimates currently reflecting a 1.3 mb/d deficit in April-July despite OPEC+ increasing production by 4 mb/d, a historically tall order.

    On net, Goldman believes today’s outcome will help support prices in the face of demand risks given Saudi’s commitment to balance the market, and the potential for Saudi to cut more – now that they have tipped their hand – than demand actually disappoints, risks of a tighter 2Q21 balance and a growing consensus bullish outlook for crude fundamentals later this year.

    Finally, for those asking, Goldman’s own year-end Brent forecast of $65/bbl is well above market forwards and consensus expectations.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 20:25

  • Leaked Documents Reveal Chinese Regime’s Orders to Steal Foreign Technologies
    Leaked Documents Reveal Chinese Regime’s Orders to Steal Foreign Technologies

    By Alex Wu of the Epoch Times

    A series of leaked government documents recently obtained by The Epoch Times reveal that Chinese authorities have funded projects that are aimed at obtaining foreign advanced technologies through partnerships with international research institutions. Public records show that China’s Ministry of Science and Technology is behind the efforts.

    Budget for ‘Transferring’ Foreign Technologies

    Hebei International Talent Exchange Association (also known as International Technology Transfer Center) was established in 1988 in Hebei Province. It has more than 200 international technical projects and more than 300 foreign experts, covering more than ten fields, including artificial intelligence (AI), information communication, biology, medical, and health.

    The organization issued a report, “Hebei Provincial Budget Project Performance Evaluation Form” on Nov. 17, in which it explicitly states that the group aims to “introduce foreign advanced technology … and realize technology transfer [to China].”

    To achieve that goal, the document specified that the organization would expand cooperation channels with at least 50 international organizations; set up a minimum of four international scientific and technological cooperation activities; maintain at least 50 foreign technology projects; obtain at least five cooperation intention agreements; and target 60 to 80 foreign technical experts for recruitment.

    The report, “Hebei Provincial Budget Project Performance Evaluation Form,” listed the budget and goals for “transferring” foreign technology, with the official seal of approval of Hebei International Talent Exchange Association. (Provided by The Epoch Times)

    The report laid out a 1 million yuan (about $153,000) budget for the association to recruit talent from overseas and fund the projects they would set up in Hebei. It also projected a profit of 10 million yuan (about $1.53 million) that could be achieved by “transferring” foreign advanced technology to Chinese companies in Hebei.

    The purpose of transferring foreign technology was mentioned in another report that was issued at the same time, titled, “Plan for the Use of Special Subsidy Funds for the Construction of Hebei International Science and Technology Cooperation Base.” The foreign technology would upgrade Hebei’s technology, improve products, and boost international competitiveness, the report said.

    U.S.-based China affairs commentator Li Linyi told The Epoch Times that the initiative is a lucrative scheme and a blatant plan to steal advanced technology and intellectual property from other countries to benefit the Chinese regime.

    According to public records, Hebei International Talent Exchange Association operates under the state-run China Association for International Exchange of Personnel (CAIEP). CAIEP is directly managed by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, an agency under the Chinese regime’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

    Higher Education Institutions Are Required to ‘Transfer’ Foreign Technology

    Hebei education authorities have also set requirements and goals for obtaining foreign technologies through its “2020 Work Plan of the International Technology Transfer Center of Hebei University of Technology,” issued in 2019. The Epoch Times obtained a copy of this document.

    Some of the instructions include establishing an international technology transfer center website; “vigorously introducing” international high-tech talents, high-level management teams and advanced technology resources; “all-round” strengthening of international cooperation and technology transfer; and “improving various working systems in the international technology transfer work.”

    The Hebei University of Engineering, for example, has set up partnerships with international schools to develop high-end scientific and technological projects, as outlined in its report, “Hebei International Joint Center Base Defense,” issued on Nov. 21 this year.

    The website of Hebei International Joint Center Base at Hebei University of Engineering, listing its goals of obtaining technology from other countries and the technological advantages gained from partnering with foreign universities. (Screenshot of Hebei International Joint Center Base website)

    Under the section “Cooperative Units and Research Teams” of the document, the university partnered with Le Mans Université and Université Paris-Saclay in France, University College London in England, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

    The document noted that University College London is the world’s top science and technology university, ranking among the top 10 universities in the world; and Professor P. Picart at Le Mans Université is an authoritative expert on digital holographic display.

    Sounding the Alarm

    In October this year, at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Fifth Plenary Session, Party leader Xi Jinping emphasized “independent science and technology” and “strengthening basic research and focusing on original innovation” in his speech.

    Analysts observed that Xi’s remarks are a response to the growing criticism from the international community regarding the CCP’s theft of intellectual property and technology from Western countries, especially the United States.

    On Dec. 9, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a speech at Georgia Institute of Technology, in which he called out the CCP’s stealing of intellectual property and technologies from other countries. He stated, “Much of the high-end industrial base inside of China is based on stolen technology, or technology purchased from other nations. It’s not home-grown.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 20:05

  • Amazon Buys 11 Boeing 767s From Delta, WestJet To Expand Amazon Air
    Amazon Buys 11 Boeing 767s From Delta, WestJet To Expand Amazon Air

    The world’s biggest online retailing monopoly, Amazon, announced on Tuesday that it is expanding its presence in the air freight logistics sector with the purchase of eleven Boeing 767-300 aircraft, which includes seven aircraft from Delta and four aircraft from WestJet. The new aircrafts will join the Prime Air network by 2022.

    The four aircraft purchased from WestJet in March are currently undergoing passenger to cargo conversion and will join Amazon Air’s network in 2021. The seven aircraft from Delta will enter Amazon’s air cargo network in 2022.

    The purchase price for the 11 Boeing’s remains undisclosed; Amazon said it will rely on third-party carriers to operate the new aircraft.

    The full press release is below:

    Today, Amazon announced its first-ever purchase of eleven Boeing 767-300 aircraft, expanding its fleet to continue to serve customers. The purchases include seven aircraft from Delta and four aircraft from WestJet, which will join the network by 2022. Amazon Air’s fleet expansion comes at a time when customers are relying on fast, free shipping more than ever.

    “Our goal is to continue delivering for customers across the U.S. in the way that they expect from Amazon, and purchasing our own aircraft is a natural next step toward that goal,” said Sarah Rhoads, Vice President of Amazon Global Air. “Having a mix of both leased and owned aircraft in our growing fleet allows us to better manage our operations, which in turn helps us to keep pace in meeting our customer promises.”

    Amazon Air plays a central role in delivering for customers by transporting items across longer distances in shorter timeframes. The four aircraft purchased from WestJet in March are currently undergoing passenger to cargo conversion and will join Amazon Air’s network in 2021, and the seven aircraft from Delta will enter Amazon’s air cargo network in 2022. These fleet additions will ensure added capacity in Amazon Air’s network for years to come. The company will continue to rely on third-party carriers to operate these new aircraft.

    Amazon Air continues to expand globally to meet the needs of its growing customer base, while investing in jobs and sustainable solutions to power its network. Last year, Amazon launched its first-ever air hub at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany and new regional air operations at Lakeland Linder International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Richmond International Airport, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, Kahului Airport, Kona International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and Louis Armstrong International Airport. This summer, Amazon Air announced its purchase of six million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel and has already invested in leading-edge electric ground service equipment and solar rooftop panels planned at some facilities. Since Amazon Air’s launch in 2016, Amazon has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and created thousands of new jobs at Amazon Air locations across the U.S.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:45

  • The Frogs Will Boil Themselves
    The Frogs Will Boil Themselves

    Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

    There’s a well-known old fable that describes a frog being boiled alive. It states that if a frog is dropped in boiling water, it will hop out. But if it’s placed in lukewarm water, it will be comfortable. Then, if the heat is turned up slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be boiled to death.

    In political terms, this translates into a slow increase, say, the slow rise of taxation or the gradual removal of freedoms.

    But there’s another way to boil the electorate of a country: have them become willing participants in their own demise.

    This method is a common practice in many countries, particularly the US. Americans have repeatedly been conned into begging for their second amendment rights to be diminished.

    The method is to make use of the media to shine a light on the horrific murder of innocents through the use of firearms.

    In recent years, this effort has been ramped up through regular senseless massacres of people, particularly children, in public places, such as schools and movie theatres.

    Whether or not these incidents are actually created by the ruling elite is a moot point. What matters is that their proliferation has been extremely effective in providing the media will the fodder to repeatedly ask, “When is the Government going to make the possession of guns illegal so that the killing will stop?”

    Many citizens are wary of such suggestions, but countless others quickly take the bait and demand that the Government “do something.”

    Eventually, this becomes a point of pride for many citizens — a badge of righteousness — for standing up for those who have been victims.

    Through such efforts, the US constitution has slowly lost its ability to serve as a limitation to Government power. A proliferation of laws that redefine what the Constitution means has, over time, eviscerated the Constitution.

    Not surprisingly, those who support this effort are largely liberal, which creates a backlash from those who are conservative and vehemently oppose any erosion of the Constitution.

    Those who are liberal may reinforce their beliefs by watching propaganda networks on television and regularly pump up the dangers of the Constitution. Likewise, conservatives have their propaganda network, which can be counted on to reinforce their views.

    Whichever side Americans take on such issues, they would be wise to keep an eye out for what may be the next development in this wrangle.

    Those who dutifully watch the liberal “news” networks may soon see pundits despairing that the failings of the aging Constitution must be dealt with. It must be updated if it is to serve changing needs. After all, the Founding Fathers cannot be blamed that they didn’t foresee the existence of AK-47s. Surely, it falls to the present administration to “correct” the failings of the well-intentioned old document.

    Conservatives, of course, are likely to be more cautious, but what we may see is for the pundits on their favoured network to express frustration that the Left is seeking to erode traditional values and must, at some point be stopped, or the country will be destroyed. There can be no question that the Founding Fathers were correct — that unless the Constitution and its amendments are not clarified once and for all as to what they were meant to express, American liberty is at stake.

    Americans, like citizens of most countries, love a good battle between good and evil. Every four years, a massive three-ring circus is staged in which the political leader is decided and both sports teams – Democrats and Republicans – go all out in seeking a victory on the playing field.

    However, in most cases, neither candidate is trustworthy or qualified for the job, but this is of no importance. The essence of the battle is not to select a wise and capable leader but to win.

    Similarly, once the populace has been wound up on both sides to believe that only a pitched battle can “re-establish the Constitution” or “modernise the Constitution,” the battle shall be met.

    At present, this eventuality may seem mere speculation. But then, the media campaign has not yet begun.

    At present, all that exists is pundits in the media bemoaning the injustice of the present situation.

    What is needed is the prediction of pundits that, whatever side an individual takes on the issue, his side is sure to win.

    On the liberal side, social warriors must come out daily in the media with demands for change and the certainty of success once the battle has begun. On the conservative side, pundits need to guarantee that the battle will be won once and for all, but that the situation is in dire need of immediate attention, or all may be lost.

    The result will not be immediate, but, with repetition, eventually, the American people on both sides of the fence may well not only suggest, but demand that the matter be sorted.

    At that point, the Government may announce that a Constitutional Review will be undertaken. It would not matter that most of those making the demand are the pundits on the media networks. What would be presented would be that “a majority of Americans demand that the review take place as soon as possible.”

    Although at the time, the propaganda may imply that the review will be focused on one part of the Constitution, such as the Second Amendment, Americans will soon discover that the entire document is up for grabs. Under the terms of the review, all facets of the Constitution may be questioned.

    Then what would the outcome be?

    Each side will hope that their elected representatives will emerge as the heroes, but that is not how politics works.

    In truth, elected leaders do not seek to serve the public but to dominate them. Invariably, their recommendations for change will be whatever transfers greater power to themselves.

    Both Democratic and Republican members will argue forcefully for the rights of the American citizen. However, in the end, a “compromise” shall be made — one in which the rights of the populace are diminished and the Government has new powers to allow it to bypass the electorate in the future.

    If this does occur, the public will, in effect, “boil themselves.” They will have demanded that the Government act, and, when the dust has settled, each side will claim some sort of victory but will fail to understand that they have brought about their own loss of rights.

    It is hoped that, when the day comes that a Constitutional Review is proposed, Americans refuse to take the bait.

    *  *  *

    Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country, but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay. In the years ahead, there will likely be much less stability of any kind. That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s. Click here to download the free PDF now.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:25

  • Here's How The FBI Tracked Down Ghislaine Maxwell
    Here’s How The FBI Tracked Down Ghislaine Maxwell

    Former Jeffrey Epstein ‘madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on July 2, following a raid on her secluded mansion in New Hampshire – despite going to great lengths to conceal her whereabouts.

    According to a new court document revealed by the Daily Beast, however, the FBI was able to track down the accused child sex-trafficker using a “stingray” device to track down her mobile phone.

    Before the feds busted Ghislaine Maxwell, they tracked her to a New Hampshire hideaway using her cellphone data, according to a newly unsealed court filing.

    The British socialite and accused accomplice of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had opened a mobile account under the name “G Max” and used it to communicate with phones belonging to her rumored husband Scott Borgerson, her sister Isabel, and one of her lawyers, Laura Menninger, the document states. -Daily Beast

    The filing – an affidavit in support of a search warrant application, was filed by the FBI on July 1, 2020, the day before Maxwell was arrested at her Bradford mansion. She stands accused of grooming three girls as young as 14-years-old for Epstein in the mid-1990s as part of an international sex-trafficking operation that lasted for years. Maxwell faces trial this summer.

    The affidavit also reveals an earlier attempt to locate Maxwell based on a New York search warrant to retrieve historical cell site data for the disgraced socialite’s cellphone account within one mile of her location, however in their application for the new warrant, the DOJ says they couldn’t locate her in New Hampshire.

    “The FBI does not know Maxwell’s current location and accordingly requires the information sought in this application in order to locate and arrest Maxwell,” reads the filing.

    The New Hampshire warrant allowed the FBI to “use an investigative device or devices capable of broadcasting signals that will be received by” Maxwell’s phone “or receiving signals from nearby cellular devices,” including Maxwell’s device.”

    Such a device may function in some respects like a cellular tower, except that it will not be connected to the cellular network and cannot be used by a cell phone to communicate with others,” the affidavit states, adding that the device would not intercept her phone’s calls, texts, and other electronic communications and data.

    These details seem to indicate that the FBI used a “stingray” device, also known as an “IMSI catcher,” to nab Maxwell. The portable equipment, which can fit inside a briefcase, simulates a cell tower and forces mobile phones in the immediate vicinity to connect to it instead of the actual tower. Once it connects, the stingray captures the phone’s exact location and the registered user’s identifying information. –Daily Beast

    According to the affidavit, Maxwell shares a joint bank account with her husband, tech CEO Scott Borgerson, and that her Amazon account sent him “multiple packages within approximately the last year.”

    Given that it’s common knowledge that anyone’s cell phone can be tracked if a government is motivated enough, we suspect Maxwell simply thought she was untouchable.

    In seeking release on bail – which has since been denied – Maxwell indicated that she had a net worth of approximately $22.5 million, all of which she was willing to pledge for her release.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:15

  • Human Rights Group Exposes China's Network Of Secret Political Prisons Where 2 Canadians Are Being Held
    Human Rights Group Exposes China’s Network Of Secret Political Prisons Where 2 Canadians Are Being Held

    Following some rumblings late last week in the FT, which noted that Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire and Alibaba co-founder (and former Chairman) who recently had a disastrous falling out with the CCP, had apparently been fired from his own show, the western media apparently only just noticed on Sunday night that Ma hasn’t been seen publicly in 2 months.

    The story immediately sparked speculation about Ma’s whereabouts – speculation that was exacerbated by the defeating silence from Beijing (the CCP essentially ignored the story while China’s subservient media and its army of censors went to work).

    On Twitter, reporters likened the apparent kidnapping of Ma (presumably by CCP thugs, as many assumed he might already be living in a reeducation camp, or one of China’s many ‘secret prisons’) to the US federal government ordering the sudden arrest of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg (on dubious charges).

    But in the pages of the FT, the paper’s reporters pointed out that Ma’s disappearance isn’t really that revolutionary, and that Beijing has been using the CCP’s rule over the law to detain not just domestic dissidents, but foreigners as well. Beijing has ramped up these tactics over the last 2 years, since two Canadians – diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor – were arrested in late 2018 on national security related charges. Accused of spying, the men were confined to secret prisons, where they were subjected to torture, denied contact with family and Canadian diplomatic officials.

    It’s widely believed the two men were detained in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, himself a prominent businessman. However, while Meng has spent most of this time on house arrest, Spavor and Kovrig have been treated abominably.

    As the world waits to learn the fate of the two Canadians, for the first time, the FT has published details about the program under which Spavor, Kovrig and tens of thousands of others have been detained across mainland China. The information was reportedly provided by Swedish human-rights group Safeguard Defenders.

    Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and entrepreneur Michael Spavor are among almost 30,000 people who have been held in the facilities from 2013-19, according to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group co-founded by Swedish citizen Peter Dahlin, who was himself held in a secret prison.

    Activists and former diplomats are urging the international community to maintain an assertive approach to Beijing, arguing that quiet diplomacy has proven ineffective. The Canadians were detained in December 2018 following the arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei and daughter of the telecom group’s founder. Ms Meng was held after the US issued an extradition request over alleged violations of sanctions against Iran and has been living under house arrest since 2018.

    Huawei has asserted that she is innocent of the charges. Mr Kovrig and Mr Spavor have spent six months in secret prisons under a programme started in 2013 known as “residential surveillance at a designated location” and were only allowed to meet consular officials once during that time.

    While the program described by Safeguard Defenders reportedly began in 2013, China has a long history of detaining foreign nationals, sometimes for its own ends, and sometimes in retaliation. The nationalities of those detained include Brits and Aussies, among others.

    “It’s been nearly 50 years since I was held, and 50 years later we’re having the same thing again,” said Anthony Grey, a British journalist who was held under house arrest for two years from 1967. Mr Grey was one of a dozen UK nationals detained following the arrest of a group of Chinese journalists in Hong Kong, who were alleged to have violated emergency regulations during violent protests and riots in the city, then under British rule.

    Mr Grey was released after several of the Chinese journalists had served their jail sentences. China has also arrested citizens of Australia, with which it has had fraught relations in recent years. Most recently, Beijing detained Cheng Lei, a journalist who worked for Chinese state television, in August, after Australian intelligence staff raided the homes of Chinese journalists in the country. Individuals detained on national security suspicions are typically held under RSDL for up to six months.

    Safeguard Defenders says about 400 people were taken into detention in 2013, the first year the programme was launched, increasing to more than 6,000 in 2019. It says detainees are abused psychologically and tortured, with tactics including keeping lights on in cells continuously and sleep deprivation.

    Data provided by the group shows how China’s secret prison population has soared in recent years.

    One issue with China’s secret prison system is that laws in China are essentially whatever the CCP says they are at any given time.

    People can be held for months while authorities investigate them.

    Chinese police can detain people for long periods without evidence outside of the RSDL system. In 2013, corporate investigators Peter Humphrey, a UK citizen, and his Chinese-born American wife Yu Yingzeng were held for almost two years, while police tried to force them to confess to a variety of crimes. They denied all allegations.

    “We have a new rising power which is acting as a bully, and is building up an inventory of prisoners who become bargaining chips in its negotiations with countries on almost anything,” said Mr Humphrey. China’s supporters see its actions as commensurate with other countries’.

    Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei, believes the charges against his daughter are politically motivated and has recommended the book The American Trap by Frédéric Pierucci, a French former executive at power group Alstom, about his jailing on extraterritorial corruption charges in the US when General Electric was trying to take over part of the French company. Mr Pierucci has alleged that Washington uses extraterritorial laws to attack countries competing with US strategic industries.

    Another group interviewed by the FT highlighted the risks associated with Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance toward detentions and leveraging them for political purposes.

    Charlie Parton, a former British diplomat and now at RUSI, a security think-tank, spearheaded the #FreeChinaHostages campaign, urging people to send Christmas cards to the detainees to Chinese embassies worldwide. “One aim is to show the world the nature of the beast. Despite propounding ideas of win-win and shared humanity, the Chinese Communist party is an unpleasant organisation,” he said.

    But with COVID-19 ravaging its economy, the EU is brushing all this aside, and embracing a new trade deal with China that many have warned will make the bloc subservient to Beijing.

     

     

     

     

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:05

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Today’s News 5th January 2021

  • The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics
    The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics

    Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

    Read Part I: Reduced Expectations And Bio-Techno-Feudalism here…

    Read Part II: Corporate Socialism here…

    The title of this essay represents a play on the Chinese Communist Party’s description of its economy. Several decades ago, when China’s growing reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economy could no longer be credibly denied by the CCP, its leadership approved the slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe the Chinese economic system. Formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the phrase became an essential component the CCP’s attempt to rationalize Chinese capitalist development under a socialist-communist political system.

    According to the party, the growing privatization of the Chinese economy was to be a temporary phase—lasting as long as a hundred years according to some party leaders—on the way to a classless society of full socialism-communism. The party leaders claimed, and still maintain, that socialism with Chinese characteristics was necessary in China’s case because China was a “backward” agrarian country when communism was introduced—too early, it was suggested. China needed a cap­italist booster shot.

    With the slogan, the party was able to argue that China had been an exception to the orthodox Marxist position that social­ism arrives only after the development of capitalism—although Marx himself deviated from his own formula late in life. At the same time, the slogan allowed the CCP to confirm the ortho­dox Marxist position. China’s communist revolution had come before developed industrial capitalism—an exception to orthodox Marxism. Capitalism was thus introduced into China’s economic system later—a confirmation of orthodox Marxism.

    Stripped of its socialist ideological pretensions, socialism with Chinese characteristics, or the Chinese system itself, amounts to a socialist-communist state increasingly funded by capitalist economic development. The difference between the former Soviet Union and contemporary China is that when it became obvious that a socialist-communist economy had failed, the former gave up its socialist-communist economic pretenses, while the latter did not.

    Whether the CCP leaders believe their own rhetoric or not, the ideological gymnastics on display are nevertheless spectacu­lar. On its face, the slogan embeds and glosses over a seemingly obvious contradiction in an attempt to sanctify or “recommu­nize” Chinese capitalist development as a precondition of full socialism-communism.

    However, the Chinese slogan does capture an essential truth about communism, one that is either unrecognized or unac­knowledged by the CCP and denied by Western Marxists. Con­trary to the assertions of communist leaders and followers, and even contrary to the claims of many who oppose it, socialism-com­munism is not essentially an economic but rather a political system.

    Once in power, socialist-communist leaders recognize that given their control over resources, they have effectively become the new owners of the means of production (whereas, as Lud­wig von Mises suggested, consumers effectively hold the power of economic disposal in free markets). In attempting to implement a socialist-communist economy, they recognize that, in the absence of prices, large-scale industrial production requires supervisory decision-making. Likewise, decision-making is not democratic in the sense promised by socialist-communist ideologues. Decision-making must be centralized, or at least bureaucratized, to a great extent. Democratic decision-making is precluded by state-owned and controlled production and distri­bution.

    Socialism-communism is a political system in which resource allocation is commanded by the state and thus effectively controlled by the state leaders, the real ruling class. The latter retain control through ideology and force.

    As opposed to a fully implemented economic system, socialism-communism is always only a political arrange­ment. This is why socialism-communism can be combined with “capitalism” under such forms as “state capitalism” or corporate socialism. Its economic pretensions will be jettisoned as capitalist development is introduced and cleverly rationalized, as in Chi­na. If such pretentions are maintained for long, they will wreck society, as in the former Soviet Union. In either case, the social­ist-communist leadership will learn that wealth production re­quires the accumulation of privately held capital—whether they understand why or not.

    Enter Corporate Socialism

    A socialist-communist sequel is coming to a theater near you. Some of the same old characters are reappearing, while new ones have joined the cast. While the ideology and rhetoric sound nearly the same, they are being put to slightly different ends. This time around, the old bromides and promises are in play, and a similar but not identical bait and switch is being dangled. Socialism promises the protection of the beleaguered from the economically and politically “evil,” the promotion of the economic interests of the underclass, a benign banning of “dangerous” persons from public forums and civic life, and a primary or exclusive concern for “the common good.” China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative may hang the takers in Africa and other underdeveloped regions as if from an infrastructural noose. A different variety is on the docket in the developed world, including in the US.

    The contemporary variant is corporate socialism, or a two-tiered system of “actually existing socialism” on the ground, coupled with a parallel set of corporate monopolies or would-be monopolies on top. The difference between state socialism and corporate socialism is merely that a different constituency effectively controls the means of production. But both depend on monopoly—one the state and the other the corporate monopolization of the economy. And both depend on socialist-communist ideology of democratic socialism, or, in a recent variant, “social justice” or “woke” ideology. Corporate socialism is the desired end, while democratic socialism and woke capitalism are among the means.

    China is the model for the economic and political system being promoted in the West, and the Great Reset is the most forthright articulation of that system – although its articulation is anything but perfectly forthright.

    The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political elite began with a socialist-communist political system and implemented “capitalism” later, the elite in the West began with “capitalism” and is aiming to implement a socialist-communist political system now. It’s as if the Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and said, “yes, we want it.”

    This explains many otherwise seeming contradictions, not the least of which is the leftist authoritarianism of Big Tech. Big Tech, and in particular Big Digital, is the ideological communications apparatus for the advancement of corporate socialism, or capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

    The Chinese characteristics that the Great Reset aims to reproduce in connection with Western capitalism would resemble the totalitarianism of the CCP. It would require a great abridgement of individual rights—including property rights, free expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the free enterprise system as we understand it.

    The Great Reset would implement the political system in much the same way as China has done—with 5G-enabled smart city surveillance, the equivalent of social credit scores, medical passports, political imprisonment, and other means of social and political repression and control.

    In the end, socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism with Chinese characteristics would amount to the same thing.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/05/2021 – 00:00

  • US Navy Preparing Largest Underwater Drone For Deployment 
    US Navy Preparing Largest Underwater Drone For Deployment 

    The US Navy could be a couple of years away from deploying the largest unmanned undersea vehicle called “Snakehead” to scout underwater areas and gather intelligence on enemy forces. 

    Called the Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (LDUUV), the Snakehead program will be an important electronic warfare platform for the service. 

    Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) published a final request for proposals (RFP) for Snakehead’s Phase 2 last week. While the actual RFP is only available to defense firms bidding on the build, the Navy could select a company to begin the build as early as Sept. 30. 

    “Snakehead is a long-endurance, multi-mission unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), deployed from submarine large open interfaces, with the capability to deploy reconfigurable payloads,” NAVSEA said in a press release while referring to the RFP. “It is the largest UUV intended for hosting and deployment from submarines.”

    Snakehead can be launched and recovered by littoral combat ships and nuclear-powered submarines. It will play a critical role for the Navy in conducting intelligence, surveillance, and countermeasure mine missions.

    To do this, the drone will have a variety of sensors, including side-scan sonars and bathymetric sensors, to generate maps of the seabed for search and destroy missions. 

    Snakehead is not the first submarine the Navy is planning to launch. The service is secretly developing armed robot submarines controlled by onboard artificial intelligence that could kill the enemy without human control. 

    Upon completion of the build, the Navy will likely deploy these underwater drones somewhere in the Pacific as geopolitical tensions with China continue to rise. Courtesy of BofA is a map of US military bases and presence in the Pacific Ocean and, specifically, in proximity to China.

    Besides the US, China and Russia are also developing or deploying underwater drones as it appears fully autonomous weapons will soon be prowling underneath the world’s oceans. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 23:40

  • The American System Is One Big Grift
    The American System Is One Big Grift

    Authored by Peter van Buren via TheAmericanConservative.com,

    The Bidens, and even the Clintons, are small-time players. The real corruption is much bigger, much higher, and entirely unpunished.

    I learned the facts of life from a drunk uncle. He was not an American, and worked in international construction in Asia. His main job was to bribe people. Over the course of many tiny glasses of some awful, clear Asian liquor I learned every yard of concrete poured required money to gangsters who controlled unions and to politicians who controlled permits. A fact of life, he said. You get used to it. He even had a joke—my hands are dirtier than the guys who dig the foundations.

    You come to realize someone is pulling the strings behind everything and it usually isn’t you, he said. The odd official just doing his job for his salary is a rube. You feel embarrassed for him, saying no for moral reasons. You learn, uncle slurred, to trust nothing. That politician on TV? The company just dropped off a nice check to his “charity.” Play by the rules? Those were the rules.

    The first bribe I ever paid was to an Indonesian immigration officer, who noticed some small defect on my passport. Of course, he said, it could be resolved. Between us. With a fine (so many euphemisms). Off to the side. In cash. It was all of $20 to save a vacation but I felt filthy, cheated, a chump. But I learned the rules.

    In New York we use the euphemism “tip,” and it is as required as oxygen to get through the day. A restaurant table pre-COVID. A last minute anything. A friendlier handling by a doorman. Timely attention to fix-it requests. My, um, friend, used to pay a lot of money for better hotel rooms until he learned $20 at check in with a friendly “anything you can do” often got him upgraded to the same thing at a fraction of the price. What, you still paying retail, bro?

    I used to think it was all small stuff, maybe with the odd mafia king bribing a judge with real money or something else Netflix-worthy.

    In America we were ultimately… fair, right? But things started to add up. We have our petty corruption like anywhere, but our souls are filthy on a much larger scale. America goes big or it goes home.

    Things like the Clinton Foundation accepting donations from the Saudis to help with women’s empowerment, an issue of course dear to the heart of the Kingdom. When it looked like his wife was going to be president, Bill made six-figure speeches to businesses seeking influence within the U.S. government, earning $50 million during his wife’s term as secretary of pay-for-play state. The Foundation, now mostly out of business, was at its peak a two-billion-dollar financial dangle. It spent in 2013 the same on travel expenses for Hillary and her family as it did on charitable grants. The media, forever big Clinton fans, told us we should be used to it. Hey, Nixon was so much worse.

    Trump refused to be very specific about who his charity donated to. We know its offshoot, the Eric Trump charity, donated to a wine industry association, a plastic surgeon supposedly gifting nose jobs to kids, and an artist who painted a portrait of Donald. Trump-owned resorts received $880,000 for hosting Trump-sponsored charity events. Trump donated money from his foundation to conservative influencers ahead of his presidential bid.

    With Joe as vice president, the Bidens made $396,000 in 2016. But in just the four years since leaving the Obama White House, Joe and Jill made more than $15 million. In fact, as his prospects for election improved, Joe and his wife made nearly twice as much in one year as they did in the previous 19 years combined. Joe scored $10 million alone for a book no one read. Jill was paid more than $3 million for her book in 2018. Joe has a tax-dodge S Corporation that donated money back to his own political PAC. Then of course there was Hunter, who scored millions in Chinese and Ukrainian money for doing nothing but being Joe’s son.

    About half the nation got very twisted over Trump’s corruption and actively avoided noticing the Clintons and Bidens, and vice-versa, to the point of covering their ears NYANYANAYNYA. Yeah, politicians are corrupt, but does anyone think the donors in all three cases didn’t know what they were buying? What, you still voting retail, bro?

    But even all those millions, measured in Epsteins (a unit of influence buying I just made up) are petty cash. Real corruption scales. Pre-COVID America’s 614 billionaires were worth $2.95 trillion. As the Dow hit record highs this month, there are now 650 billionaires and their combined wealth is $4 trillion. The 400 richest Americans own 64 percent of the country’s wealth.

    Where’d all their money come from? You.

    Dan Gilbert, chair of Quicken Loans, worth $7 billion in March, is now at $43 billion (thanks for paying on time each month.) Who benefited more from COVID and everyone buying from home then Amazon and Jeff Bezos? It takes a lot of poor people to sustain that amount of wealth at the top.

    Money is always good. But it is wrong to think just in dollars. That’s how small-time grifters like waiters and the Bidens think. The real rich understand wealth as power. The power to shape society and government to ensure they make more money for more power until someday they Have. It. All. You hope one day for an upgrade to business class; they own the jet.

    To talk about conspiracy theories is to imply something “different” happened, that the system does not work as intended; for example, instead of an election the president was assassinated to change leaders. So let’s not call what happened this autumn to elect Joe Biden a conspiracy.

    But here is what happened.

    Corporate media owned by the wealthiest Americans spent four years attacking Trump. Working as a single organism fused to the Democratic party as its host, they tried to bundle Trump into a SuperMax as a literal Russian agent. When that failed they ginned up an impeachment with more holes in it than a bad joke about Stormy Daniels. The same media then pivoted to defense when it mattered most, sending information about Hunter Biden that would have changed the election down the memory hole, and policing social media to Joe’s advantage.

    Corporate pharma, also owned by the same people, held back announcement of COVID vaccines until just after the election. The intel community, tightly bound with Big Tech and its super-wealthy owners, did its part leaking and concealing information as needed. They too worked to discredit the Hunter Biden story by calling it Russian disinfo. Money that actually controls information is gold.

    Earlier in the contest something happened, again, in Democratic primaries which began with some of the most progressive candidates in the running since Henry Wallace. Instead a politician known as the Senator from Mastercard was pushed into the White House. It was just a coincidence two promising candidates, Buttigieg and Klobuchar, dropped out nearly simultaneously just ahead of the South Carolina vote Biden desperately needed to end Bernie, again. How many people in America are powerful enough to have made those phone calls to Pete and Amy?

    Biden promptly returned the favor, filling his Cabinet with the same old thinkers corporate America liked from the Obama years. A highlight is Janet Yellen (net worth $13 million) at Treasury, who helped swizzle the corporate bailout that created the .01 percent out of the one percent after the Great Recession. Notice how crises for most of us like the Recession and COVID end up benefiting the wealthy? Biden was wrong when he told donors “nothing would fundamentally change” for the wealthy when he’s in charge—actually, things’ll get better.

    A tiny percentage of Americans own, control, and benefit from most everything; some call them the one percent but a large number of even those people are just slugs and remoras (hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers) who feed off the crumbs left by the really powerful. You know a handful of the names—Bezos, Gates, Buffet—because they own public-facing companies. Most of the others prefer less public lives while they control the public.

    And silly you, you worried that it was the Russians who stole the election. What, you aren’t down with using Prime points to vote in the next election, bro?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 23:20

  • China Seeks Military Base On The Moon In Next Decade: Report
    China Seeks Military Base On The Moon In Next Decade: Report

    A new report in Newsmax argues that “When it comes to the next phase of space exploration, China has its eyes on domination, placing the U.S. in danger of losing its superiority in technology, economics, and world power.”

    Multiple foreign policy thinkers and China watchers say “The dramatic new space race includes China’s plans to establish a military base on the moon within 10 years,” according to the report. Though during the historic space race of the 20th century China was far behind the US and Soviet Union, Brandon Weichert, author of the book “Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower,” maintains that currently “China wants to have a lunar colony by 2028 and a military base on the moon by 2030.”

    The report concludes further that “NASA does have a plan to return to the moon via its Artemis program, but it is open to other nations. Experts also worry it won’t be a priority under a Joe Biden administration.”

    Weichert along with other apparent China hawks cited in the report claim that Beijing is intent on militarizing space while US plans to counter this are much less defined and behind in preparation, also as US satellites could come under threat, considering further that anti-satellite weaponry is already advancing by US rivals Russia and China.

    Weichert put forth the following alarming scenario:

    “The biggest issue we are going to need to contend with is averting a space Pearl Harbor,” Weichert said, pointing out that the U.S. relies on satellites more than any other country in the world and has done little to defend them from a possible attack. “China and Russia have been developing counterspace strategies that are meant to deny America access to satellites.”

    Adding to this, the report cites China commentator Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, to lay out further:

    In the near term, he said China or Russia could use space as a “first strike area” by knocking out satellites as a prelude to attacking the U.S. or its allies on the ground. If the U.S. is deprived of its technology and loses communication with its allies, he said the Russians could easily carry out an invasion of the Baltics or the Chinese an attack on Taiwan in a “nightmare scenario.”

    “We have an economy and military dependent on satellites,” Chang said. “We could lose the next war within the first 10 minutes of a conflict if they take down our space assets.”

    They are arguing that the US urgently get back into establishing a firm presence on the moon in order to safeguard its resources and prevent something like a Chinese military colonization scenario. 

    Of course, it remains that the alarmism is based mostly on heavy speculation as to China’s near and long-term intent. The reality remains that when it comes to space, all others are far behind America’s proven capabilities, meaning generally that if US defense leadership senses others are closing the gap it can more easily act at any point.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 23:00

  • Queensland Cops Pay Home Visit To Author Who Bragged On Twitter About COVID-Violating Jog
    Queensland Cops Pay Home Visit To Author Who Bragged On Twitter About COVID-Violating Jog

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Queensland Police in Australia responded to a man who bragged on Twitter about going on a jog that violated lockdown rules by paying him a home visit.

    “Sneaky run across the border and back. Avoided the CCP virus police,” tweeted author Lyle Shelton along with some pictures of a beach.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    “He was referring to his Saturday run from Coolangatta on the Gold Coast, around Point Danger on the interstate border, and into Tweed Heads in NSW, before coming back,” reports the Brisbane Times.

    The next day, Queensland Police responded by commenting on Shelton’s thread, “We are aware of this tweet and making further enquiries.”

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    Under Australia’s draconian lockdown rules, people are barred from crossing state borders unless they have an “essential” reason.

    However, it subsequently emerged that Shelton, who is also a conservative political activist, has a G-Pass (General declaration pass) which allows him to cross the border without having to quarantine.

    Despite this, Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll blamed Shelton for wasting police resources after they investigated and cleared him of any wrongdoing.

    Shelton said that his tweet was a joke and questioned why Twitter didn’t react the same way when thousands of Black Lives Matter demonstrators gathered.

    “It seems strange to me there has been so much interest in one person’s jog along a beach track, but little interest when 10,000 people were on the streets of Brisbane at the height of the pandemic,” he said.

    Shelton also revealed that officers came directly to his home to quiz him about his jog.

    “They wanted to know if I had been in hotspot, I hadn’t … they were here for two minutes,” he said.

    “I think there are people on social media who have other agendas … I think this was a case of haters on Twitter amping it up for their own purposes,” he added.

    *  *  *

    New limited edition merch now available! Click here. In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 22:40

  • Putin Pushes Plan To Roll Out COVID "Immunity Passports" In Russia
    Putin Pushes Plan To Roll Out COVID “Immunity Passports” In Russia

    As Russian President Vladimir Putin ramps up his aggressive campaign to stamp out COVID-19 once and for all (as Russia races to vaccinate its most vulnerable citizens while striking deals to supply “Sputnik V” to developing markets the world), the embattled president has just raised the possibility of distributing ‘immunity passports’, an idea that has gained traction around the world since the dawn of the pandemic.

    According ton an RT report, the Russian government is considering the development and distribution of documents verifying whether individuals have been vaccinated. China has already road-tested technology transmitting people’s COVID status via smartphone apps, and it’s widely suspected that Beijing will impose some version of immunity passports, if they haven’t already.

    Russian PM Mikhail Mishustin has been tasked with carrying out the policy.

    In a series of instructions to officials, published at the end of 2020, President Vladimir Putin ordered policymakers “to consider issuing certificates to people who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 infections using Russian vaccines…or the purpose of enabling citizens to travel across the borders of the Russian Federation and those of other countries.”

    Russia’s Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, has been charged with implementing the recommendations, and is set to report back on January 20.

    For once, Putin and American billionaire Bill Gates will be seeing eye to eye, as support for “immunity passports” grows not just among governments (even in “liberal democracies” like Canada), but the private sector as well. As RT reminds us, the IATA has voiced support for “immunity passports” as a strategy for hastening the revival of air travel.

    The International Air Transport Association, which represents 290 airlines across the world, has supported the idea of vaccine passports, and is developing its own digital system to track who has been immunized against the virus. Passengers may be expected to present equivalent documents before being allowed to board planes in the future. Immunizations with the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine, the first to be registered for the prevention of Covid-19 anywhere in the world, have been taking place in growing numbers in the capital and across the country. More than 70 centers in Moscow are now offering jabs, and at least 800,000 people have received their first dose.

    Remember, once they arrived, people might soon find “Immunity Passports” will become a permanent facet of their lives: even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, they could be used to offer evidence that a traveler has been vaccinated – not just for COVID-19, but for any other diseases, or even perhaps mutated forms of COVID-19.

    Critically, as we noted previously, if we are going to live in a world where vaccines are mandatory for travel, who is to say that every nation on Earth is going to acknowledge the validity of every other vaccine. The Mainstream Media makes it seem as though just getting any vaccine with some sort of paperwork to back it up should be good enough, but this is unlikely to be true

    If push comes to shove and this concept of travel papers based on vaccination (immunization passports) comes to pass then it is very likely that non-Western versions will “not count” at border crossings. Although with enough time and money one can probably get any type of vaccine anywhere, for the overwhelming majority this could create a new invisible Iron Curtain – the Western Vaccines on one side with the Russian one (with other possible outlier versions) on the other.

    Map: The “geopolitical vaccination space” of Russia’s Sputnik V. Dark green has ordered millions, light green is considering.

    This may sound like a stretch of the imagination but the madness of Russophobic conspiracy theories seems to have no bounds. And most importantly governmental reactions to the Covid-19 Pandemic have been harsh, dubious in effect, and very short sighted. There is a real chance that in 2021 we will see the rise of the geopolitics of vaccination.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 22:20

  • In Bizarre Flipflop, NYSE Ignores Trump Executive Order, Refuses To Delist China Telcos
    In Bizarre Flipflop, NYSE Ignores Trump Executive Order, Refuses To Delist China Telcos

    In a bizarre turn of events, NYSE has decided to reverse its previous decision (from last Thursday) to follow President Trump’s Executive Order to delist three Chinese Telecom giants (China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom Hong Kong) identified as “affiliated with the Chinese military”.

    The investment ban will take effect on Jan. 11, just days before President-elect Joe Biden is due to be inaugurated, and according to NYSE on Thursday, trading in the three companies was to be suspended possibly as soon as Jan. 7 or as late as Jan. 11.

    Maybe not so “strong” after all…

    But now, in a statement on parent ICE’s website, NYSE reversed its previous stance:

    In light of further consultation with relevant regulatory authorities in connection with Office of Foreign Assets Control FAQ 857, available here, the New York Stock Exchange LLC (“NYSE”) announced today that NYSE Regulation no longer intends to move forward with the delisting action in relation to the three issuers enumerated below (the “Issuers”) which was announced on December 31, 2020.

    At this time, the Issuers will continue to be listed and traded on the NYSE.

    NYSE Regulation will continue to evaluate the applicability of Executive Order 13959 to these Issuers and their continued listing status.

    Hong Kong-listed China Telecom shares are soaring 8% on the news…

    The NYSE’s decision follows threats from Beijing:

    The ministry of commerce said in a statement that China will “take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises,” according to the state-run Global Times.

    The commerce ministry said that the U.S. was “abusing national security and using state power to crack down on Chinese enterprises” and said the move was “not in line with market rules and logic, which harms not only the legitimate rights of Chinese enterprises, but also the interests of investors in other countries, including the US.”

    The Chinese Foreign Ministry also accused the U.S. of “viciously slandering” its military-civilian integration policies and vowed to protect the country’s companies. Chinese officials have also threatened to respond to previous Trump administration actions with their own blacklist of U.S. companies, but have so far failed to do so.

    So, the question is simple – did Xi yank Biden’s leash over incriminating Hunter malarkey… and Biden promised NYSE he’ll undo Trump’s EO in three weeks anyway?

    Conspiracy theory? Or is the NYSE now in the habit of simply refusing to acknowledge a presidential executive order that warns of funding firms associated with the Chinese military? Seems like a strong stance for a stock exchange to take in the middle of such a tense geopolitical situation.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 22:14

  • Taibbi: 2021 Has to Be Better Edition
    Taibbi: 2021 Has to Be Better Edition

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News

    A year ago this week, I sat in a left corner seat in a school auditorium, watching as presidential candidate Andrew Yang yukked it up with teens at Concord High in New Hampshire.

    Yang was a hit. He said he wanted to give sixteen-year-olds a thousand bucks a month, the vote, and legalized weed. He also told them a generation of political leaders had left a sociopolitical “disaster” they would imminently be forced to address. “You could even call it a shit show,” he said (I noted a ripple of teacher applause).

    Afterward, I asked about what at the time seemed like a small controversy. The Democratic Party was scheduled to hold a primary debate in Des Moines a few weeks later — on January 14th, 2020, to be exact — and it was beginning to look like Yang, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, and a host of other viable-ish candidates would be excluded.

    The Democratic National Committee had been regularly changing qualification procedures for TV debates. At one point they allowed candidates polling as low as 1%. Now they were insisting on four “qualifying” polls showing 5% support or higher, or two polls showing 7% or more in the early battleground states of Iowa or New Hampshire. Which was fair enough, except there hadn’t been a “qualifying” poll in over a month, since November 17, 2019, in fact.

    Yang’s campaign had been a success. His innovative P.R. strategy, led by a core of online #YangGang volunteers, caused the heretofore little-known business figure to become the fifth-largest fundraiser in the fourth quarter of 2019, pulling in $16.5 million. For context, this was just $6.2 million less than eventual nominee Joe Biden ($22.7 million). The late surge prompted Buzzfeed to write, “Andrew Yang Could Win This Thing.”

    The Party didn’t agree. When Yang joined Booker and billionaire Tom Steyer in offering to fund new polls, they told him to suck it. It wasn’t the DNC’s problem. It was, they said, just bad luck that the 16 “qualified” polling organizations, like the New York Times, hadn’t done a survey in a while. “They should do more independent polling,” the Party suggested, in amusing deadpan.

    When I asked Yang if he was disappointed, he laughed. “We’re operating on the assumption the debate doesn’t exist… Besides, all of this stuff ahead of time historically hasn’t made the determination,” he said. “You know what has? Voters.”

    I liked Yang personally — he’s a rare genuinely funny politician — but was mostly agnostic about his campaign, ironically apart from his attitude about things like this. Unlike many politicians, whose aides constantly whisper off the record about the various wrongs done to their candidate, Yang embraced the long odds of his campaign, seeming to take it for granted that the institutional deck would be stacked against him.

    He figured just having a fair shot with voters was reason enough to be optimistic, and why not? At that moment in time a year ago, the persuasive authority of institutional America seemed at its nadir.

    An impeachment drama cooked up by the Party and relentlessly propagandized by mainstream news would prove a massive dud, both politically and from a ratings perspective. Legacy press outlets resorted to writing explainer pieces about why the public wasn’t as mesmerized as it should be, with the L.A. Times noting that “sobriety and clarity” were “a hard sell in an ecosystem where escapism and mirrored reality are the currency.” New York explained that Nielsen ratings didn’t account for people “checking in periodically on a C-SPAN stream.” There were many similar stories written to explain the impeachment drama’s lack of impact on Donald Trump’s poll numbers.

    Worse, it was looking like the nominees for the general election would be two oft-denounced op-ed targets in Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. A string of efforts by a panicking political elite to restore order failed, from the silly debate scam, to scare tales about Vladimir Putin scheming for Bernie (as well as Trump), to a half-baked smear campaign about Sanders allegedly telling Elizabeth Warren “a woman can’t win” — a story reported as fact by all the usual media suspects that the public roundly disbelieved — to a far more serious effort to buy the Democratic nomination outright through the bluntly obnoxious campaign of Mike Bloomberg.

    The year 2020, in other words, looked destined to be the climax of a long-developing story about the collapse of public faith in the pronouncements of America’s most powerful institutions: the news media, the two political parties, the medical and pharmaceutical establishments, the intelligence services, Wall Street, etc.

    I was skeptical that anything would change much, but it did seem the public’s snowballing alienation was moving to a new phase. Genuinely interesting ways to re-think society might now be embraced. Yang was symbolic of this. Though I didn’t necessarily buy his guaranteed income scheme, it was fascinating to hear how many people in places like New Hampshire were open to the concept. As was made clear in 2016, huge numbers of people were and are increasingly open to anything. Like Ice Cube, a lot of Americans were broke, their feet hurt, and they were “Down For Whatever”:

    The clear subtext of the last half-decade of political upheaval has been rising impatience with how difficult it has become to enjoy things once considered the basics of life. Young people leave school saddled in debt, consider themselves lucky if they get health insurance, and are usually so far from being able to imagine owning their own homes or having real professional security that marriage or children seem like absurd, unattainable luxuries.

    For older people further along in life, the logistical challenges of mere living have become so outrageous that many have committed to Dickensian work regimes, only to discover that in America, even working overtime costs money. You take a second job to pay for the child care necessitated by the first, and the little ancillary costs that seemed not so serious once — from DMV fees to getting a stove repaired to parking — now trigger a pucker factor just to consider. That’s without even taking into account all the various near-automatically bankrupting endgames built into the American experience that most people try as much as possible not to think about: serious illness, an elderly relative forced into care, divorce, surprise legal problems, etc.

    The fact that a year ago, anyone thought it made sense to tell the millions of people forced daily to navigate all this stupidity that they needed to focus on a labyrinthine political controversy in Ukraine — and to blast them for deficits of “sobriety and clarity” when they didn’t — told you everything you needed to know about the cluelessness of the people who run this country.

    Then the pandemic happened.

    No conspiracy theories are necessary to point out that all of the institutions Americans were in the process of rejecting just a year ago have since increased their power and influence. Be it opportunism or coincidence, the international emergency has written a dramatic heel turn into our history.

    A sweeping Fed-based rescue program resulted in enormous booms in asset values, allowing America’s wealthiest to increase their net worth by nearly a trillion dollars since the start of the pandemic (in mid-summer, American billionaires were collectively earning $42 billion per week). The disease pummeled people who actually had to travel to work, while empowering conglomerates like Amazon, which tripled its profits in the third quarter alone. Most of our lives are online now, an ironic reward to intelligence services that went unpunished after illegal surveillance programs were disclosed in the Obama years.

    After all that upheaval, the White House is about to be re-occupied by a political fossil from the eighties, surrounded by a zombie cabinet of Iraq War supporters, drone assassination proponents, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and neoliberal economists, coming from places like Amazon, DuPont, and Raytheon (the Pentagon appointment of the current Henry Kissinger Chair from the Center from Strategic and International Studies was a nice homage to the unchangingly vile character of America’s royal court). How bad any of this is in comparison with the chaotic presidency of Donald Trump is arguable, but it surely represents the triumph of Sameness, a powerful reminder that in America, you ultimately can’t beat City Hall. Or can you?

    The news in recent years often reads like accounts of America before the Sixties upheavals. That was also a time when long-held myths were rapidly losing force and people were beginning to question the palate of life choices celebrated in places like the Book of the Month Club and Life magazine. Men wondered why they were being sent around the world to kill poor people, only to come home to what Paul Goodman described as a “style of life dictated by Personnel… to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator.”

    Women had it worse, consigned to tend house and give themselves nightly as a reward for men who’d completed their “covenant of murder” in places like Vietnam. Spirituality in much of Jim Crow America was a superficial weekly injunction to conformity at archaic churches and temples, while our real religion, consumerism, became a constant devotional exercise, bolstered by a thousand dazzling commercials for products that people began to realize fulfilled every conceivable need, but the most important.

    We’re in such a similar place, and though America’s political leaders learned a great deal from those times — the list of absurd Woke Headlines run here a few days ago chronicles the extremely clever effort to commoditize and sell the desire for political action that had no permissible outlet in the sixties — the reality is, if you keep giving people nothing but crappy choices, they’ll eventually write their own story, even if they can’t do it through voting.

    Americans are tired. The rancorous politics they’ve been sold as bread-and-circus diversions are tiring, not laughing is tiring, having too much work and too little money is tiring, being stuck inside now is tiring, even being sexually frustrated is tiring (look at the stats on that one sometime, if you want insight into why so many Americans seemed a tad touchy in recent years). The most exhausting part is the mandate to take it all seriously. Unfortunately for America’s leaders, that’s the easiest part to change, which is why 2021 feels like such a good candidate to be the year things finally begin turning in a happier direction.

    Distortions on CNN or in the New York Times drive people crazy, but that’s only because they remember trusting those sources. They’ll forget soon and learn to walk right past mass media blather as if it were just amusingly terrible wallpaper, the way Soviets eventually did with Pravda and Izvestia. Student debt is crushing and college is an overpriced scam, but a reckoning of sorts is coming when people stop being ashamed of vocational school. Facebook and Instagram turbocharged the impact of fear-based “ring around the collar”-style marketing, but what happens when the pandemic recedes and going offline is possible again? Throwing off worries about likes and rediscovering real-life interaction feels destined to become a fashionable dissident statement, in the same way tuning in, turning on, and “dropping out” was an obvious response to the stultifying conformity of the fifties.

    Watching billionaires get richer and all the discredited vultures of the War on Terror and financial crisis eras sweep back into power is a bummer, but the tighter those people grip the reins, the more inevitable a counterculture feels. Who knows what that will look like, but it’ll probably be based on friends, family, and other things you can’t buy, and surely kinder and less maddening than the stress-packed world we’ve been asked to live in. My New Year’s resolution is to start living that other life sooner rather than later, after I check Twitter one last time, of course…

    In TK recently:

    The Wokest News Stories of 2020. A review of the year in radical political ideas, as evangelized with surprising enthusiasm by the national corporate press. Out from behind a paywall for New Year’s week.

    Meet the Censored: Mark Crispin Miller. An NYU professor is denounced by colleagues for recommending reading skeptical of mask use.

    Neoliberal Champion Larry Summers Opens Mouth, Inserts Both Feet. The testudine former Harvard President articulates the view from the bubble about the desirability of bailing out the lumpenvolk.

    Poll: Choice for a Book Review. Will be using TK as a forum for subscribers to read and discuss a book each month. I checked the poll mid-stream and ordered The Culture of Narcissism and The Deficit Myth, which both earned a lot of votes from subscribers, so I’ll be reading and reviewing whichever of those arrives first (will advise ASAP). I may try a review-as-I-read method using the discussion tool.

    More coming this week. Hope you all had a good holiday.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 22:00

  • Trump Presents 'The Real Numbers' At Georgia Election Eve Rally
    Trump Presents ‘The Real Numbers’ At Georgia Election Eve Rally

    President Trump is speaking from Dalton Regional Airport in Georgia ahead of tomorrow’s special runoff election, a race that will decide the fate of who controls the United States Senate. Earlier in the day, Trump teased what he called the real numbers” from the November general election, after he called the state’s official tally “verifiably WRONG.”

    The speech comes on the heels of fresh controversy, Saturday phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger leaked to the Washington Post. In it, Trump demanded that Georgia ‘recalculate’ the November 3. election, and ‘find’ enough ballots to overcome the widespread allegations of fraud, including video evidence.

    Watch Live:

    Earlier in the day, Georgia official Gabriel Sterling attempted to upstage Trump’s rally going through election fraud claims point by point and ‘debunking’ them. Sterling at one point said that the president’s continuing claims of election fraud were ‘undermining Georgians’ faith in the election system.”

    *  *  *

    President Trump on Monday suggested that the election results can’t be certified due to “verifiably WRONG” numbers, and teased the release of “the real numbers” during a speech in Dalton, Georgia set for 8:30p.m. eastern time tonight.

    Trump’s Monday night rally is intended to boost Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, however it’s clear that he’ll focus on his ongoing challenges to the 2020 election, which has the support of at least 140 House Republicans and nearly a dozen GOP Senators led by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

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    In a contentious phone call secretly recorded by Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger and leaked to the Washington Post, Trump warns the Republican official that “The people of Georgia are angry, and these numbers are going to be repeated on Monday night, along with others that we’re going to have by that time, which are much more substantial.

    Later Monday morning, Trump attacked the “Surrender Caucus” of Republicans who want to accept the results of the election and move on with life under a Biden administration.

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 21:57

  • Virtu Financial Becomes Latest Corporation To Ditch NYC In Favor Of Florida
    Virtu Financial Becomes Latest Corporation To Ditch NYC In Favor Of Florida

    Virtu Financial has become the latest in a long line of companies leaving New York for Florida. 

    It’s a trend that started early this year when we first reported that Citadel had set up a makeshift trading floor at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. Back then, the thought process was to get out of crowded areas due to unknowns about the pandemic. 

    As the year has progressed, companies and executives have continued to leave places like California and New York (and their liberal political leaders) in favor of lower taxes and less regulation in places like Texas and Florida. Companies like Elliot Management and Goldman Sachs have also moved some offices to Florida. 

    Virtu is the latest to follow suit, according to Bloomberg. It’ll be moving about 30 people to Palm Beach Gardens and is closing in on signing a 10 year lease. By the end of this year the firm expects total employees in Florida to rise to 50 people, about 10% of their workforce. The Palm Beach location is set to become a “full-fledged base” for the company, the report says. Employees who transfer will effectively get an 11% bump in pay due to Florida having no income tax. 

    Chief Executive Officer Doug Cifu commented: “We are dramatically oversubscribed for people who want to relocate from the tri-state area. We surveyed our employees, and the No. 1 concern that people had was quality of life — but also taking mass transit to New York City any time in the foreseeable future.”

    “I was always a non-work-from-home, people-gotta-be-in-the-office, trading-room kind of guy. But I don’t think it’s practical given the modern world and where people want to live their lives and where people are happiest,” he continued.

    The regulatory environment will likely help bolster what has already been a record year for the company, which doubled its net trading income to $1.82 billion through the third quarter. 

    The company will shrink its footprint in Manhattan by 75% and will sublet its offices while looking for a “smaller, cheaper” location. Cifu says the changes were spurred by working from home, but again – the regulatory environment – and New York’s consistent promise of higher taxes – likely played into the decision making, as well. It also helps that Cifu owns part of the Florida Panthers hockey team.

    He says he is fed up driving from New Jersey to Manhattan and spending 12 to 14 hours away from home each day. He says in Florida, his commute will be much shorter: “I would probably leave my house at 7:30 and I would be in the office by 7:36. On a good day, I’d probably leave at 4:30 — see the markets close. In the spring and the fall, for sure I’ll get 18 holes in.”

    “Why am I forcing 400-odd people to schlep to lower Manhattan? I hate it, and I’m the CEO — I don’t have a boss, I don’t have to be there on time. Can you imagine the other 399 people? They must hate it much worse than I do,” Cifu concluded. “Doing business in Florida is more inviting and more welcoming. There are parts of the political class in New York and New Jersey that just don’t value the jobs and the industry.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 21:40

  • World Out Of Whack: Global Market Commentary And Outlook
    World Out Of Whack: Global Market Commentary And Outlook

    Submitted by Ritesh Jain of World Out Of Whack

    Today, much like in the past, it is not the best idea that wins, but the narrative which captures the most mindshare. Nothing rings true than this quote of 1933 made by the Propaganda Minister of Nazi Germany

    “It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.” – Joseph Goebbels

    As Coronavirus cases continue to increase in many parts of the world and lockdowns are put in place, the story should look grim; but there is also light at the end of the tunnel because of vaccines. After the vaccines have been administered to most of the population, there will be plenty of pent-up demand that will help the economy recover. That said, who needs vaccines when you have the central banks backstopping the markets by introducing high amounts of liquidity?

    What appear to be bubbles right now, could go exponential. As J.C Parets write “News was poison in 2020. It will be worse in 2021”. The investors who often get markets right knows how to shut off the news and focus on what is important.

    The vast liquidity we have today is emanating from the balance sheets of central banks. As more electronically printed dollars are pumped into financial markets, the cost of financing goes down, thereby pushing asset valuations higher. This view is further reinforced by a weakening dollar, and even by the fact that Jerome Powell has called out the explicit link between low interest rates and the high valuations in markets.

    Vast amounts of liquidity can also create a lot of fragility in markets. Even if central banks continue injecting liquidity into the system, at some point markets will fully price it in. Once that happens, it can become the bigger driving force that may set up markets for a taper tantrum 2.0 of sorts as the system demands not just a continuation of liquidity provision but increasing amounts of it. Investors should no longer continue to think about how much central bank balance sheets have increased, but rather the rate at which the balance sheets are growing. The exhibit below by Morgan Stanley points to a deceleration in the rate of growth of G-4 central bank balance sheets as we approach the end of 2022.

    As most readers will already know, financial markets are complex systems, which means they are highly interlinked and have feedback loops. These feedback loops lead to nonlinear effects, which means small shocks can transform into large ones due to each node in the system being interlinked to other nodes. For comparison, when too much snow accumulates, the probability that even a small snowflake can trigger an avalanche goes up significantly.

    With the median correlation across asset classes reaching new highs, the probability of an avalanche goes up. Nobody could have predicted COVID-19 from appearing when it did; but what had been known for a while was that due to globalization, the world was much more prone to eventually experience a global pandemic. In a similar fashion, as markets become unhinged from their underlying fundamentals and become liquidity driven (which in turn drives correlations higher), the probability of an ‘avalanche’ occurring in the markets is becoming more and more likely.

    The response to the global pandemic was to provide financing through loan guarantees and green asset financing by the government. We have had quantitative easing programs since 2008, but we have not seen inflation in goods and services because banks were not lending money. This meant that an increase in the money supply did not make it into the real economy. Today, however, after experiencing an economic shock caused by COVID-19, the government response has led to money reaching the real economy.

    The pandemic has taught governments that they can now – through MMT-lite programs – lend directly to the economy through the commercial banking channel.

    “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” is an apt quote for liquidity (M2) sloshing around in the system but refusing to multiply (M3). The M3 velocity has been stubbornly falling since March 2020 but as per Gavekal’s Velocity Indicator this money is finally looking to multiply. Said differently, the horse has finally decided to drink water.

    But before you start admiring the below chart you should keep in mind that

    What is good for the economy is bad for the markets and what is bad for the economy is good for the markets.

    Let me explain. Liquidity is fungible. It can either go to the Financial markets or it can go the real economy. If vaccines work and business closures and layoffs subside then the money hiding in financial assets will spill over to the real economy and force Monetary policy to tighten financial conditions.

    So, rising Money velocity is not good for Financial markets and on the contrary will lead to elevated volatility in financial assets.

    The increase in velocity is bad for US dollar and US Dollar should continue to fall but not in a straight line. This liquidity is currently lifting all boats, but I think we will see some assets doing better than others in 2021. My bet is on Japan, Vietnam, African Continent, and commodities in general with a continuing bullish stance on precious metals, crude oil and agricultural commodities.

    Central Bank digital currency.

    A lot has been written in the media about central bank digital currencies (CBDC), and we might see the dawn of CBDCs with China increasingly looking like the first one to launch its version, known as CBEP.

    As per a MicroStrategy paper titled “The cost of Money being nothing”:

    If money supply is created centrally, it must also be used, or directed, centrally as indeed we are seeing at the moment with the lockdowns and the enormous surge in budget deficits. Under a CBDC scheme, the central bank would become arbiter of who should and shouldn’t be granted credit. By determining the price of money, it determines what is “value” and thereby what is produced and consumed, and how it is produced. It determines what the real return on capital is and how much capital is destroyed. By printing money to buy Treasuries, it has reshaped the entire economy around greater government spending and control. Under a central bank digital currency, monetary policy will become completely political.

    Bullish on Japan

    Japan is the only country in the G-7 where monetary policy and fiscal policy are working seamlessly thanks to embedded Abenomics reforms. Valuations are cheap, and more importantly, it is a very unloved market from an institutional and retail investor perspective. Below is a chart of 5-year flows into the biggest Japanese ETF (EWJ).

    Further, this chart from Morgan Stanley explains the Japanese story in simple terms:

    Bullish on Vietnam

    Vietnam will be one of the few countries in the world that will boast double-digit nominal GDP growth rates once the COVID-induced slowdown is over. The country has real rates in the range of 200-300 bps and a low fiscal deficit, which is a rarity in today’s world. Positive real rates, low and stable inflation, low unemployment, and a positive current account balance are characteristics of a strong economy. India was exhibiting all these characteristics in 2002-2003 (except a positive CA balance) right before a domestic consumption boom began. Vietnam is also going to be a big beneficiary of a “reshoring boom” out of China

    https://www.bofaml.com/content/dam/boamlimages/documents/articles/ID20_0147/Tectonic_Shifts_in_Global_Supply_Chains.pdf

    Bullish on Africa

    Africa is resource rich and it is going to be the next frontier of growth led by technological advancement, connectivity and more importantly the battleground of largesse for the two competing superpowers i.e., US and China. China is already increasing its influence in Africa through its Belt and Road Initiative and it plans to complement that by extending its CBDC reach over the entirety of the continent.

    African countries will have much better access to credit and will be able to sidestep a boom-and-bust cycle of currency devaluation, providing them with much needed economic stability.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerhuang/2020/05/25/china-will-use-its-digital-currency-to-compete-with-the-usd/?sh=5dd1bbab31e8

    Bullish on Commodities

    Commodities almost always rise when there is a supply side shock. The rise in commodity prices is rarely demand driven because demand can be modeled, while supply shocks are much harder to predict. If you see the chart below you will find that all peaks and troughs happen around events, and I believe that COVID-19 was such an event, which has broken supply chains across the world. The years of underinvestment in commodities and energy in general was waiting for a catalyst to start showing up in prices and I think we have that catalyst firmly in place. I also believe that soft commodities, base metals, the entire energy complex including coal and Uranium and precious metals will see more inflow of capital as they are under represented in investors portfolio.

    Where can we lose the most money?

    We must understand that markets are not cheap by any measure.

    I would say the easiest answer is in consensus, but the most concerning thing for me is the sentiment. Now, this does not mean we will get an imminent price correction, but it does mean that the market is vulnerable to any negative catalyst. I do not recall grappling with so many of these negative catalysts at the start of a year, and especially when most assets were not cheap from a historical perspective. The resurgence of the virus, a surprise increase in inflation, policy missteps, a jump in bond yields or bond spreads, fears of stagflation, China launching its digital currency, broken supply chains, geopolitical flashpoints etc. – and the list is still not exhaustive by any imagination, in my opinion.

    I believe that there is a reasonable possibility that any of these catalysts could materialize and give us a risk-off environment at various points in 2021. I expect to see a 10-20% correction in broad indices whenever a risk-off episode materializes with much larger drawdowns for individual securities. All corrections will be met with a forceful response from Monetary and/or Fiscal authorities who are left with no choice but to support the system and hope to inflate away the massive overhang of debt built in the system.

    The best way to play this environment is either through having cash (at least 30%) as an asset allocation, ready to be deployed at short notice, or by buying far out of money call options on volatility whenever the markets are in a euphoria stage.

    The cash deployment during these events should be in commodity producers, asset owners or Emerging Markets

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 21:20

  • In Surprise To Markets, BOJ Buys Smallest Amount Of ETFs In Four Years
    In Surprise To Markets, BOJ Buys Smallest Amount Of ETFs In Four Years

    The Bank of Japan bought just 50.1BN yen of ETFs on Monday – the first day of 2021 – the smallest amount it has bought in more than four years on a day when it has made a purchase as part of its ETF buying program.

    The reason this is notable is two-fold: i) it made headlines on Bloomberg, demonstrating that in this centrally-planned “normal” what really matters is how much risk assets central banks buy (and at least the BOJ is sincere about its intentions to prop up the stock market no matter the optics, unlike its “shy” peers at the Fed), and ii) the central bank buying “only” 50bn yen in stocks is a newsworthy event.

    As a reminder, in August 2016, after increasing its annual purchase target to 6 trillion yen, the BOJ more than doubled its daily purchase amount to over 70BN yen.

    Since then it has never purchased less than 70b yen on days when it buys ETFs as part of its main program, although most days it does not make purchases; the BOJ separately buys 1.2b yen in ETFs every day to support companies’ investments in “physical and human capital.”

    That changed on Monday when the BOJ inexplicably bought 20BN less than it normally buys on a day ending in “y.”

    As shown in the chart above, the bank raised its buying to a peak of more than 200BN yen during the market crash in March, before lowering that amount gradually back towards 70BN yen; In 2020, the BOJ bought a total of 7.14t yen.

    This is concerning for two reasons: the BOJ may be telegraphing to the market that its implicit support of the stock market will now be about 20% less, which would likely hammer Japanese stocks which will now have to reprice far less support from Kuroda and co; Worse, the BOJ wouldn’t be making such an implicit shift in its equity support in a vaccum, and if it is indeed confirm that this wasn’t some one off fluke, other central banks may soon follow suit.

    While we wait for the answers, keep an eye on how many ETFs the BOJ will buy today: another 51BN day and things may get interesting. And another potential concern: on Tuesday the BOJ also reduced the amount of JGBs it purchased in the 1-3 year bucket from 500bn previously to “only” 450BN: are central banks starting to phase back their support of risk assets?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 21:10

  • Iran Starts 20% Uranium Enrichment Just As US Carrier Ordered Back To Gulf Region
    Iran Starts 20% Uranium Enrichment Just As US Carrier Ordered Back To Gulf Region

    Iran on Monday confirmed that it has resumed 20% uranium enrichment at an underground nuclear facility at a moment of soaring tensions with the US and Israel in accord with prior threats to do so if international US-led sanctions weren’t rolled back.

    “A few minutes ago, the process of producing 20% enriched uranium has started in Fordow enrichment complex,” government spokesman Ali Rabeie announced on state media.

    While the continued breaching of the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal is likely aimed at gaining more leverage ahead of Biden entering the White House on January 20, it comes at a moment of a heightened state of US military alertness in the region.

    Fordo nuclear facility overhead, via Maxar/AP

    Tehran has long maintained its nuclear program is solely for peaceful domestic energy purposes, yet there are fears this puts the Islamic Republic on a more direct and easy path to developing a bomb, as The Guardian reviews

    The latest Iranian step takes Tehran further away from the terms of the deal, and underlines its willingness to play for high stakes with Washington. Up until now, Iran was enriching uranium up to 4.5%, in violation of the accord’s limit of 3.67%. Under the agreement, Iran is also only allowed to produce up to 300kg of enriched uranium in a particular compound form (UF6), which is the equivalent of 202.8kg of uranium.

    Low-enriched uranium – which has a concentration of between 3% and 5% of U-235 isotopes – can be used to produce fuel for power plants. Weapons-grade uranium is 90% enriched or more.

    The question now remains whether this could trigger either US or Israeli aggression, which happened the last time Iran declared it would enrich to 20% (a decade ago). Many analysts further believe it was Israel behind a recent “sabotage” campaign targeting Iranian nuclear energy and military sites over the past year, particularly the July 2nd Natanz fire and blast which destroyed part of the complex.

    In reaction to Tehran’s declaration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this proves the Islamic Republic is seeking the bomb. In a statement he said it’s part of Iran’s efforts to “continue to carry out its intention to develop a military nuclear program.” He vowed: “Israel will not allow Iran to produce nuclear weapons.”

    Aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, via US Navy

    Meanwhile, just ahead of Iran’s provocative announcement, the Pentagon has changed its mind over previously ordering home the lone aircraft carrier which within past weeks was patrolling the Gulf:

    Just two days after the Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller had ordered the supercarrier, USS Nimitz, to head home as a “de-esclatory” gesture toward Iran, the order has been rescinded and the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group is now set to remain in the Middle East until further notice

    Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller said in his statement, “Due to the recent threats issued by Iranian leaders against President Trump and other U.S. government officials, I have ordered the USS Nimitz to halt its routine redeployment.” 

    “The USS Nimitz will now remain on station in the U.S. Central Command area of operations.  No one should doubt the resolve of the United States of America,” he added.

    Given that also on Monday Iran announced it will be conducting “major drone exercises” starting on Tuesday, according to Fars, all of this is a recipe for a potential new conflagration in the Persian Gulf.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 21:00

  • Cruz: Google Is The "Most Dangerous Company On The Face Of The Planet"
    Cruz: Google Is The “Most Dangerous Company On The Face Of The Planet”

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    Senator Ted Cruz has continued his campaign against the unregulated expansion of Big Tech by labelling Google ‘the most dangerous company’ on the planet.

    Cruz made the comments to reporters Saturday at a campaign event for the Georgia Senate runoff.

    “I think hands down Google is the most dangerous company on the face of the planet. Google is the most dangerous because it’s the biggest by far. It is the most powerful by far. It controls the vast majority of searches people do,” Cruz noted after describing big tech as the “single greatest threat” to “free and fair elections.” 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Cruz referred to the 2016 election where “Google, through manipulated search outcomes, shifted over 2.6 million votes in 2016 to the Democrats.”

    Cruz noted that psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, who testified before Cruz’s Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution “is not a Republican. He is a liberal Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton but is outraged to see that kind of abuse of power. Google is clearly the most dangerous.”

    Cruz added that while Google is the most dangerous, “Twitter is the most brazen.”

    “We just recently had a hearing where Jack Dorsey testified with a beard that looked like he had crawled out from under a bridge,” Cruz noted.

    During that hearing, Cruz asked Dorsey if he believes Twitter has the ability to influence election outcomes, to which Dorsey replied “no”… an answer Cruz described as “absurd.” 

    “If you don’t think you have the power to influence elections, why do you block anything?” Cruz countered, forcing Dorsey to admit that “more accountability is needed.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Cruz then asked Dorsey “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Speaking Saturday, Cruz urged “Look, Twitter brazenly censored the New York Post when it ran stories about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s corruption concerning China, concerning Ukraine and Russia, and they just silenced it. Not only did they prevent you and I from circulating those stories, for two weeks, they banned the New York Post.

    Indeed, the company did more than that, they even blocked users from tweeting out the link to the Post story.

    “The New York Post is not some fly-by-night organization. It is the newspaper with the fourth-highest circulation in the country. It was founded by Alexander freakin’ Hamilton,” Cruz urged.

    Cruz added that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has “benefited because Twitter and Google are so rotten that even though Facebook’s pretty bad, just saying free speech is important makes him appear markedly better than his rivals, but all three are very serious concerns.”

    The Senate voted last week to pass the National Defense Authorization Act without the repeal of Section 230 that President Trump had requested:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 20:40

  • Two Decades Of Airline Passenger Traffic Wiped Out In 2020 
    Two Decades Of Airline Passenger Traffic Wiped Out In 2020 

    In a world plagued with a now-quickly-mutating virus pandemic running rampant in several countries sparking continued flight restrictions, airline passenger traffic worldwide plunged to two-decade lows in 2020, according to global aviation data firm Cirium.

    Cirium found that 21 years of global passenger traffic growth was wiped out in a matter of months last year because of flight restrictions to mitigate the spread of the virus, reducing traffic to levels not seen since 1999. “In comparison to last year, passenger traffic is estimated to be down 67% in 2020,” the firm said. 

    April was the height of the air travel collapse. In that month, flights plunged to just 13,600 globally on Apr. 25, compared with 95,000 tracked by Cirium on Jan. 3. This represents a stunning collapse in global flights over the period, down by more than 86%. 

    Cirium’s data showed airlines operated 16.8 million flights from Jan. 1 to Dec. 20, down from 33.2 million in the same period the prior year. US travel was down 40% over the same period, from 21.5 million flights in 2019, while international flights were 68% below the 11.7 million flights tracked the year before. 

    Cirium said at least 40 airlines altogether ceased or suspended operations during 2020, with more failures expected for 2021. This has resulted in a tsunami of defaults, bankruptcies, and bailouts.

    To view the list of the most prominent airline bankruptcies and bailouts of the past year, courtesy of Bank of America, read our most recent report titled “Mapping The Global Lockdown: Where Air Travel Is Partially Open And Where It’s Fully Closed.” 

    “This severe setback shows the true extent of the challenge faced by the struggling aviation sector as it has sought to reset itself in the new post-COVID-19 era,” Jeremy Bowen, CEO of Cirium, said.

    Bowen said, “airlines have a way before returning to 2019 levels particularly as international travel is significantly down.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 20:20

  • JPMorgan Flip-Flops Again, Says Bitcoin May Hit $100,000 "But Such Price Levels Would Be Unsustainable"
    JPMorgan Flip-Flops Again, Says Bitcoin May Hit $100,000 “But Such Price Levels Would Be Unsustainable”

    Back at the start of November, JPMorgan quant NIck Panigirtzoglou – perhaps tasked with being the skeptic in-house bitcoin strategist – predicted that based on position indicators and technicals, “bitcoin’s overbought positions by momentum traders such as CTAs could trigger profit taking or mean reversion flows over the near term.” Bitcoin, which was then trading around $14,000 not only did not mean-revert or “profit-take”, but absolutely exploded over the next few weeks and by the end of November it rose to just why of its previous, 2017 highs, trading just below $20,000.

    Of course, anyone who had shorted bitcoin on the back of Panigirtzoglou’s trade reco was not happy, which may explain why less than three weeks later the JPM quant admitted that he was wrong and scrambling to goalseek a bullish narrative to placate the bank’s institutional clients who were now clearly (mostly) long bitcoin, proposed a gold-parity thesis, according to which there is some $42 trillion in cash sloshing around, the value of above ground gold at $12 trillion is about 27x greater than the market cap of bitcoin today, which at its all time high is still just $443 billion. In short, if the value of bitcoin were to reach parity with gold, the price of one bitcoin would have to increase to $$650,000 from its current price of $24,000.

    This time Panigirtzoglou – who gave up trying to justify the relentless move higher with fundamentals, technicals, or any conventional methodology – was right directionally, and bitcoin proceeded to nearly double from its price of $18,000 at the end of November to a new all time high of $33,600 hit on Sunday.

    Which brings us to today, when seemingly eager to repeat his mistake from two months ago when he prematurely called an end to the record bitcoin run, Panigirtzoglou has published a new report asking in “Has bitcoin equalised with gold already?” (spoiler alert: not by a long, long short… but as usual JPM has its own theory).

    What is the latest JPM thesis? Well, having failed to spot the inflection point in bitcoin’s price using “technicals and momentum”, Panigirtzoglou has now flipped and instead is relying on valuation to tell him whether the price of the crypto is too high. Yes, a banking quant is using “valuation” of an intangible fiat-alternative monetary unit as a basis for a trading reco. And one wonders why almost nobody reads sellside research anymore.

    In any case, in JPM’s latest attempt at flip-flopping calling what may be the most important price inflection point in the world today, the JPM quant writes that after bitcoin’s tremendous run in recent weeks – on the backs of both rapid institutional adoption and continued retail buying – the “valuation and position backdrop has become a lot more challenging for bitcoin at the beginning of the New Year.” Which, of course, is obvious: the higher something goes, the more likely it is to go down as well as up. If only JPM was as accurate in calling the first leg of the rally higher it may even have credibility in calling such inflection points, whether it uses technicals or – as in this case – valuations methods to come up with its conclusion.

    What is even more amusing is that having been already burned once, Panigirtzoglou is especially cautions and begins by caveating that he “cannot exclude the possibility that the current speculative mania will propagate further, pushing the bitcoin price up towards the consensus region of between $50k-$100k, we believe that such price levels would prove unsustainable.”

    In other words, bitcoin can triple from here… but then it will reverse. That is clearly profound insight, and we hope that anyone who trades on such a reco has a balance sheet at least as big as that of JPM should they decide to short bitcoin here and then suffer billions in margin calls if the crypto currency were to first hit $100,000 per bitcoin.

    Which brings us back to the question of just what “valuation” methods does JPM use to conclude that bitcoin’s run is coming to end? As Panigirtzoglou explains, “we had previously used two valuation metrics for bitcoin, one based on its comparison to gold and one based on its mining cost or intrinsic value.

    Because when “valuing” bitcoin the first thing that comes to mind is how much cheaper is it relative to another asset which can’t be valued, and the other “valuation” matric is to ascribe the cryptocurrency’s “value” to its cost of extraction… as if it were some commodity that is dug out of the ground and used for various industrial applications.

    This is where you know Wall Street is reeeeeally starting to stretch in trying to ascribe a “fundamental” value to a price which reflects just two things: the trillions in excess liquidity chasing after non-fiat monetary units (which will survive after central banks destroy fiat with their pathological money printing), and expectations that inflation is about to explode which unfortunately markets can no longer represent using conventional means such as 10Y yields (more on that in a follow up post).

    To give the JPM quant the benefit of the doubt, we lay out his reasoning which somehow can be summarized in this bi-axial chart which is supposed to show that bitcoin is now more popular than gold… if only one ignores the units of the left and right axis, although judging by the IQ of JPM clients that may not be a very far-fetched assumption, to wit:

    Bitcoin’s competition with gold has already started in our mind as evidenced by the more than $3bn of inflows into the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and the more than $7bn of outflows from Gold ETFs since mid-October.

    There is little doubt that this competition with gold as an “alternative” currency will continue over the coming years given that millennials will become over time a more important component of investors’ universe and given their preference for “digital gold” over traditional gold. Considering how big the financial investment into gold is, a crowding out of gold as an “alternative” currency implies big upside for bitcoin over the long term. As we had mentioned previously in the Oct 23rd F&L, “Bitcoin’s competition with gold,” private gold wealth is mostly stored via gold bars and coins the stock of which, excluding those held by central banks, amounts to 42,600 tonnes or $2.7tr including gold ETFs.

    So using this simplistic “valuation” of claiming that the market cap of bitcoin should reach parity with gold, Panigirtzoglou “explains” that “mechanically, the market cap of bitcoin at $575bn currently would have to rise by x4.6 from here, implying a theoretical bitcoin price of $146k, to match the total private sector investment in gold via ETFs or bars and coins.”

    So even JPMorgan admits bitcoin can rather easily rise about 5x higher from here. But short it, please. Anyway, the JPM quant continues:

    But this long term upside based on an equalization of the market cap of bitcoin to that of gold for investment purposes is conditional on the volatility of bitcoin converging to that of gold over the long term. The reason is that, for most institutional investors, the volatility of each class matters in terms of portfolio risk management and the higher the volatility of an asset class, the higher the risk capital consumed by this asset class. It is thus unrealistic to expect that the allocations to bitcoin by institutional investors will match those of gold without a convergence in volatilities. A convergence in volatilities between bitcoin and gold is unlikely to happen quickly and is in our mind a multi-year process. This implies that the above $146k theoretical bitcoin price target should be considered as a long-term target, and thus an unsustainable price target for this year.

    Pay attention kids because this is called both thesis creep and “goal-seeking” – or how to hit a conclusion based on variable that you yourself have introduced into the equation and which you then use to validate your own thesis. Because here’s a counter argument: how many buyers of bitcoin are buying it because i) they say it has to hit parity with the value of gold and ii) it has to have the same vol-adjusted return profile or else they won’t buy any more?

    None, you say? Why you are correct, of course, but more importantly what this little experiment has taught us is how to read between the lines of a forced conclusion that is only there because someone got a tap on the shoulder. Most likely from their trading desk. The question then is how is JPM’s trading deks axed, and the logical response is that JPM merely wants to buy whatever the bank’s clients have to sell.

    Translation: JPM is now buying bitcoin.

    But going back to JPM’s “bearish” thesis – at least on its client-facing side – the next part is even more laughable: you see, the price of bitcoin is too high compared to its mining cost! 

    Our second valuation metric is based on the mining cost or intrinsic value of bitcoin. The ratio of the bitcoin market price to its intrinsic value is shown in Figure 2.

    The current ratio is higher than its previous mid-2019 peak and matches its end-2017 peak, again raising concerns about valuations.

    Actually no, it doesn’t but please go on, because here the goalseeked thesis gets really amusing: .

    This is not say that the mining cost is driving the market value. The opposite is likely true. In the early years, bitcoin’s production cost had naturally stronger influence on the price because new coin generation was a higher percentage of existing stock or supply. Now that more than 18m bitcoins have been mined already (vs. max supply of 21m) and new coin generation is a smaller percentage of the existing supply, the influence of the production cost on the price has likely diminished. Thus, in the current conjuncture, the market price is likely driving the production cost rather than the other way round.

    Well thanks for at least admitting that your entire “second valuation” approach is complete garbage.

    However, this causality does not mean that the bitcoin price would be diverging from its mining cost on a sustained basis. Similar to gold, when the bitcoin market price is well above the production cost, mining activity and mining difficulty should increase pushing the cost of production up towards the market price, thus inducing some convergence. But similar to previous episodes, some of that convergence could happen with an adjustment in the market price also. We thus view the acute divergence of Figure 2 as another valuation challenge for bitcoin.

    No, you don’t: you yourself admitted the two are not linked. You are merely trying to create a mental model in investor minds that bitcoin is too expensive and that may well be achieved since bitcoin has exploded higher and it just needs some remotely credible catalyst to force some profit taking… such as this note. But to argue that anything more than a brief drop will be triggered by such a goalseeked analysis is almost as naive as believing that the cost of “mining” bitcoin has anything to do with its price, which is entirely driven by how many trillions central banks are printing at any given moment and nothing else! But, again, this is all a useful model of how to spot and avoid garbage goalseeked narratives.

    Oh, and speaking of intrinsic value of bitcoin, let’s recall what none other than Panigirtzoglou’s own boss said back in Sept 2017:

    “It’s worse than tulip bulbs. It won’t end well. Someone is going to get killed,” Dimon said at a banking industry conference organized by Barclays. “Currencies have legal support. It will blow up.”

    Alas, while Panigirtzoglou could have stopped here and saved himself some jeers and snickers, he decided to continues and boldly go in “analyzing” bitcoin using the same failed approach he applied in November when anyone who followed his trade reco would have blown up almost instantly. Instead, he goes on to not only “value” bitcoin, but to appraise its upside potential in terms of positioning and momentum.

    On the first, he refutes his own argument from a month ago that the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust represents mostly institutional investors and instead now argues, that “it is wrong to view all these institutional flows of last year as entirely driven by long-term investors.”

    We believe that a significant component of last year’s institutional flows into bitcoin reflect speculative investors seeking to front run other more real-money institutional investors. The frothy positioning in CME bitcoin futures is one manifestation of this speculative institutional flow which encompasses momentum traders such as CTAs and quantitative crypto funds. Indeed, bitcoin futures, the preferred vehicle of speculative investors, saw a sharp increase in open interest in recent weeks (Figure 3), pointing to intense buildup of futures positions. This is also true with our more carefully calculated bitcoin futures position proxy shown in Figure 4, which experienced a similarly steep ascent in recent weeks to unprecedented territory.

    So… when it suited JPM to extrapolate “deep value”, “long-term” institutional bias and positioning from Grayscale flows that’s all it was, but now that Panigirtzoglou has a mandate to hammer crypto, Grayscale can be whatever he decides it should be.  Got it.

    Same thing for the other “risk”, namely of momentum traders reversing, which incidentally is what Panigirtzoglou got dead wrong in early November before admitting as much. Alas, it appears he hasn’t learned that particular lesson and is once again betting that CTAs will start selling soon even though bitcoin continues to be the one security with the most tangible trend in the entire investing universe.

    Figure 5 shows that the short look-back period momentum signal rose this week to 3.0 stdevs, and the long look-back period to 2.3 stdevs, i.e. to even higher levels than the previous peaks of mid-2019. Both are well above our 1.5stdev threshold typically associated with overbought conditions and a high risk of mean reversion.

    The JPM quant then makes similar argument about retail investors saying “Unfortunately, there are some signs that retail interest has also increased sharply.” Why unfortunately?  Because as he then explains, “The speculative mania by retail investors characterized the bitcoin surge during 2017.” Perhaps, but the mania by institutional investors is what characterizes the current surge and has far greater impact on the overall direction. Furthermore, as the following far less conflicted and much more objective analysis from Skew shows, institutional participation in the current phase higher dwarfs retail interest by orders of magnitude, no matter how hard JPMorgan would like to get its clients to sell to its prop traders.

    There is some more self-serving and unjustified arguments in JPM’s report, but the goalseeked conclusion is clear:

    we believe that the valuation and position backdrop has become a lot more challenging for bitcoin at the beginning of the New Year. While we cannot exclude the possibility that the current speculative mania will propagate further pushing the bitcoin price up towards the consensus region of between $50k-$100k, we believe that such price levels would prove unsustainable.

    In other words, bitcoin may well triple from here, but it could also drop. Which, of course, is why JPM’s quants are paid the big bucks…. especially when they are tasked with sparking a mini high net worth selloff just so either JPM’s own prop desk or a preferred institutional client can get in cheaper. Which, incidentally, is the whole purpose of JPM’s report.

    And while the reasons behind Panigirtzoglou’s report are clear and transparent, our question is whether the following statement from JPM CEO Jamie Dimon in Sept 2017 is still valid:

    Dimon also said he’d “fire in a second” any JPMorgan trader who was trading bitcoin, noting two reasons: “It’s against our rules and they are stupid.”

    To this all we can add is that anyone tho bought bitcoin in Sept 2017 may well be stupid… but they are now retired. Which is also why those same “stupid” JPM traders – who clearly trade bitcoin now – are now so desperate to shake out the weak hands who believe their self-serving, goalseeked “research.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 20:00

  • Snyder: The United States Has Become A Banana Republic
    Snyder: The United States Has Become A Banana Republic

    Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

    If we continue destroying the U.S. dollar at our current pace, toilet paper will eventually be more valuable than U.S. dollars. 

    I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but it is true.  Once the COVID pandemic hit the United States, those that control the levers of power in this country decided to go “full Weimar” and they never looked back.  As a result, the size of our money supply is rising at a rate that would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago.  To illustrate what I am talking about, I would like for you to check out this chart that was posted on Twitter by James Turk.  As you can see, M1 was up by more than 50 percent in 2020.

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    We’ve never had a year like that in all of U.S. history.  What we are doing is literally insane, but most Americans aren’t even aware of what is happening because the mainstream media isn’t talking about it.

    If you are not familiar with “M1”, here is a definition that comes from Investopedia

    M1 is the money supply that is composed of physical currency and coin, demand deposits, travelers’ checks, other checkable deposits, and negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts. M1 includes the most liquid portions of the money supply because it contains currency and assets that either are or can be quickly converted to cash. However, “near money” and “near, near money,” which fall under M2 and M3, cannot be converted to currency as quickly.

    When new money enters the system, every dollar that you are currently holding becomes less valuable.

    And if your paycheck does not rise at the same rate that the money supply is rising, that means that your paycheck becomes less valuable as well.

    It is helpful to think of our money system as a pie.  When more dollars are added to the pie, your share of the pie steadily becomes smaller.

    So who does benefit when the pie is expanded?

    The ultra-wealthy do, and I will discuss that more below.

    But first, I wanted to share another chart with you.  The first chart from James Turk showed how M1 has been rising on a percentage basis, and this next chart which comes directly from the Federal Reserve shows how M1 has been rising on an absolute basis…

    Just look at that for a moment.

    It truly is breathtaking.  M1 has literally been rising at almost a vertical rate, and it makes all of the inflation that has come before look almost meaningless.

    This is why the stock market keeps hitting record high after record high.  Stocks started to crash when COVID first started to spread in the United States, and the Federal Reserve decided to do whatever was necessary to rescue the markets.  The “unprecedented” response that we witnessed ended up being “a key driver of billionaire wealth” in 2020…

    A key driver of billionaire wealth concentration was the unprecedented monetary policy response to stabilize financial markets in the early days of the pandemic, which spurred the stock market’s gravity-defying rise. When Wall Street was on the verge of panic in March, the Federal Reserve intervened with the promise of low rates and an open-ended liquidity spigot.

    In addition, Congress just kept passing “stimulus package” after “stimulus package” in a desperate attempt to “rescue” the economy.

    But in the process they borrowed and spent trillions of dollars that we did not have, and that also helped to fuel our transition into hyperinflation.

    The good news is that hyperinflation is not showing up at the grocery store or at Walmart yet.  Eventually it will happen, but so far consumer prices are just rising at a pace that is quite a bit brisker than usual.  Where we are seeing hyperinflation is in stock prices, high end real estate in rural and suburban areas, and in other areas of the economy that the ultra-wealthy have been pouring their money into.

    Despite the fact that we just endured one of the worst economic years in U.S. history, 2020 was actually a banner year for billionaires

    Between roughly mid-March and Dec. 22, the United States gained 56 new billionaires, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, bringing the total to 659. The wealth held by that small cadre of Americans has jumped by more than $1 trillion in the months since the pandemic began.

    According to a December report issued jointly by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies using data compiled by Forbes, America’s billionaires hold roughly $4 trillion in wealth — a figure roughly double what the 165 million poorest Americans are collectively worth. The 10 richest billionaires have a combined net worth of more than $1 trillion.

    Last year the rich got a whole lot richer, and the poor got a whole lot poorer.

    As I discussed the other day, 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans.  The year ended with close to 20 million Americans still receiving government unemployment benefits, and poverty and homelessness have been exploding all around us.

    In some cases, people were waiting in lines that were up to 12 hours long just to get a couple of bags of groceries at food banks around the nation.  We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and many are expecting things to get even worse in 2021.

    And with each passing day, more businesses are closing and more Americans are being laid off.

    The retail sector has been hit particularly hard.  The following comes from Axios

    Malls are going belly up. Familiar names like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and J. Crew have filed for bankruptcy. Increasingly, Americans’ shopping choices will boil down to a handful of internet Everything Stores and survival-of-the-fittest national chains.

    And what we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg.  One recent report projected that “100,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. retail stores will close by 2025”

    A research report from UBS predicts that 100,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. retail stores will close by 2025, in a trend that started before the pandemic and has accelerated amid coronavirus-related shutdowns.

    Our national landscape is already littered with abandoned stores and restaurants, and they are telling us that it is only going to get worse.

    What is our country going to look like as this process plays out?

    Of course our authorities will just respond to every new crisis by printing even more money.

    That is what they did down in Venezuela, and now just about everyone in Venezuela is a millionaire.

    But most of those “millionaires” are living in crushing poverty because the money is absolutely worthless.

    Sadly, many other countries are doing the same thing that the U.S. is doing, and so this hyperinflationary spiral is not likely to end any time soon.

    But let there be no doubt that we are also in a global economic depression.  Global GDP is about 8 percent lower than it was before the pandemic started, and the outlook for 2021 does not look promising at all.

    If you think that there is a way for this economic story to end well, just go back and look at the M1 chart from the Federal Reserve one more time.

    Every other time this has been tried in human history, the story has ended badly.

    Our story is going to end badly too, and every American needs to get prepared to survive in a very painful hyperinflationary environment.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 19:40

  • FDA Admits PCR Tests Give False Results, Prepares Ground For Biden To "Crush" Casedemic
    FDA Admits PCR Tests Give False Results, Prepares Ground For Biden To “Crush” Casedemic

    The FDA today joined The WHO and Dr.Fauci in admitting there is a notable risk of false results from the standard PCR-Test used to define whether an individual is a COVID “Case” or not.

    This matters significantly as it fits perfectly with the ‘fake rescue’ plan we have previously described would occur once the Biden admin took office. But before we get to that ‘conspiracy’, we need a little background on how the world got here…

    We have detailed the controversy surrounding America’s COVID “casedemic” and the misleading results of the PCR test and its amplification procedure in great detail over the past few months.

    As a reminder, “cycle thresholds” (Ct) are the level at which widely used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test can detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus. The higher the number of cycles, the lower the amount of viral load in the sample; the lower the cycles, the more prevalent the virus was in the original sample.

    Numerous epidemiological experts have argued that cycle thresholds are an important metric by which patients, the public, and policymakers can make more informed decisions about how infectious and/or sick an individual with a positive COVID-19 test might be. However, as JustTheNews reports, health departments across the country are failing to collect that data.

    Here are a few headlines from those experts and scientific studies:

    1. Experts compiled three datasets with officials from the states of Massachusetts, New York and Nevada that conclude:“Up to 90% of the people who tested positive did not carry a virus.”

    2. The Wadworth Center, a New York State laboratory, analyzed the results of its July tests at the request of the NYT: 794 positive tests with a Ct of 40: “With a Ct threshold of 35, approximately half of these PCR tests would no longer be considered positive,” said the NYT. “And about 70% would no longer be considered positive with a Ct of 30! “

    3. An appeals court in Portugal has ruled that the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful.

    4. A new study from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, found that at 25 cycles of amplification, 70% of PCR test “positives” are not “cases” since the virus cannot be cultured, it’s dead. And by 35: 97% of the positives are non-clinical.

    5. PCR is not testing for disease, it’s testing for a specific RNA pattern and this is the key pivot. When you crank it up to 25, 70% of the positive results are not really “positives” in any clinical sense, since it cannot make you or anyone else sick

    So, in summary, with regard to our current “casedemic”, positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports… and is used to fearmonger mask mandates and lockdowns nationwide…

    In October we first exposed how PCR Tests have misled officials worldwide into insanely authoritative reactions.

    As PJMedia’s Stacey Lennox wrote, the “casedemic” is the elevated number of cases we see nationwide because of a flaw in the PCR test. The number of times the sample is amplified, also called the cycle threshold (Ct), is too high.

    It identifies people who do not have a viral load capable of making them ill or transmitting the disease to someone else as positive for COVID-19.

    The New York Times reported this flaw on August 29 and said that in the samples they reviewed from three states where labs use a Ct of 37-40, up to 90% of tests are essentially false positives. The experts in that article said a Ct of around 30 would be more appropriate for indicating that someone could be contagious – those for whom contact tracing would make sense.

    Just a few days earlier, the CDC had updated its guidelines to discourage testing for asymptomatic individuals. It can only be assumed that the rationale for this was that some honest bureaucrat figured out the testing was needlessly sensitive. He or she has probably been demoted.

    This change was preceded by a July update that discouraged retesting for recovered patients. The rationale for the update was that viral debris could be detected using the PCR test for 90 days after recovery. The same would be true for some period of time if an individual had an effective immune response and never got sick. Existing immunity from exposure to other coronaviruses has been well documented. These are many of your “asymptomatic” cases.

    However, due to political pressure and corporate media tantrums, the new guidance on testing was scrapped, and testing for asymptomatic individuals is now recommended again. Doctors do not receive the Ct information from the labs to make a diagnostic judgment. Neither the CDC nor the FDA has put out guidelines for an accurate Ct to diagnose a contagious illness accurately.

    Hence, our current “casedemic.” Positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports.

    A month later, Dr. Pascal Sacré, explained in great detail how all current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned: Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID.

    This assumption is misleading.  Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works.

    In mid-November, none other than he who should not be questioned – Dr. Anthony Fauci – admitted that the PCR Test’s high Ct is misleading:

    “What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard,” Fauci said, is that “if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more … the chances of it being replication-confident are minuscule.”

    “It’s very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians,” he continued, when “somebody comes in, and they repeat their PCR, and it’s like [a] 37 cycle threshold, but you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle.”

    So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it’s just dead nucleotides, period.”

    So, if anyone raises this discussion as a “conspiracy”, refer them to Dr.Fauci.

    In response to this and the actual “science”, Florida’s Department of Health (and signed off on by Florida’s Republican Governor Ron deSantis), decided that for the first time in the history of the pandemic, a state will require that all labs in the state report the critical “cycle threshold” level of every COVID-19 test they perform.

    All of which leads us to today’s announcement from The FDA

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alerting patients and health care providers of the risk of false results… with the Curative SARS-Cov-2 test.

    And why does this matter?

    Well it’s simple – this is how the establishment can show Joe Biden’s plan is miraculously rescue the world.

    We explained the “fake rescue” plan in October.

    The Fake Rescue

    Biden will issue national standards, like the plexiglass barriers in restaurants he spoke about during the debate, and pressure governors to implement mask mandates using the federal government’s financial leverage (NOTE: his 100-day mask-wearing ‘mandate’ is already in play).

    Some hack at the CDC or FDA will issue new guidance lowering the Ct the labs use, and cases will magically start to fall.

    In reality, the change will only eliminate false positives, but most Americans won’t know that.

    Good old Uncle Joe will be the hero, even though it is Deep-State actors in the health bureaucracies who won’t solve a problem with testing they have been aware of for months. TDS is a heck of a drug.

    So, there you have it folks… First Fauci, then WHO, now FDA all admit there is malarkey in the PCR Tests, but have – until now, done nothing about it… allowing the daily fearmongering of soaring “cases” to enable their most twisted 1984-esque controls.

    All that’s needed now is for one of these estemeed groups to decide to cut the Ct for a “positive” PCR Test to say 15x or 20x and suddenly, we are rescued from the “Dark Winter” as Biden’s plan slashes the positive case count dramatically… we are saved.

    As an aside, this also clearly explains the disappearance of the “flu” during this season as the plethora of high Ct PCR Tests supposedly pointing to a surge in COVID are nothing of the sort.

    As Stephen Lendman noted previously, claiming “lockdowns stopped flu in its tracks, (outbreaks) plummet(ting) by 98% in the United States” ignored that what’s called COVID is merely seasonal influenza combined with false positives (extremely high Ct) from PCR-Tests.

    And for that reason, the great 2020 disappearing flu passes largely under the mass media’s radar. Media proliferated mass deception and power of repetition get most people to believe and having successfully “killed the flu”, they will now do the same with COVID… and, if allowed by our betters, we will all return to the new normal they desire.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 19:20

  • Over 70% Of Republican Voters Want Their Lawmakers To Be More Like Trump
    Over 70% Of Republican Voters Want Their Lawmakers To Be More Like Trump

    Authored by Rusty Weiss via The Mental Recession blog,

    A new Rasmussen survey indicates 72 percent of Republican voters want their legislators to be more like President Trump.

    In fact, in their view, Trump is an extraordinarily better role model than most members of Congress.

    The national telephone and online survey “finds that 72% of Likely Republican Voters think their party should be more like Trump than like the average GOP member of Congress,” Rasmussen reports.

    By contrast, 24 percent see the average Republican in Congress as a better example for their party.

    Overall, voters gave the “average member of Congress” 45 percent to just 40 percent for the President.

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    Republican Voters Want Congress to be More Like Trump

    It’s really no surprise that Republican voters want to see their congressional representatives emulate Trump, a political outsider who actually fights for the people.

    As bad as his approval ratings are thanks to Democrat-controlled media, President Trump is easily more admired by Republicans than members of Congress.

    In fact, in 2020, he was even more admired than Barack Obama.

    “Trump tied former President Barack Obama for the honor last year but edged out his predecessor this year,” Gallup reports.

    They add, “Trump’s first-place finish ends a 12-year run as most admired man for Obama, tied with Dwight Eisenhower for the most ever.”

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    Congress meanwhile, fared much worse in a recent survey asking Americans to rank professions by their honesty and ethics.

    Congressional members actually tied car salespeople with a mere 8 percent rating them highly, while advertising practitioners came in slightly better at 10 percent.

    Rounding out low-ranking groups were business executives at 17 percent, lawyers at 21 percent, and journalists at 28 percent.

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    Trump in 2024?

    Still, Rasmussen notes that 52 percent of Republican voters think their party should put a new candidate on the presidential ticket in 2024, while 33 percent say the GOP should promote a candidate who has already run.

    At a Christmas party in December, the President hinted that he would be back in the White House in 2024.

    “It’s been an amazing four years,” Trump is heard saying in a live stream of the party by former Oklahoma Republican Party Chair Pam Pollard.

    “We’re trying to get another four years,” the President continued, “but otherwise I’ll see you in four years.”

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    A similar Rasmussen survey six years ago saw Republican voters clamoring for a new face to run for President.

    That new face turned out to be Donald Trump, as he easily dispatched with establishment politicians during the Republican primaries, and eventually defeated another entrenched swamp creature in Hillary Clinton.

    Is there anyone who might surprise in a similar manner and emerge in 2024?

    Read more at the Political Insider…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 19:00

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Today’s News 4th January 2021

  • 2021: The Geopolitics Of Vaccination
    2021: The Geopolitics Of Vaccination

    Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The biggest overall issue of 2020 by far was the global reaction to Covid-19 and there is a prevailing belief that somehow 2021 will be automatically different because one digit in the year has changed. The world is waiting for this to all be “over”. But, perhaps the big question shouldn’t be when the Coronavirus issue ends but how it ends. This health crisis, just like any other, provides the catalyst for political change and has already left a bureaucratic mark on history. The potentially most interesting (or terrifying depending on your worldview) systemic change brought on by the virus would be the start of some sort of mandatory vaccination for travel. This concept, which was unthought of just a year ago, is being discussed in the Mainstream Media both positively and negatively with some governments already greenlighting the concept verbally. The Overton Window seems to be moving very quickly on this issue. But what will this new form of bureaucracy mean on a grander scale and since numerous different sources are creating a vaccine could a form of “geopolitics” of vaccination arise depending one which is taken?

    Image: The vaccine you take could determine your travel future.

    As of now the key form of bureaucracy for international travel is a passport based on citizenship. The proposed idea to only allow vaccinated individuals to travel will essentially create a second passport (regardless of what terminology is ascribed to it) based on an individual’s vaccination record. So, because this new vaccination proof documentation will essentially function as a passport we should first take a look at the geopolitical aspects of passports before we can take a look at the geopolitical aspects of vaccination.

    The Passport Space We Know

    Passports and visa regimes throughout the 20th century became a reflection of national power and created bureaucratic geopolitical spaces of their own. If we look at the “Global Passport Power Rank 2021” then we see that the top nations are not surprisingly in the West. The choice of using the word “power” when describing passports is very relevant. For example, U.S. Citizens can visit Bulgaria and Serbia visa free, while Serbs and Bulgarians must go through the bureaucracy, fees and interviews necessary for the privilege to step on American soil. Although many Bulgarians may feel the U.S. is an ally who saved them from floundering Communism, there are plenty of Serbs alive today who consider Washington to be the murderers of their people and yet they still give Americans 90 days to stay in their nation with zero questions asked. Funny how that works out.

    Map: Visa free travel for U.S. citizens reflects where American foreign policy/influence dominates.

    In contrast, and unlike many European nations, the Serbs give eternal ally Russia 30 days for business and/or vacation. Very often traditional allies of a given nation are granted visa free entrance. Speaking of Russia, it is no surprise that many tiny nations that Russia recognizes but America does not (South Ossetia, Abkhazia etc.) allow Russian citizens to enter visa free. Furthermore, as Russia’s influence has grown since its utter defeat in the Cold War its passport has steadily increased in “power”.

    Visas and passports can reflect the strength of a nation or its proximity to power (high level vassal status) when its citizens can go almost everywhere while at the same time blocking lessers from entering their nation.

    In some ways when smaller nations demand visas from more powerful actors this show of bureaucratic force definitely makes a statement and is a form of proof of independence. It is unknown how many people actually want to go to North Korea for a summer holiday but the fact they can and do enforce/deny visas provides some level of protection from carpet baggers, foreign agents and other questionable figures, but most importantly it sends a message to other nations that they have “no right to be here”.

    So we can see that Western passport geopolitical spaces are very broad reaching covering almost the whole globe except for certain uppity hermit nations while in turn rejecting free entry to many poorer/weaker nations. The West’s businessmen and influencers can go out, but no one is coming back so easily in turn. International travel is a symbol of at least middle class status, but what is really key is where those 8 men in the business class seats can and cannot go.

    Image: Migrant labour is not only affected by real geography, but often by the geopolitics of passports and visas.

    When it comes to the poor of the world we can see that there is a reason why every London bartender is Polish, and every street sweeper in Moscow is Tajik – they have visa free entry to these respective countries to work as migrant labour. The Tajiks in Moscow would surely prefer to do the same job for U.S. dollars or British pounds, but that is simply not an option as their passports do not allow it. There are simply different migrant worker exploitation spaces available to those with Polish and Tajik citizenship.

    The Vaccination Space That Could Be Coming

    If we are going to live in a world where vaccines are mandatory for travel, who is to say that every nation on Earth is going to acknowledge the validity of every other vaccine. The Mainstream Media makes it seem as though just getting any vaccine with some sort of paperwork to back it up should be good enough, but this is unlikely to be true.

    The BBC has already written about Russia’s Sputnik V Coronavirus vaccine with some skepticism. When we consider the fact that this news giant basically writes the entire cultural narrative of the UK, then it is safe to believe that many of their politicians may choose to not recognize the validity of the Russian vaccine out of fear, spite and/or ignorance.

    In contrast, like it or not, Russian citizens are going to have access to only the Russian made vaccine. You have the option to take it or not, but getting the American type from Pfizer will require effort, patience and a much bigger personal expense. Thus, it is not forbidden per say, but will be very rare for Russian citizens to get a competing foreign vaccine, putting them all into the Sputnik V camp from a bureaucratic perspective. In fact there seems to be almost a vaccination race as nations race to develop and export their vaccine first. Perhaps this is out of national pride or humanitarian interests, but their rush may also be connected with the desire to get as many nations as possible onto your national vaccine. In the same sense that all Russian citizens with a Russian passport are in one big group, then if there will be a vaccination passport then all people who took Sputnik V or Pfizer’s shot would be placed into one similar category for travel. If this is actually happening, then surely the race is on to take as much of this new intangible geopolitical space as possible.

    Map: The “geopolitical vaccination space” of Russia’s Sputnik V. Dark green has ordered millions, light green is considering.

    If we follow bureaucratic logic, that “if the Russian vaccine is bad, then no travel to England”, this would also extend to individuals/countries that have predominantly taken the Post Soviet edition of the antivirus injection. What is important to understand is that many of the countries getting Sputnik V are not just small ignorable former Communist nations bordering Russia. These are major economic players like China, India, South Korea, and America’s neighbor to the south Mexico, all of which are all placing orders in the tens of millions.

    If push comes to shove and this concept of travel papers based on vaccination (immunization passports) comes to pass then it is very likely that non-Western versions will “not count” at border crossings. Although with enough time and money one can probably get any type of vaccine anywhere, for the overwhelming majority this could create a new invisible Iron Curtain – the Western Vaccines on one side with the Russian one (with other possible outlier versions) on the other.

    This may sound like a stretch of the imagination but the madness of Russophobic conspiracy theories seems to have no bounds. And most importantly governmental reactions to the Covid-19 Pandemic have been harsh, dubious in effect, and very short sighted. There is a real chance that in 2021 we will see the rise of the geopolitics of vaccination.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/04/2021 – 02:00

  • A Time For New Beginnings And Ending That Which Must End
    A Time For New Beginnings And Ending That Which Must End

    Authored by Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com,

    Janus is an ancient Roman, a composite god who is associated with doorways, beginnings, and transitions. A usually two-faced god, he looks to both the future and the past at the same time, embodying a binary.

    – Source

    If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

    – Thomas Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973)

    Two years ago, also during the month of Janus, I wrote a speculative article on Trump as two faces on the same coin and, specifically, considered the president as the “most interesting man in the world”: an enigmatic “ringleader”, of sorts, who always keeps us guessing between transitional episodes:

    In so many ways, Trump is the perfect foil to usher in a new epoch… a forerunner of sorts before another ringleader takes center stage.

    To be sure, President Trump is like a flip-sided Obama the way he’s branded upon America’s psyche. And, like Obama, he’s a walking, talking, Rorschach test.

    For good? Or bad?

    Either way:  We all have our suspicions and are becoming more certain with each passing day.

    And here we are today, two years later, still wondering.

    In the wake of Russiagate, the Mueller Show, the 2018 Midterms, the Ukraine impeachment debacle, COVID, and, now, a stolen presidential election, it calls to mind the following questions:

    What if the innermost circle of The Borg, or, at least, the mid-level components like the Deep State, Orwellian Media, Dems, Rinos, and punditry, were actually caught off guard by Trump’s 2016 win – simply as a result of underestimating the awareness and will of the American voters who overwhelmed The Borg’s systemic election fraud four years ago?

    What if Trump were real and Spygate, Mueller, Ukrainegate, and Covid, were the means to gaslight the dupes and tie-up the president as much as possible over the previous four years?

    In consideration of Occam’s Razor: What if everything we have seen during Trump’s presidency was merely a natural progression of events?

    Then, what if the same voter fraud occurred in the 2020 Election except, this time, The Borg was caught red-handed?

    Certainly, the Orwellian Media’s anointing of Dementia Joe was, in part, a plan conceived and launched by the “bipartisan” Transition Integrity Project (T.I.P.) under the cover of Covid and using technologies and methodologies defecated straight from the bowels of Langley.

    Everything about November 3, 2020, and the ensuing post-election narrative propagated by the Orwellian Media smacks of desperation by those attempting to pull off the coup. Does it not?

    Or it could be another show: A really, super-big, gigantic, end-of-America-type media event.

    During the holiday break, I listened to attorney Sidney Powell and Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) interviewed by a guest host on the Rush Limbaugh radio program. To hear Powell and Gohmert outline the overt suppression of evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election was staggering, to say the least. But, that very evening, the nightly news, instead, showed Kamala Harris receiving her Covid vaccine. The “Vice President-Elect”, then, through her mask, and with her trademark nasal whine, implored Americans to follow her lead and get their shots in the arm too.

    What is occurring in America now may seem surreal but it is, indeed, actually happening.

    In early December, President Trump, by his own admission, gave what may have been the most important speech of his lifetime, and it was not given one iota of coverage on my local nightly news. Instead, we were informed on “President-Elect” Joe Biden’s virtual round-table of small business owners who were impacted by the Covid pandemic as well as the number of new Covid cases in the country that day.

    Furthermore, if you go to YouTube and query “Trump’s most important speech december 2, 2020” this is what appears: “Fact-check” videos on Trump’s “baseless voter fraud claims” and “speech riddled with falsehoods”.

    Now try this: Search for the word “Plandemic” on the Duck Duck Go search engine, and you will see the website for PlandemicVideo.com appearing at the top of the results.  But if you search the same term on Google, the Plandemic video website does NOT show.  Instead, you will see a Wikipedia link labeling Plandemic as “misinformation” and a science magazine’s website “fact-checking” “unsubstantiated claims and accusations”.

    Consider for a moment the kind of power we are witnessing:  The mainstream media, the FBI, the Justice Department, the CIA, Big Tech, The Drudge Report, most of Fox News, and, now, even the American electoral system and Supreme Court… ALL assimilated by The Borg.

    How could this all-inclusive collusion exist?

    What follows will provide some of the answers to that question.

    Catherine Austin Fitts is a former banker turned whistleblower and served as the Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the late nineteen-eighties under Bush the Elder. A few days before Christmas 2020, an interview of Fitts was posted whereby she described five pillars of a Transhumanist Technocracy currently being constructed in plain sight by The Borg.  The five pillars are as follows:

    1.)  Tech engineers building “The Cloud” and Intel communications

    2.) The military installing satellites in space in conjunction with Operation Warp Speed here on earth

    3.) Big Pharma designing vaccines and injection mechanisms

    4.) The Mainstream Media’s ever-spinning propaganda machine

    5.) The Central bankers creating crypto systems designed to enslave the masses

    Fitts claimed these “pillars” are painstakingly being kept separate by the Borg until they can be integrated into our bodies, and our minds, by means of our own blood and DNA – like a trap being sprung at just the right time; and the reason we are not completely caught in the trap yet, is because The Borg has not quite finalized construction of the five pillars.

    In her interview, Fitts described our current circumstances as a war between those who consider mankind as “individuals” with rights divinely ordained and against a High Tech Oligarchy (i.e. The Borg) who views the citizens of the world as cattle and chattel.

    While listening to Fitts speak in the above-linked video, I was reminded of a June 2017 article I wrote entitled “A Digital Noose ‘Round Every Corner”. The article was about our “progressively encroaching electronic enslavement” and in relation to a 2013 book called “The Circle” that was later released as a movie in 2017 featuring the actor Tom Hanks.  In that article, the following was written:

    The elite cynically oppress the proles while telling them it’s for their own good; for their safety, or for the good of Mankind overall.  While, at the same time, they shroud themselves in secrecy and corruption, shielding their own asses, and wallets, with the unadulterated power of an avant-garde, weapons-grade, nation-state working in collusion with multifarious, multi-national corporations.

    Even after American citizens paying full price for products today, or through taking advantage of “free” services offered by U.S. corporations, these companies in turn, demand we “click” to “accept” the “terms” of our surrender; including our Fourth Amendment rights and usually in deference to the proprietorial protection of the corporate entity’s intellectual property rights; and, always without an attorney present.

    Then, global corporate monoliths like Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and Facebook, additionally, share our personal information with the NSA, or CIA, or FBI, et al, all for our own protection, and the common good.

    Yet, somehow, elite billionaires like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk regally rise above the fray and escape the daily drudgery of the little peoples.  They preach diversity and open borders from within their gated compounds; and advocate equality while claiming some are more equal than others.

    In reality, the five pillars as described by Fitts could also be considered as circles, not yet closed, and still separated for now, but soon to be conjoined like Olympic Rings.

    We’re talking about total control: a system of economic slavery and the end of privacy.  But please understand the “transition” is even more than that – it is an operation to bring about the end of Man in order to give birth to a new, transhumanist, world order. And should the circles be allowed to close, it means there will be those inside, and outside, of the “circle”, or “closed system”, or “corral”, if you prefer.  It means people will need to choose.

    In fact, we are being forced to decide even now.

    Just prior to the New Year, the internet was saturated with videos of robots dancing and it was a sobering opportunity to see how the techno-circle/pillar is approaching completion. I’m of the opinion the videos are merely demonstrations of The Borg arrogantly bragging or, rather, they are released onto the net as a means to show off the ingenuously spooky creations. Truly, it has been stunning to see the progressive advancement of these types of machines. Like their creators, they appear alive but have no soul.

    Is this the future we want?

    Most of you reading this likely understands how critical thinking takes effort whereas passive compliance is easier; at least in the near term. Very few people want to contemplate the world as a sinister place. After all, they consider themselves intelligent and of good character and so there is less cognitive dissonance for them to perceive government officials, DARPA, the WHO and CDC as trusted servants and protectors.

    Furthermore, if nice folks can recycle and lower their carbon footprint for the sake of the planet and don a mask to save lives, it feels good to them. It’s their way of looking out for others and showing respect to a just and moral universe. They have food on the table, gas in their vehicles, electricity, running water, heat and air conditioning. Why rock the boat? Why not just go along to get along? Because, they believe, technology can save them and Covid, too, will pass and all things will go back to normal.

    Hope is a beautiful thing, right?

    Now consider these questions: What U.S. president was Operation Warp Speed’s most vociferous cheerleader?  What U.S. president wanted the military to administer the Covid vaccines?

    That’s right.

    Over the past four years, I, personally, enjoyed the presentation of Trump in the same manner I would the ringleader of a circus. Except, in this particular production, the tent has been set aflame by the owners of said circus and no one yet has been, truly, led to safety by the ringleader; nor have the owners of the circus been correctly identified, let alone pursued or prosecuted. But, then again, is that actually the responsibility of the ringleader?

    Perhaps the reason for the showman was only to show us the true size of The Borg.

    But even if Trump is a true swamp-fighter and retains the presidency for a second term through any number of last-minute options and means, how can we know it’s not merely another circus staged by The Borg?

    Since conservative American’s, by and large, wish to mind their own business and be left alone, it could be they are intending to soon become ungovernable in ways the elites will experience as tens-of-millions of tiny cuts. While, at the same time, the incel’s and snowflakes appear to be pacified with an incoming president Biden; at least, for now, at the time of this writing.

    Therefore, if declared martial law was the goal of The Borg, would it be better achieved with Biden as President? Or with Trump reinstalled by his (perceived) conservatively-stacked Supreme Court or state Republican legislatures – or even through more drastic measures taken to end the coup?

    Or… perhaps the easiest pathway for The Borg to close all circles is via the tyrannical lockdown measures as mandated by Presidents Biden or Harris.

    On the alternative internet, there were a few opposing theories regarding the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville. One was that The Borg used an energy weapon from outer space to destroy the AT & T network hub in order to cover up Dominion software fraud in Georgia during the 2020 Presidential Election. The other theory was that Team Trump’s Space Force utilized outer space weaponry to prevent Dominion software fraud in the forthcoming  Georgia senate run-off races.

    Personally, given the seemingly ready-made RV-bombing narrative that ensued in the Orwellian Media, I would be less surprised if it turned out the Nashville network hub was destroyed by The Borg.  Or perhaps it was a lone ranger taking matters into his own hands after all.  Honestly, can anyone truly know what is exactly happening at any given time? Certainly not this American Nobody; hence the speculation.

    But, be assured of this: If team Biden and Harris prevail and are crowned king and queen of The Swamp, The Borg will be coming for your guns faster than Chuck Schumer and Beto O’Rourke racing towards an MSNBC reporter in the wake of a mass shooting event.  And, when that happens, in the words of a commenter on my blog:  “if you feel the need to bury your firearms it might be getting close to time to use them.”

    In the meantime, the average middle-American moonbat has no clue the election was stolen. They honestly believe Biden pulled off the victory in the urban enclaves and that the nation was saved by woke city dwellers in the select counties of a few contested states. And the propaganda spewed by the Orwellian Media provides the plausible deniability necessary for the nation’s court system and body politic to sell the charade of a “legitimate” presidential election.

    Plausible deniability, or, rather, plausible liability, is also how cities, counties, and states have been pressured to lock down under the guise of Covid – even without “mandatory enforcement” in some red (conservative) counties and states. Truly, false premises and plausible deniability go together like lies and fear, tyranny and privation, in warped realities and dystopian societies.

    According to legend, Michelangelo was once asked how he sculpted the Statue of David and the ancient artist responded: “But I didn’t. I just chipped away everything that wasn’t David… until there he was.”

    And that’s how truth-seekers can view the near-completed high towers of The Borg: by chipping away at the surrounding walls of deception.  Currently, it is an information war being waged by keyboard warriors, video whistleblowers, and voices over select radio frequencies.  The demarcation lines now divide belief systems and the territories are ideological and, even, spiritual. Yet, the tyrannical encroachment, and its resistance, will progressively manifest in three dimensions as a continuation by other means.

    At this stage, the propaganda machine acts as shock and awe cannonading upon those who stand against deception as they gather around blue campfires dotted over the remaining free internet. Certainly, the resolve within the hearts of heritage Americans remains strong – perhaps even in similar percentages of the population as during the nation’s initial birth pains. But these people must also come to understand that current circumstances are the result of plans put into place decades ago.

    The actual countdown to the End of America began in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and, just like clockwork, the steady march toward centralization has continued. The Borg has grown powerful, indeed, but it has not completely closed all of its circles yet. Time is running out, however, and perhaps the grandest deception The Borg ever conceived was to cause us to shadowbox against imaginary enemies while they, the true enemy, built their strong towers unabated.

    Of course, the Borg’s latest offensives involve the Monstrously Mutated Strains of Covid® rising like Godzilla on our television screens. And, even if Trump, in Hail Mary fashion, were to retain the presidency…. would you put it past The Borg to conjure up aliens from outer space?

    Just as doorways have always opened in the hallway of history, the choice to walk through them remained ours; and, even now, ignorance is no excuse. Certainly, there has been a “permission” aspect applied; in the same way legend says vampires may not enter a house unless they are first invited. This is why we are usually notified in advance of what will happen. Then, as always, any silence afterward is considered by The Borg as consent:

    Just as the assassination of JFK eventually led to 911, the dawn of Covid has brought about the latest transition. An initiation ritual was performed and a spell was cast.  Now, half the country, and much of the world, are hypnotized and under the hex of a hallucinogenic fever dream.

    In the precepts of Marxism, there is, indeed, a religious aspect to “The Greater Good” complete with its own morality and law. The operating program began centuries ago with Windows® now revealing Gates. In the latter cycles, WW I brought about the League of Nations; WW II delivered the U.N and 911 established the technocracy, while Covid is now in progress of closing the circle on the dead-end road to a new world order.

    Soon, the only remaining border will separate those inside from those standing outside. Those remaining outside will have targets on their backs and what remains going forward will be only dreams and nightmares… depending upon where one sleeps or stands; at least until the spell is broken.

    There has been a clarion call for A New Declaration of Independence and as things go kinetic, some of us will likely be taken out first as an example to the rest.  Then, the responsibilities will remain with you, Dear Reader, and the rest.

    Because of their insatiable thirst for power, ignorance of history, arrogant and incorrect assumptions, intolerance for freedom, and contempt for their own heritage, these Tyrants and traitors within seek to conform us to their own will and unachievable Utopian vision. But because of their rejection of the God of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, they can only create a Hell on earth. This is a vision we reject and an agenda with which we cannot and will not comply. Because our abusers will never relent, they must be ended. We understand what this will entail, what will be required of us, and the personal cost we may well have to pay, but Freedom is so dear and our Legacy so worthy, that we are ready for this great undertaking.

    Ultimately, at this late hour, to win the battles on the way to positive fruition, The Establishment must die by millions and millions of cuts. It means some of our problems will need to be accepted while others are solved. Solutions will be prioritized and the deciding factors for each will be chosen by those in the right places and at the right times.

    The underlying aspects for a need to completely control the entire world are greed and fear; both birthed within the blackness of diabolical, narcissistic pride. Yes, The Borg is afraid, hence all of its deception. And it should be made to fear even more. To be sure, The Overlords rightly fear the power of true information as they remain in daily contact with staff, contractors, and employees, in their respective circles and within arm’s reach. Others might fear those out upon the perimeter walls, or in the shadows, or just ahead, or right around the corner.

    The future flickers like shadows on a wall and one can’t help but wonder what the next few days, months, and year(s) will bring.  I am reminded of something I once heard someone say

    Worries are prayers for what we don’t want to happen.

    But beneath the rampant materialism and crass commercialism in America today, there are families, friends, and neighbors taking action and doing right by each other – demonstrating kindness, embracing forgiveness, and daily sacrificing to ensure the well-being of those in their homes, communities, and beyond.

    Everyone, sooner or later, will choose their line in the sand, or, rather, what hill they wish to die upon. This is what I meant in my last “inevitability”article about “choosing one’s battles carefully and deliberately” as well as this question:

    For those who understand that battles cannot be won simply by playing defense, a question remains: What can be won?

    I’m talking about setting realistic priorities in the here and now.

    It’s a New Year and a time for new beginnings. Hold on to the good and let go of the dross. But choose now. It is either us or them; and that is the real binary.

    The next few days and weeks will provide many of the answers we have been seeking. And, at some point… whenever… wherever… everyone will either make a stand or they won’t.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 23:45

  • Amid Erectile Dysfunction Fears, India Claims COVID Vaccine Is "110% Safe"
    Amid Erectile Dysfunction Fears, India Claims COVID Vaccine Is “110% Safe”

    Experts in India are attempting to quell rumors that two newly-approved vaccines can trigger erectile dysfunction in men, insisting the remedies are more than 100% safe, according to RT News

    On Sunday, India formally approved the emergency use of vaccines developed by Oxford–Astra Zeneca and a domestic firm named Bharat Biotech.

    India plans to inoculate upwards of 300 million people this year, but rumors are already circulating in the country that the vaccines could cause erectile dysfunction and also be dangerous to health. 

    The head of India’s Samajwadi (Socialist) Party, Ashutosh Sinha, made things worse by saying he was very concerned about the vaccines, indicating they “might contain something which can cause harm.” 

    Sinha said there’s a theory going around that the vaccines could be used to “kill/decrease the population” or cause erectile dysfunction. 

    Vaccine rumors sparked by politicians were so troubling that the country’s Drug Controller, Dr. Venugopal G. Somani, had to come out and reassure the public that vaccines are, in, fact, safe. 

    Somani said the health agency would “never approve anything if there is even the slightest safety concern.”

    He reassured the public that the vaccines are “110 percent safe.” 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Somani’s overly optimistic statement about vaccine safety is undoubtedly a red flag. Saif Khalid, a reporter for Al Jazeera, tweeted:

    “Only in India, the COVID vaccine is 110% safe.” 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    “I’d be skeptical of any regulator that claims it is 110/100 safe. Why? Exaggeration. How can you have 110 out of 100? Scientific bodies should use scientific, not a political language,” Pakistani journalist and talk show host Farrukh K. Pitafi said. 

    The big question is how many Indians are actually going to opt-in for COVID-19 vaccines? 

    On the other side of the world, there’s a significant glitch unfolding in Europe as some hospital staff refuse to take the vaccine because they don’t trust it. 

    We noted weeks ago that vaccine mistrust is growing in the US as hospital workers turn down the vaccine. 

    Despite certain government officials’ insistence that there’s absolutely no reason to question the efficacy of the vaccine – the WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan recently said there is “no evidence to be confident shots prevent transmission” and that people who receive the vaccine should continue wearing masks and following all social distancing and travel guidelines.

    In short, as we noted previously, nobody wants to be a guinea pig, and months or years from now developing some sort of illness because of the vaccine. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 23:20

  • The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate Socialism
    The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate Socialism

    Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

    As I noted in the previous installment, the Great Reset, if its architects have their way, would involve transformations of nearly every aspect of life. Here, I will limit my discussion to the economics of the Great Reset as promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF), as well as to recent developments that have advanced these plans.

    As F.A. Hayek suggested in his introductory essay to Collectivist Economic Planning, socialism can be divided into two aspects: the ends and the means. The socialist means is collectivist planning, while the ends, at least under proletarian socialism, are the collective ownership of the means of production and the “equal” or “equitable” distribution of the end products. Distinguishing between these two aspects in order to set aside the question of the ends and to focus on the means, Hayek suggested that collectivist planning could be marshalled in the service of ends other than those associated with proletarian socialism:

    “An aristocratic dictatorship, for example, may use the same methods to further the interest of some racial or other elite or in the service of some other decidedly anti-equalitarian purpose.”

    Collectivist planning might or might not run into the calculation problem, depending upon whether or not a market in the factors of production is retained. If a market for the factors of production is maintained, then the calculation problem would not strictly apply.

    The collectivist planners of the Great Reset do not aim at eliminating markets for the factors of production. Rather, they mean to drive ownership and control of the most important factors to those enrolled in “stakeholder capitalism.” The productive activities of said stakeholders, meanwhile, would be guided by the directives of a coalition of governments under a unified mission and set of policies, in particular those expounded by the WEF itself.

    While these corporate stakeholders would not necessarily be monopolies per se, the goal of the WEF is to vest as much control over production and distribution in these corporate stakeholders as possible, with the goal of eliminating producers whose products or processes are deemed either unnecessary or inimical to the globalists’ desiderata for “a fairer, greener future.” Naturally, this would involve constraints on production and consumption and likewise an expanded role for governments in order to enforce such constraints—or, as Klaus Schwab has stated in the context of the covid crisis, “the return of big government” – as if government hasn’t been big and growing bigger all the while.

    Schwab and the WEF promote stakeholder capitalism against a supposedly rampant “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is a weasel word that stands for whatever leftists deem wrong with the socioeconomic order. It is the common enemy of the Left. Needless to say, neoliberalism—which Schwab loosely defines as “a corpus of ideas and policies that can loosely be defined as favouring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention and economic growth over social welfare” – is a straw man. Schwab and company erect neoliberalism as the source of our economic woes. But to the extent that “antineoliberalism” has been in play, the governmental favoring of industries and players within industries (or corporatocracy), and not competition, has been the source of what Schwab and his ilk decry. The Great Reset would magnify the effects of corporatocracy.

    Nevertheless, the aims of the WEF are not to plan every aspect of production and thus to direct all individual activity. Rather, the goal is to limit the possibilities for individual activity, including the activity of consumers—by dint of squeezing out industries and producers within industries from the economy. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”

    As Hayek noted, “when the medieval guild system was at its height, and when restrictions to commerce were most extensive, they were not used as a means actually to direct individual activity.” Likewise, the Great Reset aims not at a strictly collectivist planning of the economy so much as recommends and demands neofeudalistic restrictions that would go further than anything since the medieval period—other than under state socialism itself, that is. In 1935, Hayek noted the extent to which economic restrictions had already led to distortions of the market:

    With our attempts to use the old apparatus of restrictionism as an instrument of almost day-to-day adjustment to change we have probably already gone much further in the direction of central planning of current activity than has ever been attempted before….It is important to realize in any investigation of the possibilities of planning that it is a fallacy to suppose capitalism as it exists to-day is the alternative. We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of to-day is just interventionist chaos.

    How much further, then, the Great Reset would take us toward the kinds of restrictions imposed under feudalism, including the economic stasis that feudalism entailed!

    I call this neofeudalism “corporate socialism”—not only because the rhetoric to gain adherents derives from socialist ideology (“fairness,” “economic equality,” “collective good,” “shared destiny,” etc.) but also because the reality sought after is de facto monopolistic control of production via the elimination of noncompliant producers—i.e., a tendency toward monopoly over production that is characteristic of socialism. These interventions would not only add to the “interventionist chaos” already in existence but further distort markets to a degree unprecedented outside of centralized socialist planning per se. The elites could attempt to determine, a priori, consumer needs and wants by limiting production to acceptable goods and services. They would also limit production to the kinds amenable to the governments and producers who buy into the program. The added regulations would drive midsized and small producers out of business or into black markets, to the extent that black markets could exist under a digital currency and greater centralized banking. As such, the restrictions and regulations would tend toward a static caste-like system with corporate oligarchs on top, and “actually existing socialism” for the vast majority below. Increasing wealth for the few, “economic equality,” under reduced conditions, including universal basic income, for the rest.

    The Coronavirus Lockdowns, the Riots, and Corporate Socialism

    The covid-19 lockdowns, and to a lesser extent the leftist riots, have been moving us toward corporate socialism. The draconian lockdown measures employed by governors and mayors and the destruction perpetrated by the rioters just so happen to be doing the work that corporate socialists like the WEF want done. In addition to destabilizing the nation-state, these policies and politics are helping to destroy small businesses, thus eliminating competitors.

    As the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) points out, the lockdowns and riots have combined to level a one-two punch that is knocking out millions of small businesses—“the backbone of the American economy”—all across America. FEE reported that

    7.5 million small businesses in America are at risk of closing their doors for good. A more recent survey showed that even with federal loans, close to half of all small business owners say they’ll have to shut down for good. The toll has already been severe. In New York alone, stay-at-home orders have forced the permanent closure of more than 100,000 small businesses.

    Meanwhile, as FEE and others have noted, there is no evidence that the lockdowns have done anything to slow the spread of the virus. Likewise, there is no evidence that Black Lives Matter has done anything to help black lives. If anything, the riotous and murderous campaigns of Black Lives Matter and Antifa have proven that black lives do not matter to Black Lives Matter. In addition to murdering black people, the Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters have done enormous damage to black businesses and neighborhoods, and thus to black lives.

    As small businesses have been crushed by the combination of draconian lockdowns and riotous lunacy, corporate giants like Amazon have thrived like never before. As BBC noted, at least three of the tech giants—Amazon, Apple, and Facebook—have appreciated massive gains during the lockdowns, gains which were abetted, to a lesser extent, by riots that cost 1 to 2 billion in property damages. During the three months ending in June, Amazon’s “quarterly profit of $5.2bn (£4bn) was the biggest since the company’s start in 1994 and came despite heavy spending on protective gear and other measures due to the virus.” Amazon’s sales rose by 40 percent in the three months ending in June.

    As reported by TechCrunch, Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram platforms saw a 15 percent rise in users, which brought revenues to a grand total of $17.74 billion in the first quarter. Facebook’s total users climbed to 3 billion in March, or two-thirds of the world’s internet users, a record. Apple’s revenues soared during the same period, with quarterly earnings rising 11 percent year-on-year to $59.7 billion. “Walmart, the country’s largest grocer, said profits rose 4 percent, to $3.99 billion,” during the first quarter of 2020, as reported by the Washington Post.

    The number of small businesses has been nearly cut in half by the covid-19 lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots while the corporate giants have consolidated their grip on the economy, as well as their power over individual expression on the internet and beyond. Thus, it would appear that the covid lockdowns, shutdowns, partial closings, as well as the riots are just what the Great Resetters ordered, although I am not hereby suggesting that they did order them. More likely, they have seized the opportunity to cull from the economy the underbrush of small and medium-sized businesses in order to make compliance simpler and more pervasive.

    In the end, the Great Reset is merely a propaganda campaign, not some button that globalist oligarchs can push at will—although the WEF has represented it as just that. Their plans need to be countered with better economic ideas and concerted individual actions. The only reasonable response to the Great Reset project is to defy it, to introduce and promote more competition, and to demand the full reopening of the economy, at whatever peril. If this means that smaller-scale producers and distributors must band together to defy state edicts, then so be it. New business associations, with the aim of foiling the Great Reset, must be formed—before it’s is too late.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 22:55

  • And The First Country To Move To A 100% Digital Monetary System Is… Venezuela
    And The First Country To Move To A 100% Digital Monetary System Is… Venezuela

    In our annual look back (and forward) post, we mused that the advent of central bank-supported digital currencies was the top financial story of 2020, buried deep under the landslide of health and political developments from covid to the US presidential election; we also said that the most important narrative of 2021 would be how fast – and where – digital currencies would be rolled out first.

    Yet while we recently speculated that China would be the first major economy to unleash a digital currency, little did we know that the first country to officially make the jump to a “fully digital” economy would be…  Venezuela!?

    That’s right: according to Bloomberg, Venezuela’s government is preparing to move to a fully digital economy – whatever that means for the country which several years ago adopted some bizarro crypto currency as the de facto petrocurrency of the state to… perplexing consequences, as hyperinflation in this South American socialist paradise (coming soon to every socialist paradise nears you) has made worthless bolivar notes practically disappear. With the local monetary system having collapsed, the US dollar has operated as an “escape valve” for Venezuela amid U.S. sanctions and collapsing oil revenues, President Nicolas Maduro said in a televised interview with Telesur on Friday. He said 18.6% of all commercial transactions are in dollars, while 77.3% are carried out in bolivars with debit cards. Only 3.4% are paid with bolivar notes.

    “They have a war against our physical currency. We are moving this year to a more profound digital economy, in expansion. I’ve set the goal of an economy that’s 100% digital,” Maduro said, adding that physical money will eventually disappear. Call Venezuela a guniea pig for the same monetary experiment which all other central banks will soon pursue as well.

    Venezuela’s currency has lost 99.999% of its value during three years of hyperinflation, forcing the country to issue higher-denomination notes which however not only become useless in record time, but the mere cost to print them – in some relatively stable currency – quickly surpasses their nominal value. The largest note now in circulation, 50,000 bolivars, is worth about $0.04. The government has prudently delayed plans to issue a 100,000 bolivar bill, which currently would be worth less than $0.10.

    After formerly subsidized fuel prices were increased in June, cash is now only used to ride public transportation, and the Caracas subway routinely stops charging passengers due to cash shortages.

    Meanwhile, since late 2019, local banks – which need some currency in which to transact – have started to offer accounts and financial products in U.S. dollars, but there’s a problem there too as those remain limited since there’s no clearing system in place to allow for digital transactions in U.S. dollars.

    As Bloomberg reports, some banks have had technical meetings with Venezuela’s central bank in an attempt to solve the problem amid high skepticism and caution due to U.S. sanctions. But Maduro vowed to create “payment formats” allowing transactions using savings and checking accounts in U.S. dollars, which is especially bizarre since Venezuela has been technically cut off from SWIFT and so Caracas may have no choice but to become the world’s first fully digital monetary regime.

    It’s also why despite promising to expand the use of the U.S. dollar in the economy, Maduro admitted that a formal dollarization wouldn’t happen. “Venezuela has its currency and we are going to defend it,” he said without a trace of humor.

    And yet, comedy or not, central banks the world over will be closely watching to see just how Venezuela will screw up this experiment of becoming the world’s first fully digital economy, because as we have been warning for a while: digital currencies – under the protective umbrella of the so-called ISO 20022 – are coming to every broke country near you in the next 12-24 months.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 22:30

  • Here's How To Prep For 2021
    Here’s How To Prep For 2021

    Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

    Remember just a year ago when everyone was pumped about an exciting new decade? It was 2020 and just the sound of it was futuristic and hopeful.

    “This is going to be my year!” people said.

    Unfortunately, I don’t think 2020 was anybody’s year unless your last name starts with B and rhymes with Sneez-os. While you’ll see lots of folks out there blithely saying, “Thank goodness 2020 is over!” I’ve got to say, 2021 isn’t looking great either.

    With the economic disaster that is sweeping the country, more lockdown mandates, a new government that is likely to crack down even more, rapidly approved vaccinations we’ll be “strongly encouraged” to receive, and who knows what else in store, if you are a New Year’s resolution type, it’s important to keep these things in mind and set more realistic goals for the year ahead.

    A lot of the old tips for prepping and stockpiling are no longer really workable for many of us. This is true for a multitude of reasons – money is tight, supplies are less abundant and more expensive, and it’s more difficult to access businesses and in-person education.

    That has a lot of people feeling overwhelmed and even helpless. My inbox is filled with messages from those who want to prepare but feel like there’s just no hope.

    I’m here to tell you that there is hope. We may be down right now, but we aren’t out. We’re only truly defeated if our attitude allows us to stay in that state of mind. When you think you’ve irrevocably lost, you stop looking for wins. And goes against what prepping is all about. I’ve always said that prepping is the ultimate act of optimism. This is a time that will test our resilience and show us what we’re really made of. (Spoiler – we’re made of strong stuff.)

    I’m not going to sugarcoat it. The clock isn’t going to strike midnight leaving us all to sigh in relief and say, “Thank goodness! It’s finally over! GoodBYE 2020!” This isn’t Cinderalla and there are no fairy godmothers or spells to be lifted. 2021 is going to be a challenge in much of the same way 2020 was and probably in ways we haven’t even imagined yet. (I mean, who really expected murder hornets and cannibalistic monkeys?)

    But none of this means that you can’t keep prepping in the year ahead. It just means you may need to be more strategic and prepare in different ways. So do you want to become more prepared in 2021? Are you with me?

    Here are some realistic goals you can set for the year ahead.

    Become more fit.

    Fitness doesn’t have to mean a gym membership or exercise class. In fact, those are both darned near impossible these days. However, there are still ways you can work on your fitness levels that will pay off big if you find yourself in a survival situation.

    • Walking: This is my favorite exercise by far and one I indulge in every single day. It’s accessible to almost everyone and you don’t have to buy any fancy equipment. Here are some tips to help you start a walking program. Don’t want to walk because it’s cold weather or rainy? What kind of weather do you expect when you bug out? Chances are, it will be less than ideal. Here are some of the benefits of training in bad weather.

    • Add some weight: If you already walk a lot or if you need an additional challenge, add a loaded backpack to your daily stroll. You can just keep on adding weight to help yourself become stronger and more fit.

    • Bodyweight exercises: Check out YouTube to find exercises you can do at home using only your own body weight for resistance.

    • Yoga: Also visit YouTube to find yoga videos. A friend of mine swears by a very inexpensive program called DDPYoga, which has workouts for everyone, including those who are bedridden or in a wheelchair.

    • Calisthenics: Go old-school and do some calisthenics like push-ups, jumping jacks, and lunges.

    It really doesn’t matter what form of exercise you choose to do – just do something on a regular basis and continue to push yourself to become more fit.

    Learn skills.

    The sky is really the limit when it comes to learning skills. Many of us find we have a lot more time at home now. Why not put that to good use learning skills that will serve you well in both everyday life and survival situations. YouTube and online courses can be great ways to add to your skillset.

    Here are a few areas in which you could find things you might want to learn:

    • Food preservation

    • Gardening

    • Marksmanship

    • Making ammo

    • Woodworking

    • Sewing/clothesmaking

    • Mending

    • Knitting

    • Fletching

    • Leatherwork

    • Herbalism

    • Foraging

    • Hunting

    • First Aid

    • Medical skills

    • Foreign languages

    • Ham radio

    • Bushcrafting

    Those are just a few ideas to get you started – basically, any skill that helps you defend yourself, produce something, communicate, or preserve something is worth learning.

    Produce more.

    I’ve written time and time again about how we’ve become a nation of consumers instead of a nation of producers. If that hasn’t convinced you, then the empty shelves in stores across the country should reinforce the fact that we are far better off when we can produce the things we require to meet our needs.

    Many of these things will cross over with the skills mentioned above. Being able to produce the food you eat from farm to pantry to table is more important than ever. Being able to acquire our food through hunting or foraging can help those who may not have the space or the security to grow their own.

    Look at the things that you use every day and think about what you can produce yourself. Look at those things and think about how you could repair the items you use now if they were to break. Do you need any special spare parts or tools? If so, order them now because people are waiting months for certain automotive and computer parts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg if we continue on our current path.

    Not only can producing directly help your family, but it can also put you in a position to barter with others who may be able to produce things you cannot.

    Focus on your small circle.

    It’s easy to be focused on the major events in the news, like the election, the pandemic, what’s happening in the UK, the vaccine, or episodes of civil unrest. I believe it’s extremely important for preppers to keep up with current events. Those of us who suspected early on that there was going to be a lockdown were able to get our supplies well before the rest of the public realized that bad things were headed our way and stripped the shelves bare. But when there’s such a barrage of bad news coming at you constantly it can be easy to lose your way and get lost in the big picture.

    While we want to know what’s going on in the world, we also need to recognize the things we can act upon and control and the things we can’t. We need, as Selco advises so often, to focus on our small circles as things become more difficult. We can teach our family members skills, we can prepare a garden, we can increase the security of our homes, and we can tighten our bonds with our communities, but we can’t necessarily change government mandates or makeover the economy.

    When things feel too big to handle, go small and you will always find some action that you can take.

    Look for happiness.

    This may sound out of place, especially right now when times seem so very dark. But there is always light. There’s always a flower, a snowflake, the laugh of a child, the voice of the person you love, or the dog curled up at your feet. There’s a book you haven’t yet gotten to read or an old favorite you can enjoy again.

    Some days it may be harder to find those moments of happiness than others and that’s perfectly normal in times like these. This is a season of introspection and of deciding what – and who – really matters in our lives.

    Many writers this year, myself included, have written that things will never be the same as they were before the Covid pandemic was used to limit our worlds. I know that my life changed dramatically and did not go in the direction I had planned. I know the same is true for family members and people I love.  It’s enough to make you feel like we have nothing ahead but despair. It’s a fact that mental health issues have been on the uptick as the lockdowns keep us isolated from friends, family, and humanity in general.

    But there is always a glimmer of hope and no matter what, I sincerely believe that the human spirit will prevail. We will always find reasons to laugh (hey, dark humor is still humor, we will find people we love and care for if we are willing to be open to that, and we can always find beauty in the mundane if we know how to seek it.

    Despite the distance this year has put between many of us and the people we love, at least the internet, for all its flaws, helps us to keep in touch and stay just a little bit closer to them. In fact, a neighbor here told me that her family did a Zoom for Christmas and because it was all online, even though they could not be together in person, they got to see cousins and relatives from far away that they hadn’t seen in many years. I believe there’s some grace to be found in that.

    So make one of your goals to seek happiness anywhere you can find it. Because your spirit matters just as much as your physical preparations do. Being with the ones you care for is important, no matter how you do it. Finding a reason to smile will always make any situation more tolerable.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 22:05

  • Military Recruiters Worry America's Youth Are Too Fat Or Dumb To Enter Service
    Military Recruiters Worry America’s Youth Are Too Fat Or Dumb To Enter Service

    A recent report in military news site Task & Purpose highlights that military recruitment could soon slump nationwide in large part because America’s youth are too fat or in other cases too dumb to fight.

    Going back a number of years this has been an increasing concern expressed by a growing chorus of both active and retired military leaders. It was also weeks ago expressed in a Dec.17 letter to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller signed by almost 800 retired admirals and generals

    They warn that over 70% of young Americans between 17 and 24 can’t make into military ranks because they are “too poorly educated, too overweight, or have a history of crime or substance abuse.”

    “Full Metal Jacket” jelly doughnut scene

    The bipartisan group that penned the letter is urging the Pentagon to create a strategy to address the growing crisis. “Without coordinated action, these trends pose a significant threat to the future of the all-volunteer force,” the letter said.

    Identifying some of the same trends, Navy Recruiting Command chief Rear Adm. Dennis Velez recently separately told Military.com that making making sure “our children are healthier” is urgently needed to divert a national crisis.

    Certain fitness and weight standards are required to even attempt to enter the armed services, with requirements determined by the particular branch – with the Marine Corps maintaining the strictest entry requirements. 

    Further the head of the Marine Corps recruiting was also quoted as follows:

    Maj. Gen. Jason Bohm, the head of Marine Corps Recruiting Service, said far fewer than 30% of young people are eligible to serve in that branch.

    “If you break it down further into those skill sets, intelligence level, and the physical ability level, those that we’re looking toward bringing into the Marine Corps… quickly decreases to about 7%,” he said.

    “That’s enormously challenging.”

    For years the bipartisan group “Mission: Readiness” has highlighted the lack of health among America’s youth, potentially impacting national security on a long-term basis:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    For the foreseeable future the trend is likely to continue, given how the pandemic related lockdowns and social distancing orders for much of the past year have often resulted in canceled youth sports leagues, a reduction in social outdoor activities, and people generally being shut in their homes for longer periods. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 21:40

  • "Baseless Conspiracy Theories" And Our Knowledge Crisis
    “Baseless Conspiracy Theories” And Our Knowledge Crisis

    Authored by Adam Ellwanger via HumanEvents.com,

    The news that the FBI is investigating Hunter Biden on suspicion of money laundering and foreign influence peddling should come as no surprise, given that the New York Post broke the story over two months ago. Of course, when that publication released the incriminating evidence that was saved to a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the story was immediately censored on social media. Of the few major media outlets that were willing to acknowledge the existence of the story, virtually all of them did so only to emphasize that the reporting was “baseless” nonsense.

    When pressed on the matter by President Trump in a debate, Joe Biden boasted that five former heads of the CIA said that the story was “a bunch of garbage.” A couple of days earlier, dozens of former intelligence officials had signed a statement that asserted the news had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” the statement read, “just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

    Bush administration speechwriter and Atlantic editor David Frum claimed on Twitter that “The story could not have been more obviously fake if it had been wearing dollar-store spectacles and attached plastic mustache.” Weeks after the FBI investigation of Hunter Biden was confirmed, Wikipedia still labels their entry on the matter as a “conspiracy theory.” Thus, in spite of emails, photographs, and video-recorded evidence to the contrary, any claim that the Bidens did anything improper (let alone “wrong” or “illegal”) was deemed “baseless.” 

    And yet here we are, with outlets like Politico and the New York Times reacting to the “newly” confirmed evidence of an investigation as though they had just caught wind of the story. Given their craven, politically-motivated annihilation of the story back in October, one wonders: what other “baseless” claims that pose a threat to the left’s agenda might the media be lying about? The only thing that met with more journalistic skepticism than the Hunter Biden story were the claims that significant ballot fraud marred the presidential election.

    Since November, the most obnoxious interlocutors I have encountered are the ones who claim to be devotees of “evidence-based reasoning” and rational thought—even while they sanctimoniously insist that you concede that “there is no evidence of fraud in this election.” As with Biden’s corruption, no rational person could claim that there is no evidence. First, there has never been a modern American election where there was no fraud, so the question isn’t really whether or not there was fraud, but how much fraud occurred. Secondly, in the case of this election, we have already documented more fraud than has been exposed in any other American presidential election.

    The “evidence-based reasoners” are right about one thing though: there is not yet definitive evidence that Trump actually won the election. But there is enormous evidence that fraudulent means were undertaken to ensure that he did not. Those claiming that allegations of fraud are “baseless” insist that there is no “compelling evidence” of these claims. Of course, “compelling” is a fairly subjective term: we can reasonably disagree what evidence is compelling. Although the word “evidence” might seem more concrete, even the definition of that term now seems up for grabs. This new instability is a troubling indicator of a knowledge crisis that threatens our democracy: in light of the constantly shifting standards for the verification of claims, we can no longer agree on the basic facts of our shared reality. Until we find that agreement, the prospects for any productive democratic deliberation are nil, let alone the prospects for “healing.”

    A MOUNTAIN WITHOUT A “BASE”: CONSIDERING THE EVIDENCE

    Most people understand intuitively that there are different forms of evidence. There is statistical evidenceanecdotal evidencehistorical evidencecircumstantial evidencedefinitive evidence, and more. Further, there is an overlap between these kinds of evidence. Statistical evidence, for example, can be combined with historical evidence: when a statistical anomaly is detected, that anomaly is that much more compelling if it is anomalous in comparison to other sets of data, both contemporary and from the past.

    Rational observers must acknowledge that each of these different forms of evidence vary in terms of how reliable and definitive they are in establishing a truth. Circumstantial evidence alone cannot serve as a sufficient indicator of truth: coincidences happen, and statistically improbable outcomes do, in fact, occur (somebody is winning those Powerball jackpots). But when it accompanies other forms of evidence, circumstantial evidence makes a contested claim more plausible. For example, if eye-witness testimony of ballot manipulation coincides with a historically-anomalous number of mail-in ballots with no selections in down-ballot races (a common indicator of fraud), then charges of misconduct become stronger due to this confluence of circumstantial, historical, and statistical pieces of evidence. 

    Each individual piece of evidence cannot be understood independently from the larger body of evidence: indicators that might be insignificant on their own might nevertheless contribute to a compelling portrait of evidence in aggregate. The irrational rush to entirely dismiss the possibility of any election fraud is enabled by an adamantine unwillingness to see the forest among so many trees. No recent American presidential election has come anywhere close to the number of process and tallying anomalies that have been reported in 2020. This discrepancy itself serves as an anecdotal indicator that justifies suspicion toward the results. With that in mind, it is worth reconsidering the claims of fraud in this election. 

    We have seen security footage of poll watchers being asked to leave in Georgia, after which the remaining officials pull containers of ballots out from under a table and begin counting after others were told counting would stop for the night. Another video shows a surreptitious hand-off of what looks to be a flash drive among poll workers.  No one can claim that this is not an unusual circumstance to occur in a battleground state late in the night of a presidential election. In most criminal cases, video recordings are generally considered a highly compelling form of evidence.

    Yet now, the media and Biden supporters tell us the videos are “missing context” and prove “nothing.” To an extent, that is correct: those ballots could be legal and there are rational, possible explanations for the actions captured on video. But no one has offered such an explanation that they can substantiate. Instead, the burden of evidence seems to be placed on only one side of the dispute. 

    If the video isn’t proof of procedural violations or fraud, then, what evidence would be required to prove that claim? It seems those who claim the allegations are “baseless” would require video footage that not only catches these poll workers in the act, but that would also show them verbally describing their actions and their malicious intent. Or, perhaps it would convince the skeptics if using the video we could definitively ascertain exactly which ballots were in those boxes, examine them, and prove that they were cast by ineligible voters or that they were inadmissible on other grounds. The problem is that these forms of “compelling” evidence are entirely implausible in themselves. 

    Typically, people don’t record themselves talking about committing a felony as they commit the crime. As for identifying which were the ballots in question, the progressive erosion of any safeguards or record-keeping on the chain of custody in the process of manual vote-counting ensures that any viable reconstruction of how the final tally was reached is impossible. Without required secrecy envelopes for ballots, with signatures not required or ignored, with mailed ballots allowed to be counted when arriving after the day of the election, with observers removed from the process, and with no other way to determine the chain of custody for mail-in ballots, the very means of producing “compelling evidence” of fraud have been systematically annihilated by the procedural changes for elections across the country.

    These changes have been accumulating for a decade or more, but the pandemic was used to justify a flood of sweeping changes in the months before the election—modifications that “conventional wisdom” says plainly advantage Democratic candidates in battleground states, as late-arriving mail-in ballots tend to skew toward Democratic candidates.

    Given that the “compelling evidence” that would convince those who insist these fraud allegations are “baseless” is basically impossible to produce, we are left with circumstantial indicators of the crime. Beyond Georgia, there is a mountain of other forms of evidence from multiple battleground states—anomalous statistical evidence, comparative historical evidence, evidence in sworn testimony from witnesses to the fraud, and anecdotal evidence. Many of these pieces of evidence are compelling on their own, and yet, even taken cumulatively, we are told the claims that there was any malfeasance in the election is a “baseless conspiracy theory.”

    These are the contours of what has become a knowledge crisis in American discourse. The elites of our society pretend that President Trump’s “lies” have undermined public trust in the media, and they claim that our radical incredulity is a threat to democracy. This is more gaslighting. The media itself has created this crisis. What counts as knowledge, news, evidence, and proof are now totally dependent on the usefulness of reality in advancing the objectives of the cultural left. When a certain fact is useless for that project, its status as fact is either denied, mocked, or ignored.

    NEWS REPORTING AND THE CULTIVATION OF UNCERTAINTY

    Traditionally, journalism has been motivated by a burning curiosity among the reporters who pursue the news. Today, they demonize the curiosity of those with whom they disagree in order to avoid the difficult task of explaining how the accusations are “baseless” in spite of so many indicators of fraud. Thus, unverified opposition research in the form of the Steele dossier can circulate on the news as if it is unquestionably true and serve as sufficient evidence to open an FBI investigation, but physical evidence of Biden family corruption is immediately (without any further investigation) dismissed as so plainly fraudulent that news related to the topic will not even be allowed to circulate

    We are told to “trust the science” on the effectiveness of wearing masks, even as cultural elites systematically ignore biological realities when it comes to activist claims regarding transgenderism. Catastrophic, anthropogenic climate change is enshrined as “settled science,” even as the abortion lobby continues to deny the life of a fetus with a heartbeat, reducing it to a “clump of cells.” When it comes to the climate, scientific reality is supposed to be the primary determinant of public policy; in regard to abortion, scientific reality is reduced to merely one more “perspective” which makes no particular demand on policy-making.

    Fantastical accusations that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist justified a thousand columns and a circus masquerading as a confirmation process. Meanwhile, much better-corroborated allegations that Joe Biden digitally penetrated a woman against her will are studiously ignored or attacked. In the former case (where the accusations decreased the prospects of a conservative appointment to the bench), the mere existence of an accusation was proof of misconduct. In the latter (where the accusations might stymie the prospects of a Democratic presidential candidate), the accusations were found to be lacking the requisite evidence for serious consideration.

    Journalists lectured the nation about the vulnerability of the American voting system to interference in 2016, only to insist, four years later, that any assertions related to domestic election interference are patently ridiculous. (All this, to say nothing of the fact that the media’s unending effort to manufacture and influence public opinion is a form of domestic election interference in itself.) And yet the field of journalism continues to celebrate itself for being uncompromising defenders of truth.

    These manipulations have cost the country enormously. The very institution that Americans have historically relied on to seek and convey the facts about political life has become a non-stop psy-op aimed at advancing a particular ideology. And, when that objective requires distortion or ignorance of reality, most journalists are perfectly happy to comply.

    Ultimately, people no longer know what to believe, which means that they also don’t know what not to believe. Only when our shared notion of reality is in radical flux could theories as ludicrous as Pizzagate and QAnon take hold. And while the cultural left maintains that these sorts of conspiracies are a threat to their interests, the truth is the opposite. The left benefits from this sort of fantastical reasoning; it provides support for their refrain that their opponents are cognitively damaged. Further, it undermines any conservative claims to truth that oppose the left’s account of reality: hyping the most outlandish theories on the right justifies the mocking dismissal of even well-supported, plausible assertions. 

    The media’s efforts to curate the information available to the public would be easy to circumvent, if those efforts were undertaken by the media alone. But the mass media is only one branch of a much more expansive coalition of powerful actors working to implement a reimagining of public life in the western world. This project is advanced through a coordinated effort by the elite segment of our societies—people in the media, the technology industry, academia, public education, government, Hollywood and the culture industry, and corporate boardrooms.

    In short, the public’s confusion regarding what is true is the product of a purposeful effort by the great institutional powers of our society. When uncertainty, skepticism, and disbelief reign, there are fewer “true believers.” The resolute commitment of true believers to a cause is a prerequisite for any successful revolution. Thus, the pervasive uncertainty of many Americans works to diminish the prospects for organized, grassroots resistance to the elite consolidation of power in this nation.

    THE FALSE EQUIVALENCE OF EVIDENCE, PROOF, AND TRUTH

    In the media’s gaslighting about the (il)legitimacy of Election 2020, we can discern one of their most inventive ploys for cultivating this knowledge crisis: the false conflation of evidence, proof, and truth. These are three discrete concepts, but they are increasingly treated as one by the major media outlets. For example, there can be substantial evidence for a claim that is nevertheless unproven; then, there exist truths for which there is neither evidence nor proof. Even more torturous is the fact that there are some things that are proven (with evidence), that are nevertheless false. But the left recognizes none of these distinctions. They falsely maintain that there is “no evidence” for claims of election fraud, when what they mean is that there is no proof that fraud produced a false outcome.

    Needless to say, the erroneous conflation of these concepts is used to undermine claims of truth that are undesirable for the left’s agenda. Their conflation is also used to advance “proofs” for claims that the left would like to be true, despite the fact that they actually only have circumstantial evidence. 

    Consider how Russian Collusion circulated for years as a “proven” truth, even though there existed only the barest, biased indications of its possibility.


    Consider how one woman’s uncorroborated assertion that she was pinned to a bed 30 years ago by a future Supreme Court nominee—on a date and in a place that she could not recall—was sufficient to upend the entire Constitutionally-mandated process for confirming a justice to the highest court. Similar examples of this rhetorical misdirection by the left are legion.

    Our knowledge crisis is a deliberately manufactured means to undermine public confidence in a shared sense of what is real, as a means to minimize the prospect of organized opposition to the new order that our elites are working to install. This crisis demands that each of us rely on our own perceptions—perhaps more than we ever have. 

    Doing so takes courage, especially given that saying what you saw (when it undermines the Narrative), ensures you are denigrated as a sub-rational lunatic who traffics in “baseless conspiracy theories.” Let the talking heads talk. But the concerns about the legitimacy of this election are anything but baseless. Evidence abounds. They are counting that our cowardice and shame will be sufficient to make us deny those facts. If we will not testify to that evidence openly, then it might as well not exist. We cannot be cowards and we can’t be ashamed. Speak—and speak in the knowledge that the only baseless claim is the one that says it is “baseless” to assert the truth that this election can never be construed as free and fair.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 21:15

  • Cuomo Creates New COVID Vaccination Obstacles To Help Fight Racism
    Cuomo Creates New COVID Vaccination Obstacles To Help Fight Racism

    Gov Andrew Cuomo’s push to make New York’s vaccination effort truly stand out is at risk of backfiring spectacularly, as new rules imposed by the governor create risks that are already slowing down the process.

    The governor is issuing an executive order making it a crime for health-care providers to “intentionally disregard prioritization” while also making “eligibility certification by recipients a mandatory part of the vaccination process.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Here’s more from the governor in his own words.

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    Should a clinic administer the vaccine to somebody before their turn, they could face a fine of up to $1MM.

    The reasoning behind the executive order appears to be preventing a “black market” for vaccines, or otherwise tying the system to wealth

    Instead, Cuomo is creating another obstacle to swift distribution of vaccines, which could risk more of them possibly spoiling. He has also prioritized addicts in state rehabs for vaccination.

    At this point, distributing vaccines to people out of turn hasn’t emerged as a problem. Instead, 3 weeks into the most ambitious vaccination campaign in modern US history, far fewer people than expected are being immunized against the virus as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states. Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech that have been shipped, fewer than 3MM have been administered, per data from the CDC. As of Sunday, the state of NY has doled out roughly 1/3rd of the nearly 775K doses that have been distributed.

    While reporting delays have been blamed, other issues have emerged, like news of several shipments of vaccine doses spoiling on its way to hospitals in Texas.

    The Orwellian nature of Cuomo’s reign just went to ’11’ on the Spinal Tap amplifier of conspiracy-theory-turned-fact as SaraACarter’s Ben Wilson reports that a proposed bill in the state of New York would allow for the “removal and detention” of people who are carriers or come into contact with any virus that, in the opinion of the Governor, “may pose an imminent and significant threat.” The Governor can detain people based on merely a “reasonably specific description.”

    Bill A416 gives the governor the right to – after determining in his/her opinion that the virus is a threat – ”order the removal and/or the detention of such a person or group of such persons by issuing a single order.”

    A clear issue with the legislation is that it allows for the detention of anyone since one would not have to be sick but merely deemed to have been in contact with someone who contracted said virus – all, of course, is determined by the governor and his/her opinion.

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    “Upon determining by clear and convincing evidence that the health of others is or may be endangered by a case, contact or carrier, or suspected case, contact or carrier of a contagious disease that, in the opinion of the governor, after consultation with the commissioner, may pose an imminent and significant threat to the public health resulting in severe morbidity or high mortality, the governor or his or her dele-gee, including, but not limited to the commissioner or the heads of local health departments, may order the removal and/or detention of such a person or of a group of such persons,” reads the bill.

    To take it even further, the bill allows for detention of people based on a “description,” meaning a specification by name is not necessary for Governor Cuomo to send his people in and swoop up any poor soul who was within a distance of any virus.

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    “Identifying such persons either by name or by a reasonably specific description of the individuals or group being detained. such person or group of persons shall be detained in a medical facility or other appropriate facility or premises designated by the governor,” the bill says.

    Whether the state of New York will grant Governor Cuomo and his future successors the right to arbitrarily kidnap anyone that potentially came into contact with a virus will be seen in the coming months.

    But what else should we expect from a governor who sent thousands of COVID-19 positive patients back to long-term care homes, directly contributing to his state’s massive death toll?

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 20:50

  • Trump Sues Georgia Secretary Of State Raffensperger Over Leaked Phone Call
    Trump Sues Georgia Secretary Of State Raffensperger Over Leaked Phone Call

    President Trump has filed two lawsuits against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over a leaked phone call obtained and published by the Washington Post on Sunday, in which Trump badgered the Georgia official over election fraud.

    “President @realDonaldTrump has filed two lawsuits – federal and state – against @GaSecofState,” tweeted Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer.

    At one point in the call, which took place just days before the state’s January 5 Senate runoffs, Trump reportedly tells Raffensperger “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” referring to Biden’s win by 11,779 votes.

    We’re guessing, but who knows, Trump was suggesting that in a state plagued with widespread accusations of voter fraud, including claims that batches of 100% Biden ballots were processed while Trump ballots were tossed or destroyed, that Raffensperger could simply ‘find’ enough uncounted Trump ballots to overcome the fraud.

    Shafer then accused the Post of misrepresenting the phone call by “heavily editing” it to omit a portion where it was allegedly made clear the discussion was for the purposes of settling litigation, and therefore confidential under federal and state law, to which The Post‘s Amy Gardner replied, “This is false. We published the entirety of the call, from start to finish.”

    On Sunday morning, Trump confirmed that he and Raffensperger had spoken, tweeting “He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the “ballots under table” scam, ballot destruction, out of state “voters”, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

    Raffensperger responded, tweeting “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.”

    More via Fox5 Atlanta:

    In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Raffensperger confirmed that the phone call took place on Saturday, and added that he told the president that he would have to turn to other states to find enough voter irregularities to overturn the 2020 presidential race, because there was not enough in the state of Georgia to do so.

    Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller, on Sunday, tweeted that the “full recording will show that @GaSecofState is still a hack, @realDonaldTrump is spot-on in his criticisms of the terrible job Raffensperger did, all of the officials running Georgia’s elections are trash, and @POTUS  won the state. #MAGA” 

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 20:25

  • Republicans, Democrats, & A New 3rd Party
    Republicans, Democrats, & A New 3rd Party

    Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

    The Republican Party will not “split” apart like the Democrats…

    The Democratic split is different. That is a party of highly diverse beliefs. You have the middle-of-the-road Democrats who want Pelosi gone. She represents to them the radical California contingent – as the call it. There are members in the Democratic Party who would toast if California split and say good riddance. There is the Communist contingent intermixed with the Socialists hiding within the Democrats. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which is a socialist and labor-oriented party with a diverse range of ideas but it is the Socialist Party of America (SPA) renamed and incorporated in the Democrats much like the Tea Party was inside the Republicans. Then you have various ethnic groups, women’s groups, and the LGBT or GLBT which stands for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender groups. All of these groups share only a common bond of hating Republicans. Beyond that, they disagree on just about everything else from the environment to taxation.

    In the case of the Republicans, there are really the elements of the Tea Party which are anti-corruption/establishment and the core of the GOP being the traditional country-club establishment. There are not so many diverse groups as there are in the Democrats. We are not looking at the Republicans “splitting” as is the case in the Democrats.

    What the Republicans fail to recognize is that Trump has even beaten Obama as the most admired president in the Gallup Polls. He expanded the party and they got the largest share of black and Hispanic votes in history.

    Trump did more for the middle class and the working man than any other president. He expanded the economy and black unemployment reached its lowest in history.

    “Trumpism”, if you want to call it that, did not begin with Trump. It really began with the Tea Party most recently which forced Speaker John Boehner out because he could not deliver the Republican vote. This “Trumpism” will not end with being driven out of office.

    This has been a major coup but by the Democrats, Republicans, and the Deep State. They all wanted a non-politician out.

    I wrote back in 2017: “There is a very REAL plot to overthrow Trump led by the political establishment and aided by the mainstream press.” All I heard from my sources was that they thought Trump won because the media focused on him ignoring all other Republicans in an attempt to pave the way for Hillary. They never expected Trump to win and that set in motion the media hatred of Trump for they believe he was their mistake – CNN especially. Right now, not even Fox News supports Trump. They too are making a very serious mistake. Go back to 2017 and you will find Lindsey Graham smashing his phone and disliked Trump immensely. Then he started to warm up to Trump.

    This “Trumpism” is not entirely confined to the Republican Party. It offers something of tremendous value to the growing level of discontent that the Democrats and world leaders look down on as “populism”. The lesson Republicans have failed to grasp is that the people did not vote for Trump because he is such a tremendous guy. They voted for Trump in 2016 because they hated everyone else in Washington. Both the Democrats and Republicans are fools. They think getting rid of Trump will get everything back to normal – I won’t tell on you and you don’t tell on me, and we all get rich!

    But Trump had tremendous support outside the USA for the very same reason. They saw him as standing against their own corrupt governments. It is an anti-establishment sentiment and Trump just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

    The political class, worldwide, saw Trump as a threat and recognized that “populism” was growing and how to stop it was debated at the World Economic Forum with the result to end voting because the people are too stupid.

    The overthrow of Trump will only solidify that “Trumpism” which is growing within the nation and the world. The appeal of socialism always presented by Democrats, liberals, progressives, is far less than the view that Washington is just too corrupt. The Gallup Poll of 2 years ago had Congress still above car salesmen. In the new December 17, 2020 poll, Congress is now officially the worst career in ethics and trustworthiness.


     

    They defeated Trump with corruption, but they confirmed they are the worst people on the planet. I reported back in 2019 that 35% of Americans believe the government is the problem according to a Gallup Poll. What they have done to Trump and as soon as the people realize that what the Democrats will do is nothing that they promised, this number will test the 50% level.

    One of the reasons the conservative Democrats want Pelosi gone is they view that she had disgraced the nation when she tore up Trump’s State of the Union speech. Even the Gallup Poll shows that the respect for those in the House is the lowest. Senators are more respected than a Congressman…

    The Democrats succeeded in getting votes not for a policy, but by getting people to hate Trump as a person. It may have been a brilliant strategy, but they did not attack the reason people voted for Trump from the start. Trumpism is a philosophy that is not really nationalism, but America first. It is something more like a group that sees themselves as disenfranchised for they are not the influential rich bankers nor the left-wing socialists who expect the government to take care of them like Santa Claus. They are the silent majority that politicians have lied to and look down upon for a very long time.

    Trumpism is not really new. It has been a growing philosophy of distrust and discontent which over the course of years has manifested a bipartisan populist undercurrent that stretches back through Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, and even Andrew Jackson – the people against the establishment. The London FT did a piece on “populism” and how all the politicians were frightened that they could be thrown out after Trump won in 2016.

    As the FT said, populism “horrified” the global political elite because they feared losing power! They hate democracy for why should these uneducated stupid people be able to vote them out of office – God forbid!

    John Kerry has come out against “populism” which is Trumpism. Kerry is 100% on board with DAVOS and Agenda 2030.

    “Normal was a crisis; normal wasn’t working,” said former US secretary of state John Kerry in his opening remarks.

    “We must not think of it in terms of pushing a button and going back to the way things were. We’re a long way off from being able to go back to any kind of normal.”

    The responsibility will lie with governments, the “great convener”, Kerry said.

    “Forces and pressures that were pushing us into crisis over the social contract are now exacerbated,” he said. “The world is coming apart, dangerously, in terms of global institutions and leadership.”

    What we never did was adequately address the social contract, the franchisement of human beings around the world, to be able to participate in things they can see with their smartphones everywhere but can’t participate in.”

    Explaining that the United States of America is currently “gridlocked”, Kerry said: “This is a big moment. The World Economic Forum – the CEO capacity of the Forum – is really going to have to play a front and centre role in refining the Great Reset to deal with climate change and inequity – all of which is being laid bare as a consequence of COVID-19.”

    (fwd to 0:30):

    They think they defeated Trump, and they will steer the Great Unwashed morons (us) to the promised land where they eliminate the right to vote so never again do they have to risk their careers with a non-politician in charge.

    There are rumblings that among this despised group of populists who were stupid enough to vote for Trump, are the overwhelming truckers who the Democrats hate because they contribute to Global Warming driving their trucks around instead of delivering things on bicycles or by horse and buggy. The truckers are very pissed off on all levels and they deeply resent Washington and the endless corruption. The talk is that they are considering a strike for a month or so which will bring all food deliveries to a halt and most other things right down to new cars. The image of truckers among the Democrats is dirty, disgusting, uneducated, racist good old boys.

    A Biden victory may end up as a Pyrrhic Victory. They may stall his Agenda 2030 being put in place by John Kerry probably to his own dismay. Their idea of ending fossil fuels and meat production is just off the wall. The radical left sees it as their object to force the rest of society to comply with their demands. This is so against the idea of a free democratic society it will only provoke internal war.

    They are already surrounding Biden with people are for the swamp as usual. And as for the claims that Trump pardon criminals, let us put that record straight. Those people were prosecuted ONLY because they supported Trump. McCain, Hillary, and Biden all took money from foreign governments, and never is anyone prosecuted. They were all political prosecutions under selective prosecution which is part of the entire corruption game.

    The Republican Party will not “split” apart like the Democrats. The factions are just black and white as opposed to the multicolored Democrats of many factions. But the populist element which once supported the Republicans will move to a new 3rd Party. In this, we will see even conservative Democrats join its ranks. What both parties forget is that “populism” is We the People – not the aristocratic political class.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 20:00

  • "The White House" – Homeless Woman Shows Off Skid Row Mansion 
    “The White House” – Homeless Woman Shows Off Skid Row Mansion 

    Homelessness is a humanitarian crisis in liberal-run Los Angeles, with more than 40,000 people living on the streets. Sections of the metro area have been transformed into a third world country, with dangerous open-air drug areas, streets littered with human feces, diseases, and homeless encampments.

    For years readers have read our frequent reporting about the horrible conditions of those living on Skid Row, a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles, known for an abundance of homeless encampments. 

    However, YouTube user, NoPauseTv, stumbled upon a tent called the “White House” that houses a homeless lady who is living the high life.

    The man holding the camera tours the luxurious tent, saying this “looks better than half of my homies houses.” 

    The White House is equipped with hardwood floors, a generator, a solar panel, toilet, microwave, other appliances, a walk-in closet, and a jacuzzi. 

    The homeless woman said she worked in the fashion industry, alleging that at one point, she was designing shoes for Stacy Adams Shoe Company. 

    There was no mention of how the lady ended up on the streets in one of the most luxurious tents on Skid Row. But this outlines the wealth inequality crisis that has exploded since the virus pandemic as the middle class collapses even further into financial devastation. 

    Due to the surge of homelessness in Los Angeles, the city government decided to build “tiny home” shelters. 

    So how soon will it be when Americans quit their jobs, hope for more helicopter money from the government, and move into luxurious tents and tiny homes? 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 19:30

  • Rethinking 2020: What's Overlooked And What's Overhyped
    Rethinking 2020: What’s Overlooked And What’s Overhyped

    Authored by Damien Ma and Houze Song via MacroPolo.org,

    In this exceptional year, much of our collective attention span was spent on the pandemic, the US election, geopolitical tensions, and social media paroxysms. When it came to US-China in particular, there simply wasn’t enough “China” as the bilateral dynamic was regularly filtered through the prism of the pandemic and the US election.

    Focusing on the daily rigamarole obscured subtler, and ultimately more consequential, developments. Stepping back at the end of 2020, we want to highlight two overlooked and two overhyped trends that, in our judgment, will matter greatly to China’s political economy and for how it adjusts to a dramatically changed external environment.

    Overlooked

    1. Closing the Curtain on the GDP Obsession Era

    Provinces Consecutively Not Meeting GDP Target Have Skyrocketed

    Note: Shows provinces that have failed to meet growth target for consecutive years.
    Source: Wind and MacroPolo.

    The signs have been there, but it wasn’t until 2020 that the writing clearly appeared on the wall: GDP growth will no longer hold sway over China’s development.

    The number of provinces that have repeatedly failed to meet national growth targets has already surged, with no apparent political consequences. Xi Jinping had also signaled in April 2020 that Beijing is willing to accept regional growth divergences. That likely foreshadowed what was to come in the 14th Five-Year Plan in November 2020, which was accompanied by Xi’s unprecedented explanation of why it didn’t include a specific growth target.

    Although some observers have noted this shift on GDP, its significance may be underappreciated. It is tantamount to simultaneously reshaping political incentives, changing the investment-driven model, and redirecting focus toward de-risking and reforming the economy. In short, the Xi administration has been unexpectedly tolerant of austerity—a precondition for ramming through very difficult structural reforms that are essentially growth negative in the near term.

    2. Decoupling Is Everywhere Except in Reality

    If a single word were chosen to define US-China in 2020, “decoupling” would be a good candidate. Bandied about with abandon, the term has created the perception that these highly complex supplier networks were being severed in real time. What has been overlooked is just how little meaningful decoupling actually happened.

    A Fraction of Foreign Businesses Planning to Leave China

    Note: The 96% result for Japanese companies include those that plan to diversify, adopt risk mitigation plans, or simply aren’t sure. The 4% are those specifically stating they plan to leave China. All are drawn from 2020 corporate surveys.
    Source: US-China Business Council; European Chamber of Commerce; and Tokyo Shoko Research.

    Foreign businesses are just one gauge of decoupling, but they are particularly important leading indicators of shifts in supply chain ecosystems. In 2020, the respective portions of US (87%) and European (89%) businesses indicating no intention to leave China are as high or even higher than they’ve been in recent years. And despite the Japanese government creating a fund to help re-shore its manufacturers, only 4% of Japanese businesses said they’re definitively leaving China.

    Pandemic disruptions certainly weighed heavily on firms’ decisions, likely delaying drastic changes or planned investment. It is also true that many companies want to diversify beyond China—some already have—to hedge against risk. Nonetheless, what has actually happened on the decoupling front appears disproportionately modest relative to the attention heaped on it. 

    Overhyped 

    1. China Slams Door on The World

    Whether it is “Made in China 2025” or “social credit,” any official neologism emanating from Beijing now gets spotlighted, scrutinized, and sometimes hyped. The latest offering of “dual circulation” is no exception, with many interpreting it as China’s pivot toward withdrawal from the world.

    Foreign Holdings of Chinese Financial Assets Have Risen Significantly ($ billion)

    Source: Wind.

    Yet when it comes to capital markets, China has gone in precisely the opposite direction, further linking itself to global capital. Although market openings began around 2018 and capital inflows rose steadily since, it wasn’t until 2020 that foreign capital inflows saw a notable spike. Moreover, the inking of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade deal and the potential conclusion of an EU-China investment treaty hardly suggest a Beijing that is closing its doors on the world.

    To be sure, technology is an area in which China does want to reduce dependence on imports. But even there it would be unrealistic to assume that China will achieve anything close to total indigenization.   

    2. BRI Is Down but Not Out

    China’s overseas lending plummeted in 2019, leading some to prognosticate the death knell of the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). Yet China’s overseas lending has risen in 2020, though it has not returned to the heights seen in 2017 and 2018.

    Chinese Overseas Lending Has Been Rebounding ($ billion)

    Source: Wind.

    This makes sense as fierce internal debate and external pressure likely pushed Beijing to make necessary adjustments and curtail some of its ambitions for the BRI project. But gone it is not, since Beijing rarely throws out the baby with the bathwater, particularly for a signature initiative that has Xi’s imprimatur.

    The 2019 lending collapse can be partly explained by the political upheaval at the China Development Bank (CDB), a major financier of BRI projects, when its former president was arrested on corruption charges. As a result, the CDB’s total assets only increased by 2% in 2019. But the policy bank is actively lending again, having recently committed more than $80 billion to projects under RCEP, some of which can surely be rebranded as BRI projects.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 19:00

  • Baltimore Cop Slammed Man On Crutches Into Pavement For Improperly Wearing Mask
    Baltimore Cop Slammed Man On Crutches Into Pavement For Improperly Wearing Mask

    The Covid ‘rules enforcement’ craziness continues, and as things like mask wearing becomes the new norm with no end in sight, now entering a year out from when the pandemic began to hit Western countries, such incidents are like only to grow.

    The latest in the US comes out of Baltimore, where a police officer has been indicted for assault on a man inside a grocery store who was merely wearing his mask “improperly” according to local media reports.

    What’s more is the man was on crutches. Baltimore detective Andre Maurice Pringle has been indicted by a grand jury for second degree (misdemeanor) assault and misconduct after last April he shoved 25-year old Brandon Walker to the ground

    Walker is said to have entered the grocery store with a face mask on top of his head, instead of covering his mouth and notes. 

    When Officer Pringle was called by store management to intervene, things escalated. Here’s how prosecutors described the ordeal which led to Walker’s head getting slammed to the ground:

    Walker, who was using a crutch and had a cast on his right foot, refused to pull the mask down over his mouth and nose, according to the release and indictment. A store manager called Pringle, who was working in the store, for assistance.

    “Officer Pringle, who was in full BPD uniform at the time, approached Walker and advised him that he had to leave the store,” prosecutors said. “The two began walking towards the exit. Walker was yelling and cursing at Officer Pringle as they continued towards the automated entry/exit doors.”

    Once in the vestibule, Walker stopped and “glared” at Pringle, prosecutors said. The officer allegedly grabbed Walker by his jacket, shoved him outside, and then slammed him to the ground face-first causing Walker to hit his head on the pavement.

    There doesn’t appear to have been video released in connection with the officer’s assault on the store patron, but it was still egregious enough to convene a grand jury over. Of course, there’s likely dozens or hundreds of similar such instances of harsh and out of control ‘Covid-enforcers’ which will never see a courtroom, much less public attention. 

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    “The contact which started with the shove and continued through the arrest resulted in intentional, harmful, offensive, and unwanted touching by Officer Pringle,” a prosecutor’s press release statement said. “The physical assaults were not accidental, consented to, nor legally justified.”

    The officer has been suspended with pay and if convicted on the assault charge could face a maximum penalty of up to ten years in prison.

    Meanwhile, in Canada…

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    Amazingly the victim who got his head smashed into the pavement for simply not wearing a mask properly was initially charged with trespassing and resisting arrest; however, those charges have since been dropped. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 18:30

  • Ethereum Tops $1000, Outpacing Bitcoin As Crypto 'Crosses The Chasm'
    Ethereum Tops $1000, Outpacing Bitcoin As Crypto ‘Crosses The Chasm’

    Update (1800): Less than 8 hours after breaking above $800, and just an hour after surging beyond $900, Ethereum has broken back above the $1000 mark for the first time since Feb 2018 ($1001 was the day’s high so far).

    Source: Bloomberg

    After breaking $600 for the first time since May 2018 in November 2020, it broke $700 for the first time since that same month in 2018 on Dec. 27, 2020, and has now notched $800, $900, & $1,000 in the same morning.

    Source: Bloomberg

    The recent scream higher in ETH has erased all of the last three weeks’ relative outperformance of Bitcoin…

    Source: Bloomberg

    In the context of the ever-widening “Overton Window” of acceptable policy positions related to government deficits, spending, taxation and monetary policy – allowing previously radical ideas to flow into the mainstream – Teddy Fusaro writes at CoinDesk that it is unsurprising that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have also crossed their own chasm in 2020. 

    Commentators often miss the connection but as other norms and institutions evolve into their future digital, mobile and virtual shape, so, too, are norms around banking, financial services and investing. The interrelationships between decentralized systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum and these dynamics are too often misunderstood or underappreciated.   

    In the pantheon of business literature that describes America’s Silicon Valley, Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” is perhaps the most frequently referenced work on how new technologies achieve adoption.

    According to Moore, each disruptive technology must go through five stages of adoption: starting with tinkering “innovators” who first try new technologies, through the “early adopters,” to the “early majority” and “late majority” – the two biggest groups – and finally, to the “laggards.”

    It is striking how regularly and routinely this roadmap has played out in technology after technology. The most critical stage of Moore’s framework for these journeys is what he terms “the chasm.” The chasm yawns between the “early adopters and the “early majority” because there is a step-function difference between the demands of these two cohorts. This is often where new technologies go to die. 

    Bitcoin and crypto may not have been ready to jump across the chasm yet, but the long year of 2020 that propelled the world across the Rubicon pushed cryptocurrency across its adoption “chasm.” 

    Read more here…

    *  *  *

    While Bitcoin has been stealing the headlines, it was Ethereum’s turn overnight as the number 2 crypto spiked back above $900 for the first time since Feb 2018…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Ethereum still has over $400 to go to reach its record highs…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bitcoin also pushed higher overnight, nearing $35,000, after correcting sharply to around $30,300 yesterday. But, within 24 hours, BTC has bounced back from $30,300 to as high as $34,778, a 14% rebound…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Ethereum’s surge began as the BTC/ETH ratio topped 43x once again, and erased all the recent outperformance, back to 37x…

    Source: Bloomberg

    CoinTelegraph’s Joseph Young asks, What triggered the Bitcoin and Ethereum rally?

    When the price of Bitcoin surpassed $33,000 on Jan. 2, some whales and high-net-worth investors warned that a 150 BTC sell order could retrace the market.

    A pseudonymous Bitcoin trader known as “i.am.nomad” wrote:

    “A 150 btc market sell would retrace this whole thing. lmao the higher price goes, the more retail gets prices out, the lower bid support will be.”

    Within hours he pinpointed the risk of a Bitcoin correction due to thin order books, BTC sharply pulled back.

    However, Bitcoin recovered quickly after the initial drop, rallying to a new record-high within 24 hours.

    The main catalysts behind Bitcoin’s rally have been the institutional accumulation of BTC on Coinbase and the short squeeze on Binance Futures.

    Throughout the past three days, Bitcoin has been trading much higher on Coinbase than on other major exchanges, as Cointelegraph reported.

    This means that aggressive buyers on Coinbase were continuously accumulating BTC despite the premium.

    Bitcoin surpasses past $34K with average trader returns at highs. Source: Santiment

    In the meantime, many traders on Binance Futures were shorting BTC, possibly expecting Bitcoin to top out at around $30,000. When Coinbase buyers continued to push BTC upwards, a short squeeze occurred. Analysts at Santiment explained:

    “For those expecting a #Bitcoin correction to kick off 2021, the $34,000 #AllTimeHigh achieved 10 mins ago is showing how painful it’s been being a $BTC bear the past 10 months. Avg. trader returns haven’t been this high across the board since June 2019.”

    Ether price rallied off of Bitcoin’s strong technical momentum. ETH/USD rose past $800 for the first time since early May 2018, demonstrating renewed momentum after stagnating throughout December.

    A pseudonymous cryptocurrency trader known as “Mayne” said on Jan. 2 before the Ether rally that ETH is likely heading to $800. He said:

    “ETH thesis still on track, daily close thru $620 we’d head to $800. I built a large long position in December and assuming $ETHBTC can hold a higher low, I think it’ll play out nicely. I should have had more BTC long exposure vs ETH in December, hoping ETH outperform for Jan.”

    What happens next?

    Ethereum has another major catalyst on the horizon as the CME futures exchange plans to launch ETH futures in February.

    Considering the high level of institutional demand for Bitcoin since the first quarter of 2020, the demand could also boost Ether upon the listing.

    Google searches for “Bitcoin.” Source: Google Trends

    Meanwhile, Bitcoin remains on an upward trajectory of price discovery, hitting new record highs on a daily basis. With a purported supply shortage and an institutional buying frenzy now spilling over into retail, the rally may still have a lot more room to run with $35,000 likely being the next psychological level to break. 

    As Cointelegraph reported, six-figure predictions have become increasingly common in recent months, particularly as the rally has broken new all-time highs.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 18:02

  • Let's Talk About "Super-COVID" And Other Mutations
    Let’s Talk About “Super-COVID” And Other Mutations

    Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

    There have been a lot of scary headlines out there about new strains of Covid and even “super-Covid.” This is causing a lot of people to freak out because they’re thinking, “Holy cow, is this thing getting even worse?”

    Keep in mind I am not a virologist or a medical professional. Neither are the politicians taking advantage of this crisis, the folks pimping Big Pharma drugs, or the journalists writing breathless headlines. I’m just another writer out there reading stuff and trying to figure this out, the same as everyone else.

    Viruses mutate

    “Mutation” is a scary word. It brings to mind every sci-fi nightmare brought to life on the big screen of some lab-born creature that gets totally out of control. It makes you think of rats so big you could saddle them and ride them. Crazy, terrifying stuff.

    But viruses mutate. It’s the nature of a virus.

    To survive: unlike plants, animals and other organisms, the only way a virus can reproduce is through a host cell, which it does by attaching its surface proteins to the cell’s membrane and injecting its genetic material into the cell. This genetic material, either DNA or RNA, then carries with it the instructions to the cell’s machinery to make more viruses. These new viruses then leave the cell and spread to other parts of the host organism.

    But host organisms are not passive observers to this process, and over time a human’s or pig’s immune system can learn from these encounters and develop strategies to prevent reinfection. The next time the same virus comes to a host cell, it may find that it is no longer able to attach to the cell’s surface membrane. So to survive, viruses must adapt or evolve, changing its surface proteins enough to trick the host cell into allowing it to attach. (source)

    So while the headlines are scary – and meant to be – it’s perfectly natural that this virus has changed.

    This isn’t always a bad thing.

    All mutations aren’t “bad” mutations. The fact that a virus mutates doesn’t mean that the virus is “worse.” I know when a virus mutates in a movie or book, it’s always the bane of humanity but in reality a mutation isn’t always a bad thing.

    What about this Super-Covid business?

    Again – it’s a mutation – a change, but not necessarily more deadly.

    A preliminary study published May 5 at bioRxiv.org, for instance, found a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike, a protein on the outside of the coronavirus that allows it to break into cells. This new variant is now found more often in places like Europe and the United States than the original form of the coronavirus. That may mean the change makes the virus more transmissible, the authors concluded. But the study lacked laboratory experiments to support the claim.

    Other explanations could also explain the pattern. The SARS-CoV-2 variant with the mutation could have ended up in certain regions thanks to random chance — a person infected with a virus that had the new mutation just happened to hop on a plane — and might have nothing to do with the virus itself. The study didn’t provide enough evidence to distinguish among the possibilities.

    “What I think has been potentially confusing to people is that we’re watching this very normal process of [viral] transmission and mutation happen in real time,” says Louise Moncla, an evolutionary epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “And there’s this real desire to understand whether these mutations have any functional difference.” (source)

    The evolution of a virus can have many different results – it can change the symptoms, it can make it more contagious, it can make it more deadly, or it can make it milder in order to affect more hosts. Just the fact that the virus mutated is not a death knell. It’s normal.

    What about “Super-Covid?”

    The new strain that the media has nicknamed “Super Covid” may not be as scary as it sounds. What researchers have discovered so far is that it’s more contagious than the former less-than-super Covid – although they’re not absolutely positive this is true. (Emphasis mine)

    After initial caution last week, scientists are becoming more convinced that the VUI-202012/01 variant of coronavirus is more transmissible. On Monday, experts from the U.K.’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) told journalists that the group now has “high confidence” that the strain has a transmission advantage compared with other variants. This compares with the “moderate confidence” that the committee said it had in a meeting on Dec. 18.

    That might seem obvious given how quickly the strain appears to be spreading, but it can be hard to exclude other explanations such as a super-spreader event giving the variant a boost — particularly since scientists don’t know what might be making the viral strain more infectious. However, scientists from NERVTAG said that looking at the genetic data of the virus alongside the epidemiological situation had convinced them of its higher rate of transmission. They noted that the strain was able to keep spreading during the November lockdown in England, even while rates of infections for non-variant coronavirus fell. (source)

    The new variant was first discovered in the UK, so more research on it has been done there than anywhere else. According to UK Minister of Health Matt Hancock, there’s no evidence to suggest this mutation is deadlier than the one with which we’ve been dealing.

    Addressing the House of Commons, Hancock said scientists had pinpointed more than a thousand cases involving the new variant that “may be associated with the faster spread” in regions including London.

    “There is currently nothing to suggest that this variant is more likely to cause serious disease and the latest clinical advice is that it is highly unlikely that this mutation would fail to respond to a vaccine,” he told MPs. (source)

    It’s even possible that the higher transmissibility could be a positive thing. Sometimes mutations like this make the disease less virulent and if that were the case – we don’t know if it is or not – then we’d be closer to seeing the virus burn out naturally as more people develop T-cell immunity from having had the virus (or having been exposed and fought it off.)

    Having a robust cellular immunity for at least for six months after even mild or asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, is good news.

    “This data is reassuring,” lead study author Paul Moss, from the University of Birmingham, told a Science Media Centre briefing. As in any other study, further research is recommended to show whether or not such level of immunity can fight off re-infection, or how long the protection lasts. “We need to have much larger population studies to show that,” Moss told journalists. (source)

    This is how a virus “burns out.”

    There’s a lot we don’t know.

    I’ve had Covid (even though 50% of the comments on my article about it said I didn’t) and it was a miserable experience. Bloodwork afterward showed I have antibodies against the virus for now, which provides me with some natural protection – for how long, nobody seems to know.

    From a preparedness standpoint, there’s nothing you need to be doing differently now than you were doing before. Remember that there are all sorts of knock-on effects (personal economymental healthsupply chain issuesmedical freedom) we should be preparing for and the emergence of new strains has not changed any of that.

    Focus on what you can control, not on media-driven hysteria.

    The new strain is something with a lot of unknowns, but the few things we currently do know point to it not being a major escalation of our situation. If more people get it and get a milder case, then it stands to reason that more people will have some natural immunity.

    Again – we don’t know this for sure – but don’t let the headlines about “super-covid” and mutations freak you out. Nobody really knows if this will be worse, and the current evidence isn’t pointing to anything apocalyptic.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 18:00

  • Israel Delivers Second Iron Dome Missile Battery To US Army  
    Israel Delivers Second Iron Dome Missile Battery To US Army  

    This weekend, the Israel Ministry of Defense delivered the second of two Iron Dome anti-air missile defense systems to the U.S. Army. 

    Defense Minister Benny Gantz told Israel National News that “the delivery of the Iron Dome to the U.S. Army once again demonstrates the close relations between the Israel Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Department of Defense.” 

    Gantz continued: “I am confident that the system will assist the U.S. Army in protecting American troops from ballistic and airborne threats as well as from developing threats in the areas where U.S. troops are deployed on various missions.”

    Watch: Israel Deliveries Iron Dome To U.S. Army

    Israel National News said the Iron Domes “will be employed in defense of U.S. troops against a variety of ballistic and aerial threats.” There was no mention of where the new missile defense system would be deployed. 

    How The Iron Dome Works

    In August 2019, the U.S. signed a landmark deal with Israel to procure two Iron Dome systems. 

    Co-developed by Raytheon and Israeli defense firm Rafael, the system has been touted by Israeli leaders as the most advanced short to mid-range interceptor in the world with a proven track record of shooting down Hamas rockets from Gaza.

    Iron Dome In Action 

    Tel Aviv announced the Iron Dome’s kill rate was around 86% when in May 2019, about 700 rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip over a few days. 

    The Iron Dome success rate is so high that even Saudi Arabia has been a buyer of the missile defense system. 

    The question now: Where is the U.S. Army going to deploy its new Iron Dome system?

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 17:30

  • Pelosi Secures 4th Term As Speaker, Democrats Break Quarantine To Vote
    Pelosi Secures 4th Term As Speaker, Democrats Break Quarantine To Vote

    In a dramatic 216-209 vote, Nancy Pelosi secured her fourth term as Speaker (which she vowed would also be her last).

    In order to secure the narrower than expected victory, reporter John Bresnehan pointed out that at least three members broke COVID quarantine to attend swearing-in ceremonies and the all-important speakership election Sunday, and in addition to those three, as Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle reports, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-FL), attended the vote to back Pelosi after testing positive for the deadly virus just six days ago.

    “3 members who are still in COVID quarantine will be allowed to cast a today, per a statement from Brian Monohan. 2 Dems, 1 R. They will cast vote in special area in House gallery. This shows stakes of today’s Speaker vote. Members were not named in statement.

    Rodney Davis, top Republican on the House Administration Cmte, is very upset about this “Popemobile” built in the House Gallery for quarantined members.

    He says the “only reason this is happening is because Speaker Pelosi needs to be re-elected speaker.” “It’s shameful.”

    Davis says Monahan won’t tell him who members in quarantine are but says they’ve had negative tests.

    “It’s horseshit. You can quote me on that.”

    A senior GOP congressional aide ripped Pelosi, calling the decision to bring these coronavirus risks into the House solely to secure a second term as Speaker a “speakership election super spreader event.”

    And so, as Congress gets back to the people’s business, first up is the “gender neutral”-zation of speech on the floor:

    According to Pelosi, the Democrats’ House rule changes will “honor all gender identities” by “changing pronouns and familial relationships… to be gender-neutral.”

    Terms like “father” and “mother” would be replaced by “parent.” “Brother” and “sister” would be axed in favor of “sibling.” Under these rules, House members would be required to refer to their “husband” or “wife” as their “spouse” or their son(s) and daughter(s) as child(ren).

    Pelosi has yet to set any kind of example for following the rules she would demand of others.

    This is her Twitter bio as of the authoring of this very post. Notice any gender-specific terms?

    Both “mother” and “grandmother” would be verboten under Pelosi’s new rules for the House.

    Finally, as a reminder, before Pelosi was re-elected as Speaker in 2018, House Democrats and Pelosi agreed to term limits for the top three Democratic leaders in the House, which Pelosi agreed would stop her from another run at speaker in 2022, Roll Call reported.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 17:09

  • Sen. Gohmert Says Republicans Need To Match Antifa, BLM Violence After Court Quashes Electoral Suit
    Sen. Gohmert Says Republicans Need To Match Antifa, BLM Violence After Court Quashes Electoral Suit

    Senator Louie Gohmert (R-TX) suggested that Republicans should be ‘as violent as Antifa and BLM‘ after US District Judge Jeremy Kernodle tossed out his lawsuit which argued that Vice President Mike Pence has the authority to unilaterally overturn the 2020 election results based on widespread claims of fraud in several states, according to Bloomberg.

    If the bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM,” Gohmert told Newsmax in a Friday night interview.

    Hilariously, Bloomberg describes Antifa as “a loosely-aligned movement that opposes fascism.”

    On Thursday, Kernodle ruled that Gohmert hadn’t sufficiently argued that he suffered an injury by any action by Pence, and therefore had no legal standing to sue. The judge didn’t consider the merits of the case in his decision.

    Congressman Gohmert’s alleged injury requires a series of hypothetical — but by no means certain — events,” wrote Kernodle – a 2018 Trump appointee, adding “Plaintiffs presuppose what the Vice President will do on January 6” and “which electoral votes the Vice President will count or reject from contested states.”

    Gohmert argued that Pence has the power to hand Trump a second term by simply rejecting swing states’ slates of Democratic electors, and instead choosing competing GOP electors when the Senate and House meet jointly to open and count certificates of electoral votes on Jan. 6. Election experts have said such a finding would create a major conflict of interest. -Bloomberg

    Gohmert filed a notice of appeal late Friday, which was promptly dismissed Saturday morning.

    Pence, who constitutionally presides over the Senate, will oversee the counting of Electoral College votes on January 6. In a Thursday filing via the Justice Department, Pence urged the judge to reject Gohmert’s suit, arguing that the Texas congressman should have sued the US Senate or House of Representatives if he disagreed with the way Electoral College votes are counted.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/03/2021 – 17:00

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Today’s News 3rd January 2021

  • The Great Reset, Part I: Reduced Expectations And Bio-Techno-Feudalism
    The Great Reset, Part I: Reduced Expectations And Bio-Techno-Feudalism

    Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

    The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind, whether everyone knows it or not. It is presaged by the measures undertaken by states across the world in response to the covid-19 crisis. (I mean by “crisis” not the so-called pandemic itself, but the responses to a novel virus called SARS-2 and the impact of the responses on social and economic conditions.)

    In his book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab writes that the covid-19 crisis should be regarded as an “opportunity [that can be] seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on the path toward a fairer, greener future.” Although Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset for years, the covid crisis has provided a pretext for finally enacting it. According to Schwab, we should not expect the postcovid world system to return to its previous modes of operation. Rather, alternating between description and prescription, Schwab suggests that changes will be, or should be, enacted across interlocking, interdependent domains to produce a new normal.

    So, just what is the Great Reset and what is the new normal it would establish?

    The Great Reset means reduced incomes and carbon use. But Schwab and the WEF also define the Great Reset in terms of the convergence of economic, monetary, technological, medical, genomic, environmental, military, and governance systems. The Great Reset would involve vast transformations in each of these domains, changes which, according to Schwab, will not only alter our world but also lead us to “question what it means to be human.”

    In terms of economics and monetary policy, the Great Reset would involve a consolidation of wealth, on the one hand, and the likely issuance of universal basic income (UBI) on the other. It might include a shift to a digital currency, including a consolidated centralization of banking and bank accounts, immediate real-time taxation, negative interest rates, and centralized surveillance and control over spending and debt.

    While every aspect of the Great Reset involves technology, the Great Reset specifically entails “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” or transhumanism, which includes the expansion of genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics and their penetration into human bodies and brains. Of course, the fourth Industrial Revolution involves the redundancy of human labor in increasing sectors, to be replaced by automation. But moreover, Schwab hails the use of nanotechnology and brain scans to predict and preempt human behavior.

    The Great Reset means the issuance of medical passports, soon to be digitized, as well as the transparency of medical records inclusive of medical history, genetic makeup, and disease states. But it could include the implanting of microchips that would read and report on genetic makeup and brain states such that “[e]ven crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”

    On the genomic front, the Great Reset includes advances in genetic engineering and the fusion of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

    In military terms, the Great Reset entails the creation of new battle spaces including cyberspaces and the human brain as a battle space.

    In terms of governance, the Great Reset means increasingly centralized, coordinated, and expanded government and “governmentalities,” the convergence of corporations and states, and the digitalization of governmental functions, including, with the use of 5G and predictive algorithms, real-time tracking and surveillance of bodies in space or the “anticipatory governance” of human and systems behavior.

    That being said, “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as the New York Times has suggested, the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking” of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders” and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.

    In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared destiny,” among other euphemisms. Together, such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).

    I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in their thrall. The mass of humanity, the planners would have it, will live under an economic stasis of reduced expectations, with individual autonomy greatly curtailed if not utterly obliterated. As Mises suggested, such planners are authoritarians who mean to supplant the plans of individual actors with their own, centralized plans.

    If enacted, such plans would fail, but their adoption would nevertheless exact a price.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 23:30

  • Visualizing The US Population By Race
    Visualizing The US Population By Race

    The American population is a unique mosaic of cultures – and almost 40% of people identify as racial or ethnic minorities today.

    In this treemap, Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh uses data for 2019 from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which bases its analysis on the latest American Community Survey (ACS) data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

    Then we break down the same data on a state-by-state basis.

    Growing Diversity in America

    As of 2019, here is the current distribution of the U.S. population by race:

    • White: 60.1%

    • Hispanic: 18.5%

    • Black: 12.2%

    • Asian: 5.6%

    • Multiple Races: 2.8%

    • American Indian/Alaska Native: 0.7%

    • Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander: 0.2%

    *Note that the U.S. totals do not include Puerto Rico.

    However, these race and ethnicity projections are expected to change over the coming years. By the year 2060, it’s expected that the distribution of Whites as a percentage of total population will fall from 60.1% to 44.3% of Americans.

    Source: U.S. Census Bureau. *Other includes American Indian/Alaska Native (0.7%) and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (0.2%). Both proportions remain unchanged in these projections.

    Interestingly, the proportion of those from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds will more than double, from 2.3% to 4.9% alongside rising patterns of interracial marriage.

    Over time, the U.S. Census has been vastly expanded to reflect the true diversity that the country holds. In fact, it was only from 1960 onwards that people could select their own race—and only from 2020 can those who chose White or Black provide further information on their roots.

    A State-by-State Breakdown

    Of course, racial diversity in the United States differs widely from region to region.

    In the Northeast—particularly the states Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire—the White population accounts for 90% or more of the total. In contrast, Black populations are highest in the District of Columbia (45%) and several Southern states.

    Note: A dash (-) indicates estimates with relative standard errors greater than 30%, which were not included in the data

    Of all the 50 states, Hawaii is home to the largest share of Asian populations at 39%. It also has one of the most diverse racial breakdowns in the nation overall, including the highest proportion of mixed race individuals.

    Looking to another island, an overwhelming majority (98%) of Puerto Ricans are of Hispanic origins. While it’s not a state, its inhabitants are all considered U.S. citizens.

    Charting the U.S. population by race is crucial for a number of reasons. This information can be used to better understand existing income and wealth gaps, track public health outcomes, and to aid in policy decision-making at higher levels.

    “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”

    – Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the U.S.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 23:00

  • Assange Extradition: Legal Teams Likely Informed Already Of Judge's Decision
    Assange Extradition: Legal Teams Likely Informed Already Of Judge’s Decision

    Authored by Alexander Mercouris via ConsortiumNews.com,

    In accordance with a British magistrate court’s usual procedure, Julian Assange’s Judgment has almost certainly already been written and sent in draft form to the respective teams of lawyers, probably early on Friday evening.

    The lawyers therefore already know what the decision is, as well as the British government and at least the Department of Justice in Washington.

    Under established procedure, Assange’s lawyers are not supposed to tell Assange himself what the decision is so he and his family are probably the only people who are directly involved in his case who don’t yet know its outcome.

    Assange outside British Supreme Court, 2011. Source: acidpolly/Flickr

    The purpose in sending the Judgment in draft form to the lawyers in advance of the Court hearing is to give them an opportunity to check it for factual mistakes.

    The public will not know the outcome until Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser reads out the Judgment in its finalized form, with any factual mistakes corrected, when Court convenes on Monday at 10 am London time. The Judgment should then be published online by the Court Service directly after she has finished.

    In addition to the Judgment – and obviously to the decision whether or not to extradite, which will be set out in the Judgment – the public may learn immediately afterward whether either of the two sets of lawyers intend to appeal. Either side has seven days to appeal the judgment.

    While the intent of allowing both sides to see the Judgment in advance is not to help facilitate an appeal, having the judgement before it is read to the court affords attorneys to a chance to consider whether or not to launch one.

    If It’s a Split Decision

    One possibility that must be considered is that Baraitser may decide to extradite on one indictment and not on the other, for instance, if she rules against extradition on the Espionage Act charges, but decides in favor of extradition on the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge (which carries a maximum five year sentence as opposed to 170 on espionage.)

    I think what would happen in that case is that the British authorities would accept Baraitser’s decision and would try to reach an agreement with the DoJ whereby, in return for Assange’s extradition, the U.S. would commit itself to try Assange only on the computer intrusion charges, and not on the Espionage Act charges.

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    The British over the course of the negotiations would tell the U.S. that if the U.S. were not willing to give that commitment then the British would not be able to extradite Assange to the U.S.

    Of course the British (if Assange were extradited to the U.S. on such a basis) would be in no position to compel the U.S. to abide by such a commitment if the U..S were to go back on it once Assange was on U.S. soil.

    Since that has to be a very likely possibility, one would think it would be a point which Assange’s lawyers would make in the appeal they would be bound to make to the High Court against Baraitser’s decision.

    In fact in such a scenario it’s not impossible that both sides would appeal to the High Court:

    1. the U.S. against Baraitser’s decision to refuse to extradite on the basis of the Espionage Act;
    2. Assange’s lawyers against Baraitser’s decision to extradite on the computer intrusion charges.

    It would be a fascinating battle and it would be fascinating to see how it would play out. Logically, the balance ought to tip in Assange’s favor since Baraitser would presumably have rejected extradition on the Espionage Act charges because they were not properly made out and because they were overtly political.

    In light of that, would the High Court be prepared to allow Assange’s extradition on computer intrusion charges to a country which had tried unsuccessfully to bring overtly political charges against him which the lower Court had rejected?

    Nothing is predictable in this case.

    Appeal Scenarios

    In the event that Baraitser decides the case in Assange’s favor, and the U.S. government decides to appeal, there is also the question of whether or not Assange will be released pending the outcome of the appeal, or whether he will continue to be kept in detention in Belmarsh.

    Journalist Glenn Greenwald in his latest article assumes that Assange will remain in detention throughout the appeal process, but that is not certain.

    Since there would be a Court Judgment saying that extradition had been refused, and since Assange is not being held because of any crime committed in the United Kingdom, and as there is no outstanding prison sentence imposed on him by any British Court, one would think that Baraitser in her Judgment would order his immediate release.

    British authorities might take steps to rearrest him (perhaps on still more, new U.S. charges) immediately as the order for his release is made. But it seems certain that Assange’s lawyers would make an prompt application, either to Baraitser or to a High Court judge for Assange’s immediate release, which given a hypothetical decision in his favor,  Baraitser or the High Court judge would probably grant.

    Given Baraitser’s demeanour in court during Assange’s hearing, and given several of the decisions she made, the greater likelihood is that she will rule in favor of U.S. extradition on both indictmments, in which case Assange would almost certainly remain in Belmarsh prison while his legal team appeals.  If she should pursue a split decision there would be a stronger likelihood that Assange would continue in detention until the appeal were decided because the Court would have decided to allow his extradition to the U.S.

    However even in that case Assange’s lawyers would still be in a position to apply for bail on the grounds that the most serious and important part of the case made by the U.S. for his extradition (the Espionage Act charges) had been refused, and that his appeal against the remaining part (the computer intrusion charges) was likely to be successful.  

    The public and Assange himself will know in less than 48 hours.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 22:30

  • "We Don't Need A World Where China Becomes Another US": Beijing Offers Vision For Restored Sino-US Relations Under Biden
    “We Don’t Need A World Where China Becomes Another US”: Beijing Offers Vision For Restored Sino-US Relations Under Biden

    Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued some blunt statements on the deteriorated state of China-US relations during a recent wide-ranging interview in state media:

    We don’t need a world where China becomes another United States. This is neither rational nor feasible. Rather, the United States should try to make itself a better country, and China will surely become its better self,” he said.

    He laid down his vision and some terms by which ties could improve amid the current “unprecedented difficulties” which plummeted sharply during Trump’s final year in office, underscoring that the current US strategy of confrontation and its “new Cold War” attitude is “doomed to fail”. 

    Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, AFP/Getty Images

    He said instead of the world cooperating more deeply to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains that “unilateralism, protectionism and power politics are standing in the way of international cooperation” – in words clearly directed at the US.

    In contrast, Foreign Minister Wang, said China has “spearheaded multilateral cooperation. Unswerving in advocating multilateralism…”.

    At the same time, Wang pointed out Sino-Russian relations have improved vastly over the past year:

    “President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin have had five phone calls and exchanged correspondence on multiple occasions, providing the most important strategic guidance for the steady growth of the bilateral relations. Mutual support between the two peoples.

    Russia was the first country to send medical and other supplies to China, and China was one of the strongest supporters of Russia’s COVID-19 response efforts.

    The two countries have also worked closely on joint epidemic response and development of vaccines and drugs. Growing practical cooperation despite challenges. The two countries have vigorously facilitated economic reopening, safeguarded the functioning of industrial and supply chains, and made steady progress in several major projects.”

    While urging the incoming Biden administration to “return to a sensible approach” on China, the top Chinese diplomat described further:

    “Fundamentally, it all comes down to the serious misconceptions of US policymakers about China. Some see China as the so-called biggest threat and their China policy based on this misperception is simply wrong. What has happened proves that the US attempt to suppress China and start a new Cold War has not just seriously harmed the interests of the two peoples, but also caused severe disruptions to the world. Such a policy will find no support and is doomed to fail.

    China-US relations have come to a new crossroads, and a new window of hope is opening. We hope that the next US administration will return to a sensible approach, resume dialogue with China, restore normalcy to the bilateral relations and restart cooperation.”

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    It was here in the interview that he claimed over and against repeat US charges and probes centered on Chinese intellectual property theft and infiltration of US systems that—

    “China never meddles in the internal affairs of the United States and values peaceful co-existence and mutually beneficial cooperation with the United States,” according to the interview. 

    Chinese state media has lately been boasting of the communist government’s coronavirus response:

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    And below is perhaps the most interesting part of the interview, where Wang offers his vision for a “window of hope”… or how positive relations with Washington can be restored:

    We know that some in the United States are uneasy about China’s rapid development. However, the best way to keep one’s lead is through constant self-improvement, not by blocking others’ development. We don’t need a world where China becomes another United States. This is neither rational nor feasible. Rather, the United States should try to make itself a better country, and China will surely become its better self.

    We believe that as long as the United States can draw lessons from the past and work with China in the same direction, the two countries are capable of resolving differences through dialogue and expanding converging interests by cooperation. This will allow the two major countries to establish a model of coexistence that benefits both countries and the world, and open up new development prospects in line with the trend of history.”

    But after four years of the Trump administration, China has emerged in US eyes as the new primary political, economic and even military rival of the United States, and further as rivals for global influence.

    Despite the optimism expressed by Wang based on the US presidential transition, it remains that Biden is likely to find himself ‘boxed in’ as a result of Trump’s continuing ratcheting pressure in the form of targeted punitive actions against Chinese companies and officials.  

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 22:00

  • Lockdown Proponent Bill Gates Quietly Funding Plan To Dim The Sun's Rays
    Lockdown Proponent Bill Gates Quietly Funding Plan To Dim The Sun’s Rays

    Submitted by Rusty Weiss of The Mental Recession

    A project conducted by Harvard University scientists and funded largely by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to test sun-dimming technology to cool global warming is quietly moving forward in Sweden.

    We know what you’re thinking – this can’t be real… but it is.

    Reuters reports that the Harvard project “plans to test out a controversial theory that global warming can be stopped by spraying particles into the atmosphere that would reflect the sun’s rays.”

    In Sweden, plans to fly a test balloon next year are already underway.

    The test balloon will not release any particles into the atmosphere, but “could be a step towards an experiment, perhaps in the autumn of 2021 or spring of 2022.”

    Those experiments may see “up to 2 kg of non-toxic calcium carbonate dust” released into the atmosphere.

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    Bill Gates Plan to Dim the Sun is a Bad Idea

    Bill Gates is living proof that just because you once did something very smart to make your mark on the world, it doesn’t necessarily make you a smart person.

    Having the gall to play God by dimming the sun’s rays and thinking it won’t lead to drastic and unpredictable problems makes that case rather obvious.

    Reuters notes the project – called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) – is playing with “something with potentially large and hard-to-predict risks, such as shifts in global rain patterns.”

    “There is no merit in this test except to enable the next step,” said Niclas Hällström, director of the Swedish green think-tank WhatNext? said.

    He added, “You can’t test the trigger of a bomb and say ‘This can’t possibly do any harm.’”

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    Gates Says Life After COVID Won’t Return to Normal Until 2022

    Social-engineering fan Bill Gates made news earlier this month when he wanted to figuratively dim the sun on society by suggesting pandemic lockdowns could and should be extended.

    The tech nerd expressed support for shutting down bars and restaurants for up to an additional six months, and indicated lockdowns may continue all the way into 2022.

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    “Certainly, by the summer will be way closer to normal than we are now, but even through early 2022, unless we help other countries get rid of this disease and we get high vaccinations rates in our country, the risk of reintroduction will be there,” Gates warned CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

    Many Americans have shown they aren’t willing to continue with the lockdown charade. We’re not sure how many will be thrilled with Gates being the ruler of the sun either.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 21:30

  • Dramatic Video Shows Unmasked Canadian Cops Bust Illegal Gathering Of Family During New Years
    Dramatic Video Shows Unmasked Canadian Cops Bust Illegal Gathering Of Family During New Years

    Unmasked police busted an illegal family gathering on Dec. 31 in Gatineau, a city in western Quebec, Canada, according to Radio Canada. The shocking incident was caught on camera.

    Service de police de la Ville de Gatineau (SPVG) received an anonymous complaint from a neighbor late Thursday evening. When police arrived at the home on rue le Baron, they discovered the homeowner lied about the number of occupants inside as public health orders in the metro area have placed limits on gatherings. 

    SPVG noticed a number of vehicles parked in the driveway of the home and loud noise coming from inside. They figured there were more than two people inside, despite the homeowner insisting otherwise. 

    Mariane Leduc, head of communications at SPVG, explained the situation went quickly downhill after an “aggressive man” had zero intention of cooperating with the police.

    Mathieu Tessier appears to be the aggressive man in the video, which was filmed from someone inside the home. Tessier was at his sister’s house when police officers without masks yanked him from inside the house and tackled him to the ground. The family alleges police officers used excessive force. 

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    After the incident, Mathieu and his sister were both arrested and then released later that night. Everyone in the home was slapped with $1,500 fines for ignoring public safety health orders against gatherings. 

    SPVG received a total of 30 complaints of illegal assembly in Gatineau on New Years’ night.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 21:00

  • "Symbols… Of Subtle Oppression": Virginia Judge Orders Removal Of Portraits Of White Judges
    “Symbols… Of Subtle Oppression”: Virginia Judge Orders Removal Of Portraits Of White Judges

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Judge David Bernhard is a jurist in Fairfax County (where I reside) has issued a controversial order that the portraits of white judges must be removed from a courtroom because their presence would deny a black defendant a fair trial. In a decision applauded in the Washington Post, Bernhard declared that a fair trial is threatened in “a courtroom gilded with … white individuals peering down on an African American defendant.” 

    The public defender filed a “Motion to Remove Portraiture Overwhelmingly Depicting White Jurists Hanging in Trial Courtroom.” The motion was not opposed by Fairfax County’s recently elected lead prosecutor Steve Descano, who the Washington Post covered as one of a number of liberal prosecutors recently elected around the country.

    Bernhard order explains:

    The low hanging fruit of overt racism is easily identified and picked off to strengthen the tree of society. The more conventional symbols which to some impart tradition, and to others subtle oppression, are less comfortably addressed. The ubiquitous portraits of white judges are such symbols. When they were hung in the more recent past, negative connotations thereof were not a consideration. To the public at large making use of the courthouse, other than some attorneys who might have appeared before the judges portrayed, there is no context to learn about who is depicted. The portraits in sum, are of benefit to only a few insiders who might fondly remember appearing before a particular judge or to a retired judge’s family making to rare visit to the courthouse. To the public seeking justice inside the courtrooms, thus, the sea of portraits of white judges can at best yield indifference, and at worst, logically a lack of confidence that the judiciary is there to preside equally no matter the race of the participants.

    We have previously discussed the removal of academic portraits and even pictures of leading writers like Shakespeare under analogous rationales.

    Judge Bernhard should be credited for seeking to address concerns over racial justice and inequality. However, I disagree with this decision as I have with the removal of academic portraits. We are thankfully achieving greater diversity on our courts and on our faculties.  That is being reflected in such honorary portraits. Yet, the removal of portraits not because of their records but their race is troubling.

    I certainly agree that in the case of Commonwealth v. Shipp, “The Defendant’s constitutional right to a fair jury trial stands paramount.”  The problem is Bernhard’s juxtapositioning of a fair trial with “the countervailing interest of adorning courtrooms with portraits that honor past jurists” who are “overwhelmingly … white individuals.”  I do not agree that the mere fact that the portraits feature white jurists constitutes a message that black people are “of lesser standing.”

    Under Bernhard’s logic, leading jurists who fought slavery and segregation would be removed because of their race.  Thus, Earl Warren, who wrote Brown v. Board of Education, would have to be removed because he was white. 

    The irony is crushing. Warren wrote that:

    “To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”

    Yet, under Judge Bernhard’s approach, Warren’s portrait would have to be removed because his image would create that same “feeling of inferiority” because he happened to be white.

    While Judge Bernhard refers to the portraits as “ornaments,” it is the use of race-based criteria for their removal that is so troubling and, in my view, misguided.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 20:30

  • Full Year-Ahead Calendar: All The Key Events In 2021
    Full Year-Ahead Calendar: All The Key Events In 2021

    Here is a calendar of all the top political, economic and financial events in the new 2021.

    January

    • Friday, January 1: UK & EU — New UK-EU trading relationship set to begin.
    • Friday, January 1: ASEAN — Brunei Darussalam assumes the ASEAN Chairmanship for 2021.
    • Sunday, January 3: USA — New Congress begins.
    • January: Japan — Ordinary Diet session begins.
    • Tuesday, January 5: USA — Runoff elections for Georgia Senate seats. Both Senate elections went to runoff after no candidate received a majority on Election Day in November. If the Democratic candidates win both runoff elections, control of the Senate will switch to the Democratic party, and Vice President-elect Harris will vote to break ties.
    • Wednesday, January 6: USA — Congress counts Electoral College votes for President and Vice President.
    • January / February: United States — Cabinet nomination hearings and confirmation votes. The Senate will hold hearings and confirmation votes for President-elect Biden’s Cabinet and Executive Branch nominees.
    • Wednesday, January 20: USA — President-elect Biden takes office.
    • Thursday, January 21: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.
    • Wednesday, January 27: USA — FOMC meeting statement.

    February

    • February 1-5: Singapore — MAS report on economic developments in Singapore.
    • Thursday, February 4: UK — BoE MPC meeting (and monetary policy report).
    • Sunday, February 7: Ecuador — General election. Ecuador will vote to elect a new president and fill all the seats in the National Assembly.
    • Sunday, February 14: Spain — Catalan regional elections.
    • Tuesday, February 16: Singapore — Fiscal year 2021 budget.

    March

    • Early March: China — The National People’s Congress. The annual NPC is scheduled to start early March and is likely to last around 2 weeks. A key thing to watch will be Premier Li’s annual government report, which usually include official economic targets for the next year, such as GDP growth, CPI inflation, fiscal deficits and employment (these targets, if available, were set during closed-door policy meetings in the preceding December). The report will also set the broad tone of economic policy direction for the rest of the year. Main government officials will hold press conferences on the sidelines, giving further details on the 14th Five-Year Plan.
    • Wednesday, March 3: UK — Annual budget.
    • Thursday, March 11: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.
    • Wednesday, March 17: Netherlands — General election.
    • Wednesday, March 17: USA — FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
    • Thursday, March 18: UK — BoE MPC meeting.
    • Tuesday, March 23: Israel — Parliamentary elections.
    • March 25-26: EU — European Council meeting.

    April

    • April: USA — Biden Administration likely to release FY2022 Budget proposal. The budget proposal is traditionally sent to Congress the first Monday in February, but at the start of a new administration this typically takes until April or so.
    • April 1 – May 31: ASEAN — 38th semi-annual summit.
    • Wednesday, April 7: South Korea — Municipal elections.
    • Sunday, April 11: Peru — General election. Peruvians will elect a President, two vice presidents, and new members of congress for all 130 congressional seats.
    • Thursday, April 22: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.
    • Monday, April 26: Chile — Election of Constitutional Convention. Chileans will elect all the members of the convention tasked with drafting a new constitution.
    • Wednesday, April 28: USA — FOMC meeting statement.

    May

    • May: Singapore — World Economic Forum annual meeting.
    • May: Australia — Federal budget released.
    • Thursday, May 6: UK — Parliamentary elections, Scotland.
    • Thursday, May 6: UK — BoE MPC meeting (and monetary policy report).

    June

    • Early June: Italy — Major cities may have mayoral elections (Milan, Roma, Naples, Turin, Bologna).
    • June: Japan — Ordinary Diet session ends.
    • June: France — Regional elections.
    • Sunday, June 6: Mexico — Congressional and gubernatorial election. Mexico will elect new representatives for the lower chamber of congress for all 500 seats. Elections will also be held for 15 state governor offices.
    • Thursday, June 10: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.
    • Wednesday, June 16: USA — FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
    • June 24-25: EU — European Council meeting.
    • Thursday, June 24: — UK: BoE MPC meeting.

    July

    • Thursday, July 22: Japan — Term ends for the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly (election in summer).
    • Thursday, July 22: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.
    • Friday, July 23: Japan — Tokyo Olympic Games begin.
    • Wednesday, July 28: USA — FOMC meeting statement.

    August

    • August: Australia — Earliest date for Federal Election. Election likely to be held sometime between August 2021 and May 2022. Current polling suggests the incumbent Liberal/National Party is likely to be returned to Government, although the opposition Australian Labour Party is yet to release their policy platform.
    • August: South Africa — Local elections.
    • Sunday, August 1: USA — Debt ceiling reinstated. The federal debt limit will be reinstated at its level on that day. If the limit is not already suspended or raised, Treasury will likely be able to draw down its cash balance for several weeks before running out.
    • Thursday, August 5: UK — BoE MPC meeting (and monetary policy report).
    • Saturday, August 21: Malaysia — Sarawak state election.

    September

    • September: Japan — Term ends for LDP President.
    • September: Germany — Federal elections.
    • Thursday, September 9: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.
    • Monday, September 13: Norway — Parliamentary elections.
    • Sunday, September 19: Russia — Parliamentary elections.
    • Tuesday, September 21: Thailand — Fiscal year 2022 budget.
    • Wednesday, September 22: USA — FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
    • Thursday, September 23: UK — BoE MPC meeting.
    • Thursday, September 30: USA — Fiscal year 2021 ends. Deadline for Congress to pass appropriations for fiscal year 2022. Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act authorization also expires, which will likely serve as an informal deadline for Congress to pass an infrastructure program.

    October

    • Saturday, October 9 — Czech Republic — Parliamentary elections.
    • October 14-15: EU — European Council meeting.
    • Thursday, October 21: Japan — Term ends for Lower House Members of Parliament.
    • Sunday, October 24: Argentina — Congressional and municipal election. Argentinians will vote to fill 127 out of 257 seats in the lower chamber of congress as well as 24 out of 72 seats in the Senate.
    • Thursday, October 28: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.

    November

    • Tuesday, November 2: USA — Election Day. A few states will hold special elections to fill vacancies in the US House of Representatives, and several others will conduct gubernatorial and other state and local elections.
    • Wednesday, November 3: USA — FOMC meeting statement.
    • Thursday, November 4: UK — BoE MPC meeting (and monetary policy report).
    • Sunday, November 21: Chile — General election. Chile will elect a new President, 20 out of the 50 seats in the Senate, and the House of Representatives in its entirety.

    December

    • Wednesday, December 15: USA — FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
    • December 16-17: EU — European Council meeting.
    • Thursday, December 16: EU — ECB Governing Council meeting.
    • Thursday, December 16: UK — BoE MPC meeting.

    Source: Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 20:00

  • HHS Overturns Plan To Impose $14,000 Fee On Distilleries That Made Hand Sanitizer
    HHS Overturns Plan To Impose $14,000 Fee On Distilleries That Made Hand Sanitizer

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    Health officials this week overturned fees that were being imposed on distilleries that made hand sanitizer early last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Two different fees, including a $14,000 one, were included in the COVID 19 relief package that was signed into law in March. That package made distilleries that produced hand sanitizer “over-the-counter drug monograph facilities” and forced them to pay fees.

    COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Distilleries made hand sanitizer because there was a nationwide shortage of the product last year.

    The fees were due on Feb. 12. The Food and Drug Administration alerted distilleries this week that the fees needed to be paid. In a public notice, the administration noted it was authorized to collect fees by the CARES Act.

    However, a Health and Human Services spokesperson said Thursday that the fees are being reversed.

    “Small businesses who stepped up to fight COVID-19 should be applauded by their government, not taxed for doing so,” Brian Harrison, chief of staff for the agency, said in a statement.

    “I’m pleased to announce we have directed FDA to cease enforcement of these arbitrary, surprise user fees. Happy New Year, distilleries, and cheers to you for helping keep us safe!”

    HHS lawyers found that the fees were issued in a manner that has the force and effect of a legislative rule, which only the HHS secretary has the authority to issue.

    The Distilled Spirits Council had reacted to the fees with surprise, issuing a press released urging the Food and Drug Administration to waive them for hundreds of distillers who helped by making hand sanitizer amid the pandemic.

    “This incredibly frustrating news comes as a complete shock to the more than 800 distilleries across the country that came to the aid of their local communities and first responders. This unexpected fee serves to punish already struggling distilleries who jumped in at a time of need to do the right thing,” said Distilled Spirits Council President and CEO Chris Swonger in a statement.

    “Everyone was totally blindsided by FDA’s announcement,” added Phil McDaniel, CEO of St. Augustine Distillery.

    In a statement after the rollback of the fees, Swonger said the move “is such a relief to hundreds of distillers.”

    “We want to thank HHS leadership for quickly intervening and protecting distillers from these unwarranted fees,” he said.

    “Distillers were proud to help make hand sanitizer for their communities and first responders during their time of need.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 19:30

  • Iran Claims "Israeli Agent Provocateurs" Are Plotting Attacks On US Forces In Iraq
    Iran Claims “Israeli Agent Provocateurs” Are Plotting Attacks On US Forces In Iraq

    Sunday marks the one-year anniversary of the January 3rd, 2020 killing of popular Iranian IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani, ahead of which US forces in the region, particularly Iraq, have been on high alert.

    Iran has over the past days accused both Israel and the United States of seeking to provoke a “pretext for war” during the last weeks of the Trump presidency, before Biden enters office and seeks rapprochement centered on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) nuclear deal. 

    On Saturday Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif again leveled the charge of the Islamic Republic’s enemies seeking to stage provocations in order to give Trump a “fake casus belli”. This time more specifics were offered, with Zarif claiming Israel is seeking to do this through “Israeli agent-provocateurs” – citing unspecified intelligence in a message on Twitter. 

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    FM Zarif claimed “new intelligence from Iraq” shows that “Israeli agent-provocateurs are plotting attacks against Americans – putting an outgoing Trump in a bind with a fake casus belli.”

    He then added a direct threat and warning, tagging Trump in the tweet: “Be careful of a trap… Any fireworks will backfire badly, particularly against your same BFFs” – the latter being a reference to close ally Israel and perhaps the Saudis as well.

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    Days prior the US flew two nuclear-capable B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf in a strong deterrence message to Tehran’s leaders. Zarif slammed the move and had for the first time referenced a “plot” to “fabricate” a pretext for war.

    It appears Iran thinks this will take the form of more attacks on the US Embassy in Baghdad, or perhaps against bases with a strong American presence in other parts of Iraq.

    Both sides are poised with fingers on the trigger in anticipation of a provocation by the other side in an intensifying standoff which could very easily escalate into the very conflict both hope to avoid. 

    Via Bloomberg

    However, there’s little doubt that some elements among both Israel’s leadership and the US national security establishment would like to see enough escalation for the US to respond with force on some level, which would certainly further hinder any future Biden efforts toward restoring the nuclear deal with Iran.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 19:00

  • How One Bad Oil Bet Sparked A Global Trading Disaster
    How One Bad Oil Bet Sparked A Global Trading Disaster

    Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

    By now we are all keenly aware of the near-devastating impact that the novel coronavirus has had on oil markets and the fossil fuel industry around the world. (If this is news to you, what rock do you live under and is there room for one more?) But while a lot of the narrative here in the West has been about the historic oil price crash in what some are now referring to as Black April, the oil trading catastrophe actually started much earlier and can largely be traced back to the bad bet of just one man, Singapore’s commodities tycoon Lim Oon Kuin. 

    The story of the oil market instability that ripped through Asia starting in China is not so much one of struggling oil companies, but a story of banking – that unsexy, behind-the-scenes sector that all too often gets none of the headlines and all of the control. It started way back in January, when most of us were just starting to gain some awareness of a strange and scary illness devastating the Chinese city of Wuhan.

    Lim Oon Kuin, sitting in his office 2,000 miles away in SIngapore, watched as this news unfolded and made a decision. He decided that China would gain control of this epidemic before it turned into a pandemic and began stockpiling fuel, quietly adding to his already vast reserves. It should come as no surprise that that bet didn’t work out. 

    As the coronavirus spread around the world and tanked global crude demand, as well as oil prices, a chain reaction of defaulted loans, was set off in Singapore that is still reverberating in global markets today.

    “Banks tried to recover loans from Lim’s company, Hin Leong Trading Pte, triggering one of the biggest scandals in the oil industry this century,” Bloomberg reported about the bad deal that has left a permanent mark on oil trading.

    “Lim’s empire collapsed, owing $3.5 billion to 23 banks, and the fallout from the debacle is still reverberating into 2021, shaking out large tracts of the vast and often opaque $4 trillion global oil-trading industry.”

    While this may sound like an outright, unmitigated disaster, as with most financial meltdowns, there are winners as well as losers here.

    The losers, as always, are the little guys:

    “hundreds of small trading firms, many of them employing only a handful of people, who will find it expensive, if not impossible, to meet the increased demands for information from banks that have become wary of lending them money.”

    This is to say that the big guys like Trafigura Group and Vitol SA will be gaining business lost by their small competitors, shoring up their oligopoly on trading. They not only benefit from increased confidence from finance companies who have become increasingly risk averse in this environment, they also have the capital to adapt to increased operational costs.

    And, as usual, less developed countries will bear the brunt of the economic fallout from this sea change. As banks become more risk averse, re-prioritize their business models, and scale down, it’s going to impact small companies in small economies the most just while they are struggling with all of the other economic hardships related to this pandemic. In this case, the big banks truly were too big to fail. The same can’t be said for the little guys.

    This is true, of course, for many market sectors, not just commodities trading. Across the world we’re seeing a sweeping consolidation as big companies are able to weather the financial storm of the COVID-19 pandemic and the little ones are folding. Look no further than the main street of your own town: as mom and pop restaurants struggle to make a sale, lines are down the block at the McDonald’s drive thru. As local shops shut down, Amazon becomes ever more of the globalized goliath it already was. 

    More than anything, however, the story of Lim Oon Kuin and his bad oil bet is an object lesson in the butterfly effect and outsized might of the all-too opaque trading sector. His will never be a household name, but the impact of his oil gamble will continue to be felt around the world for years to come. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 18:30

  • America's Hospitals To Publish The Secret Prices On More Than 300 Medical Procedures For 1st Time
    America’s Hospitals To Publish The Secret Prices On More Than 300 Medical Procedures For 1st Time

    President Trump’s health-care policy ambitions didn’t receive much attention from the mainstream media, but as we head into the new year, some of his market-based reforms are starting to become reality.

    One of the most important is a directive requiring the nation’s biggest hospital chains to publish the rates they’ve agreed to charge various insurers. As WSJ explains, after a failed attempt at an appeal, the major hospital operators are saying they will comply with the new rules and make their prices public starting on Friday.

    Suddenly, America’s hospital operators, a $1.2 trillion industry comprising some 6% of the country’s economy, will be subjected to more transparency than they’ve seen in decades. And the Trump Administration policy wonks he pushed the idea are hoping that good ol’ fashioned market dynamics will kick in, and help lower prices across the board.

    Per WSJ, the nation’s largest hospital chains, including publicly traded giants HCA Healthcare, Universal Health Services and Community Health Systems, and national nonprofit chains CommonSpirit Health and Ascension, are planing to comply with new requirements to post pricing. Tenet Healthcare declined to comment.

    Within a week, hospitals will disclose prices for 300 common procedures.

    This is how the system has worked for years: Hospital pricing is negotiated confidentially between hospitals and the employer groups and insurance companies that pay for care.

    Many criticized this system for obscuring market rates and helping drive up the cost of health insurance premiums paid by employers and workers. Rising hospital prices accounted for about one-fifth of the nation’s health spending growth over the last 50 years.

    While groups like the American Hospital Association insist that their members have responsibly shared price information related to health-care premiums and medical bills, others insist that they were long left in the dark about the potentially wide disparities charged among hospitals for the same services.

    Hilariously, the AHA has claimed that the publishing of prices would “confuse” patients. Now that the issue has been settled, the organization’s general counsel tells WSJ: “The AHA continues to believe that the disclosure of privately negotiated rates does nothing to help patients understand what they will actually pay for treatment and will create widespread confusion for them.”

    A wave of consolidation in the hospital space has reportedly caused price growth to accelerate, as the more dominant players exert their newfound market and pricing power.

    Economists who spoke with WSJ said it’s not clear how this transparency will impact the market.

    Michael McWilliams, a Harvard University professor of health-care policy, argues that the transparency won’t do much to change pricing: “So we should not believe that we can fix health-care markets simply by providing more information to consumers. There are many reasons why health-care markets do not function well.”

    But for better or worse, we will learn soon enough.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 18:00

  • 2021: Welcome To Post-Persuasion America
    2021: Welcome To Post-Persuasion America

    Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,

    Welcome to 2021 in post-persuasion America!  

    I first heard this term used by Steve Bannon, architect of the surprising 2016 Trump campaign, in a PBS Frontline documentary titled “America’s Great Divide.” Speaking way back in the pre-Covid days of early 2020, Bannon asserted the information age makes us less curious and willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We have access to virtually all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge and history on devices in our pockets, but the sheer information overload causes us to dig in rather than open up.

    Anyone who wants to change their mind can find a whole universe of alternative viewpoints online, but very few people do (especially beyond a certain age). For Bannon this meant the Trump campaign, and politics generally, was about mobilization rather than persuasion.

    Because we can always find media sources which confirm our perspective and biases – and dismiss those which don’t – the notion of politics by argument or consensus is almost entirely lost. And no matter what our political or cultural perspective, there is someone creating content tailored to suit us as stratified consumers. Thus liberals, conservatives, and people of every other ideological stripe live in vastly different digital media worlds, even when they live in close physical proximity.

    This overwhelming amount of curated and segregated white noise comes at us every day, from 24 hour news to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Idiotic platforms like TikTok and Discord vie with video games for the attention of our children.All of it leaves us numb and exhausted. Our attention spans suffer. We slowly lose our aptitude for deep thinking and serious reading. We attempt to replace wisdom and understanding with data and facts.

    But because information is so abundant and readily available, it becomes worth less and less. Information is cheap, literally.

    For our grandparents, knowledge was analog and came with a price. Gatekeepers, in the form of media, universities, libraries, and bookstores, acted as editors and filters. Walter Cronkite, the most trusted propagandist in America, delivered one version of the news every night. The local newspaper did the same every morning. Even just 30 years ago it was often no easy task, and no small cost, to obtain books and literature not easily found in local or university libraries. 

    If someone today wants to read Austrian economics, for example, (a particular boogeyman of Bannon), they can do so at virtually no cost other than time. They don’t even need to leave home. Their smart phone in their palm holds a lifetime of reading and learning in just this one discipline. No physical books, no college, no tuition, and no librarian required.  

    So why don’t more people do so? The short answer is: most people are beyond persuasion. 

    This does not mean we should surrender to the forces of economic illiteracy, or give up trying to win hearts and minds for political liberty. On the contrary, we should redouble our efforts to cultivate anyone interested in civil society, real economics, markets, property, and peace—especially those under 30. But this is not a numbers game. We should focus on those who can be reached, not some mythical majority.  Our task is to reach some people narrowly and deeply, not a majority of people superficially. We stand in contrast to the white noise, and opposed to the superficiality and anti-intellectualism of our age. Mobilizing the few is far more important and far more effective than foolishly trying to persuade the many. 

    HL Mencken was right about believing in liberty, but not believing in it enough to force it upon anyone. Just as we oppose foreign interventionism, we should stop trying to remake those US cities and states which are beyond help. We need to recognize that tens of millions of Americans are likely beyond persuasion in the direction of sensible political or economic views. Millions more are committed socialists who would readily agree to nationalize whole industries and radically redistribute property. By definition these are unreasonable views, so how does one use persuasion where reason is lacking?

    Post-persuasion America requires us to think about how to separate and unyoke ourselves politically from DC. Our immediate future lies in hard federalism, which dovetails with the soft secession which is happening already as millions of Americans vote with their feet. Mobilization and separation, not persuasion, is the way forward.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 17:30

  • Seven Arrested After Philadelphia Federal Buildings Defaced With Antifa-Related Graffiti
    Seven Arrested After Philadelphia Federal Buildings Defaced With Antifa-Related Graffiti

    Seven people were arrested after a group of “about 50 people, all dressed in black” defaced and vandalized several Federal buildings in Center City Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve.

    The large group was spotted by officers at the Robert Nix Federal building on the 900 block of Market Street, about 5 blocks away from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, where windows had been smashed in, according to ABC Philadelphia

    Police witnessed a 25 year old man throwing a brick through windows before fleeing the scene on foot with another 24 year old man and two 23 year old women. They were all eventually arrested and damage to the building was estimated to be about $3,000 – which we’re going to guess that collectively, between the four of them, they don’t have enough money to make good on.

    The same group of vandals also left “Antifa-related” graffiti at the Federal Detention Center at 7th and Arch streets, near the Ben Franklin Bridge. 

    Later in the evening, three other people were arrested, including a 25 year old man and two women, aged 22 and 26. Officials said the man was carrying what was likely a molotov cocktail and that the group “had more plans” for the evening. The man had a glass jar with a fuse going into a bottle that had “a strong flammable odor”. He also had plastic container with white powder labeled “Fire Starter.”

    Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Mike Cram said: “During a search, they recovered Molotov cocktails and some other devices which have not been identified.”

    But our take is that the real crime was a couple of nerds in their 20’s “drawlin” just to impress the women they were with. We’re sure that after the Philadelphia PD lets them out of their holding cells, it’ll be back to Xbox, Cheez-Doodles and Mountain Dew in mom’s basement – while, of course, romanticizing the story about the one day they “fought for freedom” they’ll no doubt be telling for years. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 17:00

  • Police Keep Secret List Of Kids With Bad Grades Labelling Them "Potential Criminals"
    Police Keep Secret List Of Kids With Bad Grades Labelling Them “Potential Criminals”

    Authored by Matt Agorist via The Free Thought Project,

    In the ostensible land of the free, we are told that all people are presumed innocent until proven guilty by their peers. To those who’ve been paying attention however, we know that “innocent until proven guilty” is a farce into today’s police state. If you doubt this assertion, you need only look at the data to see that a whopping 74% of people in jails across the country – have not been convicted of a crime. 

    While it is true that many of these folks are awaiting trial for crimes they did commit, there are innocent people behind bars for the sole reason that they cannot afford bail. A free country — who claims to protect the rights of citizens — should not be keeping hundreds of thousands of presumed innocent people in cages, yet this is the status quo.

    A recent report from the Tampa Bay Times shows just how determined the American police state is to guarantee an assembly line of otherwise entirely innocent people to continue this process. Police in Florida are targeting children in an attempt to label them as criminals at a young age — despite the children being entirely innocent.

    The Pasco sheriff’s office has a secret list of students it believes could “fall into a life of crime” based on ridiculous standards like their grades.

    By these standards, people like Thomas Edison, one of the most successful inventors in human history, could’ve been labeled a criminal after he was kicked out of school at age 12 for being poor at math and unable to concentrate.

    Steven Spielburg, the famous movie producer, may have been labelled a criminal as well after he temporarily dropped out of high school only to return to be put in a “special ed” class.

    Kids often make poor choices when they are younger and these choices should never put them on some police watch list or criminal database. This is nothing short of “pre-crime” tactics that ultimately lead to segregation of dystopian societies based on ratings from the state.

    Nevertheless, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office uses data from the Pasco County Schools district and the state Department of Children and Families to compile this very list from middle and high schools who they think will turn out to be criminals.

    According to the Tampa Bay Times, the sheriff’s office defended the tactics and said its data-sharing practices with the school district goes back 20 years and are intended to keeping school campuses safe. Only a juvenile intelligence analyst and the school resource officers have access to the information, it said.

    The department says they use this information to help troubled kids, but the parents of these kids have no idea that police are surveilling their children to potentially label them as future criminals.

    “These programs, in conjunction with the School District’s Early Warning System, provides recommendations to community or school based programs or resources, and mentorship to those who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, something academically proven to lead the possibility of increased victimization, mental health concerns and other aspects,” a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

    School officials explained that they didn’t even realize this child surveillance was happening.

    School District Superintendent Kurt Browning and the principals of two high schools told the newspaper they were unaware the sheriff’s office was using school data to identify kids who might become criminals.

    “We have an agreement with the Sheriff’s Office,” Browning said in a statement. “That relationship has been strengthened in the wake of the tragedy at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, and that includes processes for a two-way sharing of information that could save lives and result in timely interventions with students who are at risk.”

    The program, called the Early Warning System tracks students’ grades, attendance and behavior. If a student was a victim of abuse or witnessed abuse, this increases their chances of police labelling them a criminal.

    What qualifies for an “at risk” designation could be anything from getting a “D” on a report card to missing school more than three times in a quarter, according to the program’s manual. Other factors include witnessing domestic violence, having a parent in prison and being the victim of abuse or neglect.

    The sheriff’s office then compiles this information — combined with grades and other data sets — and puts it into a system that scores children in 16 categories. The unwitting children are then each assigned a label: On Track, At Risk, Off-Track or Critical.

    Hundreds of children are on this list.

    The sheriff’s office denies that the list is used to label kids as criminals, and claims it is instead used to identify kids at risk for victimization, truancy, self-harm and substance abuse. As the Times reports, however, future criminal behavior is the only designation on the list and the office had a hard time proving anything else:

    But the intelligence manual — an 82-page document that school resource officers and other deputies are required to read — doesn’t mention those other risks. Instead, in five separate places, it describes efforts to pinpoint kids who are likely to become criminals.

    The office could not provide any documents instructing school resource officers to interpret the list another way.

    The idea of cops spying on children in an effort to predict future criminal behavior is chilling. Thankfully, the Tampa Bay Times’ report has shed some much needed light on the practice.

    “Can you imagine having your kid in that county and they might be on a list that says they may become a criminal?’ Linnette Attai, a consultant works with student privacy laws, told the Times. “And you have no way of finding out if they are on that list? This is a district that is sending millions of dollars to the sheriff of Pasco County to target its students as criminals.”

    Indeed, this is worse than minority report.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 16:30

  • Iran's President Rouhani Accused Of Threatening Trump With Assassination
    Iran’s President Rouhani Accused Of Threatening Trump With Assassination

    Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani is being accused of threatening President Trump with assassination in a speech he gave this past week ahead of the one-year anniversary of the killing of popular Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3rd, 2020 in Baghdad.

    It all appears to be based on a mistranslation from the Farsi of Rouhani’s words while he addressed a cabinet session on Wednesday. In a widely shared article The Washington Times quoted the Iranian president as saying, “Trump will soon be dead.” The report claimed that this was a clear death threat, also given Rouhani made a comparison to the Saddam Hussein’s demise. 

    But Iran’s leaders are now slamming this as but more “anti-Iran bigotry” designed to escalate tensions as a pretext for preemptive military action against the Islamic Republic. Tehran has called The Washington Times report a deliberate mistranslation based in “fake news”. 

    “Cowardice in assassinating foreign leaders is a US-Israeli trademark; NOT Iranian,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzade tweeted Friday evening, strenuously denying all accusations of an Iranian plot to target the US president. 

    “@WashTimes should know better than to publish #FakeNews & spread anti-Iran bigotry -even though it has featured PAID content by the outlaw MeK terrorist cult,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman added. “Your readers deserve better!”

    This “misunderstanding” comes after past weeks of Iran’s civilian and military leadership vowing future “vengeance” for the assassination of Gen. Soleimani, who headed the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

    Here’s how Iranian media presented (presumably correctly) Rouhani’s words translated into English

    Addressing a cabinet session on Wednesday, Rouhani said: “I said it once, and I repeat it, Trump was like Saddam. Saddam imposed eight years of war against us and he was overthrown, and Trump imposed three years of economic war against us and he will be overthrown in the next few weeks, not just from office but from [political] life.”

    “One of the effects of the stupid and disgraceful act of assassinating Martyr Soleimani was that Trumpism ended, and in a few days, this murder’s mandate is drawing to an end and he will go down into the dustbin of history,” Rouhani added.

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    This isn’t the first time that a mistranslation of the words of Iran’s leadership had led to increased tensions. 

    In a 2005 speech then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously declared Iran’s goal was to “wipe Israel off the map”. However, this has since been subject of fierce debate and was largely debunked

    Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project noted in 2007 that Ahmadinejad “never… uttered the words ‘map,’ ‘wipe out,’ or even ‘Israel'” in his statement.  Rather, he argued, the translation should have been that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”  (Both The Washington Post and The Atlantic came up with similarly variant translations.)

    This is a key difference, Mr. Norouzi argued, because Ahmadinejad used the “vanish from the page of time” idiom elsewhere in his speech: when describing the governments of the Shah of Iran, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein.  While war and revolution were involved in the three regimes’ collapse, none of them, Norouzi argued, were “wiped off the map.”  Rather, they underwent regime change.  This suggests in turn, he said, that Ahmadinejad was calling for regime change in Israel, not nuclear genocide.  Juan Cole, another critic of the speech’s translation, compared Ahmadinejad’s statement to Reagan-era calls for the end of the Soviet Union.

    Critics of the mistranslation also point out the former president had been referencing Zionism as a political movement as well.

    The “wipe Israel of the map” words have been used endlessly by hawks arguing for preemptive action against Iran to prevent their achieving nuclear weapons capabilities. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 16:00

  • Fauci Says Mandatory COVID Vaccines Are "On The Table", Especially For Travel, School
    Fauci Says Mandatory COVID Vaccines Are “On The Table”, Especially For Travel, School

    Anthony Fauci is being broadly slammed after admitting to the New York Times that he publicly lowballed his estimate of the Covid-19 herd immunity threshold, but, as Holman Jenkins writes in WSJ, it’s ludicrously late in the day to discover that “messaging” has been going on.

    Official lying about things large and small has been a staple of COVID politics: the letters to college students threatening them with arrest if they don’t quarantine, the interstate travel “bans” that were never enforced, the death counts that swept up anybody who died of any cause while infected with COVID.

    Only lately has this reality snuck into public rhetoric as leaders in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere started admitting that their moves are more about “signaling” than any practical effect.

    And now, as The Western Journal’s Kipp Jones reports, Fauci is perhaps up to his “signaling” best once again, saying in an interview that the COVID-19 vaccines becoming mandatory in some cases is “on the table” with regard to international travel, or even in some localities to allow a return to in-person learning at schools.

    Speaking to Newsweek in an interview that was published on Friday, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spoke on the potential for so-called immunity passports, stating, “Anything is on the table. Anything is possible, of course.”

    Fauci, who presumed president-elect Joe Biden announced last month would serve as the chief medical adviser in a Biden administration, Forbes reported, signaled he would help to form policy for which cases vaccines might become mandatory. But he doesn’t foresee the federal government mandating the vaccines broadly.

    “It’s not up to me to make a decision. But these are all things that will be discussed [under the Biden administration],” he told Newsweek.

    Fauci stated with regard to national health matters “we almost never mandate things federally.”

    “I’m not sure [the COVID vaccine is] going to be mandatory from a central government standpoint, like federal government mandates,” he said.

    “But there are going to be individual institutions that I’m sure are going to mandate it.”

    “For example, influenza and Hepatitis B vaccines are mandated at many hospitals. Here at the NIH [National Institutes of Health], I would not be allowed to see patients if I didn’t get vaccinated every year with flu and get vaccinated once with Hepatitis [B]. I have to get certified every year … if I didn’t, I couldn’t see patients,” he said.

    As far as mandatory vaccinations for schools go, Fauci said he foresees those decisions being made “at the state level and city level.”

    “A citywide school system might require it in some cities but not other cities. And that’s what I mean by things not being done centrally but locally,” he added.

    He also speculated some countries might make proof of a vaccine required prior to travel. Israel, for example, will issue the so-called immunity passports to citizens traveling abroad. Those passports could allow those who have them to avoid COVID testing upon arrival at their destinations.

    The U.S. could issue similar immunization passports under a Biden administration and potentially at the recommendation of Fauci.

    Also, with regard to confusing information about the vaccines which might require those inoculated to remain socially distant and masked, Fauci said that is because it is not yet known if being vaccinated can prevent people from passing along the coronavirus to others.

    “We do not know if the vaccines that prevent clinical disease also prevent infection. They very well might, but we have not proven that yet,” he told Newsweek.

    “That’s the reason why I keep saying that even though you get vaccinated, we should not eliminate, at all, public health measures like wearing masks because we don’t know yet what the effect [of the vaccine] is on transmissibility.”

    On the subject of the unknowns about both the coronavirus and now the vaccine, Fauci said “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

    A day before his Newsweek interview, Fauci predicted a return to “normality” by the fall of this year during an interview on MSNBC.

    “If we do it correctly, hopefully, as we get into the end of the summer, the beginning of the fall of 2021, we can start to approach some degree of normality,” he said.

    However, we return to Jenkins’ WSJ op-ed for the reality of a return to normality. At year-end, pundits everywhere sermonized over the lessons of the pandemic: the need to change our relationship with nature, the need for more disease surveillance, etc.

    Most of it won’t matter in the least when natural selection throws up another disease with the properties of Covid-19. The virus wasn’t just transmitted easily; crucially, its effects were mild enough that for billions of humans the cost of quashing it outweighed the personal benefit.

    This rock-bottom truth our uninsightful media spent much of 2020 trying not to understand. Worse, it tried to make this truth go away by frightening or morally bullying people into behaviors at odds with perceived self-interest.

    This proved to be the dead end it usually does. We need to smarten up. Limited social distancing to protect the most vulnerable is the only kind likely to prove sustainable over time.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 15:30

  • Portland Mayor Turns On Antifa, Vows To Battle 'Lawlessness And Anarchy'
    Portland Mayor Turns On Antifa, Vows To Battle ‘Lawlessness And Anarchy’

    In July, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler thought he was in control. As BLM protests raged across the country in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who died while in police custody in late May, Wheeler decided to mingle with protesters – a mix of BLM activists and Antifa.

    Yet, instead of a rockstar crowd-surfing moment or whatever fantasy he envisioned, Wheeler was mocked as he gagged on tear gas, until he was forced to flee.

    Two weeks later, Wheeler had changed his tone – calling protesters who attempted to burn down a police station with people inside “attempted murderers,” as the city saw its most violent month in decadeswhich came after the Portland City Council slashed the police budget as part of an early July push to defund the police. The move forced the city to make drastic cuts to its Gun Violence Reduction Team as lawless anarchists destroyed property throughout the city.

    The loss “forced us into a position where we have to really look at what resources we can bring to bear, absent that structure that we had with the Gun Violence Reduction Team,” said Police Chief Chuck Lovell in August.

    In December, Portland police were attacked in broad daylight after Antifa erected a new ‘autonomous zone.’ Police were seen being struck by fists, fists, and even bricks hurled through the air “in broad daylight,” as the AP described further that “The violence happened in broad daylight.”

    Now, (and with the 2020 election in the rearview mirror) Wheeler has had enough in the wake of a New Year’s Eve riot.

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    In a New Year’s press conference, the Portland Mayor admits that efforts to compromise with Antifa have failed, and he’s now committing to pushing back – with his limited police force.

    My good faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence, and even scorn, from radical Antifa and anarchists,” said Wheeler.

    “It will be necessary to use additional tools, and to push the limits of the tools we already have, to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end,” he added. “Lawlessness and anarchy come at great expense, and with great risk to the future of our community. It’s time to push back harder against those who are set on destroying our community, and to take more risks in fighting lawlessness.”

    “I condemn anyone who engages in violence or criminal destruction no matter what their ideology.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 15:05

  • Facebook Shuts Down Page For GOP Senate Campaigns Just Before Georgia Runoffs
    Facebook Shuts Down Page For GOP Senate Campaigns Just Before Georgia Runoffs

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    Facebook shut down a fundraising page for Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) just days before voters head to the polls to decide between the Republicans and their Democratic challengers.

    The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) runs the Georgia Battleground Fund, a joint fundraising committee for the NRSC and the campaigns for Loeffler and Perdue.

    According to a screenshot from the committee, Facebook alerted them that the page for the fund was disabled “for policy violation.”

    The page allegedly violated a policy against unacceptable business practices.

    “We don’t allow ads that promote products, services, schemes, or offers using deceptive or misleading practices, including those meant to mislead or scam people out of money or personal information,” the alert said.

    “Big Tech is at it again,” the NRSC said in a statement.

    “This is unacceptable with only four days to Election Day.”

    A Facebook spokesperson told news outlets that what happened was a mistake.

    “An automated error caused this ad account to be disabled,” the spokesperson said.

    “The account has since been restored.”

    The Jan. 5 runoff elections could determine which party controls the Senate.

    Republicans hold a 50-48 edge in the upper chamber in the next Congress. If Democrats win both runoffs and the White House, they’d control the Senate by virtue of the tiebreaking vote the vice president, acting as the president of the Senate, can cast.

    Democrats maintained a majority in the House of Representatives, though their edge got slimmer.

    Loeffler is being challenged by pastor Raphael Warnock while Perdue is facing filmmaker Jon Ossoff.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/02/2021 – 14:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Today’s News 2nd January 2021

  • Ex-CIA Officer: The Dark Past Of Biden's Nominee For National Intelligence Director
    Ex-CIA Officer: The Dark Past Of Biden’s Nominee For National Intelligence Director

    Authored by John Kiriakou via ConsortiumNews.com,

    Former acting CIA Director Mike Morell, who has disingenuously argued for years that he had nothing to do with the agency’s torture program, but who continued to defend it, has taken himself out of the running to be President-elect Joe Biden’s new CIA director.

    The decision is a victory for the peace group Code Pink, which spearheaded the Stop Morell movement, and it’s a great thing for all Americans.  Now, though, we have to turn our attention to Biden’s nominee to be director of national intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines.

    Haines is certainly qualified on paper to lead the Intelligence Community. A longtime Biden aide, she has the president-elect’s confidence. But that’s not good enough. Haines is exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be in a position of authority in intelligence. She is the kind of neoliberal intelligence apologist whom so many of us have opposed for so many years.  Don’t just take my word for it, though.  Look at her record.

    Haines first began working for Biden when she served as deputy general counsel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was its chairman.  When Biden became vice president in 2009, Haines moved to the State Department, where she was the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs.  After only a year, she moved to the White House, where she became deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs, the National Security Council’s chief attorney.

    That’s quite a position. What it means was that her job was to legally justify President Barack Obama’s decisions on such intelligence issues as drone strikes and whether to release the CIA Torture Report.  She served there under CIA Director John Brennan.  Obama apparently liked the job she did for him because in 2013, he named Haines deputy director of the CIA (DD/CIA).

    Haines was the first woman to be named DD/CIA, and she served again under Brennan, who proved time and again that he was no fan of congressional oversight. Haines’s attitude was similar to Brennan’s: The CIA was going to do what it was going to do, and she would make no apologies for it.

    There were three controversial areas where Haines made a name for herself and for which she should have to answer in a confirmation hearing: The CIA’s refusal to release the Senate Torture Report and the decision to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer system; the CIA’s decision to not punish those officers who carried out the hack and who killed and tortured prisoners beyond even what the Justice Department said was permissible; and the government’s drone program, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians were killed.

    Avril Haines, at center facing, with President Barack Obama at right, and other aides, July 13, 2015. Via White House/Flickr

    Haines’ Torture Cover-Up

    You may recall that in December 2014, the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a heavily redacted version of the executive summary of the committee’s torture report, the result of years of investigation using primary-source CIA documents. The executive summary was about 525 pages long, just a fraction of the nearly 6,000-page complete report. And the release of the 525 pages was the result of protracted negotiations between the committee and the CIA.

    In the end, the public heard a few details of what the CIA’s prisoners underwent at secret prisons around the world. But the full story was never made public. It likely never will be. And that’s thanks to Avril Haines.

    Earlier that year, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor in a very unusual display and accused CIA Director Brennan of spying on her committee’s staff members. Specifically, Feinstein said that CIA officers had hacked into the Senate’s computers to see what it was that committee investigators were focusing on.

    The hacking was unprecedented, and Feinstein referred it to the Justice Department for prosecution.  Attorney General Eric Holder, however, chose not to pursue the case.  Brennan took responsibility for ordering the hacking and he made no apologies for it. But his top aide, his assistant, his legal adviser through the episode was Avril Haines. She has never explained her decisions in support of the hack.

    Furthermore, it was Haines who overruled the CIA’s inspector general and who decided not to punish those CIA officers who hacked into the committee’s computers, or those CIA officers who had gone over and above what the Justice Department had authorized in its “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” program, killing and maiming prisoners.

    In the end, not only were no CIA officers punished, but the leaders and most prominent officers in the torture program were promoted, in some cases into some of the most sought-after positions in the CIA.  I know this to be true. I worked for them.

    Haines and Drones

    One area in which Haines has not received a great deal of media coverage has been her role in the drone program.  When Haines was the National Security Council’s top lawyer, Brennan was the keeper of the so-called kill list. It was Haines who took phone calls in the middle of the night asking her for legal authority — permission — to launch missile attacks from drones.  She has never answered for her actions.

    Now is the time for Americans to put down their collective foot on Biden’s national security appointees.  Morell was utterly inappropriate for a senior position in the Biden national security apparatus. Haines is, too. She has, very simply, committed crimes against humanity.  I’m under no illusions that Biden is a progressive or that he will differ greatly from previous Democratic presidents on national security.

    But I do believe that wrong is wrong.  Avril Haines is exactly the kind of person we don’t want running the Intelligence Community.  This is the moment for opponents of her nomination to lobby senators on the Intelligence Committee. There’s still time to defeat her.

    * * *

    John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 23:25

  • Queens Neighborhood Terrorized By Hyperaggressive Squirrels
    Queens Neighborhood Terrorized By Hyperaggressive Squirrels

    Between the devastating springtime COVID-19 outbreak to the protests, violence and looting inspired by the killing of George Floyd, New York City has had a difficult year.

    But as 2020 draws to a close, residents of quiet Rego Park, best known to many Americans as the neighborhood from “King of Queens”, are facing off against a fresh horror: hyperaggressive squirrels.

    According to the local Patch website, at least five people in the neighborhood have been bitten or scratched by squirrels on 65th Road and 65th Drive within the last month. One woman who spoke to the reporter was forced to seek treatment at a nearby hospital for squirrel bites and scratches after one such attack, which began when she opened her front door to let in a team of movers, and the squirrel lunged at her.

    Here’s more from Patch:

    They include Micheline Frederick, who had to go to the hospital after a squirrel attack so vicious that it left her hands and arms covered with bites – and her snowy front yard stained with blood. “He was angry and he was vicious,” Frederick told Patch of the Dec. 21 attack.

    “This was more than just a bite. This thing was fighting with me.” Frederick said she was holding her front door open for two movers when the squirrel ran up to her and scurried up her leg. She threw the squirrel off of her, but it pounced back onto her and started biting and scratching her.

    Residents have reportedly sought help from 911 and filed complaints with 311, the citywide hotline for quality of living complaints, to no avail. Though rabies is reportedly extremely rare in squirrels (the city apparently hasn’t recorded a single case of rabies in squirrels since the early 1990s) the victim interviewed by Patch said she was tested for the disease as a precaution due to the number of bites.

    The attack left her pinky finger “pretty chewed up” and her hand bruised black and blue for days, she said. She had at least eight bites, prompting physicians at a nearby urgent care center to send her to the emergency room for rabies shots. “Because I had so many, they wanted to be safe rather than sorry,” she said. The NYC Department of Health says squirrels are rarely infected with rabies. Since the agency started tracking New York City rabies cases in 1992, it has never identified a case of a squirrel with the disease. With rabies being an unlikely, but not impossible, explanation, Rego Park residents say the city has declined to intervene.

    With the city presumably occupied with other more pressing efforts like fining restaurant owners and other small business owners, the people of Rego Park have mostly been left on their own.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 22:50

  • Deception And Suppression: A Year Of Beijing's Virus Coverup
    Deception And Suppression: A Year Of Beijing’s Virus Coverup

    Authored by Nicole Hao and Annie Wu via The Epoch Times,

    Around this time last year, Chinese authorities acknowledged that an “unknown” form of pneumonia was spreading in the city of Wuhan.

    But it was already too late. What we now know as COVID-19 had already broken out across the city and possibly beyond.

    In the months that followed, authorities bungled prevention measures and covered up the number of infections. They enacted travel restrictions weeks too late – as Chinese travelers seeded outbreaks around the world – and prevented international researchers from visiting the country to investigate the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19.

    A global pandemic ensued that has claimed millions of lives, brought economies to a halt, and disrupted people’s livelihoods.

    People wearing facemasks as they wait at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan on Jan. 24, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

    As the virus spread around the world, the regime in Beijing began an aggressive campaign to spread disinformation claiming that the virus didn’t originate in China; that propaganda offensive continues today.

    Meanwhile, the regime punished citizens who dared to publicize information that didn’t fit its narrative: that authoritarian control had succeeded in containing the disease.

    But in interviews with The Epoch Times, citizens tell of a different reality: draconian lockdown measures have deprived them of basic rights, while authorities continue to suppress information about new clusters around the country.

    As a new wave now hits Beijing and parts of northeastern China, locals are once again kept in the dark as authorities seal off neighborhood after neighborhood.

    Residents wait for groceries delivered to an entrance of a sealed residential compound, after new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Dalian city, Liaoning Province, China, on July 23, 2020. (China Daily via REUTERS)

    Coverup Culture

    China’s initial response was rife with missteps.

    Wuhan health authorities only confirmed the outbreak on Dec. 31, 2019, after whistleblower doctors had shared information on social media.

    Government documents leaked to The Epoch Times have since revealed that COVID-19 cases may have surfaced months earlier. Wuhan hospital data shows that patients were hospitalized with symptoms similar to COVID-19 as early as September 2019, while several people died in October 2019 from pneumonia, lung infections, and other COVID-19-like conditions.

    In the early weeks of the epidemic, the Chinese regime continually downplayed the crisis and denied that the disease could be transmitted among humans. The World Health Organization repeated Beijing’s claims, and would wait until Jan. 30 to declare the outbreak a global health emergency.

    Chinese authorities didn’t implement containment measures until Jan. 23, with a lockdown on Wuhan. However, by then, 5 million people had already left Wuhan, amid a typical peak season for domestic and international travel for the Lunar New Year holiday.

    Chinese officials in protective suits checking on an elderly man wearing a facemask who collapsed and died on a street near a hospital in Wuhan, China, on Jan. 30, 2020. (HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

    Tight Control

    Chinese authorities soon adopted a so-called “fire blanket style” procedure to contain the disease domestically.

    Once a person is diagnosed with COVID-19, the local government detects the patient’s recent close contacts and the places he has recently visited, via China’s ubiquitous surveillance camera system. One internal Chinese government document obtained by The Epoch Times shows that more than a million people nationwide were being closely monitored for their risk of contracting COVID-19 during the month of May.

    During lockdowns, people are prevented from leaving their homes. Usually, authorities mandate that only one person per household can go outside every two to three days, and can only spend an hour or two to shop for basic necessities.

    Suspected patients are isolated at government-designated quarantine centers, including some that reportedly had unsanitary conditions and a lack of medical care.

    In areas with serious outbreaks, such as Wuhan, Suifenhe, Beijing, and Shanghai, authorities created makeshift hospitals with only wall partitions separating one patient from another. Some complained that the hospitals were “like death camps.”

    Patients with mild symptoms of the COVID-19 are resting at night in the makeshift hospital set up in a sports stadium in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 18, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    A Year of Outbreaks

    Despite the containment measures, new clusters continue to emerge throughout China.

    Authorities usually require mass nucleic acid testing soon after. During an outbreak in October in the eastern city of Qingdao, authorities claimed that after testing all 11 million residents, they found zero new infections.

    International experts and local residents view such glowing accounts with skepticism. A day after authorities made that announcement, some residents told The Epoch Times that they hadn’t yet received their test results.

    Local governments also continued to cover up the scale of new outbreaks. The Epoch Times has on several occasions obtained internal government data that revealed figures much higher than what had been publicly reported, such as in Beijing, and ShandongJilin, and Heilongjiang provinces.

    Governments typically shared little information with citizens. In one classified document issued in February, Chinese authorities explicitly stated that epidemic-related documents were to be treated as top secret.

    “During the time period of combating the virus, all types of urgent documents, urgent notices, urgent events… internally shared sensitive information, and any information that the [government] leaders haven’t approved to disclose to the public” would be considered state secrets, the document said.

    Chinese students hold a memorial for Dr. Li Wenliang, who was the whistleblower of the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, and caused the doctor’s death in that city, outside the UCLA campus in Westwood, Calif., on Feb. 15, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)

    Disinformation

    The Chinese regime switched tactics around March, as countries around the world were responding to their own outbreaks.

    On March 12, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, claimed in a Twitter post that the CCP virus was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army. His baseless claim, and other similar accusations by Chinese diplomats, sparked widespread condemnation by Western officials.

    On Nov. 29, the Chinese state-run Global Times published an article suggesting that the virus originated on the Indian subcontinent. Recently, Chinese state-run media misquoted scientists’ research to claim that the virus originated in Italy.

    The Chinese regime and its media have also been promoting the theory that local COVID-19 outbreaks stemmed from frozen food supply chains. Authorities claim they detected virus strains on imported frozen salmon, shrimp, pork, beef, and other foods from a range of countries, such as Norway, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Germany.

    The WHO states that the possibility of infection from contact with food and food packaging is slim. Disease experts also say it’s unlikely the virus can spread through frozen food.

    Residents wait to be tested for the COVID-19 in Qingdao, eastern China’s Shandong Province on Oct. 12, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    Censorship

    From the beginning, Wuhan authorities silenced whistleblower doctors such as Ai Fen and Li Wenliang, who were first to note on social media that their hospitals were admitting patients with a new, potentially contagious, pneumonia-like disease. They were summoned by police and reprimanded.

    Li, who later died of the disease himself, has been described as a martyr.

    Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi, and other citizen journalists who documented the Wuhan outbreak, including visits to local hospitals and funeral homes, have gone missing. Fang and Chen’s whereabouts remain unknown.

    On Dec. 28, Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison, becoming the first known citizen journalist to be sentenced for providing first-hand information about the epidemic in China.

    Netizens also reported being detained by local police after they posted outbreak-related information on social media.

    Internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times showed that propaganda authorities heavily suppressed information about the pandemic that didn’t align with official narratives.

    Chinese security personnel wearing protective masks march through Tiananmen Square in Beijing on April 4, 2020. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

    The populace is getting fed up with the way local authorities are handling the situation.

    In March, residents under lockdown in Wuhan heckled a group of Chinese officials touring the area, shouting complaints from their apartments, such as, “It’s fake, everything’s fake!”

    Recently in the northeastern city of Dalian, college students were barred from leaving campus as the city reported new COVID-19 cases. They complained about the suddenly imposed quarantine.

    “I believe if the Dalian government continues to insist on not allowing students to leave, students could become restless. They could even join together to resist,” one student said.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 22:15

  • Iran Puts Maritime Forces On Higher Alert As Top General Warns 'Ready To Respond' To US Pressure
    Iran Puts Maritime Forces On Higher Alert As Top General Warns ‘Ready To Respond’ To US Pressure

    While populations across the globe rang in the new year and are now enjoying the holiday, wondering what 2021 will hold, tensions in the Persian Gulf between the US and Iran just grew hotter.

    CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr reports Iran’s forces in the Persian Gulf are now on high alert, possibly in preparation for some level of either offensive or defensive action.

    “Iranian maritime forces in the Persian Gulf raised readiness levels in last 48 hours,” Starr writes based on a US defense official. But it remains that it’s “not clear if moves are ‘defensive’ because expect US attack, or are signals Iran preparing for operations in the Gulf against the US,” the official said. 

    Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards commander Major General Hossein Salami, via AFP.

    The Pentagon is bracing for many “unknowns” ahead of Sunday, which marks the one year anniversary of the killing of IRGC Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani by US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport. Days ago the US flew a pair of B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf as a “warning” aimed at deterring any Iranian attempt at retaliation for the Jan, 3rd, 2020 death of the popular Iranian general.

    Threats and counter-threats have continued to be issued throughout the week, with the latest coming from Iran’s military on Friday, according to the AP:

    The top commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard [Gen. Hossein Salami] said Friday that his country was fully prepared to respond to any U.S. military pressure as tensions between Tehran and Washington remain high in the waning days of President Donald Trump’s administration.

    So essentially both sides are poised with fingers on the trigger in anticipation of a provocation by the other side in an intensifying standoff which could very easily escalate into the very conflict both hope to avoid. Iran’s Foreign Ministry has further charged that Trump is attempting to generate a provocation or “pretext for war” – specifically with the prior B-52 flyover.

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    Gen. Salami said at a commemoration event Friday at Tehran University that “Today, we have no problem, concern or apprehension toward encountering any powers. We will give our final words to our enemies on the battlefield.

    Iran’s official media accounts in English have also been active ahead of the Soleimani death anniversary under the hashtag #WillNeverForgetWillNeverForgive.

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    Meanwhile there’s been mixed signals out of Washington: on the one hand there’s been clear and aggressive ‘deterrence’ messaging such as the latest bomber flyover, but on the other yesterday the Pentagon announced it is bringing the USS Nimitz supercarrier home from the gulf region.

    As the AP explained of the move: “Sending the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, home to the U.S. West Coast would seem at odds with the idea that a show of force is needed to deter Iran. This might reflect a split within the defense establishment on whether Iran poses a heightened threat to strike in the waning days of the Trump administration.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 21:40

  • Boycotts, Bans, & Book-Burning: 8 Outrageous Incidents Of Ivy League Leftism In 2020
    Boycotts, Bans, & Book-Burning: 8 Outrageous Incidents Of Ivy League Leftism In 2020

    Authored by Benjamin Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

    The Ivy League is a group of the United States’ eight most prestigious universities. The schools produce many of the nation’s future political leaders, businessmen, scientists, and engineers.

    The Ivy League is also rife with leftism, as Campus Reform reported throughout 2020.

    1. Harvard University

    Students at Harvard asked administrators to ban Trump administration alumni from serving as faculty members, teaching fellows, and guest speakers.

    An open letter to Harvard administrators said that although Harvard usually hires officials from outgoing presidential administrations, students are “extremely concerned” about the Trump administration’s impacts on “fundamental democratic institutions.”

    The students request a “system of accountability” for “high-level political appointees and Trump administration consultants before they are invited as fellows or to teach or speak on campus.”

    Harvard, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s second highest-ranked university.

    2. Cornell University

    Students at Cornell University can use their status as a “person of color” to exempt themselves from the university’s flu vaccine mandate.

    “Students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or as a Person of Color (BIPOC) may have personal concerns about fulfilling the Compact requirements based on historical injustices and current events,” said Cornell Health’s vaccine requirement FAQ.

    Cornell, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s eighteenth highest-ranked university.

    3. Yale University

    The U.S. Department of Justice concluded an investigation into Yale, stating that it illegally discriminates against White and Asian-American applicants in its undergraduate admissions process in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    White and Asian-American applicants have a one-tenth to one-fourth chance of admission compared with African-Americans who have the same or similar qualifications, according to the Justice Department.

    Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Eric Dreiband stated that it is “past time for American institutions to recognize that all people should be treated with decency and respect and without unlawful regard to the color of their skin.”

    Yale, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s fourth highest-ranked university.

    4. University of Pennsylvania

    Students at the University of Pennsylvania boycotted classes on Election Day in the interest of “wellness.” However, they also used the boycott to push demands oriented toward defunding the school’s police department.

    One student told Campus Reform that canceling classes on election day is “unreasonable all around,” since it teaches students that “if you don’t get your way in something or don’t like the result of something, you can just avoid your responsibilities.”

    The end result is a “breed of entitled citizens,” the student added.

    Penn, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s eighth highest-ranked university.

    5. Dartmouth College

    More than 1,000 students, alumni, and faculty at Dartmouth signed a petition demanding that the school dissociate itself from the conservative student newspaper the Dartmouth Review.

    The Review addressed the letter with an editorial entitled “An Overdue Response to the College Jacobins.”

    “It was only a matter of time before the crosshairs would be set on The Review, and in the typical fashion, it manifested in an attempt to stifle rational discourse by appealing to a higher power,” the conservative newspaper stated. “It’s unfortunate that this type of intellectual cowardice has come about on campus, and I would argue that it is antithetical to the pursuits of liberal institutions such as our own wherein debate ought to be fundamental in the search for higher truth. I guess in the post-modern age, truth no longer matters much. Go figure.”

    Dartmouth, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s thirteenth highest-ranked university.

    6. Brown University

    Students at Brown created a “Burn Brown Book,” which contained a progressive wish list that included defunding the police and “free” college.

    Written entirely in memes and slang, the book tells students — who pay nearly $60,000 in tuition each year — how to “dismantle” the institution.

    A series of articles shows readers the necessary information to successfully carry out their insurrection. One essay argues that Brown should adopt Critical Muslim Studies and Critical Hawai’ian Studies departments as valuable “decolonial disciplines that unsettle white, liberal, secularism as normative.”

    7. Princeton University

    The Daily Princetonian — Princeton University’s student newspaper — published an editorial encouraging the university to punish “racist speech.”

    “For too long, White people, and particularly White men, in this country and on this campus, have held the power to decide what constitutes acceptable speech and action,” says the piece. “They have consistently deemed racist, and particularly anti-Black, fictions acceptable.”

    The Daily Princetonian suggests “anti-racist training for those who transgress the harassment policy.”

    8. Columbia University

    Columbia Law’s Human Rights Institute criticized the Trump administration on its website in a piece entitled “Human Rights Must be at the Top of the Biden Agenda.”

    “The past four years highlight how calculated disregard for human rights at home and abroad disrupts lives, fuels fear and insecurity at our university, and leads to injustice in our communities and around the world,” said the group.

    The group then suggested that the Biden administration undo Trump’s “regressive policies” that inflicted “significant harm.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 21:05

  • Home Depot Ceiling Fans Recalled After Blades Detach, Injuring People, While In Use
    Home Depot Ceiling Fans Recalled After Blades Detach, Injuring People, While In Use

    Home Depot is recalling more than 19,000 ceiling fans after reports that the fan’s blades can detach, fly off and cause “injury or property damage” while in use.

    The product in question is the King of Fans Hampton Bay 54 inch Mara Indoor/Outdoor fan, according to NBC News. Of course, if you’re about to look up and check to see if you have the same fans installed at your house, make sure you turn it off first.

    The company says it has received 47 reports of blades detaching from the fan, “including two reports of the fan blade hitting a consumer and four reports of the blade causing property damage”.

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    The King of Fans said that the decision to recall the fans is voluntary and in cooperation with U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies. 

    The company said in a statement: “The Hampton Bay 54 in. Mara Indoor/Outdoor ceiling fans are being voluntarily recalled in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada. There have been consumer reports that the fan blades on the Hampton Bay 54 in. Mara Indoor/Outdoor Ceiling Fan may detach due to an isolated manufacturing defect with the assembly of the fan blade’s locking clip to the fan flywheel, where one of the two screws retaining the locking clip is not adequately secured to the flywheel. If this occurs, the blade may detach from the fan during use, posing an injury hazard.”

    “On behalf of King of Fans and The Home Depot, we apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you. We take pride in the quality of our products, and the safety of our customers is our priority,” the notice continues – because “sorry we’ve decapitated your and/or your family members” doesn’t quite have a great ring to it.

    The fans were sold exclusively at Home Depot and online from April to October, the article notes. There were about 182,000 fans in the U.S. and 8,800 in Canada in total. Home Depot says about 80,000 of the fans were sold.

    “We’re committed to the safety and quality of our products so we contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission and voluntarily recalled the product and stopped sales when we discovered the issue,” the retailer said.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 20:30

  • 2 Minnesota Lawmakers Say State's COVID-19 Deaths Inaccurate, Demand Nationwide Audit
    2 Minnesota Lawmakers Say State’s COVID-19 Deaths Inaccurate, Demand Nationwide Audit

    Authored by GQ Pan via The Epoch Times,

    Two Minnesota legislators who believe their state’s COVID-19 death count is inaccurate are calling for a nationwide audit to find out how many people died from something other than the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus but were added to the pandemic death totals.

    Republican State Rep. Mary Franson said she has enlisted a team to examine data provided by Minnesota’s health department. Her team allegedly found that COVID-19 was blamed for some deaths clearly not linked to the respiratory disease.

    “We found clear-cut examples from the Minnesota Department of Health’s own files—public records—of suicide, a drowning, an auto accident where the passenger was ejected from the vehicle, we found dementia … and strokes,” Franson said during an interview with Fox News, adding that she was “so shocked at what I found that I just could not keep silent.”

    “The citizens of our country are being led in fear, and that fear is leading them to make irrational decisions based on the governors with their shutdowns,” she added.

    “So we need this audit. We need the truth.”

    Franson was joined by Republican State Sen. Scott Jensen, a practicing physician. Jensen has become the subject of two state probes earlier this year for arguing that the federal and state guidelines on reporting COVID-19 deaths could pressure local authorities to misclassify and inflate their numbers, and that doctors and hospitals are motivated to do so for more health care dollars.

    https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6218807692001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

    “If you could hit a threshold of 161 admissions to your hospital with COVID-19 diagnosis between January and June, you received $77,000 of additional money for each one of those admissions” through the CARES Act, Jensen told Fox News.

    “I don’t think there’s any questions that reverse incentives have been created.”

    In response to the allegations, the Minnesota Department of Health said the way it classifies COVID-19 deaths is consistent with the guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    “We’re absolutely following the national guidance on how we are doing our death reporting from COVID-19,” Infectious Disease Director Kris Ehresmann told Fox News. “If someone had tested positive for COVID and then subsequently died, we would review the death certificate and motor vehicle accident would be the cause of death and so it would not be considered a COVID death.”

    According to the state health officials, more than 413,000 Minnesotans have tested positive for the CCP virus since March and 5,262 people have died. The Health Department reported on Wednesday that 38,284 people across the state have received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 19:55

  • ​​​​​​​"Oh S***!" – Blue Glowing UFO Startles Hawaiian Residents 
    ​​​​​​​”Oh S***!” – Blue Glowing UFO Startles Hawaiian Residents 

    Footage has emerged of an unidentified flying object spotted in the skies over Leeward Oahu, Hawaii, earlier this week. 

    Hawaii News Now says multiple videos show “what appears to be a glowing‚ oblong mass — both in the sky and in the water.” 

    The incident occurred on Tuesday and was immediately reported to law enforcement authorities. Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration were also notified. They said “no aircraft incidents or accidents” were in the region at the time.” 

    “Something is in the sky. What is that?” a resident said in one video. 

    Misitina Sape filmed the blue, glowing UFO and told Hawaii News Now the footage was shot in the late evening near Haleakala Avenue in Nanakuli.

    Minutes later, a woman named Moriah spotted the mysterious flying object passing over Princess Kahanu Estates.

    “I look up and then I was like oh s***!,” she said. “I started calling my husband and them because they were all in the garage. I was like hey. Come look up there. See if you see what I see. They all said yea!.

    “I don’t know what it was. This one was going so fast,” Moriah said. 

    She was able to follow the flying object for a few miles until – how she put it – the “object appeared to drop into the ocean.” 

    Moriah can be heard in one video saying, “(It) went land in the water. Whatever it is.”

    She told Hawaii News Now that the object appeared to be larger than a telephone pole and made no noise. 

    “We called 911,” Moriah said, “For have like one cop or somebody for come out and come check em out.”

    FAA spokesperson Ian Gregor said the agency was notified of a plane that may have crashed in the area “but had no aircraft disappear off radars. And no reports of overdue or missing aircraft.”

    Meanwhile, the latest COVID-19 relief and government funding bill includes a 180-day countdown for the government to reveal what they know about mysterious flying objects. 

    During the pandemic, sightings of UFOs in the skies over New York City surged on a year over year basis. 

    Earlier this month, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, told Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper that aliens exist and have been waiting to show themselves but added they remain secret because “humanity isn’t ready” for the reveal. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 19:25

  • Seattle Bill Could 'Legalize Crime' For Those In Poverty Or With Behavioral Issues
    Seattle Bill Could ‘Legalize Crime’ For Those In Poverty Or With Behavioral Issues

    Via PlanetFreeWill.news,

    In what can only be described as turning morality on its head, a Seattle council member has introduced legislation that could allow courts to dismiss misdemeanor crimes, such as theft and assault, that were committed because of poverty or while a person was experiencing symptoms of a mental illness or substance abuse, reports the Seattle Times.

    Introduced by city Council member Lisa Herbold in late October, the legislation is a continuation of the cities “woke” social justice efforts in the wake of the George Floyd police encounter. With the bill crafted under the label “poverty defense,” its defenders say that it aims to ease the burden of usual court rulings on lower income residents but has some worried it will pave the way for crimes like assault, harassment, communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, and more, to go unpunished.

    “I think when you’re talking about folks who are committing offenses to survive or because of underlying mental-health or substance-use issues, incarceration does not have the deterrent effect people believe it has,” Herbold said.

    King County Director of Public Defense Anita Khandelwal, when defending the bill, used the example of someone without shoes stealing a pair from Goodwill and explained an attorney could acquit the thieve of wrong doing on the basis that they didn’t own a personal pair of shoes before the crime.

    A similar example would be a person guilty of a carjacking being acquitted of the crime based on the fact they did not own a car because they could not afford one.

    From the Seattle Times:

    Drunk or high driving and domestic-violence assault are carved out as exceptions in the bill, but what’s left in has been troubling to some who point to misdemeanors like non-domestic assault, harassment, communicating with a minor for immoral purposes and more.

    In a statement published Friday, police- reform group Mothers for Police Accountability worried that a person committing assault would be acquitted “by simply asserting that they were suffering from anxiety or depression or the ‘triggering’ of some past trauma or some other symptom of a mental disorder, including alcoholism and addiction.”

    Some also expressed concern about what would then happen once people with behavioral health issues were back on the street, and criticized the idea for lacking a plan to then address the behavioral health and economic issues at the root of people’s behavior.

    University’s Crime & Justice Research Center director Jacqueline Helfgott says the bill could have a huge impact on public safety, likening the effect to decriminalizing up to 90% of misdemeanor crimes in Seattle if attorneys follow the bill strictly.

    Seattle police, who have seen their departments become the target of the leftist movement to “defund the police,” have come out against the bill, saying it would “endanger the safety and rights of all people of Seattle.”

    “Seattle Police Department officers will continue to focus on holding individuals accountable who commit one of the thousands of assaults or thefts that occur in our community each year,” a statement from the city’s police force reads.

    After first being introduced in October, the bill was tabled over a budget process but it is expected to come back up for consideration over the winter.

    The leftist force behind the bill

    Behind the push for this piece of legislation, which couldn’t come at a worse time for Seattle residents as homicides in the city have recently climbed to their highest level in more than a decade, is the leftist organization called Decriminalize Seattle that opposes policing and the criminal legal system.

    As Judicial Watch reports:

    The group has called for defunding the Seattle Police Department by at least 50% and reallocating the funds to “community led health and safety systems.” It also demands the release of protestors arrested during recent violent uprising without charges. An organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, identified as one of the law’s catalysts in the media, says “what we’ve already known is that the misdemeanor system is basically a system of cycling people in poverty through municipal court over and over again without meeting their basic needs.”

    This is yet another example of the city falling under pressure from radical left wing organizations.

    When signing off on the city’s 2021 budget, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan slashed the SPD’s budget by nearly 20% and diverted the funding into “community spending” which King 5 news reports was a hat tip to the “defund the police” movement but ended up disappointing activists who said it was not enough.

    The Irony

    Council member Lisa Herbold’s lax stance on law enforcement is being highlighted after she reportedly called the police after someone threw a rock at her house on Dec. 11.

    Herbold reportedly told police that “she was on the west side of the living room near the kitchen when she heard a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot and dove into the kitchen for cover.”

    How ironic that she would want this person punished but is promoting the idea that if a crime was committed, the potential criminal could be allowed to walk scot-free if they were acting on their poverty or mental ill-ness. How inconsiderate of her …

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 19:00

  • "Bomb Cyclone" Detonates Over Alaska's Aleutian Islands Unleashing Hurricane Force Winds
    “Bomb Cyclone” Detonates Over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands Unleashing Hurricane Force Winds

    A monster storm explosively intensified in the northern Pacific near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on New Year’s Eve, battering the region with hurricane-force winds, heavy seas, and torrential rains, according to Reuters

    “It’s the most intense storm ever recorded in the North Pacific, excluding typhoons,” said Brian Brettschneider, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist with the National Weather Service (NWS). 

    The storm is classified as a “bomb cyclone” after meteorologists recorded barometric pressure of 921 millibars, a record-low reading for the region, equivalent to the center of a Category 4 hurricane. 

    Wind Speed Map

    In western Aleutians, waves greater than 50 feet were seen with winds more than 80 mph, or on par with a Category 1 hurricane. The islands are barely populated, and the storm poses a limited risk to humans, but the area is a heavily used commercial shipping route between Asia and the US. 

    Wave Height Analysis 

    Brettscheneider said the real threat of the storm is aircraft or vessels in the region. 

    Unlike hurricanes, these large and powerful storms go unnamed,” Capital Weather Gang’s weather expert Jeff Halverson wrote back in 2015. 

    The National Weather Service’s (NWS) Ocean Prediction Center (OPC) tweeted Thursday night: 

    “Here is the latest surface analysis showing a strong storm with winds to #hurricaneforce moving toward the Bering Sea. The central pressure is 921 MB making it one of the strongest storms to ever impact the North Pacific. Winds are expected to reach 95 kts near the low center!” 

    Satellite imagery of the storm is impressive. 

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    Late last night, NWS-OPC tweeted:

    “The #HurricaneForce low near the Aleutians continues to produce extreme conditions. Buoy 46071 (circled in red) is observing seas greater than 50 ft. Note in the insert the 58 ft measurement.”

    The jet stream is likely to carry the weather disturbance into the Pacific Northwest next week. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 18:35

  • How To Make Loans Scarce In Three Words: Cap Interest Rates
    How To Make Loans Scarce In Three Words: Cap Interest Rates

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

    Here’s a perfect free-market example of what not to do about allegedly high interest rates.

    Interest Rate Caps

    Reuters reports Peru Passes Law Allowing Central Bank to Cap Interest Rates on Bank Loans.

    Peru’s Congress approved on Wednesday a law that will allow policymakers to cap interest rates on loans granted by banks, a controversial measure that has been deeply critiqued by the Andean nation’s government and financial institutions.  

    The law empowers the country’s central bank to set maximum and minimum interest rates every six months in order to regulate the loan market, a measure lawmakers said is necessary to protect Peruvians from abusive lending practices.

    Loophole

    The loophole in the bill is that it “allows” rather than “requires” the Central Bank to cap rates on bank loans.

    Regardless, this is a horrible idea.

    If the Central Bank or government set rates that are too low, loans will dry up. 

    This is similar to Venezuela setting the price of gasoline at 10 cents a gallon. That’s the official price but the supply at that price is zero.

    The government set the price of gasoline but it cannot secure the supply. 

    The result is a huge black market. 

    What About the Fed?

    The Fed does not set bank loan rates directly, but it does influence them. 

    For example, mortgages loan rates are generally tied to interest rates on 10-year US Treasuries that the Fed does manipulate.

    Interest Rate Floors and Subsidies

    Unlike the setup in Venezuela, the Fed can indeed provide all the supply of dollars it wants. And as long as borrowers use the money for speculation, housing, and other items that do not show up in official inflation stats, the Fed can get away with it.

    Low interest rates helped fuel the stock market bubble and other speculative activities. The result is three major bubbles in 20 years, with allegedly low inflation. 

    Few see the current bubble only because it has not popped yet.

    These are all good reasons to end the Fed and let the market set rates.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 18:10

  • Here Are All The Banks That Paid Janet Yellen $7.3 Million In Speaking Fees In The Past 2 Years
    Here Are All The Banks That Paid Janet Yellen $7.3 Million In Speaking Fees In The Past 2 Years

    When openly bribing a politician, financier or any other power figure is too – how should we put it – illegal, there is a well-known loophole that has been used for decades to circumvent the straight to jail hazard: the old “pay for speeches” shortcut, where otherwise boring, insipid and uninspirational figures who have nothing original or creative to say, getting paid $100,000, $200,000 or much more for an hour of their time to “speak.” Of course, even five-year-olds realize that this arrangement, despite what it is called, is just a way to either buy future favors from said “speaker”, or repay them for previous preferential treatment (such as taxpayer-funded bailouts), while making them filthy rich in the process.

    It certainly worked with the Clinton Foundation, where the tens of millions spent by foreign US adversaries, especially those in the Middle East, to fund such a “generous” and noble pursuit as a (fully tax-exempt) foundation generated amazing “returns” when Hillary Clinton ran the State Department. Of course, it wasn’t just rich petrostates that sought payback for their bribes donations: for all those who couldn’t afford a $5 million check to this Clinton Foundation initiative or that (where miraculously, the foundation kept around 94% of the “donations” to cover “overhead“), there was always the 2nd tier of influence peddling better known as “paying for speeches”, and as the following list of Hillary Clinton speeches delivered in the 2013-2015 period clearly shows, many were convinced that Hillary would replace Barack Obama in 2016 and be the next US “president for hire” to special interests and generous lobby groups.

    Of course, when it comes to Hillary Clinton, it is hardly a secret that the former first lady would do anything to wave in some influence cash. It’s also hardly a secret that one Clinton’s chances of becoming next president, donations to the Clinton Foundation “unexpectedly” collapsed.

    What, however, may come as a surprise is that none other than arguably the most boring speaker of the 21st century, former Fed chair Janet Yellen – and future Secretary of the Treasury, a post which also doubles as the top bank supervisor in the US – who would send Red Bull stock limit up every time she spoke (or she would, if Red Bull wasn’t a private company) has been raking in millions from – you guessed it – speeches.

    Janet Yellen speaks during an event to name President-elect Joe Biden’s economic team in Wilmington; she was probably not paid on this occasion.

    According to Yellen’s financial disclosure document, the 74-year-old former Fed chair has raked in a whopping $7.3 million in speaking fees in just the past two years from Wall Street banks and large corporations including Citi, Goldman Sachs, Google, City National Bank, UBS, Citadel, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Salesforce. Did we mention Citadel? We did, but we should mention it again because for some odd reason the high frequency trading firm which was recently busted for frontrunning its own clients (and everyone knows what Citadel has been doing with Robinhood option orderflow) has been Janet Yellen’s biggest customer, paying her over $800,000 (!) for three speeches (in Oct 2019, Dec 2019, and again Oct 2010). And yes, this is the same Citadel where Yellen’s predecessor at the Fed, Ben Bernanke remains a “senior advisor” although how this man, who has never traded one share in his entire life, is advising hedge fund and trading giant like Citadel, remains a mystery. 

    What isn’t a mystery is why all these Wall Street firms, on at least 57 occasions, decided to fork over on average $127,310 to listen to Janet Yellen’s confoundingly boring monotone: the reason is simple – to buy influence from the one private sector individual that virtually everyone knew would soon return to “public service” under whatever administration followed Trump, and that’s precisely what happened now that Janet Yellen will not only be in charge of the Treasury, but effectively in charge of the Fed too thanks to recent quasi fusion between the two institutions, which was required to launch helicopter money/MMT. That alone explains why Citi almost $1 million listening to Yellen on at least nine occasions in the past two years.

    The result: Yellen is now literally in the pocket, and  of virtually every Wall Street investment bank and trading firm.

    The full breakdown of Yellen’s bribes speaking fees is shown below. What is also notable is that since March 2020, or around the time covid forced all conferences to be via zoom, Yellen has collected over $1.7 million in zoom appearances, not even “speeches”, on at least 24 occasions since March! 

    Here is a full list of all the Wall Street companies that have paid Yellen since the start of 2019.

    For those wondering if Yellen actually needs all this money, the answer is of course not: in addition to millions in various financial assets listed, including between $1 and $5 million in a “cash account”, Yellen also has a Stamp Collection worth between $15,001 and $50,000 or more than most Americans are worth. Oh, and Yellen also has some miracle investment in the Vanguard Short Term Bond Index Fund and the Vanguard European Stock Index Fund which has a value of “none” and yet generated over $115,000 in annual income.

    As Politico notes, Yellen’s financial disclosure is one of three filed by the Biden team at the end of 2020 “that could become politically problematic with the left wing of the Democratic Party when confirmation hearings begin in January.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    We, however, doubt this will be an issue: with Wall Street now delighted that the person it had bribed paid so generously for hours of intelligible and muffled stammering will now be Treasury Secretary, and quite happy to bail all Wall Street firms yet again after the next crash, we are confident that Wall Street – which just happens to be the puppet-master controlling both the president and Congress – will steamroll all opposition and in a few weeks, Yellen will be signing all newly printed dollar bills until early 2022 of course when all fiat currency will be “printed” digitally by the Fed and distributed directly by the central bank to any and all Americans it deems worthy.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:55

  • US COVID Cases Top 20MM As California Deaths Hit New Record
    US COVID Cases Top 20MM As California Deaths Hit New Record

    Summary:

    • US cases top 20MM
    • California sees new death record
    • Russia new cases topped 27K
    • Portugal reports nearly 7K new cases

    * * * 

    Several US states have been plagued by reporting delays over the holiday, but with California expanding lockdowns around the state, and more cases of B.1.1.7, the mutant strain first discovered in the UK, Joe Biden, Dr. Fauci and others are stepping up their warnings about the worst of the outbreak lying ahead.

    With hospitalizations – supposedly the most reliable indicator of the outbreak’s trajectory, according to the COVID Tracking Project – still close to record levels, hospitals in LA County and elsewhere have struggled to accept new patients.

    One year after Beijing first notified the WHO about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the central city of Wuhan, the US has just seen its total number of confirmed cases top 20MM.

    The 20MM number is almost 2x the 10.3MM tally from India, the second-worst-hit country. New York state’s infections remained high, with 16.5K new cases recorded over the last 24 hours, just below the record set Wednesday, as the positivity rate for NYC climbed toward 10%.

    California, meanwhile, saw its fatalities reach a new record. In a single day, the Golden State added 585 new deaths, bringing the total to just under 26K. The state also reported 47.2K new cases, pushing its total to 2.3MM.

    The pandemic entered 2021 with no signs of slowing down. Global daily deaths reached record highs this week. Countries from Germany to Japan to South Africa ended 2020 with record daily cases. Turkey, China and Brazil became the latest to report infections of the new, highly transmissible virus strain.

    Globally, the tally of confirmed cases neared 84MM, while deaths neared 2MM.

    Offering hope that the global pace of vaccinations might pick up in the new year, the WHO announced Friday tthat it has issued its first emergency-use designation for a Covid-19 vaccine, making the Pfizer/BioNtech the first immunization to receive a green light from the Geneva-based body.

    Here’s a rundown of more COVID-19 news from overnight:

    Italy registered 22,211 virus cases on Friday, from 23,477 the day before. Daily deaths declined too, with 462 fatalities reported, compared with 555 on Thursday.

    Portugal reported 6,951 new confirmed cases, below the record of 7,627 announced the previous day, taking the total to 420,629. The number of hospitalized cases fell by 34 to 2,806.

    Russia recorded 27,039 new cases of Covid-19 over the past 24 hours, taking the total number to 3.186 million, according to the country’s task force for combating the pandemic.

    * * *

    Over in Japan, authorities are seeing their stance on emergency measures shift, as Tokyo’s metropolitan government is considering a request to declare a state of emergency. According to reports from Japanese national broadaster NHK, Yasutoshi Nishimura, the minister in charge of Japan’s coronavirus response, said Wednesday that the country could consider an emergency if infections continue at the current rate. This follows several other comments and reports from officials, including a top official in Tokyo about the prospect of pursuing other

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:45

  • 2020 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead
    2020 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead

    One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2019, we pointed to a certain undertone of artificial stability permeating capital markets and society, with the economy firing on all cylinders (thanks to the massive dual deficits and debt that had exploded under the current administration), with the market surging 30% last year and at all time highs (despite flat earnings and entirely thanks to the Fed’s resumption of “NOT QE” last September in order to bail out JPMorgan and a handful of hedge funds’ treasury basis trades), and with Trump cruising to re-election victory in what we thought one year ago would be the most important even of 2020: the US presidential election. It’s also why we said that “with the Fed fully behind Trump and helping the S&P return nearly 30% in 2019, 4 more years of Trump is now virtually assured (barring some unexpected calamity in 2020).”

    Oh how prudent that disclaimer proved to be, as well as this next caveat we casually mentioned in our last year review, warning that “with the 2020 elections looming, it is certainly true that anything can still happen, only as with all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected.”

    It certainly wasn’t because around the time we were penning our year-end wrap post exactly one year ago, a highly contagious coronavirus strain had escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology (China’s first and only biosafety 4 lab) whether purposefully or intentionally, and was set to spread around the globe, unleashing the biggest global black swan in the past 100 years, triggering personal and economic hell for hundreds of millions around the world who lost their jobs or loved ones as a result of the China virus, markets nirvana for millions of 16-year-old Robinhood and hedge funds traders who benefited from the greatest stock market rally in history, and ultimately helped Joe Biden emerge from complete obscurity and with virtually no chances of defeating Trump, to eventually winning the Nov 3 presidential election, Trump’s ongoing challenges to the outcome notwithstanding.

    The arrival of the virus that would eventually be called Covid-19 by the global scientific community (to remove any links to China) – and which would lead to a historic pandemic the likes of which nobody expected one year ago – shook the world, and would lead to a slew of historic events taking place in just a few months, including a staggering lockdown of the global economy, the official arrival of global Helicopter Money, tens of trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus, an overhaul of the global economy punctuated by an unprecedented explosion in world debt, an Orwellian crackdown on civil liberties by governments everywhere, and ultimately set the scene for what even the World Economic Forum called simply “The Great Reset.”

    Needless to say, it would be impossible to describe everything that happened in 2020, or all the black swans that the pandemic and its associated lockdowns let loose upon the world, in one article: those looking for a detailed breakdown of all the major events this year are urged to read the latest magnum opus “Year in Review” by David Collum (part 1 here and part 2 here), but a quick recap of some of the most prominent and bizarre events that shook the world in the past 365 days, what Mark Orsley called “the year of years“, is as follows:

    • WW3 fears run rampant on social media as the US strikes Iranian army general Soleimani
    • Black swan health event that leads to a historic equity market crash, and funding strains
    • Fed takes US policy rates to near 0% and institutes QE at a magnitude that puts the post GFC period to shame
    • Treasury institutes trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus
    • Unprecedented lockdowns lead to Tiger King craze
    • The world learns how to school and work remotely, changing the office space landscape forever
    • WTI front month contract trades with a negative price
    • Subsequent epic equity bull market recovery rally that pierces March highs
    • Australia burns
    • Kobe Bryant tragically dies
    • We begin to watch sports with no fans
    • Pentagon releases UFO footage
    • Quantas offers flight to nowhere
    • California wildfires burn uncontrollably and wipe out parts of Napa
    • US social unrest turns violent
    • Murder hornets
    • Ruth Bader Ginsberg dies
    • Overhyped US election event that leads to a volatility collapse, year-end rally
    • A middle-aged skateboarder, drinking Cranberry juice to a 70s rock hit brings calm to the world

    That list could have gone on forever. The point is, there could not have been more regime shifts, volatility moments, and memes than 2020 (we hope).

    Yet for all the chaos and panic unleashed by covid, a certain undertone of pre-determination and almost tangible order was felt just below the surface: after all, the virus, crash, lockdown and recession provoked an unprecedented monetary and fiscal policy panic which sparked a record $22 trillion of stimulus in just the past 9 months around the world. As a result, central banks spent over $1 trillion a month on financial assets via QE, crushing yields, volatility, and spreads, and pushing stocks to all time highs at the end of 2020 even as earnings continue to slide.

    It’s almost as if the world’s richest asset owners requested the covid pandemic. It wasn’t just them however: politicians the world over would benefit from the transition from QE to outright helicopter money and MMT which made the over monetization of deficits widely accepted in the blink of an eye. And in the span of just a few months, $14 trillion in fiscal stimulus was announced, with central banks monetizing most of it, and pushing the quantity of global debt to a record $277 trillion, a number which the Institute For International Finance expects to hit a record $360 trillion by 2030

    … while thanks to central bank intervention, the price of world debt dropped to a record 5,000 year low, with global negative yielding debt now at an all time high $18tn.

    The common theme here was simple: no matter what happens, capital markets can never again be allowed to drop, regardless of the cost or how much more debt has to be incurred. Indeed, as we look back at the news barrage over the past year, and past decade for that matter, the one thing that becomes especially clear amid the constant din of markets, of politics, of social upheaval and geopolitical strife – and now pandemics –  in fact a world that is so flooded with constant conflicting newsflow and changing storylines that some say it has become virtually impossible to even try to predict the future, is that despite the people’s desire for change, for something original and untried, the world’s established forces will not allow it and will fight to preserve the broken status quo at any price – even global coordinated shutdowns – which is perhaps why it always boils down to one thing – capital markets, that bedrock of Western capitalism and the “modern way of life”, where control, even if it means central planning the likes of which have not been seen since the days of the USSR, and an upward trajectory must be preserved at all costs, as the alternative is a global, socio-economic collapse.

    And since it is the daily gyrations of stocks that sway popular moods – and why none other than the US president was tweeting almost daily ahead of the November election at what level the S&P closed on any given day to boost his approval rating and bolster his credibility – the interplay between capital markets and politics has never been more profound or more consequential. Indeed, in a historic moment when the president was impeached by the House (if not the Senate), Trump’s natural response was to point to the record high hit that very day in the S&P500.

    The more powerful message here is the implicit realization and admission by politicians, not just Trump but also his peers and challengers, that the stock market is now seen as the consummate barometer of one’s political achievements and approval. Which is also why capital markets are now, more than ever, a political tool whose purpose is no longer to distribute capital efficiently and discount the future, but to manipulate voter sentiments far more efficiently than any Russian election interference attempt ever could.

    Which brings us back to 2020 and the past decade, which was best summarized by a recent Bill Blain article who said that “the last 10-years has been a story of massive central banking distortion to address the 2008 crisis. Now central banks face the consequences and are trapped. The distortion can’t go uncorrected indefinitely.

    He is right: the distortion will eventually collapse, but so far the establishment and the “top 1%” have been successful – perhaps the correct word is lucky – in preserving the value of risk assets: on the back of the Fed’s firehose of liquidity the S&P500 returned an impressive 15.5% following the 28.50% return in 2019. It did so by staging the greatest rally off all time from the March lows, surpassing all of the 4 greatest rallies off the lows of the past century (1929,1938, 1974, and 2009).

    Yet this continued can-kicking by the establishment – all of which was made possible by the covid pandemic and lockdowns which served as an all too convenient scapegoat for the unprecedented response that served to propel risk assets (and fiat alternatives such as gold and bitcoin) to all time highs – has come with a price… and an increasingly higher price in fact. As even Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett admits, Fed’s response to the the pandemic “worsened inequality in 2020” as the value of financial assets – Wall Street –  relative to economy – Main Street – hit all-time high of 6.3x.

    And as we said previously, with the system now caught in a vice operated by a handful of people, there is no longer any chance that the status quo will change without a revolution, a revolution which is increasingly unlikely in a world where “generous” governments hand out $600 “stimulus checks” to a population that has no other means of providing for itself besides relying on the same government that is pillaging and plundering the middle class.

    In other words, going back to what we said above, 2020 helped further crystalize the realization that politics is now markets, and markets have become political weapons, and why the past decade was, as Bill Blain put it, “a story of massive central banking distortion to address the 2008 crisis.” The problem is that this distortion has only made the mess even greater, and the only hope central banks have – in their own words – is if government fiscal stimulus takes over where monetary stimulus ends, and this is where covid came in: almost overnight it ushered in MMT – the fusion of fiscal and monetary policy, the fusion of the Fed and the Treasury. In other words, 12 years after we predicted it would come, helicopter money finally arrived. 

    Only there is just one problem, or rather 277 trillion problems as shown above, because whereas one could argue that fiscal stimulus is a credible option if the world’s wasn’t drowning in debt, when global debt to GDP is 330%, it is tantamount to saying that only more debt can fix a debt crisis. Which is effectively what the world’s smartest people are saying.

    Meanwhile, the trends observed in recent years will continue: coming years will be marked by even bigger government (because only more government can “fix” problems created by government), higher stock prices and dollar debasement (because only more Fed intervention can “fix” the problems created by the Fed), and a policy flip from monetary and QE to fiscal & MMT, all of which will attempt to spark an unprecedented inflationary wave. As Hartnett writes, “if 2020 was year of COVID-19 pandemic; it will, according to Hartnett, “also be remembered as the secular low point for both inflation & interest rates.”

    He is, of course, right because once all other conventional methods to spark reflation fail, central banks will activate Plan B which is also the core pillar of the coming Great Reset: the roll out of digital currencies which can be deposited by central banks directly into digital wallets, bypassing the entire commercial banking fractional banking infrastructure, in a last ditch effort to spark the inflation that will be needed to inflate away the $300+ trillion in debt suffocating world growth. For those wondering when this will happen, tentative schedules show this historic transfer to an all digital payments infrastructure taking place as early as the second half of 2021…

    … so it is very likely that while 2020 was an insane year, it may prove to be just an appetizer to the shockwaves that will be unleashed in 2021 when we see the first stage of the most historic overhaul of the fiat payment system in history.

    Here we should note one thing: in a world undergoing historic transformations, any free press must be throttled and controlled, and over the past year we have seen unprecedented efforts by legacy media and its corporate owners, as well as the new “social media” overlords do everything in their power to stifle independent thought. For us it was especially “personal” on not one but two occasions. In January, Twitter suspended our account because we dared to challenge the conventional narrative about the source of the Wuhan virus. It was only six months later that Twitter apologized, and set us free, admitting it had made a mistake.

    Yet barely had twitter readmitted us, when something even more unprecedented happened: for the first time ever (to our knowledge) Google – the world’s largest online ad provider and monopoly – demonetized our website not because of any complaints about our writing but because of the contents of our comment section. It then held us hostage until we agreed to implement some prerequisite screening and moderation of the comments section. This was a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which resembles the dystopia of 1984 more and more each day, and we have since taken measures. In December for the first time in our 12 year history, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn’t our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us again. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the censorship bandwagon rolls out much more aggressively in the coming year.

    That said, whether the story of 2021, and the next decade for that matter, is one of helicopter or digital money, of (hyper)inflation or deflation: what is key, and what we learned in the past decade, is that the status quo will throw anything at the problem to kick the can, it will certainly not let any crisis go to waste… even the deadliest pandemic in over a century. And while many already knew that, the events of 2020 made it clear to a fault that not even a modest market correction can be tolerated going forward. That in turn may explain why the last quarters of 2020 were a mirror image of events from the first quarter when stocks tanked. After all, if central banks aim to punish all selling, then the logical outcome is to buy everything, and investors, traders and speculators did just that armed with the clearest backstop guarantee from the Fed, which in March crossed the Rubicon when it formally nationalized the bond market as it started buying both investment grade bonds and junk bond ETFs in the open market. As such it is no longer even a debatable issue if the Fed will buy stocks after the next crash – the only question is when.

    Meanwhile, for all those lamenting the relentless coverage of politics in a financial blog, why finance appears to have taken a secondary role, and why the political “narrative” has taken a dominant role for financial analysts, the past year showed vividly why that is the case.

    As for predictions about the future, as 2020 so vividly showed when it comes to true surprises and all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected. And so while many themes, both in the political and financial realm, did get some accelerated closure courtesy of China’s covid pandemic, dramatic changes in 2020 persisted, and will continue to manifest themselves in often violent and unexpected ways – from the ongoing record polarization in the US political arena, to “populist” upheavals around the developed world, to the gradual transition to a global Universal Basic (i.e., socialized) Income regime, to China’s ongoing fight with preserving stability in its gargantuan financial system which is now more than double the size of the US.

    As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website – which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from the KGB either, although now that the entire Russian hysteria episode is over, those allegations have finally quieted down), and has never spent one dollar on marketing – a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine.

    Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we – and others who do not comply with the established narrative – have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, we find it a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world – is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from “dangerous, fake information.” It’s also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website.

    In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to accelerate in the coming year, especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2020 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch out of fear of repercussions, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an orchestrated information vacuum and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which the public relations arm of established media outlets refused to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory “fake news” condemnation.

    We are grateful that our readers – who hit a new record high in 2020 – have realized it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn’t “fake news.”

    *  *  *

    And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, almost 11-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

    So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

    • In 20th spot with 690,000 readers, was an article that touched on one of the most sensitive topics of 2020 – the origins of the Covid virus. As readers are all too aware, the great debate here has been whether the virus emerged due to something as innocuous as a Chinese citizen eating a bat soup, a narrative espoused by the China-controlled media, or if it escaped from a Wuhan biolab. And as AP journalists are now discovering, all signs increasingly point to the latter, something which Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 first said back in April, shocking the world with his claim that the virus was man made as we explained in “COVID-19 Is A Man-Made Virus: HIV-Discoverer Says “Could Only Have Been Created In A Lab“.” Eventually he will be proven correct, confirming once again that the biggest “fake news” is whatever the mainsteam media pushes as the narrative du jour.
    • In 19th spot of the year’s most popular articles, we received another reminder that not all is as it seems when it comes to stoking tensions within US society, as 718,000 readers clicked on a story pointing out that “More Bricks Appear In Advance Of Monday Demonstrations In Baltimore, Texas.” While a wave of protests and violent riots swept across the nation, ostensibly as a grassroot movement condemning police violence against blacks, it had dramatic consequences across the country, leading to the defunding of countless police forces across mostly liberal cities and yet many wondered about who the puppetmaster behind this wave of violence was, because as even Jeff Gundlach mused recently, “It’s Interesting How The Violent Riots Of 2020 Ended Right After The Election.” Hopefully, one day someone will get to the bottom of who and how organized the protest deadly movement of the summer of 2020.
    • In 18th spot, addressing what may be the most critical topic of the next four years, nearly 720,000 readers were presented with a “Blockbuster Report” which in impressive detail “Revealed How THE Biden Family Was Compromised By China.” As a reminder, when news reports of Hunter Biden’s relationship with China first emerged, the social networks were quick to censor any mention of the original report. However, just a few weeks later (and certainly after the election) we learned that Hunter was indeed being probed by tax evasion stemming from his shady Chinese deals which sought just one thing: to buy favor with the family of Joe Biden. Of course, it won’t be the first time foreign powers have sought such undue influence on US politicians – after all that’s what the whole point behind the existence of the Clinton foundation, which did nothing for starving African children or Haiti earthquake survivors, but sure made Bill and Hillary filthy rich.
    • Pivoting from China’s attempts to influence the White House, we once again find ourselves in the middle of the social unrest which defined much of the summer of 2020. Only this time there was a twist: 726,000 readers were fascinated how an “Antifa Attempt To Riot In California Suburb Goes Awry” when a group of Antifa ‘protesters’ were met with instant justice at the hands of angry residents in the suburban town of Yucaipa, California. Unfortunately, we expect this violent left-right split across the heart of America to only get worse in 2021 as none of the fundamental reasons for the growing anger and resentment across US society has been addressed yet, and if anything, it has become the media’s duty to stoke even more anger and hatred.
    • Confirming the scientists at best can only make(un)educated guesses about the future (especially if they have paid conflicts of interest) was an analysis from the early spring when the covid pandemic was first sweeping across the country, and which “found” that “All Hospital Beds In The US Will Be Filled With Patients ‘By About May 8th’ Due To Coronavirus.” This article, which was based on official research and was the 16th most read of 2020, with some 764,000 views, merely showcased something that never happened, and in fact the virus rapidly faded away as soon as various containment measures were rolled out. But not before it demonstrated how the media successfully instills a sense of panic amid the population, which continues to this day even as the most apocalyptic predictions postulated by “scientists” never actually came true.
    • By now a clear pattern is emerging: 2020 was without doubt the year of Covid, and it also served as the foundation of the 15th most popular article of 2020, which discussed a “Chilling Documentary Mapping Out Likely Origin Of COVID-19.” Some 767,000 readers got their first glimpse of covid not as a virus that emerged by accident in nature but one that was created in a Chinese lab; more troubling was the hint that China released the virus on purpose in hopes of overturning the socio-economic status quo. While the jury of “scientists” is still out on the real origins of covid (even if the broader public knows all too well where it came from), one thing is certain: the unprecedented transformations sparked by covid left China as one of the biggest geopolitical winners. If nothing else, this should at least prompt some more questions about who stood to benefit from the release of the virus.
    • Covid continued to dominate the most popular list, and the 14th most read article of 2020 with 820,000 views was the report that triggered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression when on March 12, Trump finally bent under pressure and announced a ban on all travel from Europe, in the process triggering both widespread and targeted shutdowns that have lasted to this day, resulting in millions of job losses and countless small and medium business failing in response to the shotgun approach to deal with the pandemic which while crippling most of the population, made a handful of ultra rich investors and mega corporations extremely rich.
    • The 13th most popular article of 2020 touched on the year’s other biggest event, the US presidential election, and whose outcome Trump contests to this day as a result of countless allegedly fraudulent votes being cast on Nov 3. Some 830,000 readers were interested to learn how and why Trump’s then lawyer Sidney Powell intended to “Overturn Election Results In Multiple States.” So far, that has not happened, and in fact it is unlikely that it will after the Supreme Court refused to hear to Trump’s challenge last month. That said, with 3 weeks to go until the inauguration, Trump still refuses to concede although it remains unclear on what grounds he hopes to launch any upcoming legal challenges, even as Joe Biden has already hired his movers in preparation for his transition to the White House.
    • For the 12th most popular article of the past year, we once again shift back to Covid and specifically China’s massive obfuscation campaign, according to which the country which sparked the global covid pandemic has had less than 100,000 cases, even as the rest of world has arounf 500,000 new cases daily. Beijing’s facade of lies almost cracked in February when as asked whether “China’s Tencent Accidentally Leaked The True Terrifying Coronavirus Statistics.” It did, but since the truth in China has a halflife that is shorter than a virus in the wild, everyone quickly moved on and to this day the world continues to drink some bizarre Kool Aid according to which China has just a handful of new cases daily. 
    • The 11th most popular article of the year was something different: it had to do with what may well have been the most underreported story of 2020 (and 2019) – the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful, rich pedophile friends. Of course, most of Epstein’s secrets died with him when he “committed suicide” in the summer of 2019, although some hope for justice remains and it is tied to the ongoing incarceration of Epstein’s madame and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who knew everything and everyone in Jeffrey’s circle. It’s also why 835,000 read the article laying out “The Top Highlights From Ghislaine Maxwell’s Unsealed Court Records.” Unfortunately, so far Ghislain has refused to shine a light into the true scandal surrounding Epstein and his “friends”, and we are confident that if that were to ever change then the daughter of Robert Maxwell – who died in mysterious circumstances back in 1991 – will face a similar fate.
    • With 864,000 page views, the 10th most popular story of 2020 was neither Covid, nor Trump, nor Epstein-related, but instead exposed China’s giant gold counterfeiting underworld as we explained in “83 Tons Of Fake Gold Bars: Gold Market Rocked By Massive China Counterfeiting Scandal.” Over the years there has been much speculation about just how much of the $11 trillion notional in above-ground gold is legitimate, and how much gold-plated tungsten, and the shocking news that emerged out of China in June underscored that one should always check the authenticity of one’s gold holdings, especially if there is any link to China, the country that has taken counterfeiting to an art.
    • Having entered the top 10 most popular stories of 2020, we find that covid makes another appearance in 9th spot with 915,000 reads, this time with the claim made by a top pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, who made the shocking allegation that the coronavirus Is “The Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated On An Unsuspecting Public” and claimed that “There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians, it’s outrageous, this is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.” One can easily see why any reference to the story or the doctor was promptly scrubbed by the world’s social media censors who have taken it upon themselves to also be “fact-checkers” on any claim related to covid, even if as we reported previously, most of those ‘fact-checkers’ are deeply conflicted individuals who have a vested interest in perpetuating the far more lucrative, fake narrative about covid.
    • In 8th spot, with just a few hundred more page views, was our report about the scientific analysis conducted on voting patterns in the Nov 3 election. In “It Defies Logic”: Scientist Finds Telltale Signs Of Election Fraud After Analyzing Mail-In Ballot Data” we showed a statistical anslysis “which strongly suggested that fraud occurred” on election night, when several swing states inexplicably stopped reporting vote counts while President Trump maintained a healthy lead over Joe Biden. To this date, this remains a deeply polarizing issue, and even though the courts – including SCOTUS – have refused to investigate further, millions of Americans believe that there are telltale signs that Biden’s victory on Nov 3 was not proper and is why so many Americans refuse to accept Joe Biden as their president.
    • With just over 1.1 million page views and in 7th spot, was the article that got us suspended (for 6 months) from Twitter: in “Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?” we asked if Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Peng Zhou (whose data was available publicly to anyone), was the person responsible for unleashing the pandemic. While Twitter unceremoniuosly banned our account for merely asking this question, a few months later the joke was on Jack Dorsey after we reported that “Western Spy Agencies Investigating Wuhan Scientist Highlighted By Zero Hedge In January.” Of course, since the question of China’s involvement in the creation and spread of the covid virus has tremendous political consequences, so far there has been no official finding or conclusion either way.
    • The 6th most popular article of 2020 was another notable question probing the validity of the November election, namely: “Why Does Biden Have So Many More Votes Than Democrat Senators In Swing States?” Another way of asking the same question – which 1,113,129 readers also wanted answered – was “what’s going on here? If it were “never-Trumpers” pairing Biden with their GOP Congressional picks, wouldn’t one expect fewer votes for Trump than GOP Senators?” So far we have not received an answer.
    • Questions about the credibility of the presidential election continued into the Top 5 posts as well, and with 1,245,000 was out post covering the rollercoaster event which was the Nov 3 election, which had Biden winning at first, then odds overwhelmingly shifted in Trump’s favor after he won Florida and Ohio, only to see Biden be declared winner after mail in votes in most swing states came overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. Not surprisingly, “Trump Blasts Vote-Count Delays As “Fraud On The American Public” and yet it was precisely those same vote counts, as well as various documented reports of mystery ballot boxes emerging in the deep of the night, that ultimately handed Biden the election. Trump is still contesting the outcome.
    • The devastating consequences from the covid pandemic may have been more limited than many expected, largely thanks to an unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, which made life especially easy for companies that had access to capital markets, however it was quite the opposite for millions of small and medium businesses for whom the PPP loans handed out at the peak of the covid crisis provided at best a brief respite. As a result, and as we reported in “Bankruptcy Tsunami Begins: Thousands Of Default Notices Are “Flying Out The Door“,”  well over 1.2 million readers were shocked to learn just how bad the economy was for all those “mom and pop” small business operators who had no choice but to fold as the lockdowns resulting from the covid pandemic crippled the service economy and led to a historic bankruptcy filing spree.
    • The 3rd most popular article of 2020, read over 1.3 million times, had to do with another topic which the mainstream media would not come within 10 feet of, namely whether or not the highly popular Black Lives Matter movement was credible, or if it was just another way of sabotaging the popular narrative in hopes of benefiting a certain social class. One person who took the other side of the argument was an Anonymous Berkeley Professor who “Shredded the BLM Injustice Narrative” only to be met with a furious rebuke from Berkeley, which ironically validated one of the letter’s core claims that dissent outside “a tightly policed, narrow discourse” is not welcome. Sadly, to this day any truly open discourse on the topic of whether BLM’s claims are valid remains taboo, and is the surest and quickest way to ending one’s career.
    • The year’s second most popular article with just over 1.5 million reads, was also an example of conventional media cracking down on anything it found disagreeable to the popular narrative. Shortly after the first reports of covid’s spread, we published our take on a research report which found that “Coronavirus Contains “HIV Insertions”, Stoking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon.” This prompted an immediate panic among the “factcheckers” whose job was to perpetuate the mainstream narrative, and they promptly conceded that while HIV insertions are present, such insertions can also be found in other viruses. Unfortunately, their attempts to discredit the theory that covid was a manmade bioweapon have so far failed to be scientifically validated, while covid’s surprising ability to mutate and force the immune system to attack the host body itself, which are now widely accepted even by the so-called “scientists” have failed to ease concerns that covid is, in many ways, an airborne version of HIV.
    • Finally, in the top #1 spot, and cementing 2020’s status as the year of covid, was an article from March that tried to take on the mass hysteria spread by everyone from (conflicted) politicians to (conflicted) mainsteadm media to (conflicted) pharma companies, all of which had a vested interest in creating the biggest ever crisis possible. With 1.7 million page views, in “COVID-19 – Evidence Over Hysteria” we laid out one take why the widespread panic resulting from covid may be ultimately self-defeating especially when juxtaposed side by the side with the far greater (and far wider reaching) economic damage sparked by lockdowns. Alas, to this day, the hysteria dominates confirming the old saying to let no crisis go to waste, especially when the crisis in question is the biggest one in generations and allows the establishment to rollout socially and economically transformational changes that would never be possible without the scapegoat that is covid.

    With all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2021, and the next decade?

    We don’t know: as frequent and not so frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try despite endless allegations that we constantly predict the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2020, which destroyed the reputation of central banks, of economists, of conventional media and the professional “polling” and “strategist” class forever. We merely observe, try to find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it.

    We do know, however, that after a record $22 trillion in stimulus was been conjured out of thin air by the world’s central banks and politicians in just the past 9 months, as helicopter money makes a triumphal arrival in both the US and Eurozone, and as interest rates are on the cusp of breaking out, the entire world is floating on an ocean of excess money, which in 2020 once again succeeded in masking just how ugly the truth beneath the calm surface is.

    We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will eventually be revealed as fully naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone’s guess. But, as we have promised – and delivered – every year for the past 12, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

    Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2021, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2020 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day – usually with a cynical smile – helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that the system is reduced to (ab)using each and every day just to keep this grand tragicomedy going for at least one more year.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:44

  • 1984? Twitter Mob Cancels English Literature
    1984? Twitter Mob Cancels English Literature

    Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

    Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

    San Francisco Drug Overdoses Outpace COVID Deaths

    San Francisco is a city that implemented some of the more strict COVID lockdowns in 2020, inside a state that may have been the most draconian in the US.

    And while San Francisco has only seen 173 COVID-19 deaths in 2020, the city has watched as 621 people died of drug overdoses.

    In 2019 there were 441 San Francisco deaths from drug overdose in San Francisco; so even just the INCREASE in drug overdose deaths from 2019 to 2020 (an increase of 180) is greater than the number of COVID-19 deaths in San Francisco.

    This echoes other unintended consequences from lockdown isolation, such as Japan’s spiking suicide rate.

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    Twitter Mob Takes Aim at Classic Novels Taught in Schools

    Under the hashtag #DisruptTexts, English and Literature teachers across the United States are banding together to censor dangerous classic novels.

    For example, a teacher in Lawrence Massachusetts said that the organization #DisruptTexts helped her school district remove Homer’s The Odyssey from the curriculum.

    Others have done away with the “slut-shaming” classic, The Scarlet Letter, as well as Shakespeare for his works written “at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed.”

    The idea is that anything written too long ago will reflect the bias and prejudice of the past, and fail to properly indoctrinate students into the correct way of thinking, according to the woke Twitter mobsters.

    Instead the organization has partnered with Penguin Publishing to suggest teachers use titles such as Antiracist Baby a “picture book that empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves… to help readers recognize and reflect on bias in their daily lives.”

    Click here if you want to see the #DisruptTexts website for yourself.

    *  *  *

    High School Student Sues Over Woke Curriculum

    A high school student from Nevada, William Clark, has filed suit against his high school for forcing its woke curriculum on him.

    Clark has a white father and black mother; his father is deceased and he is growing up in a predominantly black household with two black siblings.

    But given that he has a white biological father, Clark is “regarded by his peers as white”. And that’s enough for him to be guilty.

    According to the lawsuit, Clark’s high school is forcing him to “unlearn the basic Judeo-Christian principles” from his upbringing.

    These values include “the proposition that every person is unique and equal before the eyes of God and will be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.”

    But Clark’s public school doesn’t believe in such principles.

    To them, whiteness is oppressive. And despite Clark being half black (i.e. just as black as Barack Obama), he is deemed to be an oppressor by school officials.

    The lawsuit alleges that school officials deliberately misled parents about the curriculum and did not inform anyone that their children would be indoctrinated into Critical Race Theory and other woke principles.

    In one class in particular, a mandatory ‘Sociology of Change’ course required for all students, the teacher greets students in the morning with “Hello my wonderful social justice warriors!”

    Students are expected to label and identify themselves based exclusively on gender, race, sexuality, and religion and then determine if your identity is associated with oppression or privilege.

    (The study material makes it easy by pre-determining for the students which identities are oppressors, and which are victims.)

    Those with oppressor identities would then be forced to submit themselves for ridicule by the rest of the class.

    Clark chose not to participate in the exercises. And for his resistance, he received failing grades, which will prevent him from graduating and threaten his college prospects.

    Click here to read the full lawsuit.

    *  *  *

    Sheriff’s Office Makes List of Innocent Kids Susceptible to “fall into a life of crime”

    Pasco County Florida thinks it can predict which kids will grow up to be criminals. So it keeps a detailed list of these innocent children.

    Factors which land kids on the list include getting bad grades in school, witnessing or being the victim of violence at home, and even “a juvenile’s social network,” which the Sheriff’s office tracks.

    Other factors which have landed 420 children on the list of potential criminals include “hanging around in public”.

    This is all described in the Sheriff’s office’s own manual, in a section on crime prevention.

    Deputies do engage some of the at-risk youth. But the main objective seems to be spying and intelligence gathering to aid in investigations– not to innocently mentor youth.

    Click here to read the manual.

    *  *  *

    UK Bans “Buy One Get One Free”

    In the country’s quest to save people from themselves, the United Kingdom will ban “buy one get one free” offers, and other promotions, on unhealthy food items.

    The rules which go into effect in April 2022 also forbid restaurants from giving free soda refills, and stop unhealthy items from being featured at the checkout.

    The argument is that obesity related illness costs the socialized healthcare system of the UK 6 billion pounds per year.

    Therefore the government has the right to dictate health standards to citizens and businesses alike.

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:20

  • "I'm Choosing The Risk Of Getting COVID": Over Half Of Health Care Workers At California Hospitals Refuse Vaccinations
    “I’m Choosing The Risk Of Getting COVID”: Over Half Of Health Care Workers At California Hospitals Refuse Vaccinations

    California’s health workers are refusing to take the new COVID-19 vaccines with over half of frontline workers at one hospital unwilling to take it, and between 20% and 50% of workers at other facilities who feel the same, according to the Los Angeles Times.

    New York nurse Sandra Lindsay becomes the first person in the US to become vaccinated

    At St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, fewer than half of the 700 hospital workers eligible for the vaccine were willing to take the shot when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five frontline nurses and doctors have declined the shot. Roughly 20% to 40% of L.A. County’s frontline workers who were offered the vaccine did the same, according to county public health officials.

    So many frontline workers in Riverside County have refused the vaccine — an estimated 50% — that hospital and public officials met to strategize how best to distribute the unused doses, Public Health Director Kim Saruwatari said. -LA Times

    Yet, as the Times notes, vaccine doubts among healthcare workers have come as a surprise to researchers, ‘who assumed hospital staff would be among those most in tune with the scientific data backing the vaccines.’

    Perhaps they were spooked by a viral video of a Tennessee nurse passing out on camera roughly 10 minutes after receiving her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine – which she says was due to an ‘over-reactive vagal response’ and not related to the jab.

    I’m choosing the risk — the risk of having COVID, or the risk of the unknown of the vaccine,” said 31-year-old nurse April Lu of the Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles, who added that she refused to take the vaccine because she wasn’t convinced of its safety for pregnant woman. Lu is six months pregnant.

    “I think I’m choosing the risk of COVID. I can control that and prevent it a little by wearing masks, although not 100% for sure,” she added. Lu isn’t alone, with several of her co-workers similarly refusing to take the vaccine.

    “I feel people think, ‘I can still make it until this ends without getting the vaccine,’” she said.

    The extent to which healthcare workers are refusing the vaccine is unclear, but reports of lower-than-expected participation rates are emerging around the country, raising concerns for epidemiologists who say the public health implications could be disastrous.

    A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of healthcare workers were “vaccine hesitant,” a figure slightly higher than the percentage of the general population, 27%.

    “Even the name, Operation Warp Speed, draws some concern for people about the rush to push it through,” said Dr. Medell Briggs-Malonson, an emergency medicine physician at UCLA Health who has received the vaccine. Still, she urged her colleagues to do the same. -LA Times

    Another healthcare worker, office assistant Nicholas Ruiz at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California says that while he interacts with nurses who deal with COVID-19 patients, he’s not taking the vaccine either.

    “I feel like the perception of the public with healthcare workers is incorrect. They might think we’re all informed of all of this. They might think that because we work in this environment,” said Ruiz, adding “But I know there’s a lot of people that have the same mentality as the public where they’re still afraid of getting it.”

    To try and convince health workers to take the jab, several hospitals are now showing employees instructional videos and interactive webinars showing staff happily getting vaccinated.

    At Laguna Hospital and San Francisco, around 10% of the nursing staff have opted out of the vaccine. Meanwhile, UCLA health reports 7,300 personnel out of 37,000 had received it – with officials noting that “there may be vaccine hesitancy in our workforce.”

    “We are not asking personnel to decide immediately whether to receive the vaccine. We want to give those offered vaccines adequate time to make a decision, and we hope that personnel will continue to understand that the benefits of vaccination clearly outweigh the risks,” the hospital said in a statement.

    Read the rest of the report here.

    Travis
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 16:55

  • Adopting A Gold Standard Would Promote Fiscal Discipline
    Adopting A Gold Standard Would Promote Fiscal Discipline

    Authored by James Caton via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    Many are surprised to learn that famed central banker Alan Greenspan has been a longtime supporter of the gold standard. But the record is clear. Greenspan published an essay in support of a gold standard with unregulated banking titled “Gold and Economic Freedom” in July 1966. He remained an advocate of the gold standard at the time of his appointment as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. And he has continued to wax about the gold standard in the time since leaving the Fed. 

    Among other things, Greenspan recognizes that the gold standard constrains government spending – and borrowing.

    Much such infrastructure would have to be funded with government debt. We are already in danger of seeing the ratio of federal debt to GDP edging toward triple digits. We would never have reached this position of extreme indebtedness were we on the gold standard, because the gold standard is a way of ensuring that fiscal policy never gets out of line.

    By now, the level of indebtedness has exceeded the value of U.S. GDP by an additional 35 percent. And the annual budget does not appear to be on course to reverse this trend any time soon. Under a commodity standard, like the gold standard, maintaining this risky position would be difficult, if not impossible, for the federal government.

    Unlike Greenspan, most economists today see the gold standard as an arcane relic. But what if Greenspan is correct? Is it possible to regain the advantages of a gold standard today?

    The Modern Monetary System and Fiscal Discipline

    As Greenspan explains in his ’66 essay, government borrowing is backed “only by the government’s promise to pay out future tax revenues.” The gold standard limited the extent to which a government can borrow because gold, unlike fiat money, cannot be printed. Governments are chastened for largess. Under a gold standard, money printing intended to support government borrowing quickly motivates investors to move gold to countries where it can earn a higher inflation-adjusted return. And the lost gold only returns after investors are compensated for the increased rate of inflation or the rate of inflation falls.

    The modern monetary system, on the other hand, has developed in a manner that facilitates state borrowing. I do not mean to accuse any particular person of intentional mischief. I simply note that financial regulation and monetary policy have developed in a manner that increasingly supports fiscal expansion.

    Consider the Basel Accords, which have charted the path of international financial regulation in recent decades. The guidelines provided by the Accords allow banks to hold supposedly safe debt – sovereign bonds – in lieu of reserves. Since these bonds typically earn a positive return and, even in the case of negative rates, tend to increase in value during a liquidity crisis, bank demand for sovereign debt has been practically insatiable. And this is only more true in an era where central banks dictate the value of short-term interest rates while also squeezing the yield curve by buying long-term bonds.

    Figure 1

    Figure 2

    As Basel II/III was being implemented, Ben Bernanke radically transformed the Fed’s operating system. To avoid short-run inflation and expectation of it by investors, Bernanke preferred to increase the quantity of reserves in the system while simultaneously paying banks risk-free interest not to lend those reserves. The alternative for a central bank would be to choose the level of reserves circulating within the financial system while allowing the competitive market to determine the rate of interest. 

    In this era of unprecedented control, the central bank has supported a massive expansion of federal borrowing. Since the Federal Reserve now sets the short-term rate, it can maintain historically low interest rates that support large fiscal deficits. Jerome Powell, the current chair, has even advocated for increases in federal spending in a wish to coordinate monetary and fiscal policies. 

    This system of monetary control suffers from massive tail risk. The value of the dollar depends upon the expectation that the government can repay its debts in the future. As Greenspan pointed out, the ability of a government to borrow depends on its convincing investors that the government will receive future taxes sufficient to repay the debt. With historically low rates set by the Federal Reserve, there is essentially no constraint on government spending except for the threat of default.

    Gold and Fiscal Discipline

    In light of the current fiscal position of the United States, there is a smattering of irony around the widespread disapproval of a gold standard among economists and policymakers. Perhaps more ironic, the gold standard failed not due to its natural functioning but due to an attempt by policymakers to circumvent the natural functioning of the gold standard so as to avoid the consequence of money printing in Great Britain during World War I. Such was the premise of the gold exchange standard where European central banks agreed – half-heartedly – to treat British pounds on par with their legal defined gold equivalent.

    The system collapsed because it was politically unpopular. Those directing policy were unwilling to cooperate in a system that they felt did not benefit them. France withdrew its gold from England starting in 1927 and the system became inoperable. Growing demand for gold reserves by central banks led to plummeting asset prices and chaos in financial markets. The gold standard didn’t fail because of the nature of a commodity standard, but rather, due to a failed intervention that sought to insulate governments and investors from the effects of Europe’s departure from the gold standard during World War I.

    As economist F.A. Hayek recognized in a 1935 interview with The Economist, it is unlikely that the world could return to a gold standard as it had functioned before World War I. To do so would require that major holders of gold reserves would be willing to reduce their holdings, essentially donating to central banks that arrived late to the gold standard. When the international gold standard was established during the 1870s, gold and silver circulated as money. Bank lending depended on holdings of these metals as reserves. To attempt to return to the classical gold standard today would likely face difficulties that would outweigh the benefits.

    But actors in the financial system would be happy to treat commodities as money if the cost of doing so was sufficiently low. There is nothing stopping any of us from opening a money market mutual fund account and writing checks or using a debit card linked to the account. Technologically, there is little reason individuals could not hold accounts denominated in a commodity like gold or silver except that they would suffer short-term capital gains taxes, in addition to the cost of accounting, for their regular transactions. Even in a world where the dollar is legal tender, savings accounts could be denominated in gold and gold would, therefore, serve as money. 

    We could allow for a de facto gold standard at little cost. And this standard would ensure that investors could discipline government for borrowing excessively. If citizens were allowed to save their income in gold-denominated accounts without extra costs of taxation and financial regulation, disciplining their government would be as easy as changing the form of one’s savings account. 

    The lowest cost means of gaining the advantages from gold would be to remove all taxes and regulatory costs that inhibit citizens from treating commodities as money. In the case that citizens could keep their savings in a commodity ETF against which they could write checks or use a debit card, protecting one’s financial position from inflation would be as easy as opening a new account. The financial system would naturally encourage fiscal responsibility and could, perhaps, prevent a fiscal crisis that is growing more likely with every federal budget.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 16:30

  • UK Judge To Give Decision On Assange Extradition On Monday
    UK Judge To Give Decision On Assange Extradition On Monday

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    On Monday, January 4th, the British judge presiding over the extradition trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will decide whether or not Assange will be extradited to the US and tried under the Espionage Act for exposing US war crimes.

    If extradited, Assange could face up to 175 years in prison. President Trump’s Justice Department indicted the WikiLeaks founder on 17 counts of espionage and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime. The charges revolve around documents provided to WikiLeaks by former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning.

    There have been rumors that President Trump is considering pardoning Assange, and many are urging him to do so. Assange’s fiancee Stella Moris made her case for the pardon recently on Fox News.

    “The consequences of a trial against Julian don’t just affect him or us as a family because everyone agrees this is a terrible, terrible case. It’s a terrible case because it is the end of the first amendment,” she said.

    Assange has been held in London’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019. A UN special rapporteur, Nils Melzer, has likened Assange’s treatment in Belmarsh to torture.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Melzer recently spoke out against the extradition, accusing the US of criminalizing journalism.

    “In essence, the United States is trying to criminalize investigative journalism. That’s the purpose of the extradition request, nothing else,” Melzer said.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 15:40

  • Senate Overrides Trump Veto Of Defense Bill
    Senate Overrides Trump Veto Of Defense Bill

    Meeting for a rare New Year’s Day session, the Senate voted 81-13 on Friday to override President Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Trump said “fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my Administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions.”

    A two-thirds majority was needed to override the veto – which would mark the first in Trump’s presidency. The NDAA authorizes over $740 billion in military programs and construction, as well as 3% pay raises for US troops. It also contains a provision to rename military bases named after Confederate generals.

    Trump also wanted to force a repeal of Section 203 protections for social-media companies enjoy due to their constant editorializing of user content, however lawmakers refused to include the provision.

    The rare January 1st session comes as the new Congress is set to be sworn in on Sunday.

    On Wednesday, the Senate voted 80-12 to begin an official debate on overriding the veto, proving that Congress can act with lightning speed when properly motivated.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Tuesday that the NDAA is crucial to national defense, and to “deter great power rivals like China and Russia.” The bill “will cement our advantage on the seas, on land, in the air, in cyberspace and in space,” he added.

    During Trump’s time in office, he has vetoed eight other bills – several of them focused on foreign policy and national security issues, according to the Wall Street Journal.

    The fight over the NDAA also underscored broader tensions over national-security issues between congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump. On foreign policy and national-security issues, many Republicans have readily bucked Mr. Trump during his presidency even as they have stood by him on many other issues.

    For instance, the Trump administration’s recent effort to cut troop levels in Afghanistan in half, to roughly 2,500, by Jan. 15, has alarmed some Republicans. The NDAA requires the administration to submit to Congress a comprehensive assessment of the withdrawal before it can use funds to pull out troops. -WSJ

    In addition to creating a commission to assess changes to bases, displays, monuments, symbols and other paraphernalia related to Confederate commanders, the bill limits the president’s ability to use emergency military construction funds for other purposes. It also restricts employees or former employees from the military-industrial complex to work directly for the Chinese government or government-controlled companies.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 01/01/2021 – 15:15

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Today’s News 1st January 2021

  • 2020's Bio-Economic World War: Communist China Lied; Millions Of Humans Died
    2020’s Bio-Economic World War: Communist China Lied; Millions Of Humans Died

    Authored by Austin Bay via The Epoch Times,

    The Chinese Communist Party’s COVID-19/Wuhan virus disinformation campaign (cover-up) rates as 2020’s biggest Big Lie. By any measure, especially body count, the CCP committed 2020’s most consequential and deadliest falsehood.

    The following analysis summarizes decisions and actions by China’s communist rulers from December 2019’s final days through the end of January 2020, when U.S. President Donald Trump shut down air travel between mainland China and America.

    (1) China’s rulers – or their frightened commissar and police apparatchiks – brutalized and jailed the doctors and researchers who identified the disease as a threat to life and sought to warn other Chinese and medical authorities worldwide.

    (2) As these brave MDs went to jail for doing a doctor’s duty, the dictatorship initiated narrative warfare. Lower-level government mouths and controlled media denied the epidemic’s outbreak.

    (3) While spinning up The Big Lie, totalitarian China, which employs The Great Firewall of China to block internet access, allowed Chinese travelers (especially Chinese New Year vacationers) to spread the disease to exotic and non-exotic – but always human biotic – international locales.

    Were these decisions and actions genocidal calculation or the usual dictatorial ineptitude? That isn’t the critical killer question. Note to readers: I originally wrote “strategic issue” instead of “killer question” and then realized that “strategic issue” was a beltway euphemism.

    The killer: Bio-economic attacks target everyone’s life first and wallet second. So you survive the disease. Your country suffers a costly hit to food and health.

    In early January, the CCP dictatorship confronted this strategic issue: a domestic epidemic that would damage the Chinese economy.

    Fact: China’s brutal dictatorship relies on economic success to pacify disgruntled citizens who know how to evade the Great Firewall and thus know the CCP ordered the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which killed over 2,000 Chinese citizens. Economic success? Translation: material bribes like small electric cars and cellphones.

    What did the dictatorship do? It decided to export the contagion.

    The dictatorship’s cruel analysis: The Wuhan virus pandemic imperiled the CCP’s strategic plan to dominate the globe. Ipso facto, the CCP could not let China’s economy alone suffer the Wuhan virus. Exporting the epidemic would slow the economies of China’s free market and ideological competitors. Bonus: It might sow social discontent, particularly in the United States, where freedom of movement is regarded as a right.

    China’s dictatorship concealed its callous decision to infect planet Earth. It quickly deployed a propaganda and narrative warfare campaign utilizing its worldwide political, economic, academic, and intelligence agency assets.

    China’s communist dictatorship decided to wage a new form of bio-economic war on human beings worldwide.

    Pay careful attention (for bribed critics and ChiCom trolls will not). I’m not arguing the virus was a bio-weapon in the military and medical definition of a biological attack on animals or plants. I am arguing the CCP leadership allowed the virus to spread beyond China so every other nation would suffer the disease’s medical, economic, and social consequences.

    That decision amounts to waging bio-economic warfare on non-People’s Republic of China human beings and their economies, from wealthy nations to wretchedly poor nations.

    At the moment, the Wuhan virus savages sub-Saharan African nations. Over the last four weeks, U.N. agencies have issued warnings of starvation conditions in South Sudan. The epidemic inhibits food distribution in South Sudan. Thus, Chinese communist bio-economic warfare kills the poorest of the poor. Superficial media miss this story and miss the Wuhan virus-starvation connection.

    Perhaps the miss isn’t unintentional. Chinese-influenced organizations, particularly in academia and media, contributed to 2020’s Big Lie. U.S Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) is clearly a CCP-corrupted politician.

    As 2021 begins, the CCP cover-up will continue. A CCP court just sentenced citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to prison for questioning the CCP’s early 2020 falsehoods.

    Zhan will spend four years in jail for telling the truth about communist China’s Big Lie.

    *  *  *

    Austin Bay is a colonel (ret.) in the U.S. Army Reserve, author, syndicated columnist, and teacher of strategy and strategic theory at the University of Texas–Austin. His latest book is “Cocktails from Hell: Five Wars Shaping the 21st Century.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 23:30

  • America's Top New Year's Resolutions For 2021
    America’s Top New Year’s Resolutions For 2021

    For many, 2020 has been ‘a year’, which makes getting a fresh start in 2021 feel very appealing.

    The turn of the calendar brings both the opportunity to reflect on the last 12 months and, as Statista’s Claire Jenik notes below, the chance to begin planning for the next dozen.

    For 2021, many Americans are making the resolution to adopt healthy habits – concerning their bodies, minds and finances.

    Infographic: America's Top New Year's Resolutions for 2021 | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As the Holiday Season Report from our Statista Global Consumer Survey shows, out of all US participants who said they were making one or several new year’s resolutions, 44 percent wanted to exercise more, while 42% planned to eat healthier in 2021. More popular resolutions for the upcoming year also circled around improving one’s health, with weight loss and quit smoking being among the favorite answers.

    After almost a year of social distancing, often also from close family members and loved ones, 34 percent said that they wanted to spend more time with family and friends.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 23:05

  • These Are The 10 Worst Mayors In The Nation In 2020
    These Are The 10 Worst Mayors In The Nation In 2020

    Authored by Jennifer Oliver O’Connell via RedState.com,

    As one of our RedState diarists Dana Pico mused,

    “There are times that I wonder if today’s Democrats see George Orwell’s 1984 not as a warning but a model of good government.”

    In celebration of a 2020 that desperately needs to come to an end, here is a list of the Top 10 Worst Mayors in the nation. These mayors most definitely use Orwell’s 1984 as their policies and procedures manual, if not their Bible.

    It comes as no surprise that all 10 of the mayors on the list are Democrat (something about that political party), and that five of the 10 are mayors of West Coast cities (something about the Pacific Ocean).

    Several of the mayors have overseen a mass exodus of people from their cities, and even their state in a 10-month period. But most of all, every one of these mayors stand out as abject failures of governance, with constituents that literally despise them.

    Without further adieu, here is the Top 10 Worst Mayor’s list for 2020:

    10. Michael Hancock (Denver)

    Denver Mayor Michael Hancock could have stayed under the radar and never made it to the Top 10 on this list. But thanks to his Holiday Hypocrisy, he landed firmly in the final spot.

    My colleague, Scott Hounsell wrote:

    “According to the news report, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock was spotted leaving the state to go spend Thanksgiving with his daughter in Mississippi.  The Mayor’s office said that the Mayor had canceled his big holiday dinner this year, but “traveled alone” (aside from the whole public transportation and flying from a crowded airport thing).

    “His flight allegedly also took off 30 minutes after he posted this little gem to his Twitter account:”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Local investigative reporter Nicole Vap dropped the hammer, exposing Mayor Hancock’s hypocrisy of not only telling others to stay at home, but hopping a flight from Colorado to Mississippi without so much as an eyelash blink.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Hancock was “deeply regretful” about his decision, saying he led with his heart and not his head.

    When do they ever lead, let alone actually use their head to do so? Asking for a friend.

    9. Sam Liccardo (San Jose)

    Our first Coastie Mayor enters the fray. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, like Hancock of Denver, probably could have avoided this list too; but, when you dictate to people that they are required to follow certain behavior, you better make sure you’re dictating to yourself.

    Liccardo decided the City of San Jose needed to be scolded and reminded…

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Another plug for local journalism, as I reported:

    “San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo (Democrat-Duh), ignored his own protocols and had Thanksgiving with family members outside of his own household.

    “ ‘The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit has learned Liccardo celebrated with his elderly parents at their Saratoga home with an unknown number of other guests. While the mayor’s staff did confirm the dinner took place, they have not disclosed how many other people attended, how many different households were present, and whether any of those in attendance wore masks while not eating.’ ”

    So much for Liccardo avoiding the big gatherings and keeping people safe. The San Jose Mayor assumed because he wasn’t Governor Gavin Newsom, that no one would be watching. Dude, we’re all stuck at home—you know we’re watching.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    8. Steve Adler (Austin)

    Austin Mayor Steve Adler has been a zealot for COVID rules and mask compliance. His Twitter profile shows he is the perfect poster child for mask adherents:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Between criticisms of Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Adler makes sure to post statistics from the County Department of Health and information on how YOU can stop the spread. While he was gaslighting his constituents pretending to be “all in it together”, Adler was posting his crumbs of wisdom from a vacation home in… wait for it… Cabo San Lucas.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Kira Davis unveiled this stunning hypocrisy:

    “Adler agreed, and just ahead of Thanksgiving he posted a video to his Facebook page once again encouraging Austinites to stay home, avoid travel and forgo Thanksgiving with family in the name of safety. He suggested that Austin may have to close again if people did not comply.

    “What he did not disclose is that he sent the message from his family timeshare in Cabo San Lucas.

    “In case you’re not a big geography fan…that’s in Mexico.

    “In an exclusive report, The Statesman reveals that recently Adler hosted an outdoor wedding for his daughter with at least 20 guests.

    Even after being exposed, Adler had the unmitigated gall to post this to his Twitter account:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Maybe if he paid more attention to the home fires, he wouldn’t get called out by the Governor of Texas for the city’s crime problem.

    7. London Breed (San Francisco)

    Our second Coastie in the running for the Top 10 sweepstakes. Besides the most pretentious name this side of Stockton, the San Francisco mayor’s woke governance has seen an exponential increase in homelessness, drug use and public nudity on the streets, not to mention dodging fecal matter on all the major thoroughfares.

    Breed has also overseen the exodus of several Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Palantir’s Alex Karp, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Yet, like Governor Gavin Newsom, and another mayoral entry, Breed targets churches as vectors of COVID spread, and complains that Newsom’s replacement of Senator Kamala Harris with someone who isn’t a Black female is a slap in the face.

    Mayor Breed slapped her own constituents in the face when, on the heels of Newsom’s infamous visit, Breed also dined at the pricey French Laundry. As Jen Van Laar reported, Breed

    attended the 60th birthday party of socialite Goretti Lo Lui at the exclusive restaurant – in the very same private dining room Newsom’s party occupied.

    “Breed’s spokesperson, Jeff Cretan, described the party as ‘a small family birthday dinner,’ comprised of eight people, but there’s no word on who the other attendees were and how many households were represented.”

    San Francisco is full of champagne elitists, but even they are getting fed up. These elected officials are constantly saying “we” must sacrifice our time with family and friends in order to stop the spread, without that sacrifice extending in their direction. Breed was still playing this game at the Christmas holidays:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    And like many in the rest of the state, very few are playing along.

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    6. Jacob Frey (Minneapolis)

    Now to the frozen tundra of the Upper Midwest. Had it not been for the death of George Floyd, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey could have fallen into woke obscurity as another pajama boy running a major city into the ground.

    Thanks to Black Lives Matter’s and Antifa’s violent “protests” over the death of George Floyd, Frey is doing a horrible job of rebuilding from the ruins, especially with no federal funds to assist that. You broke it, you pay for it.

    Frey and the Minneapolis City Council led the rallying cry to defund the police after the Floyd-inspired violence, where Frey allowed rioters to burn down the police headquarters.

    Frey and the Council got their wish, cutting 8 million from the police budget. But that “Monkey’s Paw” grant came with a huge surge in violent crime.

    If Frey stays on track, he’ll move up the list come next year.

    5. Jenny Durkan (Seattle)

    Not only does our third Coastie entry, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, win the mid-slot prize, but she is fighting with Frey and our No. 4 entry for the award of Stupidest Mayor on the Planet.

    Seattle has tolerated Antifa violence for years, thinking as long as it was isolated to certain areas, that it was all good in the hood.

    When Black Lives Matter decided to up the ante and create an autonomous zone called CHOP, then CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) in the middle of downtown Seattle, Durkan had nothing but high praise for this expression of

    “first amendment rights, demanding we do better as a society and provide true equity for communities of color is not terrorism – it is patriotism.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Durkan used it as a platform to condemn President Trump and praise Seattle, who was on the forefront of “true, meaningful change.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Only after the radicals decided to protest at her house did she decide the protests and CHAZ needed to cease. Things had been going south fairly quickly, with rapes and murders piling up in the autonomous zone, but up to that point, to Durkan it was just one big “block party.”

    So what did the good Mayor Durkan do? She laid the blame for the fallout at the feet of her police chief Carmen Best, who happened to be the first woman of color to hold the position. After the Seattle City Council voted to slash Chief Best’s salary in half, Best chose to resign.

    My colleague Sister Toldjah wrote,

    “The irony here cannot be overstated. In an effort to appease radical “Black Lives Matter” activists, the City Council chose to show their support for diverse black voices by punishing one for expressing her disagreement.”

    So much for true equity.

    4. Ted Wheeler (Portland)

    Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Jenny Durkan are almost neck and neck, but the idiot Wheeler gets a higher ranking for being the worse form of a cuck. And that’s saying a lot when you have Minneapolis Mayor Jason Frey and the winner of the No. 1 slot in this mix.

    Wheeler decided to march in solidarity with violent protestors back in July, and tolerated his own version of a CHAZ. When President Trump offered to send in the National Guard to help quell the unrest, Wheeler doubled and triple-downed on his hatred for Trump and refused help. Instead he sat back and watched as his citizens’ businesses and the city were destroyed.

    Wheeler has had BLM and Antifa mount perpetual protests at his condo building, where rioters actually entered the lobby of the building and occupied it.

    It took over 100 days of violence and destruction of property for Wheeler to finally condemn it. Too little, too late.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    3. Lori Lightfoot (Chicago)

    Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was one of the first passengers on the COVID Hypocrisy train. While she tweeted about “Stay Home, Save Lives” and threatened people if they broke the lockdowns and quarantine, she decided she needed a haircut.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    My colleague Nick Arama documented her excuse:

    “ ‘I’m on national media and I’m out in the public eye,’ she stated.

    “ ‘I’m a person who, I take my personal hygiene very seriously. As I said, I felt like I needed to have a haircut,’ Lightfoot said. ‘I’m not able to do that myself, so I got a haircut. You want to talk more about that?’ “

    It’s not her fault she needs her roots done. How dare you question her authority!

    Like Durkan, Mayor Lightfoot praised the Summer’s peaceful destructive protestors—until they showed up at her house. Then she banned them, but only from her block.

    “To quote Doc Holliday — or at least the Val Kilmer version of him — Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “hypocrisy knows no bounds”.

    According to the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Police Department is under orders from the Mayor’s Office that no protesters are allowed in the area of Logan’s Square where the Mayor lives.”

    Lightfoot continues to be a regular passenger on the Hypocrisy Express, leading a celebration rally after Joe Biden declared his victorious win in the presidential election.

    While she also continues to ignore weekend murders in Black neighborhoods, and blames them on… COVID.

    But Lightfoot is part of the intersectional Left (Black, Lesbian), so in Chicago, at least, she’ll always get a pass.

    2. Bill DeBlasio (New York)

    This was another almost neck-and-neck call, but Mayor de Bolshevik aka Marxist Mayor Marfan is still forced to take second string.

    At the beginning of the “15 days to stop the spread”, Mayor Marfan decided there needed to be a tip line to report New Yorkers who were not observing social distancing.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    It went over as well could be expected, as my colleague Sister Toldjah reported:

    “Here we are just a few days later, and the New York Post is reporting that the text line has been “flooded” with obscene photos, comparisons of de Blasio to Hitler, and links/photos to the reports of him going to the gym as other New York residents were told to hunker down.”

    De Bolshevik made a big show of painting a Black Lives Matter street mural in the wake of the George Floyd Summer of unrest, and he spearheaded the successful defunding of the police, while watching crime rates spike out of control as a result.

    Marxist Mayor Marfan is a despised man, even by the state’s governor, who is no peach himself. Democrat Max Rose called him the worst Mayor in the history of the country:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Apparently Mayor Marfan continues to double down on that title with pride, pretending to care by beclowning himself with videos about mask usage. While making plans to stiff the Orthodox Jewish community on getting vaccinations, even though he has personally blamed them for the COVID spread in the city.

    You look up “Horrible Human” in the dictionary, and de Bolshevik’s photo is more than likely next to it.

    You look up “Useless Tool”, and you’ll find a picture of this West Coast treasure who took the No. 1 spot.

    1. Eric Garcetti (Los Angeles)

    Diarist Katlyn Batts said it best:

    “The situation isn’t any better on the west coast either, where Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s approach to the COVID-19 epidemic has only worsened many of the most pressing issues facing the city.

    “Homelessness, for example, has long been a major problem facing Los Angeles. Mayor Garcetti has promised to address the issue, but he has come up short time and again in finding a true solution. The city pledged to house 15,000 of its homeless residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has continuously failed to meet that goal.

    While Garcetti referred to the homeless population as “horseshit” and has ignored the overflow of human detritus and waste that has filled every street and freeway underpass from Atwater Village to Woodland Hills, he has fixated on ensuring that every COVID-19 diktat spewed by Governor Hair Gel Newsom is enforced, even declaring that “snitches get rewards” to anyone who would report their neighbor for violating the Governor’s “safer at home” orders.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    While cutting off water and power from homes and businesses who refused to adhere to the orders.

    However, Mayor Uselessness did show his concern for Angelenos by giving them a discount on parking violations. What a stand up guy!

    Unless it comes to any male who was sexually harassed by his Deputy Mayor and advisor Rick Jacobs, that is. Then he doesn’t know anything about it.

    What Garcetti never failed to do was miss a moment to be in front of the cameras as the West Coast surrogate for the Biden-Harris ticket. He even had his hopes of riding the ticket’s coattails to D.C., where his illusions of grandeur could be fully realized.

    BLM-LA helped to burst that bubble. They labeled him a white supremacist, and protested in front of his house in order to tank any chance that Biden would consider him for a cabinet position.

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    The good news is that BLM-LA succeeded, so the rest of the nation has been spared Garcetti’s abject incompetence.

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    The bad news is Los Angeles is still stuck with him.

    What a way to be No. 1.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 22:40

  • Fake Pastors Swindle Churchgoers In $28 Million FX/Crypto Ponzi Scheme 
    Fake Pastors Swindle Churchgoers In $28 Million FX/Crypto Ponzi Scheme 

    The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against two Maryland companies and their principals allegedly defrauding more than 1,000 investors in a $28 million Ponzi scheme. 

    The SEC first filed the complaint against 1st Million LLC and Smart Partners LLC, and their principals, Dennis Jali, John Frimpong, and Arley Johnson, in August, for defrauding 1,200 investors, many of which were “African immigrants.” 

    The complaint said the trio “exploited common ancestry and/or religious affiliations to earn investors’ trust. Many of the investors were health care workers and/or members of churches attended by Jali, Frimpong, and/or Johnson.” 

    1st Million LLC Seminar 

    Investors were promised by Jali, Frimpong, and Johnson that they were “skilled and licensed traders that would invest in foreign currency exchange and cryptocurrency, “and guaranteed substantial monthly or quarterly returns while simultaneously protecting their principal from market forces,” the complaint read. 

    As always, like in any other classic Ponzi scheme, the complaint read:

    “Rather than invest money received from these targeted communities and others as promised, Defendants misappropriated investor funds for the personal use of Jali, Frimpong, and Johnson, and to temporarily keep the scheme afloat by making Ponzi payments to earlier investors.” 

    According to CBS Baltimore, officials from the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland are trying to identify victims who may have lost money. 

    CBS Baltimore added more color into the trio’s scheme, indicating they posed as “pastors and attended church events to get investments from churchgoers.” 

    Here’s one of the many seminars the fake pastors lured unsuspecting victims from various churches. 

    The scheme went on for nearly two years, from August 2017 to May 2019.

    A couple of months ago, a Baltimore man was sentenced to 22-years in jail for the largest-ever Ponzi scheme in the state’s history.  

    Just imagine if these fools actually invested millions of dollars in Bitcoin back in 2017-19… 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 22:15

  • Military And Political Trends Of 2020 That Will Shape 2021
    Military And Political Trends Of 2020 That Will Shape 2021

    Via South Front,

    2020 was a year full of surprises. It marked the advent of a new reality which may, with an equal probability, lead humanity to a new dark age or to a global digital dystopia. In this context, there is little room for a positive scenario of sustainable development that would benefit people in general, as opposed to just a group of select individuals and special interest groups. The heft of shifts in 2020 is comparable to what European citizens felt on the eve of another change of the socio-economic formation in the early 17th and 20th centuries.

    The past year began with the assassination of the Iranian military genius General Qasem Soleimani by the United States, and it ended with the murder of the prominent scholar Mohsen Fakhrizadeh by the Israelis. In early January, Iran, expecting another aggressive action from the West, accidently shot down a Ukrainian civil aircraft that had inexplicably altered its course over Tehran without request nor authorization. Around the same time, Turkey confirmed the deployment of its military in Libya, beginning a new phase of confrontation in the region, and Egypt responding with airstrikes and additional shows of force. The situation in Yemen developed rapidly: taking advantage of the Sunni coalition’s moral weakness, Ansar Allah achieved significant progress in forcing the Saudis out of the country in many regions. The state of warfare in northwestern Syria has significantly changed, transforming into the formal delineation of zones of influence of Turkey and the Russian-Iranian-Syrian coalition. This happened amid, and largely due to the weakening of U.S. influence in the region. Ankara is steadily increasing its military presence in the areas under its responsibility and along the contact line. It has taken measures to deter groups linked to Al-Qaeda and other radicals. As a result, the situation in the region is stabilizing, which has allowed Turkey to increasingly exert control over most of Greater Idlib.

    ISIS cells remain active in the eastern and southern Syrian regions. Particular processes are taking place in Quneitra and Daraa provinces, where Russian peace initiatives were inconclusive by virtue of the direct destructive influence of Israel in these areas of Syria. In turn, the assassination of Qasem Soleimaniin resulted in a sharp increase in the targeting of American personnel, military and civil infrastructure in Iraq. The U.S. Army was forced to regroup its forces, effectively abandoning a number of its military installations and concentrating available forces at key bases. At the same time, Washington flatly rejected demands from Baghdad for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops and promised to respond with full-fledged sanctions if Iraq continued to raise this issue. Afghanistan remains stable in its instability. Disturbing news comes from Latin America. Confrontation between China and India flared this year, resulting in sporadic border clashes. This situation seems far from over, as both countries have reinforced their military posture along the disputed border. The aggressive actions of the Trump administration against China deepen global crises, which has become obvious not only to specialists but also to the general public. The relationship between the collective West and the Russian Federation was re-enshrined in “the Cold War state”, which seems to have been resurrected once again.

    The turbulence of the first quarter of 2020 was overshadowed by a new socio-political process – the corona-crisis, the framework of which integrates various phenomena from the Sars-Cov2 epidemic itself and the subsequent exacerbation of the global economic crisis. The disclosure of substantial social differences that have accumulated in modern capitalist society, lead to a series of incessant protests across the globe. The year 2020 was accompanied by fierce clashes between protesters professing various causes and law enforcement forces in numerous countries. Although on the surface these societal clashes with the state appear disassociated, many share related root causes. A growing, immense wealth inequality, corruption of government at all levels, a lack of any meaningful input into political decision making, and the unmasking of massive censorship via big tech corporations and the main stream media all played a part in igniting societal unrest.

    In late 2019 and early 2020 there was little reason for optimistic projections for the near future. However, hardly anyone could anticipate the number of crisis events and developments that had taken place during this year. These phenomena affected every region of the world to some extent.

    Nevertheless, Middle East has remained the main source of instability, due to being an arena where global and regional power interests intertwine and clash. The most important line of confrontation is between US and Israel-led forces on the one hand, and Iran and its so called Axis of Resistance. The opposing sides have been locked in an endless spiral of mutual accusations, sanctions, military incidents, and proxy wars, and recently even crossed the threshold into a limited exchange of strikes due to the worsening state of regional confrontation. Russia and Turkey, the latter of which has been distancing itself from Washington due to growing disagreements with “NATO partners” and changes in global trends, also play an important role in the region without directly entering into the confrontation between pro-Israel forces and Iran.

    As in the recent years, Syria and Iraq remain the greatest hot-spots. The destruction of ISIS as a terrorist state and the apparent killing of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not end its existence as a terror group. Many ISIS cells and supporting elements actively use regional instability as a chance to preserve the Khalifate’s legacy. They remain active mainly along the Syria-Iraq border, and along the eastern bank of the Euphrates in Syria. Camps for the temporary displaced and for the families and relatives of ISIS militants on the territory controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in north-eastern Syria are also breeding grounds for terrorist ideology. Remarkably, these regions are also where there is direct presence of US forces, or, as in the case of SDF camps, presence of forces supported by the US.

    The fertile soil for radicalism also consists of the inability to reach a comprehensive diplomatic solution that would end the Syrian conflict in a way acceptable to all parties. Washington is not interesting in stabilizing Syria because even should Assad leave, it would strengthen the Damascus government that would naturally be allied to Russia and Iran. Opposing Iran and supporting Israel became the cornerstone of US policy during the Trump administration. Consequently, Washington is supporting separatist sentiments of the Kurdish SDF leadership and even allowed it to participate in the plunder of Syrian oil wells in US coalition zone of control in which US firms linked to the Pentagon and US intelligence services are participating. US intelligence also aids Israel in its information and psychological warfare operations, as well as military strikes aimed at undermining Syria and Iranian forces located in the country. In spite of propaganda victories, in practice Israeli efforts had limited success in 2020 as Iran continued to strengthen its positions and military capabilities on its ally’s territory. Iran’s success in establishing and supporting a land corridor linking Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iraq, plays an important role. Constant expansion of Iran’s military presence and infrastructure near the town of al-Bukamal, on the border of Iraq and Syria, demonstrates the importance of the project to Tehran. Tel-Aviv claims that Iran is using that corridor to equip pro-Iranian forces in southern Syria and Lebanon with modern weapons.

    The Palestinian question is also an important one for Israel’s leadership and its lobby in Washington. The highly touted “deal of the century” turned out to be no more than an offer for the Palestinians to abandon their struggle for statehood. As expected, this initiative did not lead to a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Rather the opposite, it gave an additional stimulus to Palestinian resistance to the demands that were being imposed. At the same time, Trump administration scored a diplomatic success by forcing the UAE and Bahrain to normalize their relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia to make its collaboration with Israel public. That was a historic victory for US-Israel policy in the Middle East. Public rapprochement of Arab monarchies and Israel strengthened the positions of Iran as the only country which not only declares itself as Palestine’s and Islamic world’s defender, but actually puts words into practice. Saudi Arabia’s leadership will particularly suffer in terms of loss of popularity among its own population, already damaged by the failed war in Yemen and intensifying confrontation with UAE, both of which are already using their neighbor’s weakness to lay a claim to leadership on the Arabian Peninsula.

    The list of actors strengthening their positions in the Red Sea includes Russia. In late 2020 it became known that Russia reached an agreement with Sudan on establishing a naval support facility which has every possibility to become a full-blown naval base. This foothold will enable the Russian Navy to increase its presence on key maritime energy supply routes on the Red Sea itself and in the area between Aden and Oman straits. For Russia, which has not had naval infrastructure in that region since USSR’s break-up, it is a significant diplomatic breakthrough. For its part. Sudan’s leadership apparently views Russia’s military presence as a security factor allowing it to balance potential harmful measures by the West.

    During all of 2020, Moscow and Beijing continued collaboration on projects in Africa, gradually pushing out traditional post-colonial powers in several key areas. The presence of Russian military specialists in the Central African Republic where they assist the central government in strengthening its forces, escalation of local conflicts, and ensuring the security of Russian economic sectors, is now a universally known fact. Russian diplomacy and specialists are also active in Libya, where UAE and Egypt which support Field Marshal Khaftar, and Turkey which supports the Tripoli government, are clashing. Under the cover of declarations calling for peace and stability, foreign actors are busily carving up Libya’s energy resources. For Egypt there’s also the crucial matter of fighting terrorism and the presence of groups affiliated with Muslim Brotherhood which Cairo sees as a direct threat to national security.

    The Sahel and the vicinity of Lake Chad remain areas where terror groups with links to al-Qaeda and ISIS remain highly active. France’s limited military mission in the Sahara-Sahel region has been failure and could not ensure sufficient support for regional forces in order to stabilize the situation. ISIS and Boko-Haram continue to spread chaos in the border areas between Niger, Nigeria, Cameroun, and Chad. In spite of all the efforts by the region’s governments, terrorists continue to control sizable territories and represent a significant threat to regional security. The renewed conflict in Ethiopia is a separate problem, in which the federal government was drawn into a civil war against the National Front for the Liberation of Tigray controlling that province. The ethno-feudal conflict between federal and regional elites threatens to destabilize the entire country if it continues.

    The explosive situation in Africa shows that post-colonial European powers and the “Global Policeman” which dominated that continent for decades were not interested in addressing the continent’s actual problem. Foreign actors were mainly focused on extracting resources and ensuring the interests of a narrow group of politicians and entities affiliated with foreign capitals. Now they are forced to compete with the informal China-Russia bloc which will use a different approach that may be a described as follows: Strengthening of regional stability to protect investments in economic projects. Thus it is no surprise that influential actors are gradually losing to new but more constructive forces.

    Tensions within European countries have been on the rise during the past several years, due to both the crisis of the contemporary economic paradigm and to specific regional problems such as the migration crises and the failure of multiculturalism policies, with subsequent radicalization of society.

    Unpleasant surprises included several countries’ health care and social protection networks’ inability to cope with the large number of COVID-19 patients. Entire systems of governance in a number of European countries proved incapable of coping with rapidly developing crises. This is true particularly for countries of southern Europe, such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Among eastern European countries, Hungary’s and Romania’s economies were particularly badly affected. At the same time, Poland’s state institutions and economy showed considerable resilience in the face of crisis. While the Federal Republic of Germany suffered considerable economic damage in the second quarter of 2020, Merkel’s government used the situation to inject huge sums of liquidity into the economy, enhanced Germany’s position within Europe, and moreover Germany’s health care and social protection institutions proved capable and sufficiently resilient.

    Coronavirus and subsequent social developments led to the emergence of the so-called “Macron Doctrine” which amounts to an argument that EU must obtain strategic sovereignty. This is consistent with the aims of a significant portion of German national elites. Nevertheless, Berlin officially criticized Macron’s statements and has shown willingness to enter into a strategic partnership with Biden Administration’s United States as a junior partner. However, even FRG’s current leadership understands the dangers of lack of strategic sovereignty in an era of America’s decline as the world policeman. Against the backdrop of a global economic crisis, US-EU relations are ineluctably drifting from a state of partnership to one of competition or even rivalry. In general, the first half of 2020 demonstrated the vital necessity of further development of European institutions.

    The second half of 2020 was marked by fierce mass protests in Germany, France, Great Britain, and other European countries. The level of violence employed by both the protesters and law enforcement was unprecedented and is not comparable to the level of violence seen during protests in Russia, Belarus, and even Kirgizstan. Mainstream media did their best to depreciate and conceal the scale of what was happening. If the situation continues to develop in the same vein, there is every chance that in the future, a reality that can be described as a digital concentration camp may form in Europe.

    World media, for its part, paid particular attention to the situation in Belarus, where protests have entered their fourth month following the August 9, 2020 presidential elections. Belarusian protests have been characterized by their direction from outside the country and choreographed nature. The command center of protest activities is officially located in Poland. This fact is in and of itself unprecedented in Europe’s contemporary history. Even during Ukraine’s Euromaidan, external forces formally refused to act as puppetmasters.

    Belarus’ genuinely existing socio-economic problems have led to a rift within society that is now divided into two irreconcilable camps: proponents of reforms vs. adherents of the current government. Law enforcement forces which are recruited from among President Lukashenko’s supporters, have acted forcefully and occasionally harshly. Still, the number of casualties is far lower than, for example, in protests in France or United States.

    Ukraine itself, where Western-backed “democratic forces” have already won, remains the main point of instability in Eastern Europe. The Zelenskiy administration came to power under slogans about the need to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine and rebuild the country. In practice, the new government continued to pursue the policy aimed at maintaining military tension in the region in the interests of its external sponsors and personal enrichment.

    For the United States, 2020 turned out to be a watershed year for both domestic and foreign policy. Events of this year were a reflection of Trump Administration’s protectionist foreign policy and a national-oriented approach in domestic and economic policy, which ensured an intense clash with the majority of Washington Establishment acting in the interests of global capital.

    In addition to the unresolved traditional problems, America’s problems were made worse by two crises, COVID-19 spread and BLM movement protests. They ensured America’s problems reached a state of critical mass.

    One can and should have a critical attitude toward President Trump’s actions, but one should not doubt the sincerity of his efforts to turn the slogan Make America Great Again into reality. One should likewise not doubt that his successor will adhere to other values. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter or Make Global Moneymen Even Stronger, or Russia Must Be Destroyed, or something even more exotic, it will not change the fact America we’ve known in the last half century died in 2020. A telling sign of its death throes is the use of “orange revolution” technologies developed against inconvenient political regimes. This demonstrated that currently the United States is ruled not by national elites but by global investors to whom the interests of ordinary Americans are alien.

    This puts the terrifying consequences of COVID-19 in a new light. The disease has struck the most vulnerable layers of US society. According to official statistics, United States has had about 20 million cases and over 330,000 deaths. The vast majority are low-income inhabitants of mega-cities. At the same time, the wealthiest Americans have greatly increased their wealth by exploiting the unfolding crisis for their own personal benefit. The level of polarization of US society has assumed frightening proportions. Conservatives against liberals, blacks against whites, LGBT against traditionalists, everything that used to be within the realm of public debate and peaceful protest has devolved into direct, often violent, clashes. One can observe unprecedented levels of aggression and violence from all sides.

    In foreign policy, United States continued to undermine the international security system based on international treaties. There are now signs that one of the last legal bastions of international security, the New START treaty, is under attack. US international behavior has prompted criticism from NATO allies. There are growing differences of opinion on political matters with France and economic ones with Germany. The dialogue with Eastern Mediterranean’s most powerful military actor Turkey periodically showed a sharp clash of interests.

    Against that backdrop, United States spent 2020 continuously increasing its military presence in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea basin. Additional US forces and assets were deployed in direct proximity to Russia’s borders. The number of offensive military exercises under US leadership or with US participation has considerably increased.

    In the Arctic, the United States is acting as a spoiler, unhappy with the current state of affairs. It aims to extend its control over natural resources in the region, establish permanent presence in other countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZ) through the use of the so-called “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPs), and continue to encircle Russia with ballistic missile defense (BMD) sites and platforms.

    In view of the urgent and evident US preparations to be able to fight and prevail in a war against a nuclear adversary, by defeating the adversary’s nuclear arsenal through the combination of precision non-nuclear strikes, Arctic becomes a key region in this military planning. The 2020 sortie by a force of US Navy BMD-capable AEGIS destroyers into the Barents Sea, the first such mission since the end of the Cold War over two decades ago, shows the interest United States has in projecting BMD capabilities into regions north of Russia’s coastline, where they might be able to effect boost-phase interceptions of Russian ballistic missiles that would be launched in retaliatory strikes against the United States. US operational planning for the Arctic in all likelihood resembles that for South China Sea, with only a few corrections for climate.

    In Latin America, the year of 2020 was marked by the intensification Washington efforts aimed at undermining the political regimes that it considered to be in the opposition to the existing world order.

    Venezuela remained one of the main points of the US foreign policy agenda. During the entire year, the government of Nicolas Maduro was experiencing an increasing sanction, political and clandestine pressure. In May, Venezuelan security forces even neutralized a group of US mercenaries that sneaked into the country to stage the coup in the interests of the Washington-controlled opposition and its public leader Juan Guaido. However, despite the recognition of Guaido as the president of Venezuela by the US and its allies, regime-change attempts, and the deep economic crisis, the Maduro government survived.

    This case demonstrated that the decisive leadership together having the support of a notable part of the population and working links with alternative global centers of power could allow any country to resist to globalists’ attacks. The US leadership itself claims that instead of surrendering, Venezuela turned itself into a foothold of its geopolitical opponents: China, Russia, Iran and even Hezbollah. While this evaluation of the current situation in Venezuela is at least partly a propaganda exaggeration to demonize the ‘anti-democratic regime’ of Maduro, it highlights parts of the really existing situation.

    The turbulence in Bolivia ended in a similar manner, when the right wing government that gained power as a result of the coup in 2019 demonstrated its inability to rule the country and lost power in 2020. The expelled president, Evo Morales, returned to the country and the Movement for Socialism secured their dominant position in Bolivia thanks to the wide-scale support from the indigenous population. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that these developments in Venezuela and Bolivia would allow to reverse the general trend towards the destabilization in South America.

    The regional economic and social turbulence is strengthened by the high level of organized crime and the developing global crisis that sharpened the existing contradictions among key global and regional players. This creates conditions for the intensification of existing conflicts. For example, the peace process between the FARC and the federal government is on the brink of the collapse in Colombia. Local sources and media accuse the government and affiliated militias of detentions and killings of leaders of local communities and former FARC members in violation of the existing peace agreement. This violence undermine the fragile peace process and sets conditions for the resumption of the armed struggle by FARC and its supporters. Mexico remains the hub for illegal migration, drug and weapon trafficking just on the border with the United States. Large parts of the country are in the state of chaos and are in fact controlled by violent drug cartels and their mercenaries. Brazil is in the permanent state of political and economic crisis amid the rise of street crime.

    These negative tendencies affect almost all states of the region. The deepening global economic crisis and the coronavirus panic add oil to the flame of instability.

    Countries of South America are not the only one suffering from the crisis. It also shapes relations between global powers. Outcomes of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak and the global economic crisis contributed to the hardening of the standoff between the United States and China.

    Washington and Beijing have insoluble contradictions. The main of them is that China has been slowly but steadily winning the race for the economic and technological dominance simultaneously boosting own military capabilities to defend the victory in the case of a military escalation. The sanction, tariff and diplomatic pressure campaign launched by the White House on China since the very start of the Trump Presidency is a result of the understanding of these contradictions by the Trump administration and its efforts to guarantee the leading US position in the face of the global economic recession. The US posture towards the South China Sea issues, the political situation in Hong Kong, human rights issues in Xinjiang, the unprecedented weapon sales to Taiwan, the support of the militarization of Japan and many other questions is a part of the ongoing standoff. Summing up, Washington has been seeking to isolate China through a network of local military alliances and contain its economic expansion through sanction, propaganda and clandestine operations.

    The contradictions between Beijing and Washington regarding North Korea and its nuclear and ballistic missile programs are a part of the same chain of events. Despite the public rhetoric, the United States is not interested in the full settlement of the Korea conflict. Such a scenario that may include the reunion of the North and South will remove the formal justification of the US military buildup. This is why the White House opted to not fulfill its part of the deal with the North once again assuring the North Korean leadership that its decision to develop its nuclear and missile programs and further.

    Statements of Chinese diplomats and top official demonstrate that Beijing fully understands the position of Washington. At the same time, China has proven that it is not going to abandon its policies aimed at gaining the position of the main leading power in the post-unipolar world. Therefore, the conflict between the sides will continue escalating in the coming years regardless the administration in the White House and the composition of the Senate and Congress. Joe Biden and forces behind his rigged victory in the presidential election will likely turn back from Trump’s national-oriented economic policy and ‘normalize’ relations with China once again reconsidering Russia as Enemy #1. This will not help to remove the insoluble contradictions with China and reverse the trend towards the confrontation. However, the Biden administration with help from mainstream media will likely succeed in hiding this fact from the public by fueling the time-honored anti-Russian hysteria.

    As to Russia itself, it ended the year of 2020 in its ordinary manner for the recent years: successful and relatively successful foreign policy actions amid the complicated economic, social and political situation inside the country. The sanction pressure, coronavirus-related restrictions and the global economic crisis slowed down the Russian economy and contributed to the dissatisfaction of the population with internal economic and social policies of the government. The crisis was also used by external actors that carried out a series of provocations and propaganda campaigns aimed at undermining the stability in the country ahead of the legislative election scheduled for September 2021. The trend on the increase of sanction pressure, including tapering large infrastructure projects like the Nord Stream 2, and expansion of public and clandestine destabilization efforts inside Russia was visible during the entire year and will likely increase in 2021. In the event of success, these efforts will not only reverse Russian foreign policy achievements of the previous years, but could also put in danger the existence of the Russian statehood in the current format.

    Among the important foreign policy developments of 2020 underreported by mainstream media is the agreement on the creation of a Russian naval facility on the coast of the Red Sea in Sudan. If this project is fully implemented, this will contribute to the rapid growth of Russian influence in Africa. Russian naval forces will also be able to increase their presence in the Red Sea and in the area between the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Oman. Both of these areas are the core of the current maritime energy supply routes. The new base will also serve as a foothold of Russia in the case of a standoff with naval forces of NATO member states that actively use their military infrastructure in Djibouti to project power in the region. It is expected that the United States (regardless of the administration in the White House) will try to prevent the Russian expansion in the region at any cost. For an active foreign policy of Russia, the creation of the naval facility in Sudan surpasses all public and clandestine actions in Libya in recent years. From the point of view of protecting Russian national interests in the Global Oceans, this step is even more important than the creation of the permanent air and naval bases in Syria.

    As well as its counterparts in Washington and Beijing, Moscow contributes notable efforts to the modernization of its military capabilities, with special attention to the strategic nuclear forces and hypersonic weapons. The Russians see their ability to inflict unacceptable damage on a potential enemy among the key factors preventing a full-scale military aggression against them from NATO. The United Sates, China and Russia are in fact now involved in the hypersonic weapon race that also includes the development of means and measures to counter a potential strike with hypersonic weapons.

    The new war in Nagorno-Karabakh became an important factor shaping the balance of power in the South Caucasus. The Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc achieved a sweeping victory over Armenian forces and only the involvement of the Russian diplomacy the further deployment of the peacekeepers allowed to put an end to the violence and rescue the vestiges of the self-proclaimed Armenian Republic of Artsakh. Russia successfully played a role of mediator and officially established a military presence on the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan for the next 5 years. The new Karabakh war also gave an additional impulse in the Turkish-Azerbaijani economic and military cooperation, while the pro-Western regime in Armenia that expectedly led the Armenian nation to the tragedy is balancing on the brink of collapse.

    The Central Asia traditionally remained one of the areas of instability around the world with the permanent threat of militancy and humanitarian crisis. Nonetheless, despite forecasts of some analysis, the year of 2020 did not become the year of the creation of ISIS’ Caliphate 2.0 in the region. An important role in preventing this was played by the Taliban that additionally to securing its military victories over the US-led coalition and the US-backed Kabul government, was fiercely fighting ISIS cells appearing in Afghanistan. The Taliban, which controls a large part of Afghanistan, was also legalized on the international scene by direct talks with the United States. The role of the Taliban will grow and further with the reduction of the US military presence.

    While some media already branded the year of 2020 as one of the worst in the modern history, there are no indications that the year of 2021 will be any brighter or the global crises and regional instability will magically disappear by themselves. Instead, most likely 2020 was just a prelude for the upcoming global shocks and the acute standoff for markets and resources in the environment of censorship, legalized total surveillance, violations of human rights under ‘democratic’ and ‘social’ slogans’ and proxy wars.

    The instability in Europe will likely be fueled by the increasing cultural-civilizational conflict and the new wave of newcomers that have acute ideological and cultural differences with the European civilization. The influx of newcomers is expected due to demographic factors and the complicated security, social situation in the Middle East and Africa. Europe will likely try to deal with the influx of newcomers by introducing new movement and border restrictions under the brand of fighting coronavirus. Nonetheless, the expected growth of the migration pressure will likely contribute to the negative tendencies that could blow up Europe from inside.

    The collapse of the international security system, including key treaties limiting the development and deployment of strategic weapons, indicates that the new detente on the global scene will remain an improbable scenario. Instead, the world will likely move further towards the escalation scenario as at least a part of the current global leadership considers a large war a useful tool to overcome the economic crisis and capture new markets. Russia, with its large territories, rich resources, a relatively low population, seems to be a worthwhile target. At the same time, China will likely exploit the escalating conflict between Moscow and the US-led bloc to even further increase its global positions. In these conditions, many will depend on the new global order and main alliances within it that are appearing from the collapsing unipolar system. The United States has already lost its unconditional dominant role on the international scene, but the so-called multipolar world order has not appeared yet. The format of this new multipolar world will likely have a critical impact on the further developments around the globe and positions of key players involved in the never-ending Big Game.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 21:50

  • The Wokest News Stories Of 2020: Taibbi
    The Wokest News Stories Of 2020: Taibbi

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    The year 2020 will be remembered in the real world for a terrifying pandemic, mass unemployment, a nationwide protest movement, and a historically uninspiring presidential race. The year in media, meanwhile, was marked by grotesque factual scandals, journalist-cheered censorship, and an accelerating newsroom mania for political groupthink that was equal parts frightening and ridiculous.

    The tiniest violations of perceived orthodoxies cost jobs. Reporters and editors were whacked en masse in uprisings at the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, the Miami Herald, and countless other places.

    Some of the purges were themselves amazing news stories. Reporter Sue Schafer was fired after her paper, the Washington Post, published a 3,000-word expose about a two-year-old incident in which she attended a Halloween party dressed as Megyn Kelly, who herself had been fired from NBC for defending blackface costumes. Schafer, in other words, was fired for dressing in blackface as a satire of blackface costumes, in an incident no one heard of until her own editors decided to make an issue of it. This was one example of what the New Yorker recently exulted as the “expensive and laborious” process of investigative journalism, as practiced in 2020.

    If in looking at the following list it strikes you to wonder, “Where were the editors?”, it turns out an atmosphere in which even senior New York Times bosses have to be afraid of staff is almost like having no editors at all! Given their importance in preventing the scourge of what the New Yorker called “journalistic individualism,” i.e. reporters allowed to operate outside the “collective interest,” this was really too bad. In honor, then, of that sacred covenant between writers and editors — well, the ones not purged, reassigned, or forced out this year — here’s a shortlist of the most remarkable (and presumably edited) articles of 2020, the year of the woke headline…

    Continue reading here.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 21:25

  • Goldman's Top Charts Of 2020
    Goldman’s Top Charts Of 2020

    In the year’s final report published by Goldman’s economists the bank has summarized key global themes that stood out this year and are likely to shape 2021 in a series of charts.

    First, here are some of Goldman’s key observations on the global economy:

    • The global economy came to a sudden pandemic stop with a peak hit to global GDP in mid-April of 20% that varied significantly in magnitude across economies.
    • Unprecedented policy easing and adaptation drove the rapid but partial global recovery in the second half of 2020.  Fiscal easing led to relatively stable real disposable income in most DMs and an actual surge in the US despite a historic collapse in GDP.  Monetary easing stabilized financial markets and brought the most accommodative financial conditions on record.  Targeted policies such as mask wearing mandates and other consumer and business adaptations including surges in e-commerce and work from home lowered the relative impact on economic activity from successive virus waves.
    • Relatively low bankruptcies, increased business formations, limited increases in unemployment in Europe and Japan, and sharp declines in unemployment in North America all point to surprisingly limited long-term damage to the supply side of the economy.
    • We expect the virus situation to improve sharply in 2021, driven by warmer weather in the Northern hemisphere, rising immunity from natural infections and—most importantly—a successful global vaccination campaign.  Vaccine supply is well below demand at present, but it should become plentiful in DMs in the next several months and in EMs later in the year.  The remaining issues are mostly logistical, but the speed of the rollout in Israel in recent weeks suggests that they are surmountable.
    • Slowing virus spread should boost activity in virus-sensitive sectors that account for the bulk of the output gap and the 2020 decline in inflation and drive our 2021 above-consensus global growth forecast of +6.4%

    And here are the charts, starting with the Global Sudden Stop, with China becoming the first country to lock down followed promptly by other countries in March…

    … leading to a 20% collapse of global GDP in April…

    … yet the decline wasn’t uniform and varied in both speed and magnitude across economies.

    The collapse reversed rapidly if partially in the second half, thanks to a panicked policy response and behavioral adaptation…

    Meanwhile, the historic $20 trillion QE unleashed by global central banks…

    … helped push stocks to all time highs while pushing financial conditions to the easiest on record.

    Looking ahead, Goldman sees limited supply side damage and improved virus control which drive the bank’s above-consensus 2021 global GDP forecast of +6.4%…

    … boosted by a strong business sector which “experienced surprisingly few bankruptcies and elevated business formations”

    Adding to its optimistic outlook, Goldman sees the virus spread slowing once the weather warms up in the Northern hemisphere…

    … and as natural immunity from infections builds…

    … while distribution of plentiful vaccines will further cut down on virus spread…

    … benefiting DM countries most and helping drive successful vaccination campaigns…

    … with the assumption that logistic issues get resolved, something which Goldman is optimistic about referring to Israel’s “rapid rollout”:

    The gradual elimination of covid should boost activity in virus-sensitive and restricted sectors that account for the bulk of the output gap according to Goldman…

    … which concludes by putting all of the above together, and predicting a jump in inflation in the coming years.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 21:00

  • ISIS Kills 28 Syrian Troops Near Palmyra In Most Devastating Ambush In Years
    ISIS Kills 28 Syrian Troops Near Palmyra In Most Devastating Ambush In Years

    Via AlMasdarNews.com,

    This week ISIS terrorists carried out a devastating attack on a passenger bus that was carrying dozens of Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers and civilians in the eastern region of the country.

    On Thursday the Islamic State announced responsibility for the attack that claimed the lives of at least 20 Syrian Army soldiers and eight civilians between the cities of Palmyra (Tadmur) and Deir Ezzor.

    The attack, which was carried out on December 30th at 4 P.M. (Damascus Time), was the deadliest single ambush of the year by the Islamic State and one of the few attacks they have carried out in the eastern region of the country recently.

    Al Jazeera detailed that a bus “carried soldiers and pro-government fighters who had finished their leave and were on their way back to their base in the desolate, sparsely populated area.”

    “Another source said at least 30 soldiers were killed, mostly from the Syrian army’s elite Fourth Brigade, which has a strong presence in the rich oil-producing province since the ISIL, also known as ISIS group fighters were pushed out at the end of 2017,” Al Jazeera added.

    In response to the devastating attack by the Islamic State, the Russian Aerospace Forces unleashed a massive barrage of airstrikes over the central and eastern regions of Syria, hitting several terrorist sites in the Badiya Al-Sham region.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    According to a field source in the Homs Provinice, the Russian Aerospace Forces launched dozens of strikes on the terrorist positions, inflicting heavy losses within the ISIS ranks.

    Furthermore, the Syrian Arab Army also carried out a number of artillery strikes and air raids over the terrorist positions, hitting the ISIS positions in the Homs, Deir Ezzor and Sweida governorates.

    The Islamic State has increased their attacks against the Syrian Arab Army in 2020, moving between different governorates to wreak havoc in the Arab Republic.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 20:35

  • YouTube's Top-Earner In 2020… Is 9 Years Old
    YouTube’s Top-Earner In 2020… Is 9 Years Old

    YouTube stars are regularly bombarded with the question “how much do you earn doing this?”.

    Statista’s Martin Armstrong provides this infographic to shed some light on the most lucrative end of the YouTube money list.

    Infographic: YouTube's Top-Earners 2020 | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Ryan Kaji earned $29.5 million from June 1, 2019 to June 1, 2020, keeping him in the number 1 spot on the Forbes ranking. The special thing about the Texan? He is just nine years old.

    Kaji has become famous with videos in which he presents new toys and rates them.

    Even younger is Russia-born Anastasia Radzinskaya (known as Nastya and 6 years old), whose videos have generated revenues of $18.5 million.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 20:10

  • The Year In Review: 2020 In 20 Visualizations
    The Year In Review: 2020 In 20 Visualizations

    Authored by Nick Routley via VisualCapitalist.com,

    Can you remember a year more life-changing than 2020?

    Over a million lives were lost in the pandemic, oil prices turned negative, and protests swept the streets. At the same time, 10 years of technology advancements seemed to happen in mere months—and now vaccinations are rolling out at a record speed.

    Below, we round up some of the year’s biggest news events with charts and visualizations.

    The Year in Review: 2020 in 20 Visualizations

    Graphic #1   ⟩⟩   January 2020 – Australian Bushfires

    For some in the Southern Hemisphere who ushered in the new year first, it started on fire.

    Reuters assessed the scale of the damage caused by bushfires across Australia. In fact, total burned areas reached 18.6 million hectares (186,000km²) by March, bigger than the total land mass of entire countries like Cuba.

    Here’s the damage done in the state of New South Wales alone, compared to previous years:

    While bushfires are common in Australia, this year, dry conditions fueled the flames. The fires raged for nearly 80 days, displacing or killing nearly 3 billion animals—a devastating biodiversity loss for the country.

    Graphic #2   ⟩⟩   January 2020 – Rising Iran–U.S. Tensions

    In early January, a U.S. air strike incinerated the car of General Qassim Suleimani, a security mastermind and one of Iran’s most powerful military strategists. U.S. officials claimed that Iran was planning an “imminent” attack.

    In retaliation, Iran fired two rockets at U.S. military bases located in Iraq. No one was killed. As tensions escalated, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to try and restrict President Trump’s use of military power against Iran without approval.

    Later, in mid-January, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard admitted that it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, responsible for the death of 176 people.

    Graphic #3   ⟩⟩   March 2020 – The Spread of the “Novel Coronavirus”

    You’ve heard of Patient Zero, but what about Patient 31?

    Before February, cases of the still unnamed virus were largely contained within China, with the rest of the world cautiously observing the country’s containment efforts. Slowly, but surely, the virus began to spread beyond China’s borders.

    South Korea’s 31st confirmed COVID-19 case—which was behind the rapid spread of the virus to potentially up to 1,160 contacts in the country—served as a warning to the rest of the world of how fast the virus could spread.

    » See the full graphic by Reuters

    Reuters’ unique graphic explainer uncovers how just one typical day of multiple “normal” interactions had significant super-spreader effects.

    Graphic #4   ⟩⟩   March 2020 – The Coronavirus Crash

    The S&P 500 erased over a third of its value in under a month—the fastest 30% decline ever recorded on the benchmark index.

    As a result, the global tourism industry suffered dramatic losses, with countless cruise ships docked and passenger flights traveling at half-capacity.

    This graphic shows the BEACH stocks—booking, entertainment & live events, airlines, cruises & casinos, hotels & resorts—that were most impacted by worldwide travel bans.

    While some of these stocks have since recovered, the ongoing impact of COVID-19 is still most widely being felt among companies in these types of industries.

    Graphic #5 & 6   ⟩⟩   March 2020 – Lockdown Life Begins

    From toilet paper hoarding to limits on gatherings, the pandemic’s immediate effects on our surrounding environment became clear as early as March. As daily life came to a standstill, commuter activity in major cities plummeted throughout the month.

    One unintended positive consequence of these shutdowns? Air pollution, such as nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) emissions also steeply dropped alongside these restrictions on movement.

    Possibly the most well-known diagram of the pandemic is the one that introduced the world to the phrase “flatten the curve”, showing why it was important to prevent and delay the spread of the virus so that large portions of the population aren’t sick at the same time.

    Graphic #7   ⟩⟩   April 2020 – Historic U.S. Job Losses

    After the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, unemployment figures soon hit historic proportions.

    Within a month, 22 million in the U.S. had filed jobless claims.

    To put this in perspective, U.S. unemployment levels in 2020 were roughly 10 times higher than previous peak unemployment levels in absolute terms. Or, to look at it another way, this is equivalent to the entire population of Chile or Taiwan.

    Graphic #8   ⟩⟩   April 2020 – Stimulus Announced in the U.S.

    On March 27, the $2 trillion CARES Act came into law after facing minimal resistance from the House and Senate. We broke down the historic relief package in the Sankey diagram below.

    The relief package included $1,200 direct deposits to individuals, over $350 billion in relief for small businesses, and an excess of $100 billion for the U.S. health system.

    Graphic #9   ⟩⟩   April 2020 – Oil Prices Go Negative

    In another historic event, oil prices went negative for the first time in history. Futures contracts for WTI oil fell to a stunning -$37.63 on April 20th, with producers actually paying traders to take oil off their hands.

    Oil has since recovered from this shock, cruising back to more typical price levels.

    Graphic #10   ⟩⟩   May 2020 – Black Lives Matter Protests

    “I can’t breathe.” These few words sparked the ongoing flames of a significant movement this summer: Black Lives Matter (BLM).

    After the killing of George Floyd on May 25, by police, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) recorded over 7,750 BLM-linked demonstrations over a three month span.

    The nationwide pattern of civil unrest is well-documented, but there’s been no time like the present to demand change. Though images of burning cars and police clashes dominated the headlines, in the end, 93% of the protests were peaceful.

    There’s also been a ripple effect, with thousands of similar rallies reported in countries around the world.

    Graphic #11 & 12  ⟩⟩   May 2020 – The World Works from Home

    The dramatic shift to staying at home has resulted in a much higher reliance on technology for many people. Nowhere were these trends exemplified more than the rise of video conferencing software Zoom—the platform was used for work, education, and socializing alike.

    As monthly users swelled, those who typically take to the skies also declined in a steep fashion. In this graphic from May, we noted that Zoom’s market capitalization had skyrocketed to eclipse the top seven airlines by revenue, combined.

    As remote work became the new normal for significant shares of the workforce, unique benefits of this adjusted lifestyle arose, but it didn’t come without its challenges.

    Perhaps the most significant lasting change from the COVID-19 pandemic might be the adoption of flexible work, even by firms that resisted the trend in the past.

    If many employees continue to work remotely, even part of the time, then that will have a big impact on everything from the commercial office market to the bottom line of SaaS companies that help facilitate remote collaboration among teams.

    Graphic #13   ⟩⟩   July 2020 – Tesla becomes World’s Most Valuable Automaker

    2020 was a hallmark year for Tesla. In June, it became the most valuable automaker in the world—surpassing the likes of Toyota, Volkswagen, and Honda.

    Tesla’s market valuation climbed over 375% since June 2019. While these soaring figures are one factor behind its rise, others include record Model 3 sales, which prompted market euphoria.

    But Tesla’s story is far from over.

    The company is now worth more than the largest nine automakers combined, and is set to enter the S&P 500 officially on December 21, 2020. Tesla will be the most valuable company to ever enter the index, ranking as the eighth-largest overall.

    Graphic #14   ⟩⟩   July 2020 – Big Tech’s Dominance

    In many ways, COVID-19 only accentuated differences in market share, earnings, and wealth.

    For one, Big Tech’s market cap share of the S&P 500 soared. In the seven years preceding July, the market cap of the six stocks—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet, and Microsoft—grew over 500%. By contrast, the S&P 500 rose just 110%.

    At the same time, Big Tech’s concentration reached record levels, with the five largest companies accounting for over 20% of the index’s total value.

    Graphic #15   ⟩⟩   August 2020 – Beirut Explosion

    While the world grappled with numerous biological and natural disasters, human-error led to a deadly explosion that rocked Beirut’s port. The blast was broadcast around the world in real time as people filmed the fire on their devices.

    Using satellite data, NASA and NYT mapped the extent of the damage, which claimed 135 lives and affected 305,000 more.

    » See the full interactive explainer by NYT

    This explosion was the biggest accident of its kind in modern history, triggered by the exposure of combustible ammonium nitrate—a key ingredient in fertilizers—to an open flame due to poor storage. Beyond the human toll, the financial cost of this explosion is estimated at above $15 billion.

    Graphic #16   ⟩⟩   August 2020 – Shortest Bear Market in History Ends

    In a stunning reversal, the bear market of 2020 ended on August 18 when the S&P 500 exceeded previous February highs. As trillions of dollars in stimulus response got injected into global economies, markets recovered in record time.

    Just two weeks before the shortest bear market in history ended, we published a graphic comparing previous stock crashes—from 1987’s Black Monday to the Nixon Shock of 1973—exposing the duration and intensity of market downturns since 1929.

    Graphic #17   ⟩⟩   August 2020 – U.S. Wildfire Season

    Reddish-orange skies might seem otherworldly, but this fall, they were a common sight across the West Coast of North America, where air quality reached the “hazardous” category for long stretches of time.

    2020 was the most active year on record for wildfires yet, with California and Oregon being particularly hard-hit. While some wildfires are caused by natural occurrences like lightning strikes, an overwhelming majority (85-90%) happen because of human causes such as discarded cigarettes and campfire debris.

    This is an unprecedented event. We now have the largest wildfire in [California’s] history, as well as the third largest and the fourth largest and five of the Top 10.

    – Noah Diffenbaugh, professor and senior fellow at Stanford University

    Graphic #18   ⟩⟩   November 2020 – The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

    In 2020, U.S. election spending hit over $13 billion, more than twice the amount spent on the entire 2016 election.

    Of this total, congressional spending topped $7 billion, with Democrats spending 64% more than Republican candidates for the House and Senate.

    President Biden was the first candidate ever to raise $1 billion, while Trump raised $596 million.

    Graphic #19   ⟩⟩   December 2020

    COVID-19’s Third Wave

    Like history tells us, pandemics come in waves. The third wave of COVID-19 escalated in November, when cases began to surge.

    On November 8, the seven-day average of new daily cases hit 100,000 in America. By the end of November, global cases soared to 60 million. Since then, cases have trended upward, leading local governments worldwide to enforce social distancing requirements for the winter holiday season.

    The below graphic from Reddit helps show the latest surge in cases in the U.S.:

    Graphic #20   ⟩⟩   December 2020 – Global Vaccination Effort Kicks Off

    In more recent news, Pfizer made waves when it announced it was rolling out a 95% effective COVID-19 vaccine. Then followed Moderna, at 94.5% in mid-November. As the global vaccination race intensifies, Bloomberg tracks the progress of nine vaccines and 80 publicly disclosed distribution deals representing 7.95 billion vaccination doses.

    However, even with viable vaccines, challenges still exist. All around the world, perceptions of vaccine safety have dropped significantly, which may complicate an economic recovery.

    On to the Next One

    After the wild ride that was 2020, many people are wondering what 2021 will have in store.

    In the first half of the year, vaccine distribution will surely take center stage. As well, economic recovery will be in focus as physical businesses resume more typical activity and regions slowly open up travel and tourism again.

    Much like the financial crisis of 2008 was an inflection point for the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the course of human history. Chaos can breed opportunity, and even though unemployment spiked to record highs in the U.S., new business applications did as well.

    Will things return to “normal”? As the many twists and turns of the past year have demonstrated, our complex, interconnected world is far from static. The next black swan is always just around the corner.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 19:45

  • More Than Half Of Chinese Adults Overweight As Obesity Becomes Latest Health Crisis 
    More Than Half Of Chinese Adults Overweight As Obesity Becomes Latest Health Crisis 

    The prevalence of obesity has become a worldwide phenomenon, and in China, the world’s most populous country, adults are becoming increasingly overweight. 

    It seems that over the last few decades, China has “absorbed” the best the “West” has had to offer, which includes fast-food restaurants, credit cards, smartphones, apps, and also all the stolen intellectual property, but at the same time imported the worst. 

    We outlined in 2013 that American influence (“lazy lifestyles”) was quickly spreading across China, creating a massive and unspoken diabetes crisis.  

    Fast forward seven years later, shocking new statistics show the percentage of overweight Chinese adults has skyrocketed since the early 2000s, according to BBC News

    China’s National Health Commission wrote in a new report that in 2002, 29% of adults were overweight. As of 2020, the figure is now 50% of adults are classified as overweight, of whom 16.4% are obese. 

    Over the last couple of decades, China’s economic miracle has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class. This ultimately changed their lifestyles to those that closely resembled ones in America: one that is exceptionally lazy. 

    The report outlines how Chinese citizens infrequently exercise, specifying stating that less than 25% of adults workout at least once per week. It was also noted that meat consumption has soared while healthy food intake has dropped. 

    Wang Dan, a nutritionist in the country, was quoted by AFP as saying that an abundance of Chinese adults “exercise too little, are under too much pressure, and have an unhealthy work schedule.”

    The report’s release came when China’s leaders recently unveiled plans to suppress the obesity crisis.  

    It was noted in August that Beijing requested citizens to reduce food waste and asked them to decrease food intake. 

    Shanghai officials asked residents to snitch on people who overate. The government asked diners to order one fewer dish than usual to conserve food. There was even a restaurant in southern Hunan province that weighed patrons before they ate to adjust their meal size. 

    The topic of obesity comes into focus as the pandemic has shown overweight or obese people suffer more severe complications or death from COVID-19. 

    Perhaps in Karl Marx’s eyes, he would see this as just another symptom as the Chinese have betrayed their socialist ideals and instead placed cheap consumerism on a pedal stool. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 19:20

  • Iran Says US B-52 Flyover Part Of Trump's "Plot To Fabricate Pretext For War"
    Iran Says US B-52 Flyover Part Of Trump’s “Plot To Fabricate Pretext For War”

    Authored by Jake Johnson via CommonDreams.org,

    Hours after the U.S. flew two nuclear-capable B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf for the second time this month, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif claimed Thursday that he is aware of intelligence suggesting that President Donald Trump’s administration is engaged in a “plot to fabricate a pretext for war”during its final days in power.

    “Instead of fighting Covid in the U.S., Donald Trump and cohorts waste billions to fly B-52s and send armadas to our region,” Zarif tweeted, referring to a Wednesday maneuver by the U.S. that American officials predictably characterized as defensive. The flight came just over a week after the U.S. sailed a nuclear submarine through the Persian Gulf and touted the vessel’s “ability to carry up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles.”

    Foreign Minister of Iran, Javad Zarif, Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

    “Intelligence from Iraq indicates a plot to fabricate a pretext for war,” Zarif said Thursday. “Iran doesn’t seek war but will openly and directly defend its people, security, and vital interests.”

    The warning from Iran’s top diplomat, a key negotiator of the nuclear agreement that Trump violated in 2018, came after U.S. officials blamed Iran for a recent missile attack on the American embassy in Baghdad and claimed without evidence that Tehran is preparing a “possibly imminent attack” on U.S. forces in the Middle East.

    “Our embassy in Baghdad got hit Sunday by several rockets. Three rockets failed to launch,” Trump tweeted last week. “Guess where they were from: IRAN. Now we hear chatter of additional attacks against Americans in Iraq.”

    Iran denied responsibility for the embassy attack—which injured one Iraqi and damaged two buildings—and accused the Trump administration of “seeking to increase tensions” in the region with baseless allegations.

    One unnamed senior U.S. defense official expressed concern to CNN Wednesday that “some within the government are painting the situation with Iran as more dire than it actually is and are preoccupied with the potential for retaliatory attacks by Iran to mark the anniversary of [Gen. Qasem] Soleimani’s assassination,” which Trump ordered nearly a year ago. Denounced as a violation of international law, the killing nearly provoked an all-out war between the U.S. and Iran.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    “When you need a show of force to deter attacks around the anniversary of an assassination that you originally justified as ‘reestablishing deterrence,’ you haven’t reestablished deterrence,” tweeted Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in response to the B-52 flight Wednesday. “And yes, obviously the whole ‘reestablishing deterrence’ claim was dishonest nonsense from the beginning, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s been disproven even according to its own dishonest, nonsensical terms.”

    The latest B-52 maneuver took place amid simmering fears that Trump and the warhawks in his administration could be angling to attack Iran in a last-ditch effort to undermine President-elect Joe Biden’s push to reestablish diplomatic relations with Tehran and return the U.S. to compliance with the nuclear accord. Just last month, Trump reportedly asked his advisers for a strike on Iran’s primary nuclear energy site.

    In an op-ed for Responsible Statecraft over the weekend, former CIA analyst Paul Pillar wrote that the “the objective of sabotaging the next administration points to one of the most likely and dangerous things that the unhinged lame duck president might do in his final days in office, which is to initiate a military clash with Iran.”

    Sina Toossi, senior research analyst with the National Iranian American Council, echoed Pillar’s warning in a tweet on Wednesday. “War with Iran,” wrote Toossi, “could be Trump’s final punishment on the American people for rejecting him and a massive act of sabotage against Biden for defeating him.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 18:55

  • Pfizer, GSK & Others Quietly Hike Prices On 100s Of Drugs
    Pfizer, GSK & Others Quietly Hike Prices On 100s Of Drugs

    With just hours to go until the new year, Reuters reports that a group of the world’s largest drug companies is preparing to hike drug prices, defying President Trump to issue a last-minute rebuke, as he has done in the past.

    Drugmakers including Pfizer Inc, Sanofi SA, and GlaxoSmithKline Plc plan to raise U.S. prices on more than 300 drugs in the United States on Jan. 1, according to drugmakers and data analyzed by healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors.

    The hikes come as drugmakers are reeling from effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reduced doctor visits and demand for some drugs. They are also fighting new drug price cutting rules from the Trump administration, which would reduce the industry’s profitability.

    The companies kept their price increases at 10% or below, and the largest drug companies to raise prices so far, Pfizer and Sanofi, kept nearly all of their increases 5% or less, 3 Axis said. 3 Axis is a consulting firm that works with pharmacists groups, health plans and foundation on drug pricing and supply chain issues.

    During the early days of the Trump presidency, reports of price hikes elicited angry tweets from the president. This dynamic was credited with staving off a hike or two, but that doesn’t change the fact that drug companies tend to raise prices on their inventory at least once, usually twice, per year. Still, even Reuters pointed out that the pace of drug price increases has “slowed substantially” since 2015, per Reuters.

    And the Trump Administration is pushing legislation that would constrain drugmakers’ ability to raise prices.

    Nevertheless, with drugmakers’ dedicating themselves to defeating COVID-19 (of course, the state has doled out billions of dollars in subsidies, which sort of diminishes the selflessness narrative), the industry is insisting that profits must be made up elsewhere. So prices on some 300 drugs will rise, with more formal announcements expected on Friday, and over the weekend.

    GSK did raise prices on two vaccines – shingles vaccine Shingrix and diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine Pediarix – by 7% and 8.6%, respectively, 3 Axis said.

    Teva Pharmaceuticals Inc hiked prices on 15 drugs, including Austedo, which treats rare neurological disorders, and asthma steroid Qvar, which together grossed more than $650 million in sales in 2019 and saw price hikes of between 5% and 6%. Teva hiked prices for some drugs, including muscle relaxant Amrix and narcolepsy treatment Nuvigil, as much as 9.4%. More price hikes are expected to be announced on Friday and in early January.

    […]

    In 2020, drugmakers raised prices on more than 860 drugs by around 5 percent, on average, according to 3 Axis. Drug price increases have slowed substantially since 2015, both in terms of the size of the hikes and the number of drugs affected.

    Pfizer, which threw money at its “partner”, BioNTech, to help develop and distribute a vaccine using the latter’s revolutionary mRNA technology, is one of the biggest offenders, hiking prices on cancer drugs, and the ubiquitous rheumatoid arthritis treatment Xeljanz, famous for commercials that have spawned satirical takes on social media.

    Pfizer plans to raise prices on more than 60 drugs by between 0.5 % and 5%. Those include roughly 5% increases on some of its top sellers like rheumatoid arthritis treatment Xeljanz and cancer drugs Ibrance and Inlyta.

    Pfizer said it had adjusted the list prices of its drugs by around 1.3% across all products in its portfolio, in line with inflation.

    “This modest increase is necessary to support investments that allow us to continue to discover new medicines and deliver those breakthroughs to the patients who need them,” spokeswoman Amy Rose said in a statement, pointing in particular to the COVID-19 vaccine the company developed with Germany’s BioNTech SE.

    It said that its net prices, which back out rebates to pharmacy benefit managers and other discounts, have actually fallen for the last 3 years.

    By contrast, China is cracking heads to ensure that drugmakers are responding to the public’s need with massive price cuts. According to state-run media, some drugmakers are cutting prices by as much as 51%. Chinese patients can now get reimbursement for 2.8K medicines, including 1.4K Western drugs and 1,374 traditional Chinese medicines.

    With holiday parties about to start, we wonder, will President Trump take another stand on twitter?

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    Though, at this point, even if he does, it would only serve to further complicate the relationship with these companies as ‘Operation Warp Speed’ lags further behind its target.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 18:30

  • 2020: The Year Things Started Going Badly Wrong
    2020: The Year Things Started Going Badly Wrong

    Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

    How today’s energy problem is different from peak oil

    Many people believe that the economy will start going badly wrong when we “run out of oil.” The problem we have today is indeed an energy problem, but it is a different energy problem. Let me explain it with an escalator analogy.

    Figure 1. Holborn Tube Station Escalator. Photo by renaissancechambara, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    The economy is like a down escalator that citizens of the world are trying to walk upward on. At first the downward motion of the escalator is almost imperceptible, but gradually it gets to be greater and greater. Eventually the downward motion becomes almost unbearable. Many citizens long to sit down and take a rest.

    In fact, a break, like the pandemic, almost comes as a relief. There is suddenly a chance to take it easy; not drive to work; not visit relatives; not keep up appearances before friends. Government officials may not be unhappy either. There may have been demonstrations by groups asking for higher wages. Telling people to stay at home provides a convenient way to end these demonstrations and restore order.

    But then, restarting doesn’t work. There are too many broken pieces of the economy. Too many bankrupt companies; too many unemployed people; too much debt that cannot be repaid. And, a virus that really doesn’t quite go away, leaving people worried and unwilling to attempt to resume normal activities.

    Some might describe the energy story as a “diminishing returns” story, but it’s really broader than this. It’s a story of services that we expect to continue, but which cannot continue without much more energy investment. It is also a story of the loss of “economies of scale” that at one time helped propel the economy forward.

    In this post, I will explain some of the issues I see affecting the economy today. They tend to push the economy down, like a down escalator. They also make economic growth more difficult.

    [1] Many resources take an increasing amount of effort to obtain or extract, because we use the easiest to obtain first. Many people would call this a diminishing returns problem.

    Let’s look at a few examples:

    (a) Water. When there were just a relatively few humans on the earth, drinking water from a nearby stream was a reasonable approach. This is the approach used by animals; humans could use it as well. As the number of humans rose, we found we needed additional approaches to gather enough potable water: First shallow wells were dug. Then we found that we needed to dig deeper wells. We found that lake water could be used, but we needed to filter it and treat it first. In some places, now, we find that desalination is needed. In fact, after desalination, we need to put the correct minerals back into it and pump it to the destination where it is required.

    All of these approaches can indeed be employed. In theory, we would never run out of water. The problem is that as we move up the chain of treatments, an increasing amount of energy of some kind needs to be used. At first, humans could use some of their spare time (and energy) to dig wells. As more advanced approaches were chosen, the need for supplemental energy besides human energy became greater. Each of us individually cannot produce the water we need; instead, we must directly, or indirectly, pay for this water. The fact that we have to pay for this water with part of our wages reduces the portion of our wages available for other goods.

    (b) Metals. Whenever some group decides to mine a metal ore, the ore that is taken first tends to be easy to access ore of high quality, close to where it needs to be used. As the best mines get depleted, producers use lower-grade ores, transported over longer distances. The shift toward less optimal mines requires more energy. Some of this additional energy could be human energy, but some of the energy would be supplied by fossil fuels, operating machinery in order to supplement human labor. Supplemental energy needs become greater and greater as mines become increasingly depleted. As technology advances, energy needs become greater, because some of the high-tech devices require materials that can only be formed at very high temperatures.

    (c) Wild Animals Including Fish. When pre-humans moved out of Africa, they killed off the largest game animals on every continent that they moved to. It was still possible to hunt wild game in these areas, but the animals were smaller. The return on the human labor invested was smaller. Now, most of the meat we eat is produced on farms. The same pattern exists in fishing. Most of the fish the world eats today is produced on fish farms. We now need entire industries to provide food that early humans could obtain themselves. These farms directly and indirectly consume fossil fuel energy. In fact, more energy is used as more animals/fish are produced.

    (d) Fossil Fuels. We keep hearing about the possibility of “running out” of oil, but this is not really the issue with oil. In fact, it is not the issue with coal or natural gas, either. The issue is one of diminishing returns. There is (and always will be) what looks like plenty left. The problem is that the process of extraction consumes increasing amounts of resources as deeper, more complex oil or gas wells need to be drilled and as coal mines farther away from users of the coal are developed. Many people have jumped to the conclusion that this means that the price that buyers of fossil fuel will pay will rise. This isn’t really true. It means that the cost of production will rise, leading to lower profitability. The lower profitability is likely to be spread in many ways: lower taxes paid, cutbacks in wages and pension plans, and perhaps a sale to a new owner, at a lower price. Eventually, low energy prices will lead to production stopping. Without adequate fossil fuels, the whole economic system will be disrupted, and the result will be severe recession or depression. There are also likely to be many job losses.

    In (a) through (d) above, we are seeing an increasing share of the output of the economy being used in inefficient ways: in creating deeper water wells and desalination plants; in drilling oil wells in more difficult locations; in extracting metal ores that are mostly waste products. The extent of this inefficiency tends to increase over time. This is what leads to the effect of an escalator descending faster and faster, just as we humans are trying to walk up it.

    Humans work for wages, but they find that when they buy a box of corn flakes, very little of the price actually goes to the farmer growing the corn. Instead, all of the intermediate parts of the system are becoming overly large. The buyer cannot afford the end products, and the producer feels cheated by the low wholesale prices he is being paid. The system as a whole is pushed toward collapse.

    [2] Increasing complexity can help maintain economic growth, but it too reaches diminishing returns.

    Complexity takes many forms, including more hierarchical organization, more specialization, longer supply chains, and development of new technology. Complexity can indeed help maintain economic growth. For example, if water supply is intermittent, a country may choose to build a dam to control the flow of water and produce electricity. Complexity tends to reach diminishing returns, as noted by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies. For example, economies build dams in the best locations first, and only later build them at less advantageous sites. These are a few other examples:

    (a) Education. Teaching everyone to read and write has significant benefits because it allows the use of books and other written materials to disseminate information and knowledge. Teaching a few people advanced subjects has significant benefits as well. But after a certain point, the need for additional people to study a subject such as art history is low. A few people can teach the subject but doing more research on the subject probably won’t increase world GDP very much.

    When we look at data from about 1970, we find that people with advanced education earned much higher incomes than those without advanced degrees. But as we add an increasing large share of people with these advanced degrees, jobs that really need these degrees are not as plentiful as the new graduates. Quite a few people with advanced degrees end up with low-paying jobs. The “return on investment” for higher education drops increasingly lower. Some students are not able to repay the debt that they took out in order to pay for their education.

    (b) Medicines and vaccines. Over the years, medicines and vaccines have been developed to treat many common illnesses and diseases. After a while, the easy-to-find medicines for the common unwanted conditions (such as diabetes, high blood pressure and inflammation) have already been found. There are medicines for rare diseases that haven’t been found, but these will never have very large total sales, discouraging investment. There are also conditions that are common in very poor countries. While expensive drugs could be developed for these conditions, it is likely that few people could afford these drugs, so this, too, becomes less attractive.

    If research is to continue, it is important to keep expanding work on expensive new drugs, even if it means completely ignoring old inexpensive drugs that might work equally well. A cynical person might think that this is the reason why vitamin D and ivermectin are generally being ignored in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Without an expanding group of high-priced new drugs, it is hard to attract capital and young workers to the field.

    (c) Automobile efficiency. In the US, the big fuel efficiency change that took place was that which took place between 1975 and 1983, when a changeover was made to smaller, lighter vehicles, similar to ones that were already in use in Japan and Europe.

    Figure 2. Estimated Real-World Fuel Economy, Horsepower, and Weight Since Model Year 1975, in a chart produced by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Source.

    The increase in fuel efficiency between 2008 and 2019 (an 11 year period) was only 22%, compared to the 60% increase in fuel efficiency between 1975 and 1983 (an 8 year period). This is another example of diminishing returns to investment in complexity.

    [3] Today’s citizens have never been told that many of the services we take for granted today, such as suppression of forest fires, are really services provided by fossil fuels.

    In fact, the amount of energy required to provide these services rises each year. We expect these services to continue indefinitely, but we should be aware that they cannot continue very long, unless the energy available to the economy as a whole is rising very rapidly.

    (a) Suppression of Forest Fires. Forest fires are part of nature. Many trees require fire for their seeds to germinate. Human neighbors of forests don’t like forest fires; they often encourage local authorities to put out any forest fire that starts. Such suppression allows an increasing amount of dry bush to build up. As a result, future fires spread more easily and grow larger.

    At the same time, humans increasingly build homes in forested areas because of the pleasant scenery. As population expands and as fires spread more easily, forest fire suppression takes an increasing amount of resources, including fossil fuels to power helicopters used in the battles. If fossil fuels are not available, this type of service would need to stop. Trying to keep forest fires suppressed, assuming fossil fuels are available for this purpose, will take higher taxes, year after year. This is part of what makes it seem like we are trying to move our economy upward on a down escalator.

    (b) Suppression of Illnesses. Illnesses are part of the cycle of nature; they disproportionately take out the old and the weak. Of course, we humans don’t really like this; the old and weak are our relatives and close friends. In fact, some of us may be old and weak.

    In the last 100 years, researchers (using fossil fuels) have developed a large number of antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines to try to suppress illnesses. We find that microbes quickly mutate in new ways, defeating our attempts at suppression of illnesses. Thus, we have ever-more antibiotic resistant bacteria. The cost of today’s US healthcare system is very high, exceeding what many poor people can afford to pay. Introducing new vaccines results in an additional cost.

    Closing down the system to try to stop a virus adds a huge new cost, which is disproportionately borne by the poor people of the world. If we throw more money/fossil fuels at the medical system, perhaps it can be made to work a little longer. No one tells us that disease suppression is a service of fossil fuels; if we have an increasing quantity of fossil fuels per capita, perhaps we can increase disease suppression services.

    (c) Suppression of Weeds and Unwanted Insects. Researchers keep developing new chemical treatments (based on fossil fuels) to suppress weeds and unwanted insects. Unfortunately, the weeds and unwanted insects keep mutating in a way that makes the chemicals less effective. The easy solutions were found first; finding solutions that really work and don’t harm humans seems to be elusive. The early solutions were relatively cheap, but later ones have become increasingly expensive. This problem acts, in many ways, like diminishing returns.

    (d) Recycling (and Indirectly, Return Transport of Empty Shipping Containers from Around the World). When oil prices are high, recycling of used items for their content makes sense, economically. When oil prices are low, recycling often requires a subsidy. This subsidy indirectly goes to pay for fossil fuels used to facilitate the recycling. Often this goes to pay for shipment to a country that will do the recycling.

    When oil prices were high (prior to 2014), part of the revenue from recycling could be used to transport mixed waste products to China and India for recycling. With low oil prices, China and India have stopped accepting most recycling. Instead, it is necessary to find actual “goods” for the return voyage of a shipping container or, alternatively, pay to have the container sent back empty. Europe now seems to have a difficult time filling shipping containers for the return voyage to Asia. Because of this, the cost of obtaining shipping containers to ship goods to Europe seems to be escalating. This higher cost acts much like diminishing returns with respect to the transport of goods to Europe from Asia. This is yet another part of what is acting like a down escalator for the world economy.

    [4] Another, ever higher cost is pollution control. This higher cost also exerts a downward effect on the world economy, because it acts like another intermediate cost.

    As we burn increasing amounts of fossil fuels, increasing amounts of particulate matter need to be captured and disposed of. Capturing this material is only part of the problem; some of the waste material may be radioactive or may include mercury. Once the material is captured, it needs to be “locked up” in some way, so it doesn’t pollute the water and air. Whatever approach is used requires energy products of various kinds. In fact, the more fossil fuels that are burned, the bigger the waste disposal problem tends to be.

    Burning more fossil fuels also leads to more CO2. Unfortunately, we don’t have suitable alternatives. Nuclear is probably as good as any, and it has serious safety issues. In my opinion, the view that intermittent wind and solar are a suitable replacement for fossil fuels represents wishful thinking. Wind and solar, because of their intermittency, can only partially replace the coal or natural gas burned to generate electricity. They cannot be relied upon for 24/7/365 generation. The unsubsidized cost of producing intermittent wind and solar energy needs to be compared to the price of coal and natural gas, not to wholesale electricity prices. There are a lot of apples to oranges comparisons being made.

    [5] Among other things, the growth of the economy depends on “economies of scale” as the number of participants in the economy gradually grows. The response to COVID-19 has been extremely detrimental to economies of scale.

    The economies of many countries changed dramatically, with the initial spread of COVID-19. Unfortunately, we cannot expect these changes to be completely reversed anytime soon. Part of the reason is the new virus mutation from the UK that is now of concern. Another reason is that, even with the vaccine, no one really knows how long immunity will last. Until the virus is clearly gone, vestiges of the cutbacks are likely to remain in place.

    In general, businesses do well financially, as the number of buyers of the goods and services they provide rises. This happens because overhead costs, such as mortgage payments, can be spread over more buyers. The expertise of the business owners can also be used more widely.

    One huge problem is the recent cutback in tourism, affecting almost every country in the world. This cutback affects both businesses directly related to tourism and businesses indirectly related to tourism, such as restaurants and hotels.

    Another huge problem is social distancing rules that lead to office buildings and restaurants being used less intensively. Businesses find that they tend to have fewer customers, rather than more. Related businesses, such as taxis and dry cleaners, find that they also have fewer customers. Nursing homes and other care homes for the aged are seeing lower occupancy rates because no one wants to be locked up for months on end without being able to see other members of their family.

    [6] With all of the difficulties listed in Items [1] though [5], debt based financing tends to work less and less well. Huge debt defaults can be expected to adversely affect banks, insurance companies and pension plans.

    Many businesses are already near default on debt. These businesses cannot make a profit with a much reduced number of customers. If no change is possible, somehow this will need to flow through the system. Defaulting debt is likely to lead to failing banks and pension plans. In fact, governments that depend on taxes may also fail.

    The shutdowns taken by economies earlier this year were very detrimental, both to businesses and to workers. A major solution to date has been to add more governmental debt to try to bail out citizens and businesses. This additional debt makes it even more difficult to maintain promised debt payments. This is yet another force making it difficult for economies to move up the growth escalator.

    [7] The situation we are headed for looks much like the collapses of early civilizations.

    With diminishing returns everywhere, and inadequate sources of very inexpensive energy to keep the system going, major parts of the world economic system appear headed for collapse. There doesn’t seem to be any way to keep the world economy growing rapidly enough to offset the down escalator effect.

    Citizens have not been aware of how “close to the edge” we have been. Low energy prices have been deceptive, but this is what we should expect with collapse. (See, for example, Revelation 18: 11-13, telling about the lack of demand for goods of all kinds when ancient Babylon collapsed.) Low prices tend to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They also tend to discourage high-priced alternatives. Unfortunately, all the wishful thinking of the World Economic Forum and others advocating a Green New Deal does not change the reality of the situation.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 18:10

  • Eastern Caribbean Issues Rare Volcano Alert 
    Eastern Caribbean Issues Rare Volcano Alert 

    Rarely do we hear about volcanoes in the eastern Caribbean, but this week, rumblings from down under prompted officials to issue volcanic alerts in Martinique and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. 

    On Tuesday, warnings were issued for La Soufriere volcano in St Vincent and the Grenadines after tremors, powerful gas emissions and a new volcanic dome were observed. 

    The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) said that scientists observed an “effusive eruption within the crater, with visible gas and steam.”

    CDEMA issued an “Orange” alert for the surrounding area around the La Soufriere volcano due to the threat of increased volcanic activity. 

    “Monitoring systems, satellite imagery and visual observations have confirmed increased seismic and fumarolic activity, strong gas emissions, emergence of a satellite dome on the SE of the existing volcanic dome and changes to the crater lake.

    “An effusive eruption within the crater, with visible gas and steam, was also observed on 29th December 2020,” CDEMA wrote in an update. 

    Full CDEMA Update: 

    A team of scientists from the Seismic Research Centre (SRC) of the University of the West Indies (UWI) will arrive in the region by the end of the week to assess the situation. 

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    An Orange Level alert means “eruptions may occur with less than 24 hours notice.” 

    CDEMA said monitoring systems are closely watching the volcano for any sudden changes. 

    UWI tweeted an image of a black mound of magma protruding from the surface of the existing dome in the crater at La Soufriere.

    La Soufriere’s Eruption History 

    While no evacuation orders have been issued for residents in the surrounding communities, the threat of volcanic activity and a virus-related downturn in travel and tourism could result in more devastating impacts for the economy of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 17:50

  • The Lesson Of 2020: What's The Point Of Pointing Out The Hypocrisy?
    The Lesson Of 2020: What’s The Point Of Pointing Out The Hypocrisy?

    Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

    I’ve been on vacation in Mexico for the past two weeks. But that isn’t the reason content from me has been scarcer than normal. Yes, vacations are supposed to be for recharging and taking a break from your routine.

    But as I sat down to write this morning the overwhelming sense of futility washed over me. And nothing saps your will to work more than reading through the headlines and noting the complete lack of conscience on display by the media, our political leadership or frankly anyone with half a brain.

    We live in a world today where the legislature of one of the most important states in the Union, Pennsylvania, released a report where more than 200,000 votes were counted than were actually cast. And no one in our media seems to think this is news.

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    Worse, most people in America can’t even be bothered to care about such things. And if you were to confront them with the evidence there must be some good reason why that ‘just can’t be true.’

    The FBI, which couldn’t find any issues with Hunter Biden’s laptop for months nor ever do anything substantial with Anthony Weiner’s laptop in FOUR YEARS somehow solved the case of the Nashville bomber in less than 48 hours conclusively.

    And that conclusion was the same as every other major terrorist event in this country’s recent history – a lone crackpot blew himself up to make a half-formed political statement. At least this time they had the good sense to vaguely tie the patsy to the political left versus turn him into a mouth-breathing MAGAtard with a Q-complex.

    And somehow no one seems to care. Nor does anyone care about the lack of conclusion about the shooting in Las Vegas a few years back.

    Notice the trend? Major stories that are supposed to matter are dropped the moment they get anything close to uncomfortable for those in power who are chosen to remain in power.

    I’ve always thought Donald Trump’s biggest flaw was that he was an incurious man, but compared to the so-called journalists of our corporate media Trump is the second coming of Sherlock Holmes for pity’s sake.

    There are voter irregularities of a type and kind which demand real coverage, even if it turns out to be easy to cast doubt on them. And yet, after haranguing Americans TO CARE about voter fraud in places like Belarus, Crimea, Venezuela, Iran, Serbia, Georgia we’re supposed to swallow the lie this was the ‘most secure election in this country’s history’ without even a bottle of ketchup?

    No matter where you are on the political spectrum, nor who your Twitter spirit guide is, all of these things should disturb you.

    And yet, it doesn’t seem to. It is not CNN’s nor Fox’s decision to not report on them because they don’t want to engage in searching out the truth.

    The hearings in the Georgia State Senate going on as I write this are hair-raising, painting a picture of corruption so detailed you’d think it was a Mandelbrot set.

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    Every rabbit hole you go down forks into a deeper one, revealing even more information about how truly corrupt and inhuman our political systems are and yet our media stands there like a thousand monkeys banging away on their iPhone keyboards trying to convince us what they are producing is Shakespeare and not auto-corrected Engrish.

    If we’ve reached this level of whitewashing of the news and the truth to this point, I’m having to wonder why it is North Korea is so hated? I’m at a loss to come up with anything more accurate than competitive envy at fiction writing.

    Hundreds of millions of people’s lives are being actively destroyed by overzealous governors and heads of state issuing draconian lockdown orders over a virus with multiple vaccines that are less effective than our own immune systems. A compromised WHO and CDC issue conflicting recommendations weekly and Dr. Mengele Fauci openly admits to lying to us.

    They all do this without any sense of shame, shedding crocodile tears so unconvincing they could be runner-ups at a Miss America pageant. But we’re supposed to think we’re saved because Congress decided to give us a $600 advance to pay our 2020 income taxes with?

    And I haven’t even scratched the surface here. We know why they are doing this — to support to open hostile takeover of what’s left of private capital markets and property in support of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.

    Yet here I sit watching otherwise reasonable and naturally skeptical people still live within their normalcy bias to refuse the obvious propaganda and blame the victims.

    It can’t be this bad right?

    No conspiracy can be this big?

    There was fraud but it’s trivial.

    Y’all are just sore losers and Trump really did lose his base because of his horrific foreign policy. I swear I’ve never been sadder to call myself a libertarian than I am right now.

    That is nothing but rationalization to evade the reality of what has happened and what will happen. Because the sad truth is that no matter who you are when confronted with monstrous evil most people’s first reaction is to reject it.

    And they do this not because they don’t believe people are capable of it.

    No, we reject evil of this magnitude because in order for us to maintain our sense of self-image as rational, caring people admitting its reality implies a responsibility to do something about it.

    And stopping evil takes away from “me time.”

    The same operation has been done with COVID-19, any and all data associated with it, the death statistics, the miraculous immunity to influenza Americans now seem to have, etc.

    And if we are going to just sit back, mask up, accept the $600, put our heads down and “believe all talking heads” then what’s the point in pointing out the hypocrisy of it all?

    The new Super-COVID is here and it’s time to believe it all again.

    Isn’t that the real lesson of 2020? Don’t fight the crazy just cling to the delusion that a mask isn’t a muzzle, guns can’t protect you and we still live in a society with something approximating rules.

    Isn’t that what all of this irreality is for, to desensitize us to their outrageousness? To normalize their grotesquerie? I mean, really, does anyone honestly believe any single word that comes out of Nancy Pelosi’s mouth?

    I didn’t think they made masks big enough to contain the Pinocchio nose she has to have at this point. Maybe she’s had to have so much plastic surgery to contain it that it collapsed like Michael Jackson’s and it’s actually now just negative space.

    I don’t know anymore.

    It would almost be okay going along with all of this nonsense if they were in any way artful about it. If I could, at the very least, appreciate the craft, you know, as a writer and an artist then it would make the double whiskies go down a little easier.

    I could almost stomach it if they even put in the least little effort to convince me through something approximating a good performance. I gave up on them trying to convince me with argument ages ago. But a little sincerity to go with the virtue signaling would make the game worth playing.

    But they can’t even give us that anymore. That’s how much contempt they have for us.

    And it’s easy for them to have that contempt because, frankly, that’s how much contempt we must have for ourselves to go along this perfunctorily towards their dystopia.

    Unless 2021 is the year everything changes. Unless 2021 is the year we finally show the barest minimum of self-respect, take off the masks, turn off the screens and get prepared to fight harder than we ever have.

    I’ll be here even though, at times, it feels futile. Because it is just that, a feeling. And feelings are as ephemeral and temporary as Anderson Cooper’s dalliances with the truth.

    Which, I guess, is as good a lesson to absorb from 2020 as anything else.

    *  *  *

    Join My Patreon if you you too feel there is something horribly wrong with this world.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 17:30

  • 2020 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead
    2020 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead

    One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2019, we pointed to a certain undertone of artificial stability permeating capital markets and society, with the economy firing on all cylinders (thanks to the massive dual deficits and debt that had exploded under the current administration), with the market surging 30% last year and at all time highs (despite flat earnings and entirely thanks to the Fed’s resumption of “NOT QE” last September in order to bail out JPMorgan and a handful of hedge funds’ treasury basis trades), and with Trump cruising to re-election victory in what we thought one year ago would be the most important even of 2020: the US presidential election. It’s also why we said that “with the Fed fully behind Trump and helping the S&P return nearly 30% in 2019, 4 more years of Trump is now virtually assured (barring some unexpected calamity in 2020).”

    Oh how prudent that disclaimer proved to be, as well as this next caveat we casually mentioned in our last year review, warning that “with the 2020 elections looming, it is certainly true that anything can still happen, only as with all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected.”

    It certainly wasn’t because around the time we were penning our year-end wrap post exactly one year ago, a highly contagious coronavirus strain had escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology (China’s first and only biosafety 4 lab) whether purposefully or intentionally, and was set to spread around the globe, unleashing the biggest global black swan in the past 100 years, triggering personal and economic hell for hundreds of millions around the world who lost their jobs or loved ones as a result of the China virus, markets nirvana for millions of 16-year-old Robinhood and hedge funds traders who benefited from the greatest stock market rally in history, and ultimately helped Joe Biden emerge from complete obscurity and with virtually no chances of defeating Trump, to eventually winning the Nov 3 presidential election, Trump’s ongoing challenges to the outcome notwithstanding.

    The arrival of the virus that would eventually be called Covid-19 by the global scientific community (to remove any links to China) – and which would lead to a historic pandemic the likes of which nobody expected one year ago – shook the world, and would lead to a slew of historic events taking place in just a few months, including a staggering lockdown of the global economy, the official arrival of global Helicopter Money, tens of trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus, an overhaul of the global economy punctuated by an unprecedented explosion in world debt, an Orwellian crackdown on civil liberties by governments everywhere, and ultimately set the scene for what even the World Economic Forum called simply “The Great Reset.”

    Needless to say, it would be impossible to describe everything that happened in 2020, or all the black swans that the pandemic and its associated lockdowns let loose upon the world, in one article: those looking for a detailed breakdown of all the major events this year are urged to read the latest magnum opus “Year in Review” by David Collum (part 1 here and part 2 here), but a quick recap of some of the most prominent and bizarre events that shook the world in the past 365 days, what Mark Orsley called “the year of years“, is as follows:

    • WW3 fears run rampant on social media as the US strikes Iranian army general Soleimani
    • Black swan health event that leads to a historic equity market crash, and funding strains
    • Fed takes US policy rates to near 0% and institutes QE at a magnitude that puts the post GFC period to shame
    • Treasury institutes trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus
    • Unprecedented lockdowns lead to Tiger King craze
    • The world learns how to school and work remotely, changing the office space landscape forever
    • WTI front month contract trades with a negative price
    • Subsequent epic equity bull market recovery rally that pierces March highs
    • Australia burns
    • Kobe Bryant tragically dies
    • We begin to watch sports with no fans
    • Pentagon releases UFO footage
    • Quantas offers flight to nowhere
    • California wildfires burn uncontrollably and wipe out parts of Napa
    • US social unrest turns violent
    • Murder hornets
    • Ruth Bader Ginsberg dies
    • Overhyped US election event that leads to a volatility collapse, year-end rally
    • A middle-aged skateboarder, drinking Cranberry juice to a 70s rock hit brings calm to the world

    That list could have gone on forever. The point is, there could not have been more regime shifts, volatility moments, and memes than 2020 (we hope).

    Yet for all the chaos and panic unleashed by covid, a certain undertone of pre-determination and almost tangible order was felt just below the surface: after all, the virus, crash, lockdown and recession provoked an unprecedented monetary and fiscal policy panic which sparked a record $22 trillion of stimulus in just the past 9 months around the world. As a result, central banks spent over $1 trillion a month on financial assets via QE, crushing yields, volatility, and spreads, and pushing stocks to all time highs at the end of 2020 even as earnings continue to slide.

    It’s almost as if the world’s richest asset owners requested the covid pandemic. It wasn’t just them however: politicians the world over would benefit from the transition from QE to outright helicopter money and MMT which made the over monetization of deficits widely accepted in the blink of an eye. And in the span of just a few months, $14 trillion in fiscal stimulus was announced, with central banks monetizing most of it, and pushing the quantity of global debt to a record $277 trillion, a number which the Institute For International Finance expects to hit a record $360 trillion by 2030

    … while thanks to central bank intervention, the price of world debt dropped to a record 5,000 year low, with global negative yielding debt now at an all time high $18tn.

    The common theme here was simple: no matter what happens, capital markets can never again be allowed to drop, regardless of the cost or how much more debt has to be incurred. Indeed, as we look back at the news barrage over the past year, and past decade for that matter, the one thing that becomes especially clear amid the constant din of markets, of politics, of social upheaval and geopolitical strife – and now pandemics –  in fact a world that is so flooded with constant conflicting newsflow and changing storylines that some say it has become virtually impossible to even try to predict the future, is that despite the people’s desire for change, for something original and untried, the world’s established forces will not allow it and will fight to preserve the broken status quo at any price – even global coordinated shutdowns – which is perhaps why it always boils down to one thing – capital markets, that bedrock of Western capitalism and the “modern way of life”, where control, even if it means central planning the likes of which have not been seen since the days of the USSR, and an upward trajectory must be preserved at all costs, as the alternative is a global, socio-economic collapse.

    And since it is the daily gyrations of stocks that sway popular moods – and why none other than the US president was tweeting almost daily ahead of the November election at what level the S&P closed on any given day to boost his approval rating and bolster his credibility – the interplay between capital markets and politics has never been more profound or more consequential. Indeed, in a historic moment when the president was impeached by the House (if not the Senate), Trump’s natural response was to point to the record high hit that very day in the S&P500.

    The more powerful message here is the implicit realization and admission by politicians, not just Trump but also his peers and challengers, that the stock market is now seen as the consummate barometer of one’s political achievements and approval. Which is also why capital markets are now, more than ever, a political tool whose purpose is no longer to distribute capital efficiently and discount the future, but to manipulate voter sentiments far more efficiently than any Russian election interference attempt ever could.

    Which brings us back to 2020 and the past decade, which was best summarized by a recent Bill Blain article who said that “the last 10-years has been a story of massive central banking distortion to address the 2008 crisis. Now central banks face the consequences and are trapped. The distortion can’t go uncorrected indefinitely.

    He is right: the distortion will eventually collapse, but so far the establishment and the “top 1%” have been successful – perhaps the correct word is lucky – in preserving the value of risk assets: on the back of the Fed’s firehose of liquidity the S&P500 returned an impressive 15.5% following the 28.50% return in 2019. It did so by staging the greatest rally off all time from the March lows, surpassing all of the 4 greatest rallies off the lows of the past century (1929,1938, 1974, and 2009).

    Yet this continued can-kicking by the establishment – all of which was made possible by the covid pandemic and lockdowns which served as an all too convenient scapegoat for the unprecedented response that served to propel risk assets (and fiat alternatives such as gold and bitcoin) to all time highs – has come with a price… and an increasingly higher price in fact. As even Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett admits, Fed’s response to the the pandemic “worsened inequality in 2020” as the value of financial assets – Wall Street –  relative to economy – Main Street – hit all-time high of 6.3x.

    And as we said previously, with the system now caught in a vice operated by a handful of people, there is no longer any chance that the status quo will change without a revolution, a revolution which is increasingly unlikely in a world where “generous” governments hand out $600 “stimulus checks” to a population that has no other means of providing for itself besides relying on the same government that is pillaging and plundering the middle class.

    In other words, going back to what we said above, 2020 helped further crystalize the realization that politics is now markets, and markets have become political weapons, and why the past decade was, as Bill Blain put it, “a story of massive central banking distortion to address the 2008 crisis.” The problem is that this distortion has only made the mess even greater, and the only hope central banks have – in their own words – is if government fiscal stimulus takes over where monetary stimulus ends, and this is where covid came in: almost overnight it ushered in MMT – the fusion of fiscal and monetary policy, the fusion of the Fed and the Treasury. In other words, 12 years after we predicted it would come, helicopter money finally arrived. 

    Only there is just one problem, or rather 277 trillion problems as shown above, because whereas one could argue that fiscal stimulus is a credible option if the world’s wasn’t drowning in debt, when global debt to GDP is 330%, it is tantamount to saying that only more debt can fix a debt crisis. Which is effectively what the world’s smartest people are saying.

    Meanwhile, the trends observed in recent years will continue: coming years will be marked by even bigger government (because only more government can “fix” problems created by government), higher stock prices and dollar debasement (because only more Fed intervention can “fix” the problems created by the Fed), and a policy flip from monetary and QE to fiscal & MMT, all of which will attempt to spark an unprecedented inflationary wave. As Hartnett writes, “if 2020 was year of COVID-19 pandemic; it will, according to Hartnett, “also be remembered as the secular low point for both inflation & interest rates.”

    He is, of course, right because once all other conventional methods to spark reflation fail, central banks will activate Plan B which is also the core pillar of the coming Great Reset: the roll out of digital currencies which can be deposited by central banks directly into digital wallets, bypassing the entire commercial banking fractional banking infrastructure, in a last ditch effort to spark the inflation that will be needed to inflate away the $300+ trillion in debt suffocating world growth. For those wondering when this will happen, tentative schedules show this historic transfer to an all digital payments infrastructure taking place as early as the second half of 2021…

    … so it is very likely that while 2020 was an insane year, it may prove to be just an appetizer to the shockwaves that will be unleashed in 2021 when we see the first stage of the most historic overhaul of the fiat payment system in history.

    Here we should note one thing: in a world undergoing historic transformations, any free press must be throttled and controlled, and over the past year we have seen unprecedented efforts by legacy media and its corporate owners, as well as the new “social media” overlords do everything in their power to stifle independent thought. For us it was especially “personal” on not one but two occasions. In January, Twitter suspended our account because we dared to challenge the conventional narrative about the source of the Wuhan virus. It was only six months later that Twitter apologized, and set us free, admitting it had made a mistake.

    Yet barely had twitter readmitted us, when something even more unprecedented happened: for the first time ever (to our knowledge) Google – the world’s largest online ad provider and monopoly – demonetized our website not because of any complaints about our writing but because of the contents of our comment section. It then held us hostage until we agreed to implement some prerequisite screening and moderation of the comments section. This was a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which resembles the dystopia of 1984 more and more each day, and we have since taken measures. In December for the first time in our 12 year history, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn’t our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us again. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the censorship bandwagon rolls out much more aggressively in the coming year.

    That said, whether the story of 2021, and the next decade for that matter, is one of helicopter or digital money, of (hyper)inflation or deflation: what is key, and what we learned in the past decade, is that the status quo will throw anything at the problem to kick the can, it will certainly not let any crisis go to waste… even the deadliest pandemic in over a century. And while many already knew that, the events of 2020 made it clear to a fault that not even a modest market correction can be tolerated going forward. That in turn may explain why the last quarters of 2020 were a mirror image of events from the first quarter when stocks tanked. After all, if central banks aim to punish all selling, then the logical outcome is to buy everything, and investors, traders and speculators did just that armed with the clearest backstop guarantee from the Fed, which in March crossed the Rubicon when it formally nationalized the bond market as it started buying both investment grade bonds and junk bond ETFs in the open market. As such it is no longer even a debatable issue if the Fed will buy stocks after the next crash – the only question is when.

    Meanwhile, for all those lamenting the relentless coverage of politics in a financial blog, why finance appears to have taken a secondary role, and why the political “narrative” has taken a dominant role for financial analysts, the past year showed vividly why that is the case.

    As for predictions about the future, as 2020 so vividly showed when it comes to true surprises and all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected. And so while many themes, both in the political and financial realm, did get some accelerated closure courtesy of China’s covid pandemic, dramatic changes in 2020 persisted, and will continue to manifest themselves in often violent and unexpected ways – from the ongoing record polarization in the US political arena, to “populist” upheavals around the developed world, to the gradual transition to a global Universal Basic (i.e., socialized) Income regime, to China’s ongoing fight with preserving stability in its gargantuan financial system which is now more than double the size of the US.

    As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website – which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from the KGB either, although now that the entire Russian hysteria episode is over, those allegations have finally quieted down), and has never spent one dollar on marketing – a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine.

    Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we – and others who do not comply with the established narrative – have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, we find it a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world – is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from “dangerous, fake information.” It’s also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website.

    In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to accelerate in the coming year, especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2020 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch out of fear of repercussions, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an orchestrated information vacuum and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which the public relations arm of established media outlets refused to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory “fake news” condemnation.

    We are grateful that our readers – who hit a new record high in 2020 – have realized it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn’t “fake news.”

    *  *  *

    And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, almost 11-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

    So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

    • In 20th spot with 690,000 readers, was an article that touched on one of the most sensitive topics of 2020 – the origins of the Covid virus. As readers are all too aware, the great debate here has been whether the virus emerged due to something as innocuous as a Chinese citizen eating a bat soup, a narrative espoused by the China-controlled media, or if it escaped from a Wuhan biolab. And as AP journalists are now discovering, all signs increasingly point to the latter, something which Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 first said back in April, shocking the world with his claim that the virus was man made as we explained in “COVID-19 Is A Man-Made Virus: HIV-Discoverer Says “Could Only Have Been Created In A Lab“.” Eventually he will be proven correct, confirming once again that the biggest “fake news” is whatever the mainsteam media pushes as the narrative du jour.
    • In 19th spot of the year’s most popular articles, we received another reminder that not all is as it seems when it comes to stoking tensions within US society, as 718,000 readers clicked on a story pointing out that “More Bricks Appear In Advance Of Monday Demonstrations In Baltimore, Texas.” While a wave of protests and violent riots swept across the nation, ostensibly as a grassroot movement condemning police violence against blacks, it had dramatic consequences across the country, leading to the defunding of countless police forces across mostly liberal cities and yet many wondered about who the puppetmaster behind this wave of violence was, because as even Jeff Gundlach mused recently, “It’s Interesting How The Violent Riots Of 2020 Ended Right After The Election.” Hopefully, one day someone will get to the bottom of who and how organized the protest deadly movement of the summer of 2020.
    • In 18th spot, addressing what may be the most critical topic of the next four years, nearly 720,000 readers were presented with a “Blockbuster Report” which in impressive detail “Revealed How THE Biden Family Was Compromised By China.” As a reminder, when news reports of Hunter Biden’s relationship with China first emerged, the social networks were quick to censor any mention of the original report. However, just a few weeks later (and certainly after the election) we learned that Hunter was indeed being probed by tax evasion stemming from his shady Chinese deals which sought just one thing: to buy favor with the family of Joe Biden. Of course, it won’t be the first time foreign powers have sought such undue influence on US politicians – after all that’s what the whole point behind the existence of the Clinton foundation, which did nothing for starving African children or Haiti earthquake survivors, but sure made Bill and Hillary filthy rich.
    • Pivoting from China’s attempts to influence the White House, we once again find ourselves in the middle of the social unrest which defined much of the summer of 2020. Only this time there was a twist: 726,000 readers were fascinated how an “Antifa Attempt To Riot In California Suburb Goes Awry” when a group of Antifa ‘protesters’ were met with instant justice at the hands of angry residents in the suburban town of Yucaipa, California. Unfortunately, we expect this violent left-right split across the heart of America to only get worse in 2021 as none of the fundamental reasons for the growing anger and resentment across US society has been addressed yet, and if anything, it has become the media’s duty to stoke even more anger and hatred.
    • Confirming the scientists at best can only make(un)educated guesses about the future (especially if they have paid conflicts of interest) was an analysis from the early spring when the covid pandemic was first sweeping across the country, and which “found” that “All Hospital Beds In The US Will Be Filled With Patients ‘By About May 8th’ Due To Coronavirus.” This article, which was based on official research and was the 16th most read of 2020, with some 764,000 views, merely showcased something that never happened, and in fact the virus rapidly faded away as soon as various containment measures were rolled out. But not before it demonstrated how the media successfully instills a sense of panic amid the population, which continues to this day even as the most apocalyptic predictions postulated by “scientists” never actually came true.
    • By now a clear pattern is emerging: 2020 was without doubt the year of Covid, and it also served as the foundation of the 15th most popular article of 2020, which discussed a “Chilling Documentary Mapping Out Likely Origin Of COVID-19.” Some 767,000 readers got their first glimpse of covid not as a virus that emerged by accident in nature but one that was created in a Chinese lab; more troubling was the hint that China released the virus on purpose in hopes of overturning the socio-economic status quo. While the jury of “scientists” is still out on the real origins of covid (even if the broader public knows all too well where it came from), one thing is certain: the unprecedented transformations sparked by covid left China as one of the biggest geopolitical winners. If nothing else, this should at least prompt some more questions about who stood to benefit from the release of the virus.
    • Covid continued to dominate the most popular list, and the 14th most read article of 2020 with 820,000 views was the report that triggered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression when on March 12, Trump finally bent under pressure and announced a ban on all travel from Europe, in the process triggering both widespread and targeted shutdowns that have lasted to this day, resulting in millions of job losses and countless small and medium business failing in response to the shotgun approach to deal with the pandemic which while crippling most of the population, made a handful of ultra rich investors and mega corporations extremely rich.
    • The 13th most popular article of 2020 touched on the year’s other biggest event, the US presidential election, and whose outcome Trump contests to this day as a result of countless allegedly fraudulent votes being cast on Nov 3. Some 830,000 readers were interested to learn how and why Trump’s then lawyer Sidney Powell intended to “Overturn Election Results In Multiple States.” So far, that has not happened, and in fact it is unlikely that it will after the Supreme Court refused to hear to Trump’s challenge last month. That said, with 3 weeks to go until the inauguration, Trump still refuses to concede although it remains unclear on what grounds he hopes to launch any upcoming legal challenges, even as Joe Biden has already hired his movers in preparation for his transition to the White House.
    • For the 12th most popular article of the past year, we once again shift back to Covid and specifically China’s massive obfuscation campaign, according to which the country which sparked the global covid pandemic has had less than 100,000 cases, even as the rest of world has arounf 500,000 new cases daily. Beijing’s facade of lies almost cracked in February when as asked whether “China’s Tencent Accidentally Leaked The True Terrifying Coronavirus Statistics.” It did, but since the truth in China has a halflife that is shorter than a virus in the wild, everyone quickly moved on and to this day the world continues to drink some bizarre Kool Aid according to which China has just a handful of new cases daily. 
    • The 11th most popular article of the year was something different: it had to do with what may well have been the most underreported story of 2020 (and 2019) – the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful, rich pedophile friends. Of course, most of Epstein’s secrets died with him when he “committed suicide” in the summer of 2019, although some hope for justice remains and it is tied to the ongoing incarceration of Epstein’s madame and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who knew everything and everyone in Jeffrey’s circle. It’s also why 835,000 read the article laying out “The Top Highlights From Ghislaine Maxwell’s Unsealed Court Records.” Unfortunately, so far Ghislain has refused to shine a light into the true scandal surrounding Epstein and his “friends”, and we are confident that if that were to ever change then the daughter of Robert Maxwell – who died in mysterious circumstances back in 1991 – will face a similar fate.
    • With 864,000 page views, the 10th most popular story of 2020 was neither Covid, nor Trump, nor Epstein-related, but instead exposed China’s giant gold counterfeiting underworld as we explained in “83 Tons Of Fake Gold Bars: Gold Market Rocked By Massive China Counterfeiting Scandal.” Over the years there has been much speculation about just how much of the $11 trillion notional in above-ground gold is legitimate, and how much gold-plated tungsten, and the shocking news that emerged out of China in June underscored that one should always check the authenticity of one’s gold holdings, especially if there is any link to China, the country that has taken counterfeiting to an art.
    • Having entered the top 10 most popular stories of 2020, we find that covid makes another appearance in 9th spot with 915,000 reads, this time with the claim made by a top pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, who made the shocking allegation that the coronavirus Is “The Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated On An Unsuspecting Public” and claimed that “There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians, it’s outrageous, this is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.” One can easily see why any reference to the story or the doctor was promptly scrubbed by the world’s social media censors who have taken it upon themselves to also be “fact-checkers” on any claim related to covid, even if as we reported previously, most of those ‘fact-checkers’ are deeply conflicted individuals who have a vested interest in perpetuating the far more lucrative, fake narrative about covid.
    • In 8th spot, with just a few hundred more page views, was our report about the scientific analysis conducted on voting patterns in the Nov 3 election. In “It Defies Logic”: Scientist Finds Telltale Signs Of Election Fraud After Analyzing Mail-In Ballot Data” we showed a statistical anslysis “which strongly suggested that fraud occurred” on election night, when several swing states inexplicably stopped reporting vote counts while President Trump maintained a healthy lead over Joe Biden. To this date, this remains a deeply polarizing issue, and even though the courts – including SCOTUS – have refused to investigate further, millions of Americans believe that there are telltale signs that Biden’s victory on Nov 3 was not proper and is why so many Americans refuse to accept Joe Biden as their president.
    • With just over 1.1 million page views and in 7th spot, was the article that got us suspended (for 6 months) from Twitter: in “Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?” we asked if Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Peng Zhou (whose data was available publicly to anyone), was the person responsible for unleashing the pandemic. While Twitter unceremoniuosly banned our account for merely asking this question, a few months later the joke was on Jack Dorsey after we reported that “Western Spy Agencies Investigating Wuhan Scientist Highlighted By Zero Hedge In January.” Of course, since the question of China’s involvement in the creation and spread of the covid virus has tremendous political consequences, so far there has been no official finding or conclusion either way.
    • The 6th most popular article of 2020 was another notable question probing the validity of the November election, namely: “Why Does Biden Have So Many More Votes Than Democrat Senators In Swing States?” Another way of asking the same question – which 1,113,129 readers also wanted answered – was “what’s going on here? If it were “never-Trumpers” pairing Biden with their GOP Congressional picks, wouldn’t one expect fewer votes for Trump than GOP Senators?” So far we have not received an answer.
    • Questions about the credibility of the presidential election continued into the Top 5 posts as well, and with 1,245,000 was out post covering the rollercoaster event which was the Nov 3 election, which had Biden winning at first, then odds overwhelmingly shifted in Trump’s favor after he won Florida and Ohio, only to see Biden be declared winner after mail in votes in most swing states came overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. Not surprisingly, “Trump Blasts Vote-Count Delays As “Fraud On The American Public” and yet it was precisely those same vote counts, as well as various documented reports of mystery ballot boxes emerging in the deep of the night, that ultimately handed Biden the election. Trump is still contesting the outcome.
    • The devastating consequences from the covid pandemic may have been more limited than many expected, largely thanks to an unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, which made life especially easy for companies that had access to capital markets, however it was quite the opposite for millions of small and medium businesses for whom the PPP loans handed out at the peak of the covid crisis provided at best a brief respite. As a result, and as we reported in “Bankruptcy Tsunami Begins: Thousands Of Default Notices Are “Flying Out The Door“,”  well over 1.2 million readers were shocked to learn just how bad the economy was for all those “mom and pop” small business operators who had no choice but to fold as the lockdowns resulting from the covid pandemic crippled the service economy and led to a historic bankruptcy filing spree.
    • The 3rd most popular article of 2020, read over 1.3 million times, had to do with another topic which the mainstream media would not come within 10 feet of, namely whether or not the highly popular Black Lives Matter movement was credible, or if it was just another way of sabotaging the popular narrative in hopes of benefiting a certain social class. One person who took the other side of the argument was an Anonymous Berkeley Professor who “Shredded the BLM Injustice Narrative” only to be met with a furious rebuke from Berkeley, which ironically validated one of the letter’s core claims that dissent outside “a tightly policed, narrow discourse” is not welcome. Sadly, to this day any truly open discourse on the topic of whether BLM’s claims are valid remains taboo, and is the surest and quickest way to ending one’s career.
    • The year’s second most popular article with just over 1.5 million reads, was also an example of conventional media cracking down on anything it found disagreeable to the popular narrative. Shortly after the first reports of covid’s spread, we published our take on a research report which found that “Coronavirus Contains “HIV Insertions”, Stoking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon.” This prompted an immediate panic among the “factcheckers” whose job was to perpetuate the mainstream narrative, and they promptly conceded that while HIV insertions are present, such insertions can also be found in other viruses. Unfortunately, their attempts to discredit the theory that covid was a manmade bioweapon have so far failed to be scientifically validated, while covid’s surprising ability to mutate and force the immune system to attack the host body itself, which are now widely accepted even by the so-called “scientists” have failed to ease concerns that covid is, in many ways, an airborne version of HIV.
    • Finally, in the top #1 spot, and cementing 2020’s status as the year of covid, was an article from March that tried to take on the mass hysteria spread by everyone from (conflicted) politicians to (conflicted) mainsteadm media to (conflicted) pharma companies, all of which had a vested interest in creating the biggest ever crisis possible. With 1.7 million page views, in “COVID-19 – Evidence Over Hysteria” we laid out one take why the widespread panic resulting from covid may be ultimately self-defeating especially when juxtaposed side by the side with the far greater (and far wider reaching) economic damage sparked by lockdowns. Alas, to this day, the hysteria dominates confirming the old saying to let no crisis go to waste, especially when the crisis in question is the biggest one in generations and allows the establishment to rollout socially and economically transformational changes that would never be possible without the scapegoat that is covid.

    With all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2021, and the next decade?

    We don’t know: as frequent and not so frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try despite endless allegations that we constantly predict the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2020, which destroyed the reputation of central banks, of economists, of conventional media and the professional “polling” and “strategist” class forever. We merely observe, try to find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it.

    We do know, however, that after a record $22 trillion in stimulus was been conjured out of thin air by the world’s central banks and politicians in just the past 9 months, as helicopter money makes a triumphal arrival in both the US and Eurozone, and as interest rates are on the cusp of breaking out, the entire world is floating on an ocean of excess money, which in 2020 once again succeeded in masking just how ugly the truth beneath the calm surface is.

    We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will eventually be revealed as fully naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone’s guess. But, as we have promised – and delivered – every year for the past 12, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

    Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2021, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2020 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day – usually with a cynical smile – helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that the system is reduced to (ab)using each and every day just to keep this grand tragicomedy going for at least one more year.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 17:10

  • Georgia Judge (Sister Of Top Democrat) Reverses Order To End Voter Roll Clean-Up
    Georgia Judge (Sister Of Top Democrat) Reverses Order To End Voter Roll Clean-Up

    As we detailed previously, U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner attracted considerable criticism when she declined to recuse herself from a challenge over voter eligibility.  Gardner is the sister of Stacey Abrams who has led the effort to register voters in the state.

    Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams speaks during a conversation about criminal justice reform at the New York Public Library in New York City on April 10, 2019. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

    Many felt it was inappropriate for Gardner to rule on the case, a concern that was magnified by her quick rejection of a purging of the rolls of roughly 4000 inactive voters

    Now, as Jonathan Turley details below, it appears that Gardner has not recused herself but did reverse herself.  A new order has been issued, upholding the purge in the face of an appeal.

    Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger took issue with the original order as fundamentally wrong as to the applicable Georgia election laws.

    The new order is a substantial rollback on the original order and the change was praised by Raffensperger’s office.

    It will allow the requirement of provisional ballots from those voters. Gardner however directs that no challenges to their eligibility be upheld based exclusively on data in the National Change of Address Registry, which Democrats have challenged as unreliable.

    At a time of heightened tensions over election integrity, Gardner’s decision not to recuse herself fueled further uncertainty. 

    Stacey Abrams’ organization Fair Fight donated $2.5 million to Senate Majority PAC.

    That is the group which used Majority Forward as its nonprofit arm, and the donation was the largest to Senate Majority PAC since the November election.

    So Gardner is ruling on an issue closely associated with her sister and originally ruled in favor of the group which lists her sister’s organization as its largest contributor. 

    At a minimum, that creates an appearance of a conflict. 

    I can understand Judge Gardner’s view that there is no real conflict. These two very successful women continue to work in the same state. Judge Gardner may have been concerned that a recusal would encourage endless such challenges over tangential links to her sister’s work. 

    Yet, she could have recused while stressing that this is a unique time and a unique set of circumstances. A recusal could have been simply a recognition of the court that her familial tie could undermine confidence in the review.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 16:52

  • Perdue In Quarantine Days Before Critical Georgia Runoff
    Perdue In Quarantine Days Before Critical Georgia Runoff

    With just days to go until the special election vote in Georgia where he – alongside Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who is facing her own opponent – will face off against Democrat Jon Ossoff, Republican Sen. David Perdue is being forced to quarantine, alongside his family, after coming into contact with a COVID-positive individual.

    The news comes at a particularly inopportune moment for Perdue and his family. Polls show Perdue’s lead over Ossoff, a progressive Democrat from the Atlanta suburbs who has gained a degree of national prominence after putting up a good fight (but still losing) in an earlier Georgia special election, has been slipping as national anger simmers over the Senate GOP’s decision to block the $2K stimulus checks pushed by President Trump.

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    Here’s a statement from Perdue and his campaign.

    “This morning, Senator Perdue was notified that he came into close contact with someone on the campaign who tested positive for COVID-19. Both Senator Perdue and his wife tested negative today, but following his doctor’s recommendations and in accordance with CDC guidelines, they will quarantine. “The Senator and his wife have been tested regularly throughout the campaign, and the team will continue to follow CDC guidelines. Further information will be provided when available.”

    Perdue’s race has tremendous implications for Republicans nationwide, as their grip on the Senate is hanging in the balance.Republicans currently have a razor-thin majority of 50-48 in the Senate. If Democrats win both seats, then the balance of the Senate would be 50-50, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be empowered to cast the tie-breaking vote.

    But even losing one seat would put Democrats just one Mitt Romney away from doing whatever they want.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 12/31/2020 – 16:40

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