Oct 01

Today’s News 1st October 2020

  • UK Paramedic Team Tests Jet Pack For Rescues 
    UK Paramedic Team Tests Jet Pack For Rescues 

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/01/2020 – 02:45

    A British jet suit company is revolutionizing how rescuers respond to emergencies in steep, rocky terrain regions. Instead of paramedics scaling the side of a hill, or mountain, on foot, which could take a while, and in an emergency, every minute counts, a “flying” medic could take just a few minutes, reported BBC News.

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    Gravity Industries, the company behind the flying suit powered by several miniature jet engines, published a video Tuesday of a recent test of its suit in action in Britain’s mountainous northern lake district.

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    Gravity teamed up with a local paramedic team, Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS), to conduct a simulation emergency where a young girl had fallen from the hillside and sustained a leg injury. The flying medic could scale the side of the hill at 32 mph, arriving at the incident scene in just under 90 seconds; traveling on foot would have taken at least 30 minutes or more.

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    Andy Mawson, director of operations at GNAAS, said the test of the flying suit via a first responder was “awesome” to see. 

    Mawson said: “There are dozens of patients every month within the complex but relatively small geographical footprint of the Lakes.” 

    “We could see the need. What we didn’t know for sure is how this would work in practice. Well, we’ve seen it now, and it is, quite honestly, awesome,” he said. 

    Mawson said the simulation is a game-changer for first responders to deliver timely critical care services. 

    “The biggest advantage is its speed,” he said. “If the idea takes off, the flying paramedic will be armed with a medical kit.” 

    Mawson said the speed of the rescue “could mean the difference between life and death.” 

  • The Surreal US Case Against Assange
    The Surreal US Case Against Assange

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/01/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Alexander Mercouris via ConsortiumNews.com,

    Following the Julian Assange case as it has progressed through its various stages, from the original Swedish allegations right up to and including the extradition hearing which is currently underway in the Central Criminal Court in London, has been a troubling and very strange experience.

    The U.S. government has failed to present a coherent case. 

    Conscious that the British authorities should in theory refuse to extradite Assange if the case against him were shown to be politically motivated and/or related to Assange’s legitimate work as a journalist, the U.S. government has struggled to present a case against Assange which is not too obviously politically motivated or related to Assange’s legitimate work as a journalist. 

    This explains the strange succession of one original and two superseding indictments. 

    The U.S. government’s first indictment was based on what was a supposedly simple allegation of computer interference, supposedly coordinated in some sort of conspiracy between Assange and Chelsea Manning. 

    This was obviously done in an attempt to dispel the idea that the request for Assange’s extradition was politically motivated or was related to Assange’s legitimate work as a journalist. 

    However lawyers in the United States had no difficulty pointing out the “inchoate facts” of the alleged conspiracy between Assange and Manning, whilst both lawyers and journalists in the United States and elsewhere pointed out that the facts in the indictment in fact bore all the hallmarks of action by a journalist to protect a source.

    The result was that the U.S. government replaced its indictment with a first superseding indictment, which this time was founded largely on the 1917 Espionage Act, and was therefore closer to the real reasons why the case against Assange was being brought. 

    However, that made the case look altogether too obviously politically motivated, so it has in turn been replaced by a second superseding indictment, presented to the court and the defence team virtually on the eve of the trial, which has sought to veer back towards strictly criminal allegations, this time of involvement in computer hacking.

    More Problems for Another Indictment

    The allegations in the second superseding indictment have however faced major difficulties, in that they do not seem to concern the United States and may not even be actual crimes.  Also they rely heavily on the evidence of a known fraudster, whose “evidence” is inherently unreliable. 

    The U.S. government has failed to make clear whether the additional allegations in the second superseding indictment are intended to constitute a separate standalone case.  Initially they appeared to deny that they did; then they hinted that they might do; now however they seem to be acting as if they don’t.

    As if that were not confusing enough, the U.S. government and its British lawyers have floated confusing and contradictory theories about whether or not the British authorities can extradite Assange even if the case against him is politically motivated, and even if it is related to his journalistic activities.

    Initially they seemed to be arguing that — contrary to all British precedent and the actual text of the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Britain — Britain can in fact extradite Assange to the U.S. on a politically motivated charge, because the enabling Act which the British Parliament passed, which made the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Britain a part of British law, is silent on whether or not individuals can be extradited to the U.S. on a politically motivated charge.

    This argument of course came close to conceding that the case against Assange is politically motivated after all.

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    Central Criminal Court in London, commonly known as Old Bailey, 2004. (Nevilley, Wikimedia Commons)

    This threadbare argument, at least for the moment, seems to have been abandoned.  At least nothing has been heard of it throughout the current hearing.  Instead the U.S. government and its British lawyers have argued, in the face of the incredulity of a string of expert and factual witnesses, that the case is not politically motivated after all.

    The same inconsistencies have beset the U.S. government’s arguments as to whether or not Assange is being charged under the Espionage Act for activities related to his work as a journalist. 

    Initially the U.S. government’s position was that he was not.  This was based on some theory — never satisfactorily explained or articulated — that Assange in some way is not a journalist, even though he is charged with doing things that journalists do. 

    Faced by a barrage of expert witnesses who pointed out that the charges brought against Assange under the Espionage Act do in fact relate to work journalists do, the U.S. government midway through the hearing reversed course. 

    Now it says that the charges against Assange not only do relate to his work as a journalist, but that they can be brought against any journalist who does the things Assange is being charged with having done.  The U.S. government has even argued that The New York Times would have been successfully prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing the Pentagon Papers, because that was an action essentially identical to the ones for which Assange is being charged.

    The implications for journalists of this astonishing reversal are truly shocking.  It is staggering that in the media it has attracted no attention.

    Trouble with Witnesses 

    The U.S. government has shown the same lack of coherence in its response to the defence’s impressive lineup of expert witnesses.

    The conventional way of responding to an expert is to call another expert to state a contrary view.  On the critical issues of U.S. law, especially the protections provided to journalists by the First Amendment to the Constitution, as well as on the politics in the U.S. behind the Assange prosecution, the U.S. government has however done no such thing.  Presumably it has found it difficult or impossible to find experts who can be relied upon credibly to state a contrary view. 

    Instead, armed only with affidavits from U.S. Justice Department officials, who are of course not impartial experts at all, but who are part of the U.S. government’s legal team, the U.S. government’s British lawyers have been left to argue that the defence’s experts are not really experts at all — an impossible argument to make convincingly in my opinion — and to debate with the experts points of U.S. politics and U.S. law — including difficult points of U.S. constitutional and case law — about which the experts are by definition far more knowledgeable than the British lawyers. 

    The result, inevitably, has been a series of humiliations, as the lawyers have been repeatedly caught out by the experts making basic errors of fact and interpretation about the points which they have sought to argue. 

    Unsurprisingly, the lawyers have attempted to make up for this by trying to intimidate and denigrate the experts, in a way that has only highlighted their own lack of expertise in the relevant areas by comparison with that of the experts.

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    Trevor Timm, a defence witness and press-freedom advocate, in 2014. (YouTube)

    Given the collapse into incoherence of the U.S. government’s case, it is unsurprising that the U.S. government’s British lawyers are now reportedly trying to persuade the Judge against hearing closing arguments. 

    Given the constant shifts and reversals in the U.S. government’s position, preparing and presenting a closing argument to the court which would be internally consistent and credible must be fast becoming a nightmare.  If closing arguments do take place, as I still expect, it will be interesting to see which of the many conflicting arguments and theories they have made the U.S. government’s lawyers finally run with.

    On its face the U.S. government’s case ought to be close to collapse.  There was even a point in the hearing where one of the U.S. government’s British lawyers apparently admitted to the judge that the reason for the second superseding indictment was that the first superseding indictment was “failing.” 

    If so, then given that the charges being prosecuted against Assange are still basically those set out in the first superseding indictment, the case against Assange ought to be dismissed, and the U.S. government’s request for his extradition ought to be refused.

    The Underlying Truth

    It remains to be seen whether that is what actually happens.  However, that brings me to the single most important fact, and the underlying truth, about this extraordinary case.

    It is very easy when following the intricacies of such a complex legal process to lose sight of what this case is really about.

    Ultimately the U.S. government is not pursuing Julian Assange because he helped Chelsea Manning take certain steps with a computer to conceal her identity, or because he had some historic contacts with hackers, or because he became involved in some activities in Iceland, which caused him to fall foul of a fraudster (and FBI informant). 

    Nor is it because Assange received and published classified material.  In the U.S. the receipt and publication by the news media of classified material has grown to almost industrial levels. 

    It is because Assange, to a greater extent than any other journalist since the end of the war in Vietnam, has exposed the darkest and most terrible secrets of the U.S. government.

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    The case against Assange has its origin in the calamitous “War on Terror” launched by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. 

    That “war” provided the cover for a series of violent military aggressions, primarily in the Middle East, by the U.S. and its closest allies, first and foremost Britain but also including other countries such as Saudi Arabia and France.

    The result has been a series of wars in a succession of Middle East countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen— fought by the U.S. and its allies and proxies, which have caused the devastation of whole societies, and the death and dispersal of millions.

    In the process the U.S. has become drawn increasingly into practices which it once condemned, or at least said it condemned.  These include the “extrajudicial killing” (i.e. murder) of people — who have included children and U.S. citizens — by drone strikes, a practice which has now become routine; the kidnapping of individuals and their detention without trial in places like Guantanamo, a practice which despite unconvincing protestations that “extraordinary rendition” no longer happens almost certainly continues; and the practice of torture, at one time referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which almost certainly still continues, and indeed appears to have become normalized.

    All of this activity straightforwardly violates international (and domestic U.S.) law, including war crimes law and human rights law, and does so moreover in fundamental ways. 

    It also requires, in order to implement the policies that result in these unlawful acts, in the creation of a vast and ultimately unaccountable national security apparatus of a sort that is ultimately incompatible with a democratic society.  Inevitably its activities, which have become routinely unlawful, are becoming unlawful within the territory of the United States, as well as outside it. 

    This manifests itself in all sorts of ways, for example through the vast, indiscriminate and illegal bulk-surveillance program exposed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, and by the systemic FISA surveillance abuse exposed over the course of the Russiagate “scandal.” 

    The extent to which the very existence of the national security apparatus, required to implement various U.S. illegal activities and to achieve its foreign policy goals, has become incompatible with a democratic society, is shown by one of the most alarming of recent developments, both in Britain and in the United States. 

    This is the growing complicity of much of the media in concealing its illegal activities.  Obviously without that complicity these activities would be impossible, as would the serial violations of international law, including war crimes law and human rights, which the United States and some of its allies now routinely engage in.

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    All this explains the extreme reaction to Julian Assange, and the determined attempts to destroy him, and to pulp his reputation.

    Julian Assange and his organization WikiLeaks, have done those things which the U.S. government and its national security apparatus most fear, and have worked hardest to prevent, by exposing the terrible reality of much of what the U.S. government now routinely does, and is determined to conceal, and what much of the media is helping the U.S. government to conceal.

    Thus in a series of astonishing revelations Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have exposed in the so-called embassy cables the extraordinarily manipulative conduct of U.S. foreign policy; in the Vault 7 disclosures the instruments the CIA uses in order to — as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said, “lie” and “cheat” — and, most disturbingly, in collaboration with Chelsea Manning, the rampant war crimes and egregious human rights abuses carried out by the U.S. military during the illegal war and occupation of Iraq.

    This is an extraordinary record for a journalist, and for an organization, WikiLeaks, which was only set up in 2006. 

    Not surprisingly, the result has been that the pursuit of Assange by the U.S. government has been relentless, whilst the media, much of which has been complicit in covering up its crimes, has preferred to look the other way.

    Hence, the Surreal Quality 

    It is this underlying reality which gives the whole case currently unfolding in London’s Central Criminal Court its surreal quality.

    That the true purpose of the U.S. government’s relentless pursuit of Assange is to prevent him from exposing more of its crimes, and to punish him for exposing those of its crimes which he did expose, if only so as to deter others from doing the same thing, is perfectly obvious to any unbiased and realistic observer.  However, the hearing in London is being conducted as if this were not the case. 

    Thus, the extraordinary zigzags in the U.S. government’s rationale for bringing the case, as it cannot admit the true reason why the case has been actually brought.

    Thus, also the U.S. government’s strenuous efforts throughout the hearing to prevent evidence being produced of its crimes which Assange exposed.  

    The U.S. government has strenuously opposed all attempts to introduce as evidence the appalling “Collateral Murder” video, which shows the deliberate murder of civilians in Iraq by members of the U.S. military.  It has also strenuously opposed the introduction of evidence from a defence witness about his own torture.  This despite the fact that in both cases the fact of the U.S. crimes is scarcely disputed, and has in fact been all but admitted.

    The result is the paradoxical and bizarre situation whereby the U.S. authorities try to cobble together a case against Assange based on a confusing medley of discordant and conflicting claims and facts, whilst failing to prosecute or hold to account those who were responsible for the very serious crimes which he has exposed.

    In fact, as the U.S. government’s case has unraveled, the argument has become increasingly confined to the discrete issue of whether — by exposing the U.S. government’s crimes —Assange “irresponsibly” put the safety of various U.S. government informants at risk.

    As it happens the evidence is clearly that he did not.   Over the course of the hearing the court has heard of Assange’s many and serious attempts to conceal the identities of these informants, and of the reckless and even possibly malicious actions of certain others, who actually exposed them. 

    The court has also been told of the absence of any evidence that any one of these informants has in fact been harmed by any disclosure by WikiLeaks or Assange.  Moreover, an expert witness has argued convincingly that the disclosure by a journalist of the identities of such informants would not under U.S. law be a crime anyway.

    In response the U.S. government’s lawyers have relied heavily, not on the evidence of any actual witness, but on passages in a book by two Guardian journalists who are known to be hostile to Assange, and who — by publishing a password — seem to have done more to compromise the identities of the informants than Assange ever did. 

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    Neither of these journalists has been called to give evidence on oath about the contents of their book.  Doing so would, of course, have exposed them to cross-examination by the defence about the truth of the book’s contents. Given the weight the U.S. government is apparently placing on the book, I find it astonishing that they were not called.

    The surreal quality of the U.S. government’s treatment of this issue is shown by the fact that when an actual witness — the German journalist John Goetz — did in fact come forward and offer to give evidence on oath about a specific allegation in the book — refuting an allegation in the book that Assange supposedly made comments at a dinner, which Goetz attended, that showed a reckless disregard for the safety of the informants — the U.S. government’s lawyers strenuously objected, and were able to get the judge to exclude this evidence.

    However, it is the staggering disproportion between the scale of the crimes Assange has exposed, and the crimes of which he is accused — if they are even crimes, and of which he anyway appears to be innocent — which for me stands out.

    Assange and WikiLeaks have exposed rampant war crimes and human rights abuses over the course of illegal wars waged by the U.S. government and its allies.  The death toll from these wars runs at the very least into the tens of thousands, and more plausibly into the hundreds of thousands or even millions. 

    By contrast over the course of the entire hearing no evidence whatsoever has been produced that as a result of any of Assange’s actions anyone has come to any actual physical harm. 

    Yet it is Assange who is in the dock, facing demands for his extradition to the United States, where a 175-year sentence may await him, whilst the persons responsible for the colossal crimes he has exposed, not only walk free, but are amongst those who are trying to jail him.

    The point was made forcefully during the hearing by one of the defence’s most powerful witnesses, Daniel Ellsberg.

    It was also made forcefully to Consortium News by one of its readers, who has correctly pointed out that the crimes which Assange exposed were clearly defined as war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunal, whose decisions are universally accepted as forming the bedrock of international war crimes law. 

    The Nuremberg Tribunal moreover made it clear that there is not only a positive duty to refuse to participate in such crimes, even when ordered to do so, but that no sanctions should ever been imposed for exposing such crimes when they occur. 

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    Judges’ bench at international military tribunal at Nuremberg, 1946. (Wikimedia Commons)

    In other words, it is Assange and his sources, first and foremost Chelsea Manning, who are the defenders of international law, including the Nuremberg Principles, and including in the case which is currently underway, whilst it is those who persecute them, including by bringing the current case against Assange, who are international law’s violators.

    This is the single most important fact about this case, and it explains everything about it.

    Assange and Manning have paid an enormous price for their defence of international law, and for the principles of basic human decency and humanity. 

    Manning was recently held in long spells of solitary detention, and has had her savings confiscated by the U.S. authorities, for no reason other than that she has refused to testify against Assange.

    Assange has been subjected to what various UN agencies have characterized as long periods of arbitrary detention and psychological torture. 

    He continues to be denied bail, despite his known health problems, and is separated from his family. 

    He continues to have difficulties consulting privately with his lawyers, and has been exposed to the indignity — qualified in other cases by the European Court for Human Rights as a human rights violation — of being kept inside court rooms confined to a glass box or cage. 

    John Pilger has described vividly and in great detail, including to Consortium News, the inhuman conditions to which Assange is daily exposed to. That these amount to human rights violations ought not to require discussion or explanation. 

    International Conventions

    That these human rights violations breach a host of international conventions to which Britain is a signatory, including against torture and arbitrary detention, in respect of the right to a fair trial, in respect of the right to privacy and dignity of the person, and of the right to a family life, also ought not to require discussion or explanation. 

    Recently there has been an outcry in Britain because legislation the British government is proposing, which would allow it to modify unilaterally the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement it agreed last year with the European Union, breaches international law. 

    Without in any way disputing the importance of this issue, which may have important consequences for peace in Ireland, I find the angry protestations of some British journalists and politicians, that Britain never violates international law, frankly unreal. 

    If they want examples of Britain violating international law they need look no further than the facts of Assange’s case.  They might also benefit from looking at what has been said over the course of the ongoing hearing in the Central Criminal Court.

    Despite all the difficulties, there is however no reason to give up hope.

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    London graffiti, March 2020. (duncan c, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

    The extraordinary zigzags the U.S. government has been forced to make as it tries and fails to put a coherent and convincing case against Julian Assange together, show that the law, for all its many flaws, remains an important defence.

    I am aware of the many criticisms which have been made of Vanessa Baraitser, the judge who is hearing Assange’s case.  I don’t disagree with any of them. 

    However, I do get the impression that Baraitser’s patience has been sorely tried by the U.S. government’s repeated and dizzying changes of position.  I also get the impression that she was particularly annoyed when the U.S. government, on the virtual eve of the hearing, presented to the court and the defence its second superseding indictment, which in effect made a nonsense of the first. 

    That may explain why the U.S. government’s British lawyers have largely conducted the case as if the second superseding indictment did not exist, basing their arguments mostly on what the first superseding indictment says, though perhaps unsurprisingly, and to the bafflement of the experts, they are now increasingly making arguments which have no basis in any indictment.

    Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, Baraitser has rejected the U.S. government’s various attempts to exclude en masse the evidence of defence witnesses, even if she has imposed a 30-minute guillotine on their examination in chief (direct examination) by defence lawyers.

    In summary, and in my opinion, there is still a chance, however small, that Baraitser will decide the case in Assange’s favour. 

    If she does not do so, then I would have thought, based on what has happened over the course of the hearing, that Assange will have good prospects on appeal.

    More encouraging than what has been happening inside the court, where the outcome remains very much in doubt, and where the prospects must be considered problematic to say the least, is what has been happening outside.

    My wife, who attended one of the hearings last week, saw placards held up by some of Assange’s supporters outside the court, which called on road users to honk their horns in support of Assange.  To her delighted astonishment, despite the media blackout which surrounds the case, and despite the long campaign of character assassination to which Assange has been subjected, an extraordinarily high proportion of road users (more than a quarter) did so.

    That reinforces my sense that the tide of opinion, at least in Britain, is shifting.  The battle is far from over, and can still be won.

  • Air Force Reveals Six-Gen Stealth Jet Has Been "Built And Flown"
    Air Force Reveals Six-Gen Stealth Jet Has Been “Built And Flown”

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/01/2020 – 01:00

    The US Air Force has revealed a new stealth fighter prototype it says has already secretly built and flown, according to Defense News. 

    So move over F-22 Raptor, or better yet, maybe its time for the Air Force to rethink its unreliable F-35 Lightning II program because there’s a new stealth jet that could potentially dominate the skies by 2030. 

    Air Force acquisition head Will Roper recently spoke with Defense News and said the jet, built under the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, could enter production “pretty fast.” 

    “We are ready to go and build the next-generation aircraft in a way that has never happened before,” Roper told Defense News in an exclusive interview ahead of the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference in mid-September. 

    Roper said, “We’ve already built and flown a full-scale flight demonstrator in the real world, and we broke records in doing it.” 

    As the NGAD program is classified, not much is known about the secretive jet. Roper wouldn’t give additional details on the aircraft to Defense News or anyone at the event. 

    The disclosure of the Air Force’s sixth-generation prototype could be perfect timing for the Air Force to request more funds from Congress as a modernization wave is sweeping across the military, said Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense budget analyst with the American Enterprise Institute.

    “If you can quickly get to something and show progress through product, it just changes the whole dynamic for the Hill,” she said. “[Roper has] got so many headwinds, it seems this would be a likely avenue to show conceptual success for his ideas.”

    The announcement also follows years of troubling stories about just how “f**ked up” the F-35 program is. Readers may recall:

    … the list goes on and on. 

    Nevertheless, there is hope for a new stealth jet, and it appears the Air Force is moving quickly on its futuristic projects. Recently, the Navy’s Rear Adm. Greg Harris recently told a virtual audience that the service is looking at F/A-XX or next-generation air dominance family systems. 

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    Six generation stealth jets could become a reality at the end of this decade.

  • Congressional Hearing Reveals US Govt's Invisible Hand In Protests Around The World
    Congressional Hearing Reveals US Govt’s Invisible Hand In Protests Around The World

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/01/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee grilled Michael Pack, who President Trump recently appointed to head the US government’s state propaganda arm, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

    Pack was appointed in June and started a big shakeup at the US state media outlets run by the USAGM, like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Pack fired senior staffers, pushed out management, and froze funding.

    During last week’s hearing, Democrats and Republicans on the committee teamed up to attack Pack for his purges. But what seemed more important to Congress and former USAGM officials was Pack’s move to freeze funds to the Open Technology Fund (OTF). The OTF was formed in 2012 and operated as part of Radio Free Asia for seven years. In 2019, the OTF became an independent non-profit, although it is financed by US taxpayer dollars through the USAGM.

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    “Color Revolutions”

    According to former USAGM officials and OTF board members, the OTF supports protesters in other nations across the world. “In many places around the globe, OTF quietly is providing support to protesters,” said Grant Turner, the former USAGM chief financial officer, who Pack removed in August. “So the Hong Kong protesters are protecting their identities from surveillance by OTF tools; protesters in Iran; we’ve seen it in Beirut,” Turner said.

    Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, who sits on the board of the OTF, also testified and spoke of how the OTF helps protest movements. “OTF has a long history of supporting internet freedom efforts, and was poised to expand its efforts in Hong Kong,” Kornbluh said. “It was going to serve support for circumvention tools and expand support for digital training.”

    Kornbluh explained that the USAGM froze OTF funds before China’s national security law for Hong Kong came into effect. “And then USAGM froze, and continues to withhold, its funding – and did that just weeks before the new security laws came into effect,” Kornbluh said. “So OTF hasn’t been able to support any of these efforts.”

    The frozen Hong Kong funds were first reported by Time magazine in June. According to Time, Pack froze $2 million that would have “directly benefited the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.” One project the OTF was working on in Hong Kong was a “cybersecurity incident response team” that would have analyzed Chinese surveillance techniques in Hong Kong. The team would have shared information with developers who would design apps for protesters to use. The freeze in funding made this project impossible to go through with.

    Another OTF project hampered by the freeze was a $500,000 “rapid response fund, designed to provide fast relief for civil society groups, protesters, journalists, and human rights defenders.” According to Time, this initiative has already made several payouts to groups in Hong Kong since the civil unrest began in June 2019.

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    Michael Pack is the chief executive of the US Agency for Global Media, US Senate file image

    The cut in funding inadvertently revealed the US government’s covert role in the Hong Kong protest movement. The US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy also provides funding for “pro-democracy” movements in Hong Kong.

    Besides the US government supporting Hong Kong protesters through cutout organizations like the OTF and NED, there has been more overt interference in the city. Throughout the demonstrations, protesters were seen waving US flags and calling for Congress to pass legislation. Leaders of the movement even traveled to Washington and testified before Congress, pleading for US intervention.

    President Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law in November 2019. The administration has since sanctioned Hong Kong officials and changed the city’s special trade status. This US interference gave Beijing the foreign boogeyman it needed to pass the controversial national security law.

    Pack was appointed to head the USAGM after the White House accused Voice of America of repeating Chinese state propaganda in its coronavirus coverage. Considering this, the damage Pack’s overhaul did to the OTF’s support for protesters in Hong Kong was likely an unintended consequence.

  • Military Suicides Rise An Alarming 20% As Top Brass Blame COVID Stress
    Military Suicides Rise An Alarming 20% As Top Brass Blame COVID Stress

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 23:40

    Military suicides are up an average of 20% this year over the same period in 2019, according to the Associated Press, citing military officials.

    Broken down by service, suicide among active duty Army is up 30%, from 88 last year to 114 this year, while the Army Guard is up 10% from 78 to 86 over the same period.

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    While the Pentagon would not provide 2020 suicide data, Army officials cites discussions in DoD briefings – and say that while they can’t directly attribute the rise to COVID-19, the timing coincides.

    “I can’t say scientifically, but what I can say is – I can read a chart and a graph, and the numbers have gone up in behavioral health related issues,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told AP.

    Pointing to increases in Army suicides, murders and other violent behavior, he added, “We cannot say definitively it is because of COVID. But there is a direct correlation from when COVID started, the numbers actually went up.”

    Preliminary data for the first three months of 2020 show an overall dip in military suicides across the active duty and reserves, compared to the same time last year. Those early numbers, fueled by declines in Navy and Air Force deaths, gave hope to military leaders who have long struggled to cut suicide rates. But in the spring, the numbers ticked up. –Associated Press

    “COVID adds stress,” said Air Force chief Gen. Charles Brown in public remarks. “From a suicide perspective, we are on a path to be as bad as last year. And that’s not just an Air Force problem, this is a national problem because COVID adds some additional stressors – a fear of the unknown for certain folks.”

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    There were 98 suicides between active duty Air Force and reserves as of September 15, unchanged from from last year – which was the worst in three-decades for active duty suicides across the branch. In 2018, the Pentagon claimed in a report that the military suicide rate was roughly equivalent to the US general population “after adjusting for the fact that the military is more heavily male and younger than the civilian population.“

    The 2018 rate for active duty military was 24.8 per 100,000, while the overall civilian rate for that year was 14.2, but the rate for younger civilian men ranged from 22.7 to 27.7 per 100,000, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. –Associated Press

    “We know that the measures we took to mitigate and prevent the spread of COVID could amplify some of the factors that could lead to suicide,” said the Army’s director of resilience programs, James Helis – who said that virus-related isolation, combined with loss of childcare and financial disruptions is putting a strain on military families. 

    Meanwhile, Army leaders also pointed to stress from the United States being at war for nearly two decades – with deployments being compounded by the virus, along with civil unrest and natural disasters.

    According to Army veteran Sergio Alfaro who served for 4.5 years, fears associated with the virus amplified his PTSD and suicidal thoughts.

    “It’s definitely something that’s made things a bit more chaotic, trying to plan for the future, do things together,” said the former Iraq vet who dealt with daily mortar rounds in Baghdad in 2003. “It’s almost like adding more trash on the heap.“

  • Fahrenheit 451 Predicted People Would Demand Tyranny
    Fahrenheit 451 Predicted People Would Demand Tyranny

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 23:20

    Authored by Barry Brownstein via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    Even if it has been a while since you read Fahrenheit 451, you might remember Ray Bradbury’s classic for its portrayal of a dystopian future in which an authoritarian government burns books.

    Read Fahrenheit 451 again to discover why people wanted their tyrannical government to burn books. Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, yet the parallels to today’s social climate for censorship are haunting.

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    Bradbury’s protagonist is Guy Montag, who, like all firemen in Bradbury’s future, burns books. 

    In Bradbury’s dystopia, firemen became “custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.”  

    Today’s mainstream and social media are “custodians of our peace of mind” as they filter out “conflicting theory and thought.” Captain Beatty is Montag’s boss. Beatty explained, “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one.” 

    If you don’t want people debating questions such as Covid-19 policy, Beatty has the ticket:

    “Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.” 

    Today, millions listen daily to reports of case counts of Covid-19. Like Bradbury predicted, listeners can recite the numbers but have no context to make sense of the numbers. Many have little idea that important scientists and doctors have advocated alternatives to lockdowns that could save lives and abate catastrophic impacts on economies. As in Bradbury’s world, many are working tirelessly to disparage and censor alternative views. 

    After Montag questions his role as a book burner, he recites Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold to neighbors. His neighbors were shocked at the feelings the poem provoked. One cries out, “Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words… Why do people want to hurt people? Not enough hurt in the world, you’ve got to tease people with stuff like that!”

    Incredibly, Bradbury anticipated today’s social climate where people claim censorship is justified because someone hurt their feelings.

    Beatty explains a dominant social norm justifying censorship: Do not offend minorities. Bradbury is clear; “minorities” meant practically everyone:

    “Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico.”

    Pretending you can “stay happy all the time” was another social norm driving popular demand for censorship in Fahrenheit 451. Beatty explains,  

    “[Censorship] didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”

    In Bradbury’s dystopia, to consider conflicting theories makes for unhappiness, so Beatty lauds the fireman’s mission and justifies censorship:

    “The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dyke. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and dreary philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.”

    In Bradbury’s future, intellectuals came under scrutiny when ideas conflicted. The word “intellectual” became a “swear word.” The public dreaded “the unfamiliar” and disdained a world where merit mattered. Again, Bradbury has Beatty explain the mindset behind such thinking: 

    “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well read man?” 

    In Bradbury’s dystopia, thinking was not welcome. Even front porches were eliminated. One of Montag’s young neighbors explained why:

    “People sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over… they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.” 

    Social distancing is today embraced as a way to keep us safe from Covid-19. Social distancing also keeps us safe from “conflicting theories and thoughts.” Chairs have been removed from social gathering places. Hallways are quiet. Nobody stands around the water cooler. People have few places to talk with each other. The parallel to porches is haunting. 

    Perhaps you are sensing a shift in social norms undermining parental rights and the sanctity of the family. Bradbury foresaw a push for government-funded pre-school. Captain Beatty explains, “The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.”

    Bradbury also anticipated today’s justification of looting. Some claim that rioters are merely damaging property, not people. Before he began to see the evil he was part of, Montag eased his conscience with this similar line of thinking: “You weren’t hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things really couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don’t scream or whimper.”

    Warning his readers of policies shaped by the majority, Bradbury writes, “The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.” Today, politicians claim the right to destroy freedom when they get a majority vote of the people. This dangerous reasoning is antithetical to the founding principles of this country. 

    We can take a lesson from Bradbury’s character Professor Faber, who recognized the consequences of his own self-censorship:

    “I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the `guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.”  

    How ironic that today, claiming they are “woke,” progressives clamor for tyranny and censorship. In Bradbury’s world the “woke” saw through the lies of tyranny and censorship. Bradbury would exhort us to avoid expediency and speak out to prevent the worst.

    In his novel, Bradbury didn’t take a deep dive into the psychology of saying nothing. My recent essay on mask mandates by businesses provoked a strong response. Many were sympathetic to my point that businesses respond to consumer demand. Yet, some believe that business policy is being shaped by a small but frightened and very vocal minority who complain loudly to managers about customers not wearing a mask. 

    Going against the vocal herd takes courage. In his book The Heart Aroused, poet David Whyte, who works with businesses on organizational change issues, shares a universal story: 

    “A man I know finds himself in a meeting room at the very edge of speech; he is approaching his moment of reckoning, he is looking for support from his fellow executives around the table … the CEO is pacing up and down on the slate gray carpet. He has asked, in no uncertain terms, for their opinion of the plan he wants to put through. ‘I want to know what you all think about this,’ he demands, ‘on a scale of one to ten.’” 

    Whyte explains the CEO made it plain he wanted to hear “ten.” Whyte’s friend thinks the plan is terrible, and rumors are that other executives feel the same. As the CEO goes around the room, Whyte’s friend hears his colleague, one by one, say “ten.” When it is his turn, “against everything he believes, (Whyte’s friend) hears a mouselike, faraway voice, his own, saying ‘ten.’”

    According to Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s theory of the spiral of silence, “our willingness to express an opinion is a direct result of how popular or unpopular we perceive it to be.” When we believe our belief is popular, we will make a point of signaling that we are part of the herd. Like Whyte’s friend, we will avoid expressing our point of view when we sense it will be unpopular.

    If you think the public is empowered by social media to express unpopular views, you would be mistaken. As in Fahrenheit 451, people censor themselves first, even before Facebook and Twitter add their own censorship. 

    In 2014, the Pew Research Center surveyed the public about their willingness to freely express their views about the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations. The survey revealed that “people were less willing to discuss the Snowden-NSA story on social media than they were in person.” Social media was not an outlet for those concerned about expressing an unpopular view. 

    Consistent with the “spiral of silence” theory and compatible with Bradbury’s dystopian future, no matter what the setting, people are reluctant to share an unpopular view. A 2020 Cato survey found 62% “of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”

    Today, how many say nothing to their neighbors and colleagues about Covid-19 policies for fear of being accused of not valuing human lives? In Fahrenheit 451, silence helped pave the way for the public’s embrace of tyranny. In 2020, Fahrenheit 451 is far more than a chilling, cautionary tale. To reverse the spiral of silence we must make space for candid conversations by thoughtfully considering alternative viewpoints.

  • Ukraine Probes Likely Murder Of US Embassy Staffer In Kiev Park
    Ukraine Probes Likely Murder Of US Embassy Staffer In Kiev Park

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 23:00

    Ukrainian authorities are investigating the shocking and mysterious death of a US Embassy employee on Wednesday. 

    So far all that is known is that a woman was found lying unconscious near railroad tracks in a park near the city center, apparently the victim of a brutal attack, given she had a head injury, according to Reuters.

    She succumbed to her wounds at a nearby hospital, after which investigators found her ID, indicating she was employed by the US embassy in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The US Embassy-Kyiv subsequently confirmed an American member of its staff has died under unknown circumstances.

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    US Embassy in Kiev file image, via Kyiv Post/Ukrafoto

    A criminal investigation is underway, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko, who issued a statement in English saying it “may be a crime”. He followed with: “But may be an accident too. Body was found on railway in earphones during the jogging.”

    “The unconscious woman was admitted to a hospital where she subsequently died. During the examination of the victim’s belongings, an identity card of an employee of the U.S. Embassy in her name was found,” Ukrainian police said.

    Police say the investigation is focused on suspected murder and that they are seeking a suspect based on possible eyewitness accounts, described as follows:

    Police are looking for a dark-haired man of 30-40, dressed in dark shorts and a T-shirt. 

    Within hours after the news breaking, the US Embassy-Kyiv issued confirmation.

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    Central Kiev, via iStock

    Little is known as to the identify of the woman, other than she was an American citizen. American embassies abroad also typically employ dozens of local workers within the host country, but the confirmation suggests she could be US diplomatic personnel, or part of another high level agency.

    “We are heartbroken to report the death of an American member of the U.S. Embassy Kyiv community,” an official US Embassy statement said. “Officials from U.S. Embassy Kyiv are currently working with authorities to determine the circumstances of the death.”

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    US embassies also host a multitude of federal agencies, some in covert or clandestine capacities. Though the majority of personnel are State Dept. Foreign Service, such as diplomats, usually CIA and others like the Defense Intelligence Agency (the DoD’s civilian intelligence arm that works closely with the Pentagon) also operate out of foreign embassies.

  • Escobar: China Deploys Sun Tzu To Prevail In The Chip War
    Escobar: China Deploys Sun Tzu To Prevail In The Chip War

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 22:40

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog, originally posted at The Asia Times,

    Beijing has a plan to become the indispensable tech core of East Asia, linking ASEAN, Northeast Asia and even both Koreas…

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    Let’s cut to the chase: with or without a sanction juggernaut, China simply won’t be expelled from the global semiconductor market.

    The real amount of chip supply Huawei has in stock for their smart phone business may remain an open question.

    But the most important point is that in the next few years – remember Made in China 2025 remains in effect – the Chinese will be manufacturing the necessary equipment to produce 5 nm chips of equivalent or even better quality than what’s coming from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

    Conversations with IT experts from Russia, ASEAN and Huawei reveal the basic contours of the road map ahead.

    They explain that what could be described as a limitation of quantum physics is preventing a steady move from 5nm to 3nm chips. This means that the next breakthroughs may come from other semiconductor materials and techniques. So China, in this aspect, is practically at the same level of research as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

    Additionally, there is no knowledge gap – or a communication problem – between Chinese and Taiwanese engineers. And the predominant modus operandi remains the revolving door.

    China’s breakthroughs involve a crucial switch from silicon to carbon. Chinese research is totally invested in it, and is nearly ready to transpose their lab work into industrial production.

    In parallel, the Chinese are updating the US-privileged photo-lithography procedure to get nanometer chips to a new, non-photo lithography procedure capable of producing smaller and cheaper chips.

    As much as Chinese companies, moving forward, will be buying every possible stage of chip manufacturing business in sight, whatever the cost, this will proceed in parallel to top US semiconductor firms like Qualcomm going no holds barred to skirt sanctions and continue to supply chips to Huawei. That’s already the case with Intel and AMD.

    Huawei’s game

    Huawei for its part is investing deeply in a very close R&D relationship with Russia, recruiting some of their best tech talent, notoriously strong in math, physics and rigorous design work. An example is Huawei’s purchasing of Russian face recognition company Vocord in 2019.

    Some of the best tech brainpower in South Korea happens to be Russian.

    Huawei has also established a “5G ecosystem innovation center” in Thailand – the first of its type in ASEAN.

    In the medium term, Huawei’s strategy for their top notch smart phones – which use 7nm chips – will be to hand over the business to other Chinese players such as Xiaomi, OPPO and VIVO, collect patent fees, and wait for the inevitable Chinese chip breakthrough while keeping production of 5G equipment, for which it has sufficient chips.

    Huawei’s Harmony OS is considered by these IT experts to be a more efficient system than Android. And it runs on less demanding chips.

    With the expansion of 5G, most of the work on smart phones can be handled by cloud servers. By the end of 2020, at least 300 cities across China will be covered by 5G.

    Huawei will be concentrating on producing desktop computers and digital displays. These desktops will come with a Chinese processor, the Kunpeng 920, and run by a Chinese Unified Operating System (UOS).

    UOS is a Linux system developed by China’s Union Tech and commissioned by Beijing to – here’s the clincher – replace Microsoft Windows. These desktops will not be sold to the general public: they will be equipping China’s provincial and national administrations.

    It’s no wonder a steady rumor in IT circles is that the best bet ahead would be to put money in a Chinese Chip Investment Fund – expecting to collect big time when major tech breakthroughs happen before 2025.

    The East Asian tech core

    Whatever the trials and tribulations of the chip war, the inescapable trend ahead is China positioned as the indispensable tech core of East Asia – encompassing ASEAN, Northeast Asia, and Eastern Siberia linked to both Koreas.

    This is the hard node of the incoming Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the biggest free trade deal in the world – which is bound to be signed by 2021.

    India has opted for self-exclusion from RCEP – which in geoeconomic terms condemns it to a peripheral role as an economic power. Compare it to South Korea, which is boosting its integration with ASEAN and Northeast Asia.

    East Asia’s tech core will be at the heart of a global production chain integrating the very best in science and technology conception and the very best production specialists scattered around all nodes of the global supply chain.

    That’s a natural consequence, among other factors, of East Asia introducing patent applications at a multiple of 3.46 times the US.

    And that brings to the very special Samsung case. Samsung is increasing its R&D drive to in fact bypass US-branded technologies as soon as possible.

    When South Korea’s President Moon turbo-charges his appeal for the official end of the Korean War that should be seen in tandem with Samsung eventually reaching a wide-ranging tech cooperation deal with Huawei.

    This pincer movement graphically spells out South Korean independence from the American bear hug.

    It does not escape the Beijing leadership’s attention that the emergence of South Korea as a stronger and stronger geopolitical and geoeconomic actor in East Asia must be inextricably linked to access by China to the next generation of chips.

    So a crucial geopolitical and geoeconomic process to watch in the next few years is how Beijing progressively attracts Seoul to its area of influence as a sort of high-tech tributary power while banking on the future of what would be a Korea Federation.

    This is something that has been discussed every year, at the highest level, at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

    Wang Huiyao of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization notes how China and South Korea already have a free trade agreement and “will start the second phase of negotiations to establish a new mechanism for China-South Korea economic cooperation, which is developing fast.”

    The next – immensely difficult – step will be to set up a China-Japan free trade mechanism. And then a closer, interconnected China-Japan-South Korea mechanism. RCEP is just the first step. It will be a long sail all the way to 2049. But everyone knows which way the wind is blowin’.

  • More Than 500 JPMorgan Employees Inexplicably Got Emergency Virus Relief Funds
    More Than 500 JPMorgan Employees Inexplicably Got Emergency Virus Relief Funds

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 22:20

    Three weeks ago, when we first reported that JPMorgan – the bank that this week was slammed with a record settlement of nearly $1 billion when it admitted it had manipulated and spoofed the gold and Treasury markets – was probing its employees’ role in abuse of PPP funds following reports of “instances in which Covid-relief funds were misused by customers and is probing employees’ involvement in the potentially illegal activities”, we said that it was about time the role of banks was put under the microscope because ” while it was easy to blame the administration for rushing to hand out hundreds of billions in grants/loans (without which the US economy would still be in a depression), a key question is how and why did the private banks that were gatekeepers for all this capital, allow such abuse to take place.“

    A few days later, we also found out that not only did JPM employees allegedly enable fraud by clients when obtaining PPP loans, the largest US bank also found that some of its employees themselves “improperly applied for and received”, i.e. stole, Covid-relief money that was intended for legitimate U.S. businesses hurt by the pandemic.

    The bank discovered the actions, which were tied to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, “after noticing that suspicious amounts of money had been deposited into checking accounts owned by bank employees.” The findings prompted an unusual all-staff message from JPMorgan Tuesday which according to Bloomberg “puzzled many across the industry for its candid admission of potentially illegal acts by some of its own while not describing what they had done.”

    At the time, JPMorgan sent a memo to its roughly 256,000 employees in which senior leaders said they had seen “instances of customers misusing Paycheck Protection Program Loans, unemployment benefits and other government programs” and that some employees had fallen short on ethical standards, too.

    JPMorgan tried to mitigate this discovery by claiming that only a handful of its employees were abusing the program.

    Well, fast forward to today, when we learn that more than 500 JPMorgan employees got assistance from taxpayers aimed at helping businesses through the pandemic “and dozens of them shouldn’t have”, according to Bloomberg.

    The discovery that so many people at the largest and most profitable U.S. bank had tapped the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program raised suspicions inside the company and set off a hasty probe, the full extent of which hasn’t been previously reported.

    Upon discovering that “hundreds of employees” – clearly not the brightest ones as they used checking accounts operated by their employer into which they deposited funds meant for struggling Americans – had received government funds in their accounts, JPMorgan “began scrutinizing director-level employees and workers who received certain amounts.” Of almost two dozen in that first group, the bank found that at least five – none of them director-level employees – had improperly tapped the program, one of the people said. We say at least because every update on this issue reveals that more and more employees had illegally tapped the taxpayer-funded program.

    Amusingly, the bank concluded that of the hundreds of deposits many were “probably” legitimate – providing funds, for example, to side businesses run on workers’ own time, although how a JPM banker would have a “side” business that suddenly needs emergency funding is probably left best for the upcoming Congressional hearings.

    JPM’s findings of illegal employee activity come amid a broader sweep of individual accounts that received business aid. On July 22, the SBA warned banks to be on the lookout for suspicious deposits or activity as part of the EIDL program. The SBA’s inspector general has also flagged evidence of fraud in the program, saying it identified more than $250 million in aid given to potentially ineligible recipients as well as $45.6 million in possibly duplicate payments. A Bloomberg analysis of SBA data last month identified $1.3 billion in suspicious payments.

    As a result, prosecutors have brought charges against more than 20 businesses for fraud under the CARES Act, which authorized the PPP loan program, and a recent report by the House Committee on Oversight suggested that there could have been billions of dollars worth of fraud in the PPP program. Rep. James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, called on the inspectors general of the U.S. Treasury Department and SBA to investigate the program.

    “The SBA does not comment on individual borrowers. Evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse with any of SBA’s loan programs is not tolerated and should be reported. … The SBA successfully distributed 5.21 million loans and $525 billion to small businesses in an unprecedented amount of time, through the Paycheck Payment Program,” the SBA said, misstating the name of the Paycheck Protection Program.

    “This is going to be the biggest fraud in government history, the magnitude of which we will not know for many years to come,” said Vic Hartman, a former FBI agent and author of a 2019 book about fraud based on lessons from his career.

    In retrospect, it’s most surprising that only 500 JPMorgan bankers were involved.

     

  • Face Masks Are The Mob's "Dumbo's Feather"
    Face Masks Are The Mob’s “Dumbo’s Feather”

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 22:00

    Authored by Jeff Harris via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

    I remember watching Walt Disney’s film Dumbo’s Feather as a kid. Released in 1941 the story is about a cute baby elephant born with huge ears and forced to perform as a Circus clown. Dumbo is befriended by a mouse who confidently proclaims Dumbo can use his big ears to fly if he will only hold a magic feather in his trunk.

    Leaping off the high-dive platform with his magic feather Dumbo indeed flies! But he soon discovers the feather isn’t magic at all because he could fly without it.

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    So what does this have to do with the mobs obedient wearing of face mask to ward off the “deadly” Covid virus? You know, that deadly virus that is so incredibly virulent that according to the CDC 99.8% of those exposed to it survive? 

    It’s true, I’m not a psychiatrist, I don’t even play one on TV. I’m throwing this out there as a kind of thought experiment for your consideration. The mask mandates have been in force for about six months. Instead of giving ostensibly “free” people the option of choosing to wear face mask of their own volition (as in Sweden) the politicians totally ignored citizen’s rights and ordered lockdowns, social distancing, sheltering in place, and the public humiliation of worthless face masks.

    Now you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to simply observe the behavior of the masses. At least in my neck of the woods virtually everyone in public places is obediently wearing a face mask. We were initially told this was to “flatten the curve” and would only be necessary for a few weeks.

    But somehow, those few weeks have been extended and extended by power mad governors and mayors into six long months. Interestingly the CDC, WHO and other “experts” proclaimed people shouldn’t wear face masks early on, but then bizarrely changed their minds all of a sudden?

    Back to Dumbo

    So what does this have to do with Dumbo’s Feather? Well think about it. Human beings are a superstitious lot and made more so when the mainstream media pumps 24/7 fear porn about an invisible “deadly virus” that is all around us! “Millions will die if they don’t obey the expert’s guidance!”

    It stands to reason that for many people who’ve obediently worn their face masks and haven’t gotten sick, they could easily assume the mask is their “magic feather” that’s protecting them and saving their very lives! “See, I’ve been wearing my mask and haven’t gotten sick; it must work!”

    Just like a lucky rabbit’s foot, or a four leaf clover tucked in one’s pocket, I suspect face masks have become a psychological crutch for the masses. This is psychological terrorism by government criminals! Human’s forced to endure extended traumatic experiences are much easier to manage as was discovered by government scientist back in the 1950’s and 60’s.

    Omnipresent, debilitating fear is the primary tool governments use to control the masses. The mask is a highly valuable tool in the fear arsenal as it’s a ubiquitous, visual reminder that death lurks all around us! “Don’t take any chances, wear your mask, obey the rules, do what you’re told and everything will be OK.”

    That’s the message. After all, these government folks are only interested in what’s best for us, right? Well no, they do NOT have our best interests at heart, only their power, control and the wealth they can wring out of us.

    H. L. Mencken, the witty American Journalist hit the nail on the head over half a century ago:

    “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

    I suspect that even if by some miracle the “authorities” suddenly announced Covid was contained and we could return to normal life, millions would willingly continue wearing their mask. When humans have been deeply traumatized by fear of an untimely death they don’t get over it quickly.

    The scars are deep and for many will never heal. How ironic that the mask is not only a visual cue to remain fearful but also a beacon of hope for those who equate it with their avoiding illness to date; their magic Dumbo’s Feather.

    In a free country one gets to choose for themselves if they want to wear a mask, stay home, stop working, quit attending church or take baths in bleach water for that matter! So is the USA a free country; I think not! I will not comply!

  • Coinbase Has A New Plan For Dealing With Office SJWs: Pay Them To Leave
    Coinbase Has A New Plan For Dealing With Office SJWs: Pay Them To Leave

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 21:40

    The CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, has devised an interesting strategy for getting rid of crusading SJW employees, like the rebellious workers creating headaches for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not being “woke” enough.

    Pay them to leave.

    Citing an internal email to employees, CNBC’s Kate Rooney reports that Armstrong offered employees severance packages of 4-6 months if they felt uncomfortable with the company’s policy of political neutrality in the workplace. In the note, Armstrong cited “internal strife” at companies like Facebook and Alphabet as a threat to “value” at Coinbase.

    “While I think these efforts are well-intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division,” Armstrong said.

    The announcement comes after Armstrong clarified the company’s stance on office activism, saying that he preferred employees left political discussions and activities to their off-hours.

    For anybody who absolutely can’t tolerate this arrangement (or simply wants a few months of free pay, at the cost of losing their job in the middle of an economic downturn) the company is offering severance packages, so that anyone “who doesn’t feel comfortable with this new direction” can simply leave.

    Pay packages will range between 4 to 6 months, depending on seniority of the employee. That’s not bad, but not great, as far as Silicon Valley exit packages go. But it’s certainly enough to last a skilled engineer until they land a new gig.

    He finished with a positive spin: “Life is too short to work at a company that you aren’t excited about,” Armstrong said in the email, which was previously reported by The Block. “Hopefully this package helps create a win-win outcome for those who choose to opt out.”

    As CNBC pointed out, the approach stands in stark contrast to the prevailing sentiment in Silicon Valley, which is to encourage employees to speak their mind, even when it might endanger the company’s bottom line.

    Will Coinbase’s policy catch on? Or will they need to follow Peter Thiel and (maybe) Elon Musk out of the Bay Area.

  • The Urban Exodus – Will They Or Won't They Come Back?
    The Urban Exodus – Will They Or Won’t They Come Back?

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 21:20

    Submitted by Philip Fischer, founder of eBooleant Consulting, LLC; previously he was Managing Director, Head of Fixed Income And Municipal Bond Strategy, Global Bank & Markets, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

    Years before this pandemic began, I gave a speech at the Library of Congress in Washington DC on “Science and the Literary Imagination.” It was an exploration of the ways in which the limits of literary thought were stretched by the possibilities introduced by scientific discovery.

    Now, I think it is timely to think how this era of great scientific discovery has stretched the risk and return potentialities in economics. The growth of the tech giants makes the return potential clear. But the scientific risk component of systemic risk is also clear.

    There should be no doubt that I favor the acquisition of scientific knowledge and in any event, we have little, if any, ability to keep the Genie in the bottle. But the acquisition of knowledge creates new states of nature to price. These include genetic manipulation and air conditioning.

    Here we should note that discoveries are discoveries specifically because they are uncorrelated with current events. As such, scientific discoveries are unhedgable. In my last blog entry, I commented on the role that pandemics play in inducing mass migrations. Whether this virus itself is a “natural” or man- made disaster remains unresolved. The pandemic, however, was clearly facilitated by the amalgamated collection of technology facilitating its spread. And the role of technology in this cycle of municipal depopulations needs to be considered carefully in light of the many discoveries made in recent years.

    They are leaving because they can

    The press is replete with stories about the exodus from major American cities. And has been so for a long time. A September 2019 Forbes article “New Yorkers Are Leaving The City In Droves: Here’s Why They’re Moving And Where They’re Going” seems almost quaint now.1 The Mayor of New York was trying to run for President of the United States while the moving vans were going into overdrive on the East Side of Manhattan. Much of the interstate migration was the product of tax policy in the blue states.  And that was in the good times.

    And, then as now, economists disregarded the depleting populations of the large American population centers. “It has long been a tenet of municipal finance that residents so love their cities that they are largely indifferent to their taxes. This is belied by the experience of the past two decades.”2

    While a few places like New York City and Boston have managed to buck the general malaise, most cities in the Northeast and North Central United States have faced a multigenerational decline. In fact, the Census Department’s graph of the center of the US population, illustrates as well as any, the relentless thrust of the population west and south.

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    While the westward shift of the population occurs for many reasons, we are concerned with one particular item. That is the role of technology in the decline of the Eastern states. And here one invention is particularly relevant. While there are many places where air conditioning drove demographics, the deserts of the Southwest for example, it is in the East where its impact is most relevant. The invention of air conditioning was an important factor in the Eastern cities losing their relative advantage to the South. 

    Perhaps the best example was Washington DC where the adoption of air conditioning was a significant factor in converting a sleepy southern city into a governmental mega city.4

    And the analog to air conditioning this time is telecommunications. Those leaving the cities add the ability to work remotely to the increasing taxes and decreasing quality of life in deciding whether to return. Municipal finance needs to respect the change in technology. It adds another credit negative to these cities.

    A discussion of municipal credit and technology can be very extensive and there will be a plethora of topics to consider in this blog. Nevertheless, we should note the point I made at the Library of Congress. Science imposes a discipline in our risk analysis. Ordinarily in financial analysis the black swans, low probability events, are just that, unlikely. In a more rigorous sense, however, we have to consider that discovery shortens our time horizon. In the limit, if innovation is fast enough, we are driven to say that if it is now possible that something can happen, it must happen.

    * * *

    [1] New Yorkers Are Leaving The City In Droves: Here’s Why They’re Moving And Where They’re Going
    [2] Schramm, Carl. “Save America’s Dying Cities.” Issues in Science and Technology 36, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 62–70. https://issues.org/americas-dying-cities-carl-schramm-revitalizing-competitiveness/
    [3] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2010/geo/center-of-population-1880-2010.html
    [4] Air-Conditioning Comes to the Nation’s Capital, 1928–60, Joseph M. Siry, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2018) 77 (4): 448–472. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2018.77.4.448

  • "Super Spreaders" Cause More Than 4 Million COVID-19 Infections Across India, New Study Finds
    “Super Spreaders” Cause More Than 4 Million COVID-19 Infections Across India, New Study Finds

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 21:00

    In what scientists have billed as the first major analysis of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in a developing country, a new study published Wednesday in the journal Science shows that a small number of “super spreaders” caused as much as 2/3rds of infections in India.

    The data was gathered over months while tracing more than 3 million contacts in the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

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    Until recently, most of the research on the virus came from the US, Europe and China. But with India set to surpass the US as the world’s largest outbreak over the next 2 weeks or so, the research has arrived at a critical time. It shows that roughly 8% of confirmed cases later led to 2/3rds of the outbreak.

    With India teetering on the cusp of passing 100,000 deaths – it would be the third country to top that number after the US and Brazil – Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy and author of the study, said in an interview with Bloomberg that his research marks the first time that scientists have had granular data allowing them to actually map the spread of the virus from contact to contact in two Indian states.

    But on the flip side, the researchers found that 71% of infected people never passed the virus to anyone.

    “We’ve never had this degree of information to say, hey, some people are really transmitting the virus in a massive way,” Laxminarayan said in an interview. In contrast with the super-spreader minority, 71% of confirmed cases whose contacts were traced weren’t found to have spread the virus to anyone.

    Data for the study were gathered by thousands of contact-tracers during the lengthy lockdown imposed by the Indian government.  Almost 130 million people live in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

    Combined, their population represents roughly 10% of all of India. Both states reported their first infections on March 5. The data examined ended on Aug. 1.Now, India has nearly 6.25 million confirmed cases of the virus.

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    Source: Science

    Health workers traced the spread using the same skills they’ve used to trace the spread of HIV and tuberculosis. In settings like public transit, coming into close contact with an infected person could carry as high as a 79% risk of infection.

    One notable finding of the study was the role that younger people played in spreading the virus. In the two Indian states, children under the age of 14 often “silently” spread the virus to their parents and family members.

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    An analysis of the risks for different age groups found that the rate of mortality for the youngest cohort was 0.05% for ages 5 to 17. On the other end of the spectrum, the mortality rate hits 16.6% for people aged 85 and up.

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    Read the full paper below:

    Science.abd7672.Full by Zerohedge on Scribd

  • Global Food Shortages Are Becoming Very Real, And US Grocery Store Chains Are Preparing For Worst Case Scenarios
    Global Food Shortages Are Becoming Very Real, And US Grocery Store Chains Are Preparing For Worst Case Scenarios

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 20:40

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

    The head of the UN World Food Program repeatedly warned us that we would soon be facing “famines of biblical proportions”, and his predictions are now starting to become a reality.  We have already seen food riots in some parts of Africa, and it isn’t too much of a surprise that certain portions of Asia are really hurting right now.  But I have to admit that I was kind of shocked when I came across an article about the “hunger crisis” that has erupted in Latin America.  According to Bloomberg, “a resurgence of poverty is bringing a vicious wave of hunger in a region that was supposed to have mostly eradicated that kind of malnutrition decades ago”. 

    We are being told that food shortages are becoming acute from Mexico City all the way down to the southern tip of South America, and those that are the poorest are being hit the hardest.

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    Let me ask you a question.

    What would you do if you didn’t have any food to feed your family?

    Fortunately, for the vast majority of my readers that is just a hypothetical question.  But for many families in Latin America, the unthinkable is now actually happening…

    He couldn’t feed his family. Matilde Alonso knew it was true but couldn’t believe it. The pandemic had just hit Guatemala in full force and Alonso, a 34-year-old construction worker, was suddenly jobless.

    He sat up all alone till late that night, his mind racing, and fought back tears. He had six mouths to feed, no income and no hope of receiving anything beyond the most meager of crisis-support checks — some $130 — from the cash-strapped government.

    I once had a friend that is a hardcore prepper tell me that his worst nightmare would be for his daughter to tell him that she was hungry and he didn’t have anything to give her.

    Many of us can’t even imagine being in Matilde Alonso’s shoes.  Sadly, this is going to be happening to even more families soon, because the UN World Food Program is projecting that the number of people facing “severe food insecurity” in Latin American and Caribbean nations will rise by a whopping 270 percent in the months ahead.

    Thankfully, for the moment the United States is in far better shape.  But there have been serious shortages of certain items throughout this pandemic, and many grocery stores have had a very difficult time trying to keep their shelves full.

    For example, during my most recent trip to my local grocery store I noticed more empty shelves than I had ever seen before, and that greatly alarmed me.

    And now we are being told that grocery stores all over the country are attempting to stockpile goods in an attempt “to avoid shortages during a second wave of coronavirus”…

    Grocery stores across the United States are stocking up on products to avoid shortages during a second wave of coronavirus.

    Household products – including paper towels and Clorox wipes – have been difficult to find at times during the pandemic, and if grocery stores aren’t stocked up and prepared for second wave this winter, runs on products and shortages could happen again.

    When even CNN starts admitting that more shortages are coming, that is a sign that it is very late in the game.

    And the Wall Street Journal is reporting that some chains are actually putting together “pandemic pallets” in anticipation of more shortages…

    According to the Wall Street Journal, Associated Food Stores has recently started building “pandemic pallets” to ensure cleaning and sanitizing products are readily available in its warehouses to prepare for high demand through the end of the year.

    “We will never again operate our business as unprepared for something like this,” Darin Peirce, vice president of retail operations for the cooperative of more than 400 stores told the outlet. If grocery stores sense something is coming and are preparing for another “wave” of this scamdemic, it may be something worth taking note of.

    Most of these grocery chains believe that another wave of COVID-19 is the worst case scenario that they could possibly be facing.  Sadly, that isn’t even close to the truth.

    We have entered a time when global food supplies are going to become increasingly stressed, and it is going to be absolutely critical to keep U.S. food production at the highest levels possible.

    Unfortunately, U.S. farmers have been going bankrupt in staggering numbers during this downturn, and the federal assistance that was supposed to help them survive has mostly gone to “large, industrialized farms”…

    Five months into the pandemic, farmers say the federal payments have done little to keep them afloat, as these favor large, industrialized farms over smaller family farms. In fact, initial payments under the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program – which provided $16 billion in direct support and $3 billion in purchases – revealed an uneven distribution of financial aid.

    An NBC News analysis of the first 700,000 payments showed how corporate farms and foreign-owned operations received over $1.2 billion in coronavirus relief – or over 20 percent of the money – with average payments of almost $95,000. Smaller farms, meanwhile, had average payments of around $300. The figures did not take into account other struggling farmers who are ineligible for assistance.

    Reading those numbers greatly frustrated me, because family farms have always been so critical to our success as a nation.

    U.S. farm bankruptcies hit an eight-year high last year, and they are on pace to go even higher this year.

    This should deeply alarm all of us, because we are going to need as much food production as possible during the years to come.

    In 2020, we have just seen one major disaster after another all over the world, and many of these disasters have directly affected global food production.  For example, in my previous articles I haven’t even mentioned the historic flooding that has been going on in China for months that is wiping out crops on a massive scale…

    Experts from the global financial services group Nomura said that although the flooding is among the worst that China has experienced since 1998, it could still get worse in the weeks to come, with the nation poised to lose $1.7 billion in agricultural production.

    However, since the start of the monsoon season, the area of flooded croplands have almost doubled. Nomura’s estimates also do not include the potential loss of wheat, corn and other major crops. Therefore, China could be facing a far greater economic loss than current projections.

    On my news headlines website, I am going to start posting stories like this on a daily basis so that people can keep up with what is really going on out there.

    We really are facing a very serious global food crisis, and the number of people without sufficient food is only going to grow as the months roll along.

    For now, most Americans still have plenty of food, and we should be very thankful for that.

    But everyone should be able to see that global conditions are rapidly changing, and we should all be using this window of opportunity to prepare, because very, very challenging times are ahead of us.

  • Bill Gates: West Must Finance Global Vaccine Distribution Network If It Wants To Defeat COVID-19
    Bill Gates: West Must Finance Global Vaccine Distribution Network If It Wants To Defeat COVID-19

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 20:20

    In an interesting choice of venues, Bill Gates has just published his latest editorial in the Nikkei Asian Review, the English-language flagship of the Japanese financial publishing and data giant. In it, the billionaire Microsoft founder argues that the US and its European allies should dedicate more government funds for guaranteeing supplies of vaccines for poorer countries, which don’t have the wherewithal to strike deals like the $2 billion agreement that Washington struck with Pfizer.

    Hoarding supplies of vaccines isn’t just wrong, Gates argues, it’s counterproductive – since the only way we can truly eradicate COVID-19 is to vaccinate everyone, in every country.

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    But it’s not just a question of donating supplies. The Western world and its leading corporations must collaborate with government to start ramping up supply chains to ensure that production of billions of doses of the vaccine can be produced quickly once emergency approval has been granted.

    Because we can immunize against the disease, governments will be able to lift social distancing measures. People will stop having to wear masks. The world’s economy will start running again at full speed.

    But elimination will not happen by itself. To achieve this goal, the world first needs three things: the capacity to produce billions of vaccine doses, the funding to pay for them, and systems to deliver them.

    Right now, most of the world’s supply of COVID-19 vaccines is slated to go to rich countries. These nations have been making deals with pharmaceutical companies, securing the right to buy billions of doses as soon as they are produced.

    But what about low- and lower-middle income nations of the world, everywhere from South Sudan to Nicaragua to Myanmar? These nations are home to nearly half of all human beings, and they do not have the purchasing power to make big deals with pharmaceutical companies. As things stand now, these countries will be able to cover, at most, 14% of their people.

    To support his case, Gates cites new modeling from Northeastern projecting that the death toll will be twice as high if vaccines aren’t widely distributed in the developing world.

    New modeling from Northeastern University helps illustrate what will happen if vaccine distribution is so unequal. The researchers there analyzed two scenarios. In one, vaccines are given to countries based on their population size. Then there is another scenario that approximates what is happening now: 50 rich countries get the first two billion doses of vaccine. In this scenario, the virus continues to spread unchecked for four months in three quarters of the world. And almost twice as many people die.

    This would be a huge moral failing. A vaccine can make COVID-19 a preventable disease, and no one should die from a preventable disease simply because the country they live in cannot afford to secure a manufacturing deal. But you do not even have to care about fairness to see the problem with the “rich-country-only” scenario.

    As Gates claims: The only way to eliminate the threat of SARS-CoV-2 anywhere, is to eliminate it everywhere.

    Fortunately, corporations like Pfizer and Gilead are collaborating to ramp up supplies not just of vaccines, but of therapeutics like Gilead’s remdesivir.

    Remarkable progress has already been made on this front when it comes to therapeutics. Pharmaceutical companies have agreed to expand drugmaking capacity by using each other’s factories. remdesivir, for example, was created by Gilead, but extra quantities will now be produced in Pfizer factories. No company had ever allowed its factories to be used by a competitor in this way, and now we are seeing similar cooperation when it comes to vaccines.

    In addition to the manufacturing capacity to make them, we also need the funding to pay for billions of vaccine doses for poorer nations. This is where the ACT Accelerator can help. It is an initiative supported by organizations like Gavi and the Global Fund. Not many people have heard of them, but they have spent two decades becoming experts in the task of financing vaccines, drugs, diagnostics.

    After all, trying to “shame” developed countries for simply trying to protect their citizens isn’t a strategy.

    The best way to close this vaccine gap is not by shaming rich countries. They are doing something perfectly understandable — trying to protect their people. Instead, we need to vastly increase the world’s vaccine manufacturing capacity. This way, we can cover everyone no matter where they live.

    While President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” handed billions of dollars to vaccine developers, Gates claims that the UK and Japan, which have both publicly promised to set aside vaccine supplies for poorer nations, should be emulated by other western nations – cough, the US, cough.

    But it’s not enough to simply manufacture the vaccines, an endeavor that would likely cost billions upon billions of dollars. The west should help the developing world create a network of on-the-ground health-care workers around the world to help administer the vaccines, and report any new threats of zoological transmission.

    The United Kingdom is a good model for what other wealthy nations should do. It has donated enough money for the Accelerator to procure, probably, hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for poor countries. So do countries like Japan. The Japanese government was the first advanced economy to announce a public commitment of 17.2 billion yen ($16 million) on Sep. 15 to secure doses for poorer nations.

    But more are still needed. I hope other nations are as generous.

    Finally, even when the world has the manufacturing capacity and funding lined up, we will need to strengthen health systems – the workers and infrastructure that can actually deliver vaccines to people around the world.

    There is a lot of be learned from the ongoing effort to eradicate polio. One of the most famous photos of the polio eradication effort in India was of a line of health workers. They were carrying vaccine coolers over their heads as they waded through waist-deep floodwaters to reach a remote village. Spotting COVID-19 cases in the poorest parts of the world will take a similar network of primary health workers – one that can reach places where even roads cannot. With good diagnostics, these workers can also sound the alarm if another disease jumps from a bat – or bird – to a human.

    There are, in effect, three parts to Gates’ plan, as he teases in the headline: vaccines are the only solution (not “herd immunity” – God forbid), going “global” is the only right way to do it, and – most importantly – more public money is needed to make it happen.

    Typically, self-interest and altruism require opposite behaviors, but in this rare case, Gates argues, the altruistic thing is also an act of self-interest, since the only way we can eradicate COVID-19 would be to ensure the entire world is vaccinated, spending public money on vaccines bound for poorer nations makes sense.

    In other words, in eliminating COVID-19, we can also build the system that will help reduce the damage of the next pandemic.

    One thing I have learned studying the history of pandemics is that they create a surprising dynamic when it comes to self-interest and altruism: Pandemics are rare in cases where a country’s instinct to help itself is tightly aligned with its instinct to help others. The self-interested thing and the altruistic thing — making sure poor nations have access to vaccines — are one and the same.

    And by building a global on-the-ground health-care network, we will be able to detect the next killer virus before it becomes a pandemic.

    To sum up: Americans don’t need all those vaccines! They’re not even going to take them! Maybe the federal government should turn supplies over to the Gates Foundation and WHO, which are already working on expanding access to vaccines.

    Wait a second: Didn’t President Xi say China was going to provide vaccines to the entirety of the developing world as part of its quest to “atone” for unleashing the virus in the first place?

  • Japan's Stock Exchange Halts All Trading "Due To Network Issue"
    Japan’s Stock Exchange Halts All Trading “Due To Network Issue”

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 20:03

    As Asian markets open for the start of Q4 trading, Japanese markets have hit a ‘glitch’ resulting in the halting of all buying and selling of securities.

    Tokyo Stock Exchange operator Japan Exchange Group said in a statement:

    We would like to express our sincere gratitude for your exceptional support for the operation of the Securities Market on this exchange.

    Today, there is a failure to deliver market information, and we are pleased to let you know that we will stop buying and selling all stocks on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

    At the same time, it is not possible to accept orders from that time.

    Recovery is currently undecided, but we will contact you again about future plans.

    Seems like it’s a system-wide issue:

    • *NIKKEI, TOPIX ARE NOT TRADING DUE TO SYSTEM ISSUE

    • *JPX: TOSTNET ALSO NOT EXECUTING TRADES

    • *JAPAN SAPPORO EXCHANGE ALSO HALTS TRADING

    • *JAPAN NAGOYA STOCK EXCHANGE ALSO EXPERIENCING SYSTEM ISSUES

    Nikkei futures are modestly lower with the halt…

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    And Yen is weaker…

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    What will the BoJ do when it can’t buy Topix ETFs?

  • The Individual Against The Odds
    The Individual Against The Odds

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 20:00

    Authored by Kym Robinson via The Libertarian Institute,

    There is a genre in fiction that celebrates an individual’s adversity against seemingly impossible odds. Whether this is a person who takes the war to organized crime (Mack Bolan), a secret agent saving the world for their government (James Bond), a wronged loner lost and bullied by the law and the society that rejects them (John Rambo), one who wants something so bad that they will defy social conventions (Velvet Brown), or even a rogue that hides behind a mask and inspires a revolution against tyranny (V), they are in some way inspiring. They are better than most not just because of courage, but also often principle. They are the outsider, the curmudgeon, and blowhard, or worse.

    In the coming eclipse of cancel culture and layered censorship, certain allegories and metaphorical fiction will become a dangerous device for story tellers to use. It is no longer a method of sedition to lift a mirror up to a wider culture or society, to reveal an imagery that the victims or an outsider may see. The marketplace of varied opinions and diverse perspectives that is supposedly a hallmark of the abstract known as western civilization is becoming less welcome to such variations. Instead, through technology and a paternalistic tendency society is becoming a dystopia tinkering between the prose of Huxley and Orwell, but especially that found in the film ‘Demolition Man.’ It is a creation of the timid, those who shy away from difference while claiming to champion it.

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    “First Blood” (1982)

    Social media, like most innovations, was a promise to open our worlds and to connect and share so many different ideas and experiences. Instead it becomes a series of cultivated echo chambers that snuff out certain viewpoints and celebrate others, always confirming a particular bias. It is with an unofficial handshake that the public, made of shrill and easily offended individuals, unite with corporations and states to mash out a new moral order that mutates in instances of outrage and crisis. It clings to central planning and yet it is not necessarily centrally planned. It is a negative instinct to constrict and subvert any desires and needs for liberty. It is the widespread transformation of language to duplicate words into meanings that could only be conjured up inside the laboratories of intellect inefficiency. It is born from a need to be safe and correct, but it is a dangerous approach to any issue or problem.

    The story of the individual saying no or wanting to be left alone is now one that is deemed selfish and dangerous. It is bad that one or a few may defy the collective good. The abstract religion of social contracts and duty to the state are the order and safety that a majority cling to. A society of so many dependents who demand and extract from the individual hinder productivity and creative instincts while demanding more. It would be as much of a cliché to invoke Ayn Rand as it would George Orwell—both would simplify the moment—but alas, the Randian term “moocher” is perhaps apt at times. The moochers rule. Tyranny inevitably is like a kind chef cooking a frog in warm water slowly until it boils, so that it may not leap for freedom until it’s too late.

    It is with great concern that if the fiction of the past is not censored, redacted, or destroyed that it will be viewed, and that many will view the villains of the story as the hero. The individual, those who fight for freedom and liberty, are now the bad guy.  Those with the imperial conviction to control and impose law and order, however maniacal, are the true heroes, the pillars of society. John Rambo after all was carrying a knife and Sarah Connor was stockpiling weapons. Will great firemen like Guy Montag burn the pages of dangerous books and char the words of seditious thought to maintain a society of ignorance?  It is after all a state of bliss to be hidden from such dangers.

    What does it say about a society or culture that will not leave people alone? That it will not let them be or demand that they must not merely comply, but pay tribute? The one who does not want these conditions is considered selfish, while those who exist at the expense of others are normal. The myth is that the elites and rulers are the only benefactors from the centrally planned nightmares that always lead to tyranny. There are many who benefit from such a regulated society, where grants, welfare, and subsidies feed the ineffective and perpetuate an ideology of employment over outcome. The many planners, agents, and ‘moochers’ all benefit, enjoying the trappings of such a state.

    The individual must speak in whispers like a thief, yet they are the one getting stolen from. They must plan around impositions as though a conspirator, but it is those in conferences and on committees who conspire against them. They are the ones whose homes are invaded if they possess contraband, do not pay enough tribute to the state, or if they speak wrongly on social media. The terror regimes of North Korea and the Peoples Republic of China are often pariahs, yet the more the open nations of the west condemn them, the more they seem to employ their methods of control and order.

    The majority tends to yearn for a comfortable status quo that allows them to enjoy life, often at the expense of others. They are the opulent living city dwellers of the Capitol in ‘The Hunger Games.’ They are the humans inside the pods that will not swallow the pills in ‘The Matrix,’ and those who refuse to wear the sunglasses in ‘They Live.’ To have a bitter truth revealed is painful. That means the victims of the wars, the unintended consequences of regulation, the trampled innocent of policy, all cannot have a voice, and if they do it is often skewered and redirected. The status quo is always preserved. Partisan politics allows the steering wheel to keep turning, even as the direction stays the same.

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    Linda Hamilton playing Sarah Connor in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991)

    A man like John Rambo—a vagrant used by his government and then rejected—is a danger not because of his skills and experiences, or because he carries a large knife, but because he wants to be left alone. He is directionless and does not have a generic path in mind. It is a long road, but it is his to take. In time the radical individual becomes embraced and utilised by the state, in life and fiction. In the United States, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. is no longer a dangerous emblem of civil rights defying the order of his time, but a murder victim of cause, likely killed by the very government that now enshrines his name. But his ideals?

    Mack Bolan, a former Vietnam war veteran like John Rambo, comes home to a society that no longer needs him. His family is murdered and wronged by the Mafia. So, Bolan deserts the military and wages his own war. In time, as the franchise succeeds and the 1970s climate of anti-establishment thinking grows into Reagan’s America, Bolan fights the Soviets and terrorists. He works with the CIA and other covert government agencies, and like the Punisher (inspired by Bolan), he serves Uncle Sam. Around the same time as this switch, so too does John Rambo in the sequels. These individuals become implements of the state, however begrudging it may be.

    As the new century loomed it was not merely the state itself that was the danger, but corrupt actors from within. Gene Hackman and Will Smith as an ‘Enemy of the State’ do not go up against the U.S. government but instead rogue elements of it. This becomes the theme as the individuals continue to defy the odds, but only in a watered-down way. Mark Wahlberg in ‘The Shooter’ is a wary ex-serviceman, a loner, living remote with conspiracy inclinations. We are shown this as the camera pans across his library. He is bought in by the government as a consultant but is betrayed and used as a patsy. But again it is the secret agency of corrupt individuals, not the government itself.

    Perhaps the peak of this genre was the 1990s when so many things culminated: the promise of a technological future where liberty and decentralized markets could thrive, and where no more would Cold War threaten the globe with nuclear misery and endless proxy wars. Instead the new century arrived, and it was like the last one. All those promises were betrayed. Like the fictional individuals ultimately going on to serve the odds, Arnold Schwarzenegger would become the governor of California. The man who championed Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and appeared in the documentary series introduction, the Austrian ‘Austrian’ economist of free markets who starred in many ‘individual against the odds’ films, ultimately became another statist. ‘The Running Man’ would go on to run the show in the sequel. It defeats the point.

    The animated film ‘Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,’ perhaps one of the greatest tales of individual liberty told, shows a defiant horse that does not want to be owned and broken in by humans, whether that’s by a native American boy or a U.S. army cavalry officer. In the end the native American boy accepts the horse’s wishes and the cavalry officer realizes that he cannot break the stallion’s spirit. It is a beautiful and basic story, that if you love something you should let it to be free. To respect freedom itself is in a sense love.

    In the follow-up sequel, the whole point is missed. It is a cynical defeat of an established franchise, an all too common theme for any fan that has seen the terrible litany of remakes in the modern era. Instead of Spirit the stallion being free—a rebel—he becomes submissive and a prop to a city girl. It is a complete about face of what the original film was about. The hero of individual defiance is again saddled and broken in by the very odds that he was heroically defying. No longer does the individual stand up to do the right thing despite personal risk, but instead he is relegated to be a vapid avatar for contemporary consumption, spiritless and all too common.

    Perhaps this is the theme: no longer will individuals be this feral radical, but instead be tamed in the end. The uniqueness and dignity of their principles becomes perverted by a mandate devised inside the cauldron of academia by a committee of experts or the reactionaries on social media. In the end, like Spirit the stallion they must be broken in and ridden for some collective monolith. Maybe in the future the spirit of the individual will be found inside the broken algorithms of a machine’s mind, like WALL-E, a lowly robot with basic AI that eventually sees the world for what it is. And the comfortable obese humans wrapped in technology, having destroyed nature—both their own and the wider world’s—will be saved by the touch of a machine who simply thinks for itself and says, “no more.” By then will it be to late? Will the sacred beauty of the individual flower pushing through the filthy mess of the collective be plucked for good?

    Bryce Courtenay, in The Power of One, wrote, “Pride is holding your head up high when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.”

  • Chamath Palihapitiya Slams Airline Bailouts: "Giving More Money To These CEOs Is Idiotic And Dumb"
    Chamath Palihapitiya Slams Airline Bailouts: “Giving More Money To These CEOs Is Idiotic And Dumb”

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 19:40

    Good live TV is tough to pull off, especially on CNBC, but once in a while, an otherwise boring debate about the economy or policy will fly ‘off the rails’ and traders and other financial professionals will turn the volume up and tune in.

    That happened back in the spring, when Ventuer Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya debated CNBC’s Scott Wapner about whether the Trump Administration should bail out the airlines, and other industries suffering from the pandemic. Palihapitiya famously asserted that the government should “Let them [the airlines] fail” before explaining that these companies burnt up their rainy day funds and took on unnecessary debt to finance share buybacks. And since airlines are asset rich, the businesses will survive bankruptcy intact, along with all or most of the staff.

    This response horrified Wapner, and we chronicled the reulting clash. Thrilled with the response, CNBC has brought Palihapitiya and Wapner together for at least one interview since that initial encounter, and on Wednesday, the pair sat for yet another interview as part of CNBC’s “Seeking Alpha” Conference, which was hosted digitally this year.

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    Remarkably, the two men essentially circled back to their original debate about bailouts, and Palihapitiya delivered on the colorful quotes. Troubled airlines shouldn’t be bailed out, Palihapitiya argued, because they have been so poorly managed. Handing government money to the airline CEOS and their boards would be “idiotic and dumb”.

    CNBC has frequently hosted airline executives and lobbyists to argue the other side – that not delivering on the bailouts could put the industry in jeopardy (while implying that customer safety could ultimately be impacted). But Mnuchin’s comments this morning seemed to put hopes for a bail out to rest, even though President Trump promised that the airlines would be taken care of.

    But instead of blaming COVID-19 for the airlines’ woes, Palihapitiya pointed out that the companies essentially put themselves in this situation. Instead of building up reserve funds, these companies focused on buying back stock and bolstering the company’s valuation. It was “the most absolutely horrid and idiotic form of capital allocation you could imagine,” he said.

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    If governments are going to hand out money to corporations every 10 years, then the government should impose new restrictions on how that money is spent, Palihapitiya said, hinting at support for making share buybacks illegal, or subject to greater restrictions.

    “This has been happening for the last 15 or 20 years,” Palihapitiya said. “If you were going to give these folks money, you should have created some much tighter guardrails for what you were going to do in the future.”

    Instead of topping off the rescue programs instituted by Congress and the Fed, Palihapitiya argued that any future stimulus funds should go to small business owners and individuals only.

    “If you really believe in trickle-down economics, then let’s actually see how trickle-down economics would work. Give money into the hands of ordinary Americans…What I guarantee you they will do is they will spend.”

    “We should be improving unemployment benefits, we should make sure they don’t get forced out of their homes, to the extent that they have loans that are coming due…they need to be compensated,” Palihapitiya.

    Prodded again by Wapner about the tens of thousands of airline employees who may lose their jobs this week, the venture capitalist who recently launched a SPAC of his own, stood his ground and insisted that “not another dollar” should go to “these CEOs and boards”.

    Moving on to the subject of politics, Palihapitiyah dismissed Tuesday night’s debate as “shambolic” and called it a “Dumpster fire” that was “so bad”. However, he also said that, in a way, it was also “incredibly clarifying,” before cautioning that a shift toward brand over substance could one day lead to Kim Kardashian, the pioneering reality TV starlet, to the White House.

    “not>

  • Military Personnel Outnumber Civilian Scientists In US Vaccine Program
    Military Personnel Outnumber Civilian Scientists In US Vaccine Program

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 19:20

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Military personnel outnumber civilian scientists in the United States government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program. With the military so heavily involved in the distribution of this vaccine, is it any surprise that most Americans don’t want anything to do with it?

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    An organizational chart obtained by Stat shows, raising concerns about whether military officials are qualified to lead the massive public health campaign. The military is used for war. Rolling it out to distribute a rushed vaccine signals one thing to the public if you’re brave enough to admit it: this vaccine distribution is a war on the public perpetrated by the government. Wake up.

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    This vaccine won’t be voluntary by any sense of the word.  You don’t have to take it, but if you don’t, you won’t be able to eat, buy food, pay rent, or leave your house that will be taken from you if you cannot pay the mortgage because you refuse the vaccine. That doesn’t sound like anyone will have much of a choice.

    This vaccine could be ready before the election, however, it may not be. Political chaos surrounding the elections is all a part of this vaccine agenda.  The goal is to have everyone tracked, traced, monitored, and under authoritarian control. The goal is the New World Order.

    The Health and Human Service’s $300 million “pandemic-related” ad campaign (propaganda rollout) touched off an outcry, and rightfully so, after Politico reported leaked details. Among the concerns were its funding sources: Food and Drug Administration contributed $15 million for pre-campaign work, while most of the program’s $300 million budget was requisitioned from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention funds appropriated by Congress, Politico revealed.

    Additionally, the Ohio national guard was called upon to help provide “security” for the presidential debate. Around 300 members were sent to the city to “ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending Tuesday’s presidential debate in Cleveland.”

    The military will be increasingly used in the coming months and it’s rollout will be seen as a way to provide peace and safety. Please remain vigilant and prepared. Stay alert and know all the possibilities of what could be coming, as it’ll give you an idea of the additional preps that will be needed. As of right now, refuse to live in fear, and make sure you can defend yourself and your family, especially if you intend to deny the vaccine.

    Changes are coming, so prepare and stay alert.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Sep 30

Today’s News 30th September 2020

  • Romanian Village Elects Mayor Who Died From Covid Complications Days Before The Election
    Romanian Village Elects Mayor Who Died From Covid Complications Days Before The Election

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 02:45

    You just can’t keep a good man down. 

    Villagers in Deveselu, South Romania like their mayor so much, they elected him for a third term – despite the fact that he died from Covid-19 complications 10 days before the country’s elections.

    Mayor Ion Aliman was reelected in a “landslide” for the village after his death came too close to the election for officials to remove his name from the ballot. He would have been 57 years old on the day of the election. The village is home to about 3,000 people, according to AP. 

    Hundreds of villagers went to the polls to vote for Aliman, who won 1,057 of the 1,600 votes that were cast in the village. After the election results came out, villagers visited his grave to pay their respects. 

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    Romanian villagers with Mayor Ion Aliman

    “This is your victory” some villagers said, surrounding his grave. “We will make you proud, we know that from somewhere up there you are watching.”

    Aliman was a member of the country’s left leaning Social Democrat Party who, despite the good local news, lost the Mayoral run in the country’s capital, Bucharest. 

    About 19 million voters cast ballots across Romania to elect local officials. The Social Democrat Party is expected to regain power in early December when the country has its Parliamentary vote. 

  • Azerbaijani-Armenian War: Turkish F-16s Enter The Game. Armenia Threatens To Use Iskander Missiles
    Azerbaijani-Armenian War: Turkish F-16s Enter The Game. Armenia Threatens To Use Iskander Missiles

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 02:00

    Submitted by South Front,

    The Armenian-Azerbaijani war continues raging in the South Caucasus.

    As of September 29, the Azerbaijani advance in the Nagorno-Karabakh region struck the Armenian defense and Azerbaijani forces were not able to achieve any military breakthroughs. Armenian troops withdrew from several positions in the Talish area and east of Fuzuli.

    The Azerbaijani military has been successfully employing combat drones and artillery to destroy positions and military equipment of Armenia, but Azerbaijani mechanized infantry was unable to develop its momentum any further.

    While both sides claim that they eliminated multiple enemy fighters and made notable gains, the real situation on the ground remains more or less stable with minor gains achieved by Azerbaijani troops. Armenian sources say that 370 Azerbaijani troops were killed and over 1,000 injured. The number of killed Armenian fighters, according to Azerbaijani sources, is over 1,000. Armenian sources also note the notable role of Turkey in the developing conflict.

    Armenian President Armen Sarkissian said that Turkey has been assisting Azerbaijan in its war against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic with advisers, mercenaries and even F-16 fighter jets. He added that the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is still possible through dialogue. However, the President emphasized that the Armenian nation cannot allow a return to the past.

    “105 years ago, the Ottoman Empire carried out the genocide of the Armenians. In no case can we allow this genocide to be repeated,” Sarkissian said.

    Armenia threatens to use Iskander short-range ballistic missile systems obtained from Russia against Azerbaijani targets if Turkish F-16 warplanes are employed on the battlefield.

    Meanwhile, Armenian Ambassador to Russia Vardan Toganyan said that members of Turkish-backed Syrian militant groups have been already participating in the conflict. He said that recently about 4,000 Turkish-backed militants were deployed to Azerbaijan. In turn, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan said that “people who have arrived from Syria and other countries of the Middle East” are fighting on the side of Armenia. Earlier, pro-Turkish sources claimed that Armenia was transporting fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Thus, the sides are not only claiming that they are gaining an upper hand in the war, but also accuse each other of using foreign mercenaries and terrorists.

    On the evening of September 28, the Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic confirmed that 84 of its troops were killed in the recent escalation. The Armenian side also claimed that its forces had shot down an Azerbaijani aircraft. However, this claim was denied by the Azerbaijani military. Baku continues insisting that all Armenian claims about the Azerbaijani casualties in the war are fake news.

    On September 29, the Armenian side continued reporting about Azerbaijani helicopters being shot down, and declaring that they repelled Azerbaijani attacks. Nonetheless, the scale and intensity of the strikes by the Azerbaijani side did not demonstrate any decrease. On top of this, the Armenian Defense Ministry said that a Turkish Air Force F-16 fighter jet shot down an Armenian Su-25 warplane. The F-16 fighter jet allegedly took off from the Ganja Airbase in Azerbaijan and was providing air cover to combat UAVs, which were striking targets in Armenia’s Vardenis, Mec Marik and Sotk. Azerbaijan and Turkey denied Armenian claims that a Turkish F-16 shot down the Su-25.

    So far, no side has achieved a strategic advantage in the ongoing conflict. However, the Azerbaijani military, which receives extensive support from Turkey, is expected to have better chances in the prolonged conflict with Armenia, if Erevan does not receive direct military support from Russia.

  • Dramatic Video Shows Armenia Score Direct Hit On Azerbaijani Drone
    Dramatic Video Shows Armenia Score Direct Hit On Azerbaijani Drone

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/30/2020 – 01:00

    Now in the third day of full war in the disputed Karabakh region, Armenian forces have managed to shoot down an Azerbaijani drone that was flying over their positions, all of which was captured in widely circulating video. 

    The moment the missile struck is clear in the video given the powerful explosion and fireball that ripped through the skies over the battlefield. It underscores that both sides are increasingly deploying high-grade sophisticated weaponry in the mountainous battle zone. 

    The self-proclaimed breakaway republic of Nagarno-Karabakh, which is officially within Azerbaijan’s borders but which has been governed by ethnic Armenians since 1994, saw fighting explode over the weekend. 

    BBC reports there’s already been nearly 100 military deaths among local Armenian military forces, and many dozens of civilians killed or wounded on either side by shelling, while Azeri military casualties have not been produced. 

    Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev condemned Armenian forces’ shelling, which he said killed 10 Azeri civilians since Sunday. Al Jazeera reports that Yerevan has shot back with similar accusations of targeting civilians:

    Armenia’s defense ministry said an Armenian civilian bus in Vardenis – an Armenian border town far from Nagorno-Karabakh – caught fire after being hit by an Azeri drone, but no one appeared to be hurt. It said it was making further checks.

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    Armenia’s Ministry of Defense later on Tuesday said its forces took out another drone, marking at least two successful enemy drone downings.

    Since the start of the escalation in fighting on Sunday, tank and infantry units have been observed engaged in ground warfare. 

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    Frontline fighting has only intensified since, with a full troop mobilization declared by Armenia, and additional heavy weaponry pouring into the border region.

  • Where Is The Right's "George Soros"?
    Where Is The Right’s “George Soros”?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 23:45

    Via The American Mind,

    No Coup For You

    Democrats are preparing to win by any means necessary. What’s the Right going to do about it?

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    Michael Anton’s warning about the upcoming election, “The Coming Coup,” continues to roil the public square. Will Republican leaders do their best to prepare for the crisis of legitimacy—caused purposefully by Democrat Party changes to our normal voting procedures—that now almost surely awaits us for weeks after November 3? We hope so.

    But note well: for all the controversy it has caused, no one on the Left has yet tried to refute Anton’s article, point by point. Instead, slime continues to ooze forth from the usual crevices. At first, no one on “the other side” except Ed Kilgore at New York magazine responded. As we said in “Stop the Coup,” Kilgore, much like everyone else in the mainstream press, simply “sidesteps outrageous statements from leftist activists and Democrat Party royalty indicating they do not plan to concede even if Trump wins.” But at least Kilgore nodded towards to the substance of Anton’s article.

    The TIPsters Strike Back

    The next round of responses revealed what has become the new normal for the American Left. Let’s take three quick examples.

    First, a scurrilous, poorly constructed hit piece appeared (listen to us discuss on our ‘The Roundtable’ podcast here) smearing Anton, The American Mind, and the Claremont Institute as anti-Semitic for daring to mention George Soros’s name. As Newt Gingrich—recently silenced on Fox News for the same supposed sin—responded here at The American Mind: “This is ludicrous.” Once again, the article did not deny or disprove anything asserted in “The Coming Coup.” Instead, it absurdly called us racists.

    Nonetheless, Nils Gilman, a think-tanker and PhD from UC Berkeley and one of two central co-founders of the Transition Integrity Project that Anton called out in his article, retweeted this execrable piece of garbage and upped the ante—using it to declare that our friend and colleague Michael Anton “deserves” to be shot to death. Writing such a tweet is unthinkable for anyone in a similar position to Gilman on the American Right; we all know such a public statement would lead to unemployment and full-fledged cancellation.

    The letter that Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams sent to Gilman’s employer in reply, read in part:

    This is incitement to political violence. Mr. Gilman has yet to retract his inflammatory words.

    Is the official position of the Berggruen Institute that its political opponents should be killed? Does the Berggruen Institute countenance or tolerate advocacy of political violence by its employees? If not, why has the Berggruen Institute not disavowed this threat? Why has the Berggruen Institute not terminated the employment of Nils Gilman?

    […]

    I call on you immediately to disavow, explicitly and publicly, political violence against Michael Anton or anyone else. Failure to do so will constitute an endorsement of political violence by the Berggruen Institute, its staff, and its donors.

    Gilman and his friends laughed it off. The tweet is still up. The Berggruen Institute has not responded. And as Claremonster Steve Hayward wrote in City Journal, even the moronic Never Trumpers got in on the act.

    Charlie Sykes, an anti-Trump conservative, this week tweeted, “For no particular reason, this morning I’ve been thinking about Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last public appearance.” The Romanian dictator’s last public appearance, of course, was the execution of him and his wife following a ten-minute trial. This is not just unsubtle; it isn’t even artful.

    There is something especially pathetic about having to watch these cringing wormtongues writhe in action. Charlie Sykes is being paid now to be a useful idiot for the Left; he will not be pleased with the ultimate fate of his career should they win.

    Another TIP member, Edward Luce, recently chimed in with lies and false gossip about Anton in the Financial Times. As Anton replies in “From Death Threats to Lies”:

    It’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. TIP’s initial strategy of ignoring criticism of their open coup talk was starting to fail. They realized they needed to get back on the offensive. Hence the recent slate of “Trump Is Attempting a Coup!” articles, on which I hope to have more to say later. These latest attacks are part of a counteroffensive, pure and simple.

    The counteroffensive consists of attempts to slander us and distract the audience from the central problem.

    What Now?

    Many of the folks above know better. Many in the audience know better. But they know something else, more viscerally—especially those in the upper middle class whose professions are tied to larger forces and elite trends—namely, the white-hot ruling class fury at the Orange Bad Man. They feel it keenly now more than ever. They see the ruling class marshaling its forces, readying the purge of the heretics who dare oppose them. During these times, it is unlikely that those beholden to such forces will stick their necks out. Instead, it is easier to believe the acceptable propaganda of “polite” company.

    At present, that propaganda includes two big lies that serve as the bedrock assumptions used by the powers-that-be to stir up and scare the upper-middle, professional classes – the otherwise-very-intelligent-people – many of whom still believe Trump was a Russian agent and Vladimir Putin his handler.

    1. “Trump will not leave office. The President of the United States is prepping to refuse to peaceably transfer power if he loses the election.” This, of course, is part and parcel of the coup narrative that Anton has helped bring into the light. When the results of the election are unclear and disputed in the courts due to their own efforts to change voting procedures throughout the nation, they will say that Trump is refusing to lose office while they are on the side of the angels.

    2. “Trump is telling people to vote twice/break the law.” This is rated fake news even by fake news itself. But the whole story fits very well with the coup narrative as it delegitimizes the President and the election.

    So here, again, is the question of the hour: Do Republican leaders understand the purpose of the two false statements above and how enthusiastically—and successfully—they are being wielded as rhetorical weapons at present?

    What the other side is doing is smart. They wish to win, by any means necessary.

    But where is the Right’s George Soros?

    Where is the Right’s Transition Integrity Project and accompanying war-gaming of the possibilities this fall?

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    Are Republicans preparing for the political complications that will inevitably result from the hundreds of lawsuits Democrats have filed and will file in the future?

    Where are the Republican party’s 600+ lawyers-in-waiting?

    Where are the Right’s meetings for activist and lobbying groups to plan to protect the polling places and put people in the streets for weeks after the election?

    What we know for sure is that it is very likely that we will not know the results of the election for weeks after election day. This should now be the assumption of every thinking person on the Right. The question is: what are we going to do about it?

  • US Destroyer Shatters Navy Record For Longest Stint At Sea Due To Virus Measures
    US Destroyer Shatters Navy Record For Longest Stint At Sea Due To Virus Measures

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 23:25

    Last April and May as the United States emerged as the world’s coronavirus epicenter, the US Navy began taking emergency precautions as the outbreak started to impact entire crews and ships, as was especially the case with the whole USS Theodore Roosevelt disaster off Guam.

    These drastic measures included keeping US warships out to sea much longer than previously scheduled, especially those ships which had “clean” crew – that is, no confirmed cases of COVID-19. After all, if the only possible place for a non-infected crew to become infected was shore, then why not stay out at sea to maintain full operational readiness, or so the logic went. 

    NBC News now reports that due to these extra coronavirus measures and extended time at sea a US guided missile destroyer has now shattered all prior US Navy records for the longest consecutive number of days at sea for a military surface ship.

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    USS Stout, via US Navy/Flickr

    “The USS Stout reached 208 days at sea Sept. 26, spending nearly seven months in the Middle East and the North Africa area, known as the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations,” NBC writes, citing US Navy press statements. “The previous record of 207 days, held by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS San Jacinto, was also set this year.”

    During normal times a warship could expect to make multiple port visits in various parts of the globe traversed, however, the Navy has for months had a ban on port visits in effect to mitigate the possibility of new outbreaks among seamen. 

    The USS Stout had previously deployed as part of the USS Eisenhower Carrier group but remained at sea long after the carrier returned home at the start of summer. 

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    A statement from 5th Fleet commander Vice Adm. Samuel Paparo said, “We are extremely proud of Stout’s accomplishments in theater as they’ve been operating to ensure freedom of navigation.”

    He added: “Under the challenges of COVID-19 and the uncertainty of regional tensions, Stout embodied their motto and prevailed with ‘Courage, Valor and Integrity.'”

    However, once defense affairs journalist quipped that it’s “not a record you want” given it was entirely done out of force of extreme circumstances, with parts of naval operations clearly hampered by the virus.

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    Throughout the summer America’s rivals look on closely, especially China and Russia, eager to see just how severely operations and military readiness will be impacted across the Navy and Department of Defense by COVID-19.

  • The Election Has Already Been Hijacked & The Winner Decided: 'We, The People' Lose
    The Election Has Already Been Hijacked & The Winner Decided: ‘We, The People’ Lose

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 23:05

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”

    – Herbert Marcuse

    Republicans and Democrats alike fear that the other party will attempt to hijack this election.

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    President Trump is convinced that mail-in ballots are a scam except in Florida, where it’s safe to vote by mail because of its “great Republican governor.”

    The FBI is worried about foreign hackers continuing to target and exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system, sowing distrust about the parties, the process and the outcome.

    I, on the other hand, am not overly worried: after all, the voting booths have already been hijacked by a political elite comprised of Republicans and Democrats who are determined to retain power at all costs.

    The outcome is a foregone conclusion: the Deep State will win and “we the people” will lose.

    The damage has already been done.

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has been tasked with helping to “secure” the elections and protect the nation against cyberattacks, is not exactly an agency known for its adherence to freedom principles.

    After all, this is the agency largely responsible for turning the American republic into a police state. Since its creation, the DHS has ushered in the domestic use of surveillance drones, expanded the reach of fusion centers, stockpiled an alarming amount of ammunition (including hollow point bullets), urged Americans to become snitches through a “see something, say something” campaign, overseen the fumbling antics of TSA agents everywhere, militarized the nation’s police, spied on activists and veterans, distributed license plate readers and cell phone trackers to law enforcement agencies, contracted to build detention camps, carried out military drills and lockdowns in American cities, conducted virtual strip searches of airline passengers, established Constitution-free border zones, funded city-wide surveillance cameras, and undermined the Fourth Amendment at every turn.

    So, no, I’m not losing a night’s sleep over the thought that this election might by any more rigged than it already is.

    And I’m not holding my breath in the hopes that the winner of this year’s popularity contest will save us from government surveillance, weaponized drones, militarized police, endless wars, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, profit-driven private prisons, graft and corruption, or any of the other evils that masquerade as official government business these days.

    You see, after years of trying to wake Americans up to the reality that there is no political savior who will save us from the police state, I’ve come to realize that Americans want to engage in the reassurance ritual of voting.

    They want to believe the fantasy that politics matter.

    They want to be persuaded that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats (there’s not).

    Some will swear that Donald Trump has been an improvement on Barack Obama (he is not).

    Others are convinced that Joe Biden’s values are different from Donald Trump’s (with both of them, money talks).

    Most of all, voters want to buy into the fantasy that when they elect a president, they’re getting someone who truly represents the citizenry rather than the Deep State (in fact, in the oligarchy that is the American police state, an elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots in cooperation with a political elite).

    The sad truth is that it doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: Corporate America. Understanding this, many corporations hedge their bets on who will win the White House by splitting their donations between Democratic and Republican candidates.

    Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion. It is a political illusion aimed at persuading the citizenry that we are free, that our vote counts, and that we actually have some control over the government when in fact, we are prisoners of a Corporate Elite.

    In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities, more often than not, are exactly the same so that we don’t join forces and do what the Declaration of Independence suggests, which is to throw the whole lot out and start over.

    It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty. Most of all, both parties enjoy an intimate, incestuous history with each other and with the moneyed elite that rule this country.

    Despite the jabs the candidates volley at each other for the benefit of the cameras, they’re a relatively chummy bunch away from the spotlight. Moreover, despite Congress’ so-called political gridlock, our elected officials seem to have no trouble finding common ground when it’s time to collectively kowtow to the megacorporations, lobbyists, defense contractors and other special interest groups to whom they have pledged their true allegiance.

    So don’t be fooled by the smear campaigns and name-calling or drawn into their divide-and-conquer politics of hate. They’re just useful tactics that have been proven to engage voters and increase voter turnout while keeping the citizenry at each other’s throats.

    It’s all a grand illusion.

    It used to be that the cogs, wheels and gear shifts in the government machinery worked to keep the republic running smoothly. However, without our fully realizing it, the mechanism has changed. Its purpose is no longer to keep our republic running smoothly. To the contrary, this particular contraption’s purpose is to keep the Deep State in power. Its various parts are already a corrupt part of the whole.

    Just consider how insidious, incestuous and beholden to the corporate elite the various “parts” of the mechanism have become.

    Congress. Perhaps the most notorious offenders and most obvious culprits in the creation of the corporate-state, Congress has proven itself to be both inept and avaricious, oblivious champions of an authoritarian system that is systematically dismantling their constituents’ fundamental rights. Long before they’re elected, Congressmen are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “For many lawmakers, the daily routine in Washington involves fundraising as much as legislating. The culture of nonstop political campaigning shapes the rhythms of daily life in Congress, as well as the landscape around the Capitol. It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”

    The President. What Americans want in a president and what they need are two very different things. The making of a popular president is an exercise in branding, marketing and creating alternate realities for the consumer—a.k.a., the citizenry—that allows them to buy into a fantasy about life in America that is utterly divorced from our increasingly grim reality. Take President Trump, for instance, who got elected by promising to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump has paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the rest of the Deep State (also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”) to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic. The lesson: to be a successful president, it doesn’t matter whether you keep your campaign promises, sell the American people to the highest bidder, or march in lockstep with the Corporate State as long as you keep telling people what they most want to hear.

    The Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court—once the last refuge of justice, the one governmental body really capable of rolling back the slowly emerging tyranny enveloping America—has instead become the champion of the American police state, absolving government and corporate officials of their crimes while relentlessly punishing the average American for exercising his or her rights. Like the rest of the government, the Court has routinely prioritized profit, security, and convenience over the basic rights of the citizenry. Indeed, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky makes a compelling case that the Supreme Court, whose “justices have overwhelmingly come from positions of privilege,” almost unerringly throughout its history sides with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful.

    The Media. Of course, this triumvirate of total control would be completely ineffective without a propaganda machine provided by the world’s largest corporations. Besides shoveling drivel down our throats at every possible moment, the so-called news agencies which are supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda have instead become the mouthpieces of the state. The pundits which pollute our airwaves are at best court jesters and at worst propagandists for the false reality created by the American government. When you have internet and media giants such as Google, NBC Universal, News Corporation, Turner Broadcasting, Thomson Reuters, Comcast, Time Warner, Viacom, Public Radio International and The Washington Post Company donating to political candidates, you no longer have an independent media—what we used to refer to as the “fourth estate”—that can be trusted to hold the government accountable.

    The American People. “We the people” now belong to a permanent underclass in America. It doesn’t matter what you call us—chattel, slaves, worker bees, it’s all the same—what matters is that we are expected to march in lockstep with and submit to the will of the state in all matters, public and private. Unfortunately, through our complicity in matters large and small, we have allowed an out-of-control corporate-state apparatus to take over every element of American society.

    We’re playing against a stacked deck.

    The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. The people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the citizenry, while milking us of our money and possessions.

    It really doesn’t matter what you call them—Republicans, Democrats, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.

    As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, our failure to remain informed about what is taking place in our government, to know and exercise our rights, to vocally protest, to demand accountability on the part of our government representatives, and at a minimum to care about the plight of our fellow Americans has been our downfall.

    Now we find ourselves once again caught up in the spectacle of another presidential election, and once again the majority of Americans are acting as if this election will make a difference and bring about change. As if the new boss will be different from the old boss.

    When in doubt, just remember what the astute commentator George Carlin had to say about the matter:

    The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork…. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. …The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice…. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on…. It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.

  • South Korean-Built Mini Nuclear Reactors That "Won't Melt Down" Approved For US
    South Korean-Built Mini Nuclear Reactors That “Won’t Melt Down” Approved For US

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 22:45

    Apparently it’s not over for South Korea’s commercial nuclear development industry after in 2017 President Moon Jae-in initiated his plan to phase out nuclear power and halt all reactor construction projects in the country.

    Now for the first time South Korean-built key nuclear components will be used in the United States as part of efforts to introduced further safeguards at US facilities. The cutting edge new ‘miniature’ design was previously described in Forbes as a reactor that “doesn’t need the complex back-up power systems that traditional reactors require” and which “won’t melt down or otherwise cause any of the nightmares people think about when imagining the worse for nuclear power.”

    Nikkei Asian Review reports this week that “Miniature nuclear reactors that use key components from South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction have won first-of-its-kind certification for use in the U.S.“

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    It’s part of a $1.3 billion contract between Doosan and American company NuScale Power for work on a major project in Utah, approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in late August.

    The nuclear plant is scheduled to come online by 2029 under the operation of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, with the South Korean-made small reactor modules, or SMRs, considered crucial to the cutting edge infrastructure and updated safety measures.

    Nikkei describes what’s slated to be a 12-module plant:

    Each SMR unit is capable of producing 50 megawatts of power, or about 5% that of a conventional reactor. An SMR is considered a safer alternative since it can be cooled in a water tank, cutting out the risk of an accident due to problems with water pumps or the electrical source.

    Doosan’s SMRs are designed to be placed in underground water tanks. There is only a minor risk of reactors losing cooling capabilities due to earthquakes or other external factors.

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    Via NuScale Power

    “Small Modular Reactor” size comparison to conventional reactor:

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    Doosan has been a lead developer behind South Korea’s nuclear power industry, responsible for construction of at least two dozen reactors at five nuclear plans, but has seen its finances on the brink of collapse in recent years amid Moon Jae-in’s nuclear phaseout and amid the move toward other ‘safer’ alternative energy sources.

    “The U.S. approval of the Utah project, which greenlights the $1.3 billion SMR order, will lead to an injection of much-needed capital. That and an agreement to sell off its construction equipment business have lifted Doosan’s stock price,” Nikkei notes.

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    Via US Dept. of Energy/NuScale

    As a ‘faster’ and ‘cheaper’ to install – but purportedly safer – reactor design, it could as Nikkie underscores, be “a promising antidote to the trend away from nuclear power in Western countries.”

    The US Department of Energy deems Small Modular Reactors as “a key part of the Department’s goal to develop safe, clean, and affordable nuclear power options,” according to its official website.

  • "Will You Shut Up Man?" – Debate Post-Mortem: Trump Dominant But Biden Better Than Expected
    “Will You Shut Up Man?” – Debate Post-Mortem: Trump Dominant But Biden Better Than Expected

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 22:44

    And just like that it’s over…

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    It was contentious, for sure; but here is a quick summary of the performance:

    • SCOTUS – Trump won by TKO

    • COVID – Biden won, but close.

    • Economy – A tie

    • Race – A tie (Trump facts on Biden’s history versus Biden repetitive claims Trump’s a racist but no gotcha)

    • Law And Order – Trump won (Biden unable to get past ‘defund’ and reform)

    • Track Records – Trump won (Biden unable to get past Green New Deal malarkey)

    • Election Integrity – A tie (but we might have given Trump the edge on Coup/recent ballots issues)

    Overall, Biden did a lot better than many expected but on policies and straightforward facts, Trump won the first debate comfortably.

    CNN’s Wolf Blitzer made it clear what the goal was:

    “Clearly this is the most chaotic presidential debate that I have ever seen. That most of you have ever seen I suspect. … I wouldn’t be surprised by the way if this was the last presidential debate between the president of the United States and the former vice president of the United States but we will see.”

    *  *  *

    Full Debate Post-Mortem

    As is usual the evening began with a few hundred protesters, unsure of exactly what they were angrily protesting outside the presidential debate to “dump Trump” and explain that “Black Lives Matter”…

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    Biden (or whoever was running his Twitter feed) showed some humor right before the debate…

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    In the 2016 debates, Mexican Peso was the markets’ proxy (falling when Trump did well and rising when Hillary outperformed). It’s not clear what the current market proxy will be – gold?

    No handshake – as pre-agreed – at the start…

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    The first question was on SCOTUS.

    President Trump clarified his position: “We won the election. Elections have consequences… We won the election and therefore we have the right to choose her.”

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    Biden’s response aggressively swung to healthcare and abortion as opposed to the actual process and claimed 100 million Americans would lose healthcare because of ACB.

    Biden stumbled early on with his answers and the first gaffe hit – “how many of those who have died from COVID have survived?”

    Trump stomped right on him, over-ruling the moderator going directly at Biden’s talking points. Biden stumbled a little but held it together: “I’m not here to call out his lies, everyone knows he’s a liar.”

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    Trump blasted Biden for pandering to the left and Bernie. Biden responded:  “I am the Democratic party right now.”

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    The discussion escalated, and the SCOTUS section ended with this:

    “Will you shut up, man?” Biden says, as Trump repeatedly taunts “will you pack the court? Will you pack the court?”

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    Then the debate moved on to COVID.

    Biden began by attacking Trump for 200,000 dead and his lack of response. In a stunning moment of irony, Biden claimed Trump “should get out of your bunker, and out of the sand trap, in your golf course.”

    “You would have lost far more people,” Trump says, interrupting Biden.

    Then the discussion shifted to shutting down the economy: “He wants to shut down this country and I want to keep it open,” Trump says.

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    The next topic was the economy, and its recovery.

    “We built the greatest economy in history, we closed it down because of the China plague,” Trump said, adding that “Joe wants to shut down this Country. I want to keep it OPEN!”

    Biden pivoted to the $750 tax issue, but focused on the fact that “you can’t fix the economy until you fix the COVID crisis.”

    Moderator Wallace then shifted to ask Trump if he paid $750 in Federal taxes.

    Trump slammed Biden by asking what he had done for 47 years?

    “You’re the worst president America’s ever had, c’mon.” – Biden to Trump, to which Trump replied: “I’ve done more in 47 months — than you’ve done in 47 years.”

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    Then the discussion jumped to Biden’s tax plan but the big moment was when Trump pivoted to Hunter Biden asking about the $3.5 million from a Moscow mayor’s wife. Biden denied it, Trump slammed… “He didn’t get three and a half million dollars, Joe?”

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    Biden claimed that was “totally discredited,” except it hasn’t been. Biden: “my son did nothing wrong at Burisma.”

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    The issue of race came up next.

    Wallace: “Why should voters trust you rather than your opponent to deal with the race issues facing this country over the next four years?”

    Biden began by focusing on Charlottesville: “this is a president who has used everything as a dog whistle to try to generate racism — to try to generate racist division.”

    Trump went after Biden hard, reminding him of the busing decision, the “super predators” comments:

    “He did a crime bill, 1994, where you called them super predators,” Trump says. “You have treated the Black community about as bad as anybody in this country.”

    Biden stumbled through trying to say that there is systemic racism in America. Trump emphasized his law-and-order stance.

    The topic shifted to Critical Race Theory, and Trump did a good job explaining his position: “They were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not going to do that, I’m not going to allow that to happen,”

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    “He’s the racist,” Biden says of Trump.

    Then the debate transitioned to Law & Order.

    Trump says “Democratic cities” are where the problems have been occurring.

    Biden: “I’m in favor of law … Law and order with justice where people are treated fairly.”

    “I’m totally opposed to defunding the police budget,” Biden says – well that’s not exactly true is it…

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    Wallace asks Trump: Are you willing to condemn white supremacists, militia groups?

    “Sure, I’m prepared to do that,” Trump says of condemning White supremacists. “Almost everything I see is from the left wing not the right wing.”

    “Proud boys — stand back and stand by — but I’ll tell you what somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.”

    Biden then claimed that “Antifa is an idea, not an organization.”

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    “When a bat hits you over the head, that’s not an idea,” Trump says of antifa.

    Speechless!

    The topic of the candidates’ track records came up next.

    “There has never been an administration that has done what I’ve done,” Trump says, “and that’s with the impeachment hoax.”

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    Biden: “Under this president we’ve become weaker, sicker, poorer, more divided and more violent. When I was vice president we inherited a recession, we fixed it.”

    Trump and Biden got heated as Biden attempted to bring up Beau Biden’s heroism, but Trump pivoted to Hunter and left Biden stumbling.

    Climate Change then popped up (presumably on track records)

    “We have to do better management of our forests,” Trump says. “Every year, I get the call, ‘California’s burning. California’s burning.’”

    In a rather shocking admission, Biden said?: “No, I don’t support the Green New Deal.” Biden then says after asserting: “The Green New Deal will pay for itself as we move forward.”

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    Does Biden know that Kamala Harris was a cosponsor of the Green New Deal?

    And the last topic of the debate was Election Integrity…

    “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” Trump says of mail-in ballots.

    Biden: “If I win, that will be accepted. If I lose that will be accepted.”

    Trump also bought up the Obama/Biden coup: “There was no transition. They came after me trying to do a coup.”

    *  *  *

    It’s over. Now the pundits weighing in.

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    Finally, we can’t leave the post-mortem without commenting on Wallace’s performance. While Trump did try his usual bullying, Wallace repeatedly steeped on Trump’s responses to Biden

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    Which gave us an idea…

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    * * *

    Time for a beer… or five!

  • Will Justice Amy Star In "The Five"?
    Will Justice Amy Star In “The Five”?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 22:25

    Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

    By nominating Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump kept his word, and more than that.

    Should she be confirmed, he will have made history.

    Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors — even Ronald Reagan, who filled three court vacancies — fell short. Trump’s achievement — victory in the Supreme Court wars that have lasted for half a century — is a triumph that will affect the nation and the law for years, perhaps decades.

    Trump’s remaking of the Supreme Court for constitutionalism may well be the crown jewel of his presidency.

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    Consider. If Judge Barrett becomes Justice Barrett, she will join Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to create a constitutionalist core of five justices, a controlling majority.

    On the other side would sit the three liberals: 82-year-old Stephen Breyer and Barack Obama appointees Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

    If Chief Justice John Roberts envisioned a Roberts Court where he would be the swing vote for 4-4 deadlocks, deciding every such case himself, his dream could be about to vanish.

    If Barrett is confirmed, the new court becomes “The Five,” with its youngest, newest and most charismatic member, a 48-year-old protege of Justice Antonin Scalia, its brightest and rising star.

    Consider the credentials of the jurist Trump just named.

    Barrett was summa cum laude at Notre Dame Law School, graduating first in her class. She clerked for Scalia, taught law at South Bend for 15 years and has served for three years on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    She is a non-Ivy League, Middle American and a devout Catholic and mother of seven, including a special needs child and two adopted children from Haiti. Almost universally, former classmates and colleagues, liberals among them, praise her temperament, brilliance and scholarship.

    America’s court wars, in which the coming battle over Barrett’s nomination may prove decisive, go back half a century.

    It was begun in June 1968, as Richard Nixon, victorious in his party’s primaries, was moving inexorably to the GOP nomination in Miami Beach and very possibly on to the presidency of the United States.

    Chief Justice Earl Warren, an old adversary of Nixon’s from California days, was not happy with this. A report in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Warren “is said to feel that Richard Nixon — regarded as the GOP’s likely presidential nominee — would be bound to appoint a new Chief Justice pledged to overturn recent court decisions guaranteeing constitutional rights of criminals.”

    Nixon sent the clipping to me with a note: “Buchanan: Why doesn’t (Strom) Thurmond send this to Southern papers — opinion leaders.”

    The Inquirer article proved to be on point. In collusion with Chief Justice Warren, President Lyndon Johnson had hatched a plot.

    Warren would announce his resignation as chief justice and would make acceptance contingent upon Johnson’s nominee to succeed him being confirmed. And that nominee would be Justice Abe Fortas, a court ally of Warren and longtime crony of LBJ. All three were in on it.

    When Fortas was confirmed, his vacant seat as associate justice would then be filled by Federal Judge Homer Thornberry, also an ally of Johnson’s going back to his Texas days.

    Thus would Nixon be preempted, the liberalism of the high court guaranteed, and the Warren Court succeeded for another decade by the Fortas Court.

    When LBJ named Fortas, Nixon went silent. But GOP Senators Robert Griffin, John Tower and Howard Baker moved to block Fortas’ ascent. They used an argument familiar to us today. The new president chosen in November, not the president retiring in January, should choose Warren’s replacement as chief justice.

    The attack from Senate Republicans soon zeroed in on Fortas’ social liberalism on pornography as manifest in his having voted alone on the court to approve for public viewing films depicting acts of homosexual sex.

    Fortas not only failed to win the support of the two-thirds of the Senate he needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, he also failed to win a simple majority, receiving only 45 votes for confirmation. On Oct. 1, 1968, Fortas asked Johnson to withdraw his nomination, and in the spring of 1969, he was forced to resign from the court in a financial scandal.

    Warren would have to swear in Nixon as the nation’s 37th president on Jan. 20, 1969, and then watch Nixon replace him as chief justice with Judge Warren Burger in the spring of that same year.

    Came then Nixon’s losing battles to put Southern judges Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell on the court, Reagan’s failure to elevate Bob Bork, and the brutal but failed assaults on Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.

    Now comes Amy Coney Barrett’s turn.

    If Senate Republicans stay united, then they can realize a victory that generations of their GOP predecessors had hoped to see.

  • American West Dominates Ranking Of Cities That Saw Fastest Growth Over Last Decade
    American West Dominates Ranking Of Cities That Saw Fastest Growth Over Last Decade

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 22:05

    The lengthy economic recovery that followed the great recession will be remembered for, among other things, the torrid gains seen in real-estate markets from NYC, to Boston to the Bay Area, and beyond. A recent survey from Construction Coverage found that home prices in some cities have skyrocketed over the ten year period, while prices in other cities slumped even further. As hot markets got hotter, as unloved urban areas continued to decay.

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    Interestingly enough, many of the cities that saw the biggest increases in prices likely wouldn’t be considered obvious. Instead, what Construction Coverage found was that many small and mid-sized cities in the Sun Belt saw surprisingly strong appreciation. The leader in the “Large City” category was Oakland, Calif. – aka “San Francisco’s Brooklyn”.

    San Bernardino topped the mid-sized city list, while Lehigh Acres Fla. took the No. 1 spot in the small cities category.

    Here’s a ranking of the 15 large cities that topped the ranking of the highest price appreciation.

    Oakland

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    Percentage change in median home price since 2010: 102.2%

    Absolute change in median home price since 2010: $400,119

    2020 median home price: $791,554

    2010 median home price: $391,435

    Median household income: $76,469

    Detroit

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    Percentage change in median home price since 2010: 101.7%

    Absolute change in median home price since 2010: $19,478

    2020 median home price: $38,638

    2010 median home price: $19,160

    Median household income: $31,283

    Phoenix

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    Percentage change in median home price since 2010: 99.0%

    Absolute change in median home price since 2010: $136,536

    2020 median home price: $274,488

    2010 median home price: $137,952

    Median household income: $57,957

    San Jose

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    Percentage change in median home price since 2010: 98.7%

    Absolute change in median home price since 2010: $494,246

    2020 median home price: $995,212

    2010 median home price: $500,966

    Median household income: $113,036

    Las Vegas

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    Percentage change in median home price since 2010: 98.3%

    Absolute change in median home price since 2010: $143,651

    2020 median home price: $289,830

    2010 median home price: $146,179

    Median household income: $53,575

    See the rest of the list in the graphic below:

  • UNC Grad Students Demand Administrators' Salaries Be "Redistributed"
    UNC Grad Students Demand Administrators’ Salaries Be “Redistributed”

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 21:45

    Authored by Ben Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

    The University of North Carolina’s “Anti-Racist Graduate Worker Collective” is calling for the redistribution of administrators’ salaries for “worker relief.”

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    According to the Daily Tar Heel, a memo from the UNC System’s former interim president Bill Roper stated that chancellors in the System can issue salary reductions for certain employees, including faculty and senior administrators in an attempt to help mitigate COVID-19 losses. The Anti-Racist Graduate Worker Collective is asking that this authority be exercised to fund programs and departments low on resources.

    According to a statement from Vice Chancellor for Human Resources and Equal Opportunity and Compliance Becca Menghini to the Daily Tar Heel, the school has a desire to manage funding in order to “prioritize people, reduce operational expenses, and put focus on the teaching, research and service components of our mission.”

    “Should we determine that personnel actions are needed, we will most certainly work to distribute the effort such that those with higher earnings assume a larger share of the burden,” Menghini said.

    Since April, the group of UNC graduate students has expressed concerns over the pay disparities on campus. 

    The list of “demands” to the university noted that the “current minimum graduate worker service stipend of $15,700 per academic year does not allow students to save cash reserves for emergencies, and many graduate workers have lost second and third jobs they rely on to make ends meet.”

    The group demanded that the “University administration accept a pay cut of 10%, and that the funds freed up by this cut be redistributed directly to worker relief,” including graduate students.

    “We are tired of seeing the people at the top get more and more, while we are forced to make do on what effectively becomes less and less as cost of living increases,” the group said.

    A UNC freshman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Campus Reform that he agrees with the graduate workers’ demands. 

    However, he does not think that “they can just call for redistribution of [the administration’s] salary” but instead call for “better money management across the entire board.”

    Campus Reform reached out to the UNC System but did not receive a response in time for publication. 

  • China's Too-Big-To-Fail Real Estate Giant Averts Liquidity Crisis
    China’s Too-Big-To-Fail Real Estate Giant Averts Liquidity Crisis

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 21:25

    Last week, we reported that Beijing was suddenly on edge after a core pillar of China’s housing market – China Evergrande, the mainland’s second largest and the world’s most indebted property developer, saw its stock plunge and its bonds briefly halted following reports it was seeking government help to stave off a cash crunch caused the price of its shares and debt to tumble, and sparking a crisis of confidence among creditors who’ve lent the world’s most indebted developer more than $120 billion.

    At the heart of Evergrande’s problems was its massive debt which had hit the brick wall of China’s suddenly careening housing market, leaving the company in a liquidity crunch and locked out from capital markets, preventing it from continuing its unprecedented debt expansion at a time it was facing a brutal debt maturity schedule which sees billions in existing yuan and dollar bonds set for repayment.

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    As we concluded, “If the company remains locked out of capital markets, if it can’t restore access to its line of credit, and unless it can complete its reverse merger, it just may be over for Evergrande, and also for China’s gargantuan housing bubble.”

    Fast forward to Tuesday, when the Chinese conglomerate – on the edge of a liquidity and solvency abyss – took a critical step toward avoiding a cash crunch that had threatened to roil the nation’s $50 trillion financial system and reverberate across global markets.

    As Bloomberg reports, following a turbulent few days which saw Evergrande bonds plunge and in which banks, bondholders and senior government officials grew alarmed about Evergrande’s financial health, the world’s most indebted developer said it reached an agreement with a group of strategic investors to avoid repayments that would have soaked up most of the company’s available liquidity and potentially crippled the junk-rated company’s balance sheet.

    On Tuesday, Evergrande said that investors holding equity stakes worth about 86.3 billion yuan ($12.7 billion) agreed to keep their shares and not require the company to buy them out. That group represents the majority of the 130 billion yuan in shares held by strategic investors in its Hengda Real Estate unit, who could demand repayment in January under certain conditions. Evergrande is also in talks with the remaining investors on similar deals. The developer has finished negotiations with investors holding 15.5 billion yuan of equity interests, who are seeking further approvals. Talks with investors holding the remaining 28.2 billion yuan are ongoing.

    The deal buys crucial time for Evergrande to rein in a complex web of liabilities that some analysts have said makes the property behemoth too big to fail.

    “The agreement solves the core issue of Evergrande, which is liquidity concern,” said Raymond Cheng, a property analyst at CGS-CIMB Securities. It’s also known as “kicking the can.”

    As reported last week, as part of an agreement Evergrande struck with some of its largest investors, the company raised about 130 billion yuan ($19bn) by selling shares in its subsidiary Hengda Real Estate which it hoped to float on the Shenzhen’s stock exchange through a merger with an already listed company; Evergrande would need to repay investors if failed to win approval for a backdoor listing on the Shenzhen stock exchange by Jan. 31. 

    Evergrande owes $88 billion to banks, shadow lenders and individual investors across China and has borrowed $35 billion from bondholders around the world. More than 2 million homebuyers have given the company down payments on yet-to-be-completed properties.

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    Relief after Evergrande’s announcement late Tuesday in Hong Kong helped send the company’s dollar bonds surging, although at 80 cents on the dollar it was still trading slightly lower than before investor angst exploded to the fore on Thursday.

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    Last week’s losses came after reports that Evergrande had warned provincial officials of a liquidity squeeze, citing its obligation to return money to some strategic investors if it failed to win approval for a backdoor listing of its main real estate assets in China by Jan. 31. While Evergrande dismissed the reports as based on rumors and “fabricated” documents, the news contributed to a selloff in high-yield bonds across Asia and prompted several Chinese banks to hold emergency meetings to assess their exposure.

    While it was unclear if China’s authorities played any role in the agreement, China’s cabinet and its financial stability committee, chaired by Vice Premier Liu He, have discussed risks posed by Evergrande without making any decisions on whether to intervene, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter said before Evergrande’s announcement.

    Had the company failed to reach an agreement with investors, Chinese regulators were considering options to support the developer, such as directing state-owned companies to take stakes in Evergrande or giving the company a green light for its proposed listing of an electric-vehicle unit in China, Bloomberg added, confirming just how “systemic” the company is to Beijing and the local economy. 

    In the end, those pragmatists who were confident that China would not allow the company to fail were proven right. Indeed, speculation that authorities would bail out the company solve any liquidity problems is one reason why its shares and bonds rallied even before Tuesday’s announcement.

    The amusing irony is that even though China’s government has long threatened it would allow critical companies to fail, it boldly continues its long history of bailing out systemically important companies to maintain financial stability. While policy makers have in recent years sought to instill more market discipline and reduce moral hazard, the economic shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has refocused their attention on stability.

  • The Fed Has Given Big Business A Huge Advantage
    The Fed Has Given Big Business A Huge Advantage

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 21:05

    Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

    The last few months have been painful for small businesses across America. These businesses often have a difficult time getting a bank loan. Bubbling up to the surface is the recognition the Fed has played a major role in pushing inequality higher. This was highlighted when Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell admitted it’s tough for the Fed to boost lending to smaller businesses. “Trying to underwrite the credit of hundreds of thousands of very small businesses would be very difficult,” Powell said. He acknowledged that many of these small loans are really nothing more than the personal promises of people struggling to keep the doors of their business open.

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    And it’s gone!

    As the financial pain from the pandemic and government restrictions placed on businesses continue, much of the money thrown out to ease our pain has rapidly flowed into the hands of Wall Street and big business. The reality that most small businesses close in failure underlines the risk involved in loaning money to such concerns. Still, it is difficult to deny the importance of small business in the overall economy. It plays a major role in communities by both creating jobs and allowing individuals to better their lot in life.

    During a recent exchange between House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Rep. Maxine Waters of California and Powell, it became evident that Powell was not rushing to implement changes in the way things are done in an effort to aid small businesses and level the playing field. Waters suggested the Fed and Treasury Department lower the minimum size of the loans under the Main Street Lending Program to $100,000 from the current $250,000 to help a larger number of small companies that have been hurt by the pandemic. Powell even went so far as to claim there was little demand for loans below $1 million.

    A business owner struggling to pay his three workers would dispute Powell’s statement about little demand for smaller loans. Both Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have also voiced concern about the commercial real estate sector and how they both indicated it is not easy for the federal government to craft an aid program to blunt the damage growing in this part of the economy. Mnuchin said the PPP program has played a role in enabling firms to continue paying their rent so landlords can pay their mortgages. There is fear building in the area of commercial real estate that defaults will send property values into a downward spiral.  

    Sadly, the same policies that dump huge money into larger businesses because it is an easier and faster way to bolster the economy give these concerns a huge advantage over their smaller competitors. A big problem is that this often is enough to put smaller companies out of business. The damage this is doing to society is something that will be difficult to remedy. Once businesses close a series of negative events generally unfold such as buildings going empty and debts not being paid. This tends to impact the economy and communities for years.

    On Thursday Powell and Mnuchin appeared before the Senate Banking Committee and answered even more questions about the hardship the coronavirus has brought upon the economy. While they see significant support for legislation that supports jobs and extending the PPP the recognized the gap between the House and Senate negotiations. Still, they gave little doubt more money and fiscal support will be needed and they are ready to act. This includes looking at ways to expand the Main Street lending facility and make the programs more flexible. This means we will probably see more money flowing into a forgivable loan or grant programs. Both indicated the need to get more PPP money to businesses with decreased revenue saying it would be very important in the effort to save jobs.

    The recession this year due to covid-related shutdowns is bizarre in nature due to the extreme intervention of central banks and governments. We have seen many small businesses devastated at the same time personal incomes have soared. Usually, a recession is marked by a fall in incomes or consumers being tapped out and unable to spend. The massive fiscal stimulus that has been unleashed by the U.S. government has led to the biggest surge in personal income in history. In fact, government transfer payments have soared to where they constitute an unheard of 30% of all personal income.

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    Government Transfer Of Payments Has Soared

    To put this into context, the  transfer of payments has been rising for decades but the covid-19 crisis has allowed it to explode. During the 50s and 60s, it was around 7%. for a short period in the mid70s and following the 2008 financial crisis it hit the high teens. as the chart on the left indicates this is far above any intervention we have experienced in the past. This is why in this bizarre economy nobody should consider the GDP as an indicator of our economic health.  

    In short, the Fed has been subsidizing the 1% at a heightened pace for the past decade and this has both spurred inequality and given big business a huge advantage in the ability to fund its needs. It also means the government has been funding the lives of every American to a greater extent. From the talk now being bantered around, it sounds like all these people are talking about again releasing trillions of dollars into the economy. We should all be aware that the longer this goes on the more power is shifted away from the people and the small businesses that line Main Street.

    A final thought, it is all very difficult to square this with what Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin said on Thursday, “The U.S. recession was severe but also short and is now over.”

    Ironically, this is also the same day that St. Louis Fed President James Bullard claimed the economy could fully recovery on some metrics by the end of this year. In my opinion, more important than squaring such talk is the fact small business has taken the brunt of pain dished out while Wall Street and big business have eaten their lunch.

  • Watch Live: Trump Versus Biden, Round 1 – The Quickening
    Watch Live: Trump Versus Biden, Round 1 – The Quickening

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 20:45

    Watch live (due to begin at 2100ET):

    With only around 6% of voters reportedly undecided, one wonders just how much this matters… but hey the TV ratings will be through the roof.

    The bar for Biden to beat expectations is low (anything other than falling asleep may be perceived as a win).

    *  *  *

    ‘Who wants to live forever’ in the annals of US history?

    That is the question we hope to get closer to answering as tonight’s Presidential debate brings Joe Biden and Donald Trump the closest together since the COVID lockdowns began.

    Biden and Trump are scheduled to face off at 9pmET at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

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    Matt Taibbi warns that the potential for this event to spiral out of control and descend into an Ali-Frazier-Studio-Brawl situation is significantly higher than in any major party debate before, light years beyond even the Trump-Clinton situation.

    Trump and Biden are each almost guaranteed to go after one another’s children. Even if Trump somehow doesn’t call Biden a drug-addled dummy, or challenge him to remember what state he’s in, Wallace could easily bring it up and goad Trump into doubling down.

    Would we be surprised by something like, “Joe hasn’t had a hard-on in thirty years?” We would not.

    Similarly, would we be shocked if Biden’s brain malfunctioned mid-insult and said something like, “Answer that, you stupid fat un-American bastard!” No, we wouldn’t.

    Trump has a history of breathing down his opponent’s collar, while Biden has a long record of jamming his bony Creepshow-finger in the sternums of people who challenge him — hell, he does it to people who like him. He nibbled his wife’s finger onstage and is on record talking about fighting people with bicycle chains. Trump has been known to spray water bottles around at the podium and go after wives and mothers of political opponents.

    These are weird, unstable dudes, in a super-charged environment, on live TV.

    The moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, chose the following six topics for the candidates to answer questions on.

    1. COVID-19:

    2. Race and Violence In Our Cities

    3. The Candidates’ Track Records

    4. The Integrity of the Election

    5. The Economy

    6. The Supreme Court

    Each topic will be tackled for 15 minutes.

    The debate is slated to go on for 90 minutes.

    As with every debate, there will be plenty of spinning and pivoting from the candidates. And what if they say something that simply isn’t true? What will Wallace do?

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    Poynter’s Tom Davis notes that Wallace has turned down all interview requests leading up to tonight’s debate, but as The New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum notes in his debate preview, Wallace sees himself as a facilitator, not a fact-checker.

    Before moderating a debate in 2016 between Trump and Hillary Clinton — a job he was widely praised for — Wallace said, “I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad.”

    That’s also what debate commission co-chairman Frank Fahrenkopf said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday — that the moderator is not there to fact-check the candidates.

    It is the job of the networks and other news organizations to fact check. However, don’t expect to see the networks fact-checking in real time on your TV screen as the debate is ongoing. The networks will save that for their post-debate coverage.

    Remember, at the end of the day, “there can be only one!”

    And maybe – as Deutsche notes – being “the one” tonight may not be the best plan…

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    In fact, in the last 10 elections with debate reaction data stretching back to 1976, only 2 candidates who were perceived to have won the first debate went on to win the election.

    If you’re a gambling man (woman or other)…

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    And because we all deserve a laugh, here’s Babylon Bee:

    CNN Pre-Debate Poll Shows Biden Clearly Won Debate

    In a highly accurate and scientific CNN poll taken pre-debate, presidential candidate Joe Biden has had a clear win over incumbent President Donald Trump, with 98% saying Biden won the debate tonight and only 2% saying Trump won.

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    “Biden just dominated Trump with his very non-senile performance,” said pundit Jacob Ingram. “Or at least that’s what everyone knows is going to happen.”

    The poll sampled smart people who are also attractive and cool, and it’s very clear that those people all think Biden is great and have already awarded him the win in tonight’s debate against the dumb and abrasive Trump.

    “With such a clear and decisive win, there’s really no reason to even have the debate,” said Biden campaign staffer Lucas Mathis. “That would only distract from how great Biden is doing. And ruin his naps.”

    The Trump campaign has denounced the poll as “fake news,” even though the poll was made using numbers and a computer which are common instruments of science.

    It is unclear if the actual debate tonight could affect the poll results, but most experts expect that it will not. 

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    Watch live (due to begin at 2100ET):

    But, as Poynter.org’s Tom Davis asks, “Does it even matter?”

    Two things about tonight’s debate. Expect huge television numbers. And yet don’t expect it to sway many voters.

    The first Trump-Clinton debate in 2016 drew a whopping TV audience of 84 million, making it the most-watched presidential debate ever. That many people could watch tonight’s debate, although not all on TV. Streaming services and views on websites could make up a sizable portion of the audience.

    But will it make a difference among voters? The New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum points to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows that 70% of voters say the debates likely would not influence their vote. In that case, you wonder if some will not watch simply because they are stressed out or just plain tired of divisive politics.

    Meanwhile, a new NBCLX/YouGov poll shows that while Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats for their preferred candidate to say whatever is necessary to “win” a debate, 83% of those polled (3,190 Americans) prefer that candidates always tell the truth in a debate.

    I do expect a big audience tonight, even if it won’t change many minds. Why? Partly for viewers to feel validated by their candidate and partly because, hey, it’s Trump vs. Biden for the first time on TV.

    Watch Useful Idiots host Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi moderating a livestreamed debate-drinking game:

    The rules are simple:

    Drink THE FIRST TIME:

    1. Biden begins a sentence with, “Look.”

    2. Biden brings up Trump’s taxes, or “$750.”

    3. Trump mentions “Hunter.” Double-shot if he gives him a nickname, like “Crack-boy.”

    Drink EVERY TIME:

    1. Biden mentions “Obama” or the “Obama-Biden administration.”

    2. Biden says, “United States of America.”

    3. Trump calls Biden a radical leftist. Double if he references the “Bernie-Biden left” or some iteration thereof.

    4. Trump mocks Biden for being mentally impaired or lost without a teleprompter.

    5. Biden gives up his time before it’s up, a.k.a. the “Check, please!” rule.

    6. Biden invokes, “C’mon, Man,” “Malarkey,” “Scranton,” “Existential threat,” “Soul of the Nation,” or “I’m the guy that…”

    7. Trump brings up “ballots,” “fake news,” “Ilhan Omar,” “career politician,” “Get Trump,” “hoax,” “Sleepy,” or the awesomeness of police.

    8. Biden brings up the loss of any of his family members. Double if Trump steers this moment in an inappropriate direction.

    9. Trump tells a lie; Biden says something that doesn’t make sense.

    10. The men accuse each other of being racist. Drink twice if you believe the charge.

    11. Martyr shots: Biden invokes the name of a nonwhite police victim like Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, or Trump invokes the name of an embattled statue subject like Jefferson, Lincoln, or Teddy Roosevelt.

    12. “Amy Coney Barrett.” Bonus if Biden botches the name, e.g. “Amy Hairy Conehead.”

    You may finish your remaining alcohol if there is a fight. The men grabbing each other by the neck, pulling ties or underwear bands, spitting, ball-kicking, or any other physical provocation counts.

  • NYC Hammered By 40% Bankruptcy Surge, Braces For Next Wave 
    NYC Hammered By 40% Bankruptcy Surge, Braces For Next Wave 

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 20:25

    While Wall Street panic buys stocks again, on hopes Washington can pass the next round of much-needed economic stimulus, the broader commercial real estate market continues to implode and nowhere more so than the epicenter in New York City, where nearly 6,000 business closures, has resulted in a 40% eruption in bankruptcy filings across business districts of all five boroughs this year, reported Bloomberg. 

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    Al Togut, a bankruptcy lawyer who has handled insolvencies for small firms to mega-corporations, said, “by late fall, there will be an avalanche of bankruptcies … When the cold weather comes, that’s when we’ll start to see a surge in bankruptcies in New York City.”

    The coming wave of business closings, as explained in “Old Man Winter To Plunge Restaurants Into Further Chaos,” is set to crush eateries and other small businesses in NYC ahead of the holiday season. 

    “It’s a crisis, and we need to act—our economy can’t recover without saving small businesses,” said NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, a candidate in next year’s mayoral election.

    “When they close, we don’t just lose our beloved Main Street businesses. We lose jobs, tax revenue and the economic backbone of our city,” Stringer said. 

    The Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit membership organization of NYC’s top businesses, warned the virus pandemic could permanently close a third of the 230,000 businesses across all five boroughs. 

    Bankruptcy filings in the region have skyrocketed since the middle of March, when the state of New York reported its first deaths from Covid-19 and Governor Andrew Cuomo closed all nonessential businesses. There were 610 filings in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York from March 16 to Sept. 27, according to court records. That’s a 40 percent jump from the same period in 2019 and the most by far for any year since the financial crisis. The districts include some nearby counties.

    Almost 6,000 New York City businesses closed from March 1 to Sept. 11, according to Yelp, the website of user reviews. Over 4,000 of those closed permanently.

    The carnage has been demoralizing after decades in which the city fought back from the brink of bankruptcy, the scourges of crack cocaine and violent crime, terrorist attacks and recession. The pandemic hit as the city had achieved record high employment and low crime. – Bloomberg

    The effects of the pandemic are still being felt in late September, as only 15% of NYC’s 1.2 million office workers had returned, according to the Partnership for New York City. None of this suggests NYC’s recovery will be “V” shaped. 

    “Retail and real estate will continue to decline in New York until you can reignite the office traffic,” warned Joseph Malfitano, who advised Brooks Brothers and the parent company of Ann Taylor in their bankruptcies earlier this year. 

    Vin McCann, a restaurant consultant, said once temperatures dip in the city, the next wave of restaurant closures will be seen. 

    “Once you hit below 60 degrees… I would bet you that between 25 and 50 percent of restaurants in New York City will not come back,” said McCann. 

    The city’s Department of Small Business Services received about 35,000 requests from businesses since June and has allocated nearly 4,000 grants, totaling about $80 million, to business owners struggling to survive the virus-induced economic downturn. 

    “A third of our small businesses could be closed if we don’t have a strong recovery,” said Jonnel Doris, the department’s commissioner. “The fate of small businesses will determine the fate of the city.”

    In early September, NYC restaurants banded together and sued the state for $2 billion in damages and allege that the government is violating the constitutional rights of the owners of more than 150,000 NYC restaurants. 

    This is particularly troubling, considering the spillover of closures is beginning to pressure the commercial real estate market in the city. 

  • 911 System Goes Down Across The Country: Was This A Test?
    911 System Goes Down Across The Country: Was This A Test?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 20:05

    Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

    As we inch closer and closer to election day and the potential chaos that will ensue, more and more signs of a destabilization of American society that will have reverberations across the world are coming into view. Pieces of the puzzle that have been put together by writers such as myself, Brandon Turbeville, Whitney Webb, Alan Watt and many others are now seen coming together in real life. We are just a month away from one of the most simulated events in years, the 2020 election.

    Both I and Whitney Webb (her articles are a MUST READ) have been writing about the coming chaos that is clearly slated to take place in November if Deep State elements have their way.

    But there are more than simple “war games” and simulations taking place right now. What possibly amounts to real-world simulations, attributed to systems outages, have recently developed across the country.

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    911 down across the country

    One such “real world simulation,” (aka test run) was reported in the U.S. Sun on September 28, 2020 in an article entitled, “911 Emergency: 911 Lines Go Down Across The US Sparking Panic As Callers Can’t Get Through To Emergency Services,” where Catherina Gioina reported,

    POLICE departments across the country Monday night reported their 911 systems nonoperational – and it’s reportedly due to a Microsoft Office 360 outage.

    “As of 5 p.m., City phones and emails are experiencing intermittent outages related to a larger Microsoft 365 outage,” the City of Redmond, Washington tweeted. “We are hoping the issue is resolved shortly. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

    Panic spread across the nation’s police departments as the 911 systems were rendered useless – and left police departments turning to social media to tell residents there were other ways to contact emergency services.

    “ATTENTION: The 911 lines are not operational nationwide. This is for phone calls and text messaging,” tweeted the Minneapolis Police Department. “If you need police, fire or emergency medical assistance in Minneapolis, please call” a local number.

    “We will advise when this issue is fixed,” it ended.

    Similar problems continued for other police departments in the state of Minnesota.

    The Minnetonka Police Department tweeted “911 lines are out nationwide. In Minnetonka and Hennepin county, you will need to call” another local number.

    Minnesota’s Crystal Police Department instead urged residents to call their local fire station for help instead.

    “911 is currently out in Crystal. If you have an emergency please go a fire department,” it tweeted. “They will be staffed with crews. More to follow when info becomes available.”

    The issue was likewise felt in Delaware, where the Delaware State Police asked people to call a local number.

    “Delaware State Police Dispatch Centers are currently experiencing a state wide interruption in service,” the dispatch center said in a statement. “Anyone attempting to call 911 either by cellphone or landline will experience a busy signal.”

    “At this time the issue is being addressed and it is unknown how long the 911 phone service will be unavailable,” the statement continued. “If you need to report an emergency, you are encouraged to text 911 and type your emergency in the message field.”

    A number of police departments in Arizona were running into issues with 911 as well.

    “POLICE ALERT: 911 lines are down statewide. For emergencies, please call Prescott Valley Police Dispatch at,” the Prescott Valley Police Department tweeted “until further notice.”

    Also in Arizona, the Tucson Police Department asked residents to contact a local number as well.

    “911 services are down in the City of Tucson. If you need to make an emergency call, dial,” the department tweeted. “We will let you know when 911 is back online.”

    Luckily, the Oro Valley Police Department, also in Arizona, said they had solved the issue.

    “It’s fixed! 911 is back up for all agencies! We did take this opportunity to test the “Text to 911″ and that did continue to work through this outage,” the department tweeted. “So keep that in mind, it is another way to contact police services.”

    Microsoft Office 360’s outage crashed across the nation Monday evening, forcing the more than 500,000 businesses that use the service to make do while the tech giant addresses the issue.

    A Microsoft spokesperson told The Sun: “We’re working to resolve a service interruption impacting a subset of customers performing authentication operations. Visit the Azure Status page for updates.”

    CNN, The Hill, and NBC New York among many other outlets reported on the outages also.

    Was this an accident or a test?

    This outage has many now wondering whether or not someone is preparing for a nationwide emergency services outage in the wake of election chaos. Others are wondering if the United States will experience a massive cyberattack – predictably to be blamed on Russia, China, or Iran – either in the lead up to, during, or shortly after the 2020 elections.

    The fact that the disruption in communications is being attributed to a Microsoft outage is telling also. For those who may not have had the chance to read Whitney Webb’s article, “How Government and Media Are Prepping America for a Failed 2020 Election,” Webb has a section titled “Conflict of interest-ridden Microsoft “defends democracy” where she writes of Microsoft’s actual danger to democracy. She writes,

    Last year saw the tech behemoth Microsoft join the effort to blame foreign state actors, specifically Iran, for cyberattacks against the U.S. This helped to bolster assertions that had largely originated with a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and hawkish, neoconservative-aligned think tanks as media reports on Microsoft’s related claims treated the company as an independent private sector observer.

    Yet, as MintPress investigations have revealed, Microsoft has clear conflicts of interest with respect to election interference. Its “Defending Democracy” program has spawned tools like “NewsGuard” and “ElectionGuard” that it claims will help protect U.S. democracy, but — upon closer examination — instead have the opposite effect.

    Last January, MintPress exposed NewsGuard’s neoconservative backers and how special interest groups were backing the program in an effort to censor independent journalism under the guise of the fight against “fake news.” Subsequent investigations revealed the risk that Microsoft’s ElectionGuard poses to U.S. voting machines, which it claims to make more secure and how the platform was developed by companies closely tied to the Pentagon’s infamous research branch DARPA and Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200.

    ElecionGuard software has since been adopted by numerous voting machine manufacturers and is slated to be used in some Democratic Primary votes. Notably, the push for the adoption of ElectionGuard software has been spearheaded by the recently created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is the federal agency tasked with overseeing election security and is headed by Christopher Krebs, a former high level Microsoft executive.

    In recent months, Microsoft has also been at the center of claims that Iran attempted to hack U.S. presidential campaigns ahead of 2020 as well as claims that Iran plans to target the U.S. power grid and other critical infrastructure with cyberattacks.

    Last October, Microsoft penned a blog post discussing a “threat group” it named Phosphorus that they “believe originates from Iran and is linked to the Iranian government.” The post went on to claim that Phosphorus attempted to target a U.S. presidential campaign, which later media reports claimed was President Trump’s re-election campaign. Microsoft concluded that the attempt was “not technically sophisticated” and ultimately unsuccessful, but felt compelled to disclose it and link it to Iran’s government.

    Though it provided no evidence for the hack or its reasons for “believing” that the attack originated from Iran, media reports treated Microsoft’s declaration as proof that Iran had begun actively meddling in the 2020 election. Headlines such as “Iranian Hackers Target Trump Campaign as 2020 Threats Mount,” “Iran-linked Hackers Target Trump 2020 Campaign, Microsoft says”, “Microsoft: Iran government-linked hacker targeted 2020 presidential campaign” and “Microsoft Says Iranians Tried To Hack U.S. Presidential Campaign,” were blasted across the front pages of American media. None of the reports scrutinized Microsoft’s claims or noted the clear conflict of interest Microsoft had in making such claims due to its efforts to see its own ElectionGuard Software adopted nationwide.

    Media reports also left out the fact that Microsoft is a major government contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon. Notably, the Trump campaign, which Microsoft said was the target of this attack, was later identified as the only major presidential campaign using Microsoft’s “AccountGuard” software, part of its dubious “Defending Democracy” program that also spawned NewsGuard and ElectionGuard. AccountGuard claims to protect campaign-linked emails and data from hackers.

    Microsoft surfaced not long after, again claiming that Iran was maliciously targeting the United States’ civilian infrastructure. This subsequent claim was first published by Wired and later covered by other outlets. Those reports cite a single person, Microsoft security researcher Ned Moran, who claimed that an Iran-backed hacking group called APT33 was targeting the U.S. “physical control systems used in electric utilities, manufacturing, and oil refineries.”

    “They’re trying to deliver messages to their adversaries and trying to compel and change their adversaries’ behavior,” Moran told Wired. Moran also stated that “Microsoft hasn’t seen direct evidence of APT33 carrying out a disruptive cyberattack rather than mere espionage or reconnaissance, it’s seen incidents where the group has at least laid the groundwork for those attacks.”

    The truth is that the nationwide outage could indeed be a result of a failure of Microsoft system and the timing could indeed have been a coincidence. Given the fact that there have been so many simulations of the events of 2020 and, particularly the 2020 elections, however, it is well worth paying attention to. It is also dangerous to assume anything so critically important as nationwide emergency services momentarily disappearing is a coincidence, especially this year.

    You may be completely on your own in the event of an emergency.

    Writers on this website have assured you frequently that in the event of a crisis, you may find yourself completely on your own. Selco and Jose have both shared stories confirming this in their own writings.  Just recently, a woman in Kenosha, Wisconsin came to the same conclusion during the riots there – nobody was coming to help.

    If things go sideways, you’d better be prepared to handle the situation on your own because help may not be on the way.

  • You Can Now Have A Tiny Home Office 3D-Printed In 24 Hours 
    You Can Now Have A Tiny Home Office 3D-Printed In 24 Hours 

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 19:45

    As the new workplace normal moves rapidly towards remote work, demand for smaller, smart satellite workplaces has increased. Not too long ago, we noted how some Americans were shelling out as much as $30,000 for tiny home offices in their backyards. 

    Now, a California-based startup, called Might Buildings, is 3D printing tiny offices (about a 350 square foot structure) in just 24-hours, reported Spectrum News 1 Los Angeles.

    While we showed other companies, such as Colorado-based Studio Shed, using traditional labor and materials, Might Buildings uses synthetic stone 3D printed under UV light to make complex shapes and structures. 

    “We developed a 3D printing technology that allows us to build and manufacture buildings faster and more efficiently than traditional construction,” said Natalia Dobrynina, head of sales for Mighty Buildings. 

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    Might Buildings says the building plans are pre-approved for any county in California. 

    “Depending on your access to your site, we could use a crane to pick it up and drop it into your backyard,” Dobrynina said.

    Watch Might Buildings 3D-Print Tiny Office 

    And if it is not a tiny home office people are seeking, then there’s the ability to transform it into a tiny home and generate rental income. 

  • Vietnam Cashes In On China Exodus
    Vietnam Cashes In On China Exodus

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 19:25

    By Tim Daiss of Asia Times Financial,

    As the Sino-American trade war pushes on with seemingly no end in sight, US companies continue to move their operations away from China. This offshore pivot has taken on renewed impetus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, intersecting with geopolitical fallout between Washington and Beijing, and magnified by the US presidential election only six weeks away.

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    Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Trump.

    Other countries are also moving operations out of China, including long-time US ally Japan. In July, Tokyo earmarked 220 billion yen ($2.2bn) as part of a record economic stimulus package to relocate its companies from China back to Japan and 23.5bn yen to move production to other countries, predominately Southeast Asia. To date, around 90 Japanese firms have joined the exodus from China, with more likely to follow, according to the Japan External Trade Organization.

    A report in June by Gartner, a business and logistics advisory group, found that 33% of global supply leaders have moved, or intend to move, their supply chain operations out of China by 2023. According to Kamala Raman, a senior Gartner supply chain analyst, the development began more than two years ago when the onset of the trade war made supply chain leaders aware of the weaknesses of their globalised supply chains and also made them question the logic of heavily outsourced, concentrated and interdependent networks.

    Countries in the Asia-Pacific region that have already benefited from this pivot away from China include Malaysia, India, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. However, Vietnam appears to be benefiting the most due to a number of factors.

    Despite their obvious political and ideological differences and history as antagonists during the Vietnam War, bi-lateral relations between Washington and Hanoi are at an all-time high. While much of those improved relations can be attributed to globalisation, a common adversary found in an increasingly assertive China has further solidified those ties.

    Washington and Hanoi are also forging closer military cooperation in an effort to push back against Beijing’s hegemonic pursuits in the South China Sea, which have escalated since Xi Jinping became president of China nearly eight years ago.

    Vietnam’s opportunity

    Vietnam’s development over the past three decades has been momentous. Economic and political reforms put in motion in 1986 have spurred rapid economic growth, transforming what had been one of the world’s poorest nations into a lower middle-income country on the move.

    To its credit, Vietnam offers friendly foreign direct investment (FDI) policies for companies that either want to move or supplement their China production strategy, as well as a strategic location, and a stable political and business environment.

    Khanh Cong Le, a Ho Chi Minh City-based wind power project engineer and consultant, told ATF that Vietnam also possesses a geographical advantage over many of its competitors in the region.

    “Clearly, with Vietnam bordering China to the north, it’s a condition that makes it easier to connect with supporting industry away from China,” Khahn said.

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    “Vietnam has a long coastline [around 3,260km] and a convenient gateway to the South China Sea to connect with markets in Pacific countries. Vietnam is also the axis connecting northeast Asia with southeast Asian countries,” he said.

    Vietnam also offers a young and growing workforce, including thousands eager for new employment opportunities. More than two-thirds of Vietnam’s population is younger than 35, creating favourable demographics to fuel its rise.

    However, what should be one of Vietnam’s greatest strengths, could also be one of its toughest challenges in attracting more US manufacturers, namely a lack of skilled workers and low education levels.

    According to global recruitment firm Manpower, only 12% of Vietnam’s approximate 57.5 million workforce can be identified as highly skilled. The majority of the country’s labour still lives in rural areas and works in the agricultural sector.  

    Vietnam’s workforce numbers, however, also limits its ability to attract more manufacturers looking to move out of China, whose workers number more than 770 million, according to World Bank data.

    Consequently, opportunities from offshoring away from China will continually be shared by not only the 10 countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose total population equals 650 million, but also India, whose labour force totals around 500 million.

    Vietnam also suffers from a lack of infrastructure, while poorly built and aging roads along with congested ports, increase the time to transport goods, raises costs and reduces overall efficiency and competitiveness.

    “Weak infrastructure and high transport costs have prevented Vietnamese firms from fully tapping into the logistics sector’s potential,” Tran Thanh Hai, deputy director of Vietnam’s Import-Export Department, said recently.

    He added that the logistics sector in Vietnam has seen rapid development in recent years with yearly growth rates of 13% to 15%.  However, “poor roadway and aviation infrastructure has been one of biggest challenges for the sector despite improvements in recent years,” he said.

    Trade imbalance sticking points

    Vietnam’s trade imbalance with the US has also remained a sticking point, particularly during the Trump administration. The country’s trade with the US continued an upward trajectory for the January to July period to $46.4bn, a 10.8% increase from the same period last year, according to US Census Bureau data.

    Conversely, US exports to Vietnam decreased at a 1.8% rate from January through July compared with the same period last year. The US trade deficit with Vietnam is now nearly $40bn.

    As such, and due to a highly positive current account balance and because the country’s central bank has been active in terms of net foreign exchange purchases, Vietnam remains at risk of being labeled a currency manipulator by the US.

    To help offset the growing trade deficit, policy makers have been courting US energy companies not only keen on importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) to meet Vietnam’s looming domestic gas supply crunch, but also attracting much needed FDI in its growing gas-to-power sector, particularly in the Mekong Delta in the south.

    Over the past several weeks, a growing number of US companies have stoked new interest in Vietnam’s gas and power sector after several months of weak activity, mostly due to the coronavirus. They are racing to be included in Vietnam’s most recent National Power Development Plan, which is expected to be submitted to prime minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc by October for approval.

  • Which Jobs Have Been Hardest Hit By The Pandemic
    Which Jobs Have Been Hardest Hit By The Pandemic

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 19:05

    Heading into Friday’s payrolls report, the labor market has been enjoying a strong tailing, with the unemployment rate falling to a lower-than-expected 8.4% in August, and consensus is looking for a further decline to 8.2 % in September. In terms of non-farm payrolls, the consensus is also looking for continued job growth of +865k, but as Jim Reid cautions, “it’s worth bearing in mind that having lost over -22MM jobs in March and April, even this figure would mean that just over half of them have been recovered, still leaving nonfarm payrolls over 10MM below their peak back in February.”

    Still, considering the continued gridlock over a new fiscal stimulus, if the consensus forecast of 850k NFP proves correct, it will certainly be a continuation of upward momentum with more than 51% of recent job losses recovered through September, leaving employment at 93% of February levels.

    That said, there are underlying challenges as BofA writes in report published late last week looking at who is falling behind even as the labor market recovery continues. AS BofA economist Alexander Lin writes, “the pandemic affected the economy unevenly, impacting the lower-income population more than the upper-income cohorts. This has remained true in the recovery as well.”

    One can see the differences using the industry level data in the nonfarm payroll figures. Leisure & hospitality remains deep in the red and is the lowest paid industry (Chart 3). There are some higher paid industries like mining & logging and information services that remain below 90% of pre-pandemic levels, but they account for much smaller shares of employment.

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    Lin then highlights that employment by education reveals an even starker gap between the high skilled and low skilled. The level of employed with a bachelor’s degree or more saw a peak-to-trough decline of around 6% but has basically fully recovered from those losses through August. On the other end of the spectrum, those with less than a HS diploma have only recovered to 81% of pre-pandemic levels.

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    Meanwhile, the dramatic changes to the labor composition have distorted the standard wage metrics, with average hourly earnings last running at 4.7% yoy, a number which analysts expect to accelerate to 4.8% in September. The CPS micro data provide additional perspective, allowing economists to track workers from month to month and their wages over time. It also reveals that the median wage of those that remained employed throughout the pandemic increased, as did the median wage of those that were rehired, which may soon become a challenge to the Fed which is confident wages growth will remain subdued until at least 2023 per its latest Average Inflation Targeting regime.

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    At the same time the distribution showed similar results as the 25th and 75th percentiles also increased. This provides further evidence of low-income workers falling behind.

    Unfortunately, whereas the BLS calculation of wage growth is highly skewed due to a slower rebound in hours worked, the reality is that wage pressures are likely extremely subdued according to BofA which cites a recent PEW survey (Parker et al, 24 Sep 2020) released this week which found that 32% of adults said they or someone in their household had to take a pay cut due to reduced hours or demand from the pandemic. This stat was also skewed more negatively by income, as 37% of low-income  households experienced pay cuts versus 26% of upper-income households.

    Long-term problems emerging

    Wages aside, with the pandemic now in its seventh month and labor market slack still elevated, many of the unemployed are transitioning into the “long-term unemployed cohort,” which covers those without a job for more than 26 weeks. To wit, starting in July, the level of unemployed 15-26 weeks spiked to 6.5 million, which is nearly double the previous record high of 3.5 million. The level of unemployed 27 weeks & over may soon follow.

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    Of course, the longer one is unemployed, the lower the chances they can find another job. As BofA notes, using labor flows, the BLS calculates the probability of reemployment by duration of unemployment. The probability drops from 27% for 5-14 weeks to 20% for 15-26 weeks

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    It drops further to 18% for those unemployed for 26-52 weeks, with Lin warning that “longer spells of unemployment also lead to lower reemployment wages as skills and employee bargaining power erode.”

    The bottom line is that with the lower-income cohort already falling behind, the odds clearly become more stacked against them over time. The end result is therefore even greater income disparity, hardly optimal for an economy where the Fed’s constant manipulation of market has already led to a historic divergence in wealth between the top 1% – which just hit a record 200 year of average income vs “only” 60 in 1978 – and the bottom 50%, whose income has not changed one bit in over 40 years.

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Sep 29

Today’s News 29th September 2020

  • Madrid Erupts As Citizens Clash With Police During Anti-Lockdown Riots
    Madrid Erupts As Citizens Clash With Police During Anti-Lockdown Riots

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 02:45

    London wasn’t the only European city where frustrated denizens took to the streets in anger to protest another round of COVID-19-inspired lockdowns. Madrid saw anti-lockdown protests blossom into full-on riots – as they were described in the Spanish press – as clashes between citizens and police grew increasingly violent.

    Last week, the city council imposed new restrictions on more than 1 million inhabitants of Madrid, as they expanded the number of COVID-19 hot spots to 45. Localized restrictions on movement were similar to those imposed during the lockdown in the spring, though not as harsh.

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    Over the weekend, thousands of Spaniards streamed into the streets of Madrid. Dozens of residents were involved in violent clashes with the police.

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    Demonstrating that American cops don’t have a monopoly on police brutality, one Spanish cop was filmed headbutting a detained man.

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    Protests weren’t confined to Madrid. They were widespread over the weekend across areas such as Usera, Puente de Vallecas, Villa de Vallecas, Villaverde, Ciudad Lineal, Vicálvaro, San Blas and Carabanchel.

    Over one million people are subject to the new localized lockdown restrictions and may only leave their homes for work, medical or educational purposes and only if they carry supporting documents. Poorer and migrant workers who rely on public transit to get to jobs in the construction industry say these measures discriminate against them.

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    Local businesses must operate at 50% capacity and must close before 10pm. Gatherings are limited to no more than six people. The new measures will be reviewed every 2 weeks.

    Madrid is presently one of the worst-hit cities in all of Europe, with an infection rate of roughly 1,000 cases per 100,000 residents.

  • "The World Has Gone Absolutely Insane!"
    “The World Has Gone Absolutely Insane!”

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by The Saker via The Vineyard of The Saker blog,

    We all know that we are living in crazy, and dangerous, times, yet I can’t help being awed at what the imperial propaganda machine (aka the legacy ziomedia) is trying to make us all swallow. The list of truly batshit crazy stuff we are being told to believe is now very long, and today I just want to pick on a few of my “favorites” (so to speak).

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    First, of course, comes the “Novichok Reloaded” scandal around the alleged poisoning of the so-called “dissident” Alexei Navalnyi. I already mentioned this absolutely ridiculous story once, so I won’t repeat it all here. I just want to mention a few very basic facts:

    • Navalnyi is pretty much a discredited non-entity in Russia. “Putin” (because this is how the imperial propaganda machine always personalizes the evils of Russia: “Putin” did this or that, as if Putin was personally in every alleged Russian evil deed) had absolutely and exactly zero reasons to harm Navalnyi in any way. I would even add that IF Navalnyi was poisoned in Russia (which I do not believe) then the FSB screwed up by not offering him 24/7 protection, especially in the current political climate (i.e. struggle for the completion of North Stream 2).

    • The Empire always likes to produce a “sacrificial lamb” to symbolize the putative evil of the nation which dares to resist. In Iran it was Neda, in Kuwait the infamous “incubator babies”, in Syria anonymous kids killed by Russian gas, and in Russia it was Nemtsov (did not really work) and now Navalnyi (I wonder who the sacrificial lamb will be in Belarus (Tikhanovskaia?). The FSB should have seen this coming, especially after Nemtsov.

    • There is exactly zero evidence that the mineral water bottle which the Germans claim contained traces of, what else, “Novichok”, ever was anywhere near Navalnyi or even that it ever was in Russia. No such bottle was found by, or mentioned to the Russian investigators. This bottle was, allegedly, hidden from the FSB by Navalnyi supporters, and secretly brought to Germany. What that means in terms of “chain of custody” is self-evident.

    • As I have mentioned in my past article, if what the German authorities are claiming is true, then the Russians are truly the dumbest imbeciles on the planet. Not content to use this now famous “Novichok” gas against Skripal in the UK and after failing to kill Skripal, these stupid Russians decided to try the very same gas, only “improved”, and they failed again: Navalnyi is quite alive and well, thank you!

    • Then there is this: according to the imperial propaganda machine, Novichok was so horribly dangerous, that the Brits had to use full biosuits to investigate the alleged poisoning of Skripal. They also said that they would completely destroy the dangerous Skripal home (though they never did that). The self same propaganda machine says that the Novichok used on Navalnyi was a more powerful, improved version. Okay. Then try to answer this one: why did the Russians NOT put on biosuits, why did not a single passenger suffer from any side effects (inside a closed aircraft cabin!)? How is it that this super-dooper Novichok not only failed to kill Navalnyi (who, allegedly, ingested it!) but also failed to even moderately inconvenience anybody from the many people Navalnyi was surrounded by on that day?

    I could continue to deconstruct all this nonsense, but that would take pages. I will mention two thing though:

    First, the Russians have requested any and all evidence available to the Germans and to the Organization for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – but they got absolutely nothing in return. Yet the EU is demanding an investigation (which is already under way in Russia anyway!) as if the Russians did not want the exact same!

    Second, Navalnyi apparently has an immunity to otherwise deadly Russian biological

    After being exposed to an improved Novichok and after weeks in coma in intensive care, here is Navalnyi trotting down stairs feeling great agents, just take a look at him on this post-Novichok photo:

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    [By the way, the first time around the Brits also never gave the Russians *any* information, nevermind any kind of evidence. Apparently, to hide some super-secret secrets. Yeah, right!]

    Next, I absolutely have to mention the absolutely insane situation around Belarus.

    To make a long story short, the EU wants to sanction Russia for intervening in Belarus while that self-same EU is intervening in every possible imaginable manner: from the Poles who treat Tikhanovskaia as a modern False Dmitri the Fifth (see here for a summary of Polish-run False Dmitris), to the promise of a special “Marshall Plan for Belarus”, to the coordination of all the protests from Poland. The EU refuses to recognize Lukashenko as the winner (in spite of the fact that there is exactly zero evidence suggesting that Lukashenko lost) and refers to Tikhanovskaia as the “Leader of Belarus” (whatever that means).

    As for our US American friends, having learned exactly *nothing* from the abject failure of their Guaido coup in Venezuela, they now want to repeat exactly the same with Tikhanovskaia in Belarus. As a result, Tikhanovskaia has been re-christened “Juanita Guaido”

    But the worst are still the Europeans. Not only are they prostituting themselves to the leaders of the Empire, the following countries were the first to declare that they will not recognize Lukashenko as the leader of Belarus: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia (which is no surprise, they all compete for the title of most pro-US colony on the planet), but also putatively mentally sane countries such as Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Denmark. The case of Germany is particularly amazing, because Germany will now be placed under immense pressure to cancel North Stream 2, something which the entire German industry opposes. Eventually, the US, Canada, the Ukraine, the UK and the entire EU joined in and also refused to recognize Lukashenko as the leader of Belarus.

    What is especially amazing to me is that these EU imbeciles apparently don’t care that without North Stream 2 they will have to purchase US gas, at much higher prices, which will make the EU economy less effective than the US one. And I thought that prostitutes are always acutely aware of the money they can make: not the European ones, apparently.

    Still, I think that the “top honor” in this category goes to Poland which, while condemning some undefined Russian intervention in Belarus, runs the NEXTA Telegram channel which runs videos like this one: (in Russian – no, not in Belarusian, they *know* that 99.9999% Belarussians speak Russian):

    Oh, but it gets better.

    NATO seems to be trying to frighten Russia with maneuvers in Poland and B-52 flights over the Ukraine and the Black Sea (see here for a full analysis). As for the Poles and Ukronazis, they apparently believe that the Russian bear covered himself in poop and ran away at full speed.

    What I am going to say next is not a secret, every military person who looked into this issue knows and understands this: NATO, and I mean the combined power of all NATO member states, simply does not have the hardware needed to wage a war against Russia in Europe. What NATO does have is only sufficient to trigger a serious incident which might result in a shooting war. But once this war starts, the chances of victory for NATO are exactly zero. Why?

    Well, for one thing, while coalitions of countries might give a thin veneer of political legitimacy to a military action (in reality, only a UNSC resolution would), in purely military terms you are much better off having a single national military. Not only that, but coalitions are nothing but the expression of an often held delusion: the delusion that the little guy can hide behind the back of the big guy. Poland’s entire history can be summarized in this simple principle: strike the weak and bootlick (or even worse!) the powerful. In contrast, real military powers don’t count on some other guy doing the heavy lifting for them. They simply fight until they win.

    Yes, the Europeans, being the cowards that they are, do believe that there is safety in numbers. But each time these midgets gang up on Russia and start barking (or, to use Putin’s expression, start oinking) all together, the Russians clearly see that the Europeans are afraid. Otherwise, they would not constantly seek somebody to protect them (even against a non-existing threat).

    As a direct result of this delusion, NATO simply does not have the equivalent of the First Guard Tank Army in spite of the fact that NATO has a bigger population and much bigger budgets than Russia. Such a tank Army is what it would take to fight a real war in Europe, Russia has such an Army. NATO does not.

    The other thing NATO does not have is a real integrated multi-layered air defense system. Russia does.

    Lastly, NATO has no hypersonic weapons. Russia does.

    (According to President Trump, the USA *does* have super-dooper “hydrosonic” weapons, but nobody really knows what that is supposed to mean).

    I would even argue that the comparatively smaller Belarusian military could make hamburger meat of the roughly three times larger Polish armed forces in a very short time (unlike the Poles, the Belarusian are excellent soldiers and they know that they are surrounded by hostile countries on three sides).

    As for the “armed forces” of the Baltic statelets, they are just a sad joke.

    One more example: the Empire is now sending ships into the Black Sea as some kind of “show of force”. Yet, every military analyst out there knows that the Black Sea is a “Russian lake” and that no matter how many ships the US or NATO sends into the Black Sea, their life expectancy in case of a conflict would be measured in minutes.

    There is a popular expression in Russia which, I submit, beautifully sums up the current US/NATO doctrine: пугать ежа голой задницей, which can be translated as “trying to scare a hedgehog with your naked bottom”.

    The truth is that NATO military forces currently are all in very bad shape – all of them, including the US – and that their only advantage over Russia is in numbers. But as soon as you factor in training, command and control, the ability to operate with severely degraded C3I capabilities, the average age of military hardware or morale – the Russian armed forces are far ahead of the West.

    Does anybody sincerely believe that a few B-52s and a few thousand soldiers from different countries playing war in Poland will really scare the Russian generals?

    But if not – why the threats?

    My explanation is simple: the rulers of the Empire simply hope that the people in the West will never find out how bad their current military posture really is, and they also know that Russia will never attack first – so they simply pretend like they are still big, mighty and relevant. This is made even easier by the fact that the Russians always downplay their real capabilities (in sharp contrast to the West which always brags about “the best XYZ in the world”). That, and the fact that nobody in the Western ruling classes wants to admit that the game is over and that the Empire has collapsed.

    Well, they apparently can hide these truisms from most of their public opinion: Trump promises super-dooper missiles and big red buttons, and his supporters immediately wave (Chinese made) US flags! But I assure you that the Russians (political leaders and even the general public) know what the real score is.

    Yet the Empire still refuses to deal with Russia in any other way except insults, bullying, threats, accusations, sanctions, and constant sabre-rattling. This has never, and I mean never, worked in the past, and it won’t work in the future. But, apparently, NATO generals simply cannot comprehend that insanity can be defined as “doing the same thing over and over again, while hoping to achieve different results”.

    Finally, I will conclude with a short mention of US politicians.

    First, Trump. He now declares that the Russians stole the secret of hypersonic weapons from Obama. This reminds me of how the Brits declared that Russia stole their vaccine against the sars-cov-2 virus. But, if the Russians stole all that, why is it that ONLY Russia has deployed hypersonic weapons (not the USA) and ONLY Russia has both two vaccines and 2 actual treatments (and not the UK)? For a good laugh, check out Andrei Martyanov’s great column “Russia Steal Everything”.

    And then there is Nancy Pelosi who, apparently, is considering, yes, you guessed it – yet another impeachment attempt against Trump? The charge this time? Exercising this Presidential prerogative to nominate a successor to Ruth Ginsburg. Okay, Pelosi might be senile, but she also is in deep denial if she thinks impeaching Trump is still a viable project. Frankly? I think that she lost it.

    In fact, I think that all the Dems have gone absolutely insane: they are now considering packing both the Supreme Court and the Senate. The fact that doing so will destroy the US political system does not seem to bother them in the least.

    Conclusion: quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat!

    We live in a world where facts or logic have simply become irrelevant and nobody cares about such clearly outdated categories.  We have elevated “doubleplusgoodthinking” into an art form.  We have also done away with the concepts of “proof” or “evidence” which we have replaced with variations on the “highly likely” theme.  We have also, for all practical purpose, jettisoned the entire corpus of international law and replaced it with “rules-based international order“.  In fact, I can only agree with Chris Hedges who, in his superb book the “Empire of illusions” and of the “triumph of spectacle”.  He is absolutely correct: not only is this a triumph of appearance over substance, and of ideology over reality, it is even the triumph of self-destruction over self-preservation.

    There is not a big “master plan”, no complex international conspiracy, no 5D chess.  All we have is yet another empire committing suicide and, like so many before this one, this suicide is executed by this empire’s ruling classes.

  • Armenian-Azerbaijani War Rages In South Caucasus
    Armenian-Azerbaijani War Rages In South Caucasus

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/29/2020 – 01:00

    Submitted by SouthFront.org,

    On September 27, a new regional war in South Caucasus arose from the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.

    Pro-Armenian forces captured the region in the early 90s triggering an armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Further development of the hostilities and the expected offensive by pro-Azerbajian forces were stopped by a Russian intervention in May of 1994. As of September 2020, the Nagorno-Karabakh region and nearby areas are still under the control of Armenian forces, de-facto making it an unrecognized Armenian state – the Republic of Artsakh (more widely known as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic).

    The 2018 political crisis in Armenia the led to a seizure of power in the country by de-facto pro-Western forces led by current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan which did not strengthen Armenian positions over the territorial dispute. The double standard policy of the Armenian government, which was de-facto conducting anti-Russian actions but keeping public rhetoric pro-Russian, also played its own role. For years, Russia has been the only guarantor of Armenian statehood and the only force capable to rescue it in the event of a full-scale Azerbaijani-Turkish attack. Nonetheless, the Armenian leadership did pretty well in undermining its strategic partnership with its neighbor.

    On the other hand, the political and economic situation in Azerbaijan was more stable. Baku also was able to secure good working relations with Russia. Together with the developing strategic partnership with Turkey, a natural historical ally of the country, and the strengthening of Turkish positions in the Greater Middle East, led to an expected attempt by Azerbaijan to restore control over the contested territories.

    The Azerbaijani advance started on in the morning of September 27 and as of September 28, the Azerbaijani military said that it had captured seven villages and several key heights in the Fuzuli and Jabrayil areas. The military also announced that Azerbaijan captured the Murov height of the Murovdag mountain range and established fire control of the Vardenis-Aghdar road connecting Karabakh with Armenia. The Ministry of Defense said that this will prevent the transportation of additional troops and equipment from Armenia along the route in the direction of the Kelbajar and Aghdar regions in Karabakh.

    The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry also claimed that over 550 Armenian soldiers were killed and dozens pieces of Armenian military equipment, including at least 15 Osa air defense systems, 22 battle tanks and 8 artillery guns, were destroyed. All statements from the Armenian side about the casualties among Azerbaijani forces were denounced as fake news.

    Azerbaijan calls the ongoing advance a “counter-offensive” needed to put an end to Armenian ceasefire violations and to protect civilians. President Ilham Aliyev signed a martial law decree and vowed to “restore historical justice” and “restore the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan” Turkey immediately declared its full support to Azerbaijan saying that it is ready to assist it in any way requested, including military support.

    In its own turn, the Armenian military admitted that Azerbaijan captured some positions near Talish, but denied that the Vardenis-Aghdar road was cut off. According to it, at least 200 Azerbaijani soldiers were killed, 30 armored vehicles and 20 drones were destroyed. The Armenian Defense Ministry also said that it has data about Turkish involvement in the conflict, the usage of Turkish weapons and the presence of mercenaries linked to Turkey. Earlier, reports appeared that Turkey was deploying members of its Syrian proxy groups in Azerbaijan. Arayik Harutyunyan, the President of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, openly stated that the republic is at war with both Azerbaijan and Turkey.

    The Washington establishment that helped Pashinyan to seize power is also not hurrying up to assist its ‘new friends’ in Armenia. They see the Nagorno-Karabakh region as a point of possible conflict between Russia and Turkey (which is useful to promote the US agenda in the Greater Middle East). The instability in South Caucasus, close to the borders of Russia and Iran, also contributes to the geopolitical interests of the United States. Therefore, the Pashinyan government should not expect any real help from the ‘democratic superpower’.

    On the other hand, the direct involvement of Russia and thus the Collective Security Treaty Organization on the side of Armenia is unlikely until there is no direct attack on its territory. Moscow would intervene into the conflict both politically and militarily, but only as far as necessary to prevent a violation of Armenia’s borders. Russia would not contribute military efforts to restore Armenian control over Nagorno Karabakh should the region be captured by Azerbaijan.

    If the regional war between Azerbaijan and Armenia develops further in the current direction, Armenia could loose at least a part of its positions in the contested region. In the worst-case scenario for the Armenian leadership, Azerbaijan, with help from Turkey, will have a real chance to restore control over the most of the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.

  • US & China: Emerging Technologies And The Race To Control The Future
    US & China: Emerging Technologies And The Race To Control The Future

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 23:40

    Authored by Lawrence Franklin via The Gatestone Institute,

    The United States is in a “Tech War” with China, the victor will control the global dissemination of information. The winner will also write the world’s rules and standards for emerging technologies in the digital economy.

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    Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping threw down the gauntlet to the U.S. in a May 2017 speech, where he outlined the plan for establishing a Chinese-supervised “Digital Silk Road.” President Xi realizes that the information dimension of modern war is bound up with China’s apparent overall objective of unseating the United States as the leader of the existing liberal democratic world order.

    Xi seemingly wants to secure a commanding lead in the emerging hi-tech disciplines to create a sense of inevitability about China’s rise to world domination. The U.S. still has the time, talent and resources to secure a victory over China in this contest for global leadership, provided that the U.S. has the will, self-discipline and flexibility to institute a total societal mobilization over decades.

    China specialists such as Gordon Chang and policy officers in the Trump Administration have sought to educate the American public on how China came to emerge as a potent challenger to U.S. global primacy in hi-tech disciplines. Many of the methods by which China rose to contender status include stealing intellectual property on a massive scale, with the collusion, sadly, of many Americans; forced transfer of entrepreneurial secrets of U.S. firms as a prerequisite to operating in the Chinese market; meticulous, long-term planning to secure China’s national priorities; legal and illegal recruitment of foreign human talent, and lavish state support for Chinese hi-tech firms.

    China may have unintentionally alerted the Free World to its present danger by revealing the CCP regime’s true face — not exactly the one presented by “A rising China is a … positive ­development not only for China, but for America” — as well as its global ambitions. China has revealed this true face by an abominable human rights record, underscored by its genocidal policy toward China’s Uighur minority in Xinjiang Province. China’s aggressive territorial expansion against Hong Kong and several of its Asian neighbors — not to mention how it deliberately exported the Wuhan virus internationally while closing transportation to limit its spread within China — has helped strip away its carefully orchestrated image as a responsible major power and has exposed a belligerent state controlled by the CCP.

    Now, a Chinese physician and virologist, Dr. Yan Limeng, who fled China and is in hiding in the U.S., has said that China released the virus “intentionally” — perhaps, one surmises, as a way of torpedoing both President Trump’s prospects for re-election and his effort to alter trade deals that have favored China by $600 billion a year. Meanwhile, Twitter thoughtfully deleted Yan’s clearly important account.

    China’s domestic implementation of advances in surveillance technology to control its own population also has contributed to the negative transformation of China’s international image. The CCP has employed these advances to create a surveillance state to monitor the actions of Chinese citizens, and many countries have purchased Chinese facial recognition products. These state customers run the gamut of political systems from dictatorships to democracies.

    Artificial intelligence (AI) is another emerging technology where China is making inroads on the reported U.S. lead. China has set a goal of overtaking the U.S. in AI by 2030. AI is a scientific discipline that teaches machines to imitate human actions. Such applications have enormous potential to impact the efficiency and accuracy of modern weapon systems such as missiles. AI exercises have produced results as in assisting surgery and where machines have bested world-class Chess Masters and Go enthusiasts.

    Five factors contribute to breakthroughs in AI and other emerging technologies: patents, investment, hardware, talented labor and academic research. Both China and the U.S. are improving the ability of AI to capture the nuance of languages.

    China has now surpassed the U.S. in the number of published scientific studies, but there is a caveat: U.S. scientific publications remain, on the whole, qualitatively superior. These studies help keep the U.S. a step ahead in basic software such as computer data management, processing and in operating system software.

    Another critical discipline where the U.S. maintains a clear advantage over China is semiconductor chip technology, necessary for the manufacture of various electronic devices. The Trump administration’s decoupling of China’s Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd from the American market has helped slow Beijing’s effort to catch up to the United States in semiconductor technology. The electronic materials, chemical gases, and lithographic technology — all components necessary for the production of the most advanced semiconductors — can presently only be produced in Free World states such as the U.S., Japan, and the Netherlands

    Perhaps the most spirited and public manifestation of the U.S.-China “Tech War” is in space. This competition may recall the drama of the “space race” between an earlier generation of superpower rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union. Rather than the US-USSR rivalry to reach the moon, the focus in the current US-China contest is in space weaponry — and reaching Mars. China is making impressive strides in space operations by recently deploying the BeiDou constellation of 30 satellites, its rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS). China also has plans to launch its own space station as an alternative to the International Space Station that highlights global cooperation, especially between the U.S. and Russia. Ominously, China appears to be doubling down on its effort to checkmate the West’s capability to use space-based systems during conflict. If China can successfully blind U.S. systems by offensive cyber operations or outright destruction of U.S. systems by anti-satellite attacks, the war-fighting advantage currently possessed by the West can be annihilated. China executed a successful anti-satellite strike as early as 2007; it showed its capability by destroying one of its own aging weather satellites.

    Still another new technology with enormous potential for solving complex mathematical and scientific problems more quickly than today’s computers can is quantum computing. While the U.S. claims to have created the first quantum computer, China appears to be leading in the military application of this new science. China has already demonstrated the ability to create unbreakable encrypted messaging, an accomplishment that could keep other countries in the dark about planned secret Chinese military operations, such as, say, an invasion of Taiwan.

    The U.S. still leads China in Research and Development (R&D) spending, but Beijing has made great strides in this area as well. In order to keep pace with China’s all-out effort to dominate emerging technologies, a well-disciplined, coordinated approach by the U.S. government, sort of a “Manhattan Project” in all of the key hi-tech areas, might help. The costs to the US of falling behind could well prove catastrophic.

  • Putin To Be Among First To Receive 'Controversial' Sputnik Vaccine Ahead Of S.Korea Visit
    Putin To Be Among First To Receive ‘Controversial’ Sputnik Vaccine Ahead Of S.Korea Visit

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 23:20

    After previously touting that his own daughter was among the first to take the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, standing in as a prominent early ‘guinea pig’ of sorts vouching for its safety, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he plans to receive it soon, according to a story in Newsweek on Monday.

    Without specifying precisely when he would receive the vaccine, which was met with approval by government regulators in August, Putin reportedly indicated it would come before his next trip to South Korea. 

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    Via Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation

    “Putin has not yet committed publicly to receiving the vaccine—the development of which has been financed by the state Russian Direct Investment Fund—but told South Korean President Moon Jae-in by phone Monday that he would have the shot before a planned visit to Seoul, Newsweek reports.

    Moon personally invited Putin to come to South Korea during a call upon the occasion of the 30th anniversary of establishment of the Russian-South Korean diplomatic relations.

    According to a summary of the call, Russian media sources indicate that Putin told Moon:

    “I will come to South Korea… I will personally take the Russian vaccine and go.”

    Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine was developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya research institute with help from the Russian defense ministry. It was tested at Moscow’s state medical university.

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    Prior visit in Russia between the two leaders, via Yonhap.

    Initially met with broad global skepticism, Russia’s health ministry last month announced it expects to begin mass anti-coronavirus vaccinations by October, with the first rounds to be administered to front line medical workers as well as teachers.

    Global critics have charged Russia appears to be ‘rushing’ out a vaccine amid the international race to come up with a preventative ‘cure’ for countries’ populations.

    And apparently Putin plans to be among these front line early recipients of the Russian vaccine as well, given his international travel schedule. 

  • Is America Zinnished?
    Is America Zinnished?

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 23:00

    Authored by John Quincy Adams via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    About twenty years ago The Atlantic published a piece by Jeffrey Tayler named “Russia is finished” subtitled “The unstoppable descent of a once great power into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance.” Not a very successful prediction was it? But what he did was fashionable at the time – he described what was happening in Russia in the nineties and made a straight-line projection from there. His error was assuming the continuation of the straight line – and he made the error because he thought Russia was only “Zaire With Permafrost”.

    My purpose in this essay is to apply the points that the author made about Russia twenty years ago to the United States of America today and adopt a simple straight-line projection based on a corresponding view of American history. This is not so much because I think that America really is finished – after all, as Adam Smith observed, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and America has seen hard times before – but in order to illustrate the perilous position America is in today. As the author of the Atlantic piece must now understand, straight-line predictions are always risky because – as happened in Russia – other forces can appear to change the “unstoppable descent”. But a straight-line prediction from the American situation as of the autumn of 2020 does point to an “unstoppable descent” into “social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance”.

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    In my opinion, Tayler’s principal error, which constrained his estimation of what was possible, was his overarching view of Russia as a brutal, dysfunctional, backwards dictatorship.

    The hostility that Russians feel toward their government comes not from some innate lack of civic duty but from the terror, violence, and deceit that have since the late Middle Ages characterized the way in which their rulers have treated them…

    Byzantium was moribund, its religion having suffocated the intellectual traditions of the Hellenes.

    Mongol khans, with all their pomp and cruelty, became the figures on which many Russian rulers would model themselves…

    Muscovite czars, Ivan the Terrible foremost among them, destroyed all institutions that could rival their power, turning the nobility into servants, enslaving the peasants to the nobility, and employing Orthodoxy as their official ideology—for Orthodoxy proclaimed the czar God’s chosen representative on earth…

    Russia, isolated and infused with a messianic sense of its own superiority over the West, suffered the predations of rulers bent on building a strong state…

    Taking full advantage of Russia’s absolutist traditions, Joseph Stalin followed in the footsteps of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and set about strengthening the state, enacting programs of industrialization and agricultural collectivization: he enslaved vast segments of his population to build industries, mine the earth, and gather crops…

    Can only expect more of the same from a country with that past.

    This is what might be called the Richard Pipes take on Russia.

    Let us consider what would be predicted for the future of America if we were to take the Howard Zinn point of view.

    That is to say, an America based on slave labor, the extermination of native peoples, exploitation of the poor by the rich under cover of an attractive but hollow ideology, predatory behavior in its neighborhood backed by merciless warfare wherever it doesn’t get its way. You could expect only more of the same.

    Now the Pipes and Zinn views are not false, but they are partial. Russia is not nothing but a brutal dysfunctional dictatorship, it has its Father Zosimas too. Neither is America just a brutal, dysfunctional plutocracy, it has its spiritual values too. But, just as Tayler took a Pipes view of Russia, we will in what follows take a Zinn view of America. And just as Russia’s future turned out to be much better than Tayler/Pipes foresaw, let us hope that America’s future is better also. We will take the points Tayler makes about Russia, apply them to America and project the future from that point through Zinn’s perspective and see what we get.

    Russian oligarchs.

    the oligarchs rose to prominence not by building railroads and industries but by exploiting antiquated pricing systems, disorganized legal codes, and—most important—Soviet-era connections with the government.

    The three richest men in America today – owning, it is said, as much as half the population – did not gain their wealth by railroads or industries; one runs a mail order store, one a software company and one is a speculator. The Forbes 400 are worth more than almost two-thirds of the country and COVID has made them even richer while, for the others, unemployment skyrockets. Not surprisingly, a 2014 study found that these plutocrats dominate the so-called democracy. “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.” All rather Zinnish, isn’t it? Difficult to see that trend ending by itself.

    Russian contempt for politicians.

    When Russians talk of their politicians, they frequently speak of “thieves,” “bandits,” and “swindlers”…

    A recent Pew poll on American attitudes to their government shows similar disgust

    Even larger majorities say the country is not performing well when it comes to the government being open and transparent (69% say this does not describe the country well), the tone of political debate being respectful (72%), people agreeing on basic facts even if they disagree politically (72%), elected officials facing serious consequences for misconduct (73%) and that campaign contributions do not lead to greater political influence (also 73%).

    Russian military failure.

    One of the most spectacular elements of the Soviet Union’s collapse has been Russia’s fall from military superpower No. 2 to a country whose army can be neutralized by bands of irregulars fighting with little more than the weapons on their backs.

    No need to belabor this point – two decades in Afghanistan says it all.

    Squandering wealth on weaponry.

    Putin would do well to recall that high defense spending helped to bring about the demise of the Soviet Union.

    Enough said – more, more and still more.

    Russian population decline.

    Over the past decade Russia’s population has been shrinking by almost a million a year, owing to a plummeting birth rate and a rising number of deaths from alcoholism and violence. Predictions are astonishingly grave: the country could lose a third of its population (now 146 million) by the middle of the century. This does not factor in new scourges—tuberculosis and HIV, in particular, which have been spreading exponentially since 1998.

    America’s birthrate is now falling and deaths from opioid overdoses and suicides are rising.

    Taking Tayler’s points one after another and comparing Russia with America today, we see it’s not Russia that’s looking bad in 2020.

    • Oligarchs are losing power in Russia but gaining it in America.

    • Confidence in government is rising in Russia but falling in America.

    • Russia’ military achievements are rising while America’s are falling.

    • Russia’s military expenditure is falling but America’s keeps rising.

    • Russian population is stabilizing while America’s is starting to fall.

    And we haven’t been nearly as negative about America’s future as we could have been. With the talk about ignoring the results of November’s elections, how close are we to civil war? Is there really a possibility of a coup d’état? There’s certainly talk of it. There already is a considerable amount of street violence in America now, how much worse will it get? What will the final effects of COVID be? Certainly not an increase in confidence about the American can-do spirit or competence. How many people unemployed by COVID will ever work again? How big can the budget deficit get before it all bursts? Can the US ever get its manufacturing dominance back? What happens to the “American Dream” as most people get poorer while a few become ludicrously rich – here’s a RAND study to put a number on the four-decade trend – trillions and trillions.

    Tayler was extremely wrong in his estimation of Putin as many others were, seeing nothing but KGB.

    Putin the Terrible… Putin had the security connections to protect them once Yeltsin left office… Putin needs pliant and adoring media to ensure an absolutist rule… Putin supported the reinstatement of a slightly modified version of Stalin’s national anthem… Putin has put forward plans that will only worsen his country’s plight,

    But the Putin team changed the trajectory – again “Zaire with permafrost” blocked his mind. Would he expect that Biden/Harris will turn things around in America? (He doesn’t seem to think much of Trump.)

    And how did this come to pass? Adams foresaw it – America brought the monsters home.

    Russia by contrast is a model of stability, efficiency and prosperity. With a much better future too.

  • China Initiates 5 Simultaneous Military Drills 'Directed At Taiwan'
    China Initiates 5 Simultaneous Military Drills ‘Directed At Taiwan’

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 22:40

    Following a two-month period which already saw a very noticeable uptick in Chinese PLA military drills in the regions of the Yellow, South China, and East China Seas, Beijing has announced the start of five simultaneous military drills which it says are “directed at Taiwan”.

    It’s only the second time in recent months that this many exercises have been triggered all at once in four seas.

    Reuters describes that “Two of the exercises are being held near the Paracel Islands in the disputed South China Sea, one in the East China Sea, and one in further north in the Bohai Sea, the Maritime Safety Administration said in notices on its website.”

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    Chinese PLA drills file image via Weibo

    And drills in the Yellow Sea are featuring live-fire exercises from Monday through Wednesday. The maritime notices issued by the PLA include bans on all civilian ships entering the areas where drills are being conducted. 

    One month ago a major incident unfolded after an American U-2 spy plane allegedly entered a Chinese military ‘no fly zone’ in order to monitor PLA drills. Beijing had slammed the “naked provocation” and issued a veiled threat that in future exercises the US aircraft could be shot down.

    According to Reuters, Beijing has specifically framed the new drills as in response to “threats” centered on Taiwan:

    China has also held frequent military activities near Chinese-claimed Taiwan and has taken the usual step of declaring that such drills are directed at Taiwan. 

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    Washington has conducted two recent high level diplomatic visits to Taipei, with Taiwan’s military also recently updating its rules of engagement to say it has a right to “counterattack” Chinese warplanes. 

    “In the face of high-frequency harassment and threats from the enemy’s warships and warplanes recently… the military clearly redefined the contingency handling regulations concerning the first strike as our right to self-defense and counter-attack,” Taiwan’s defense ministry said a week ago.

  • UW-Madison Grad Student Resigns Leadership Roles After Falsely 'Identfying' As Black
    UW-Madison Grad Student Resigns Leadership Roles After Falsely ‘Identfying’ As Black

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 22:20

    Authored by Leo Thuman via Campus Reform,

    A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student stepped down from leadership roles in the university’s graduate student union after admitting that she had dishonestly presented herself as a “person of color.”

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    In a letter published on the website Medium on September 6, University of Wisconsin graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad apologized and admitted that she had been dishonest about her racial and ethnic background. 

    “I am so deeply sorry for the ways you are hurting right now because of me.”  She also admitted that the feelings of betrayal people felt because of her were caused by her dishonest presentation of her racial-ethnic identity: “all of those things are a consequence of how I have navigated our relationships and the spaces we share.”

    Vitolo-Haddad announced that she is trying to repair the damage her deceit caused, and that “the first step towards that, however, is to resign my position as co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association.” 

    The Teaching Assistant’s Association is a labor union at UW-Madison representing graduate students who are employed in various capacities at the university, but mainly in teaching positions.  As of the time of publication, Vitolo-Haddad was not listed on the ‘Officers’ section of the union’s website.

    Vitolo-Haddad also announced in her letter that she would resign from her position as a graduate teaching assistant at the university.

    In a second letter, published on September 8 on Medium, Vitolo-Haddad confessed that she was not at all of Black ancestry, and was in fact Italian and Sicilian.  She acknowledged that she “should have never entered Black organizing spaces” and continued, saying: “they are not my place.” 

    She attempted to portray her guilt as the cause of her admission, writing that “once realizing this, it wasn’t sufficient to just leave; I should have explained that directly to the people who invited me and clarified my identity.”

    Further, Vitolo-Haddad admitted that she had identified herself as Black on multiple occasions.

    “When asked if I identify as Black, my answer should have always been ‘No.’ There were three separate instances I said otherwise,” she wrote in the letter.

    Vitolo-Haddad is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

    CNN reported that Vitolo-Haddad was previously offered a tenure-track position at Fresno State University in California. The university told the network that she would not be receiving the position. 

    Vitolo-Haddad isn’t the first major public case of a white woman impersonating someone from a minority group. 

    Campus Reform recently reported on a George Washington University professor who had similarly pretended to be black. That professor, Jessica Krug, also resigned from her teaching position.

    Campus Reform was unable to reach Vitolo-Haddad for comment.

  • Rich Investors Take "Cautious" Approach To Markets Over Next 12 Months 
    Rich Investors Take “Cautious” Approach To Markets Over Next 12 Months 

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 22:00

    By now, it is common knowledge that technology stocks, the FAAMGs, are in one of the biggest bubbles in capital markets history. Investors have quickly pivoted to these fast-growing tech firms, with an unprecedented concentration in AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, and FB. With the US presidential election fast-approaching, momentum and valuation concerns have materialized for these high-flying stocks, as the world’s most sophisticated family offices and investors have recently described their investment outlook as “cautious,” according to a new Citi Private Bank survey. 

    About three-quarters of all respondents, including ultra-high net worth individuals and family offices, described their 12-month investment sentiment as “cautious.” Many flagged the cautious mood, raised cash reserves, and increased direct investments due to the virus pandemic. 

    The survey, which was administered in June and July to about 180 family offices and investors, had a quarter of all respondents worried about the surge of social unrest and violent crime spreading across the US. 

    About 59% of respondents said they had or will increase their allocations to direct investments over the coming 12 months, with technology, healthcare, and real estate as their three top sector choices.

    Stephen Campbell, Managing Director and Chairman, Private Capital Group, Citi Private Bank, said family offices and wealthy investors have survived the virus downturn and see more opportunity in private markets.

    “Our findings capture the sentiment of respondents from all regions of the globe. We find that family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals have weathered the crisis well. They are positioned to deploy further capital as they see opportunities arise, especially in private markets. However, it cannot be ignored that the survey found liquidity to be at a premium, and clients often willing to sacrifice short to medium-term returns to maintain that,” Campbell wrote in the survey. 

    The caution expressed by respondents comes as FAAMGs are clearly in a bubble. 

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    Half of the respodents said they expect total portfolio returns for the next 12 months to be in the 1% to 5% range. When asked about future reconfigurations to the portfolio, 56% said they are making “some tactical changes,” while only 14%” reported making “significant portfolio changes.”

    Peter Clive Charrington, Global Head of Citi Private Bank, commented on the survey:  

    “The results and analysis in this report give a rare insight into the thinking of some of the world’s most sophisticated family office executives and other leading investors. We asked them about their outlook for the global economy and financial markets, as well as what they are doing with the portfolios that they oversee. The answers about the opportunities and risks ahead – and the actions that respondents expect to take – provides Citi Private Bank the opportunity better to address the challenges and needs of our global clients. We have found to a surprising degree that our clients have remained closer to their Citi team as they navigate these uncertain times.”

    In a separate survey, produced by UBS Global Wealth, they noted, the wealthiest of investors are waiting for a pullback in markets before they start buying. 

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    The question wealthy investors have on their mind: How deep will the pullback be? 

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  • Second O'Keefe Video Drops: Alleged Cash-For-Ballot Transaction Caught On Tape, Ilhan Omar Accused Of Direct Involvement
    Second O’Keefe Video Drops: Alleged Cash-For-Ballot Transaction Caught On Tape, Ilhan Omar Accused Of Direct Involvement

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 21:47

    Update (2338ET): Following an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” James O’Keefe released a second ballot-harvesting video featuring an apparent purchase of a ballot from a Somali resident of Minnesota.

    The video then features several allegations made by local Somalis regarding the alleged scheme – including Rep. Ilhan Omar’s direct involvement.

    “She’s [Ilhan Omar] the one who came up with all this [pay-for-vote],” said one source who added. “She’s [Ilhan Omar] the one, somehow. Nobody knew, but, yeah, this is something like new with Ilhan [Omar].”

    Jamal Omar said cash for votes is an open secret in Minneapolis. “The techniques that he [Ali Isse] uses to exchange money for vote — that’s not a secret. It’s, it’s open, and everybody knows about it,” he said. “$200, $300 per ballot received!” –Project Veritas

    “Nobody would say that Ilhan Omar isn’t part of this,” said Omar Jamal – a Somali community insider and chairman of the Somali Watchdog Group. “Unless you’re from a different planet, but if you live in this universe, I think everybody knows it.”

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    According to Jamal, senior Ilhan Omar staffer Ali Isse Gainey is at the center of the vote-buying scheme.

    Jamal also said that Ilhan Omar operatives would accompany Somali residents to the voting booth and do the actual voting for the person.

    “They help us at the voting booth. They allow them to help us,” said one Minneapolis ballot harvester recorded on hidden camera. “They go inside with us and help us, and they actually do that inside there.”

    Watch:

    And read the rest of the report here.

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    The Minneapolis Police Department announced Monday evening that they would be investigating allegations of ‘vote harvesting’ by supporters of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) following an explosive Project Veritas exposé.

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    “The MPD is aware of the allegations of vote harvesting,” tweeted the Minneapolis PD. “We are in the process of looking into the validity of those statements. No further information is available at this time on this.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsO’Keefe’s latest video features Minneapolis resident Liban Mohamed – who brags on tape about illegally collecting some 300 ballots from Somali immigrants in an effort to help his City Councilman brother, Jamal Osman.

    What’s more, the journalist teased a “cash-for-ballots financial transaction ON TAPE” in a Monday night Twitter poll.

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    Mohamed called O’Keefe “Fake News” in a Monday tweet, according to the Daily Mail.

    The Veritas video also featured Somali political operative Omar Jamal – who said he believes ballot harvesters are hired to take advantage of elderly members of the Somali community.

    Omar spokesman Jeremy Slevin said the claims were “amplifying a coordinated right-wing campaign to delegitimize a free and fair election this fall undermines our democracy.”

    President Trump took to Twitter late Monday evening, calling the allegations “totally illegal,” and that he hopes that “the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review.”

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  • Decentralized Finance As Value Creator… And Destroyer
    Decentralized Finance As Value Creator… And Destroyer

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 21:40

    Authored by Omid Malekan via Medium.com,

    As you’ve probably seen, DeFi on Ethereum is now the hottest thing in all of crypto, further establishing the platform’s first mover advantage, and firing what should be perceived as a shot across the bow of traditional financial services. The success of the movement is attributable to three fundamental properties of decentralized blockchain networks:

    1. Composability: Any output of an existing solution — such as collateralized lending or automated market making — could easily be used as an input of a new solution. This means that developers can build on the work of others, mixing and matching existing services to create their own financial supermarkets (what the crypto kids call money legos).

    2. Transparency: Every project is transparent, open-source and imminently replicable. Not only can developers look under the hood of successful projects, they can copy the code and introduce their own variation.

    3. Permissionless: Anyone can do anything. There are no licenses to acquire, vendors to onboard, KYC procedures to follow or AML/CFT laws to be crippled by. Those who have innovative ideas build them and those who like the resulting service use them. Full stop.

    Also aiding the boom is a growing cast of supporting infrastructure in the form of stablecoins, oracles and ramps to other platforms such as Bitcoin. All of this has been around for years, as have the earliest DeFi protocols. But the action didn’t take off until the arrival of liquidity mining earlier this year, an innovative incentive scheme best understood with an analogy: Back in the day, banks used to give away toasters for opening a new account. DeFi projects go one step further and give away equity, in the form of a governance token. The more users borrow, lend, provide liquidity or trade in a particular protocol, the greater the claim on future revenues and say in ongoing governance that they get.

    Liquidity mining is the decentralized and community-owned ethos of the crypto universe expanded to financial services. There is no off-chain equivalent, but analogous to Robinhood giving away free stock to its clients based on usage. (RH would never do this, because the infrastructure can’t handle it and the regulators won’t allow it— yet another reason why the only real innovation in financial services is happening on the blockchain).

    The introduction of liquidity mining set the DeFi world on fire. Even those who didn’t have an immediate need to lend, borrow or trade started doing so to earn a reward. This spike in activity created a virtuous cycle: the more people used a protocol, the more valuable the token it was giving away was perceived to be, so the greater the incentive for new users to join the party. In just three months, the value of assets involved with DeFi went up 10x, and fees on Ethereum surged as well.

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    All of this is great for adoption, energy and excitement. DeFi has reinvigorated the crypto ecosystem, attracted attention from outsiders and caused even greater agita for regulators still grappling with the difference between security tokens and tokenized securities. What it’s not great for is the value of the DeFi governance tokens themselves. This might be considered heresy in the most devout DeFi circles, but I would argue the vast majority of DeFi tokens are borderline worthless. Why? Because of what makes DeFi great in the first place. Put in crypto speak:

    Composability + Transparency + Permissionless = No Moat

    Put in plain English: If you build it, they will come, but then someone will build a replica, and they will leave. In a world where anyone can do anything, including copy your code, tweak your solution and parody your name, then every successful project will have imitators, and since there are no account signups, national borders or regulatory barriers, your customers can become their customer with a single click. This isn’t just speculation, it has already happened, with comical naming conventions to boot. The popular decentralized exchange Uniswap yielded Sushiswap which was then copied into Kimchiswap. Another popular service called Curve was forked into Swerve, and the robo-yield-farmer Yearn has spawned more copycats than one can keep track of.

    At issue is the fundamental equation of trust. The main goal of a decentralized platform like Ethereum is the minimization of counterparty risk — a fundamental driver of financial innovation for millennia. The platform’s success in doing so makes it both easy to build new solutions and hard to monetize them, because everyone shares the most important edge. This is not the case in traditional finance. You can spend billions of dollars replicating the physical infrastructure of the NYSE or BoA, but end up with none of their customers, because you won’t have the licenses, reputations and relationships that make those entities trustworthy.

    Ironically, that means the only lasting value any DeFi solution could have comes from the messy and more centralized stuff that you can’t just copy and paste, such as business development, VC backing and human talent. It also means that the oldest DeFi protocols who have the most sophisticated teams and weathered more than just a single season are the only ones worth owning at current prices. My favorites are MakerDao, Compound, Aave and Uniswap. Everything else is either too new, too unproven, too unused or too easy to copy (Maker increasingly seems like the only solution that’s truly fork proof, given Dai’s growing penetration into obscure corners of the ecosystem, and Latin America)

    Even more ironically, the market currently values most of these protocols in the opposite order that I do. The DeFi aggregator Yearn, which would have no reason to exist if not for the base protocols it feeds, has a higher market cap than all of them. The synthetic asset maker Synthetix, whose sUSD stablecoin has less than $60m in distribution, is valued more than Maker, whose Dai stablecoin is approaching $1B. These disparities are the result of the crypto world’s never ending (and always embarrassing) desire for free money. Maker isn’t giving away any equity, while SNX is giving away plenty.

    These disparities will eventually be resolved. The valuations of the core protocols will rise to the top while some of the current high-flyers will end up worthless. But even then, the upside will always be capped by the fact that competition is easy to build. The most sustainable winners will be the off-chain infrastructure providers, for the simple reason that you can’t fork USDC’s cash reserves or Bitgo’s cold storage.

    And once again, the biggest winner of all will be Ethereum itself, as DeFi has only increased its value and cemented its first mover advantage. It is a mistake to assume that today’s astronomical transaction fees are anything other than a blessing. Demand outstripping supply is the best thing that can happen to any startup.

  • Chinese State Media Floats Trump 'October Surprise' Theory Centered On Disputed Islands
    Chinese State Media Floats Trump ‘October Surprise’ Theory Centered On Disputed Islands

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 21:20

    The editor-in-chief of the Chinese Community Party run Global Times, Hu Xijin, has once again raised eyebrows with his typical bellicose and provocative statements and predictions.

    This time he took things to a new level, cryptically citing “information learned” — as if from an insider source or perhaps even Chinese intelligence — to suggest President Trump has a major ‘October Surprise’ in store, and of course it relates to the prospect of military conflict with China at a moment things are fast heating up over the Taiwan issue in particular.

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    Getty Images/The Daily Express

    The Global Times editor and writer claimed on Monday: “Based on information I learned, Trump govt could take the risk to attack China’s islands in the South China Sea with MQ-9 Reaper drones to aid his reelection campaign,” in a Tweet that was a among his more provocative lately.

    It’s unclear where he came by this “information” and he certainly didn’t back it up with proof or specific sources, but he added that “If it happens, the PLA will definitely fight back fiercely and let those who start the war pay a heavy price.”

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    Hu Xijin has been closely following the TikTok controversy, lately labelling the US as being in a “hysterical state” over advanced Chinese tech and popular aps.

    He also days ago said “The US is clearly preparing for new provocative actions” related to the potential expelling of Chinese diplomats amid the ongoing tit-for-tat on multiple fronts. 

    China’s English language mouthpiece publication geared toward Western audiences often in an indirect way “relays” Beijing’s threats and warnings. Typically Hu himself reflects the insider thinking of the Chinese Communist Party, but with a more hawkish tinge, so it’s more than likely there are many officials in the party who actually believe there’s some level of a US election October surprise related to China coming.

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    Perhaps it’s also related to PLA forces kicking off military drills in no less than four regional seas on Monday, expected to run through Wednesday.

    Recall that just last week he also warned that China “would definitely start a just war” if American soldiers ever returned to being stationed on Taiwan. They had permanently departed in 1979 upon US normalized relations with the People’s Republic of China.

  • Will Biden 'Corruption' Be Off-Limits In First Debate?
    Will Biden ‘Corruption’ Be Off-Limits In First Debate?

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 21:00

    Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

    Chris Wallace, America is watching!

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    When the “Fox News Sunday” host takes the stage on Tuesday to moderate the first presidential debate of 2020, he will for 90 minutes be the most important person in the world.

    His questions, his demeanor, his raised eyebrow will signal to millions of voters how they are to assess the two candidates — President Donald John Trump and former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

    If his questions are piercing for both, if his skepticism is applied equally to both the Republican and Democrat, then all is well in this corner of the world of journalism. But if instead Wallace accuses Trump and coddles Biden, we will have one more instance of media bias, which has become so rampant that President Trump had to christen it with a pet name — Fake News.

    Every day, the supposedly professional press corps cozies up to Biden with softball questions (“Why aren’t you more angry at President Trump?” has to be my favorite!) while accusing Trump of being a mass murderer, a racist and a Putin puppet. So conservatives are entirely justified in having low expectations for the debate and for Wallace, who has exhibited symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome more than once.

    Wallace can ask anything he wants of Trump. I am confident the president will acquit himself admirably, but the litmus test for Wallace playing fair in the debate will be whether or not he asks any hard-hitting questions of Biden — especially about the new Senate report on the corrupt activities of his son Hunter in Ukraine and elsewhere.

    If you have heard anything about the Biden report on CNN and MSNBC, or read about it in your newspapers, chances are you came away thinking that Republicans had made up a series of fake charges against the Bidens. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

    The Washington Post, as usual, was at the front of the pack for Fake News coverage. The Post used its headline to focus entirely on Hunter’s position on the board of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and claimed that the report doesn’t show that the cozy arrangement “changed U.S. policy” — as if that were the only reason you would not want a vice president’s son enriching himself at the trough of foreign oligarchs.

    The story then spent most of its 35 paragraphs excusing Hunter’s behavior either directly or through surrogates such as Democrat senators, and most nauseatingly by quoting Hunter Biden’s daughter, Naomi, who “offered a personal tribute to her father” in the form of a series of tweets, including the following:

    “Though the whole world knows his name, no one knows who he is. Here’s a thread on my dad, Hunter Biden — free of charge to the taxpayers and free of the corrosive influence of power-at-all-costs politics. The truth of a man filled with love, integrity, and human struggles.” Oh my, that’s convincing evidence of innocence of wrongdoing. I imagine she also endorses her grandfather for president, for what it’s worth.

    The three reporters who wrote the Post piece also spin the facts like whirling dervishes. They say that the report by Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley “rehashes” known details of the matter. They quote Democrats to say without evidence that the report’s key findings are “rooted in a known Russian disinformation effort.”

    The following passage in particular shows how one-sided the story is:

    “Democrats argue that Johnson has ‘repeatedly impugned’ Biden, and they pointed to his recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Biden’s ‘unfitness for office,’ as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to argue that the entire investigation was orchestrated as a smear campaign to benefit Trump.”

    Using the “shoe on the other foot” test, can you ever imagine a similar statement being made in the Washington Post about the Trump impeachment investigation? Let’s see. How would that go?

    “Republicans argue that Rep. Adam Schiff has ‘repeatedly impugned’ Trump, and they pointed to his recent comments hinting that the report would shed light on Trump’s ‘unfitness for office’ to argue that the entire investigation was orchestrated as a smear campaign to benefit Biden.”

    Oh yeah, sure! The chance of reading that paragraph in the Washington Post news pages would have been absolutely zero.

    Perhaps even more insidious was the decision by the editors to push the most significant news in the report to the bottom of the Post’s story. That is the lucrative relationship that Hunter Biden established in 2017 with a Chinese oil tycoon named Ye Jianming. Biden was apparently paid $1 million to represent Ye’s assistant while he was facing bribery charges in the United States.

    Even more disturbing, “In August 2017, a subsidiary of Ye’s company wired $5 million into the bank account of a U.S. company called Hudson West III, which over the next 13 months sent $4.79 million marked as consulting fees to Hunter Biden’s firm, the report said. Over the same period, Hunter Biden’s firm wired some $1.4 million to a firm associated with his uncle and aunt, James and Sara Biden, according to the report.”

    Then, in late 2017, “Hunter Biden and a financier associated with Ye also opened a line of credit for Hudson West III that authorized credit cards for Hunter Biden, James Biden and Sara Biden, according to the report, which says the Bidens used the credit cards to purchase more than $100,000 worth of items, including airline tickets and purchases at hotels and restaurants.”

    The Post also glossed over payments received by Hunter Biden from Yelena Baturina, who the story acknowledges “is the widow of former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and is a member of Kazakhstan’s political elite.” What the story doesn’t say is that the payments received by Hunter Biden’s companies while Joe Biden was vice president totaled close to $4 million. Does anyone have even the slightest curiosity why Hunter’s companies received these payments from a Russian oligarch? As Donald Trump Jr. noted, if he had the same record of taking money from foreign nationals, he “would be in jail right now.”

    In other words, the headline and the lede of the Washington Post story were entirely misleading. What readers should have been told is that there is a pattern of corruption and inexplicable enrichment in the Biden family that has continued for years and that Joe Biden has turned his back on it.

    Seems worthy of the attention of the voters who will determine the nation’s leadership for the next four years. So the most important question at the debate Tuesday night is the following: Will Chris Wallace take the same cowardly path as the Washington Post, or will he demand an answer from candidate Biden as to why influence peddling, conflicts of interest and virtual money laundering are acceptable?

    Based on Wallace’s track record, I’m not holding my breath that we will get either the question or the answer, but if we do, I will happily applaud him as the tough-as-nails journalist he is supposed to be.

  • "Supply Has Been Decimated": California Mask Shortage Has Worsened Due To Wildfire Smoke
    “Supply Has Been Decimated”: California Mask Shortage Has Worsened Due To Wildfire Smoke

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 20:40

    N95 masks were already in hot demand when wildfires on the West Coast started blanketing the entire coast with smoke. It seems that it isn’t just the pandemic that California is doing a poor job at managing – but also the state’s growing wildfire problem.

    The kicker is that both issues are spurring a massive demand for masks – and the state is having a shortage. 

    Now, West Coast residents like Lindsey Major, who is 25 and has asthma, are desperate to find N95 masks. “You can breathe, but it’s like something weighing on your chest. My lungs felt like they were full of wet bands,” she told Bloomberg. She was able to finally get one mask after posting desperately on a Facebook group. 

    The very same masks that are being recommended by the CDC to filter out Covid were “almost unfindable” as air quality on the West Coast deteriorated due to the wildfires. Supply has been “decimated”.

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    Major (Source: BBG)

    Now, with weeks to go in wildfire season, dozens of fires across California resulted in 3.7 million acres burning. Smoke from the fires has been pushed into major cities, resulting in orange skies – some photographs of which we posted days ago here. 

    Health departments have been urging citizens to stay inside as much as possible, despite the fact that most homes lack high grade air filters. 

    President Trump used the Defense Production Act back in April to force 3M to continue to make N95 masks. The company is predicting output of 95 million masks per month in October, which is up from 50 million in June. But officials from many states still claim they are having trouble purchasing PPE, including masks. 

    And emergency mask shipments “are hardly making it into the hands of the general public,” according to Bloomberg. Instead, many requests for masks are going directly to first responders and health-care workers. 

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    Jim Murphy is another West Coast resident who said he bought N95 masks back in January, but wound up giving them to relatives who were essential workers. 

    “If you’re like me, and you have a couple of dogs you need to take out for walks, you have no choice but to get outside. It would sure be nice to have something that would protect you from the smoke even for short periods of time,” he said.

    Aaron Bourne, the general manager at W.C. Winks Hardware in Portland, said he sold out of a shipment of 100 masks in less than 2 business days. 

    Joel Kaufman, a doctor and professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, concluded that the masks should be saved for emergency workers close to fires that have been fitted for them: “The people we worry most about — the people with chronic lung conditions – aren’t good candidates to wear these masks, because the masks increase the amount of work it takes to get air in and out. The folks who need it the most are, sort of, the least able to tolerate wearing them.”

  • The Disturbing Intersection Between Antifa, BLM, & Public-School Teachers
    The Disturbing Intersection Between Antifa, BLM, & Public-School Teachers

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 20:20

    Authored by Col. (Ret.) John Mills  via The Epoch Times,

    As violent protesters have begun to diminish for the time being in areas such as Portland, it is time to reflect upon exactly who is perpetrating the street violence in Portland and other places. Not only who these people are (we’ll get to that in a moment), but what is the trigger that is inciting these people to violence?

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    One key facilitator is intuitively obvious – it’s the mask. Anonymity gives a sense of boldness to lash out and behave in aggressive ways. The original psychological study that established this proclivity was the famous (or infamous) Stanford study from 1971. This study in many ways established the social phenom of mirrored sunglasses, both as fashion chic and also their popular association with authoritarianism.

    The takeaway from the study was that anonymity in many ways encourages behavior that most would not normally carry out. Updated studies in 2010 further validated the association of anonymity with aggressive and unkind acts, and, frankly, the beginnings of violent acts focused on self-gratification.

    So, when some insisted the citizens mask up, the first flammable element was established for civil disorder. The order was to mask up—and most everyone dutifully did. Some of the masks were of little medical value, but no one questioned that—anything was acceptable.

    In a first in modern human history, an entire populace now faced each other, masked-up. This was the first step toward chaos on the American street. Some didn’t realize the unintended consequences; some did and exploited this opportunity for the next step in manipulating society.

    Grievance and Narcissism

    The next combustible element put in the pile seemingly was George Floyd’s death. His death was sad and appeared initially to be solely police brutality—facts will be presented, and this will be dealt with in a court of law, that’s our process. However, violence, destruction, and chaos shortly spun out of control after May 25, 2020. It was far more than George Floyd. Many of the rioters were expressing sheer, unadulterated anger. But anger over what?

    To get to the core of this anger, one must understand the driving tenets of the psychology of those masked purveyors. The rainstorm of gibberish they are spewing can be boiled down to two things—grievance and narcissism.

    And where did they get this gibberish? This often idolized, but rarely understood character called Marx. Marx was a sloven, slothful, and sloppy scatterbrain who shook down rich friends for support while his family lived in abject poverty and filth. He thought big thoughts of grievance and narcissism while his family starved.

    The essence of his thought – it’s always someone else’s fault (grievance), and they need to hand over their wealth to support me (narcissism).

    Please read or re-read W. Cleon Skousen’s classic, “The Naked Communist” to understand this toxic and cancerous thought pattern. This is the same thought pattern that created the corrosive and destructive “1619” project that is an updated version of Marx’s thoughts.

    In conducting the forensics of our current social unrest, we have masks combined with grievance and narcissism. Now all the purveyors of hate and discontent need are the organization and structure to channel their hate and discontent.

    School Teachers and Librarians as Social Justice Warriors

    Having the organizational infrastructure in place, unionized K-12 teachers and staff are the perfect societal, organized group to take the combination of masks, grievance, and narcissism and operationalize it as the shock troops for taking down the American constitutional system. Rick Moran identified this in his 2017 piece, “Dozens of public school teachers involved in Antifa.” It was a clarion call that something was going on.

    The arrest reports from around the country have shown a high number of those arrested are part of the K-12 education system. Often times, arrests from Portland have reflected numbers north of 50 percent. Andy Ngo and others have done an excellent job of documenting this connection – often at great personal risk. The street thugs of Antifa and BLM seem to lose their “bravery” once the mask comes off and they are exposed.

    The Puppet Master: China

    Now we have all the ingredients. Masks. Grievance and narcissism. Organization and structure. Now all that is needed is some funding and encouragement. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under great pressure with a collapsing economy, rising pushback against belt and road initiatives, and an American President who has run over their plans like a bulldozer, has seized on this opportunity to de-stabilize America. It’s now a race to see who can collapse whose country first.

    Chinese agents have been handing out “walking around” money – the old school term that American CIA clandestine operations officers used with great operational effect in many foreign countries (Guatemala, Iran) and later in other countries (Chile).

    The CCP learned from us and funded the riots of 2020. TikTok enabled the tailored channeling and delivery of grievance and narcissism on a vast scale. The Chinese consulate in Houston was closed in particular for diplomatic officials being identified as enabling street violence.

    The FBI Director and Attorney General have now made China Job #1. The conduit of Chinese Communist money has been using the historical path of China and Hong Kong financial transactions to party officials and family members in Vancouver, BC and then converting the wired funds into cash to be snuck into the U.S. for several purposes such as real estate acquisitions.

    This CCP funding has been carried over the border into the United States as the walking around money paying Antifa and BLM leaders and street agitators. $250 for smashing windows for the night when the police let me go immediately with no charges? The positive return on investment is clear for all participants. Especially when masks are worn.

    The Clear Forensics

    Like forensics done on a fire, the chain of events and combination of combustible elements are clear. Masks. Grievance and Narcissism. School Teachers, staff, social workers and such. Foreign funding and meddling by the CCP. The fire forensics are clear on the root cause of violence by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in 2020. The violence has little to do with George Floyd. It’s an insatiable manifestation of grievance and narcissism that will never be satisfied. The answer: Reject the thesis of their argument.

    Do not quibble, do not try to rationalize with the mob – reject their thesis and aggressively deal with them – both citizens and all levels of government must lock shoulders and stand against the blind rage of the street mobbery. Once specific personalities are personally held liable for the death and destruction they create, the violence will rapidly go away.

    This is not just the masked actors – this includes the state and local leaders and politicians that act in a feckless, hapless matter. Fecklessness may not be a crime, but results count, so citizens, please hold these politicians and leaders responsible through recall petitions and new elections.

  • The Man Who Tried To Convert The "Vampire Squid" Into A "Lovable Teddy Bear" Is Leaving Goldman
    The Man Who Tried To Convert The “Vampire Squid” Into A “Lovable Teddy Bear” Is Leaving Goldman

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 20:00

    Five years ago, when Goldman made a historic pivot away from its prop and flow trading, investment banking and central banker incubating bread and butter, and into a consumer digital deposit and lending platform via “Marcus”, it prompted a lot of raised eyebrows across Wall Street and at Goldman Sachs itself, where the strategy shift “was initially met with cynicism from some of Goldman’s own investment bankers, who openly derided it.”

    Yet despite the snickers that Goldman was becoming a subprime lender to offset its declining capital markets dominance, Marcus plowed ahead with new offerings and partnerships, and got a lift from the industry’s deposit windfall this year. According to Bloomberg, it is on the cusp of generating $1 billion in annual revenue (which remains a small fraction of the bank’s tally of roughly $40 billion.

    Yet not everything appears to be going to plan at 200 West Street, because as Bloomberg reports, the banker who was instrumental in spawning and helping guide Goldman’s tentacular embrace of Main Street is giving up his post in a management shuffle at the consumer unit.

    Harit Talwar, who Bloomberg describes as “the face of Goldman’s five-year-old dive into mom-and-pop banking” is leaving the investment bank and Omer Ismail will take over as the new global consumer head.

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    Talwar joined Goldman in 2015, when former CEO Lloyd Blankfein first sketched out his plans for a new consumer-facing business line which now include an Apple co-branded credit card, a “high yield” deposit account (which pays a whopping 0.60% in interest), and a consumer lending division, all under the Marcus umbrella. The 59-year-old Talwar previously headed the US cards division for Discover Financial and spent 15 years at Citigroup with roles tied to cards, loans and retail banking.

    According to Bloomberg, he had to be coaxed into joining the Wall Street titan, initially unsure of Goldman’s commitment to a strategy pivot. He probably regrets his decision in retrospect.

    That said, Marcus continues to grow, albeit slowly (taking market share from other banks has proven difficult), which begs the question what may have prompted his departure? One possible answer is that Talwar pitched the online offering as a “lovable teddy bear,” in contrast to the “vampire squid” moniker the firm got stuck with courtesy of Matt Taibbi immediately following the financial crisis.

    Under Talwar, Goldman tried to develop a reputation for its consumer business distinct from the one earned by its traditional dealings in high finance which are – shall we say – unsavory, including using a brand that tries to remove the Goldman association (the Marcus name was a nod to Marcus Goldman, a German immigrant who founded the firm in 1869).

    Joking aside, what may have done Talwar in appears to be the oldest reason in the book: egos. As Bloomberg notes, some executives expected the consumer business to grow as a separate division that would express Goldman’s devotion to what it called a startup inside a 150-year-old firm. “But CEO David Solomon sprung a surprise on the operation earlier this year when he folded the consumer unit into the group that also includes wealth and asset management, clipping its standing as an independent business line.”

  • Here Are 4 Potential Hotspots Where The Next World War Could Erupt At Any Time
    Here Are 4 Potential Hotspots Where The Next World War Could Erupt At Any Time

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 19:40

    Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

    If 2020 had a slogan, it would be “The Year Of Our Discontent.” This sentiment is felt in virtually every country globally as national governments declare war on their economy, the working class, the poor, and the very old and the very young. In America, the “discontent” is genuine.

    Already reeling from a mass propaganda campaign of division created by the MSM corporate outlets, Americans were still attempting to claw their way out of an economic depression with some success.

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    Then, of course, came COVID.

    China engaged in a massive police state repression of what few individual liberties existed, locking residents in their apartment buildings, disappearing doctors, and, allegedly, patients themselves. Australia and Western Europe joined in the hysteria, with Australia attempting to become as totalitarian as the Chinese and mainly succeeding.

    Western Europe engaged in the biggest propaganda campaign since the war in Iraq and the United States. Locked in some media manipulated struggle, Western Europe saw its governments shut down their economies, deploy National Guard troops, enforce lockdowns, and wear masks for their states’ populations.

    As a result of the implementation of Communo-Fascism, the world’s economy tanked, shrank, and may never come back as long as these governments and “leaders” remain in power.

    In America, however, amid the economic collapse and COVID hysteria, a new threat has emerged.

    Almost every major city in America is experiencing violence on a nightly basis. Riots, physical assaults, vandalism, and street clashes are becoming ordinary. Some conflicts are deadly as the “right” begins to fight back against the attacks of the “left.” We’re seeing armed conflict in our streets on an increasingly regular basis.

    For those living in America, the civil war, societal disruption, and chaos sowed overseas for so many years appear to be germinating back home.

    In other words, the empire appears to be collapsing as they all inevitably do.

    But, when empires collapse, they often leave a vacuum. At the very least, they present opportunities to other powers and, especially, other empires.

    In addition to America’s problems at home, it appears the entire world might be sleepwalking into a third World War and yet another “restructuring” of the world order. Seemingly localized incidents have an international and global root, and the reverberations will be felt across the entire planet.

    While most people alive today might believe that the first World War was a direct result of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the truth is somebody laid the groundwork for that war years prior. Indeed, even after the assassination, the sparks did not immediately fly. As Historian Christopher Clark wrote, the world was “sleepwalking” into one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th Century.

    It took over a month before the first shots of the war were truly fired after the assassination. In the meantime, the world’s population carried on as it had prior – going to work, going to school, engaging in business, etc. Politicians crowed about national dignity and others about retribution. In a sense, once the initial shock of the assassination had worn off, life continued as usual until it didn’t.

    It is now entirely possible that we find ourselves in just the same type of situation.

    While the world’s people are focused on a virus and America teeters on the brink of a civil war, the world’s governments are positioning themselves for a global conflagration, the likes of which we have never seen if for no other reason that the existence and proliferation of nuclear weapons.

    Below are just a few examples of the world’s current hotspots that could, at any moment, drag the entire globe into a military confrontation.

    Armenia | Azerbaijan

    The Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict continues apace. Both sides have fired at one another repeatedly over the past few years. On Sunday, however, the situation erupted and an official state of war was declared in the region.

    Zero Hedge reports:

    “Early in the morning, around 7 a.m. the Azerbaijani forces launched a large-scale aggression, including missile attacks…” Armenia’s Defense Ministry stated Sunday. Armenia has since reportedly declared martial law and a “total military mobilization” in what looks to be the most serious escalation between the two countries in years.

    Air and artillery attacks from both sides ramped up, with each side blaming the other for the start of hostilities, while international powers urge calm. Crucially, civilians have already been killed on either side by indiscriminate shelling. At least a dozen soldiers on either side have also been reported killed.

    Armenia’s high command has ordered all troops throughout the country to muster and report to their bases: “I invite the soldiers appointed in the forces to appear before their military commissions in the regions,” a statement said. (source)

    While previously avoiding large-scale military clashes, there is potential to bring in much more significant players – Russia and Turkey and NATO itself- as both nations are acting as patrons and weapons suppliers to the Armenians Azeris. Read the article, “Regional Conflict Brewing In Azerbaijan, Armenia,” to get a clear understanding of the conflict taking place.

    United States | Russia

    Although things might not appear as dangerous today as they did during the time period of Obama’s “red lines” in Syria and the highest point of American provocation in Ukraine, 2020 has marked direct, albeit minuscule, skirmishes between Russians and Americans in Syria.

    Incidents of fistfights followed numerous Russian and American refusals to allow others to pass through checkpoints. American and Russian soldiers have intentionally run each other’s patrols off the road, resulting in injuries. It is now commonplace for these forces to collide in this manner, with one or the other being forced off the highway by a slightly more substantial contingent of opposing forces, complete with helicopters circling overhead.

    Even if the Russian and American militaries’ strategy is to “let boys be boys,” how long will it be before those boys decide to fire on one another?

    Of course, there is a second front where the United States and Russia could potentially find themselves in a military conflict, one even more dangerous than Syria. After all, Ukraine is on the border of Russia and, for that reason, an immensely more important region. Russia maintains a covert force in Eastern Ukraine.

    In contrast, the United States maintains troops in Western Ukraine, and shelling still occurs regularly between the Western and Eastern sides. Any major incident between the two would have cataclysmic repercussions for the world. While Russia might not go all the way to defend Syria, it will absolutely do so in Ukraine.

    China | India | South East Asia | Japan | United States

    While analysts seem divided on China’s question – some argue China is a victim of US imperialism, while others see it as the root of all evil – the truth is somewhere in between.

    China and the US are unquestionably at odds with one another. However, China is every bit as much an empire as the United States, and it is much more adept at playing the long game.

    However, recently, as the Trump administration in the United States begins calling out unfair trade practices, WTO favoritism, and Free Trade policies and attempting to bring jobs back to the United States from Chinese sweatshops, China has responded more traditionally.

    From retaliatory and targeted tariffs (fair enough) to alleged cyber attacks, China is responding. However, the Chinese response has come in the form of traditional military tactics and preparing for “unrestricted warfare” with the United States. In other words, war with no rules.

    But China has also increased its aggression against its Asian neighbors in the east, most notably Japan and Vietnam. Chinese friction with Japan is perhaps the most well known, and it centers around the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu in China). Also, China is attempting to extend its borders in the South China Sea by creating artificial islands to stretch its maritime claims.

    Japan is now openly preparing for war with China, having changed its Constitution to allow its army to operate overseas and begin planning stages for a defensive strategy of offense.

    Its tensions with Vietnam and the Philippines also stem from a desire to impose its empirical desires upon those sovereign governments generally within the orbit of the United States.

    Taiwan has always been a sore spot with China, with PROC maintaining that it’s the ultimate goal is “liberation” and return of Taiwan to mainland China. However, recently, China has become even bolder in its claims, threatening imminent war to reclaim Taiwan.

    Greece | Turkey

    Greek and Turkish relations have always been tense. Yet, Western audiences persist in believing they are outside of history and that any Euro-Med country is beyond the point of starting pointless wars.

    However, Turkey’s moves in the Mediterranean in 2019 (signing a maritime treaty with Libya involving Greek waters and islands without informing Greece) and attempting to explore for gas and oil in Greek territorial waters have led to several face-offs between the two countries, including some alleged and unconfirmed clashes between naval and coast guard forces.

    A war between Turkey and Greece would necessarily involve the rest of Europe, as evidenced by the fact that France has already sent token air support to the region to deter Turkey.

    Of course, Germany’s close relationship to Turkey may not put it on the side of Europe and possibly raise tensions between France and Germany if the conflict goes too far. Europe may very well find itself in yet another inter-European quagmire with the wildcards of NATO, US, Russia, and the ironically capitalistic Chinese waiting in the wings.

    Conclusion

    This is by no means an exhaustive list of conflicts shaping up around the world. It is merely a glimpse into some of the more significant possibilities that might launch this planet into a repeat of 1914 when the modern world was sleepwalking into the greatest catastrophe it had yet to see.

    We can no longer afford to continue sleepwalking. Like the first World War, a new world will undoubtedly rise out of the ashes. But these ashes will be nuclear, and the world will be far different from the one in 1919.

    The building blocks for that world are already in place, but that is a topic for another article.

  • China Has Purchased Less Than One-Third Of Goods It Promised Under Phase One Deal 
    China Has Purchased Less Than One-Third Of Goods It Promised Under Phase One Deal 

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 19:20

    President Trump has touted his “historic” US-China trade agreement as a boon for America’s farmers. Still, a little more than eight months have passed since the deal was signed, and Beijing has purchased less than one-third of the US exports it said it would buy this year under the agreement. 

    A summary of China’s monthly purchases of US goods covered by the deal, derived from Chinese customs (China’s imports) and the US Census Bureau (US exports) data, presented by Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), shows China’s year-to-date total imports of covered US goods (as of August) were $56 billion, versus the prorated year-to-date target of $115.1 billion.

    What this means for the prorated year-to-date target as of last month is that China is about 48% below the levels it needs to fulfill the trade deal this year. As for the full-year target of $172.7 billion, well, China has only purchased less than a third. 

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    Here is PIIE’s breakdown of China’s imports by product type, showing Beijing is severely behind in purchases of agriculture, manufactured goods, and energy products. 

    Covered Agriculture Products

    For covered agricultural products, China committed to an additional $12.5 billion of purchases in 2020 above 2017 levels, implying an annual target of $36.6 billion (Chinese imports, panel b) and $33.4 billion (US exports, panel c). Through August 2020, China’s imports of covered agricultural products were $11.0 billion, compared with a year-to-date target of $24.4 billion. Over the same period, US exports of covered agricultural products were $9.6 billion, compared with a year-to date target of $22.3 billion. Through the first eight months of 2020, China’s purchases were thus only at 43 percent (US exports) or 45 percent (Chinese imports) of their year-to-date targets.

    Covered Manufactured Products

    For covered manufactured products, China committed to an additional $32.9 billion of purchases in 2020 above 2017 levels, implying an annual target of $110.8 billion (Chinese imports) and $83.1 billion (US exports). Through August 2020, China’s imports of covered manufactured products were $41.5 billion, compared with a year-to-date target of $73.9 billion. Over the same period, US exports of covered manufactured products were $33.2 billion, compared with a year-to-date target of $55.4 billion. Through the first eight months of 2020, China’s purchases were thus only at 60 percent (US exports) or 56 percent (Chinese imports) of their year-to-date targets.

    Covered Energy Products

    For covered energy products, China committed to an additional $18.5 billion of purchases in 2020 above 2017 levels, implying an annual target of $25.3 billion (Chinese imports) and $26.1 billion (US exports). Through August 2020, China’s imports of covered energy products were $3.5 billion, compared with a year-to-date target of $16.9 billion. Over the same period, US exports of covered energy products were $4.8 billion, compared with a year-to-date target of $17.4 billion. Through the first eight months of 2020, China’s purchases were thus only at 27 percent (US exports) or 21 percent (Chinese imports) of their year-to-date targets.

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    Despite the lack of purchases, Trump continues to tell farmers the deal is “fully intact.” Nevertheless, increased friction between both countries over coronavirus, technology transfers, and Taiwan have erupted this year, making it less likely for Beijing to fulfill its phase one obligations as it has gone elsewhere.  

    A new development that could weigh on US purchases is that China appears to be urging domestic companies to limit imports of foods from countries where the virus pandemic continues to rage. 

    Readers should be asking one simple question: Why isn’t the Trump administration being held accountable for not enforcing their own trade deal?

  • Russia Was Trying To Hurt Trump? Impending Declassification To 'Flip Collusion Theory On Its Head': Solomon
    Russia Was Trying To Hurt Trump? Impending Declassification To ‘Flip Collusion Theory On Its Head’: Solomon

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 19:12

    New declassifications expected as soon as this week could flip the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory on its head, according to Just The News‘ John Solomon.

    According to multiple officials familiar with the planned declassification, “new evidence will raise the specter that Russian President Vladimir Putin was actually trying to hurt President Trump, not help his election in 2016, as the Obama administration claimed.”

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    The rumored release comes on the heels of revelations that former UK spy Christopher Steele’s primary dossier source was tied to Russian intelligence – suggesting that the Kremlin was in fact working with Trump’s enemies to harm his chances of winning the 2016 US election. And while the Mueller investigation found no ‘collusion’ between Trump and Russia, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsay Graham (R-SC) brought up the notion of Putin working against Trump.

    “Everything Russia-Trump was looked at. You had $25 million, 60 agents. You had subpoenas, you had people’s lives turned upside down,” Graham told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “The question is, ‘Did they look at Russia coming after Trump?'”?

    “We’ve got a Russian spy on the payroll of the Democratic Party putting together a document that details the FBI was not reliable,” he added.

    We recommend clicking into this tweet and reading the entire thing:

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

     As Solomon notes:

    The possibility that the FBI and CIA had reason to suspect Russia was trying to hurt Trump and help rival Hillary Clinton first emerged in a Just the News article last month that revealed a House Intelligence Committee secret report accused the U.S Intelligence Community Assessment of ignoring credible evidence that the Russians tried to help Clinton in 2016.

    “When I was briefed on the House Intelligence Committee report on the January 2017 ICA, I was told that John Brennan politicized this assessment by excluding credible intelligence that the Russians wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election and ordered weak intelligence included that Russia wanted Trump to win,” former CIA and National Security Council official Fred Fleitz told the outlet last month – which noted that Brennan was CIA director at the time.

    “I also was told that Brennan took both actions over the objections of CIA analysts. I am concerned about what happened to these analysts and worry that they may have been subjected to retaliation by CIA management,” Fleitz added. “These analysts are true whistleblowers, and they should come to the congressional intelligence committees to tell their stories and set the record straight on the ICA.”

    To that end, the impending document release will show that the intelligence community “cherry-picked pebbles of evidence” to help support the case that Russia was trying to help Trump win the 2016 election, when ‘there was similar evidence to the contrary.’

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Sep 28

Today’s News 28th September 2020

  • US Angrily Threatens To Close US Embassy In Baghdad After Near Daily Attacks
    US Angrily Threatens To Close US Embassy In Baghdad After Near Daily Attacks

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 02:45

    Following near daily attacks centered in and around Baghdad’s Green Zone where the sprawling US embassy is located as well as other multiple American and other international institutions, Washington has put the Iraqi government on notice over the breakdown in security, saying it could shutter the US embassy altogether. 

    The State Department is livid after repeat rocket and mortar attacks on the embassy, and has blamed a failure of Iraq’s security forces and of Iraq’s leaders to respond appropriately, also amid the intensified proxy war with Iran:

    In a new escalation, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Iraqi President Barham Saleh last week to deliver an ultimatum, Iraqi and foreign officials told AFP.

    Unless Iraq’s government puts an end to the rockets raining down on US military and diplomatic sites, Washington would shutter its embassy and recall its troops, the sources said.

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    Protests near the US Embassy in 2019, via AP.

    We doubt the majority of Iraqis will miss the American presence, given in recent years anti-American demonstrations have grown, demanding the end of US troop presence. 

    One unnamed Iraqi official said of this latest controversy: “The Americans aren’t just angry. They’re really, really, really angry,” according to AFP, while another noted, “The honeymoon is over.”

    The State Department has specifically faulted Baghdad’s inability to reign in its own unruly Shia militias which the US says serve as a proxy arm of Tehran.

    “Iran-backed groups launching rockets at our embassy are a danger not only to us, but to the Government of Iraq,” a US official said to AFP.

    US defense systems protecting the embassy have been increasingly active over the past two months:

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

    In mid-September, during a 48-hour period there were no less than four attacks on Western targets in Baghdad, including two direct attacks on the US embassy compound.

    Currently a Trump initiated US troops draw down is underway, taking America’s presence down to about 3,000 nationwide, or about one-third of prior levels. However, there are still hundreds of diplomatic personnel operating out of the Green Zone, not to mention many thousands of US private contractors throughout the country.

  • France: More Terrorism, More Silence
    France: More Terrorism, More Silence

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,

    On September 25, in Paris, two people were stabbed and seriously wounded outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 of the satirical magazine’s editors and cartoonists were murdered by extremist Muslims in 2015. The suspect, in police custody, is being investigated for terrorism.

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    The accused murderers in the 2015 attacks are currently on trial in Paris.

    Shortly before the knifing attack, on September 22, Charlie Hebdo‘s director of human resources, Marika Bret, did not come home. In fact, she no longer has a home. She was evicted after serious and concrete death threats from extremist Muslims. She decided to make her “exfiltration” public for French intelligence to alert the public to the threat of extremism in France.

    “I have lived under police protection for almost five years”, she told the weekly Le Point.

    “My security agents received specific and detailed threats. I had ten minutes to pack and leave the house. Ten minutes to give up a part of one’s life is a bit short and it was very violent. I will not go home. I am losing my home to outbursts of hatred, the hatred that always begins with the threat of instilling fear. We know how it can end”.

    Bret also claimed that the French Left abandoned the “battle for secularism“.

    From the start of the trial of the men accused of committing the murders at Charlie Hebdo in 2015 — and especially since the renewed publication of Mohammed cartoons — Charlie Hebdo has received threats of all kinds — including from al Qaeda. Security today at the satirical magazine is massive. “The address of our headquarters is secret, there are security gates everywhere, armored doors and windows, armed security agents, we can hardly get anyone in”, Bret said.

    Today, there are 85 policemen protecting Charlie‘s journalists.

    Bret has become another example of the clandestine nature of freedom of expression in France, the country of Voltaire. The first was Robert Redeker, a professor of philosophy. On September 17, 2006, he arose early to write an article for Le Figaro on Europe’s grappling with Islam. Three days later, he was in a safe house and on the run.

    Last January, Mila O., a 16-year-old French girl, made insulting comments about Islam during a livestream on Instagram.

    “During her livestream, a Muslim boy asked her out in the comments, but she turned him down because she is gay. He responded by accusing her of racism and calling her a ‘dirty lesbian’. In an angry follow-up video, streamed immediately after she was insulted, Mila responded by saying that she ‘hates religion'”.

    Mila continued, saying among other things:

    “Are you familiar with freedom of expression? I didn’t hesitate to say what I thought. I hate religion. The Koran is a religion of hatred; there is only hatred in it. That’s what I think. I say what I think… Islam is sh*t… I’m not a racist at all. One cannot simply be racist against a religion… I say what I want, I say what I think. Your religion is sh*t. I’d stick a finger up your god’s a**h*le…”

    After her school’s address was posted on social media, she was forced to leave and transfer to a different school, this time kept secret.

    The journalist Éric Zemmour was attacked several times outside his house; the French-Moroccan journalist Zineb el Rhazoui also found the address of her home published on social media.

    Meanwhile, to his credit, French President Emmanuel Macron has been defending Charlie Hebdo‘s right to freedom of expression. Blasphemy, he said, “is no crime.”

    “The law is clear: we have the right to blaspheme, to criticize, to caricature religions. The republican order is not a moral order… what is outlawed is to incite hatred and attack dignity.”

    A 2007 legal case ruled that “In France it is possible to insult a religion, its figures and its symbols … however, insulting those who follow a religion is outlawed.”

    The courageous words of the French authorities, however, seem harmless, pale and dull, compared to the strength of extremist violence and intimidation.

    Islamic fundamentalism has already managed to displace not only thousands of persecuted Christians — such as Asia Bibi, forced to flee for her life from Pakistan to Canada after she was acquitted of committing blasphemy. This brand of extremism has also managed to transform many European citizens into prisoners, people hiding in their own countries, sentenced to death and forced to live in houses unknown even to their friends and families. And we got used to it!

    On the day of Iran’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses, he and his wife, Marianne Wiggins, were taken from their home in North London by the British secret service, to the first of more than fifty “safe houses” in which the writer lived for the next ten years.

    The Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders — whose name, as the next to be murdered, was found on a sheet of paper knifed into the murdered filmmaker, Theo van Gogh — has been living in safe houses since 2004. “I am in jail,” he says, “and they are walking around free.”

    Ten years ago, a Seattle Weekly reporter, Molly Norris, in solidarity with the endangered makers of the television cartoon “South Park,” also drew a caricature of Mohammed. The last newspaper article that talked about her stated:

    “You may have noticed that the Molly Norris strip is not included in this week’s issue. That’s because there is no more Molly… on the advice of FBI security specialists, she will be moving and changing her name…”

    The Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, which first printed cartoons of Mohammed in 2005, gave up. The paper declined to republish the caricatures of the Prophet of Islam when Charlie Hebdo printed them again on its front page. The editor who published the cartoons at Jyllands Posten, Flemming Rose, is still escorted by bodyguards. “I really admire Charlie‘s courage,” he said.

    “Heroes who have not succumbed to threats or violence. Unfortunately, they received limited support. No publication in France or Europe behaves like Charlie. That is why I believe that in Europe there is an unwritten law against blasphemy. I am not criticizing the journalists and editors who make this choice. We cannot blame people who, unlike Charlie, do not put their lives in danger. But let us not be fooled: this lack of courage to follow in Charlie‘s footsteps comes at a price, we are losing freedom of speech and an insidious form of self-censorship is gaining ground”.

    In recent days, the new editor of Jyllands Posten, Jacob Nybroe, repeated:

    “We will not publish them anymore. I confirmed this editorial line when I arrived and received a lot of applause. I may look like a coward, but we cannot do it”.

    The names of Danish cartoonists appeared on the same “hit list” that Al Qaeda published with the name of Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in chief, Stéphane Charbonnier, murdered in the 2015 massacre. The Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is alive only because during a terror assault on his home, he hid.

    Today Jyllands Posten‘s headquarters has bulletproof windows, metal bars and slabs, barbed wire and video cameras. It sits opposite the port of Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, and is under surveillance day and night. Each automatic door, each elevator, requires a badge and a code. You enter it as if it were a bank vault. One door opens and after it closes, the next door opens. The journalists who work there enter one at a time. “To put it simply, freedom of speech is in bad shape around the world. Including in Denmark, France and throughout the West,” Rose said, “These are troubled times; people prefer order and security to freedom.”

    If all of us do not defend our freedoms, soon we will not have them anymore.

  • From Pistol-Dollar To Petro-Dollar To Pharma-Dollar…
    From Pistol-Dollar To Petro-Dollar To Pharma-Dollar…

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/28/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Dr. T.P.Wilkinson via GlobalResearch.ca,

    In 1973, the world economy was brought almost to a halt by a supposed shortage of oil. The ostensible trigger for this alleged shortage was the so-called Yom Kippur War in which the armed forces of the Anglo-American Empire’s settler-colonial offshore enterprise in Palestine, also known as the State of Israel, repelled the forces of Egypt and Syria, which had moved to reoccupy the territory stolen from them by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. One response to the Anglo-American Empire’s support of its client state against those states Israel wished to conquer was an oil embargo proclaimed by OPEC, with the largest producer– the autocratic Anglo-American protectorate Saudi Arabia at the lead.

    Portrayed in the mainstream Western media as a sign of Arab economic strength – also as anti-Semitism in some quarters – the embargo led to massive economic disruption in all the countries that had to import oil, mainly Europe and its former colonies.

    This embargo created the impression of a global oil shortage—which although there was none, could not be overcome without violating the power of the oil cartel. While the OPEC embargo formally restricted the sale of crude oil to Israel’s sponsors, there was no real oil shortage since oil supplies to Europe and the US have always been in the hands of the majors (now super-majors), then known as the “seven sisters”. OPEC’s announcement of an embargo at the well had no impact on the enormous upstream reserves held by the mainly American majors. However it did provide the pretext for massive price increases at the pump– presented as shortage-induced.

    Unnoticed except in the aftermath and ignored generally in popular debate or historical literature was the far more insidious deal made secretly while everyone from Bonn to Boston and Lyon to Los Angeles was queuing for petrol or the dole.

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    In 1971 Richard Nixon had announced that the US dollar would no longer be redeemable for gold – at any price. This decision had been largely induced by the enormous debt incurred funding the US war against Vietnam. In the course of this fateful decision, secret negotiations were undertaken with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which led to an agreement that Saudi Arabia and OPEC would not sell oil in any currency except US dollars.

    The oil crisis pushed the price of oil to such heights that many countries in Europe and especially the newly independent countries, soon exhausted their foreign exchange reserves and were compelled to borrow US dollars to pay for oil imports. The result was a boom for the US regime, e.g. oil and banking – not its ordinary citizens – as the demand for US currency led to an inflow of foreign exchange and an overall improvement in its current accounts. Meanwhile the US Treasury could literally print dollars to buy oil– when the time was right.

    Even today this story is told in a way to cast aspersions on the Arab states– although all the major oil-producing Arab states involved were and are entirely dependent upon the Anglo-American Empire and its military force for their very survival. It is a false parable used to exaggerate the innocence or helplessness of the settler-colonial state “surrounded” by “ragheads” instead of “redskins” who have all the oil, while poor Israel only has atomic bombs and the biggest foreign aid subsidy per capita of any country the US funds.

    Why do I take the trouble here to recount history, which is or ought to be well known– at least to the historically literate?

    It is worth recalling here that the Seven Sisters, as they were then called, are actually fewer now due to mergers. The upstream oil industry is still dominated by the Standard Oil companies (yes, Rockefeller, i.e. ExxonMobil) and their allies as well as the Rothschild-Nobel companies. Together they assure that oil prices and distribution are closely controlled– if not absolutely– and that the commerce in oil is billed in the leading currency of the Empire, the US dollar.

    The Anglo-American Empire, amazingly similar in composition to the dream of Cecil Rhodes and his personal banker Lord Rothschild, relies not only on oil and the financial transactions connected with it.

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    There are two other major businesses that support the value of lead currencies, like the USD, GBP or even the EUR. They are war– and hence both legal and illegal arms sales– and drugs, both licit and illicit. All three “markets” are entirely controlled by cartels and state regulation. Moreover they provide windfall profits because they are all addictive and toxic. That means the traders get money and the buyers get garbage.

    Stemming from the 19th century Opium Wars, Great Britain became the biggest dope pusher in the world. The opium trade made the British East India Company shareholders and those who traded with and for it wealthy beyond compare. While the US American schoolchild may learn about the Boston Tea Party, in which a few ruffians dumped British East India Tea into the harbour as a protest against taxation like the Townshend Acts[6], they won’t learn that proud New England families not only funded the Ivy League colleges with slave trading but with the income from opium business.

    It is essential to recall that every crime is simply the unauthorised version of an activity otherwise deemed legal. The difference between marriage with dowry and prostitution is simply the statute book. The difference between war and murder is the sovereign authorisation. Seagram (Bronfman) produced whiskey in Canada that was legal and sold it more profitably in the US during Prohibition where it was illegal. The leading pharmaceutical companies are the brothers of the heroine, cocaine and synthetics pushers. And between all these folks who are all just merchants, there is the State– the armed bureaucracy that regulates these businesses in accordance with the most powerful to permit each side of these businesses to extract the maximum profit– yes, from us.

    That said, as I have written in previous articles, the question of history arises not from the need to find the “true past” but to answer questions in the present. It is the most urgent present question with which I have been preoccupied for the past six months. Why in a global system dominated by the religious ideology of Business and the absolute priority of “the economy” have we seen the leading authorities, autocratic and bureaucratic, suspend the “economy” and disregard Business because of a new, improved version of the seasonal influenza? There are rational and irrational explanations. That is because power may be understood rationally but those who hold and exercise it are often– if not always clinically insane (it is just because they own the clinics and the doctors that no one can utter this diagnosis!).

    Again I want to remind the impatient reader– who implicitly strains my patience by not reading or remembering anything longer than the last Facebook or Instagram post– that all meaningful organisational decisions are made in secret by those who have the most power in the organisation– whether it is the classroom in which you send your child to be bullied (or bully) or the workplace you freely attend to earn money to pay the bank for the privilege of living in whatever house they let you buy. If you work in a big enough company or institution your boss and the bank know what your credit future will be like before you do. But never mind this bit of mundane reality. The point is simply nothing of any importance is ever decided in public where you have anything to say about it.

    Having gotten that embarrassing sentimentality out of the way, let us consider what has happened since March 2020.

    The Pandemic

    Following events in China, the OPEC of the pharmaceutical cartel, aka the World Health Organisation (in an earlier article I also wrote that “witch-hunting” is also part of their job), performed some international bureaucratic gymnastics – like several years ago with the so-called “swine flu” – to declare a high grade pandemic phase alert (see table).

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    This decision was presented as some kind of service to public health — this euphemism is deliberately conflated with concern for the wellbeing of ordinary humans, but is nothing of the sort. To make this quite clear: most genuine public health issues arise from poor nutrition, vile working conditions, polluted air, water and food, and poverty. None of these “pathogens” is part of the WHO brief. The World Health Organisation was established solely to market Western medical products worldwide and at the most profitable rates possible. This means among other things by arranging that poor countries devote precious foreign exchange for the purchase of bulk pharmaceuticals of dubious value under the pretext of being able to treat their indigent populations for illnesses that are almost entirely due to poor nutrition, vile working conditions, polluted air, water and food and poverty. Long before the Bush-Clinton clique promoted “humanitarian interventionism”, the WHO was poisoning the poor for humanitarian purposes (also known as eugenics).

    N.B. anyone who has not grasped the consequences of the US regime’s ownership of the UN and its agencies should read the story of the UN in Korea and in the Congo for a start.

    But I am digressing if only slightly. OPEC has never included all the oil producing countries and it was only effective as a cartel because it had the deep if covert collaboration of the Anglo-American oil majors. Without the pumps– wholly controlled upstream by either Rockefeller or Rothschild/ Nobel– Saudi oil would have been worthless. While we all imagine that oil is what drives our cars and heats our homes that is in fact a relatively minor and expendable part of the oil economy. Upstream the truly lucrative oil flows into petrochemicals, e.g. plastics, fertilizers, and– guess what, pharmaceuticals! Indeed the oil business, which started with “snake oil”, has never left it. Petroleum, that stuff that sticks to duck feathers and suffocates fish is the same gooey slime that forms the basis of much of the medicine you take. Think about it a minute: Monsanto (now part of IG Farben legacy, Bayer AG) started as a poison producer when the US Army panicked about a potential natural sugar shortage during the Great War and gave John Francis Queeny the inspiration to sell the US Government coal tar as a sweetener. Some readers may recall when saccharine was finally prohibited. However it had been identified as a carcinogen already in the 1920s!

    Pharmaceuticals– until the dawn of genetic manipulation, a largely petrochemical or opiate driven product stream– is an integral part of the triad that drives modern capitalism: drugs, oil and guns. The oil industry is tightly held; mainly by two dynastic groups. And surprise, surprise the drug industry is too– the successors to the Anglo-American opium trade dominate the licit pharmaceuticals side and the illicit opium-based and cocaine drug trade. Since these businesses cannot be regulated in boardrooms alone, more than occasional persuasion is needed. So guns are just as important. But the gun trade is a topic for another day.

    So what happened in March, really? My previous observations and summaries have not yet been rebutted. Nonetheless I do believe that beyond the obvious manifestations of the West’s confrontation with China, aside from the hyper-policing regime that is being created, there is a useful analogy which is perhaps more powerful than the US regime’s destruction of the New York World Trade Center buildings. That act of armed propaganda by other government agencies was certainly powerful in expanding the police and military power of the degenerate US Empire. However, like the US war against Vietnam it has been extremely expensive. All the president’s accountants and all the president’s lawyers have not been able to put Humpty Dumpty (at least not his bank account) together again.

    So like those who tried to command Richard Nixon– and finally deposed him– the ruling class of the Anglo-American Empire is determined to eliminate another “Nixon” outsider (although Nixon always thought he really “belonged”) and restore order. Nixon, like the reigning POTUS, enjoyed wide popular support. However he had lost the support of the Establishment (which has come to be called the “Deep State” so as to imply that there is no Establishment or to lend its overt members legitimacy while denying the means by which it actually exercises power). Nixon actually saved the Establishment but it did not want to be saved by an outsider. It did not want to anyone outside its own exclusive circle. So a pretext was found– and he was dismissed. He knew that the alternative was a “Kennedy solution”.

    The present POTUS has been trying to save the US regime from the antagonism of those it has abused both domestically and foreign. He has tried to harness the latent populism– what too many people confuse with “Left”– and channel it back into that revival tent in a way no Oreo Obama could have done– despite his Kennedy plagiarism.

    But that is all really a sideshow for the financial disaster that the Reagan-Bush-Clinton dynasty (and its obscene scions in Britain and Germany) left the dying Anglo-American Empire. Nixon presided over the clever back channel negotiations to open China, bring Pepsi to the Soviet Union and save the USD by linking it to oil. Everything indicates that Trump has no clue of any of this– and no one is going to tell him either.

    But the USD domination is under attack from all sides, by the weak and the strong. The Empire has been losing its wars but paying its bankers trillions and trillions for that privilege – beyond the capacity of anything the Empire can produce. Without a reinforced US dollar no one in the Empire can imagine the future.

    So hark, the sneeze heard around the world.

    The WHO assumed the role OPEC played in 1973. It declared a global pandemic under the most spurious conditions with the full knowledge that this would not only permit a shutdown of the economy (for political and economic benefits I have detailed elsewhere) but to create something only logical– the Pharmadollar. To keep it poetic, we now have the three P’s of global monetary domination: pistol dollar, followed by the petrodollar and now the pharma-dollar.

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    An emerging and potentially infinite demand for pharmaceuticals – legal or illegal – safe or unsafe – will offer the Western pharmaceutical cartels untold and unlimited profits and because these are all countries working in the USD / EUR markets, together with the WHO will be guaranteed potentially unlimited profit streams. So from the first circle of hell we descend into the second circle. Can we get any closer to damnation?

  • Video Shows 'Black Mirror'-Like Robot Dog Patrolling "Da Street!!!" 
    Video Shows ‘Black Mirror’-Like Robot Dog Patrolling “Da Street!!!” 

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 23:30

    A couple of Canadians were living in Charlie Brooker’s dystopian science fiction television series called Black Mirror on Thursday (Sept. 24) when a Boston Dynamics robot ‘dog’ came walking down the street. 

    The whole encounter was caught on video by Canadian Twitter user @bIoodtear. The 18-second video was straight from the Black Mirror episode titled “Metalhead,” where a four-legged robotic dog started killing people. However, there was no gore in this encounter; the Boston Dynamics’ robot was walking down the sidewalk, turned, and looked at the camera, then went on its way.

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

    Here’s the video: 

    A techno dystopian world is closer than you think – just wait until governments deploy fleets of these robots to surveil people.

    Oh wait, it has already happened: “‘Skynet’-Like Robot Dog Patrols Singapore’s Parks To Ensure Humans Are Social Distancing” 

  • The Most & Least Expensive US Cities For Cannabis Amid COVID-19
    The Most & Least Expensive US Cities For Cannabis Amid COVID-19

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 23:00

    Via Priceonomics.com,

    With the coronavirus pandemic and related shutdown, 2020 was the year that many Americas discovered delivery services for their essentials. E-commerce, grocery delivery, and food delivery have all seen ​unprecedented growth ​in usage this year.

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    For cannabis consumers, delivery has long been a popular service, but coronavirus has made this method more important than ever. In an era where cannabis distribution has been ​deemed an “essential service” by most local governments, marijuana sales have skyrocketed.

    At Wikileaf, we help consumers track the prices of cannabis through delivery services and dispensaries across America. Using our data, we thought we’d analyze which cities had the highest priced cannabis sold through their delivery services and how that compared to dispensary prices.

    Among the cities we track, we found that San Francisco, CA had the most expensive cannabis in the nation at $47.37 per eighth of an ounce. In contrast, Salem, OR had the least expensive cannabis at $28.24 per eighth.

    In some cities you pay a premium for the convenience of cannabis delivery compared to picking it up yourself at the dispensary. At other cities, however, dispensary costs are significantly higher than delivery, perhaps accounting for the real estate and staffing costs associated with running a physical location.

    Before diving into the results, let’s spend a moment reviewing the dataset and methodology. For this analysis, we looked at the average price of an eighth of an ounce of cannabis during August 2020 in 13 large cities in the United States where we track prices. Average prices are segmented by delivery versus dispensary.

    The chart below shows the average price of an eighth of an ounce of cannabis in each of the thirteen cities we examined, sorted from most to least expensive:

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    Source: Wikileaf

    San Francisco, a city that often ranks at the top of various “most expensive lists” has the most expensive cannabis delivery prices of any city we track. An eight of an ounce of cannabis delivered in San Francisco is almost $20 more expensive than in Salem, OR the least expensive city in our rankings. The second most expensive city in the rankings is Ann Arbor, Michigan a college town that is home to the University of Michigan. Rounding out the top three is Las Vegas, the destination catering to famously price-insensitive tourists.

    Two of the least expensive cities for cannabis delivery are located in Oregon. Consumers in both Portland and Salem benefit from the ​large supply of cannabis growers ​in the state which keeps prices down.

    Next, let’s look at the price of an eighth of an ounce of cannabis at dispensaries. The chart below shows the same sample of cities ranked from most to least expensive brick and mortar prices:

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    Source: Wikileaf

    The three most expensive cities for buying cannabis in dispensaries are also the same ones that are most expensive for delivery, just in slightly different order. Ann Arbor, Michigan is the most expensive place to purchase cannabis at a dispensary, followed by Las Vegas and San Francisco.

    All three of the least expensive cities for purchasing cannabis are located in Oregon. The state’s high supply of marijuana growers contributes to affordable prices for both dispensary and delivery consumers. The level of supply and low prices can make it ​challenging to run a cannabis business ​in the state, but benefits consumers.

    Lastly, let’s look at whether there is any “delivery premium” for having cannabis delivered to you rather than going to the dispensary on your own. The following chart shows a comparison of dispensary versus deliver prices, sorted by cities that have the highest delivery premium.

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    Source: Wikileaf

    By a significant margin, consumers in Phoenix, Arizona pay the highest premium for delivery. An eighth of an ounce of cannabis costs $9.22 more via delivery than at a dispensary in Phoenix, more than two dollars higher than Oakland, CA, the city with the second highest delivery premium. Detroit and Los Angeles standout as cities where it’s significantly cheaper to purchase cannabis via delivery than at a dispensary. For most cities, the price of cannabis is comparable between dispensaries and deliveries.

    During the pandemic, delivery services have become essential and cannabis delivery is no different. In this article, we’ve shown that San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Las Vegas have the most expensive cannabis delivery in the cities we track. However, these cities also tend to have high prices for cannabis in general, including at dispensaries.

    For others, going to the dispensary and marveling at the selection may be the preferred method of purchase. In some cities like Phoenix and Oakland, you can save quite a bit of money by shopping on your own at dispensaries rather than opting for deliveries. However, for most cities, the prices of delivery and dispensaries are comparable and consumers can opt for whichever option they prefer.

  • Colorado Encourages Dead People, Non-Citizens To Vote
    Colorado Encourages Dead People, Non-Citizens To Vote

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 22:30

    The Colorado Secretary of State is under fire after mailing postcards to dead people and non-citizens, urging them to go online and register to vote.

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    According to CBS4, at least a dozen people are confirmed as receiving the postcards who shouldn’t have – while the number of unconfirmed erroneous mailings is of course unknown.

    “Which sounds really nice except my mother has been dead four years and she hasn’t lived, voted, owned property, worked, or done anything other than visit Colorado since 1967,” said resident Karen Anderson – who opened her mail about a week ago and found one of the postcards addressed to her mother.

    Anderson wonders “how many went out that nobody called in about,” noting that the State of Colorado even issued her mother’s death certificate.

    CBS4 has learned of about a dozen people who received the postcards who shouldn’t have. They went to a deceased woman in Las Animas County, six migrant workers in Otero County, a Canadian in Douglas County, a man from Lebanon in Jefferson County, and a British citizen in Arapahoe County.

    Colorado Director of the Secretary of State’s elections division, Judd Choate, said the state goes to ‘great lengths’ to ensure the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls, however there are always mistakes. 

    “Colorado does virtually every single possible thing it can do reasonably to clean its voter rolls,” he said, adding that the list they use for the postcards is compiled by the National Electronic Registration Information System – which uses data from the DMV, national and state death records, voter rolls in other states, and change of address forms. He says his office then performs a second vetting.

    “Yes, it’s true that occasionally it will go to a person that it shouldn’t go to, someone who’s already registered or somebody that’s below the age of 18, but the vast, vast majority go to the people who are eligible and then many of them follow-up and become registered voters and they get their ballot in the mail and can vote in our election,” said Choate – who added that postcards were mailed to around 750,000 people, of which he expects maybe 10% to register.

    “You hear about them trying to register dead people but I never really thought I’d see it,” said Anderson.

  • Leaked Docs Expose Massive Syria Propaganda Operation Waged By Western Govt Contractors & Media
    Leaked Docs Expose Massive Syria Propaganda Operation Waged By Western Govt Contractors & Media

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 22:00

    Authored by Ben Norton via TheGrayZone.com,

    Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders, planted stories in media outlets from BBC to Al Jazeera, and ran a cadre of journalists. A trove of leaked documents exposes the propaganda network.

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    Leaked documents show how UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria’s political and armed opposition.

    Virtually every aspect of the Syrian opposition was cultivated and marketed by Western government-backed public relations firms, from their political narratives to their branding, from what they said to where they said it.

    The leaked files reveal how Western intelligence cutouts played the media like a fiddle, carefully crafting English- and Arabic-language media coverage of the war on Syria to churn out a constant stream of pro-opposition coverage.

    US and European contractors trained and advised Syrian opposition leaders at all levels, from young media activists to the heads of the parallel government-in-exile. These firms also organized interviews for Syrian opposition leaders on mainstream outlets such as BBC and the UK’s Channel 4.

    More than half of the stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained in a joint US-UK government program called Basma, which produced hundreds of Syrian opposition media activists.

    Western government PR firms not only influenced the way the media covered Syria, but as the leaked documents reveal, they produced their own propagandistic pseudo-news for broadcast on major TV networks in the Middle East, including BBC Arabic, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Orient TV.

    These UK-funded firms functioned as full-time PR flacks for the extremist-dominated Syrian armed opposition. One contractor, called InCoStrat, said it was in constant contact with a network of more than 1,600 international journalists and “influencers,” and used them to push pro-opposition talking points.

    Another Western government contractor, ARK, crafted a strategy to “re-brand” Syria’s Salafi-jihadist armed opposition by “softening its image.” ARK boasted that it provided opposition propaganda that “aired almost every day on” major Arabic-language TV networks.

    Virtually every major Western corporate media outlet was influenced by the UK government-funded disinformation campaign exposed in the trove of leaked documents, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, CNN to The Guardian, the BBC to Buzzfeed.

    The files confirm reporting by journalists including The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal on the role of ARK, the US-UK government contractor, in popularizing the White Helmets in Western media. ARK ran the social media accounts of the White Helmets, and helped turn the Western-funded group into a key propaganda weapon of the Syrian opposition.

    The leaked documents consist mainly of material produced under the auspices of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. All of the firms named in the files were contracted by the British government, but many also were running “multi-donor projects” that received funding from the governments of the United States and other Western European countries.

    In addition to demonstrating the role these Western intelligence cutouts played in shaping media coverage, the documents shine light on the British government program to train and arm rebel groups in Syria.

    Other materials show how London and Western governments worked together to build a new police force in opposition-controlled areas.

    Many of these Western-backed opposition groups in Syria were extremist Salafi-jihadists. Some of the UK government contractors whose activities are exposed in these leaked documents were in effect supporting Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and its fanatical offshoots.

    The documents were obtained by a group calling itself Anonymous, and were published under a series of files entitled, “Op. HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] Trojan Horse: From Integrity Initiative To Covert Ops Around The Globe. Part 1: Taming Syria.” The unidentified leakers said they aim to “expose criminal activity of the UK’s FCO and secret services,” stating, “We declare war on the British neocolonialism!”

    The Grayzone was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents. However, the contents tracked closely with reporting on Western destabilization and propaganda operations in Syria by this outlet and many others.

    UK Foreign Office and military wage media war on Syria

    A leaked UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office report from 2014 reveals a joint operation with the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development to support “strategic communications, research, monitoring and evaluation and operational support to Syrian opposition entities.”

    The UK FOC stated clearly that this campaign consisted of “creating network linkages between political movements and media outlets,” by the “building of local independent media platforms.”

    The British government planned “Mentoring, training and coaching for enhanced delivery of media services, including digital and social media.”

    Its goal was “to provide PR and media handling trainers, as well as technical staff, such as cameramen, webmasters and interpreters,” along with the “production of speeches, press releases and other media communications.”

    An additional 2017 government document explains clearly how Britain funded the “selection, training, support and communications mentoring of Syrian activists who share the UK’s vision for a future Syria… and who will abide by a set of values that are consistent with UK policy.”

    This initiative entailed British government funding “to support Syrian grassroots media activism within both the civilian and armed opposition spheres,” and was targeted at Syrians living in both “extremist and moderate” opposition-held territory.

    In other words, the UK Foreign Office and military crafted plans to wage a comprehensive media war on Syria. To establish an infrastructure capable of managing the propaganda blitz, Britain paid a series of government contractors, including ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), Innovative Communication & Strategies (InCoStrat), and Albany.

    The work of these firms overlapped, and some collaborated in their projects to cultivate the Syrian opposition.

    Western government contractor ARK plays the media like the fiddle

    One of the main British government contractors behind the Syria regime-change scheme was called ARK (Analysis Research Knowledge).

    ARK FZC is based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. It brands itself as a humanitarian NGO, claiming it “was created in order to assist the most vulnerable,” by establishing a “social enterprise,  empowering local communities through the provision of agile and sustainable interventions to create greater stability, opportunity and hope for the future.”

    In reality ARK is an intelligence cutout that functions as an arm of Western interventionism.

    In a leaked document it filed with the British government, ARK said its “focus since 2012 has been delivering highly effective, politically-and conflict-sensitive Syria programming for the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Canada, Japan and the European Union.”

    ARK boasted of overseeing $66 million worth of contracts to support pro-opposition efforts in Syria.

    On its website, ARK lists all of these governments as clients, as well as the United Nations.

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    In its Syria operations, ARK worked together with another UK contractor called The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), which is directed by Richard Barrett, a former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6.

    ARK apparently had operatives on the ground inside Syria at the beginning of the regime-change attempt in 2011, reporting to the UK FCO that “ARK staff are in regular contact with activists and civil society actors whom they initially met during the outbreak of protests in spring 2011.”

    The UK contractor boasted an “extensive network of civil society and community actors that ARK has helped through a dedicated capacity building centre ARK established in Gaziantep,” a city in southern Turkey that has been a base of intelligence operations against the Syrian government.

    ARK played a central role in developing the foundations of the Syrian political opposition’s narrative. In one leaked document, the firm took credit for the “development of a core Syrian opposition narrative,” which was apparently crafted during a series of workshops with opposition leaders sponsored by the US and UK governments.

    ARK trained all levels of the Syrian opposition in communications, from “citizen journalism workshops with Syrian media activists, to working with senior members of the National Coalition to develop a core communications narrative.”

    The firm even oversaw the PR strategy for the Supreme Military Council (SMC), the leadership of the official armed wing of Syria’s opposition, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). ARK created a complex PR campaign to “provide a ‘re-branding’ of the SMC in order to distinguish itself from extremist armed opposition groups and to establish the image of a functioning, inclusive, disciplined and professional military body.”

    ARK admitted that it sought to whitewash Syria’s armed opposition, which had been largely dominated by Salafi-jihadists, by “Softening the FSA Image.”

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    ARK took the lead in developing a massive network of opposition media activists in Syria, and openly took credit for inspiring protests inside the country.

    In its training centers in Syria and southern Turkey, the Western government contractor reported, “More than 150 activists have been trained and equipped by ARK on topics from the basics of camera handling, lighting, and sound to producing reports, journalistic safety, online security, and ethical reporting.”

    The firm flooded Syria with opposition propaganda. In just six months, ARK reported that 668,600 of its print products were distributed inside Syria, including “posters, flyers, informative booklets, activity books and other campaign-related materials.”

    In one document spelling out the UK contractors’ communications operations in Syria, ARK and the British intelligence cutout TGSN boasted of overseeing the following media assets inside the country: 97 video stringers, 23 writers, 49 distributors, 23 photographers, 19 in-country trainers, eight training centers, three media offices, and 32 research officers.

    ARK emphasized that it had “well-established contacts” with some of the top media outlets in the world, naming Reuters, the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times, Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, Orient TV, and Al Arabiya.

    The UK contractor added, “ARK has provided regular branded and unbranded content to key pan-Arab and Syria-focused satellite TV channels such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, BBC Arabic, Orient TV, Aleppo Today, Souria al-Ghadd, and Souria al-Sha’ab since 2012.”

    “ARK products promoting HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) priorities by fostering attitudinal and behavioural change are broadcast almost every day on pan-Arab channels,” the firm bragged. “In 2014, 20 branded and un-branded Syria reports were produced on average by ARK each month and broadcast on major pan-Arab television channels such as Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, and Orient TV.”

    “ARK has almost daily conversations with channels and weekly meetings to engage and understand editorial preferences,” the Western intelligence cutout said.

    The firm also took credit for placing 10 articles per month in pan-Arab newspapers such as Al Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat.

    US-UK program Basma cultivates Syrian media activists

    The Syrian opposition media war was organized within the framework of a project called Basma. ARK worked with other Western government contractors through Basma in order to train Syrian opposition activists.

    With funding from both the US and UK governments, Basma developed into an enormously influential platform. Its Arabic Facebook page had over 500,000 followers, and on YouTube it built up a large following as well.

    Mainstream corporate media outlets misleadingly portrayed Basma as a “Syrian citizen journalism platform,” or a “civil society group working for a ‘liberatory, progressive transition to a new Syria.’” In reality it was a Western government astroturfing operation to cultivate opposition propagandists.

    Nine of the 16 stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained through the US/UK government’s Basma initiative, ARK boasted in a leaked document.

    In an earlier report for the UK FCO, filed just three years into its work, ARK claimed to have “trained over 1,400 beneficiaries representing over 210 beneficiary organisations in more than 130 workshops, and disbursed more than 53,000 individual pieces of equipment,” in a vast network that reached “into all of Syria’s 14 governorates,” which included both opposition- and government-held areas.

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    The Western contractor published a map highlighting its network of stringers and media activists and their relationships with the White Helmets as well as newly created police forces across opposition-controlled Syria.

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    In its trainings, ARK developed opposition spokespeople, taught them how to speak with the press, and then helped arrange interviews with mainstream Arabic- and English-language media outlets.

    ARK described its strategy “to identify credible, moderate civilian governance spokespeople who will be promoted as go-to interlocutors for regional and international media. They will echo key messages linked to the coordinated local campaigns across all media, with consortium platforms able to cover this messaging as well and encourage other outlets to pick it up.”

    In addition to working with the international press and cultivating opposition leaders, ARK helped develop a massive opposition media super-structure.

    ARK said it was a “key implementer of a multi-donor effort to develop a network of FM radio stations and community magazines inside Syria since 2012.” The contractor worked with 14 FM stations and 11 magazines inside Syria, including both Arabic- and Kurdish-language radio.

    To propagate opposition broadcasts across Syria, ARK designed what it called “Radio in a Box” (RIAB) kits in 2012. The firm took credit for providing equipment to 48 transmission sites.

    ARK also circulated up to 30,000 magazines per month. It reported that “ARK-supported magazines were the three most popular in Aleppo City; the most popular magazine in Homs City; and the most popular magazine in Qamishli.”

    A Syrian opposition propaganda outlet directly run by ARK, called Moubader, developed a huge following on social media, including more than 200,000 likes on Facebook. ARK printed 15,000 copies per month of a “high-quality hard copy” Moubader magazine and distributed it “across opposition-held areas of Syria.”

    The British contractor TGSN, which worked alongside ARK, developed its own outlet called the “Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office (RFS),” a leaked document shows. This confirms a 2016 report in The Grayzone by contributor Rania Khalek, who obtained emails showing how the UK government-backed RFS media office offered to pay one journalist a staggering $17,000 per month to produce propaganda for Syrian rebels.

    Another leaked record shows that in just one year, in 2018 – which was apparently the final year of ARK’s Syria program – the firm billed the UK government for a staggering 2.3 million British pounds.

    This enormous ARK propaganda operation was directed by Firas Budeiri, who had previously served as the Syria director for the UK-based international NGO Save the Children.

    40 percent of ARK’s Syria project team were Syrian citizens, and another 25 percent were Turkish. The firm said its Syria team staff had “extensive experience managing programmes and conducting research funded by many different governmental clients in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq and other conflict-affected states.”

    Western contractor ARK cultivates White Helmets “to keep Syria in the news”

    The Western contractor ARK was a central force in launching the White Helmets operation.

    The leaked documents show ARK ran the Twitter and Facebook pages of Syria Civil Defense, known more commonly as the White Helmets.

    ARK took credit for developing “an internationally-focused communications campaign designed to raise global awareness of the (White Helmets) teams and their life saving work.”

    ARK also facilitated communications between the White Helmets and The Syria Campaign, a PR firm run out of London and New York that helped popularize the White Helmets in the United States.

    It was apparently “following subsequent discussions with ARK and the teams” that The Syria Campaign “selected civil defence to front its campaign to keep Syria in the news,” the firm wrote in a report for the UK Foreign Office.

    “With ARK’s guidance, TSC (The Syria Campaign) also attended ARK’s civil defence training sessions to create media content for its #WhiteHelmets campaign which launched in August 2014 and has since gone viral,” the Western contractor added.

    In 2014, ARK produced a long-form documentary on the White Helmets, titled “Digging for Life,” which was repeatedly broadcast on Orient TV.

    While it was running the White Helmets’ social media accounts, ARK bragged that it was boosting followers and views on the Facebook page for Idlib City Council.

    The Syrian city of Idlib was taken over by al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, which then went on to publicly execute women who were accused of adultery.

    While effectively aiding these al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups, ARK and the British intelligence cutout TGSN also signed a document with the FCO hilariously pledging to follow “UK guidance on gender sensitivity” and “ensure gender is considered in all capacity building and campaign development.”

    Setting the stage for lawfare on Syria

    Another leaked document shows the Western government-backed firm ARK revealing that, back in 2011, it worked with another government contractor called Tsamota to help develop the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability (SCJA). In 2014, SCJA changed its name to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA).

    The Grayzone exposed CIJA as a Western government-funded regime-change organization whose investigators collaborated with al-Qaeda and its extremist allies in order to wage lawfare on the Syrian government.

    ARK noted that the project initially worked “with seed funding from the UK Conflict Pool to support investigative and forensic training for Syrian war crimes investigators” and has since “grown to become a major component of Syria’s transitional justice architecture.”

    Since the US, European Union, and their Middle East allies lost the military phase of their war on Syria, CIJA has taken the lead in trying to prolong the regime-change campaign through lawfare.

    InCoStrat creates media network, helps them interview al-Qaeda

    In the leaked documents, another UK government contractor called Innovative Communications Strategies (InCoStrat) boasted of building a massive “network of over 1600 journalists and key influencers with an interest in Syria.”

    InCoStrat stressed that it was “managing and delivering a multi donor project in support of UK Foreign Policy objectives” in Syria, “specifically providing strategic communication support to the moderate armed opposition.”

    Other funders of InCoStrat’s work with the opposition in Syria, the firm disclosed, included the US government, the United Arab Emirates, and anti-Assad Syrian businessmen.

    InCoStrat served as a liaison between its government clients and the Syrian National Coalition, the Western-backed parallel government that the opposition tried to create. InCoStrat advised senior leaders of this Syrian shadow regime, and even ran the National Coalition’s own media office from Istanbul, Turkey.

    The Western contractor took credit for organizing a 2014 BBC interview with Ahmad Jarba, the then-president of the opposition National Coalition.

    The firm added that “journalists have often reached out to us in search of the appropriate people for their programmes.” As an example, InCoStrat said it helped plant its own Syrian opposition activists in BBC Arabic reports. The firm then added, “Once making the initial connections we encouraged the Syrians to maintain the relationships with the journalists in the BBC instead of using ourselves as the conduit.”

    Like ARK, InCoStrat worked closely with the press. The firm said it had “extensive experience in engaging Arab and international news media,” adding that it worked directly with “heads of regional news in major satellite TV networks, press bureaus and print media.”

    “Key members of InCoStrat have previously worked as Middle East correspondents for some of the world’s largest news agencies including Reuters,” the Western contractor added.

    Also like ARK, InCoStrat established a vast media infrastructure. The firm set up Syrian opposition media offices in Dera’a, Syria; Istanbul and Reyhanli, Turkey; and Amman, Jordan.

    InCoStrat worked with 130 stringers across Syria, and said it had more than 120 reporters working inside the country, along with “an additional five official spokesmen who appear several times a week on international and regional TV.”

    InCoStrat also established eight FM radio stations and six community magazines across Syria.

    The firm reported that it penetrated the armed opposition by developing “strong relationships with 54 brigade commanders in Syria’s southern front,” that involved “daily, direct engagement with the commanders and their officers inside Syria,” as well as defected officers Free Syrian Army (FSA) units in government-held Damascus.

    In the leaked documents, InCoStrat boasted that its reporters organized interviews with many armed opposition militias, including the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.

    Don’t just plants media stories; “initiate an event” to create your own scandals

    In its media war on Damascus, InCoStrat pursued a two-pronged campaign that consisted of the following: “a) Guerrilla Campaign. Use the media to create the event. b) Guerrilla Tactics. Initiate an event to create the media effect.”

    The intelligence cutout therefore sought to use the media as a weapon to advance tangible political demands of the Syrian opposition.

    In one case, InCoStrat took credit for a successful international campaign to force the Syrian government to lift its siege of the extremist-held opposition stronghold of Homs. The Grayzone contributor Rania Khalek reported on the crisis in Homs, which was besieged by Damascus after the far-right Sunni fundamentalists that controlled it began carrying out sectarian massacres against religious minorities and kidnapping Alawite civilians.

    “We connected international journalists with Syrians living in besieged Homs,” InCoStrat explained. It organized an interview between Britain’s Channel 4 and a doctor in the city, which helped raise international attention, ultimately leading to an end to the siege.

    In another instance, the UK contractor said it “produced postcards, posters and reports” comparing the secular government of Bashar al-Assad to the fundamentalist Salafi-jihadists in ISIS. Then it “provided a credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson to engage the media.”

    The campaign was very successful, according to InCoStrat: Al-Jazeera America and The National published the firm’s propaganda posters. The British contractor also organized interviews on the topic with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian, The Times, Buzzfeed, Al-Jazeera, Suriya Al-Sham, and Orient.

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    After regime change comes Nation Building Inc.

    InCoStrat has apparently been involved in numerous Western-backed regime-change operations.

    In one leaked document, the firm said it helped to train civil society organizations in marketing, media, and communications in Afghanistan, Honduras, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. It even trained a team of anti-Saddam Hussein journalists inside Basra, Iraq after the joint US-UK invasion.

    In addition to contracting for the United Kingdom, InCoStrat disclosed that it has worked for the governments of the United States, Singapore, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark, and Libya.

    After NATO destroyed the Libyan state in a regime-change war in 2011, InCoStrat was brought in in 2012 to conduct similar communications work for the Libyan National Transitional Council, the Western-backed opposition that sought to take power.

    Coordinating with extremist militias, cooking news to “reinforce the core narrative”

    The leaked documents shed further light on a UK government contractor called Albany.

    Albany boasted that it “secured the participation of an extensive local network of over 55 stringers, reporters and videographers” to influence media narratives and advance UK foreign policy interests.

    The firm helped create an influential Syrian opposition media outfit called Enab Baladi. Founded in 2011 in the anti-Assad hub of Daraya, at the beginning of the war, Enab Baladi was aggressively marketed in the Western press as a grassroots Syrian media operation.

    In reality, Enab Baladi was the product of a British contractor that took responsibility for its evolution “from an amateur-run entity into one of the most prominent Syrian media organizations.”

    Albany also coordinated communications between opposition media outlets and extremist Islamist opposition groups by hiring an “engagement leader (who) has deep credibility with key groups including (north) Failaq ash-Sham, Jabha Shammiyeh, Jaysh Idleb al Hur, Ahrar ash-Sham, (center) Jaysh al Islam, Failaq al Rahman, and (south) Jaysh Tahrir.” Many of these militias were linked to al-Qaeda and are now recognized by the US Department of State and European governments as official terrorist groups.

    Unlike other Western government contractors active in Syria, which often tried to feign a semblance of balance, Albany made it clear that its media reporting was nothing more than propaganda.

    The firm admitted that it trained Syrian media activists in a unique “newsroom process” that called to “curate” news by “collecting and organising stories and content that support and reinforce the core narrative.”

    In 2014, Albany boasted of running the Syrian National Coalition’s communications team at the Geneva Peace talks.

    Albany also warned that revelations of Western government funding for these opposition media organizations that were being portrayed as grassroots initiatives would discredit them.

    When internal emails were leaked showing that the massive opposition media platform Basma Syria was funded by the United States and Britain, Albany wrote, “the Basma brand has been compromised following leaks about funding project aims.”

    The leaks on social media “have damaged the credibility and trustworthiness of the existing branded platform,” Albany wrote. “Credibility and trust are the key currencies of the activities envisaged and for this reason we consider it essential to refresh the approach if the content to be disseminated is to have effect.” The Basma website was taken down soon after.

    These files provide clear insight into how the Syrian opposition was cultivated by Western governments with imperial designs on Damascus, and was kept afloat with staggering sums of cash that flowed from the pockets of British taxpayers – often to the benefit of fanatical militiamen allied with Al Qaeda.

    While Dutch prosecutors prepare war crimes charges against the Syrian government for fighting off the onslaught, the leaked files are a reminder of the leading role that Western states and their war-profiteering companies played in the carefully organized destruction of the country.

  • Texas Residents Warned Their Drinking Water May Contain A "Brain-Eating Microbe"
    Texas Residents Warned Their Drinking Water May Contain A “Brain-Eating Microbe”

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 21:30

    Today in “news you definitely don’t need to get in the middle of an already tumultuous 2020”, some Texas residents are being told not to drink their water due to it potentially being tainted with a “brain-eating microbe”.

    An advisory was issued for Lake Jackson, Freeport, Angleton, Brazoria, Richwood, Oyster Creek, Clute and Rosenberg to not use water for anything other than flushing toilets, according to The Guardian.

    This comes after the The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality warned of potential contamination of the water supply with Naegleria fowleri.

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    Naegleria fowleri is a microscopic amoeba that infects people when it enters the body through the nose. From there, it travels to the brain and can cause a “rare and debilitating disease” called primary amebic meningoencephalitis.

    The infection is usually fatal and has been seen before in the past, notably in tap water in Southern Louisiana from 2011 to 2013. It was also found in an untreated geothermal well in Arizona in 2003. 

    The advisory affects 120,000 people in addition to Dow Chemical workers in Freeport and Clemens and Wayne Scott state prisons. It will remain in effect until the Brazosport Water Authority, where the contamination is thought to be, is thoroughly flushed and tested. The BWA pulls its water from the Brazos river. 

    In other news, who’s ready to get 2021 started as soon as humanly possible?

  • The Truth According To Social Justice – A Review Of "Cynical Theories"
    The Truth According To Social Justice – A Review Of “Cynical Theories”

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 21:00

    Authored by Jonathan Church via Quillette.com,

    A review of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Pitchstone Publishing (August 25th, 2020), 352 pages.

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    In November 1964, the American historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay in Harper’s Magazine about the paranoid style in American politics, arguing that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds” ripe for “conspiratorial fantasy.” Arguably, many elites in contemporary mainstream American institutions appear to believe that anybody expressing concern about a so-called cancel culture has been in possession of such a paranoid mindset. Even when 150 artists and writers signed an open letter in none other than Harper’s Magazine, decrying “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity,” the response from many has been to mock these concerns and dismiss them as “paranoid,” or “privileged.”

    The backlash to the Harper’s Letter comes on the heels of John McWhorter’s thesis that anti-racism is a new religion, David French suggesting that a secular fundamentalist revival is occurring on the Left, and Andrew Sullivan asking whether “intersectionality [is] a religion?” In short, there is indeed something of a militant crusade that lies at the heart of what Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay call “Social Justice in Action,” the title of chapter nine in their sensational new book, Cynical Theories, which explains “How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.”

    While there are those who claim, not unreasonably, that cancel culture is “a catch-all for when people in power face consequences for their actions or receive any type of criticism,” Pluckrose and Lindsay write about a disabled grandfather and bag packer who was sacked by his employer for sharing an apparently Islamophobic Billy Connolly skit, an act, which they claim “follows from applications of postcolonial Theory” (in this case, the grandfather was eventually reinstated). They also write about the software engineer James Damore, who was fired by Google for writing an internal memo on diversity which cited scientific research about sex differences, arguing that this sacking “follows from the assumptions underlying queer Theory and intersectional feminism.” They write about how a British football commentator and comedian Danny Baker lost his job at the BBC “for not realizing that a photograph of a chimpanzee in a smart coat and bowler hat that he tweeted could be construed as racist,” which, they argue “follows from the way critical race Theory describes the world.”

    The book explains a half-century arc of intellectual history culminating in our current state of histrionic overreach in the name of social justice. Cynical Theories superbly exposes a history of ideas which, in challenging unifying narratives and universal values, have come to threaten free speech, honest debate, and the valuing of reason itself.

    The story begins in universities and culminates in the dogmas of Social Justice. However Pluckrose and Lindsay do not suggest that working towards a more just society is an unworthy cause. They argue instead that the crusade marching in the name of critical social justice is often not about social justice at all. It is about a nakedly illiberal set of cynical theories that find their origin in the ideas of postmodern intellectuals dating back to the late 1960s. These ideas have coalesced into a central thesis which posits that truth, knowledge, and morality are so wrapped up in discourses of power and privilege that they must be understood as socially constructed rather than as the fruits of objective inquiry. In the words of Robin DiAngelo, “there is no objective, neutral reality.”

    If there is a mantra for postmodernism the denial of objective reality would be it. The ideas of myriad intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida have branched off in many directions as postmodernism mutated from its playful—if nihilistic—state of radical skepticism in the 1960s to its militant, doctrinaire stage of “reified postmodernism” in the 2010s which possesses a “logical contradiction between [its] radical relativism and dogmatic absolutism.” (Full disclosure: I emailed back and forth with Pluckrose a couple of years ago on the subject of “reification,” a correspondence for which she has thanked me for in the acknowledgements of the book, however I was not involved in the book’s writing or editing).

    From the opening pages, one gets the sense that Pluckrose and Lindsay have immersed themselves in every noteworthy work of postmodern scholarship available. They begin by identifying two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes.

    1. The postmodern knowledge principle refers to a “radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.”

    2. The postmodern political principle is the “belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.”

    The four postmodern themes are:

    (1) the blurring of conceptual boundaries such as that between health and sickness or truth and belief,

    (2) the power of language to construct reality rather than to merely articulate the intent of an author or an objective reality that we can discover,

    (3) cultural relativism, and

    (4) the loss of the individual or a universal human nature in favor of compilations of socially constructed intersectional identities.

    “Together,” they write, “these six major concepts… are the core principles of Theory, which have remained largely unchanged even as postmodernism and its applications have evolved from their deconstructive and hopeless beginnings to the strident, almost religious activism of today.”

    The rest of the book is devoted to explaining how these two principles and four themes have worked their way through the academy and society as it has evolved from its “high deconstructive phase” in the 1960s to 1980s, to “applied postmodernism” in the 1980s to mid-2000s, and finally to “reified postmodernism” in the 2010s, “when scholars and activists combined the existing Theories and Studies into a simple, dogmatic methodology, best known simply as Social Justice scholarship.”

    This summary necessarily oversimplifies a half-century of evolving ideas. Indeed, Pluckrose and Lindsay devote six of their 10 chapters to explaining how these ideas have morphed and mutated, beginning with postcolonial theory, and working their way into queer theory, several waves of feminism, gender studies, disability and fat studies, critical race theory, and intersectionality. They demonstrate an impressive erudition as they analyze postmodern texts to uncover the meaning of things like standpoint theory, epistemic violence, and positionality, and explain how social justice scholars resolve the contradiction between “radical relativism and dogmatic absolutism” by favoring “interpretations of marginalized people’s experience” which are “consistent with Theory” while explaining away all others as an internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest.

    The original postmodern intellectuals rejected grand narratives in favor of a radical skepticism which rejected Christianity, Marxism, science, reason, and the pillars of liberal democracy. A half-century later, their ideas have transitioned to what Pluckrose and Lindsay describe as reified postmodernism (reification refers to the idea that an abstraction can be made into a real thing). In this phase, social justice activism treats Theory as reality, and thus as the one and only way to view and interpret reality.

    And so what we are left with is “The Truth According to Social Justice.” Teaching, write Pluckrose and Lindsay, “is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory.” In this third phase, postmodernism pushes into everything, applying its deconstructive methods everywhere in the task of creating social change. Not without noticing the inherent irony, they observe that “postmodernism has become a grand, sweeping explanation for society—a meta-narrative—of its own.” As such, it functions as a set of pre-existing theories into which activists shoehorn the situational intricacies of experience. This has led to the dogmatism we see in militant social justice activism, “a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind.”

    None of this is to say there are no merits to fields like critical race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and other critical theories. Intersectionality is a useful concept that conveys the idea that identity is connected to social groups. As members of several social groups, we can find ourselves the victim of multiple forms of social oppression. Moreover, we must recognize, for example, that queer theory is right that “[w]e have changed the way we see sexuality quite profoundly,” while the “initial aims” of disability studies and activism “were to place less onus on disabled people to adapt themselves to society and more on society to accommodate them and their disabilities.”

    As Theory developed, however, reasonable and humane concerns about oppression and marginalization mutated into an ideological virus spreading through scholarship and society, with scholars like Barbara Applebaum writing that “[r]esistance will not be allowed to derail the class discussions!” and “those who refuse to engage might mistakenly perceive this as a declaration that they will not be allowed to express their disagreement but that is only precisely because they are resisting engagement.” Or Alison Bailey writing “[c]ritical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities.” The Truth According to Social Justice abandons the liberal commitment to reason, science, and debate as a failure to “decolonize” our minds from the influence of Enlightenment institutions erected to benefit straight, white men.

    In sum, politics matters more than truth.

    What Cynical Theories expresses is not a paranoid state of mind. It is a genuine concern about the threat that social justice activism, identity politics, and the legacy of postmodernism poses to Enlightenment liberalism and the belief that “disagreement and debate [are] means to getting at the truth.” The book explains how we have arrived at a state in which social justice scholarship treats the principles and themes of postmodernism as The Truth, where no dissent is tolerated, and anyone who disagrees must be cancelled.

  • North Korea Warns Of Border Intrusions By South's Navy Amid Search For Slain Official
    North Korea Warns Of Border Intrusions By South’s Navy Amid Search For Slain Official

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 20:30

    Despite Kim Jong-Un offering a nearly unheard of apology for last week’s shooting death of a South Korean fisheries official after he was found to have breached the disputed border in waters of the western coast, tensions are still running high which could set off further conflict. 

    North Korea’s military says it is searching for the charred remains of the official, after its border patrol soldiers had burned it on coronavirus fears. But now Pyongyang is warning Seoul not to interfere, given the south’s increased naval maneuvers in the region off Yeonpyeong Island. It appears both sides are conducting a major search of the area.

    “We urge the south side to immediately halt the intrusion across the military demarcation line in the west sea that may lead to escalation of tensions,” North Korean state news agency KCNA said on Sunday.

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    Republic of Korea Navy maneuvers file image, via The Korea Times.

    Apparently both sides are searching in order to recover the body on either side of the maritime border, while issuing warnings not to venture across the ambiguously defined demarcation line.

    “The South has been searching only in waters south of the Northern Limit Line, a contested sea demarcation between the two Koreas that dates to the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said, quoting an unnamed coast guard official,” Reuters reports.

    And KCNA was cited further:

    South Korea has mobilized 39 vessels, including 16 naval ships, and six aircraft for the search, which continued on Sunday despite the North Korean complaints, Yonhap said. North Korea was beginning its own search operation to recover the body, KCNA said.

    The whole crisis was sparked when on Thursday the South Korean man had reportedly disappeared from a boat close to the the western border island of Yeonpyeong. He was reportedly set upon by a North Korean patrol vessel while wearing a life jacket. Seoul defense sources told AFP that “circumstances tell us that there was an intent to defect.”

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    That’s when the north’s border patrol questioned him from the boat, and then shot multiple times, killing the man and afterward burning his body.

    Kim Jong-Un later issued an unprecedented message saying that the north was “very sorry” over the “unexpected, unfortunate incident” which was expressed in a letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

  • Federal Judge Blocks Trump's TikTok Ban Hours Before Midnight Deadline
    Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s TikTok Ban Hours Before Midnight Deadline

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 20:18

    Update (2015ET): Judge Nichols has – at least temporarily – blocked the White House’s TikTok ban, and sparred Google and Apple from an order to remove the app from their app stores at midnight.

    As we noted below, several reporters believed this was the expected outcome, based on the judge’s questions during today’s emergency hearing. The first of two critical deadlines loomed at mighnight, but it appears the judge has – as expected – adhered to the precedent set in a ruling averting a similar block on WeChat.

    Before making his ruling on whether the Trump Administration’s national security concerns were urgent enough to justify the ban, the judge said he would solicit feedback from both parties, which was cited as the primary reason for the delay. The 90-minute hearing took place Sunday morning in a Washington DC courtroom.

    What happens next is uncertain, a quality that has permeated the administration’s crackdown and subsequent race for a deal. The administration via the Department of Commerce has set Nov. 12 to be the final post-election deadline, and there’s still plenty of time for appeals should the Trump Administration choose to push ahead with its case. Last week, Chinese media published a series of editorials implying that the TikTok deal was in jeopardy of being quashed by Beijing, while President Trump reiterated demands for American control or TikTok would be shunted out of another massive market (it has already been banned in India, along with hundreds of other Chinese apps). But ByteDance and Oracle and Wal-Mart have issued conflicting statements about the ownership breakdown in a final deal, and there’s still some reason to believe that the US could get what it wants – majority control in the hands of American investors – since American VC firms own more than 40% of TikTok’s paret, ByteDance. But Beijing has hinted that it won’t tolerate such an arrangement.

    * * *

    The day has finally arrived. During a 90-minute emergency hearing Sunday morning, lawyers from the DoJ faced off with the legal team from ByteDance in arguments before Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, who has said he release his decision by late Sunday.

    That decision comes in response to TikTok’s latest legal action – a request for an emergency injunction – to try and circumvent a series of executive orders signed by President Trump that seek to completely shut down the app by No. 12. If allowed to stand, TikTok would be booted from American app stores, as of midnight, with more restrictions set to come into effect after the election.

    The proceedings have been kept mostly under wraps, with a select group of reporters, mostly from various wire services, allowed to report on the hearing. About an hour ago, a redacted brief filed by the government outlining its argument was finally released, after Bloomberg published a preview earlier today which revealed that the DoJ’s argument centered on an earlier ruling from a judge in PA.

    So far, this is the biggest hint that we’ve gotten on the judge’s decision, hinting that whether TikTok has been accorded “due process” might be a key issue in the judge’s thinking.

    And while a decision might not arrive until late tonight, since the judge is requiring both sides to respond to his opinion before it’s unsealed.

    Axios’ editor Dan Primack believes the odds are that TikTok’s request will be granted, given the precedent from the WeChat ruling earlier this month.

    Here’s a redacted briefing outlining the rest of the government’s argument, the most thorough explanation yet, which was apparently filed Friday night, but only released Sunday afternoon. In its ruling, the DoJ accuses TikTok of being a “mouthpiece of the Communist Party” and alleges that the company has an “informal” relationship with the state security apparatus due to Chinese laws compelling cooperation by domestic companies.

    Doj s Memorandum in Opposition to Tiktok by Zerohedge on Scribd

    Beijing-controlled papers published a flurry of editorials opposing the deal last week. ByteDance’s venture investors, including General Atlantic Partners and Sequoia Capital, created the structure that makes it look like TikTok will largely be owned by US investors, though this fact has apparently been disputed as both Beijing and Washington want the other to come away with majority control – one of the key sticking points in the talks, according to press reports. According to the structure, Oracle will manage TikTok in its cloud, a highly lucrative business, while ByteDance would retain control of TikTok’s content-recommendation algorithm, seen as its “secret sauce”. An IPO would then be planned for some time next year.

  • New CDC Estimates: Fatality Rate For COVID-19 Drops Again And May Surprise You
    New CDC Estimates: Fatality Rate For COVID-19 Drops Again And May Surprise You

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 20:00

    Submitted by Mark Glennon of Wirepoints

    What’s are the real chances of dying if you are infected with COVID-19? You’ll probably be surprised how low they are according to new numbers from the Center for Disease Control. We’ll state those numbers simply for those of you who aren’t crazy about math.

    The CDC’s new estimate, for the first time, is broken down by age groups. Here is what the CDC calls its “current best estimate” of chances of dying from the virus if you get infected:

    1 out of 34,000 for ages 0 to 19;

    1 out of 5,000 for ages 20 to 49;

    1 out of 200 for ages 50 to 69; and

    1 out of 20 for ages 70 and up.

    Here’s another way to look at the same numbers. If you get infected, your chances of surviving are as follows:

    Age Group                                           Probability of Survival

    0-19:                                                    99.997%
    20-49:                                                  99.98%
    50-69:                                                  99.5%
    70+:                                                     94.6%

    The CDC’s numbers are actually published as what’s called the “Infection Fatality Ratio” or IFR. The relevant portion of their chart is reproduced below. We’ve just stated their numbers a different way and rounded a bit. IFR includes, as those who were “infected,” those who got the virus but never got sick or displayed symptoms.

    The CDC’s “best estimate” may be off and it offered other scenarios, also shown in the chart below. They are all very low, however, as you can see. For those age 20-49, for example, even under the worse case scenario, the IFR is only .0003. That means your chances of dying even if you got infected would be 1 out of 3,333.

    Estimates of COVID’s lethality have been dropping regularly. In March, when most of the nation went into lockdown, Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated the mortality rate at about 2% and the World Health Organization pegged it at about 3.4%. Both are far higher than the current CDC estimate.

    Those earlier numbers, which were far more frightening, got extensive press coverage. Very little media attention, however, has gone toward the new numbers.

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    Source: CDC, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html

     

  • Atlanta BLM Founder Arrested After Spending $200,000 In Donations On House, Entertainment, & Suits
    Atlanta BLM Founder Arrested After Spending $200,000 In Donations On House, Entertainment, & Suits

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 19:25

    The founder of a Black Lives Matter group in Atlanta has been charged with misappropriating donations solicited through Facebook on behalf of the social justice cause. 

    32 year old Sir Maejor Page has been arrested by the FBI on fraud and money laundering charges after he used $200,000 in BLM donations on “food, dining, entertainment, clothing, furniture, a home security system, tailored suits and accessories,” according to Fox News. 

    He was arrested in Toledo after the Toledo FBI office opened an investigation last year on a tip they received from a cooperating witness. Page founded Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta in 2016 and had taken in more than $466,000 in total donations in June, July and August alone. 

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    FBI agent Matthew Desorbo said in the agency’s complaint against Page: “In sum, Page has spent over $200,000 on personal items generated from donations received through BLMGA Facebook page with no identifiable purchase or expenditure for social or racial justice.”

    Page took in the donations “for George Floyd” according to his Facebook page. Instead the money was diverted to things like a home security system (ironic, given the looting and riots), dining and clothing. He also used $112,000 of the money to purchase a house for himself in Toledo, Ohio. 

    BLM of Greater Atlanta lost its tax exempt status in 2019 for failing to submit its IRS 990 tax returns. Despite this, Page had become a “familiar face” at BLM marches in Atlanta. He was even part of a group that ultimately met with former Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed to demand changes in policing. 

    What are you going to tell us next, that throwing a brick through the window of an Old Navy and stealing T-Shirts isn’t a path to racial justice either?

  • Backlash Builds After Biden Compares Trump To Nazi Propagandist Goebbels
    Backlash Builds After Biden Compares Trump To Nazi Propagandist Goebbels

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 19:10

    Authored by Sara Carter via SaraACarter.com,

    Democratic candidate Joe Biden is getting a lot of heat for his outrageous comments comparing President Donald Trump Saturday to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. The backlash against those comments has been fierce on Twitter, with many people asking for an apology for the insulting and inaccurate comment.

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    Biden made the comments during an interview on MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle. She asked how he would handle and respond to Trump’s repeated claims that the Democratic Party, along with Biden, were pushing a Marxist, socialist agenda.

    Trump is like “Goebbels,” said Biden.

    “You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge…I think people see very clearly the difference between me and Donald Trump.”

    “Trump is clearing protests in front of the White House that are peaceful, you know, with the military,” Biden went on to say.

    “This guy is more Castro than Churchill.” 

    Adam Milstein, a well-known and well respected Jewish philanthropist, said in a Tweet, “Goebbels helped carry out the systematic murder of more than six million Jewish people.”

    “This is unacceptable, offensive and demeans the memory of the Holocaust,” Milstein, who is also a friend of mine for full disclosure stated. “Biden must apologize!”

    The tragedy, in my opinion, is that many anti-Trump Biden supporters also seem to be perpetuating these dangerous comments. Moreover, there are also many antiSemitic tweets on Twitter and the platform is doing little to stop that propaganda. SAD!

    Biden should be ashamed of himself and like Milstein has demanded, along with many others, he must apologize.

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  • NYT Publishes 10,000 Word Summary Of 20 Years Of Trump Tax Returns; President Calls It "Totally Fake News"
    NYT Publishes 10,000 Word Summary Of 20 Years Of Trump Tax Returns; President Calls It “Totally Fake News”

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 18:41

    With the news and outrage cycle in need of a fresh Trump reset now that the first presidential debate is just two days away, on Sunday afternoon – almost exactly two years after the NYT first published a report alleging how Trump “engaged in suspect tax schemes as he reaped riches from his father“, the NYT published what to many anti-Trumpers is the holy grail of Trump bomshells: a 10,000+ word summary of more than two decades of Trump tax documents which reveal that the president paid no income taxes for 10 of the 15 years before he was elected president, with his income tax payments in 2016 and 2017 amounting to just $750. The reason, as was already largely known, Trump had generated nearly $1 billion in casino-linked losses in the 1990s and onward (incidentally, loss carryfowards or NOLs are perfectly acceptable and legal instrument which anyone can apply against future income) and which offset much of the money that he made.

    The NYT also claims the documents show Trump losing millions of dollars from his golf courses, “vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due” and that Trump earned $73 million abroad.

    Combined, Trump initially paid almost $95 million in federal income taxes over the 18 years. He later managed to recoup most of that money, with interest, by applying for and receiving a $72.9 million tax refund, starting in 2010.

    “The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

    The NYT report focuses closely on the specifics of the $73 million refund:

    A large refund has been crucial to his tax avoidance.

    Mr. Trump did face large tax bills after the initial success of “The Apprentice” television show, but he erased most of these tax payments through a refund. Combined, Mr. Trump initially paid almost $95 million in federal income taxes over the 18 years. He later managed to recoup most of that money, with interest, by applying for and receiving a $72.9 million tax refund, starting in 2010. The refund reduced his total federal income tax bill between 2000 and 2017 to an annual average of $1.4 million. By comparison, the average American in the top .001 percent of earners paid about $25 million in federal income taxes each year over the same span.

    The $72.9 million refund has since become the subject of a long-running battle with the I.R.S.

    When applying for the refund, he cited a giant financial loss that may be related to the failure of his Atlantic City casinos. Publicly, he also claimed that he had fully surrendered his stake in the casinos. But the real story may be different from the one he told. Federal law holds that investors can claim a total loss on an investment, as Mr. Trump did, only if they receive nothing in return. Mr. Trump did appear to receive something in return: 5 percent of the new casino company that formed when he renounced his stake. In 2011, the I.R.S. began an audit reviewing the legitimacy of the refund. Almost a decade later, the case remains unresolved, for unknown reasons, and could ultimately end up in federal court, where it could become a matter of public record.

    A visual summary prepared by the NYT of Trump’s profit and losses is shown below:

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    One argument made by the NYT is that by the time Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, “his revenue streams from “The Apprentice” and licensing were drying up”, his “proceeds from fame continued to tumble, falling below $10 million in 2017 and to $2.9 million in 2018” and Trump “was in need of financial reinvigoration.” This is where the idea to run for president came form.

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    The question then is, since there appears to be no discovery of legal malfeasance, did Trump’s businesses benefit from the presidency which the NYT responds affirmatively “in some respects” pointing to the flood of new members in Mar a Lago “starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket millions more dollars a year from the business.”

    And without a blockbuster “gotcha” that would confirm that Trump had violated the law, the NYT simply concludes by noting that “in the end the financial picture for Mr. Trump is fraught” and that “as he approaches one of the most consequential elections in American history — down in most polls, under I.R.S. audit and heavily in debt — his businesses may not be well equipped to navigate what lies ahead.”

    While notable, and hardly unique to just the president, this is probably not the damning climax so many in the anti-Trump field were expecting in the 4-year-long crusade to get Trump’s tax returns. Oh yes, and then there is the audit, the same audit Trump has said prevents him from publishing his tax filings:

    Hanging over his head is the audit. Should the I.R.S. reverse the huge refund he received 10 years ago, Mr. Trump could be on the hook for more than $100 million.

    Since the question of where all this information came from will likely be scrutinized, the NYT noted that “all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it” adding that “while most of the tax data has not previously been made public, The Times was able to verify portions of it by comparing it with publicly available information and confidential records previously obtained by The Times.”

    Those arguing that the report may paint a one-sided picture of Trump’s tax returns will be out of luck hoping that the NYT would publish the source data:

    “We are not making [Trump’s tax] records themselves public because we do not want to jeopardize our sources, who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public.”

    The article also admits “the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled,” and also kills off the idea that President Trump’s finances were somehow linked to Russia. The piece reads: “Nor do [the tax returns] reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.”

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    Of course, to the rabid Russian conspiracy theorists, not even this admission will suffice as Matt Taibbi put it succinctly:

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    For those pressed for time, here is a recap of the key revelations in the NYT article, which the NYT recapped in a separate article:

    • Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750.
    • He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
    • Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes.
    • The financial pressure on him is increasing as hundreds of millions of dollars in loans he personally guaranteed are soon coming due.
    • Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.
    • Ivanka Trump, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received “consulting fees” that also helped reduce the family’s tax bill.
    • As president, he has received more money from foreign sources and U.S. interest groups than previously known. The records do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

    While the media will be going through all of these revelations with a fine-toothed comb, it’s also notable what the report fails to show: unless the NYT has saved the kicker for a subsequent article, “there appears to be no wrongdoing, no Russia ties, and nothing of substance beyond what most corporations do”, as the National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam writes.

    Also of note, the New York Times failed to include the details of the returns in its reporting, admitting in its own article: “The Times declined to provide the records, in order to protect its sources.”

    When asked during a Sunday news conference about the NYT revelations, Trump called the central claim the NYT makes – that he only paid $750.00 in federal income taxes – “fake news.”

    In a statement to The Times, Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten said “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and reportedly took issue with the amount of taxes Trump has paid: “Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015.”

  • Abenomics: Big Debts With Nothing To Show For It
    Abenomics: Big Debts With Nothing To Show For It

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 18:20

    Authored by Andrew Moran via The Mises Institute,

    Reaganomics, Clintonomics, Obamanomics, and Trumponomics. Abenomics is an economic philosophy named after Prime Minister Abe. It is a multipronged strategy that involves increasing Japan’s money supply, enhancing government spending, and reforming the world’s third-largest economy to make it more competitive. He launched Abenomics once he started his second term in December 2012, announcing that his government would “implement bold monetary policy, flexible fiscal policy and a growth strategy that encourages private investment, and with these three pillars, achieve results.” In other words, Abe promised to reverse the country’s stagnation and supercharge Japan. But what did he achieve after eight years as head of state?

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    The Fruits of Abenomics

    In the aftermath of the Lost Decade, Tokyo never fully recovered from this abysmal period. Abe enjoyed electoral success because he championed economic policies that would lead to prosperity and growth. However, Abe’s government fell short of the $5.6 trillion growth target laid out by the prime minister.

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    The Nikkei 225 stock market index has done incredibly well under Abe, as it has more than doubled since 2012. This was achieved because a critical component of Abenomics was the Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) large-scale monetary easing putsch that involved subzero interest rates, enormous asset purchases, and yield curve control. This triggered massive asset inflation and a weakened yen, which boosted its exports and allowed Japanese firms to expand their footprints in foreign markets.

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    But what about common folk? Wage growth has stagnated for the last thirty years. Unlike its Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) partners, average real wages have flatlined since 1991, and it continued under Abe, despite his cabinet mandating higher salaries. Although deflation is often associated with the Japanese economy, consumer and producer prices have gone up since 2014. When you factor in an unwelcomed sales tax hike and a depreciated yen, the cost of living became a tad too high.

    The most significant burden for the Japanese population will inevitably be government debt. Tokyo generated international headlines when it reported a 1 quadrillion yen public debt. There is no argument that the national debt and the budget deficit will explode following the covid-19 pandemic. Before the virus outbreak, the prime minister did introduce a plan to organize its financial mess. But once the coronavirus gripped the Japanese economy, the government abandoned fiscal responsibility and instead implemented a series of exorbitant stimulus and relief packages. Right now, spending is about survival. In the future, the astronomical debt levels will hinder expansionary fiscal efforts, which would impact the state-dependent economy.

    In the end, somebody is going to have to pay the bill. Seniors over sixty-five account for a third of the population, young people are not having children, and the current system is bloated. These are indicators that a lot of change is needed, but it is unclear if the Diet has an appetite to modify public policy.

    Abenomics Is Here to Stay

    Abe said that he would officially resign when the Liberal Democrat Party chooses his successor. No matter who is selected to lead Abe until the next election, Abenomics is here to stay, even if the opposition forms a government. Tokyo would have no other choice but to embark upon a perpetual campaign of printing and spending money in the postcoronavirus economy, particularly if a second wave strikes. The next leader might tinker around with altered approaches, but it will be more of the same.

    Japan is in a recession, debt to gross domestic product is more than 200 percent, and the many purchasing managers’ index (PMI) readings suggest business activity is still contracting. Japan would need Abenomics right now, even if this neo-Keynesian approach to central planning failed during the boom phase of the business cycle. Japan will never kick its easy money addiction, but that is par for the course of the rest of the planet that has adopted ultraloose fiscal and monetary policy.

  • Trump Administration, CDC Sued By Landlords Over 'Unconstitutional' Moratorium On Evictions
    Trump Administration, CDC Sued By Landlords Over ‘Unconstitutional’ Moratorium On Evictions

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 17:55

    A national moratorium on evictions is being challenged in at least two lawsuits filed in federal court on the grounds that denying landlords the right to evict tenants for nonpayment is unconstitutional.

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    The National Apartment Association – a trade group representing the apartment rental housing industry, joined a lawsuit filed in a Georgia federal district court against the Trump administration and the Centers for Disease Control. The original suit was brought by a group of landlords and the New Civil Liberties Alliance – a nonprofit group which seeks to protect constitutional freedoms and civil rights “from violations by the Administrative State,” according to MarketWatch.

    “Agencies have no inherent power to make law, and nothing in the relevant statutes or regulations gives CDC the power or authority to issue an eviction-moratorium order,” said the New Civil Liberties Alliance in a summary of the court filing which claims that the CDC’s moratorium “violates the U.S. Constitution because the CDC has not identified any act of Congress that confers upon it the power to halt evictions or preempt state landlord-tenant law.”

    The group claims the CDC moratorium basically “commandeers” state officials – including law enforcement officers and judges, to enforce federal law.

    As Zachary Yost of the The Mises Institute noted last month, the war on landlords has begun.

    A second lawsuit was filed by a group of Tennessee property owners, who similarly argue that the CDC’s moratorium violates the constitution – and that the agency has prevented landlords from exercising due process over their property rights.

    “Plaintiffs readily acknowledge the nobility of the CDC’s and, by extension, the executive branch’s, desire to help those profoundly affected by the current health crisis,” states the suit. “However, that help must conform to the law and must not infringe unlawfully upon the rights of others.”

    Rental-housing industry officials have warned that the CDC’s order could have devastating effects on landlords, particularly smaller “mom-and-pop” landlords who own only a handful of properties.

    “The CDC eviction moratorium will surely cause more economic harm than it prevents,” said David Howard, executive director of the National Rental Home Council, another industry trade group. “It puts renters in a position of having to pay back rent that they likely won’t have, while causing immediate hardship for property owners who have no means of carrying the costs of ownership.”

     

    Now that the moratorium is in effect, Howard said, many property owners have come to the conclusion that they may not be able to afford to stay in business. (The National Rental Home Council is not party to either of the lawsuits against the CDC.) –MarketWatch

    Another group questioning the legality of the moratorium – the National Multifamily Housing Council – has not joined either of the lawsuits, but has instead pursued rental assistance for struggling tenants.

    “It is far better to focus on ensuring renters can pay the rent than to try and come up with policies like eviction moratoriums that do not address the root cause and put housing providers at financial risk,” said Paula Cino, the group’s VP of construction, development and land use policy.

    Affordable housing experts agree with Cino.

    “Rather than suing for the right to evict during a pandemic, landlords should be working with renters to ensure Congress provides at least $100 billion in emergency rental assistance to help renters avoid a financial cliff when the moratorium expires and to help landlords continue to operate their rental homes,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

    Said experts also say that the two lawsuits against the CDC are unlikely to be successful – as landlords who have previously challenged state moratoria on evictions using similar arguments.

    “Every single case filed previously was dismissed for lack of merit, and we think the same thing should happen with these new cases,” said Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project.

    And while the CDC has issued its moratorium, evictions are still making their way through state and local courts nationwide. The CDC’s order doesn’t automatically protect tenants from being kicked out of their homes for failure to pay the rent amid the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, renters must proactively sign a document stipulating that they cannot pay and provide that document to their landlord. Legal experts have also suggested that loopholes in the order could allow for evictions to occur.

    As of Monday, roughly 3,500 eviction cases had been filed by private-equity firms and other corporate landlords, according to information collected by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, an initiative that seeks to monitor these firms. In the last week alone, more than 1,860 cases had been filed. –MarketWatch

    “Corporate landlords are moving quickly to file evictions before renters can make use of the protections,” said Yentel. “As the CDC order makes clear, eviction poses significant harm to individuals, their communities, and our broader public health as we collectively work to contain the coronavirus pandemic and prevent unnecessary deaths.”

  • MSM Promotes Yet Another CIA Press Release As News
    MSM Promotes Yet Another CIA Press Release As News

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 17:30

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    The Washington Post, whose sole owner is a CIA contractor, has published yet another anonymously sourced CIA press release disguised as a news report which just so happens to facilitate longstanding CIA foreign policy.

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    In an article titled “Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden”, WaPo’s virulent neoconservative war pig Josh Rogin describes what was told to him by unnamed sources about the contents of a “secret” CIA document which alleges that Vladimir Putin is “probably” overseeing an interference operation in America’s presidential election.

    True to form, at no point does WaPo follow standard journalistic protocol and disclose its blatant financial conflict of interest with the CIA when promoting an unproven CIA narrative which happens to serve the consent-manufacturing agendas of the CIA for its new cold war with Russia.

    And somehow in our crazy, propaganda-addled society, this is accepted as “news”.

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    The CIA has had a hard-on for the collapse of the Russian Federation for many years, and preventing the rise of another multipolar world at all cost has been an open agenda of US imperialism since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed it is clear that the escalations we’ve been watching unfold against Russia were in fact planned well in advance of 2016, and it is only by propaganda narratives like this one that consent has been manufactured for a new cold war which imperils the life of every organism on this planet.

    There is no excuse for a prominent news outlet publishing a CIA press release disguised as news in facilitation of these CIA agendas. It is still more inexcusable to merely publish anonymous assertions about the contents of that CIA press release. It is especially inexcusable to publish anonymous assertions about a CIA press release which merely says that something is “probably” happening, meaning those making the claim don’t even know.

    None of this stopped The Washington Post from publishing this propaganda piece on behalf of the CIA. None of it stopped this story from being widely shared by prominent voices on social media and repeated by major news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and NBC. And none of it stopped all the usual liberal influencers from taking the claims and exaggerating the certainty:

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    The CIA-to-pundit pipeline, wherein intelligence agencies “leak” information that is picked up by news agencies and then wildly exaggerated by popular influencers, has always been an important part of manufacturing establishment Russia hysteria. We saw it recently when the now completely debunked claim that Russia paid bounties on US troops to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan first surfaced; unverified anonymous intelligence claims were published by mass media news outlets, then by the time it got to spinmeisters like Rachel Maddow it was being treated not as an unconfirmed analysis but as an established fact:

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    If you’ve ever wondered how rank-and-file members of the public can be so certain of completely unproven intelligence claims, the CIA-to-pundit pipeline is a big part of it. The most influential voices who political partisans actually hear things from are often a few clicks removed from the news report they’re talking about, and by the time it gets to them it’s being waved around like a rock-solid truth when at the beginning it was just presented as a tenuous speculation (the original aforementioned WaPo report appeared on the opinion page).

    The CIA has a well-documented history of infiltrating and manipulating the mass media for propaganda purposes, and to this day the largest supplier of leaked information from the Central Intelligence Agency to the news media is the CIA itself. They have a whole process for leaking information to reporters they like (with an internal form that asks whether the information is Accurate, Partially Accurate, or Inaccurate), as was highlighted in a recent court case which found that the CIA can even leak documents to select journalists while refusing to release them to others via Freedom of Information Act requests.

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    A lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, assassinating, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic spook agency with an extensive history of deceit and depravity that selectively gives information to news reporters with whom it has a good relationship is never doing so for noble reasons. It is doing so for the same rapacious power-grabbing reasons it does all the other evil things it does.

    The way mainstream media has become split along increasingly hostile ideological lines means that all the manipulators need to do to advance a given narrative is set it up to make one side look bad and then share it with a news outlet from the other side. The way media is set up to masturbate people’s confirmation bias instead of report objective facts will then cause the narrative to go viral throughout that partisan faction, regardless of how true or false it might be.

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    The coming US election and its aftermath is looking like it will be even more insane and hysterical than the last one, and the enmity and outrage it creates will give manipulators every opportunity to slide favorable narratives into the slipstream of people’s hot-headed abandonment of their own critical faculties.

    And indeed they are clearly prepared to do exactly that. An ODNI press release last month which was uncritically passed along by the most prominent US media outlets reported that China and Iran are trying to help Biden win the November election while Russia is trying to help Trump. So no matter which way these things go the US intelligence cartel will be able to surf its own consent-manufacturing foreign policy agendas upon the tide of outrage which ensues.

    The propaganda machine is only getting louder and more aggressive. We’re being prepped for something.

    *  *  *

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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  • Quants Discover A Guaranteed Source Of Alpha: Just Trade Based On The Growth Of The Fed's Balance Sheet
    Quants Discover A Guaranteed Source Of Alpha: Just Trade Based On The Growth Of The Fed’s Balance Sheet

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/27/2020 – 17:14

    It was almost 9 years ago in January 2012 when – in a world that was becoming increasingly centrally-planned by central banks and disconnected from fundamentals – we first recommended to readers that the simplest way to generate alpha and outperform the broader market was to do the opposite of what Wall Street’s professionals were doing, and go long the most hated stocks. This is what we said one year later, in 2013, when reviewing and doubling down on this very strategy:

    …  in a world in which nothing has changed from a year ago, and where fundamentals still don’t matter, what is one to do to generate an outside market return? Simple: more of the same and punish those who still believe in an efficient, capital-allocating marketplace and keep bidding up the most shorted names.

    Fast forward to early 2019 when none other than Bank of America confirmed that we were correct: as the bank’s chief equity strategist Savita Subramanian wrote last April, “over the last several years, buying the most underweight stocks by large cap active funds and selling the most overweight stocks by large cap active funds has consistently generated alpha.”

    As the bank added, the 10 most neglected stocks had outperformed the 10 most crowded stocks by an annualized spread of 8.4% on average during the first 15 days of each quarter since 2012. This is shown in the chart below which reveals that buying the 10 most underweight stocks and selling the 10 most overweight stocks by active funds has generated alpha every year in the past five except 2017.

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    Ok fine, as we said nearly a decade ago, going long the most shorted names has been a source of incremental alpha for much of the past decade (a time when most hedge funds had abandoned alpha generation altogether, and instead focused on levered beta strategies in hopes of halting the melting of the ice cube that is the “2 and 20” model).

    But what if there is an even simpler strategy to beat the market and generate alpha? According to SocGen quants including Solomon Tadesse, Andrew Lapthorne and others, who last week penned a note titled “Can quants make money by tracking the Fed books?” there is, and it involves that other strategy we have been pounding the table on for much of the past decade, namely to trade alongside the Fed’s balance sheet which has become the dominant price setter in this bizarro, upside down market.

    Before we get into the details of the proposed trade, here is some background which we provide solely for the benefit of the handful of remaining idiots who still claim the Fed does not influence stock prices:

    The Fed balance sheet and the stock market

    Monetary policy historically dictates asset price dynamics, with low interest rates and accompanying expansionary monetary policy supporting risk asset rallies and monetary contractions by contrast driving market retreats. This has increasingly been more obvious since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, where financial market reactions appear to have become increasingly aligned and dependent on central bank actions.

    Indeed, with the advent of QE programmes as monetary policy tools in the wake of the 2008 GFC, the trajectories of market performance and the Fed balance sheet appear to have converged into lock step. Total assets on the Fed balance sheet have expanded from $2.24tn at the end of 2008 to the current level of about $7tn, for 216% growth, while the S&P 500 rose from 903.25 to about 3340, netting cumulative growth of about 270% during the same period. Over the course of the current  pandemic, the Fed balance sheet has increased from $4.67tn on 18 March 2020 (a week before the market bottom) to $7.01tn, growing by 50%, while the S&P 500 has risen by 42% during the same period.

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    This broad view of the relationship between Fed actions and stock market performance appears to suggest a causal link going from central bank policies to asset prices. The question then is how predictable are asset returns based on prior Fed actions, and whether such predictability can be utilised in enhancing investment performance?

    How predictable indeed, and has the Fed forcibly made its policies so transparent yet market-moving to ensure that everyone can partake in the market “upside”? Before we get into the experimental specifics, here is a summary of the simple strategy proposed by the SocGen quants – to trade in lockstep with the change in Fed’s balance sheet:

    • Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, financial markets appear to have become increasingly aligned with central bank actions and increasingly less connected to economic fundamentals. So, should you simply follow the Fed? The above observation is now generally expected, and there is a plethora of charts circulating showing the relationship between the size or the growth of the Fed balance sheet and a variety of risk assets. But can we use this information systematically to inform our investment decisions?
    • The sheer scale of these unconventional measures does seem to have also made asset returns more predictable, and performance appears increasingly contingent on central bank actions. This provides a potential opportunity for investors.
    • And with the Fed committing to maintain its asset purchase programmes “at least at the current pace to sustain smooth market functioning”, and with ultra-low rates expected to at least until 2023, according to the Fed, it is clear these unconventional monetary policies are going to remain a key driver of markets for some time.

    To help confused Gen-Z investors (and other hedge funds), the SocGen note introduces a simple tactical alpha strategy that uses the growth of the Fed balance sheet to measure the degree to which monetary expansion is supporting risk-asset rallies. The strategy, implemented in the context of the classic long-only equity/cash decision, “provides supportive evidence of market predictability and the potential to utilize measures of unconventional monetary policies in designing systematic strategies.”

    In short, all one needs to outperform the market is to front- or even back-run the Fed’s balance sheet growth.

    More importantly, “the simulation generates a sizable outperformance with a reasonable success rate” and while illustrative, the strategy provides a framework to extend to analogous risk -on/-off cases involving other asset classes, as well as the design of more complex long/short strategies with leverage.

    Some experiment observations. As Lapthorne, Tadesse et al write, to check if these contemporaneous correlations might suggest causality, the figures below present the correlation of weekly growth (log differences) in total Fed balance sheet assets with lagged and subsequent returns of the S&P 500 index. It shows the correlation between the Fed’s asset expansion/contraction in week t and stock market returns in week t + k, where correlations at negative values of k indicate the Fed’s response to lagged stock returns, and correlations at positive values of k show stock market’s reactions to the Fed’s actions.

    The negative correlation between lagged stock market performance and current growth in Fed assets (left-hand chart) means that stock market declines increase the likelihood of Fed action in the form of balance sheet expansion. On the other hand, the positive correlation between subsequent stock market performance and current Fed asset growth means that Fed balance sheet expansion leads to positive stock market performance. The impact of Fed asset growth on equity markets lasts, on average, for the subsequent four weeks.

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    Consistent with economic priors, balance sheet expansion leads to stronger positive market returns, and our analysis shows that this lasts for up to four weeks, following the policy change (left figure), with a peak observed at three weeks. On the other hand, and contrary to expectations, Fed balance sheet contractions are also followed, on average, by market rebounds, although the strength of these correlations were much weaker in the initial three weeks, with a stronger bounce on the four-week mark.

    As the strategists explain, while there appears to be a small announcement effect at week 0, the market reaction appears gradual. This is consistent with the notion that Fed asset purchases primarily impact the stock market through liquidity spill-overs from the other asset classes that are the target of the direct asset purchases (i.e. Treasuries, MBSs, and corporate bonds). It may also reflect the impact of subsequent equity repricing from lower cost of capital due to the Fed actions.

    How to trade these observations?

    As SocGen’s strategists lay it out, the design of investment strategies that utilize Fed actions need to consider the distinctive lead-lag correlations between Fed expansion and Fed contraction. As a broad illustration, the bank quants design a weekly tactical alpha strategy based on Fed asset growth that aims to boost investment returns by selectively overweighting riskier assets during Fed monetary expansion regimes. To that end, the quants used weekly Fed balance sheet data over the period of 2009 and Sep. 2020 – a period of intensive use of unconventional monetary policy tools.

    The strategy consists of using a classic equity-cash allocation with the goal of generating excess returns by systematically tilting towards risk opportunistically following expansionary monetary policy. As an illustration, a long-only portfolio with a strategic allocation of 75/25 between equity and cash was constructed, with a 25% risk budget allocated for tactical alpha, but this can easily be adapted to an equity/bond mix or a long/short strategy.

    The evidence shows that the impact of Fed asset growth lasts on average for four weeks with the lead-lag correlation to cumulative S&P returns peaking at around the fourth week. The input to the strategy is the weekly growth rate in the Fed total assets, and the strategy seeks to allocate more to equities (from safe asset holdings) during periods of monetary easing as reflected in the growth in Fed assets.

    Table 1 below summarizes the performance of this simple tactical tilting strategy. It should come as no surprise to almost anyone, that a systematic tracking of the Fed balance sheet adds value, with the strategy generating annualized excess returns of about 250bp per annum with a tracking error of similar magnitude, providing a risk-adjusted alpha of one, at hit rate above 60%.

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    Comparing the performance of the “tactically-boosted” portfolio against the traditional 75/25 benchmark, total returns would have gone up to 12.9% from 10.4%, while the Sharpe ratio improves only modestly as overall volatility would also pick up.

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    As laid out in the next chart below, the positioning of the strategy shows that the portfolio broadly tracked the monetary policy stance, as reflected in the Fed balance sheet during the period. During the winding down of QE and quantitative tightening in 2017 and 2018 all through half of 2019, the portfolio largely took off its equity bet, staying with its max cash positions, only to get go back to equity starting in the latter part of 2019 as monetary easing began. It was also heavily tilted towards equity in the heyday of QE in 2010 through 2014, with periodic shifts to cash during moments of a lull in asset purchases.

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    To conduct the above analysis, SocGen’s quant used the growth in the total assets of the Federal Reserve to design the tactical alpha strategy. A large part of the strategy performance and of market predictability seems to come from the QE-laden SOMA component of the Fed balance sheet (table below), though with higher volatility. There is also evidence that changes in the defensive holdings of the balance sheet (which includes repo and the dollar-swap facilities, which are largely used during crises) may contain some information. Finally, despite the small (realized) size and sporadic nature of the back-stop facilities component, the symbolic role of these programs – which include the Corporate Credit, Main Street, Commercial Paper, Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity, Municipal Liquidity, Term Asset-Backed Securities and other facilities that were introduced during the current crisis – to instil market confidence cannot be overemphasized. Thus, as the quants conclude “using the overall Fed assets may provide signal diversity across the three pillars, aggregating information on unconventional policies across all domains of Fed activities.“

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    In summary, to generate scare alpha in the current environment, one can either be a die-hard contrarian and repeatedly go long the most hated/shorted names, or can pursue an even simpler  tactical alpha strategy that uses information on the growth of the Federal balance sheet as a signal of the degree of monetary expansion that generally supports risk-asset rallies.

    As SocGen concludes, the strategy implemented in the context of a long-only equity/cash decision provides some evidence of the potential to utilize measures of unconventional monetary policies in designing systematic strategies. The simulation generates a sizable outperformance with a reasonable success rate, which one would naturally expect in a world where trillions in Fed balance sheet expansions lead to record stock market rallies.

    That said, unlike the “go long the most hated names” which is a pure alpha trade, the Fed balance sheet-tracking strategy proposed by SocGen is implementable as an overlay through trading on futures or other derivatives, and is meant to add an incremental 2.5% or so to overall returns. As Lapthorne et al wrap up, “while illustrative, the strategy provides a framework to extend to analogous cases of risk -on/- off cases involving other asset classes, as well as the design of long/short strategies with leverage. Given the multitude of factors that bear on asset performance, the Fed balance sheet signal could also be blended with other factors in multi-factor settings to enhance portfolio performance.”

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  • Will A Military Coup Undo The November Elections, Donald Trump, & The Republic Itself?
    Will A Military Coup Undo The November Elections, Donald Trump, & The Republic Itself?

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 23:45

    Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    On March 20, I published an article called Why Assume There will be a 2020 Election? where I laid out the existential threat of a new Wall Street military Coup which would not only render elections obsolete, but would impose a new fascist hell onto America and the world.

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    In that article I discussed the importance of General Smedley Butler’s strategic decision to expose the Wall Street plot to overthrow the newly elected president Franklin Roosevelt who was in the midst of waging a war on both Wall Street, the City of London and the chaos these financiers engineered during the great depression. Butler’s congressional testimony put the spotlight on these shadow creatures and gave FDR the breathing space and public supported needed to wage war on America’s deep state while pushing a bold healing of the nation under the New Deal.

    That article was followed by a sequel on April 3 entitled Standing on the Precipice of Martial Law which featured the story of John F Kennedy’s battles with the London-directed Deep State and Military Industrial Complex in depth and also how JFK worked closely with the film maker John Frankenheimer to expose these intrigues to the American people by turning the book 7 Days in May into a film (unfortunately released only after other means were found to depose of the president). That article also dealt with the various PNAC-affiliated “planning scenarios” run over a year before September 11, 2001 which established the groundwork for a new type of Coup d’état within America with Cheney’s Continuity of Government protocols, the vast expansion of biowarfare infrastructure under the Bio-Shield Act, regime change wars abroad and police state measures within America itself.

    The Trump Factor

    After years of ongoing deep state penetration of the USA since JFK’s murder, a surprising nationalist dark horse president found himself in the Oval Office in the form of Donald Trump and just two months away from the 2020 elections, the threat of a new Military Coup organized by international financiers is as high as ever.

    In his Labor Day press conference, Trump, who has distinguished himself as the first president since Eisenhower to call out the “military industrial complex” threw down the gauntlet saying:

    “Biden … sent our youth off to fight in these crazy endless wars. It’s one of the reasons the military— I’m not saying the military is in love with me; the soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars…. And I said, ‘That’s good. Let’s bring our soldiers back home. Some people don’t like to come home. Some people like to continue to spend money.’ One cold-hearted globalist betrayal after another, and that’s what it was.”

    This statement should be taken both as a rallying call for patriots to use what is possibly their last chance to save the collapsing republic and avoiding world war three.

    On September 5, Colonel Richard Black (Former State Senator and Judge Advocate) delivered a presentation at a Schiller Institute seminar where the colonel warned of the interconnected pattern of statements by former high ranking military officials either openly calling for a military coup (Lt. Colonels Paul Yingling and John Nagl on August 11) or celebrating the anarchist mobs threatening to tear the republic apart. To the latter group, Col. Black named former Defense Secretary James Mattis, Colin Powell, and Col. John Allen who have all questioned the authority of the President and touted their belief that Trump would not leave the White House willingly in January 2021. The actual source for those concerns didn’t come from any actual evidence obtained from reality however, but in fact arose out of “November chaos scenario war games” advanced by Soros/Clinton/Neocon-affiliated think tanks like the Transition Integrity Project which ran Event 201-like “fictional” scenario “war games”.

    In one of the June TIP scenarios, Trump wins the popular November vote by a landslide, but due to the slow influx of mail-in ballots, it is soon revealed that Biden is the winner, whereby Trump supposedly locks the doors of the White House refusing to leave. In the TIP “game”, Biden was played by none other than John Podesta. These scenarios were again replayed more recently by a DNC-connected outfit named Hawkfish funded by Michael Bloomberg which was covered on Axios running a more detailed version of this computer model called “Red Mirage”.

    Warning of a military coup, Col. Black stated:

    “The coordinated release of scathing remarks by senior officials coupled with publication of a letter advocating a military coup suggests a deep sickness within the Pentagon and within our constitutional structure.”

    As RT reported, between 2008-2018, 380 high ranking pentagon officials have been hired by defense contractors including 25 generals, 9 admirals, 43 Lieutenant Generals and 23 Vice Admirals… which provides just one sampling of the potential for treachery prevalent within the sick constitutional structure.

    Other Soros-affiliated operations have sprung forth on multiple fronts to ensure maximum instability leading up to the elections. Beyond the obvious anarchy operations within the streets of America itself, a Canadian-based Soros-funded anarchist group called the Adbusters/Blackspot Collective which claims credit for coordinating Occupy Wall Street in 2010 has unleashed a 60-day “Lay Siege to the White House” offensive beginning on September 17. The British-Canadian pedigree of this act represents a long-standing tradition of anti-U.S. operations stretching back to the Aaron Burr plot of “northern secession” with Canada in 1804, the Montreal-directed assassinations of Abraham Lincoln AND John Kennedy to name but a few.

    As Whitney Webb pointed out in her excellent assessment of this operation:

     “other known members of the TIP include David Frum (the Atlantic), William Kristol (Project for a New American Century, The Bulwark), Max Boot (the Washington Post), Donna Brazile (ex-DNC), John Podesta (former campaign manager – Clinton 2016), Chuck Hagel (former Secretary of Defense), Reed Galen (co-founder of the Lincoln Project) and Norm Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute).”

    As Webb lays out in her article and as I documented in my April 2020 ‘Standing on the Precipice of Martial Law’, the new “Continuity of Government” protocols created in February to deal with the inevitable breakdown of America’s governing mechanisms under COVID pandemonium are very much still in effect. A parallel chain of command under jarhead war hawk General Terrance O’Shaughnessy (head of both NORTHCOM and NORAD) has been established and members of that parallel government await the moment to come forth in bunkers 650 meters under a mountain in Cheyenne, Colorado to “wait out the COVID-19 crisis”.

    Traitors tied to the Military Industrial Complex, and other NATO-phile unipolarist ideologues among the military are undoubtedly itching for action, and unless extraordinarily creative and speedy maneuvers can be accomplished by Trump and his trusted allies (who number few and far between) in tandem with his potential allies among the Multipolar Alliance, then all hope for the republic, and global war avoidance more broadly may be lost.

  • China Plans To Protect TikTok "At All Cost" Against "Mafia-Style Robbery" & US Threat To National Security
    China Plans To Protect TikTok "At All Cost" Against "Mafia-Style Robbery" & US Threat To National Security

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 23:15

    It was a week ago that Beijing made clear it won’t be signing off on the messy and mired in confusion proposed Oracle-TikTok deal, citing that it would harm its “national security interests,” which is exactly the same reason given by Trump for trying to shut TikTok down in the first place.

    China’s state-run Global Times is out with a new editorial Saturday indicating that Beijing will stick to protecting TikTok “at all costs”. The theme of “compromised” national security is still being presented as the crux of the matter.

    “China is prepared to prevent Chinese firm TikTok and its advanced technologies from falling into US hands at all cost,” Global Times introduces.

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    This even if that should mean the hugely popular app “risks being shut down in the US, because allowing the US to seize the firm and its technology will not only set a dangerous precedent for other Chinese firms, but also pose a direct threat to China’s national security, Chinese experts said on Saturday, a day ahead of a court battle in the US over a ban of the app.”

    Again, interestingly this seems to be the mirror image argument the Trump administration has harped on for much of the past year, especially on Huawei. GT’s argument continues:

    More importantly, for Beijing, the case goes way beyond just a mafia-style robbery of a lucrative Chinese business and cutting-edge technologies, but a threat to its national security, because the US could find loopholes in those technologies to launch cyber and other attacks on China and other countries to preserve its hegemony, the experts added.

    Voicing the communist government’s rationale further, GT cites an expert at the China Electronics Standardization Institute Liu Chang, who says “What the US wants, we definitely cannot give.”

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    “From the perspective of both the company and the Chinese government, this cannot be allowed to happen,” he said.

  • Which Of These Poses The Greater Threat To The Country?
    Which Of These Poses The Greater Threat To The Country?

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 22:45

    Authored by Mike Whitney,

    “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”

    – Joseph Conrad

    Here’s your political puzzler for the day: Which of these two things poses a greater threat to the country:

    1. An incompetent and boastful president who has no previous government experience and who is rash and impulsive in his dealings with the media, foreign leaders and his critics?

    2. Or a political party that collaborates with senior-level officials in the Intel agencies, the FBI, the DOJ, the media, and former members of the White House to spy on the new administration with the intention of gathering damaging information that can be used to overthrow the elected government?

    The answer is “2”, the greater threat to the country is a political party that engages in subversive activity aimed at toppling the government and seizing power. In fact, that’s the greatest danger that any country can face, an enemy from within. Foreign adversaries can be countered by diplomatic engagement and shoring up the nation’s military defenses, but traitors–who conduct their activities below the radar using a secret network of contacts and connections to inflict maximum damage on the government– are nearly unstoppable.

    What the Russiagate investigation shows, is that high-ranking members of the Democrat party participated in the type of activities that are described above, they were part of an illicit coup d’etat aimed at removing Donald Trump from office and rolling back the results of the 2016 elections. It is a vast understatement to say that the operation was merely an attack on Donald Trump when, in fact, it was an attack on the system itself, a full-blown assault on the right of ordinary people to choose their own leaders. That’s what Russiagate is really all about; it was an attempt to torpedo democracy by invoking the flimsy and unverifiable claim that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin.

    None of this, of course, has been discussed in a public forum because those platforms are all privately-owned media that are linked to the people who executed the junta. But for those who followed events closely, and who know what actually happened, there has never been a more serious crime in American history. What we discovered was that the permanent bureaucracy, the media and the Democrat party are riddled with strategically-placed quislings and collaborators that are willing to sabotage their own government if they are so directed. The question that immediately comes to mind is this: Who concocted this plot, who authorized the electronic eavesdropping, the confidential informants, the widespread spying, the improperly obtained warrants, the fake news, and the endless leaks to the media? Who?

    What we witnessed was not just an attempted coup, it was a window into the inner-workings of a secret government operating independently from within the state. And the sedition was not confined to a few posts at the senior levels of the FBI, CIA, NSA, or DOJ. No. The corruption has saturated the entire structure, seeping down to the lower levels where career bureaucrats eagerly perform tasks that are designed to damage or incriminate elected officials. How did it ever get this bad?

    And who is calling the shots? We still don’t know.

    Let me pose a theory: The operation might have been concocted by former CIA-Director John Brennan, but Brennan surely is not the prime instigator, nor is Clapper, Comey or even Obama. The real person or persons who initiated the coup will likely never be known. These are the Big Money guys who operate in the shadows and who have a stranglehold on the Intelligence agencies. These are the gilded Mandarins who have their tentacles wrapped firmly around the entire state-power apparatus and who dictate policy from their leather-bound chairs at their high-end men’s clubs. These are the people who decided that Donald Trump “had to go” whatever the cost. They pulled out all the stops, engaged their assets across the bureaucracy, and launched a desperate 3 and half year-long regime change operation that blew up in their faces leaving behind a trail carnage from Washington, DC to Sydney, Australia. In contrast, Trump somehow slipped the noose and escaped largely unscathed. He was pummeled mercilessly in the media, disparaged by his political rivals, and raked over the coals by the chattering classes, but — at the end of the day– it was Trump who was left standing.. Trump– who took on the entire political establishment, the Intel agencies, the FBI, the mainstream media, and the Democratic party– had beaten them all at their own game. Go figure??

    Keep in mind, the Democrats have known that the Mueller probe was a fraud from as early as 2017 when the President of Crowdstrike, Shawn Henry, (who provided cyber security for the DNC) admitted to Congress that there was no forensic evidence that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia or anyone else.

    Think about that for a minute: The entire Mueller investigation was based on the assumption that Russia hacked into the DNC servers and stole the emails. We now know that never happened. The cyber-security team that conducted the investigation of the DNC computers admitted in sworn testimony before Congress that there was no evidence of “exfiltration” or pilfering of any kind. Repeat: There was no proof of hacking, no proof of Russian involvement, and no proof of foul play. The entire foundation upon which the Russia investigation was built, turned out to be false. More importantly, Democrat members of the Intelligence Committee knew it was false from the get-go, but opted to let the charade continue anyway. Why?

    Because the truth didn’t matter, what mattered was getting rid of Trump by any means necessary. That’s why they used “opposition research” (Note– “Oppo” research is the hyperbolic nonsense political parties use to smear a political opponent.) to illegally obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump team. It’s because the Democrat leadership will do anything to regain power.

    By the way, we also have evidence that the warrants that were used to spy on Trump were obtained illegally. The FISA court was deliberately misled so the FBI could carry out its vendetta on Trump. Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith “did willfully and knowingly make and use a false writing and document, knowing the same to contain a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and entry in a matter before the jurisdiction of the executive branch and judicial branch of the Government of the United States.” Bottom line: Clinesmith deliberately altered emails so that FISA applications could be renewed and the spying on the Trump campaign could continue.

    So, let’s summarize:

    1. The Democrats knew there was no proof the emails were stolen; thus, they knew the Russia probe was a hoax.

    2. The Democrats knew that their fraudulent “opposition research” was being used to illegally obtain warrants to spy on the Trump camp. This makes them accessory to a crime.

    3. Finally, the Democrats continue to spread (virtually) the same Russia-Trump collusion allegations today that they did before the Mueller investigation released its report. The lies and disinformation have persisted as if the “nation’s most expensive and exhaustive investigation” had never taken place. What does this tell us about the Democrats?

    On a superficial level, it tells us that they can’t be trusted because they don’t tell the truth. But on a deeper level, it expresses the party’s Ruling Doctrine, which is to control the public by means of deceit, disinformation, propaganda and lies. Only the powerful and well-connected are entitled to know the truth, everyone else must be subjected to fabrications that are crafted in a way that best coincides with the overall objectives of ruling elites. That’s why the Democrats stick with the shopworn mantra that Trump is in bed with Russia. It doesn’t matter that the theory has been thoroughly discredited and disproved. It doesn’t even matter that the theory was never the slightest bit believable to begin with. What matters is that party leaders are preventing ordinary people from knowing the truth, which is an essential part of their governing doctrine. It’s surprising that this doesn’t piss-off more Democrats, after all, it’s the ultimate expression of contempt and condescension. When someone lies to your face relentlessly, repeatedly and shamelessly, they are expressing their loathing for you. Can’t they see that?

    But maybe you think this is overstating the case? Maybe you think the Dems are just trying to “cover their backside” on a matter that is purely political?

    Okay, but answer this: Were the Democrats involved in a plot to overthrow the President of the United States?

    Yes, they were.

    Is that treason?

    Yes, it is.

    Then, are we really prepared to say that treason is “purely political”?

    No, especially since Russiagate was not a one-off, but just the first shocking example of how the Democrats operate. If we examine the Dems approach to the Covid-19 crisis, we see that their policy is actually more destructive than the 4-year Russia fiasco.

    For example, which party has imposed the most brutal, economy-eviscerating lockdowns and the most punitive mask mandates, while steadily ratcheting up the fearmongering at every opportunity? Which states suffered the most catastrophic economic damage due in large part to the edicts issued by their Democrat governors? Which party is using a public health emergency to advance the global “Reset” agenda announced at the World Economic Forum (WEF)? Which party is using the Covid-19 fraud to crash the economy, eliminate 40 million jobs, roll-back basic civil liberties and turn the United States into a NWO slave-state ruled by Wall Street bankers, Silicon Valley technocrats and Davos elites? Which party?

    And which party has aligned itself with Black Lives Matter, the faux-social justice organization that is funded by foreign oligarchs that are working tirelessly to crush the emerging populist movement that supports “America First” ideals? Which party applauded while American cities burned and small businesses across the country were looted and razed by masses of hooligans engaged in an orgy of destruction? Which party’s mayors and governors rejected federal assistance to put down the riots and reestablish order so ordinary people could get back to work to provide for themselves and their families? And which party now is threatening widespread social unrest and anarchy if the upcoming presidential election does not produce the result that they or their globalist puppet-masters seek?

    The Democrat party has undergone a sea-change in the last four years. There’s no trace of the party that was once headed by progressive-thinking idealists like John F Kennedy.

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    What’s left now is a shell of its former self; a cynical, self-aggrandizing, cutthroat organization that has betrayed its base, the American people, and the country. Indeed, for all its many failings, it is the ‘betrayal’ that is the most infuriating.

  • In The Midst Of A Pandemic, Blanketed In Wildfire Smoke, The City Of Berkeley Is Focused On Banning Candy Bars
    In The Midst Of A Pandemic, Blanketed In Wildfire Smoke, The City Of Berkeley Is Focused On Banning Candy Bars

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 22:15

    It doesn’t look like California is going to get the message that there’s such a thing as “too much government” anytime soon – so, if you were holding out hope, this might just be the time to give up. 

    While the state continues to struggle giving its citizens basics, like masks to survive the ongoing pandemic and wildfires, legislators have turned their ire to the real important issue: Snickers bars.

    Now, Berkeley, California is looking to implement a measure this week that would “prohibit grocery stores bigger than 2,500 square feet from displaying junk food and other unhealthy items in checkout aisles,” according to CBS. 

    The ordinance would apply to 25 retailers in Berkeley including major names like CVS, Safeway and Whole Foods. Retailers will be allowed to sell chips and candy bars elsewhere in their stores. Oh thank you, sweet government Gods, for allowing us to continue to purchase potato chips. 

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    The Center for Science in the Public Interest called the ordinance the nation’s “first healthy checkout policy.” 

    CSPI senior policy associate Ashley Hickson said: “This is a massive win for consumers,” (we’ll pause for laughter) “and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, when grocery stores are more integral to our well-being than ever before. By offering healthier options at checkout, stores will contribute to advancing public health and level the playing field for consumers during an already stressful time.”

    Kate Harrison, a council member who co-authored the ordinance, said: “It’s not a ban, it’s a nudge.” Actually, Kate, you’re the nudge.

    And when we see the inevitable article in 12 months that Berkeley is baffled by why the city isn’t attracting small businesses anymore, we’ll be able to point right back to these types of burdensome regulations. The only problem, of course, is that there’s very small chance legislators in California, convinced they need to save the world from itself, will even realize the fault of their actions.

    They certainly haven’t so far. How long until everything but bread and water is banned?

  • Chaotic Scene Unfolds As Car Plows Through Trump Supporters In California, Multiple Injuries Reported; Driver Arrested
    Chaotic Scene Unfolds As Car Plows Through Trump Supporters In California, Multiple Injuries Reported; Driver Arrested

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 21:45

    Several people were injured on Saturday after a car plowed through a group of Trump supporters who were counter-protesting a Black Lives Matter rally in Yorba Linda, California.

    The driver raced down the street as people carrying Thin Blue Line and American flags chased her, only to be faced with a line of police cars. She then continued down the wrong side of the road for a stretch before being stopped and taken into custody.

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    A woman is taken into custody after witnesses said she drove her car into a crowd of protesters in Yorba Linda on Saturday, September 26, 2020. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

    At least two injuries were reported with one being taken away by an ambulance.

    Different angle:

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    According to the OC Register, the BLM march took place on Imperial Highway – while counter-protesters gathered on the other side. The conservative group crossed over to the BLM protesters to confront them when the white sedan ‘came tearing through the crowd.’

  • Top NASA Official Unveils $28 Billion Plan To Land First Woman On Moon
    Top NASA Official Unveils $28 Billion Plan To Land First Woman On Moon

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 21:15

    The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has unveiled a $28 billion program to send the first woman to the moon in 2024 as part of its Artemis program.

    NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine released a statement Monday (Sept. 21), announcing the new mission to put a human back on the lunar surface would be the first time since 1972. 

    Bridenstine said, “with bipartisan support from Congress, our 21st-century push to the Moon is well within America’s reach.” 

    “As we’ve solidified more of our exploration plans in recent months, we’ve continued to refine our budget and architecture. We’re going back to the moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers,” he said. 

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    Bridenstine added that “a sustainable presence” on the moon will eventually pave the way for astronauts to take their “first steps on the Red Planet,” referring to NASA’s future mission to Mars.  

    NASA’s lunar missions are part of its Artemis plan, including the first mission – known as Artemis I – will launch the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft around the moon for a series of tests this fall to check performance, life support, and communication capabilities. Astronauts will be apart of the Artemis II mission in 2023. Artemis III allows the first woman and the next man back onto the lunar surface in 2024. 

    “In 2024, Artemis III will be humanity’s return to the surface of the moon – landing the first astronauts on the lunar South Pole. After launching on SLS, astronauts will travel about 240,000 miles to lunar orbit aboard Orion, at which point they will directly board one of the new commercial human landing systems, or dock to the Gateway to inspect it and gather supplies before boarding the landing system for their expedition to the surface,” NASA’s statement read. 

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    President Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1 in 2017, which allows NASA to integrate private companies into its space program to return humans to the moon, followed by missions to Mars and beyond. 

    And for hints of why NASA wants to return to the moon. Bridenstine, last week, called for a “lunar gold rush” by paying private companies to extract rare earth metals from the moon.

    The Artemis missions appear to pave the way for America to tap into hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars of untapped resources of the moon , including fifteen lanthanides, as well as scandium and yttrium – used in modern electronics. There’s also an abundance of Helium-3, a very rare gas, with the potential to fuel clean nuclear fusion power plants. This infographic from 911Metallurgist.com explains why NASA wants to harvest the moon’s resources:  

    “Across history, human development has relied upon the finite resources available on Earth. But the moon – a seemingly barren rock – may actually be a treasure trove of rare resources vital to Earth’s future. And now, nations are looking upwards to a potential lunar gold rush,” 911Metallurgist.com states in the infographic’s intro. 

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    NASA’s next step in exploring and commercializing the solar system starts with landing the first woman on the moon in 2024. 

  • Trump Unveils "Platinum Plan" For Black Americans, Designates Antifa, KKK As "Terrorist Organizations"
    Trump Unveils "Platinum Plan" For Black Americans, Designates Antifa, KKK As "Terrorist Organizations"

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 21:15

    President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign released a “Platinum Plan” that outlines promises he is making to black Americans over the next 4 years, if he remains the U.S. president.

    As The Epoch Times’ Mimi Nguyen Ly details below, the plan seeks to uplift black communities through, in part, an investment of about $500 billion.

    The Trump campaign announced late Friday:

    “After years of neglect by Democrat politicians, black Americans have finally found a true advocate in President Trump, who is working tirelessly to deliver greater opportunity, security, prosperity, and fairness to their communities.

    “While Joe Biden takes black voters for granted—and even questions their blackness if they dare to support conservative ideals—President Trump is working hard to earn the black vote through his Platinum Plan.”

    The president’s daughter, Senior White House Adviser Ivanka Trump posted details of the plan on Twitter late Friday.

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    The “Platinum Plan” (pdf) is based on four core values – opportunity, security, prosperity, and fairness.

    The plan seeks to add some 3 million new jobs for the black community, create 500,000 new black-owned businesses, and increase access to capital in black communities by almost $500 billion.

    Part of the plan includes bringing back manufacturing jobs to the United States to advance jobs and business, and having an immigration policy that protects American jobs. It also calls to “increase activity in opportunity zones including benefits for local hires.”

    Trump is also promising access to better education and job training opportunities, and will work to “advance home ownership opportunities and enhance financial literacy in the black community,” according to the plan.

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    People listen while President Donald Trump speaks during an event for black supporters at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, on Sept. 25, 2020. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

    Over the next 4 years, Trump promises to lower the cost of healthcare, and “bring better and tailored healthcare to address historic disparities” for the black community. The president will also ensure that black churches can compete for federal resources, and “defend religious freedom exemptions to respect religious believers and always protect life.”

    The president also seeks to further criminal justice reform, with his plan saying that he will “commit to working on a Second Step Act.” He will also work towards “safe urban neighborhoods with highest policing standards,” the plan states.

    Other aspects of the plan includes making Juneteenth a National Holiday, prosecuting the KKK, designating Antifa a terrorist organization, and making lynching a national hate crime.

    Trump’s move to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization came after FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that those who engaged in recent violent protests are targets of serious FBI investigations.

    “We have seen Antifa adherence coalescing and working together in what I would describe as small groups and nodes,” Wray has said. Wray added that the bureau is conducting multiple investigations “into some anarchist violent extremists, some of whom operate through these nodes.”

    Before that, Attorney General William Barr in August said Antifa is a “revolutionary group” that is bent on establishing communism or socialism in the United States.

    “They are a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism. They’re essentially Bolsheviks. Their tactics are fascistic,” Barr said in an interview with Fox News on Aug. 9.

    At a “Black Voices for Trump” campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, Trump characterized his Platinum Plan as a “black empowerment plan,” and warned black voters against supporting his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

    “Though black Americans have traditionally been shut out of opportunities to grow our own businesses and create generational wealth, President Trump is working hard to give us access to the American Dream,” K. Carl Smith, Black Voices for Trump advisory board member, said in a statement.

    “President Trump is a businessman and understands that pride, community, and dedication are built through entrepreneurship.”

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    President Donald Trump elbow bumps with Herschel Walker during a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on Sept. 25, 2020. (John Bazemore/AP Photo)

    “No one in Washington politics today has done more to hurt black Americans than Joe Biden,” Trump told supporters on Friday. “For half a century, Joe’s personally advocated or enacted virtually every policy that has caused pain and suffering in the black community. You know that.”

    In a statement prior to Trump’s rally in Georgia, Biden said, “As president, I will work to advance racial equity across the American economy and build back better … I promise to fight for black working families and direct real investments to advance racial equity as part of our nation’s economic recovery.”

  • Prof Compares Black Americans Supporting Trump To Jews Supporting Hitler
    Prof Compares Black Americans Supporting Trump To Jews Supporting Hitler

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 20:45

    Authored by Ben Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

    Northwestern University journalism professor Stephan Garnett referred to African-American speakers at the Republican National Convention as “a grand display of buffoonery.” In an exclusive interview with Campus Reform, Garnett doubled down, comparing Black Americans who support Trump to Jews supporting Hitler.

    In an op-ed for MaxNewsToday titled “Black RNC Speakers Don’t Represent Us,” Garnett denounced Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Sen. Tim Scott, former NFL star Herschel Walker, and other prominent Black conservatives for declaring, “Donald Trump is not a racist.”

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    “What a grand display of buffoonery, almost as entertaining as a minstrel show,” said Garnett.

    “In fact, as far as the majority of African-Americans are concerned, it was a minstrel show.”

    Garnett also said that “as for those Black ‘patriots’ who spoke so rapturously about [Trump] at the RNC, we in the Black community have an age-old, down-home term for them. And it ain’t pretty.” Garnett called Trump’s lack of racism a “fiction” and called Black swing voters who are considering Trump “too dumb to see racism even when it runs up and socks ’em in the jaw.”

    Black RNC speakers attempted to challenge the narrative that the U.S. is a fundamentally racist nation.

    Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, explained at the RNC that his mother worked 16 hours per day to provide for him and his brother. He described his efforts to succeed in his career and rise above poverty.

    “Because of the evolution of the heart, in an overwhelmingly White district… the voters judged me on the content of my character, not the color of my skin,” said Scott. “Our family went from Cotton to Congress in one lifetime. And that’s why I believe the next American century can be better than the last.”

    Polls indicated that the RNC led to a nine-point increase in Trump’s approval rating among registered Black voters.

    During an interview with Campus Reform, Garnett doubled down on his op-ed, saying he has “zero respect” for African Americans who support Trump. After acknowledging that African Americans have the right to support the candidate of their choice, Garnett said, “Donald Trump does not support the interests of African Americans.” 

    Garnett said he “does not want to hear” the argument that the economy is better for African Americans under Trump, because Trump “inherited” a good economy from former President Barack Obama and since “he can no longer make that claim” due to the coronavirus pandemic.”

    “If you are a Black American and you support Donald Trump, I have an issue…”Garnett said. 

    Twice, Garnett compared the idea of Jews supporting Adolf Hitler to the idea of Black Americans supporting Trump. 

    “You do not support someone who works against your interests. And Donald Trump is not supportive of the interests of African Americans,” he said,” adding that Trump “has proven time and time again through his actions and through his word that he is racist.”

    Asked whether he believes the “threat” posed to Black Americans by Trump rises to the same level as the threat to Jews posed by Hitler during the Holocaust, Garnett responded, simply, “Yes.” 

    “I think Donald Trump, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the most dangerous man in America at this moment,” he added.

  • Landlords Avoid Confrontation With 'Uber Of Evictions'
    Landlords Avoid Confrontation With 'Uber Of Evictions'

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 20:15

    “Unemployment is at a record high and many cannot or simply are not paying rent and mortgages…  “We are being contracted by frustrated property owners and banks to secure foreclosed residential properties.” –Civvl

    A new startup company called Civvl is placing Craigslist ads across the country for gig workers to evict those who have fallen behind on rent during the pandemic, who can earn “up to 125/hour” for their services.

    “Be hired as an eviction crew,” reads another ad.

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    As Vice reports:

    During a time of great economic and general hardship, Civvl aims to be, essentially, Uber, but for evicting people. Seizing on a pandemic-driven nosedive in employment and huge uptick in number-of-people-who-can’t-pay-their-rent, Civvl aims to make it easy for landlords to hire process servers and eviction agents as gig workers.

    “It’s fucked up that there will be struggling working-class people who will be drawn to gigs like furniture-hauling or process-serving for a company like Civvl, evicting fellow working-class people from their homes so they themselves can make rent,” Chicago-based paralegal and housing activist, Helena Duncan, told Vice.

    Civvl uses catchy gig economy language such as “be your own boss,” and “flexible hours!” or “Looking for self-motivated individuals with positive attitudes.”

    “FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG DUE TO COVID-19,” their website read. “Literally thousands of process servers are needed in the coming months due courts being backed up in judgements that needs to be served to defendants.”

    The website also featured a quote, attributed to The New York Times: “Too many people stopped paying rent and mortgages thinking they would not be evicted.” A search reveals this phrase hasn’t appeared in the Times. The company did not respond to requests for comment or a source for this quote, but the mention of the Times has since disappeared from its website. –Vice

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    Civvl is connected to another gig economy company, OnQall – an app which describes itself as providing “on-demand task services to non-urban communities beyond main city areas.” The company is heavy on using celebrities of various grades to promote their platform.

    To put the business of OnQall more simply, Ice-T said in an apparent Cameo video, “It’s basically Uber, for side hustle jobs. You dig it?” Ice-T’s representative did not respond to a request for comment. Another vertically-shot selfie video from Omarosa Manigault Newman, offers generic words of congratulations to OnQall’s CEO, Paul Francis, on his app. 

     

    “Mrs Newman is NOT associated with Civvl,” A spokesperson for Omarosa told VICE. “That video is certainly a cameo and should be credited as such.”  –Vice

    Read the rest of the report here.

  • John Legend Threatens To 'Leave Country' If Trump Reelected – After Buying $17.5 Million LA Mansion This Month
    John Legend Threatens To 'Leave Country' If Trump Reelected – After Buying $17.5 Million LA Mansion This Month

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 19:55

    Singer John Legend (real name John Roger Stephens) says that Americans might “have to start thinking about going somewhere else” if President Trump is reelected.

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    Legend joins a long tradition of Hollywood liberals who vow to leave the country over President Trump but then don’t.

    “At some point, if that project [to destroy democracy] was to be in any way successful, you’d have to think about going somewhere that is a true democracy, that has respect for the rule of law and human rights,” Legend virtue signaled in an interview this week with Cosmopolitan UK.

    “If America chooses to be that place then people will have to start thinking about going somewhere else. It is truly disturbing and concerning,” he added.

    “We were born and raised here, all of our families are here. It would be hard to leave. But I don’t know what one’s supposed to do when you have a leader who is trying to destroy democracy,” Legend added.

    Legend, 41, performed at the Democratic National Convention and is a huge Biden supporter – while Trump has referred to the performer as “boring,” and referred to his wife Chrissy Teigen as “filthy-mouthed.”

    Teigen deleted 60,000 tweets earlier this year after coming under fire for sexualizing children.

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    That said, Legend’s obvious virtue signal would be slightly more believable if he and Teigen hadn’t just bought a $17.5 million mansion in Beverly Hills.

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  • Outrage Grows Over Pentagon Funneling $1BN In COVID Relief To Defense Contractor Wish Lists
    Outrage Grows Over Pentagon Funneling $1BN In COVID Relief To Defense Contractor Wish Lists

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 19:45

    Authored by Jessica Corbett via CommonDreams.org,

    A coalition of 40 ideologically diverse organizations on Thursday demanded that federal lawmakers investigate allegations from earlier this week that the Pentagon misused much of $1 billion in congressionally appropriated Covid-19 relief funding for what one critic called “a colossal backdoor bailout for the defense industry.”

    The groups’ call came in a letter (pdf) addressed to Reps. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) Steve Scalise (R-La.), leaders of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. The push for a probe was prompted by Washington Post reporting that some tax dollars directed to the Defense Department in March for building up U.S. supplies of medical equipment have “instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used to make things such as jet engine parts, body armor, and dress uniforms.”

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    Getty Images

    In addition to a probe, the National Taxpayers Union, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), Win Without War, and 37 other groups urged Clyburn and Scalise to determine whether Congress should pass a bill suspending the Pentagon’s spending authority for the funds, arguing that the department’s decision-making “violates congressional intent at minimum, and represents a significant breach of trust with the taxpayers who fund the military’s budget and its emergency spending.”

    Win Without War advocacy director Erica Fein said in a statement that “this gross misuse of Covid-19 relief funds provides yet another example of the Pentagon’s wasteful, unaccountable spending, which puts the corporate profits of the weapons industry over the lives and well-being of everyday people.”

    “This scandal should be a wake-up call,” she added. “The greatest threats to human security cannot be addressed by funneling money into weapons of war. We must resist the corrupting influence of the military contracting industry, stop pouring our resources into the bloated, unaccountable Pentagon coffers, and instead invest in meeting our country’s, and the world’s, real human needs.”

    The United States continued to lead the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths Friday afternoon. There have been more than seven million confirmed infections and over 203,000 deaths nationwide, according to Johns Hopkins University’s global tracker. President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress have come under fire for inadequately responding to the public health crisis.

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    As the letter the highlights, the Post reported that the Defense Department—which is run by former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper—gave at least $183 million to contractors “to maintain the shipbuilding industry” and $80 million to an “aircraft parts business suffering from the Boeing 737 Max grounding.”

    Additionally, the Pentagon gave $25 million to a firm that also “received between $5 million and $10 million” from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP); $3 million to a firm that also received between $150,000 and $350,000 from the PPP; and “$2 million for a domestic manufacturer of Army dress uniform fabric.”

    Chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman issued a lengthy statement Wednesday defending the spending and criticizing the Post piece. He said in part, “As indicated by recent reporting, there appears to be a misunderstanding by some about what the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (“CARES Act”) did and did not do with respect to the Department of Defense.”

    Hoffman added that the department has been “wholly transparent” in its decisions about the relief funds and claimed that “much of [the] useful context” it provided to the newspaper was “left out of the story leading some to misconstrue the expenditures when in fact they are wholly appropriate as directed by Congress.”

    Although the Post acknowleged that Pentagon officials “contend that they have sought to strike a balance between boosting American medical production and supporting the defense industry, whose health they consider critical to national security,” critics at the groups behind the letter aren’t buying that argument.

    “It’s unconscionable that the department would prioritize defense contractor wish lists over the health and safety of the American people,” declared Mandy Smithberger, director of POGO’s Center for Defense Information.

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    Arguing that Congress was clear it wanted the Pentagon to use its powers to address ongoing shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), Smithberger said “the American people deserve better judgment from the agency entrusted with leading our national security and responses to unanticipated threats.”

    Other signatories include Beyond the Bomb, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Demand Progress, Greenpeace USA, Indivisible, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Public Citizen, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

    On Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) requested that the department’s inspector general investigate reports about the Pentagon’s spending, writing that the alleged misuse of funds “meant for the response to the deadly pandemic plaguing our country is inconsistent with the will of Congress and may be illegal.”

    That request and the groups’ collective call for a congressional investigation follow a similar letter that a pair of lawmakers sent Tuesday to Clyburn as well as Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.). Maloney heads the House Oversight Committee while Smith chairs the chamber’s Armed Services Committee.

    Writing as co-chairs of the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus, Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) condemned the Pentagon’s actions as “unacceptable.” They urged the trio to “review the legality of the Department of Defense’s spending decisions and every possible remedy.”

  • New Research Explains Why Children Are Far Less Vulnerable To COVID-19 Than Adults
    New Research Explains Why Children Are Far Less Vulnerable To COVID-19 Than Adults

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 19:20

    For months, some scientists dismissed the lack of symptomatic COVID-19 infections in children as perhaps a factor of schools being cancelled before the pandemic entered its worst phases. But new research has emerged to suggest that children’s bodies really do process the virus differently than adults, in a way that makes them less susceptible to its most life-threatening excesses.

    In a new study that was reported on by the New York Times yesterday, one reason for children’s relative good fortune is that a branch of their immune system that evolved to protect against unfamiliar pathogens rapidly destroys the coronavirus before the virus can do serious damage to its youthful host.

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    “The bottom line is, yes, children do respond differently immunologically to this virus, and it seems to be protecting the kids,” said Dr. Betsy Herold, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who led the study. In adults, the body’s immune response to the virus is “much more muted”.

    As the NYT explains, when the body encounters an unfamiliar pathogen, it responds within hours with a flurry of immune activity, called an innate immune response. The body’s defenders are quickly recruited to the fight and begin releasing signals calling for backup. Since children more frequently encounter viruses and other pathogens with which their bodies are unfamiliar, their immune responses are typically a lot harsher than adults’.

    Over time, an individual’s immune system encounters so many of these biological invaders, that it builds up a large rolodex of frequent pests, then relies on more complicated systems of fighting off bodily threats. At the same time, this ‘innate response’ fades, leaving adults more susceptible to pathogens that are new to the entire population.

    One study examining 60 adults and 65 children and young adults under the age of 24, all of whom were hospitalized at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York City from March 13 to May 17, found that children exhibited severe symptoms much less frequently than even the young adults.

    The patients included 20 children with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, the severe and sometimes deadly immune overreaction linked to the coronavirus. Overall, the children were only mildly affected by the virus, compared with adults. The kids mostly reported gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea and a loss of taste or smell. Only five children needed mechanical ventilation, compared with 22 of the adults. Only two children died, compared with 17 adults.

    To be sure, the coronavirus can be lethal for people of all ages, and there are many risk factors that put people with preexisting health issues at greater risk.

    But these differences in immune system function between generations might not be the only reason why kids suffer from COVID-19 in much smaller numbers. Writing in the Blaze, Daniel Horowitz discusses some new research from Europe, which found that 3% of samples of a different coronavirus variety that causes the common cold (between 15% and 30% of colds are thought to be caused by coronaviruses of one type or another) tested positive for COVID-19.

    That means a significant number of positive tests from schools and other places children congregate could be false positives. Keep in mind, when a child tests positive, not only are they quarantined for a week, but oftentimes, all children with whom they’ve been in contact – sometimes even their entire class – are also quarantined for 2 weeks.

    But as the world’s understanding of the virus improves, maybe societies will learn to allocate resources in a different way that doesn’t place so much emphasis on testing and isolating the least vulnerable.

    Scitranslmed.abd5487.Full by Zerohedge on Scribd

  • Why Are So Many Asteroids Having Close-Calls With Earth In 2020?
    Why Are So Many Asteroids Having Close-Calls With Earth In 2020?

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 18:55

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

    Have you noticed that it seems like stories about asteroids that are approaching the Earth are constantly in the news this year?  It wasn’t always this way.  In the old days, maybe there would be a story about an asteroid every once in a while, and those stories were never a big deal.  But now asteroids are zipping by our planet with frightening regularity, and several more very notable passes will happen over the next few weeks. 

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    For example, an asteroid that was just discovered on September 18th will come very, very close to the Earth on Thursday.  According to NASA, it will actually come closer to our planet than many of our weather satellites…

    An asteroid about the size of an RV or small school bus will zoom past the Earth on Thursday, NASA announced, passing within 13,000 miles of the Earth’s surface.

    That’s much closer than the moon and is actually closer than some of our weather satellites.

    This asteroid will speed by at more than 17,000 mph, but the good news is that it is so small that it would not be a serious threat even if it hit us.

    But two other very large asteroids are also going to pass the Earth by the end of this month, and both of them are large enough to do an enormous amount of damage…

    Two large asteroids will pass Earth in the next two weeks, with one measuring up to 426 feet in diameter and the other 656 feet—comparable in size to ancient Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, which is 455 feet tall.

    The first, smaller asteroid will pass by Earth on September 25 at a distance of 3.6 million miles, according to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks and predicts asteroids and comets that will come close to Earth. The second larger asteroid will fly by on September 29 at a closer distance of 1.78 million miles.

    The good news is that neither of them have a chance of hitting us this time around, but the fact that the Earth’s neighborhood has so much “traffic” these days is a major concern.

    Any soldier will tell you that if enough bullets get fired at you there is a very good chance that eventually you will get hit.

    Let me give you a couple more examples of “near Earth objects” that are headed our way in the near future…

    In October, an “unknown object” is expected to enter our gravitational field and become a temporary “mini-moon”…

    An object known as 2020 SO is heading towards Earth, and from October, it will be a ‘mini-moon’, which could stay in orbit of our planet until May next year. While we have The Moon, Earth regularly gets many small asteroids and meteors which caught in its orbit, which astronomers call ‘mini-moons’.

    And in November, we are being told that a small asteroid will come very close to our planet on the day before the election…

    An asteroid is projected to come close to the Earth on November 2, a day before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the Center for Near Earth Objects Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed.

    The asteroid known as 2018VP1, first identified at Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, has a diameter of 0.002 kilometers (over 6.5 feet), according to the data.

    Scientists say that it is not likely that this asteroid will hit us, but they admit that they cannot claim this with 100 percent certainty…

    And that’s why the future of 2018 VP₁ is uncertain. It was observed 21 times over 13 days, which allows its orbit to be calculated fairly precisely. We know it takes 2 years (plus or minus 0.001314 years) to go around the Sun. In other words, our uncertainty in the asteroid’s orbital period is about 12 hours either way.

    That’s actually pretty good, given how few observations were made – but it means we can’t be certain exactly where the asteroid will be on November 2 this year.

    Fortunately, this particular asteroid is also too small to seriously hurt us, and we should be thankful for that.

    But the fact that so many space rocks have been headed our way is definitely alarming.

    Back in August, an asteroid the size of an SUV came extremely close to hitting our planet.  The following comes from NASA…

    Near Earth Asteroids, or NEAs, pass by our home planet all the time. But an SUV-size asteroid set the record this past weekend for coming closer to Earth than any other known NEA: It passed 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday, Aug. 16 at 12:08 a.m. EDT (Saturday, Aug. 15 at 9:08 p.m. PDT).

    What made that incident so unsettling was the fact that NASA didn’t even see it until it had passed us…

    The flyby wasn’t expected and took many by surprise. In fact, the Palomar Observatory didn’t detect the zooming asteroid until about six hours after the object’s closest approach. “The asteroid approached undetected from the direction of the sun,” Paul Chodas, the director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, told Business Insider. “We didn’t see it coming.”

    Unfortunately, the truth is that our scientists simply cannot see everything that is up there.

    They are doing their best, but everyone agrees that our technology is limited.

    But over the last 20 years our technology has definitely improved, and at this point the number of asteroids that our scientists have identified is far greater than it was a couple of decades ago…

    The animation maps out all known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) — space rocks that get within about 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of our planet’s orbit — from 1999 through January 2018, in roughly 10-year time steps.

    The differences are stark. In 1999, identified NEAs speckled the inner solar system thinly, in a light dusting. Many more were discovered by 2009, and Earth’s neighborhood looks absolutely swamped in the present-day portion of the video.

    Of course more giant space rocks are being discovered all the time, and unfortunately many of them are not identified until after they have had a close encounter with our planet.

    If NASA couldn’t see the asteroid that almost hit us in August in advance, what else can’t they see?

    And is it just our imagination that the number of close calls seems to be increasing, or are scientists just getting a whole lot better at detecting them?

    At this moment we don’t have all the answers, but we should be thankful that our experts are trying to keep a close watch on the skies because scientists tell us that it is just a matter of time before we are hit by a giant asteroid.

    In the movie Deep Impact, such a scenario was called an “extinction level event”.

    As I write this article, there are thousands of giant space rocks floating around up there that could cause such a disaster, and NASA is working to catalog them all as rapidly as they can.

  • A Visual History Of The Fed's Forward Guidance
    A Visual History Of The Fed's Forward Guidance

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 18:30

    Ten years after the Fed had steadfastly followed a monetary policy prescription based on the preachings of the Phillips model, late in August the Fed finally admitted that it had done everything wrong. As Fed vice chair Richard Clarida said when discussing the Fed’s new policy “framework” of Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (or no FAIT), this was “a robust evolution in the Federal Reserve’s policy framework and reflects the reality that econometric models of maximum employment, while essential inputs to monetary policy, can be and have been wrong.”

    The immediate implication here is that had the Fed operated under inflation targeting in the 2012-2018 period, the Fed would have never started hiking rates. As Clarida explained “a decision to tighten monetary policy based solely on a model without any other evidence of excessive cost-push pressure that puts the price-stability mandate at risk” – such as what happened the last time the Fed tightened “is difficult to justify, given the significant cost to the economy if the model turns out to be wrong and given the ability of monetary policy to respond if the model were eventually to turn out to be right.” This has been interpreted to mean that the Fed’s tightening cycle of 2015, which some have suggested cost Hillary the election, would never have happened and that the Fed is taking Trump’s presidency quite personally.

    But more to the point, it begs the question why should the Fed’s economic takes, views and analyses be taken seriously anymore? After all, if the Fed now admits it was operating under a “wrong” framework, what’s to say that inflation targeting isn’t wrong? Or that propping up stocks for the sake of avoiding collapse while blowing the biggest ever asset bubble isn’t wrong, and so on.

    Frankly, we don’t know or care, but now that the Fed is once again in a corner and on the verge of launching both yield curve control (should the Democrats sweep in November), expanded QE (once the S&P drops a total of 20% from its all time high), and even more forward guidance (to the abyss), we decided to show readers the catastrophic history of the Fed’s projections even before it had admitted it had no clue what the relationship between labor and inflation is.

    First, we look at the Fed’s laughable forward guidance history:

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    Next, a look at the FOMC’s balance sheet policies: this one is especially amusing in the context of the Fed’s dramatic reversal from “autopilot” to rate cuts as soon as stocks slumped in late 2018.

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    Finally here is a look at how the Fed’s economic projections policies have changed over time.

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    Source: Morgan Stanley

  • No Internet, No Problem. Venezuela Gets Bitcoin Satellite Node
    No Internet, No Problem. Venezuela Gets Bitcoin Satellite Node

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 18:05

    Authored by Jose Antonio Lanz via Decrypt.co,

    In brief

    • Venezuela deployed its first Bitcoin satellite node.

    • It allows for a node on the ground to receive Bitcoin transaction details from a Blockstream satellite without internet.

    • Venezuela has poor internet connectivity.

    Venezuela has its first Bitcoin satellite node capable of processing transactions without an internet connection.

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    The Venezuelan “space node” was set up in the country by Anibal Garrido and the Anibal Cripto team. It uses technology from Blockstream, which contracts satellites—in this case, EUTELSAT-113 – to broadcast data between points via offline connections. That’s huge in a country where internet infrastructure is lacking.

    The idea came from Cryptobuyer, a Latin American startup focused on offering cryptocurrency-based payment solutions. 

    “We started in Venezuela because of the obvious connectivity problems and Cryptobuyer is always looking for a way to be resilient to these kinds of problems by anticipating any possible contingency,” CEO Jorge Farias told Decrypt.

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    The node on the ground “receives the data packet via satellite, directly from the connection provided by Blockstream,” Anibal Garrido explained to Decrypt. Garrido added that he hopes to expand access by deploying something akin to a mesh network that can broadcast data between various devices.

    The node antenna, deployed in Valencia, is the first of three. The other two will be deployed in the capital city, Caracas, and Puerto Ordaz. Cryptobuyer chose Valencia because it is an industrialized city but doesn’t have many tall buildings that could block the signal.

    This would be the first stage of an ambitious project that could help increase Bitcoin’s usability in a country with below-average technological infrastructure. Internet speeds in Venezuela are some of the slowest on the continent. Electricity service has also been known to fail, leaving large chunks of the country without power.

    Could this antenna make it possible to pay with Bitcoin in remote areas or in the event of an internet failure? Farias thinks so. He pointed out that that is why they are looking to deploy a mesh system that communicates with the Blockstream satellite:

    “We use a P2P network that uses some USB devices that are already in Venezuela. Soon we will deploy these devices with coverage of about four kilometers each.” 

    But beyond the pragmatism, Anibal considers Venezuela a breeding ground for actualizing Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision.

    “This project seeks to demonstrate the character of the Bitcoin protocol: Open nature, without restrictions and without borders,” he said. “Consequently, Venezuela is a pioneer in Latin America and the world in the use and application of this type of technology that is not imposed by decree or force.”

    Despite its political and economic problems, Venezuela ranks first among all Latin countries in cryptocurrency adoption. One can only imagine how much Bitcoin could grow now that it can bypass the internet.

  • Bank of America Issues $2 Billion Bond To Fight "Race Inequality"
    Bank of America Issues $2 Billion Bond To Fight "Race Inequality"

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 17:40

    In our bizarro world in which the Fed, having failed at sparking wage inflation (and is now hiding behind the semantic construct of Average Inflation Targeting which gives it leeway to keep rates at zero for decades to come), has instead pivoted to levitating the stock market as the primary source of social wealth creation, is now seeking to combat climate change,  has become an expert epidemiologist,  and has even been tasked with ending racial inequality (which is delightfully paradoxical since it is the Fed that is behind the biggest wealth divide in history), it should probably come as no surprise that banks which are behind the biggest corporate debt bubble in history, are now selling debt under the absurd virtue-signaling guise of “fighting racial inequality.”

    No really: last week Bank of America issued a $2 billion bond (on which it was also the sole bookrunner) which aims to advance racial equality, economic opportunity and environmental sustainability.

    The initiative, backed by the high priests of all that is virtuous including BofA Vice Chairman Anne Finucane and Chief Operating Officer Tom Montag, is the company’s eighth environmental, social and governance (ESG) themed bond, bringing its total issuance in the category to $9.85 billion, the bank said in a statement .

    The bond offering, which priced earlier in the week, has an explicit “social portion” for the use of proceeds which will be dedicated to “help reduce inequalities for Black and Hispanic-Latino borrowers and communities” including:

    • Mortgage lending, construction loans and other financing and investments relating to single or multi-family housing or affordable housing projects;

    • Financing for medical professionals to create or expand medical, veterinary and dental practices;

    • Supply chain finance loans to be offered directly to minority-owned business enterprises;

    • Deposits and equity investments in Black and Hispanic-Latino Minority Depository Institutions that are also Community Development Financial Institutions;

    • Equity investments in Black and Hispanic-Latino owned or operated businesses

    “Our focus on sustainable finance is one of the ways we drive responsible growth. By addressing these critically important issues through ESG-themed securities, we are offering a way for fixed income investors to be part of social and environmental change, and drive solutions through the debt capital markets,” said vice chairman (shouldn’t that be chairwoman?) Anne Finucane, who leads the company’s ESG, sustainable finance, capital deployment and public policy efforts. “Our communities and the environment are inextricably linked, and Bank of America cares deeply about both and continues to explore innovative ways to enable investors to use their investments to help address these societal challenges.”

    “We want to be an example for other issuers,” Karen Fang, the bank’s head of global sustainable finance, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a bull year or a bear year, we need to be committed to these causes.”

    What BofA really means is that it has tapped into a surging market where fellow virtue-signalers – in hopes of reducing the heat they are under from an increasingly angry public – buy the bonds to have a token claim that they too are among society’s most noble. Kinda like donating a small fraction of one’s income to charity each year in order to (hopefully) wash away far greater sins, something the Clinton foundation grasped decades ago.

    As a result, companies looking to fund ESG projects are tapping the green-bond market at the fastest monthly pace ever according to Bloomberg, with September’s global green-bond issuance already exceededing $30 billion, beating the prior record of $26 billion set in November 2018. And, as Bloomberg adds, “issuance is expected to remain brisk as companies see an opportunity to show their green credentials and potentially reduce funding costs while investors increasingly focus on sustainability.”

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    In short, investors hope to signal their virtue by buying green bonds – they certainly aren’t buying the bond for its generous coupons: the BofA bond will pay interest semi-annually at a fixed rate of 0.981% for the first four-years, and quarterly at a floating rate thereafter. At the same time issuers allocate a small portion of the proceeds to noble ESG causes, thus absolving them of all their non-ESG sins.

    The virtue signaling doesn’t stop there: while BofA did not spent any money placing the bond as it itself underwrote it, it threw a few nickles at “minority-owned broker dealers” who served as joint lead managers, including Loop Capital Markets, Ramirez & Co., Inc. and Siebert Williams Shank.

    “I don’t think that trend will diminish even in the face of market volatility,” said Andrew Karp, the bank’s head of global investment-grade capital markets. “ESG activity will no doubt grow in the months and years to come.”

    Virtue signaling aside, what is the real story? Well, within a year, the bank said it would publish a report on the bond’s asset allocation, and it will be updated as long as the notes remain outstanding. We won’t be surprised to find that the “non-social portion” of the use of proceeds was somehow used to repurchase BofA’s non-ESG stock.

  • The Supply Chain Is Broken And Food Shortages Are Here
    The Supply Chain Is Broken And Food Shortages Are Here

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 17:15

    Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper,

    If you are a reader of this site, you might be more interested in the food supply chain than most, at least when things are good. So, if you have been paying attention recently, you might find that there have been some severe disturbances in that supply chain.

    Several months ago, the immediate disruptions began at the beginning of the COVID-19 hysteria, when factories, distribution centers, and even farms shut down under the pretext of “flattening the curve.”

    As a result, Americans found necessities were missing on the shelves for the first time in years. Items like hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes were, of course, out of stock.

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    Soon other items became noticeably missing as well.

    People began to notice meat, and even canned vegetables and rice were soon missing from the shelves. Most of this was simply the result of mass panic buying, although “preppers” were blamed for “hoarding.” Therefore, people who had not been prepping all along and were suddenly caught with their pants down.

    But that’s not the whole story.

    Manufacturing and packaging facilities and slaughterhouses shut down due to intrusive totalitarian government reactions to an alleged pandemic. Combined with panic buying, those facilities’ ability to replace what was bought up was drastically reduced. As a result, consumers were forced to wait weeks before buying what they needed (or wanted) again. Even then, they had to show up in the morning.

    We are still experiencing those shortages, though better hidden. As anyone who shops regularly can tell you, you can find what you need, but you may have to go to three stores to get it, where one would have done in the past. In this article, you’ll find some advice about dealing with the limited varieties of inventory that people are currently noticing at stores.

    War launched on the economy by state governments put millions of Americans out of work.

    Now, when most rational people would be happy to have a job at all amid such high unemployment, they were prepared to stop the machine’s wheels from working.

    Workers suddenly started to organize, strike, and walk off the job conveniently when the food supply was already broken. Of course, these workers had not organized or initiated a strike at any time before when working conditions were bleak, and wages were low.

    While extraordinary times beget extraordinary reactions, the timing of the newfound sense of workers’ resolve cannot go unnoticed.

    At the same time, we witnessed farms dumping thousands of gallons of milk down the drain, meat producers slaughtering animals and burying them, and farmers destroying crops all over the country and the world.

    The reason for this is two-fold.

    First, many major producers would not want a glut of their product on the market and see their prices dropdown.

    Second, with the totalitarian measures forcing the shut down of restaurants across the country, many farms and producers lost a massive part of their market, thus destroying it.

    A government genuinely concerned with its people’s health would have bought that produce and either distributed it or freeze-dried and stored it for the coming apocalypse.

    Indeed, the Trump administration attempted this with some very minor success and high cost. Food banks at least benefited. But the damage to the food supply was already done.

    And then came the winds.

    As time moved forward, we saw devastating straight-line winds blow across places like Iowa, destroying massive amounts of crops and farming infrastructure, effects rarely advertised on mainstream media outlets.

    Following those winds, we saw massive wildfires along the West Coast’s entirety from Washington to California and as far east as Colorado, South Dakota, and Texas.

    One need only take a look at the map at fires seemingly heading east, burning up prairies and farmland all along the way to see that the food chain will experience yet even more hiccups once the smoke has cleared.

    But while leftists claim the fires are the natural result of “climate change” and conservatives blame lack of adequate forest management (which has some merit), both completely ignore the fact that close to ten people were arrested for setting these fires.

    Repeatedly, arsonists are being arrested for starting blazes though the motive is unclear. Those of us who have studied history, however, can speculate with some certainty.

    But these problems are not unique to the United States.

    Countries all over the world are experiencing supply chain problems. Australia, for instance, is about to run out of its domestic rice supply by December entirely.

    Now, here we are, with winter fast approaching and the food supply decimated. The world’s population is walking around masked and terrified of getting within six feet of another human, and the cities all across America are on fire with violent riots.

    Communists and the inevitable response are clashing in the streets and threatening to turn in to a possible American Civil War 2.0. What role will hunger play in this scenario?

    At the moment, we can’t say for sure.

    But what we can say with certainty is that this will be a very long, very trying winter.

    Food shortages are coming, and they aren’t too far away.

    You do not have much time left before the items you can grab now are gone and gone for good. Here are some tips for shopping when there aren’t many supplies left on the shelves, and here’s a list of things that are usually imported from China that we haven’t been receiving in the same quantities (if at all) since the crisis began.

    Many of the readers of this website will be prepared, no doubt, but others won’t. Not only do we advise you to prepare – but we also advise you to be ready for the unprepared.

  • Amy Coney Barrett Picked By Trump As U.S. Supreme Court Nominee
    Amy Coney Barrett Picked By Trump As U.S. Supreme Court Nominee

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 16:50

    President Trump is set to announce his nominee for the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last week. And, as previously reported, Trump has picked Amy Coney Barrett.

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    Barrett was considered a finalist for the Supreme Court vacancy left by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh was tapped by the president instead. Due to her religious beliefs, Barrett is feared by liberals even though some concede that she has “a topnotch legal mind.”

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    Barrett, known to be a devout Catholic who considers abortion “always immoral,” would fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The loss of liberal icon Ginsburg and the confirmation of the conservative Barrett, 48, could cement the Supreme Court’s rightward shift for a generation.

    While Joe Biden has said the winner of the presidential contest should fill Ginsburg’s seat, there’s little Democrats can do to delay a vote on Barrett, a former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the high court’s former conservative standard-bearer. Needless to say, her appointment will play a dominant role in the final weeks of the presidential election.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after Ginsburg’s death on Sept. 18 that a vote will be held on the Senate floor for Trump’s nominee.

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    McConnell has not said yet whether the vote will take place before or after the Nov. 3 election. In a statement moments after the nomination, McConnell said that “Judge Amy Coney Barrett is an exceptionally impressive jurist and an exceedingly well-qualified nominee to the Supreme Court. A brilliant scholar. An exemplary judge. President Trump could not have made a better decision.”

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    The Senate Judiciary Committee must hold confirmation hearings with the nominee ahead of the confirmation vote by the full Senate. Although senators typically go home to campaign for reelection in October, members of the Judiciary Committee may have to remain in Washington for any hearings ahead of the election.

    Late Friday, amid multiple media outlets, all citing anonymous sources, reporting that Trump was planning to nominate Barrett, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced that the Senate was going to “begin a thorough review of Judge Barrett’s nomination.”

    “I look forward to meeting with her in the coming days as the Judiciary Committee prepares for her confirmation hearing,” Cornyn announced.

    This is the third justice nominated by Trump appointed to the Supreme Court. If appointed, Barrett would also expand the conservative majority on the court, widening it to 6 to 3.

    Watch Live (Trump Address due to start at 5pmET):

    *  *  *

    So, who is Amy Coney Barrett?

    The Epoch Times’ Mimi Nguyen Ly explains Barrett, 48, who currently serves on the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, earned her J.D. at Notre Dame Law School in 1997. She served as a clerk in 1997-1998 for Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and later as a clerk in 1998-1999 for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016.

    After her clerkships, she was an associate at law firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C. for a year, and later moved to Texas-based firm Baker Botts in 2000, before leaving for academia.

    In 2002, she became a professor at Notre Dame Law School, where she taught constitutional law, the federal courts, and statutory interpretation. She was named “distinguished professor of the year” three times, according to SCOTUSblog.

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    Barrett was appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate 55-43 to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017. At the time, every full-time member of Notre Dame Law School’s faculty signed a strong letter of support (pdf) for her nomination, as did every law clerk who served a U.S. Supreme Court justice during the term that Barrett clerked for Scalia (pdf).

    Barrett is a Roman Catholic. At her confirmation hearing, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned her over her Catholic faith in fulfilling the judicial role.

    “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said.

    “And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.”

    Feinstein also indicated that she was worried that Barrett may ignore Supreme Court precedents on issues such as abortion.
    Barrett said she would respect Supreme Court precedent.

    When asked about the article, Barrett said, “It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law.” She also said later at the hearing that her views on abortion “or any other question will have no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge.”

    Finally, as we previously pointed out, Alan Dershowitz notes  under our Constitution, Senator Feinstein’s statement crossed the line. Ours was the first Constitution in history to provide that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

    Although Feinstein did not explicitly impose a religious test, she suggested that personal religious views — which she called dogma — might disqualify a nominee from being confirmed.

    That would clearly be unconstitutional.

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    Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) attends a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 16, 2020. (Tom Williams/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

    A number of past cases and writings provide insight into Barrett’s stance on various issues, from the death penalty, to immigration, and gun rights.

    For example, Barrett was questioned at her 7th Circuit confirmation hearing about an article she co-wrote in 1998, titled “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases.” The article discussed Catholics’ moral and legal obligations when asked to rule in a death penalty case. It stated, “The prohibitions against abortion and euthanasia (properly defined) are absolute; those against war and capital punishment are not.”

    “There are two evident differences between the cases. First, abortion and euthanasia take away innocent life. This is not always so with war and punishment,” read the article, which Barrett wrote with former Notre Dame law professor John H. Garvey, who now is the president of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

    “If one cannot in conscience affirm a death sentence the proper response is to recuse oneself,” the law review article also said.

    “Catholic judges must answer some complex moral and legal questions in deciding whether to sit in death penalty cases. Sometimes (as with direct appeals of death sentences) the right answers are not obvious. But in a system that effectively leaves the decision up to the judge, these are questions that responsible Catholics must consider seriously,” the article concluded. “Judges cannot—nor should they try to—align our legal system with the Church’s moral teaching whenever the two diverge. They should, however, conform their own behavior to the Church’s standard. Perhaps their good example will have some effect.”

    Barrett and her husband have seven children, two of whom are adopted from Haiti. Her husband, Jesse Barrett, serves as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Indiana.

    If Barrett is confirmed, she would join Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to form a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court of justices who were appointed by Republican presidents.

    Barring some unforeseen disaster, there appears little Democrats can do – despite the threats – to delay a vote on Barrett, solidifying a right-leaning shift to the court for a generation.

  • In Unprecedented Reversal, Nasdaq Shorts Hit Second Highest Ever
    In Unprecedented Reversal, Nasdaq Shorts Hit Second Highest Ever

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 09/26/2020 – 16:35

    On Friday we pointed out that one week after one of the biggest inflows into stock funds on record – when retail traders furiously BTFD in hopes the market’s upward momentum would accelerate – speculators hit a brick wall and reversed furiously as stocks slumped, with US equity funds and ETFs reporting $26.87BN of outflows, the largest weekly outflow since December 2018 and the third largest outflow ever! In other this was the fastest and biggest sentiment reversal on record.

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    This record sentiment reversal was driven by despair-driven capitulation outflows from high beta and momentum names, as tech-focused ETFs suffered $1.23 billion worth of outflows, the largest since December 2018, when global stock markets tanked. September was also the first month of outflows for the tech sector since the March crash.

    But nowhere has the sentiment shift been as clear as in Nasdaq 100 Mini futures, where after more than a year of bullish sentiment with just one tiny dip into bearish territory in May, speculators finally puked, sending the net non-commercial NQ futs to -134,311 contracts, surpassing the peak bearish sentiment during and after the financial crisis…

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    … and in fact the second highest on record, with just July 2006 more bearish. What happened back then? For the next generation of traders out there, that’s when Fed had just reached the peak of its rate-hike cycle (yes, there was a time when rates above 2% were possible), hammering the Nasdaq.

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    Back in 2006 the Fed responded by starting an easing cycle in 2007, and the resulting drop in rates from over 5% to 0% eventually allowed the Nasdaq to rebound and hit all time highs.

    This near-record bearish positioning, which we first pointed out last week, has given even the Bear Traps Report – which is furiously bearish on tech stocks – pause, prompting it to asses the all too real possibility of a squeeze:

    Nasdaq non-commercial futures positioning is now the shortest since 2008, the index has rapidly blown through the March lows. We are definitely not bullish Nasdaq, but this certainly gives us pause. It is quite possible that this is just momentum players hedging their FANG gains etc, but still quite a move. Keep in mind, that was out a week ago. We’d imagine most dealers and former dealers are bearish risk and are short futures because every piled into puts very quickly (i.e dealers had to hedge themselves on the other side of the trade). Setting up for a squeeze to short into…

    What is curious is that it took only a modest Nasdaq correction over the past month to send sentiment to the second most bearish on record. And unlike 2006, this time the Fed can’t cut rates any lower to reverse sentiment.

    On the other hand, the Fed can and will do everything in its power to push sentiment even higher now that Powell has made it clear the Fed is all in the stock market as the primary wealth effect mechanism, in which case watch out once the near record short-squeeze in NQ futs begins: it can and will send the Nasdaq to all time highs faster than you can spell “Brrrrr.“

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Sep 26

Today’s News 26th September 2020

  • Pepe Escobar Exposes 'Sinophobia Inc.' – The West's Information-Industrial Hybrid Warfare Complex
    Pepe Escobar Exposes ‘Sinophobia Inc.’ – The West’s Information-Industrial Hybrid Warfare Complex

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 23:40

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog, (Originally posted at The Asia Times),

    It took one minute for President Trump to introduce a virus at the virtual 75th UN General Assembly, blasting “the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world”.

    And then it all went downhill.

    Even as Trump was essentially delivering a campaign speech and could not care less about the multilateral UN, at least the picture was clear enough for all the socially distant “international community” to see.

    Here is President Xi’s full statement. And here is President Putin’s full statement. And here’s the geopolitical chessboard, once again; it’s the “indispensable nation” versus the Russia-China strategic partnership.

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    As he stressed the importance of the UN, Xi could not be more explicit that no nation has the right to control the destiny of others: “Even less should one be allowed to do whatever it likes and be the hegemon, bully, or boss of the world .”

    The US ruling class obviously won’t take this act of defiance lying down. The full spectrum of Hybrid War techniques will continue to be relentlessly turbo-charged against China, coupled with rampant Sinophobia, even as it dawns on many Dr. Strangelove quarters that the only way to really “deter” China would be Hot War.

    Alas, the Pentagon is overstretched – Syria, Iran, Venezuela, South China Sea. And every analyst knows about China’s cyber warfare capabilities, integrated aerial defense systems, and carrier-killer Dongfeng missiles.

    For perspective, it’s always very instructive to compare military expenditure. Last year, China spent $261 billion while the US spent $732 billion (38% of the global total).

    Rhetoric, at least for the moment, prevails. The key talking point, incessantly hammered, is always about China as an existential threat to the “free world”, even as the myriad declinations of what was once Obama’s “pivot to Asia” not so subtly accrue the manufacture of consent for a future war.

    This report by the Qiao Collective neatly identifies the process:

    “We call it Sinophobia, Inc. – an information industrial complex where Western state funding, billion dollar weapons manufacturers, and right-wing think tanks coalesce and operate in sync to flood the media with messages that China is public enemy number one. Armed with state funding and weapons industry sponsors, this handful of influential think tanks are setting the terms of the New Cold War on China. The same media ecosystem that greased the wheels of perpetual war towards disastrous intervention in the Middle East is now busy manufacturing consent for conflict with China.”

    That “US military edge”

    The demonization of China, infused with blatant racism and rabid anti-communism, is displayed across a full, multicolored palette: Hong Kong, Xinjiang (“concentration camps), Tibet (“forced labor”), Taiwan, “China virus”; the Belt and Road’s “debt trap”.

    The trade war runs in parallel – glaring evidence of how “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is beating Western capitalism at its own high-tech game. Thus the sanctioning of over 150 companies that manufacture chips for Huawei and ZTE, or the attempt to ruin TikTok’s business in the US (“But you can’t rob it and turn it into a US baby”, as Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin tweeted).

    Still, SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), China’s top chip company, which recently profited from a $7.5 billion IPO in Shanghai, sooner or later may jump ahead of US chip manufacturers.

    On the military front, “maximum pressure” on China’s eastern rim proceeds unabated – from the revival of the Quad to a scramble to boost the Indo-Pacific strategy.

    Think Tankland is essential in coordinating the whole process, via for instance the Center for Strategic & International Studies, with “corporation and trade association donors” featuring usual suspects such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.

    So here we have what Ray McGovern brilliantly describes as MICIMATT – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex – as the comptrollers of Sinophobia Inc.

    Assuming there would be a Dem victory in November, nothing will change. The next Pentagon head will probably be Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (2009-2012) and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, which is big on both the “China challenge” and the “North Korean threat”.

    Flournoy is all about boosting the “U.S. military’s edge” in Asia.

    So what is China doing?

    China’s top foreign policy principle is to advance a “community of shared future for mankind”. That is written in the constitution, and implies that Cold War 2.0 is an imposition from foreign actors.

    China’s top three priorities post-Covid-19 are to finally eradicate poverty; solidify the vast domestic market; and be back in full force to trade/investment across the Global South.

    China’s “existential threat” is also symbolized by the drive to implement a non-Western trade and investment system, including everything from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Silk Road Fund to trade bypassing the US dollar.

    A Harvard Kennedy School report at least tried to understand how Chinese “authoritarian resilience” appeals domestically. The report found out that the CCP actually benefitted from increased popular support from 2003 to 2016, reaching an astonishing 93%, essentially due to social welfare programs and the battle against corruption.

    By contrast, when we have a MICCIMAT investing in Perpetual War – or “Long War” (Pentagon terminology since 2001) – instead of health, education and infrastructure upgrading, what’s left is a classic wag the dog. Sinophobia is perfect to blame the abysmal response to Covid-19, the extinction of small businesses and the looming New Great Depression on the Chinese “existential threat”.

    The whole process has nothing to do with “moral defeat” and complaining that “we risk losing the competition and endangering the world”.

    The world is not “endangered” because at least vast swathes of the Global South are fully aware that the much-ballyhooed “rules-based international order” is nothing but a quite appealing euphemism for Pax Americana – or Exceptionalism. What was designed by Washington for post-WWII, the Cold War and the “unilateral moment” does not apply anymore.

    Bye, bye Mackinder

    As President Putin has made it very clear over and over again, the US is no longer “agreement capable” . As for the “rules-based international order”, at best is a euphemism for privately controlled financial capitalism on a global scale.

    The Russia-China strategic partnership has made it very clear, over and over again, that against NATO and Quad expansion their project hinges on Eurasia-wide trade, development and diplomatic integration.

    Unlike the case from the 16th century to the last decades of the 20th century, now the initiative is not coming from the West, but from East Asia (that’s the beauty of “initiative” incorporated to the BRI acronym).

    Enter continental corridors and axes of development traversing Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Indian Ocean, Southwest Asia and Russia all the way to Europe, coupled with a Maritime Silk Road across the South Asian rimland.

    For the very first time in its millenary history, China is able to match ultra-dynamic political and economic expansion both overland and across the seas. This reaches way beyond the short era of the Zheng He maritime expeditions during the Ming dynasty in the early 15th century.

    No wonder the West, and especially the Hegemon, simply cannot comprehend the geopolitical enormity of it all. And that’s why we have so much Sinophobia, so many Hybrid War techniques deployed to snuff out the “threat”.

    Eurasia, in the recent past, was either a Western colony, or a Soviet domain. Now, it stands on the verge of finally getting rid of Mackinder, Mahan and Spykman scenarios, as the heartland and the rimland progressively and inexorably integrate, on their own terms, all the way to the middle of the 21st century.

  • Astronauts Isolate As Mystery Air Leak Hunt Continues On International Space Station
    Astronauts Isolate As Mystery Air Leak Hunt Continues On International Space Station

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 23:20

    NASA and the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos are searching for a small air leak on the International Space Station (ISS), according to Sputnik. 

    The crew of the ISS will move to the Russian side of the station on Friday, and through the weekend, to allow for a couple of days of air pressure tests. This will be the second time astronauts have isolated in an attempt to find the leak. 

    “Over the coming weekend, the ISS crew will self-isolate in the Russian segment of the station to search for an atmospheric leak at the station. The crew will regularly perform all planned operations, nothing threatens the crew’s safety,” a representative Roscosmos told Sputnik.

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    US astronaut Christopher Cassidy tweeted that the ISS crew would “try again with the module isolation this weekend. No harm or risk to us as the crew, but it is important to find the leak we are not wasting valuable air.” The crew took similar precautions in August, when they isolated on the Russian side of the station for four days. 

    Cassidy provided more color on the situation via a series of tweets. He said, “Moscow and Houston Mission Control Centers have been tracking a tiny air leak for several months.” For the last week, Cassidy has been examining all the window seals of the station using an ultrasonic leak detector.

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    NASA has said the leak was first detected on Sept. 2019 but has worsened in recent months.  

    As the ISS crew works over the weekend to find the source of the leak, readers may recall, in 2018, the station experienced another air leak that was initially thought to be the result of a micrometeorite. It was eventually concluded the tiny hole that created a dangerous air leak was a “deliberate sabotage.” 

     

  • What's The Difference Between 'Villain' Assange & 'Intrepid' Woodward?
    What’s The Difference Between ‘Villain’ Assange & ‘Intrepid’ Woodward?

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 23:00

    Authored by Lee Camp via Counterpunch.org,

    The completely fair super awesome trial of Julian Assange continues in the U.K. as I write this. It’s a beautiful blend of the works of Kafka, Stalin and Joseph Heller.

    Seeing as Julian is kept in a glass container in the courtroom, like a captured cockroach, maybe Kafka wins the day.

    The court clearly must keep Julian in that giant Tic-Tac container because he’s undoubtedly as dangerous as Hannibal Lecter. If he weren’t in there, no one would know when he might lurch forward and PUBLISH SOMETHING THAT’S TOTALLY TRUE!

    What they’re deciding in this trial is whether Assange should be extradited to the United States, or “kidnapped” as the kids call it these days.

    If he is lovingly black-bagged by our government, they have promised he will face 175 years in prison if convicted by another super rad show trial presided over by an American government puppet judge. (A puppet judge is just like a real judge but they’ve got the government so far up their backside they can taste the Cheetos.)

    Countless excitable activists out there say this persecution of Julian Assange is unheard of. They’re acting like no journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. They’re acting like it’s unprecedented for the U.S. to go after a journalist who’s not even a U.S. citizen and has never operated his organization from the U.S. They’re acting like it’s ridiculous to add on new superseding indictments days before the trial begins.

    But all the people saying that are… um… correct. Yeah, they nailed it. (Sorry for the buildup – I thought that paragraph would come out differently.)

    Two Journalists

    Right now, one journalist, Julian Assange, is on trial while being held in a maximum security prison in London. Another journalist, Bob Woodward, is in a very different situation. The liberal Establishment is preparing to chisel his likeness out of a small boulder and display it next to the Lincoln Memorial. They love him because he got President Donald Trump to do interviews wherein Trump, as always, sounds like a lying buffoon. Among other things the president admits he knew Covid-19 was “deadly stuff” back in at least February, but played it down anyway.

    But this is nothing new. Every time Bob Woodward puts out a book, the mainstream media fan-girls all over him. Myriad kings and queens of televised logorrhea describe him as a “veteran reporter,” a “famed reporter,” or “synonymous with investigative journalism!”

    So what’s the difference between liberal-hero journalist Bob Woodward and dastardly evil villain cannibal-pedophile Julian Assange (who Hillary Clinton famously said we should drone bomb)?

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    Well, Julian is on trial for obtaining and disclosing classified information from the U.S. government. Liberal superhero Bob Woodward would never do such a thing like that! …Oh, that’s right. He actually said in his own online journalism class —

    “I have rarely found a significant story where there isn’t a document. …Often you can’t get it because it’s classified but… it’s there, and if you can get somebody to assist you, it will indeed help you with your story. …The hardest documents [to get] are intelligence documents. …And I’ve had them and printed them.”

    Hmm, so the icon of investigative journalism actually brags about printing classified information. Well, maybe the difference between Assange (currently being fed to the lions) and Woodward (currently being lionized) is that Assange supposedly pressured people into giving him classified information whereas Woodward would never do that. For Bob the information just arrives at his door unsolicited.

    …Oh, wait a second. On video Woodward recently said,

    “Documents rarely just arrive in the mail out of the blue. …You have to go to human beings and say, ‘Will you give it to me?’ You say, ‘Come on, let’s talk. Let’s, uh, not be chickenshit about this.’”

    Soooo, the guy that has the entire mainstream media licking his shoes has been involved in obtaining and publishing classified information, and in fact pressuring sources into supplying him those documents? Wow. Bob Woodward and Julian Assange are exactly the same except Assange has actually not been proven to have pressured sources into giving him documents.

    And there’s one other difference between the Almighty Bob Woodward and the so-called servant of Lucifer, Julian Assange.

    Nothing WikiLeaks has ever published has been proven false. Not one sentence. Whereas, the outlets Woodward works with like The Washington Post and The New York Times publish false information all the time.

    They said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; they said Kim Jung-Un killed his girlfriend while she was still alive; they published 16 anti-Bernie Sanders stories in the span of 16 hours while trying to sink his candidacy. They said China imprisoned millions of Uighurs based on extrapolating from the accounts of EIGHT PEOPLE! They are utter garbage when compared to the unassailable record of WikiLeaks. But when needed, legacy media like The Washington Post and The New York Times bend over for the national security state. That’s the real difference.

    Julian Assange actually stood up to the U.S. and U.K. empires by publishing their war crimes. Woodward hasn’t really done that since President Richard Nixon was in office. Most big-time American journalists back down to the State Department when push comes to shove. Those who don’t — like Seymour Hersh, Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges and a few others — are never allowed in the pages of the mainstream media again.

    The next time you see a mainstream media talking-head fawn over Bob Woodward, just remember that if they had any backbone, any moral core, they would be fawning over Julian Assange instead.

    *  *  *

    (The jaw-dropping video clips of Bob Woodward were discovered and put together by Matt Orfalea. You can watch his work here.)

    Lee Camp is the host and head writer of the comedy news TV show “Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp.” This is a chapter from Camp’s new book “Bullet Points & Punch Lines,” which features an intro by Jimmy Dore and a foreword by Chris Hedges. Grab a copy at LeeCampBook.com.

  • 'No Anything In The Champagne Room': Ontario Shuts Strip Clubs
    ‘No Anything In The Champagne Room’: Ontario Shuts Strip Clubs

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 22:40

    The province of Ontario, Canada is implementing strict new public health measures to help ‘stop the spread of COVID-19,’ which includes last call at 11 p.m. at bars, a province-wide shutdown of all strip clubs, and a requirement that all businesses adhere to recommendations and instructions issued by the Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health in regards to screening for the virus.

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    “Over the past five weeks, Ontario has experienced an increase in the rate of new COVID-19 cases. Private social gatherings continue to be a significant source of transmission in many local communities, along with outbreak clusters in restaurants, bars, and other food and drink establishments, including strip clubs, with most cases in the 20-39 age group,” reads the release.

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    “Last week our government took immediate action to respond to the recent rise in COVID-19 cases, by setting new limits for certain social gatherings and organized public events across Ontario. As the number of cases have continued to rise, it is evident that despite the tremendous efforts of Ontarians further action is required to prevent the spread of the virus,” said Health Minister Christine Elliott. “On the advice of Ontario’s public health officials, we are moving forward with these measures to help keep Ontarians safe by limiting the potential for exposure in locations where the current risk of transmission is higher, and to avoid future lockdowns. Protecting the health and wellbeing of Ontarians will always remain our top priority.”

    So, as of now, there’s nothing going on in the champagne room.

  • Video Surfaces Of Biden Calling Troops "Stupid Bastards" When They Won't Clap
    Video Surfaces Of Biden Calling Troops “Stupid Bastards” When They Won’t Clap

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 22:36

    In 2016, Joe Biden called US troops stationed in Southeast Asia “stupid bastards” and a “dull bunch” – and we don’t need to trust anonymous sources in the Atlantic to believe it, since he said it on a recently resurfaced recording.

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    “I have incredibly good judgment,” says Biden. “One, I married Jill, and two, I appointed Johnson to the academy. I just want you to know that.”

    When nobody reacts, Biden adds “Clap for that, you stupid bastards.”

    He then calls the soldiers a “dull bunch,” adding “It must be slow here, man.”

    Watch:

    From another angle:

    The video, posted in 2017, is from an appearance in front of the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing on March 7, 2016 – and comes weeks after President Trump was accused of calling troops “losers” and “suckers.”

    The account has been refuted by at least 21 sources – but that didn’t stop Biden from turning it into a campaign ad.

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  • Complaining About The Transition Integrity Project's Election-Theft Plan Can Be Dangerous
    Complaining About The Transition Integrity Project’s Election-Theft Plan Can Be Dangerous

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 22:20

    Authored by Charis Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,

    It seems that criticizing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and their plan to disrupt and steal the 2020 presidential election can be dangerous.

    Michael Anton, a former Trump administration official and now of the Claremont Institute, published an article titled, “The Coming Coup” that seems to have caught the attention of TIP co-founder Nils Gilman. According to the journalist Natalie Winters:

    “Gilman, who serves as Vice President of Programs at the Chinese Communist Party-linked Berggruen Institute, took to Twitter to express his desire that Anton be executed in the same fashion as Robert Brasillach.

    “Specifically, he insisted ‘Michael Anton is the Robert Brasillach of our times and deserves the same fate.’“

    I’ll save you the effort of searching for Brasillach — he was a French author and journalist who advocated for the fascists and was executed by firing squad in 1945. So — the leadership of TIP has spoken. Now you know their thinking, their motives and their true objectives. It seems Gilman wants Anton executed.

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    Gilman’s tweet is a refreshingly frank declaration. All the usual pretense and guile are set aside. No virtue signaling, no coded language, no projection, no dog whistles to the party faithful and the stenographers at WaPo, CNN, et al.

    The brutality and viciousness of Marxism and its adherents is on display. Those that may have held reservations or harbored some doubt on my analysis of what TIP really had in store for the election now have their answers. I would rather have been wrong.

    Oh, to have been “backstage” at the June “war games” of TIP! One can only guess at the fevered imaginings that had to be cooled and edited into the 22-page report. What sort of Bolshevik fantasies floated about the Zoom-connected strategy sessions? If Gilman advocates executing someone by firing squad for daring to question TIP, what other penalties and extraordinary measures were discussed by the supposed bipartisan arbiters of the electoral process?

    How is this “normal?” Where is the 24/7 news media reporting on Gilman’s conduct? Go ahead and do a news search on Gilman and this tweet. It won’t take long — there is virtually no reporting, other than the Twitterverse. What does that tell you? Are you disturbed by how your news information is “curated?”

    What about questions and comments to other leaders of the TIP operation? One is always left wondering about the proverbial shoe being on the other foot. What would the reporting look like if a Trump advocate or leader of a similarly situated group on the other side of the political spectrum had tweeted the same thing about an opposite number? I think you already know the reactions and the answers.

    More broadly — how long does the American public put up with this sort of unchecked lethality? What about the not-so-thinly veiled calls for execution by firing squad of one’s political opponents? When does the favored elite stop getting a pass for unlawful, unethical conduct? When does the reaction stop being, “Oh, well!”? Is there a gag level? A breaking point? Do Gilman’s fantasies have to be acted upon before people understand the dangers of this sort of vicious thinking and communication?

    I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, even on occasions when people get out on thin ice or test the limits of what is “acceptable.” Gilman’s tweet is something else. There is the tweet itself — which is a repulsive and dangerous smear against Anton and a call to violence — but there is also what it means against the backdrop of what TIP is all about, how it is organized, funded, promoted in the media, and used as a rallying point by the Left for disruption of a presidential election.

    You already know what TIP plans to do in the coming election. You can read Anton’s analysis. Now you have the real, unvarnished thinking of TIP co-founder Gilman. Gilman likes execution by firing squad. Election Day is coming. TIP wants it to be Election Season. Beware of how much else they want that comes to fruition. It could be dangerous.

  • Breakthrough Research On Severe COVID-19 Infections Opens Door To New Treatment
    Breakthrough Research On Severe COVID-19 Infections Opens Door To New Treatment

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 22:00

    So far, scientists have figured out that being male, elderly, and having underlying medical conditions can all raise risk factors for patients. But even patients who check all these boxes don’t always experience serious symptoms. Scientists suspect that several factors influence severity, including pre-existing levels of inflammation, natural immunity levels, and the amount and strain of virus that starts the infection – along with variations in patients’ genetic makeup.

    As has been previously reported, many patients suffer the worst of the symptoms for COVID-19  due to an immune system overreaction called a “cytokine storm”. As Dr. Fauci once explained, while “too little immunity is no good”…“too much immunity is really, really bad”.

    Now, researchers have discovered the role of a critical protein which could open the door to a new potential COVID-19 treatment.

    Studies comparing reactions to COVID-19 in siblings have unearthed an interesting detail: the availability of a substance called interferon. Interferons are signaling proteins that help orchestrate the body’s defense against viral pathogens; they’re used to treat diseases like Hepatitis C.

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    A growing body of evidence, including twin landmark studies published Thursday in the journal “Science” showed that “insufficient” interferon levels may be a dangerous precursor to a serious infection.  As one researcher explained, the data suggest the virus uses this “one big trick” to slip past the body’s initial defense systems.

    “It looks like this virus has one big trick,” said Shane Crotty, a professor in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. “That big trick is to avoid the initial innate immune response for a significant period of time and, in particular, avoid an early type-1 interferon response.”

    The research highlights the potential for interferon-based therapies to expand a range of non-vaccine-related treatments, like Gilead’s remdesivir and convalescent plasma.

    Research shows the timing of medical intervention is also critical.

    “We think timing may be essential because it’s only in the very early phase one can really battle the virus particles and defend against infection,” said Alexander Hoischen, head of the genomic technologies and immuno-genomics group at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen that analyzed the DNA of the two sets of brothers.

    Then again, some people are believed to have trouble fighting infections because they make antibodies that deactivate their own interferon. On Thursday, a global consortium of researchers said such immune reactions to the protein could account for life-threatening pneumonia in at least 2.6% of women and 12.5% of men that causes inflammation in the patient’s lungs.

    Findings from the research offer the first explanation for the significantly higher mortality rate seen in male and elderly COVID-19 patients.

    Interferon-blocking antibodies appeared in 101 of 987 patients with severe disease, but none of the 663 people with an asymptomatic or mild case, according to the research being published in “Science”. Patients over 65 were also more likely than younger ones to have the autoimmune abnormality, which was “clinically silent until the patients were infected with SARS-CoV-2,” said a group of more than 100 scientists said.

    Researchers estimated that Inteferon issues might underlie as many as 14% of fatalities and the most severe cases.

  • Revolution 2020: How Did We Get Here… And How Will It End?
    Revolution 2020: How Did We Get Here… And How Will It End?

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 21:40

    Authored by Angelo Codevilla via The American Mind,

    Understanding what drives the revolution that is destroying the American republic gives insight into how the 2020 election’s results may impact its course. Its practical question – who rules? – is historically familiar. But any revolution’s quarrels and stakes obscure the question: to what end? Our revolution is by the ruling class – a revolution from above. Crushing obstacles to its growing oligarchic rule is the proximate purpose.

    But the logic that drives the revolution aims at civilization itself.

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    What follows describes how far along its path that logic has taken America, and where it might take us in the future depending on the election’s outcome.

    Regime Change

    Aristotle, in Book 5 of the Politics, describes how revolutions kill regimes (such as America’s) that balance the contrasting interests of ordinary people with those of the wealthy, of officials, and of other prominent persons. As the balance between any complex regime’s components shifts over time, the system may seamlessly transform into unmixed democracy, oligarchy, or some kind of monarchy. The revolution may be barely perceptible—providing that those who impose themselves, whether from above or below, do so without adding insult to injury.

    But, if the party that takes power thereby destroys the friendship that had bound the several parts, even trifling incidents can spiral into all-consuming violence. Thucydides’ account of the revolution that destroyed Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War is prototypical. The French revolution, the Spanish civil war, and countless others echo it. Today, the oligarchic transformation of America’s republic is turning violent. Aristotle, however, points out that oligarchies born of violent revolution tend to succumb to the very violence that births them, quickly degenerating into some kind of tyranny or one-man rule. Restoration of anything like the original constitutional regime is most unlikely.

    The U.S. Constitution had codified as fine a balance between the powers of the Many, the Few, and the One as Aristotle may have imagined by arming the federal government’s components, the States, and ordinary citizens (via the first ten Amendments as well as elections) with means to maintain the balance. Its authors, however, were under no illusions about the efficacy of “parchment barriers” to prevent interests from coalescing into factions against the common good. During the 19th century, interests and opinions in the South and the North coalesced into antagonistic ruling classes that fought the century’s bloodiest war. In the 20th, the notion that good government proceeds from scientific expertise, as well as the growing identity between big business and government, fostered the growth of a single nationwide Progressive ruling class. Between the 1930s and the early 21st century, the centralization of administrative power in this class’s hands did much to transform the American republic established in 1776-89 into an oligarchy.

    Progressive Oligarchy in America

    The ruling class was able to transform America’s constitutional regime because its collective partisanship bridged the divisions between the federal government’s parts, the states, as well as between public and private power.

    In America as everywhere else, government regulation of business meant the twains’ coalescence. From the very first, the blurring of lines between public and private—the focus of government on distributing tasks and rewards—shifted decision-making from citizens who merely vote to the administrative system’s “stakeholders.” This reorganization of liberal societies was first codified in Italy’s 1926 Corporation Law as Fascism’s defining feature. Before WWII every Western country, America included (in FDR’s New Deal), had adopted a version thereof. In 1942 Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, a neo-Marxist analysis, described this oligarchy as the necessary consequence of modernity.

    In America, however, this oligarchy fit Aristotle’s (or Marx’s) mostly economic criteria only superficially. Yes, as we will see below, its power always very much involved the growing identity between government power and private wealth, and hence on restricting access to wealth to the politically connected. But as the decades passed, it became ever clearer that membership in the U.S. ruling class depends primarily on sharing the right socio-political opinions.

    The European tradition of government by experts reaches back beyond Napoleon and Hegel to royal techno-bureaucrats. Being essentially amoral, it treats transgressors as merely ignorant. It may punish them as rebellious, but not as bad people. That is why the fascists, who were part of that tradition, never made it as totalitarians. People—especially the Church—remained free to voice different opinions so long as they refrained from outright opposition. America’s growing oligarchy, however, always had a moralistic, puritan streak that indicts dissenters as bad people. More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

    Progressivism’s foundational proposition—that the American way of life suffers from excessive freedom and insufficient latitude for experts to lead each into doing what is best for all—is the intellectual basis of the oligarchy’s ever-increasing size, wealth, and power. The theme that the USA was ill-conceived in 1776-89 and must be re-conceived has resounded from Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) to the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden: “listen to the scientists!” The criticism’s main point has been constant: America’s original conception validated the people’s right to live as they please, and made it hard to marshal them for Progressive purposes.

    But the Progressive critique adds a moral basis: the American people’s indulgence of their preferences—private ease and comfort, focus on families, religious observance, patriotism—has made for every secular sin imaginable: racism, sexism, greed, etc. Because most Americans are racist, sexist, un-appreciative of real virtue or refinement (these are somehow rolled together), because these Americans resist knuckling under to their betters, America is a sick society that needs to be punished and to have its noxious freedoms reformed.

    Hence, the revolution that created the American oligarchy—illiterate contemporary Marxists notwithstanding—has nothing in common with Karl Marx’s original democratic (in the Aristotelian sense) conception “from below” (e.g. his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme) other than “overthrowing the pillars of the house.” Ours is the Party-centered oligarchic revolution from above that Lenin outlined in What Is to Be Done? (1902). This Leninism is the template of the Soviet and every other Communist regime, bar none. In our revolution, too, everything—always and everywhere—is about the Party.

    Upbuilding the Ruling Class

    The moral class critique from above was always implicit. It largely stayed in the background of the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s. The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly-credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.

    But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power, endowing them with socio-political clienteles as well as with levers for manipulating them. As its members’ powers grew, they developed a taste for disdaining independent Americans and acquired whips for punishing them.

    In 1950, Americans at all levels of government spent 2% of GDP on K-12 education and 0.37% on higher education. In our time we spend 4.4% on K-12 and 1.9% on higher education, of a GDP that is about ten times as large. By any measure, the increases have been huge. These were supposed to uplift Americans intellectually and (maybe) morally. But they have dumbed down the nation to the point of mass illiteracy at the bottom and, at the top, created herds of ignorant, haughty, debt-ridden college graduates, fit only to enforce government edicts against Americans they despise. But the money also built up and entitled a class of monied, entitled, self-indulgent educrats—mostly administrators. U.S. college towns nowadays are islands of luxury, ease, and hate. They act as the ruling class’s gatekeepers.

    Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir had reminded Americans to preserve our country’s beauty and bounty for all. But beginning in the 1960s the ruling class started using conservation as an excuse for restricting the public living on and profiting from the land, even their own properties. This resulted in big developers, regulators, politicians and lawyers making fortunes while preserving the privacy and increasing the value of places where they themselves live. (Now they want to outlaw building new single-family homes anywhere.) They also reaped billions from subsidies for “renewable energy” by flogging possible correlation—without evidence of cause—between CO2 and “global warming.” All others have suffered.

    In 1965, the Census counted some 40 million people as “poor”—roughly the same number as today. Over the succeeding half-century, the Federal government has spent some $22 trillion to lift people out of poverty. Had that money been divided evenly between all the poor, each would have been a millionaire. Instead, the War on Poverty swelled and solidified America’s underclass. Because the government paid to support women with children so long as they were not married, marriage and family cohesion declined. With only about one in eight black children growing to adulthood with two married parents, the black community and America as a whole are beset by a self-perpetuating flow of dysfunctional youth. This led to the long-term imprisonment of more than a million people. Prisons became an industry. But the war on poverty enriched countless contractors, consultants and members of the “helping professions.”

    These initiatives are scams. Whatever else they have done, they have increased the number of people whose livelihoods depend on government. Since 1965, the number of direct employees has more than doubled to 22 million, and their pay exceeds that of persons who actually perform services that people want. The city of San Francisco, for example, employs 19,000 persons whom it pays more than $150,000 yearly. This does not count the countless government contractors, or the advantages for some and disadvantages for everyone else that government power combined with corporate power conveys. In short, whatever else these initiatives have done, they surely have created a lot of patronage.

    The Little Law That Ate the Constitution

    One initiative, sold as the pursuit of justice for black Americans, has empowered the U.S. ruling class with power that transcends money. More than all the other campaigns combined, it has fueled its members’ sense of entitlement to rule fellow citizens it deems moral inferiors. That sweet, heady sense—not any love for blacks—is what drives it.

    Into the 1960s, the states of the former Confederacy had imposed segregation to racially separate accommodations. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court had approved them so long as they were “equal.” In fact, most of what states had reserved for Negroes was grossly inferior. The longstanding campaign for “civil rights” had rallied the country against this obvious negation of the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” But as liberals fought state-imposed racial segregation, they had come to equate justice with the forcible imposition of racial integration resulting from countless personal choices. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed state-directed segregation, also gave impetus to all manner of efforts to re-form society by legal-administrative force.

    The decision itself eliminated any chance that this could be done in a disinterested manner. It was not based on the plain, unequivocal meaning of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws.” Back in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan had dissented from Plessy, arguing that any state establishment of racial preference whatever, regardless of its character or intention, violates those words. But Thurgood Marshall based his decision on “science”—that is, on the variable opinions of the credentialed class. A sociologist by the name of Kenneth Clark claimed he had proven that Negro children could feel and learn normally only in a racially mixed environment. (The “black is beautiful” movement began countering this immediately.) Quickly, “scientific” conventional wisdom made “benign” or “remedial discrimination” by race official U.S. government policy.

    The Brown decision’s reliance on “science” also confused legally established segregation with the segregation that results from personal choices. This confusion was the basis for Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of race. Thenceforth, Civil rights law was no longer about removing legal barriers to personal choices. It had begun forcing personal choices. The Supreme Court’s approval of the law as a mere regulation of interstate commerce was thin pretense. The Act turned out to be the little law that ate the Constitution and poisoned American society.

    It was passed primarily by Republican votes. Democrats, seeing the empowerment of a historic Republican constituency in the South as potential disaster, scrambled to avert it by out-pandering Republicans, while describing any reticence on their part as racial animosity and ascribing whatever ailed Negroes to the Republicans’ racism. Quickly, the dynamics of politics turned “civil rights” into a ruinous socioeconomic scam.

    Howard W. Smith, segregationist Democrat of Virginia, best foresaw the scam’s size. Bitterly, to ensure that the law’s logic would roil the lives of its sponsors as it was roiling his constituents’, Smith, Chairman of the House of Representatives’ powerful Rules Committee, added language that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex. The list of supposedly invidious discriminations that the Act (as amended) thus prohibits never stopped growing—age, all manner of disabilities, sexual orientation, etc. In the Act’s lengthening legal shadow, even speech that some may construe as insufficiently hostile to discriminatory “anti-discrimination” has become punishable civilly as well as criminally. Thus, willy-nilly, the Act established what U.S. law quickly recognized as “protected categories” of persons. This negates the American republic’s bedrock: “all men are created equal.” It invited whoever perceives himself disadvantaged or dishonored to construe himself part of such a category and to invite the government to discriminate against his foe. As government joined in some people’s quarrels against others, government became fomenter and partisan in endless strife.

    Race (and sex, etc.) is yet another set of excuses for transferring power to the ruling class. The oligarchy is no more concerned about race than it is about education, or environmentalism, or sex, or anything else. It is about yet more discretionary power in the hands of its members, for whom not all blacks (or women, or whatevers) are to be advantaged—only the ones who serve ruling class purposes. In education, employment, and personnel management, co-opting compatible, non-threatening colleagues is the objective. As Joseph Biden put it succinctly: if you don’t vote for him, “you ain’t black.” A ruling class of ever-decreasing quality is a result.

    Members and hangers-on who receive privileges, however, are a small number compared with the ruling class’s clients. Breaking down their client’s resistance to the revolution of the ruling class requires inducing them to share in the revolution’s logic of hate for its targets. This in turn requires control over channels of communication. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are indispensable for this. But creating and maintaining a sense of identity between oligarchs and the client mobs is possible mostly because of the latter’s gullibility.

    The Logic of Hate

    I noted that this revolution’s logic leads to no logical end. That is because “the logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior.” Its force, I observed, “comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands,” but rather “from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation.” Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

    In short, the Progressive ruling class’s intensifying efforts to oppress those they imagine to be their inferiors is not reversible. It is far less a choice of policy than it is the consequence of its awakening to its own identity—awakening to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them. It is awakening to its deep resentment—indeed, to hate—for whoever does not submit preemptively.

    Let there be no doubt: the ruling class’s focus on Donald Trump has been incidental. America’s potentates do not fear one pudgy orange-haired septuagenarian. They fear the millions of Americans whom they loathe, who voted for Trump, who gave his party control of House and Senate, and who will surely vote for folks these potentates really should fear.

    The Trigger

    America’s oligarchic transformation had proceeded smoothly for decades because the ruling class had taken care not to add insult to injury. But as time passed, its arbitrariness and contempt increasingly tried the patience of ordinary people who practiced constitutional restraint.

    During the 2008 financial panic, however, as the Progressive, bipartisan ruling class scrambled incompetently to save itself and its clients’ assets, it fatefully flaunted its united contempt for the rest of Americans. Republican president George W. Bush, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, the overwhelming majority of Republican politicians and institutions, and the literati from the Nation to the (post-Buckley) National Review were of identical minds with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Democrat politicians and institutions regarding measures to be taken—to which three fourths of the public objected, to no avail. United, this ruling class scoffed at popular opposition.

    Insult having awakened substantial numbers of Americans to the injuries being inflicted on them, they looked to push back.

    That began a cycle of recrimination which laid bare and accentuated the differences that had been growing between America’s rulers and ruled. At the time, I wrote that

    The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners—nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who hath created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity.

    The people who killed one another in 1861-65 respected each other as individuals and shared standards of truth, justice, and civility. But as our ruling class put the rest of America beyond the proverbial pale, what remained of friendship among the American republic’s components drained away.

    By 2016, most Americans preferred either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders over ruling-class candidates for president. And of course, they increasingly despised one another. In short, the popular basis for constitutional restraint had ceased to exist on all sides. But mostly the ruling class, unaccustomed to outright opposition to its presumption of authority, deemed the voters’ recalcitrance to be illegitimate. That began the revolution’s active phase.

    At that time, I wrote that, regardless of who won the upcoming election, the United States of America had crossed the threshold of a revolution, and that though no one could know how that would end, we could be sure only that the peaceful American way of life we had known could never return. Hilary Clinton’s or Donald Trump’s victory in the election would merely have channeled the revolution onto different courses. We would look back on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as relics from an age of moderation.

    Identity Unfolded

    Events since 2016 have surprised because of the ever-increasing speed with which this revolution’s logic has unfolded. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 suggestion that Donald Trump might refuse to accept losing the election seemed a speck of gratuitous campaign mud. Even if Trump had lost and been so minded, his recalcitrance could not have amounted to anything. No one imagined, however, that the Democratic Party—the party of government, of the entertainment industry, of the educational establishment, of the judiciary, of corporate America, the party of the ruling class—that this party, having lost the 2016 elections, would refuse to accept popular rejection and launch a full-court “Resistance” against the voters who had rejected them. But that is what happened.

    A parenthetical note is needed to square politics’ perversion of language with reality. The word “resistance” does describe what the ruling class did vis-à-vis the 2016 election’s results. But the impression that the ruling class was resisting some kind of onslaught is the reverse of reality. In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy. Hence the self-described “Resistance” was but a continuation of its longstanding oligarchic revolution.

    The oligarchy’s offensive to forcibly disable the voters began as a mere protest against—and explanation and excuse for—the 2016 elections’ outcome. But, as its identity unfolded according its logic of hate, one thing led to another.

    Official and unofficial ruling class confluence in the Resistance turned the Democratic National Committee’s July 2016 throwaway lie that the Russians had hacked its emails into a four-year national convulsion about Trump’s alleged conspiracy with Putin. Ruling class judges sustained every act of opposition to the Trump administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every insinuation, nonstop, unquestioned. The Resistance made it official ruling class policy that Trump and his voters’ “racism” and a host of other wrongdoings made them, personally, illegitimate. In 2016 Hillary Clinton had tentatively called her opponents “deplorables.” By 2018 the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2020 they could be fired for a trifle, set upon on the streets, and prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, even for defending themselves.

    This happened because the Resistance rallied the ruling class’s every part to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, and seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob. Success supercharges them. The Resistance fostered in the ruling class’s members the sense that they were more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger, and better about themselves than they ever had.

    Ruling class violence started on inauguration day 2017 and grew unceasingly, at first an ominous background to all manner of bureaucratic, oligarchic, and media attacks on the election’s winners. But note well that the black-clad burners and looters were the very opposite of a proletariat and that, Marxist rhetoric aside, they never attacked the wealthy or the powerful—not Wall Street, nor major corporations, certainly not any government, never mind Google, Facebook, or Twitter, America’s most powerful monopolies, or corporate officials. Instead, they received financial contributions from these sources. The violent ones were as troops in the service of the powerful, out to crush the spirit of rebellious subjects. Some Marxists!

    The 2018 elections tested the Resistance’s tactical efficacy. Had the Democratic Party failed to recapture the House of Representatives, the ruling class might have sought some sort of modus vivendi. Instead, the Democrats took the House. Did any reasonable person imagine that they would not use every last bit of its legitimate authority and much more to push the Resistance to a higher level?

    Reiterating the ruling class’s efforts to cower potential Trump voters since 2016 is superfluous. Countless voices indicted and convicted Trump of every misdeed imaginable, largely uncontradicted. And yet, as 2019 ended, the U.S. economy’s vibrancy, and the incompetence with which the ruling class had waged a Resistance that had grown tiresome, made it quite likely that Trump would be re-elected—and maybe even that somewhat roused Republicans would retake full control of Congress.

    Then came COVID-19 and the riots.

    “Intersectionality” Beats Conspiracy

    The full story of the COVID-19 pandemic and of the riots that followed is yet to be told and is beyond our scope. The readiness and ease with which the ruling class turned these events into something like a coup d’état might lead one to imagine a vast conspiracy. But no conspiracy could have accomplished so thoroughly what the ruling class’s single-mindedness did. It illustrates the power of a hate so shared among diverse groups that each acts pursuant to it, more coherently than they would have were a general staff to have coordinated them.

    Yes, in January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci had ruminated publicly about how the next epidemic to hit America could redound to Trump’s disadvantage. Independently, other ruling class figures went on the record to the same effect. Yet none could have known precisely how such an epidemic might hit. When it did, they exploited it, at first tentatively, but following the logic that already possessed them. Yet they were able to do it only with Trump’s help.

    In January 2020, when COVID hit and Trump cut off travel from China and Europe, the ruling class predictably indicted him for racist excess. Fauci and the CDC claimed that the virus was not particularly contagious to humans, and Democrat officials urged people to attend big gatherings. After contagion became obvious the media, following Fauci, did not apologize for their errors. Instead, they spread estimates that the virus would kill some two million Americans, that U.S. hospitals would be overwhelmed, and insisted that Trump urge Americans to avoid contact with one another “to slow the spread and flatten the curve” of infections. No one suggested that any measures available might stop the virus. Trump took that step—unnecessary, but possibly politically analgesic.

    As of this point in mid-March, nothing extraordinary had yet changed the balance of power in America. But then Trump let himself be persuaded to extend the suggestion of “lockdown” indefinitely, subject to such conditions as the CDC might make for “reopening.”

    Thus, having made “lockdowns” his own, did Trump largely disempower himself, enabling and legitimizing the ruling class’s seizure of powers that are reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. Subsequently, the entire ruling class—the media (especially the social media giants), every officeholder, politician, and publicist associated with the Democratic party, and corporate America—took upon itself powers over the American people such as not even Woodrow Wilson had wielded in World War I. Foremost of these is exclusion of criticism of itself from public circulation. Banning church services and other voluntary organizations, interactions among neighbors, as well as closing small businesses reduced communications of whatever the ruling class might decide largely to one-way, top-down conveyance.

    Thus did the oligarchy manage to convince the public to let it treat a virus the infection/fatality rate of which (circa 0.01%) is either equal to or lower than that of the average of seasonal influenzas, as if it were the plague. Worse that, for the sake of public health, the public should acquiesce in restrictions—such as quarantining uninfected persons and staying indoors—that reverse the logic of quarantine.

    The ruling class use of COVID-19 is medical nonsense. But the “lockdowns” made perfect political sense because they disadvantaged primarily the sort of people who vote conservative. The lockdowns also made ordinary people more economically dependent on government, while enriching those best connected with it.

    Most remarkable has been the unbroken consistency with which every part of the ruling class’s entourage joined the campaign while piggybacking its own priorities to it—to the complaisance of all the others. That is the meaning of “intersectionality.” Teachers’ unions, for example, conditioned returning to the classroom on the government banning charter schools; Black Lives Matter (BLM) claimed that “White Racism” must be treated as another public health menace. All other components supported them. All signified solidarity by demanding that all Americans wear masks outdoors, and that those who don’t be jailed. Meanwhile, they insisted that persons convicted of rape, robbery, and murder be released. The world turned upside down.

    The riots that began depopulating America’s major cities in late May are intersectionality’s apotheosis. Since blacks commit homicides at five times and other violent crimes at three times the rate of whites, confrontations between black criminals and police are quotidian. Violent reactions to such confrontations are common. Any number of personalities and organizations, mostly black, have made fortunes and careers exploiting them, e.g. New York’s Al Sharpton. Increasingly since 2013 BLM has become the most prominent of these, founded as a project of a hardline Communist organization based in Cuba and funded lavishly and unaccountably by a high percentage of America’s major corporations. Its stated goals of protecting the black community against police brutality notwithstanding, it functions to mobilize black voters on the Democratic Party’s behalf. Along with Antifa, an organization of violent Marxists and anarchists, BLM organized the physical side of the ruling class’s campaign of intimidation against the American people.

    The patently counterfactual claim that months of burning, looting and personal attacks by mobs professionally armed, marshaled, and effectively authorized are “mostly peaceful protests” doubly serves the ruling class by warning the victims that they are alone, can expect no help, and that even resenting the mobs is culpable.

    Yet the riots may be intersectionality’s downfall because ordering people to tell each other things they know are not true is the most hazardous of political power grabs.

    A New Regime?

    In 2020, the ruling class imposes itself by Democratic officials’ arbitrary regulations as well as by all manner of corporate restrictions on dissent. Demanding that people apologize for their whiteness and show other signs of submission on pain of being fired have become routine. In 2016 it would have been difficult to imagine the 2020 level of ruling class presumption, virulence and violence. In 2020, violent bands roam America’s cities with official complaisance, acting as the ruling class’s officious enforcers of powers without logical end.

    Thus, acting in the name of public health and social justice, the ruling class effectively repealed the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Freedom of religion? Filling churches and synagogues, celebrating baptisms, weddings and funerals can now land you in jail. Freedom of speech? On the contrary. You may now be punished for failing to declare what is ordered of you, even if you don’t believe it, or even for failing to attend a political re-education session or by not showing due deference therein. Freedom of assembly? Only for those on the ruling class side. Property? If you forcibly defend it against the mob, Democrat-controlled states will jail you. They will also prosecute you for defending your life.

    None of this was done by laws passed by elected representatives. All was done by all manner of officials’ and bureaucrats’ edicts, and discretionary actions supported by the media and corporations. Leaderless, the American people by and large obeyed a regime that had become an oligarchy served by thousands of its clients, eager to hurt opponents financially, socially, and physically.

    The Other Side

    The major question overhanging our revolution is how all this has affected the Right side of American society. Since recognizing that the ruling class’s oligarchy surrounded them circa 2008, they sought to keep it at bay. In 2010 their Tea Parties elected the most heavily Republican Congress in a generation. But the Republicans they elected mostly joined the ruling class. Rather than voting for one of them—Mitt Romney for president in 2012—many stayed home.

    Then in 2016, sensing that the barbarians were at the gates, they gave short shrift to whoever would not denounce Republicans as harshly as Democrats and elected the loudest denouncer, Donald Trump. By 2020, Trump notwithstanding, the barbarians had proved to be the gatekeepers. They cowed the deplorables, punished them to convince them that they are evil and isolated, deprived them of normal social intercourse, and made them dependent on media that pushed politically correct reality down their masked throats.

    The deplorables are angry, but so what?

    Why have conservatives mostly obeyed perverted authority? Did the ruling class succeed? Is the revolution over? A minority seem to believe that example may lead leftists once again to recognize their opponents’ equal rights. In short, they are conservatives who yearn to preserve something already gone. They are not yet revolutionaries for their own cause.

    Most have felt sandbagged by Donald Trump’s and the Republican Party’s verbally combative but toothless reaction to the oligarchic revolution. They waited in vain for them to use the active and passive devices available to any president or house of Congress to deprive the ruling class of its government-derived powers: commanding and prohibiting, funding and defunding, hiring, firing, rewarding and punishing, accrediting and discrediting to punish violations of freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, of basic civil rights. Instead, these officials largely gave the oligarchic regime a pass. Private persons cannot easily defend themselves while their own officials don’t. Now they no longer care what the Trump administration’s calculations might have been.

    Today, the oligarchy’s impositions pursuant to the COVID-19 epidemic and the riots that followed removed conservatives’ equivocations by forcing millions bereft of protection to look beyond conventional leadership and categories. They have made existential choices, voiced mostly to family and friends but increasingly evidenced by action.

    Millions moved out of cities and Democrat-ruled states, and millions more wished to do so. Yet more people clogged the roads out into mask-less America as for breaths of fresh air. Countless persons whose jobs or careers had been wrecked have been forced to look for ways to live the rest of their lives. The majority of Americans having been accused of racism, etc., and sensing that the powers-that-be stacked the deck against them, look upon the powers-that-be as enemies.

    No one could know for sure how much the empowered oligarchy had cowered ordinary people’s resentment or inflamed it. The fact that some two thirds of respondents told pollsters that they are afraid publicly to voice their views suggests much.

    Whatever may happen, it is safe to say that, on the Right side of American life, conventional conservatism is dead, as is political moderation.

    2020: Who You Gonna Believe?

    The 2020 election is the first of the ways in which these changes will manifest themselves. The election, regardless of its outcome, cannot by itself diminish the oligarchy’s hold on America’s institutions nor alter the revolution’s driving logic, nor extinguish the rest of America’s commitments to itself, nor return America to what had been normalcy.

    When the American people vote on November 3, they—like the proverbial husband who walks in on wife in flagrante—will choose whether to believe what they are told or what their senses tell them.

    The ubiquity, depth, and vehemence of the ruling class’s denigration of Donald Trump is such as to render superfluous any detailing thereof. Suffice it to note that not a day in four years has gone by without the news media hyperventilating or ruminating on some allegation of Trump’s wrongdoing or wrongbeing. For what? Again, the list of subjects is so exhaustive that it is easier to note that there is hardly any mortal transgression of which he has not been accused. Suffice it to say that, to the extent one depends on the media’s narrative, one cannot help but believe that Donald Trump is the enemy of all good things, that nothing he has done has been any good, that he is responsible for all that is bad.

    Nor has the media forgone any occasion to protect, foster, and embellish narratives in support of each and every member of the “intersectional” coalition and to shut out or denigrate alternatives thereto. It labels as false and/or as “hate speech” facts and arguments that counteract its narratives. Since the ruling class can be certain of the media’s unquestioning support, it need not worry about truth.

    For example, do physicians in America and around the world use hydroxychloroquine successfully against the COVID-19 virus? Yes, correct—but banished as if it were false because it is politically incorrect. Riots, arson, and looting are leading so many to relocate from America’s major cities as to cause urban vacancies and a house-building boom in the country? Fact. But politically incorrect fact, indeed, racist. Repeat: “mostly peaceful protests, mostly peaceful protests.”

    To win the 2020 election, the oligarchy deployed all its forces and staked its legitimacy, whole. It cannot imagine losing them. Yet, win or lose, the election changed American politics in a way not entirely friendly to the oligarchy.

    For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. How many Americans are willing to join the privileged ones in confessing their neighbors’ sins in exchange for the hope of being counted as “allies” of the folks doing the real oppressing rather than among the real oppressed? How many are happy that their company’s H.R. department now decides promotions, demotions and firings regardless of professional competence? Do most Americans really believe that the authorities ought to have the powers they exhibited during the COVID affair, and do they see the “mostly peaceful protests” as part of a brighter future for themselves?

    Since 2016 the ruling class have had the luxury of acting as if the deplorables were lifeless punching bags. On November 3 they will find out to what extent that may not be so. Its leaders have already discovered that their “intersectional” entourages are not entirely controllable. After the election, the politicians bidding for leadership of conservatives will make Trump look like milquetoast. As the ruling class tries to suppress them, it will also have to deal with uncontrollable allies, whose violence will spur the conservatives to fiercer resistance.

    Revolution has already undone the regime established in 1776-89. The election’s alternative outcomes will strongly affect how it moves America toward a new regime.

    What If the Rulers Win?

    Victory for the Democratic Party is a recipe for violent strife.

    The lack of moral-political authority at the head of the ruling class has been arguably the most important and least remarked fact of public life in 21st-century America. Most visibly since 2008, its leaders have led primarily by pulling rank—denigrating ordinary Americans and calling attention to their own elevated stations in government and society—and by courting the coalition of groups driven by intersectional hate.

    After an electoral victory, these leaders—the elected officials, the deep state bureaucrats, the corporate and finance chiefs, the educrats, etc.—will be able to wield power to the extent of the losers’ complaisance and their ability to satisfy the intersectionals’ ambitions and hates. Moderating and meshing these contrasting requirements would be hard even for exceptionally astute and potent persons. But neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris has talent, personal following, or moral authority. Hence, the winners would be hostages to the war that their own activists would wage against the rest of America, and to the deplorables’ resistance.

    For most ruling class notables, enjoying and parceling out victory’s prerogatives is the revolution’s point. They would prefer to suppress the deplorables while minimizing disruption of the economy and avoiding violence. For these chiefs, rubbing the deplorables’ faces in excrement is mostly an instrument of conflict. But for the intersectionals, it is the revolution’s very objective, its driving logic. For them, vengeance is electoral victory’s foremost prerogative. Determined as the chiefs may be that the intersectional tail must not wag the revolutionary dog, the fact is that each and every part of the intersectional coalition sees itself as the dog.

    For their part the deplorables would not accept the legitimacy of the Left’s victory in 2020 any more than the Left accepted the Right’s victory in 2016. Why should they? Lacking any hope of federal protection, they would retrench behind such state, local, and private means of resistance as they may have, while they sought effective national leadership. Sensing that disobedience to the point of violence had become the only effective means of defense, they would respond to challenges with force. The revolution’s logic would play out in a series of confrontations, and the revolution’s next stage would depend on these confrontations’ outcomes.

    Understanding these confrontations requires reconsidering what happened in America after 2016, and especially in 2020. Elected officials of the Left acted as laws unto themselves regardless of federal law, according to the principle “stop me if you can.” The Trump administration’s passivity validated their decisions. All manner of bureaucrats, corporate officials, and employees—indeed anyone who wielded any kind of authority—came to believe that they had the right and duty to police, to command, and to punish whoever offended their sensibilities.

    This phenomenon recalls social practice in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, East Germany, etc. The sense of arbitrary authority over the regime’s outlawed enemies is a hallmark of totalitarianism. The alleged offenses matter little and the truth not at all. Even after accusations prove to be hoaxes, the narrative’s usefulness and being on the right side is all that matters. The Right was slow to learn that lesson. But learn it they did.

    Intersectional groups exist regarding each and every facet of life to make as much trouble as they can for whoever differs from them. Following the Left’s victory in 2020, attorneys general, agency potentates, mayors, and corporate officials who are part of or partial to these groups would see it as more to their advantage than ever to act against deplorables: investigations to harass, lawsuits to bankrupt, arrests to defame, seizures of property, firings, cancelings, restraining orders, custody of children…there is no limit to how people can be hurt by willful uses of power.

    As the intersectional groups were swollen by recruits during the post-2016 period, their adherents became more independent as they became more radical. All of the above surely augurs assaults on deplorables increasingly pervasive, unpredictable, and violent. It also leaves the deplorables no alternative but to respond in kind.

    In sum, the Right is likely to emulate the Left’s 2016-20 Resistance to the best of its abilities and limits of its powers. And since a fully empowered Left is likely to be far more kinetic in its response to Resistance than Trump had been, violent clashes would be inevitable.

    At all levels, officials of red states are the deplorables’ first line of defense. And indeed, during the post-2016 period some such officials used tactics similar to their leftist homologues: refusing to enforce dictates from above, and declaring their jurisdictions “sanctuaries” for one or another’s causes. Correctly, they judged that just as the Trump administration was not going to send the army to California to enforce immigration laws, nobody was going to send force majeure to their jurisdictions to govern in their stead.

    Were the Left to win in 2020, that assumption would be tested. Every U.S. agency has a SWAT team. The Biden/Harris administration’s appointees would surely want to use them to crush resistance to any number of edicts. Among the most interesting questions concerning such an administration is the extent to which it would try to restrain its members from major confrontations with red states and with private groups of Deplorables.

    Though the material balance of forces would be heavily weighted on the Left’s side, it would not prejudge the outcomes simply because government agents are unaccustomed to opposition—check-collectors rather than heroes willing to suffer harm for a cause. Believing in nothing, they are unlikely to go beyond initial skirmishes into guerrilla war against an armed population fighting for a way of life.

    Yet there is no doubt that such an administration would lack the power as well as the inclination to restrain the manifold pent-up acts of vengeance that its empowered, energized base would unleash on the deplorables in countless instances. Some have suggested that such an administration could tame that base by offering sinecures in exchange for calm, and that only a lack of money would limit its ability to buy it. But it is doubtful that money would extinguish the taste for raw force to which so many had become accustomed in 2020. Hence, violent confrontations, all over the country, would be virtually certain.

    Where these confrontations led would depend on how the Right side of American life organized itself politically after Trump’s defeat. The 2016 Republican primaries’ unambiguous lesson was the voters’ wholesale rejection of the Republican Party’s establishment. Two candidates out of seventeen, Trump and Cruz, were serious alternatives because they ran against both Parties. Nothing that has happened since then, or that would happen were Trump to be defeated in 2020, would make establishment Republicans any less disgusting to deplorable voters.

    In short, American politics’ Right side will be looking for leaders eager to do unto the Left what the Left has been doing to them, for leaders who organize effective resistance, and who offer a prospect for saving their constituents’ way of life.

    Necessarily, the race for leadership would center on the besieged deplorables’ plight. This would mean organizing nationwide measures such as tax strikes and other actions to protest or cripple major administration decisions. It would also mean nationalizing opposition to local instances of injustice, perhaps interposing conservative elected officials between citizens targeted by injustice and their tormentors. It would mean fostering and leading campaigns of civil disobedience.

    After 2016 the Left had pretended to be frightened of populism. It would be incumbent on whoever would lead the Right side of American life after 2020 to give them real reasons to fear it.

    Since to lead is to show the way, contenders for leadership must frankly distinguish what is possible and what is no longer so. They would have to acknowledge the extent to which a half century of ruling class dominance has reduced the proportion of people who believe that “all men are created equal” and that none may rule another except by reasoned persuasion. Hence, now, they would have to start from the fact that republican life is possible only among these Americans, and not possible with people insensible to all manner of freedom.

    To avoid having the left’s priorities forced on them and eschewing desire to force anything on the Left, to avoid a civil war of which the armed forces must be the arbiter, they would ask their voters to support plans for so de-centralizing government—that is, for a much-expanded federalism—as to guarantee their right to live the kinds of lives that other Americans are no longer willing or able to live.

    If, in the event of the Left’s victory in the 2020 election the Right does not come up with such leadership, the ruling class’s inability to control the inevitable clashes between the intersectionals and the Deplorables really is likely to lead to a civil war that only the military can end. That might end the revolution on the usual terms: right is the interest of the stronger.

    What if They Lose?

    Donald Trump’s reelection would reduce the intersectionals’ confidence a bit and give the Right side of American life a bit more leeway as it chooses new leadership. In this slightly calmer atmosphere, the beginning of the 2024 election cycle would open a host of possibilities.

    But it would not end our revolution any more than the ruling class’s victory would. The revolution’s essentials would remain and its logic would continue to unfold. The ruling class, having failed peaceably and hence firmly to establish oligarchy, remains pressed by the deplorables on one side and its chosen intersectional instruments on the other. It dares not try dismounting the tiger it rides.

    The deplorables tried in 2016 to call into being a Party to relieve the ruling class’s oppression and, Trump notwithstanding, ended up oppressed by the intersectionals more than they ever imagined. In 2020, despite Trump, only these are stronger than four years earlier. But the intersectionals’ power is an expression of the ruling class—and in 2020 the ruling class, its enormous power over money and institutions notwithstanding, lacks energy and legitimacy of its own and must borrow them from the intersectionals. Trump’s reelection raises no obstacles to their aggrandizement that did not exist the previous day. Virtually without obstacles under Trump I, that aggrandizement would continue under Trump II.

    After election day 2020 Trump, even victorious, is a spent force. From the day he declared his candidacy until some time in 2018 he embodied the Deplorables’ hopes for salvation. Thereafter until the 2020 election, he embodied the certainty that his defeat would mean the choice between subjection and war.

    Few if any of his voters deluded themselves that his second term would be better than his first, during which they had lost more of their country than in the previous half century. But the deplorables’ fate is tied to Donald Trump—until election day 2020. The morning after the 2020 election, the deplorables’ agenda resets to 2016, with the vital difference of urgency. Yes, the deplorables need a political vehicle of their own for the future. But, most urgently, they need national focus and organization to guard their freedoms today. That means instantly searching for new leadership, and urgently getting behind it.

    Donald Trump having vaccinated the deplorables against what Theodore Roosevelt used to call “the unbridled tongue and the unready hand,” candidates for leadership of the Right side of American life will have to present themselves by actually leading their fellow Deplorables effectively to resist and reverse what officious and official policy by potentates high and low are doing, and have done, to foul so much of American life.

    There is no substantive difference between the sort of leadership that the deplorables will demand in the wake of Trump’s reelection from what they would have demanded after his defeat. The problems are the same. In either case they would have to lead protests, lawsuits, boycotts, campaigns for legislation, for legitimizing or delegitimizing all manner of potentates, as well as explaining how to reestablish the American way of life on a sound basis for those who want to live it. The difference would lie in circumstances. In the wake of electoral defeat, the Left’s more energetic and widespread acts of oppression would effectively set the Right’s defensive agenda. But having won at the polls and having a nominally friendly administration, the deplorables’ leaders would have the luxury of picking their fights with strategic consistency.

    The revolution long since destroyed the original American republic in the minds, hearts, and habits of a critical mass of citizens. They neither want nor are any longer able to live as Americans had lived until so recently. Loudly, they declare that the rest of us are racists, etc., unworthy of self-government. No one can undo that. Chances are against the undoing happening on its own. The longer we pretend to live under precisely the same laws, the likelier we will end up killing one another. We must not do that. And yet regional differences notwithstanding, we are mostly intermingled. Sorting ourselves into compatible groups is part of the American genius and tradition. More of that has been happening and more will happen yet. If we want to live in peace, as we should, we must contrive to agree to disagree to accommodate peace.

    The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

  • Trump To Nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett To Supreme Court
    Trump To Nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett To Supreme Court

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 21:30

    Trump’s likely nominees to replace RBG on The US Supreme Court – 7th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, 11th Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa, and 4th Circuit Judge Allison Jones Rushing – have, according to sources who have leaked their information to The New York Times, been narrowed down to Judge Amy Coney Barrett:

    President Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the favorite candidate of conservatives, to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and will try to force Senate confirmation before Election Day in a move that would significantly alter the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court for years.

    Mr. Trump plans to announce on Saturday that she is his choice, according to people close to the process who asked not to be identified disclosing the decision in advance. The president met with Judge Barrett at the White House this week and came away impressed with a jurist that leading conservatives told him would be a female Antonin Scalia, referring to the justice who died in 2016 and for whom Judge Barrett clerked.

    Barrett is the most feared by liberals, some of whom concede that she has “a topnotch legal mind.”

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    Many have focused on Judge Barrett’s devout catholicism – and therefore the abortion debate…

    “She is the perfect combination of brilliant jurist and a woman who brings the argument to the court that is potentially the contrary to the views of the sitting women justices,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, who has praised Mr. Trump’s entire shortlist.

    Additionally, as NYT noted earlier in the week, liberal groups have been sounding the alarm over Judge Barrett for two years because of concerns over how she might rule on abortion and the Affordable Care Act.

    “Amy Coney Barrett meets Donald Trump’s two main litmus tests: She has made clear she would invalidate the A.C.A. and take health care away from millions of people and undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom,” said Nan Aron, the president of Alliance for Justice, a liberal group.

    In a 2017 law review article written before she joined the appeals court, Judge Barrett was critical of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s 2012 opinion sustaining a central provision of the Affordable Care Act, saying he had betrayed the commands of textualism. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” she wrote.

    The court will again hear arguments on the fate of the law in November, and Judge Barrett’s article suggested that she would give its challengers a sympathetic hearing.

    However, in one of her most revealing opinions, Barrett took an expansive view of the Second Amendment – dissenting to the right of two colleagues who were appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

    In the world of conservative judges, she has particularly strong credentials. Judge Barrett began clerking for Justice Antonin Scalia 22 years ago, and her fellow clerks are quick to say she was his favorite. She graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame Law School and joined the faculty in 2002, earning praise from colleagues as an astute scholar and jurist even if they did not always agree on her jurisprudential premises.

    But, as a reminder, Alan Dershowitz notes that when Judge Barrett came before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary for her nomination to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Senator Diane Feinstein generated considerable controversy when she said to Barrett:

    “The dogma lives loudly in you.”

    This was a reference to Barrett’s deep Catholic faith. Under our Constitution, Senator Feinstein’s statement crossed the line. Ours was the first Constitution in history to provide that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

    Although Feinstein did not explicitly impose a religious test, she suggested that personal religious views — which she called dogma — might disqualify a nominee from being confirmed.

    That would clearly be unconstitutional.

    But then again… when did pursuing anything ethically or legally challenged ever stop the current suite of Dem leaders from pursuing their task of ‘Never-Trump’ and ‘Never-anyone-Trump-wants’.

    However, in this case, barring some unforeseen disaster, there appears little Democrats can do – despite the threats – to delay a vote on Barrett, solidifying a right-leaning shift to the court for a generation.

  • Beijing On Edge: China's 2nd Largest Property Developer Plummets Amid Fears Of Imminent Liquidity Crisis
    Beijing On Edge: China’s 2nd Largest Property Developer Plummets Amid Fears Of Imminent Liquidity Crisis

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 21:20

    Is China’s housing bubble – the main “wealth effect” for hundreds of millions of middle class Chinese – finally about to burst?

    On Friday, trading in onshore bonds of China Evergrande, China’s second largest and the world’s most indebted property developer, was halted after reports it was seeking government help to stave off a cash crunch caused the price of its shares and debt to tumble, and sparking a crisis of confidence among creditors who’ve lent the world’s most indebted developer more than $120 billion.

    As Bloomberg reports, long-simmering doubts about the property giant’s financial health exploded to the fore on Thursday, following reports it had sent a letter to Chinese officials warning of a potential cash crunch that could pose systemic risks. The news sparked a furious liquidation in the company’s bonds that continued into Friday, sending the price of Evergrande’s yuan note due 2023 down as much as 28% to a record low. Losses in the company’s dollar bonds spread to high-yield debt across Asia.

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    The selloff was so intense that according to the Financial Time, it forced the Shanghai stock exchange to suspend trading in Evergrande bonds for half an hour on Friday morning, due to “abnormal fluctuations”, which is a polite euphemism for “selling.”

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    The crash in Evergrande shares and bonds was sparked after a letter, purportedly from the company, circulated on Chinese social media on Thursday requesting support for a previously planned reorganization from the provincial government in Guangdong, where Evergrande is based. In the purported letter dated August 24, the FT reports  that Evergrande asked the Guangdong government to approve a plan to float its subsidiary Hengda Real Estate on Shenzhen’s stock exchange through a merger with an already listed company (another eerie similarity to the Nicola SPAC-reverse merger). Evergrande reportedly added that a failure to complete the reorganization would pose “systemic risks.”

    In response, and in continuing its most sincerely imitation of Trevor Milton, the company said in a filing to Hong Kong’s stock exchange late on Thursday that the documents “fabricated and pure defamation” and that it had reported the matter to China’s security authorities.

    “There are rumors circulating on the Internet about the reorganisation of Hengda Real Estate. The relevant documents and pictures are fabricated and are pure defamation, causing serious damage to the Company’s reputation. The Company strongly condemns such acts and has reported the case to the public security authorities.”

    Just to be safe, reports that Evergrande also asked its employees to post on social media platform WeChat a statement saying the letter was fake, according to the FT.

    The full-blown attempt at deflecting investor skepticism proved woefully insufficient, however, and resulted in a wholesale puke in the company’s publicly traded securities, with Evergrande shares falling 9.5% to the lowest level since May at the close of trading in Hong Kong.

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    Alas, where there’s smoke there is usually fire – especially in an economy that has been ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic – and on Thursday rating agency S&P poured fuel on the fire when it cut its outlook on Evergrande’s B+ credit rating outlook from stable to negative.

    “Evergrande’s short-term debt has continued to surge, partly due to its active acquisition of property projects,” it said. “We had previously expected the company to address its short-term debt, especially given the tough economic climate.”

    Making matters worse, there is a near-term trigger that could catalyze a full-blown debt and liquidity crisis and which is further spooking investors. As part of an agreement Evergrande struck with some of its largest investors, the company raised about 130 billion yuan ($19bn) by selling shares in Hengda and needs to repay investors if fails to win approval for a backdoor listing on the Shenzhen stock exchange by Jan. 31.

    This is a problem because that amount represents 92% of Evergrande cash and cash equivalents of 142.5 billion yuan in. And since the fate of the company itself is suddenly determine by its stock price – a reverse merger appears very much unlikely if Evergrande can’t stabilize its stock price – the possibility of a toxic feedback loop emerges, where the lower the stock price drops, the more aggressive the selling, the more likely a terminal liquidity event occurs and forces the company to demand a shareholder-liquidating bailout.  S&P agrees, saying that Evergrande will have to repay a portion of its investments in Hengda, even as it sought to contain the panic by adding that the risk of a liquidity crunch was “still low for now.” We’ll check back in a week.

    Though it’s unclear why Evergrande has yet to win approval for its listing plan, Bloomberg speculates it may relate to China’s efforts to tame sky-high home prices and restrain fundraising by developers. Regulators have been using a wide range of policy levers since 2016 to deter speculative home-buyers, curb expensive land prices and restrict lending to residential builders.

    Evergrande has said it won’t raise new funds through the listing in Shenzhen, but the transaction could allow the company to achieve a higher valuation and thus easier access to future financing. Its stake sale to strategic investors in 2017 implied a valuation of about 425 billion yuan for the unit, which holds most of Evergrande’s real estate assets. That’s almost three times higher than the market value suggested by the developer’s existing shares in Hong Kong. Chinese property developers trade at about 12 times projected earnings on average in Shanghai and Shenzhen, compared with about 5 times in Hong Kong.

    In yet another red flag, Bloomberg reports citing five sources that at least five Chinese banks and two trust firms held emergency meetings on Thursday night to discuss their Evergrande exposure and access to collateral. Among them was China Minsheng Banking Corp., whose exposure to Evergrande exceeds 29 billion yuan. And since this is China, where once a default cascade begins it may never end, reader will recall that Minsheng Bank, also known as “China’s JPMorgan” was itself in crisis last spring when it missed a bond payment in January 2019 and sought money from its employees to avoid collapse.

    But while Minsheng may be stable for now, Evergrande is anything but especially after at least two of the banks that were present in the emergency meetings decided to bar the company from drawing unused credit lines, effectively capping the company’s liquidity just as it will desperately need access to every incremental yuan. The developer had credit lines of 503 billion yuan as of June 30, of which 302 billion yuan were unused, according to Bloomberg.

    “Regardless of the authenticity of the letter, we think the situation may have prolonged negative impact,” Manjesh Verma and Stella Li, credit analysts at Citigroup, wrote in a report. “It increases concerns among various investors and lenders and hence increases difficulty in funding access and refinancing.”

    Meanwhile, the FT notes that analysts have long been concerned that any issues at Evergrande could ripple through China’s financial system: “Evergrande is a significant source of systemic risk,” said Nigel Stevenson, an analyst at GMT Research. “There are huge debts in the listed parent company that will ultimately need to be refinanced.”

    Just how huge are the debts? One look at the chart below should answer all questions on why the second most important Chinese property developer is also a systematically important company for a country where the bulk of household wealth is not in the stock market but in real estate.

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    As Bloomberg adds, Evergrande has long been viewed as a poster child for highly leveraged companies in China, where corporate debt swelled to a record 205% of gross domestic product in 2019 and has likely climbed further this year as firms increased borrowing to tide themselves over during the pandemic. Evergrande has tapped banks, shadow lenders and the bond market in recent years to expand beyond the property industry into businesses ranging from electric cars to hospitals and theme parks –- areas that often align with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s policy priorities.

    The core problem that Evergrande has faced as it unleashed this historic debt issuance spree, is that it did not expect the coronavirus to cripple the Chinese economy. Following the coronavirus pandemic, investors have sharpened their focus on China’s heavily indebted property developers, which have huge volumes of outstanding debt held by foreign entities (amusingly enough, FTSE Russell just announced Chinese government bonds will be included into its flagship World Government Bond Index from October 2021, as China can never find enough greater fools to whom it can sell even more Evergrande debt).

    Amid the economic slowdown, Evergrande this month was forced to slash the price of its properties in China by 30%. The company has said the discounts were a “normal sales strategy” for September and October. Just one problem: those two months are a peak time for home sales in China, which means that Evergrande is lying. Again.

    * * *

    One big variable surrounding the future of Evergrande is whether Beijing will merely swoop in and bail it out if it is unable to repay creditors. While the Chinese government has a long history of bailing out systemically important companies to maintain financial stability, policy makers have in recent years sought to instil more market discipline and reduce moral hazard. Case in point, as part of China’s spotty efforts to rein in risk, authorities have recently nationalized indebted conglomerates such as HNA Group, Anbang and Tomorrow Group. They’ve also introduced new rules for financial holding companies, including Evergrande, that impose minimum capital requirements and other restrictions meant to reduce the threat of systemic blowups.

    In any case, every ponzi scheme eventually comes to an end, and unless Evergrande can find a way to continues it unprecedented debt expansion, it is facing a brutal debt maturity schedule…

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    … which sees billions in existing yuan and dollar bonds set for repayment. If the company remains locked out of capital markets, if it can’t restore access to its line of credit, and unless it can complete its reverse merger, it just may be over for Evergrande, and also for China’s gargantuan housing bubble.

  • Ann Coulter Outraged: 'Innocent' Until Proven 'Trump Supporter'
    Ann Coulter Outraged: ‘Innocent’ Until Proven ‘Trump Supporter’

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 21:00

    Authored by Ann Coulter via AnnCoulter.com,

    During a BLM “peaceful protest” in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 30 (over George Floyd’s dying of a heart attack while in police custody in Minneapolis), James Scurlock was peacefully protesting by breaking into an architecture firm – hoisting an office chair and hurling it into two computer monitors, then ripping a phone from a desk and throwing it against the wall, as his friend shattered another monitor – all of which was captured on video.

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    Nearby, Jake Gardner, an Iraq War veteran and Trump supporter, was keeping watch over the two bars he owned, The Hive and The Gatsby, aided by his 68-year-old father and a security guard. The peaceful protesters soon made their way to Jake’s bar, where they hurled a street sign through The Hive’s plate-glass window. He and his father rushed outside to prevent the peaceful protesters from storming his bar.

    Scurlock’s friend, catching his wind after smashing computer monitors, knocked Gardner’s father to the ground. (It’s on tape.) Or as CNN’s Madeline Holcombe put it: “An unidentified man can be seen pushing Gardner’s father.”

    Gardner rushed to help his father, then backed away toward the bar, lifting his shirt to show the protesters he was armed, and telling them to move along. Again, it’s all on tape. Murmurings can be heard from the crowd: “That (expletive) got a gun” and “It’s not worth it (expletive) you stu–,”

    At that point, peaceful protester Alayna Melendez leapt on Gardner from behind (not subscribers to the Marquess of Queensberry rules, these peaceful protesters), knocking him down and into the street, whereupon yet another peaceful protester jumped on top of Gardner, who fired two warning shots in the air, scattering his first two assailants.

    Again: all on tape.

    Three seconds later, as Gardner was trying to get up, Scurlock jumped on him from behind and put him in a chokehold — which I believe is considered definitive proof of intentional murder when performed by a police officer. In videos, Gardner can be heard yelling, “Get off me! Get off me!”

    With his right arm pinned, and Scurlock choking him, Gardner moved the gun to his left hand and shot over his shoulder, hitting Scurlock in the collarbone, killing him.

    Or as The New York Times’ Azi Paybarah explained it:

    “Mr. Gardner got into a fight with one man, James Scurlock, 22. The two scuffled before Mr. Gardner fired a shot that killed him.”

    They “scuffled.”

    It brings to mind the Times headline from Nov. 23, 1963: “President Kennedy Dies in Dallas After Scuffle — Albeit at Great Distance — With Lee Harvey Oswald.”

    Let’s be fair, though. Maybe Scurlock jumped Gardner, or maybe Gardner jumped Scurlock. Who knows? It’s not like there are 4 million videos of the incident.

    Gardner was immediately taken into police custody for questioning and held until 11 p.m. the next night.

    The Democratic district attorney, Don Kleine, his chief deputy Brenda Beadle, and all the homicide detectives spent 12 hours that weekend reconstructing the incident with multiple videos. Their unanimous conclusion? That Gardner shot Scurlock in self-defense.

    Despite the delusional claims posted on “social media” that Gardner used the N-word — which, as we all know, is grounds for summary execution by any black person — none of the videos substantiate that. To the contrary, Scurlock’s own friend denied that Gardner said anything racial at all. (Apparently, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.)

    At 22, Scurlock already had a rap sheet a mile long, including home invasion, assault and battery, domestic violence — and, of course, he was in the middle of a crime spree that very night. Methamphetamine and cocaine were found in his urine.

    But “the community” erupted like COVID in April. Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt (bisexual, graduate of a now-defunct college) repeatedly called Gardner a “white supremacist.” Another Nebraska state senator, Kara Eastman (bisexual), called Gardner’s shooting of Spurlock a “cold-blooded murder.”

    (Why do I mention their sexual orientations? A lot of the hate toward Gardner seems to come from the transgender community for his posting on Facebook that transgenders would be restricted to the unisex bathrooms because a man in a dress had attacked a female customer in the ladies’ room.)

    Twitter was full of unattractive humans claiming that Gardner was a “white supremacist,” which were dutifully reprinted in local media, such as this one from @nostudavab (Twitter banner: “F*CK TRUMP”):

    “Club owner Jake Gardner shot and killed a protestor in Omaha on video, yelling racial slurs. he is openly racist and homophobic. he murdered James Scurlock, he’s proud of it, and he’s not in jail.”

    Protesters besieged Kleine’s neighborhood.

    Kleine responded to the mob’s demand for “justice” by calling in a black prosecutor, Fred Franklin, to make damn sure the grand jury indicted Gardner – whom Kleine (the elected D.A.) had found to be innocent. As he was expected to do, Franklin produced a series of fanciful indictments, including for manslaughter and making a “terroristic threat.” (The “terroristic threat” was Gardner lifting his shirt to show the peaceful protesters that he was armed.)

    The special prosecutor’s ALL NEW EVIDENCE THAT BLEW THE OTHER FACTS AWAY was this: The night of the BLM protest, Gardner had posted on Facebook:

    “Just when you think ‘what else could 2020 throw at me?’ Then you have to pull 48 hours of military style firewatch.”

    WHY WAS THIS MAN NOT IMMEDIATELY ARRESTED?

    Gardner’s landlord, Frank Vance, promptly evicted Jake’s bars from the building, and sent an anguished apology letter to Scurlock’s family:

    (“deepest sympathy … the pain and suffering … losing a child to unnecessary violence … apologize for this horrible incident … time to heal … very deepest condolences”).

    Gardner was facing 95 years in prison for shooting a career criminal who was choking him, and now he had lost his source of income. So naturally his friends tried to set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for his legal defense.

    GoFundMe’s response? They instantly and repeatedly took down the page, based on their clearly stated policy: We don’t like you.

    Here’s a thought, GoFundMe: Guaranteeing a fair trial for an individual accused of a crime isn’t the same as defending the thing he’s accused of. That’s the whole point! Gardner wanted to prove that he was innocent. Nope! No fair trial, no fair press, no livelihood, no GoFundMe. No chance.

    Meanwhile, the family of the convicted criminal who jumped Gardner has already raised more than a quarter-million dollars on GoFundMe. (Funeral expenses can be costly!)

    Poor Jake Gardner didn’t stand a chance against the raging, hate-filled multitude. Even those sworn to uphold the law, like Kleine and Franklin, leapt in with the mob. And a corporation whose business it is to enable people to raise money for just causes such as getting a fair trial refused to do business with him, not unlike the Memphis Woolworth’s treatment of black people in 1960.

    Sadly, President Trump never said a word about his polite, cheerful supporter being railroaded in Omaha. Gardner had attended Trump’s inauguration with such high hopes. He had well wishes even for the (can we say “insane”?) protesters he encountered there.

    Last weekend, facing death threats and a kangaroo court, and with no means to mount a defense, Gardner killed himself, rather than be killed by the mob waiting for him back in Omaha.

    This is the part of the column where I make a clarion call for action. How about civil suits against the monsters in the prosecutor’s office, against the criminal-supporting GoFundMe and the Facebook and Twitter defamation mobs! Maybe a department of justice investigation or FCC action against biased social media companies. Antitrust suits. Boycotts!

    I’ve got nothing. The country has gone mad. I always figured the first armed civilian who ever fought back would put an end to the violence exploding all over the country — the violence that police and prosecutors can’t or won’t stop. “We have the guns,” conservatives like to say. In fact, it’s even worse now.

    It’s official: You can’t protect yourself. Not even a blameless ex-Marine could defend himself from being choked to death. The D.A. will call in a “special” prosecutor to throw you to the wolves, and they’ll both be praised for railroading an innocent man in the Omaha World Herald, while the national media defame you.

  • Philly Treasurer Indicted For Embezzlement & Using A "Sham Marriage" To Obtain US Citizenship
    Philly Treasurer Indicted For Embezzlement & Using A “Sham Marriage” To Obtain US Citizenship

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 20:40

    Like most Democratic-machine cities, Philadelphia has endured its fair share of corruption emanating from city hall. But this latest scandal is truly unprecedented – it’s almost like a prestige TV plot come to life.

    Philadelphia City Treasurer Christian Dunbar is facing federal charges – and, if convicted, up to 45 years and $1.5 million fine – for allegedly embezzling thousands of dollars from bank customers and also committing to a “sham” marriage to gain American citizenship. 

    The charges were unveiled by Attorney William McSwain on Friday. The prosecutor said Dunbar was arrested by FBI agents on Friday.morning. A local TV station pointed out that the charges facing Dunbar are unrelated to his work as treasurer.

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    Dunbar

    Philly Mayor Jim Kenney says Dunbar, who is originally from Liberia, and reportedly a descendant of American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, has been fired as city treasurer, and the inspector general will begin a “thorough review” of Dunbar’s office.

    “The criminal complaint announced today does not involve Christian Dunbar’s work with the City of Philadelphia. But in light of the allegations, his employment has been terminated effective immediately. At the same time, I have asked Inspector General Alexander DeSantis to begin a thorough review of the City Treasurer’s Office during the time of Dunbar’s employment as both Deputy Treasurer and Treasurer. This review can help resolve any concerns about the Office’s conduct and transactions during this period,” Kenney said in a statement.

    According to the criminal complaint, Dunbar is facing charges of embezzlement by a bank employee, conspiracy to commit marriage fraud, and fraudulent procurement of citizenship. He allegedly stole a total of $15,000 from two customers at the Wells Fargo Bank in Newtown Square where he worked as a financial adviser, weeks before he was appointed as the city’s deputy treasurer in 2016.

    But the scheme to obtain citizenship through fraudulent marriage was perpetrated by Dunbar and three others – his current wife, and two friends they allegedly met at Temple University.

    Dunbar’s wife, identified in the criminal complaint only as “FND”, along with the two others – identified only as “Person #1” and “Person #2” – also deliberately participated in the scheme to defraud the US via entering into sham marriages, but the complaint didn’t detail any charges relating to them.

    The two sham marriages – one between Dunbar and one of the co-conspirators, and the other between Dunbar’s now-wife, and one of the other conspirators – occurred within days of each other in December 2006 and were performed by the same officiant, a former Temple University professor. But since that time, the only “legitimate” marriage Dunbar and his wife have participated in has been their own, which was cemented in Senegal back in 2013.

    “The alleged conduct that is outlined in this case reveals a pattern of dishonesty, poor judgment and criminal behavior that spans many years,” McSwain said Friday .

    Over the last four years as treasurer, Dunbar has been responsible for managing the city’s debt obligations, bank accounts, its operations and capital accounts and petty cash amounts related to various departments.

    Dunbar’s maternal grandfather, William VS Tubman, served as president of Liberia for 27 years and is widely regarded as “the father of modern Liberia”.

    Read the press release below:

    PHILADELPHIA – United States Attorney William M. McSwain announced that Christian Dunbar, 40, of Philadelphia, PA, the current Philadelphia City Treasurer, was arrested this morning and charged by Criminal Complaint with embezzlement by a bank employee, conspiracy to commit marriage fraud, and fraudulent procurement of citizenship. U.S. Attorney McSwain detailed the charges at a press conference this afternoon in front of the James A. Byrne U.S. Courthouse in Philadelphia.

    As the Philadelphia City Treasurer, Dunbar’s responsibilities include: (1) managing the City’s debt obligations, which includes overseeing the issuance of the City’s municipal bonds; (2) managing the City’s bank accounts, including its operating account, capital account, and petty cash accounts in various departments; (3) paying the City’s bills, including making payments to vendors, cutting payroll checks, and making payments to pension plans; and (4) managing the City’s cash reserves.

    According to the Criminal Complaint, Dunbar allegedly participated in two schemes – (1) bank embezzlement and (2) marriage fraud in order to become a U.S. citizen.

    The details of the alleged bank embezzlement scheme are as follows: Just weeks before his appointment to serve as the City’s Deputy Treasurer, Dunbar, while employed at Wells Fargo Bank in Newtown Square, stole $15,000 from two different bank customers. The Complaint alleges that on two separate occasions, once in December 2015 and again in January 2016, Victim #1 met with the defendant to transfer $5,000 between Victim #1’s Wells Fargo bank accounts. During both meetings, Dunbar allegedly directed Victim #1 to sign several documents, including a blank withdrawal slip. He later allegedly used the blank slips to withdraw cash from Victim #1’s account and deposit those funds into his own personal bank account.

    The defendant allegedly used the same trick with Victim #2. In December 2015, Dunbar assisted Victim #2 in the same Wells Fargo branch and directed Victim #2 to sign several documents, including a blank withdrawal slip. As alleged in the Criminal Complaint, he later used the blank withdrawal slip to withdraw money from Victim #2’s account. Soon thereafter, Dunbar allegedly made significant cash deposits into his personal bank account.

    Dunbar also allegedly participated in a conspiracy to enter into a sham marriage in order to secure immigration benefits, and ultimately U.S. citizenship, for himself and his family. The details of that alleged fraud are as follows: The Criminal Complaint alleges that the defendant and his current wife, identified in the Complaint by the initials “F.N.D.,” both entered into fraudulent marriages, Dunbar with Person #1 and his wife with Person #2. Prior to these sham marriages, Persons #1 and #2 were U.S. citizens, but Dunbar and F.N.D. were not – having been born in Liberia and Senegal, respectively. By marrying U.S. citizens, Dunbar and F.N.D. were able to gain their own U.S. citizenship.

    These four individuals – Christian Dunbar, F.N.D., and Persons #1 and #2 – attended Temple University together and allegedly coordinated this sham marriage plan. Both of these sham marriages occurred within days of each other in December 2006 and were performed by the same officiant — a former Temple University professor. But since the time they attended Temple University together, Dunbar and F.N.D. were the only legitimate couple, marrying each other in Senegal in June 2013 (while Dunbar was still legally married to Person #1).

    On their child’s 2014 birth records, Dunbar is listed as the father, F.N.D. is listed as the mother, and they are listed as married to each other.

    But in February 2012, relying on his sham marriage to Person #1, the defendant allegedly applied to become a permanent resident of the United States (which he certified as true under the penalty of perjury), was granted that status in October 2012, and then submitted additional paperwork to become a naturalized citizen in late 2015 and early 2016.

    As detailed in the Complaint, in paperwork he submitted in 2015 and in subsequent interviews, he continued to make fraudulent claims about his marital status, which was the basis for his becoming a naturalized citizen in January 2016. Two months later, he filed paperwork to divorce Person #1.

    “The alleged conduct in this case shows a pattern of deception, dishonesty and criminality that no individual should ever engage in – but is especially alarming and intolerable for a high ranking City official,” said U.S. Attorney McSwain. “City officials whose job is to handle money should not be thieves. And they should not have a track record of engaging in elaborate immigration fraud against the public that they are supposed to serve. My Office will continue to hold public officials to the high standard of conduct that residents of this City deserve. And when we find that a public official’s behavior falls short, we will hold them accountable.”

    “The accusations against Christian Dunbar run quite the criminal gamut, from stealing his own bank customers’ money to violating the immigration laws that help protect our national security,” said Michael J. Driscoll, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division.

    “In his role as City Treasurer, Dunbar holds a position of public trust, making these charges lodged against him today extremely disturbing. The FBI is working every day to battle public corruption and the corrosive damage it does to people’s faith in government. We must hold public officials to high ethical standards — and we will hold them to obeying federal law.”

    If convicted, Dunbar faces a maximum possible sentence of 45 years’ imprisonment and a fine of $1.5 million.

    * * *

    Source: DoJ

  • Chinese Container Factories Are Now Sold Out Until February
    Chinese Container Factories Are Now Sold Out Until February

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 20:20

    By Greg Miller, senior editor at American Shipper

    Watch the containers to see which way the economic winds will blow. How many are ordered, for when and for how much. And if you do, you’ll see that box demand is strong — not just through year-end, but into 2021. 

    Three of the largest container-equipment lessors — Triton (NYSE: TRTN), Textainer (NYSE: TGH) and CAI International (CAI) — conducted virtual presentations for institutional investors over the past week, hosted by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW). Notes on those presentations provided to FreightWaves by KBW paint a rosy picture of consumer demand.

    According to one theory, U.S. import volume is so high today because shippers are bringing orders forward. Volumes will start tapering off soon and moderate through year-end.

    This doesn’t seem to jibe with what the container-equipment lessors are seeing.

    “Triton expects to see sustained heightened activity through the fourth quarter, while demand could remain strong through the Chinese New Year [in mid-February 2021],” reported KBW.

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    Leased Triton container hits the road

    A handful of producers in China build almost all of the world’s containers. “At this point, factories are now full through January and are taking orders for February and March delivery,” KBW said, reporting on Triton’s presentation.

    “Based on indications from customers [shipping lines], demand looks like it is going to continue into the first quarter,” speakers said in the Textainer and CAI presentations.

    Liners caught short

    Container lines own a portion of their container portfolio and rent the rest from box-equipment lessors.

    One of the key takeaways from the Triton presentation was that “the surprising strength in trade meant that shipping lines were structurally short on containers.”

    Compounding the capacity crunch, lessors noted that due to “changes in labor regulations [in China], the manufacturers are limited to one shift per day, effectively capping production levels.”

    That is not welcome news for liners and cargo shippers facing mounting container shortages.

    Shift in consumption

    Triton pointed to “the ongoing strength of the consumer and the shift in consumption away from services and experiences into goods, particularly anything related to the home.”

    Shippers transport lighter cargoes such as consumer goods in 40-foot containers. They ship heavier cargoes such as raw materials in 20-footers. Triton noted that the 40-foot sector “is the tightest portion of the market.” Its own portfolio is now at nearly 100% utilization. In contrast, the 20-foot segment, more prevalent in the intra-Asian raw-materials trades, is softer.

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    A leased CAI box in California

    Demand has been so strong that box-equipment lessors will be protected even if there is a COVID second wave and “the recent upswing fizzles out,” said KBW.

    “Due to the strength of the recent upswing, the lessors have been able to lease out nearly all containers under demand — namely 40-foot high cubes — on favorable terms for multi-year contracts.”

    High demand is hiking the price of new containers. They are now at $2,200 per cost equivalent unit (CEU) versus $1,800 earlier this year. (CEU expresses the value of a container as a multiple of a 20-foot dry cargo unit.)

    “If demand is sustained, prices could push higher following Chinese New Year,” KBW added.

    Lease rates paid by liner companies have also improved, albeit not as much as they could have. Triton said that it “could push pricing [higher] to boost returns, but given that business is tied to seven to eight main shipping lines, management feels the short-term benefit is not worth the risk to long-term relationships.”

    A better bellwether

    It takes around two years to build a ship, but only six to eight weeks to build a new box. This makes it less likely for box supply to outstrip demand than ship supply. The box market can more easily self-correct.

    “Lessors are typically wary of placing orders too far out as the exposure to movements in steel prices is risky,” wrote KBW. “This caution keeps order and production cycles short.”

    Michael Webber, founder of Webber Research & Advisory, highlighted the significance of box-equipment lessors as a more general bellwether.

    “These [box-equipment lessor] stocks offer a better real-time gauge of what’s actually happening from a trade perspective and they’re closer as a real-time indicator to the container lines themselves,” he said during an interview with FreightWaves. “I tend to look at the box-lessor stocks as the best gauge.”

    “It’s also a very tradeable group,” said Webber. “You can actually make money trading this group by having a fundamental thesis and having that thesis play out. That is not always the case.”

    Positive signal

    Box-equipment lessor stocks should be trading on next year’s outlook, not 2020, he continued. People have already placed bets “on the back half of the year,” said Webber. “Now we’re talking about what 2021 and what a return to normalcy looks like,”

    If the stocks of companies like Triton are a bellwether for the bigger picture, then the signs are certainly positive. As of the closing bell on Wednesday, Triton’s stock was back to where it began the year.

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  • Salvation Army Launches Red Kettle Campaign Early To "Rescue Christmas" 
    Salvation Army Launches Red Kettle Campaign Early To “Rescue Christmas” 

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 20:00

    The Federal Reserve’s release of its Beige Book in early September revealed permanent economic scarring, suggesting the economic revival is not as robust as previously thought. The stalling recovery, thanks to the lapse in fiscal stimulus, is pressuring households once more, prompting The Salvation Army, for the first time in 130 years, to start its annual holiday fundraising campaign early “in order to rescue Christmas.”  

    “Our ability to raise vital funds to serve those in need this Christmas and beyond is at risk,” said Commissioner Kenneth G. Hodder, National Commander of The Salvation Army.

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    Hodder said, “We need everyone who has the capacity to come alongside us and ensure that the holiday season is bright for millions. We’re asking you to help rescue Christmas with us by providing support in any way you can. Our hope is to offset these challenges to meet the increasing demand for services across our nation.” 

    “Based on the increase in services already provided in response to the pandemic, the organization could serve up to 155 percent more people in 2020 with Christmas assistance, including putting food on the table, paying bills, providing shelter and helping place gifts under the tree – assuming the resources are available. At the same time, due to the closing of retail stores, consumers carrying less cash and coins, and the decline in foot traffic, The Salvation Army could see up to a 50 percent decrease in funds raised through the red kettles, which would limit their capacity to provide services for the most vulnerable. To put this in perspective, last year, $126 million was raised through about 30,000 red kettles,” The Salvation Army said. 

    Tens of millions of households are in desperate need of support this year, more than ever, – the virus-induced economic downturn has resulted in depressionary unemployment and wiped out emergency savings for millions of people. There’s also the risk that “more than 50 million” Americans will be fighting hunger this holiday season. 

    The Salvation Army’s red kettle fundraising campaign is a familiar sight during the holidays, but this year, with the proliferation of online shopping as consumers stay home to avoid contracting the virus, donations are expected to be well below average. Also, less and less of the organization’s iconic red kettles will be seen as shopping malls shutter their doors if that is because of public health orders or because of bankruptcy. 

    By starting their annual holiday fundraising campaign early, the goal is to support households with food, financial aid for paying bills, and, in some cases, provide shelter for those who are now homeless.  

    Despite the virus pandemic, cash and coins will still be expected, but The Salvation Army may expect a reduction in the number of coins this year, thanks to the national coin shortage. Folks can also use Apple or Google Pay at any red kettle.

    The Salvation Army’s mission to “rescue Christmas” for millions of broke Americans implies there’s no “V” shaped recovery coming this year.

  • 10 Most Extreme Examples Of Anti-American Sentiment At US Colleges (& How Trump's 1776 Commission Could Reverse It)
    10 Most Extreme Examples Of Anti-American Sentiment At US Colleges (& How Trump’s 1776 Commission Could Reverse It)

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 19:40

    Authored by John Hanson via Campus Reform,

    During a Constitution Day address last week, President Donald Trump announced the creation of the 1776 commission, seeking, “to promote patriotic education.” The president wanted to “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.” 

    National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood spoke with Campus Reform about the importance of the commission. He called the 1776 commission a welcome, “push-back against the New York Times‘ ‘1619 Project’ and other propagandistic efforts to undermine the teaching of accurate American history in our schools and colleges.”

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    Wood stressed the importance of accurate teaching of American History, arguing that, “our political liberty and economic prosperity are rooted in the American Founding, and that these achievements can easily be lost if we fail to teach that history and the values expressed in that history to every new generation.” 

    When asked if there were any specific ideas the commission should include, Wood said, “the rise of slavery beginning in the late 17th century in the colonies, and the opposition to slavery beginning soon after should be taught, along with the increasing prominence in the 18th century of ideals of universal rights.”

    Wood said if he had a chance to speak to all Americans, “I would want to refresh people’s memories about two things:  first, the attempt in the early 1990s to draft a U.S. history curriculum, under the direction of the historian Gary Nash, and second, the attempt by the College Board in 2014 to impose new Advanced Placement U.S. History Standards.”

    Wood condemned these new curricula saying, “In both cases, these efforts were essentially captured by academics who harbored deep biases against traditional American values and who ended up presenting ‘narratives’ aimed at persuading American schoolchildren to disdain their own country.  The new Commission is needed in no small part because of the destructive legacy of these earlier to capture the teaching of U.S. History for the political goals of factions that truly disdain our country.”

    Campus Reform has reported for years on the anti-American sentiment that has become prevalent on college campuses. 

    Compiled here are some examples of this sentiment, held by students and educators alike. 

    1. College profs mark Fourth of July by bashing America 

    A litany of professors used America’s birthday celebrations as a time to bash her. 

    Haverford College’s Eric Hartman argued that America is, “Never working to right wrongs.” Villanova University’s Elizabeth Kolsky said that the Revolution, “contributed to the worldwide spread of white supremacy.” 

    “Americans do not even seem to believe Black people even deserve the right to pursue happiness,” was the interpretation of Nikki Taylor, the head of Howard University’s history department.

    2. Shocking number of young Americans say other countries are better 

    Almost half of young Democrats would argue that other countries are better than the United States; barely 20 percent of Republicans in the same age range agreed. 

    3. Amid historic violence, colleges criticize America as ‘white supremacist’ country 

    After the death of George Floyd, colleges all around America have decried America as a flawed and racist nation. One particularly notable example is the Chancellor of the University of California – Santa Cruz. Chancellor Cynthia Larive said that America was full of, “white supremacist systems.”  Then UC system president Janet Napolitano condemned the “racism that has plagued this country…” 

    4. UCSB prof uses religion class to teach about ‘error’ of ‘American Exceptionalism’ 

    In a class intended to teach “the major themes and issues in Asian American religious history, belief, and practice,” a UCSB professor spoke instead on the “error of American Exceptionalism.” One student said the professor, “used his claim of this being ‘important context’ as an excuse to bash America and push Marxist propaganda.”

    5. U.S. students bash America while Hong Kong protesters fly its flag 

    While Hong Kong protestors held up the American flag as a symbol of freedom, hope, and democracy, college students called the flag, “deeply problematic.” Another student argued that “We’ve always been portrayed as kind of this idealistic democratic society and it’s just not true.” 

    6. University paper publishes 9/11 editorial, claims U.S. needs to ‘get over’ terrorist attacks 

    In 2014, just thirteen years after 9/11, a Wyoming student argued that “We, the United States of America, need to get over it.” He stated that “Contrary to popular belief, America is not the best country in the world,” therefore public displays of patriotism are, “downright disgusting.” 

    7. Students say they’re not proud to be American 

    After a Gallup poll in 2018 said that young Americans were less patriotic, Campus Reform sent Cabot Phillips to speak with students at New York University. One student said, “I’m not proud of America. I’m not proud of what we’ve done.” Another simply said, “Definitely not.” 

    8. Prof: ‘God Bless America’ is a ‘warmongering’ song 

    Ithaca College professor Stephen Mosher wrote an op-ed arguing against the use of God Bless America at sporting events. The complaint primarily seems targeted at his belief that, “expressions of hyper-patriotism took hold” in the wake of 9/11 and that the “warmongering song ‘God Bless America’” has become a sort of second, unofficial anthem. 

    9.  Syracuse U: U.S. Constitution is ‘exclusionary’ to some students

     A conservative group at Syracuse University was denied in 2019 after the school claimed that the U.S. Constitution, which the group asks members to sign a statement in support of, is “exclusionary.” 

    “[R]equiring students to agree in the superiority of the U.S. Constitution is exclusionary to international students and other individuals,” the school said in an email. 

    10. Harvard students claim America is a bigger threat than ISIS 

    In 2014, during the rise of ISIS, Harvard students argued that, for the world, America was a larger threat than ISIS. 

    An extremist group that was known for its public and broadcast executions of American journalist James Foley and other acts of terror, ISIS seeks to create a worldwide Islamic state governed by Sharia law. 

  • "They Don't Care About Us" – Indian Farmers Block Roads As Demonstrations Flare-Up Over Farm Bill 
    “They Don’t Care About Us” – Indian Farmers Block Roads As Demonstrations Flare-Up Over Farm Bill 

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 19:20

    Thousands of angry farmers took to the streets and blocked roads and railways across India on Friday, in protest against new farming legislation that would halt government programs that purchase grains at fixed prices, therefore allowing big corporations to dictate market prices, reported Reuters. 

    Much of the protests are centered in the states of Punjab and Haryana. The Indian government continues to reject the notion the legislation would hurt farmers; nevertheless, after Sunday (Sept. 27), farmers will no longer have the ability to sell certain grains to state-controlled markets, which would allow them to sell to private buyers. 

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the new farm legislation would “completely transform the agriculture sector” and empower “tens of millions of farmers” while driving much-needed investments and modernization efforts in the industry. 

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    Indian farmers blocking the roadway. h/t Reuters 

    Reuters notes, as soon as next week, farmers will be able to sell grains to institutional buyers and big retailers such as Walmart. The government will still buy rice and wheat at fixed prices. 

    But none of the assurances from the Modi government have calmed farmers who reside in Punjab and Haryana – India’s northern farm belt. Thousands poured onto the streets Friday, blocking roads and railway tracks, shouting anti-government slogans.

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    More than 100 farmer unions took part in the demonstrations. However, many farmers did not socially distance themselves from others nor wear masks, comes when coronavirus cases and deaths are surging in the country. 

    Bhupinder Singh Mann, the president of the All India Kisan Coordination Committee, told AFP, the “government is trying to exploit the farmers, they don’t care about us.” 

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    Indian farm protest. h/t The New Indian Express 

    Reuters spoke with farmer Karam Singh, who accused the government of disbanding traditional wholesale markets for farm products. Other farmers, and leaders, say the nearly 7,000 regulated wholesale markets where the fixed prices are paid by the government ensure timely payments to growers. 

    Singh pointed out the legislation has made India’s most impoverished farmers, those who own 5 acres or less, vulnerable to price swings. 

    “The private sector will give us a good price for one or two years, but what about after that?” he asked. “The government should guarantee the private sector will give us more than the government price.”

    Reuters says the protests have remained “peaceful.” Here’s what happened Friday:

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    More from CNBC on the protests.  

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    And while farmers are hitting the streets, India is a prolonged virus-induced economic downturn expected to roll into 2021. There’s also the public health crisis, where coronavirus is spreading faster in India than anywhere else in the world. 

    “Although this might be the low point in the ongoing crisis, the rapid increase in infections this quarter provides no hope of a near-term recovery,” Prakash Sakpal, senior Asia economist at ING, told Reuters last month. 

    “The macro policy has hit a snag amid stretched public finances and rising inflation. This means pretty much nothing can save the economy from continued deep declines for the rest of the year.”

    India is dealing with a host of problems, including a virus pandemic, economic downturn, border issues with China, and developing social instabilities with farmers. 

  • The Inconvenience Of Freedom
    The Inconvenience Of Freedom

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 19:00

    Authored by Jeff Harris via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

    Let’s face it, Americans love convenience! Big box stores like Home Depot, Walmart and Target have ridden the convenience train to untold wealth. Amazon has tapped into the love of convenience by enabling us to “shop” from our couches. No more pesky hunting for the credit card and having to type in all that info. Just one click and you’re done!

    And yes I’ll admit I enjoy convenience too. But too much convenience can be a trap if we’re not careful. The American Revolutionary War was fought to throw off the shackles of tyranny in a quest for freedom and liberty. It was not very inconvenient for the American colonist to leave their homes, farms, businesses and loved ones to fight what many believed was a hopeless cause against the most powerful military in the world at that time.

    And yet they were willing to gamble their lives, leave their families for long months even years, and suffer deprivation, exposure to the elements, hunger and misery for what? A chance, slim though it might be for FREEDOM!

    Freedom to live life as they saw fit. Freedom to worship when and how they chose. Freedom to gather with whomever they chose. Freedom to travel wherever they chose. Freedom to speak their minds without fear of retribution. Freedom to trade and do business wherever and with whomever they chose. And most importantly, freedom to be left alone to pursue life, liberty and happiness as they saw fit.

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    Our Freedom hangs in the Balance

    Yet today virtually all of the freedoms our forefathers fought, bled, and many died for are in grave jeopardy. So the question is do you value your freedom and liberty enough to be inconvenienced? I ask because when I go in a Walmart or the grocery store or Home Depot virtually everyone is wearing a mask, except me.

    I’ve spoken with any number of people who’ve said basically the same thing, “I don’t necessarily believe the mask makes much difference but I just don’t want to be hassled, so I wear it.” In other words what they’re really saying is their right to live as free men or women isn’t worth being inconvenienced or heaven forbid, marked as a trouble maker.

    Refusing to wear a mask is inconvenient for a variety of reasons but I think it’s critical to push back against the Covid tyranny as best we can. No sane, rational person seeks needless confrontation at every business they try to enter. But you have to ask yourself what price you’re willing to pay to retain some semblance of freedom and liberty?

    Is it worth the bother of invoking your rights to a mask exemption that virtually every mask mandate offers? Virtually every state mask rule has a mask exemption for health reasons. And you don’t need a doctor’s note to use this exemption.

    All you have to do is say, “I can’t wear a mask safely due to a medical condition.” Personally, wearing a mask makes me feel like I can’t breathe comfortably which is a legitimate medical condition. I have no illusions that a few people who invoke their mask exemption is going to magically make the Covid scam go away. But if we don’t push back, if we meekly surrender our rights to the tyrants, they will only demand more control over our private lives.

    They will never be satisfied until they have total control over the public. Trying to wait it out and hope it all goes away is a fool’s game. As long as people meekly submit to tyranny they will only get more of it. Bullies only respect a punch in the nose. Taking your stand to invoke your right to a mask exemption is a very small, but not insignificant step toward retaining freedom and liberty.

    Yes, it’s inconvenient, awkward and sometimes heated. But is your freedom and that of your children and grandchildren worth a little inconvenience? I will not comply!
     

  • World War II Memorial 'Cancelled' For Being 'Too White'… And Other Absurdities
    World War II Memorial ‘Cancelled’ For Being ‘Too White’… And Other Absurdities

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 18:20

    Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

    Just when you think it couldn’t get more bizarre… we give you this week’s absurdity.

    Mural dedicated to WWII Vets cancelled for being too white

    70 years ago, a decorated Veteran from World War II painted a mural on the campus of the University of Rhode Island to honor the fallen who lost their lives in the war.

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    The 95 year old artist is still alive today, to see his artwork being cancelled.

    Students complained that the lack of diversity in the mural made them feel uncomfortable. There were too many white people depicted, and not enough minorities.

    The university quickly bowed to the mob, covered up the painting, and plans to remove it entirely.

    It’s ironic that in 2020, questioning the woke mob is liable to have you labeled a Nazi.

    So a man who had the balls to fight the actual Nazis will have his memorial painting destroyed to appease the snowflakes who can’t even look at a painting without an emotional fit.

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    Former Marine commits suicide after the mob targets him

    A Nebraska bar owner, Jake Gardner, was inside his bar when the windows were shattered by “peaceful protesters.”

    Gardner, a former Marine who served in Iraq, went outside to try to diffuse the situation. He saw his father (a man in his 60s) shoved violently to the ground by peaceful protestors. But still, Gardner maintained his composure.

    A video then shows that Gardner tried backing away from three men when they attacked him.

    Gardner ends up on the ground, with an attacker on top of him. Gardner fired his weapon, and the attacker died.

    The county prosecutor reviewed the video evidence and confirmed that Gardner acted properly and in self defense. The video confirms this. And he stated that he would NOT charge Gardner.

    But the mob was not willing to accept this outcome. So they surrounded the courthouse and peacefully protested… at which point the Grand Jury caved and decided to charge Gardner with manslaughter.

    This sadly appeared to put Gardner over the edge. And he took his own life last week.

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    Escaped Prisoner in UK tried to turn himself in seven times

    An British inmate incarcerated in the UK recently escaped; apparently he was worried about his mother and wanted to visit her.

    But once the visit was over, he was ready to go back to prison and serve out the remainder of his sentence.

    So he went down to the local police station to turn himself in. But they refused to arrest him. It appeared there was no outstanding warrant for his arrest.

    It took SEVEN tries before this escaped convict was able to successfully turn himself in to police.

    Perhaps the cops were too busy trying to catch people illegally watching TV without a license (seriously, that’s a thing in the UK).

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    Election supervisor investigates a toilet

    A homeowner in Michigan put a toilet on his front lawn, along with a sign that says “place mail-in ballots here.”

    For anyone familiar with the debate about whether mail-in ballots increase voter fraud, the display is an obvious joke.

    However the local election supervisor thinks it’s a crime, so she called the police to investigate.

    She said, “It is a felony to take illegal possession of an absentee ballot… Elections in this country are to be taken seriously and there are many people who are voting by mail for the first time this election.”

    Such sensitive little authoritarians…

    Let’s hope that any eligible voter would not mistake the front yard toilet for an actual official ballot depository.

    And if that’s the level of intelligence among voters, we have bigger problems to worry about.

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    New Jersey Doubles Down on Chasing the Rich Away

    About 4 years ago, billionaire David Tepper left New Jersey and moved to Florida.

    New Jersey instantly lost hundreds of millions of dollars every year in tax revenue just from this one guy.

    But it wasn’t only Tepper fleeing New Jersey’s 8.97% income tax rate. In 2018, for example, New Jersey lost 5,700 millionaires.

    Not coincidentally, 2018 was the same year that New Jersey hiked it’s income tax rate to 10.75% for those earning more than $5 million.

    And now, with a massive government budget shortfall thanks to COVID shutdowns, New Jersey will double down on its bad idea.

    They didn’t learn their lesson in 2018… so now the state will increase its tax rate to 10.75% for everyone earning more than $1 million per year.

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    Tased and arrested for not wearing a mask

    An Ohio mother sat with her family in the stands at her son’s middle school football game.

    They were outside, and a good 15 feet from any other fan.

    But the school resource officer confronted the woman, and asked her to put a mask on.

    She refused, citing asthma. She wasn’t sitting near anyone and was properly distanced, so she clearly posed no threat.

    That really should have been the end of it. But instead the woman ended up being tased and forcibly removed from the stands.

    Ironically the police officer had his mask hanging around his neck the whole time (instead of covering his nose and mouth), and another officer who also responded wasn’t wearing a mask at all.

    In the end, it doesn’t even appear that the school’s mask mandate was legally enforceable. So they charged the mom with ‘trespassing’… at her son’s football game.

    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.

  • Daily Briefing – September 25, 2020
    Daily Briefing – September 25, 2020


    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 18:10

    Managing editor, Ed Harrison, and senior editor, Ash Bennington, come together to analyze the price action in stocks, bonds, and currencies. Ed looks forward to his interview with Leon Cooperman, and Ash interprets the latest economic data, including today’s dismal print for durable goods orders. They then consider the latest political news and discuss how the upcoming presidential election will impact markets. In the intro, Ash speaks to Real Vision editor, Jack Farley, about stocks, credit spreads, and a steepening VIX curve.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Sep 25

Today’s News 25th September 2020

  • French Officials Considering "Absurd" New Tax On Vehicles Based On Weight
    French Officials Considering “Absurd” New Tax On Vehicles Based On Weight

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 02:45

    Pretty soon, there’s going to be no cars left to drive. Between California looking to phase out internal combustion engines by 2035 and France apparently now considering another tax on vehicles based on how much they weigh, it seems like the world is hell bent on assuring a future that’s replete with Ubers and public transit. 

    But regardless, the press to “save the planet” much push on. That’s why at the Convention Citoyenne sur le Climat (the Citizens’ Climate Convention) in June 2020, the idea of taxing vehicles by how much they weigh was raised. It is currently being considered by the French government, according to The Connexion.

    Meanwhile – as is usual with government – the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. In May 2020, just one month earlier, the government was doling out an aid package of 8 billion Euros for the French car industry trying to boost production. The taxes by weight would have just the opposite effect. 

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    The future of French automobiles

    Luc Chatel, president of automobile association la Plateforme de la Filière Automobile (PFA) pointed out that the two policies obviously contradict each other and has asked for “stability” in decisions being made by government. Good luck with that. 

    He stated on French TV last week:  “We cannot, three months after [the government announced its support plan], put in place a tax that will go against what we’ve been told.”

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    He called the tax “absurd” and continued: “The cars will benefit from a bonus for reduced CO2 emissions and a penalty [for their weight] at the same time. It’s ridiculous.”

    Chatel predicts that 70% of vehicles in France will be affected by the tax.

    And for France, it looks like the environmentalist agenda doesn’t stop with vehicles. “As well as taxing vehicles according to their weight,” the Connexion article says, “the 150 measures proposed by the citizens’ Climate Convention include changing the French constitution to highlight the importance of environmental protection, and introducing a new environmental crime called ‘ecocide’.”

  • Will A Second COVID-19 Lockdown Coincide With A "No Deal" Brexit?
    Will A Second COVID-19 Lockdown Coincide With A “No Deal” Brexit?

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Steven Guinness,

    When I last posted an article about Brexit in May I discussed how the convergence of a possible world trade organisation scenario with the EU and the Covid-19 lockdown measures would serve to exacerbate the economic strain that the UK is currently being subjected to. I argued that as the devastation brought about by the self imposed lockdown became more profound, not only would a WTO Brexit compound matters but it would also put further downward pressure on sterling and prove a harbinger for a significant spike in inflation over the coming years.

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    Four months on and a number of developments have since occurred. As I predicted, the transition period was not extended, meaning it will come to an end on the 31st December 2020. Shortly afterwards a cabinet office document of ‘worst case scenarios‘ was revealed that detailed what may happen should a no deal Brexit coincide with a ‘second wave‘ of Covid-19. One possibility raised was how the government could decide to deploy the military on the streets of Britain in the event of public disorder.

    Earlier this month, with trade negotiations floundering, Boris Johnson announced that if a deal cannot be agreed by October 15th the UK will walk away and revert to WTO tariffs. Following on from this was his latest intervention came just days ago when he unveiled renewed Covid-19 restrictions on the population after a rise in those testing positive for the virus, just as the final rounds of Brexit negotiations are due to begin.

    One aspect to pick up on here is how when addressing the nation this week, Johnson made clear that he would be prepared to authorise using the military to ‘backfill when necessary‘ should the police require more support to enforce restrictions. Johnson also told the House of Commons that he had the option to ‘draw on military support where required to free up the police.’

    Johnson’s official spokesman had this to say on the matter:

    This would involve the military backfilling certain duties, such as office roles and guarding protected sites, so police officers can be out enforcing the virus response.

    This is not about providing any additional powers to the military, or them replacing the police in enforcement roles, and they will not be handing out fines. It is about freeing up more police officers.

    So here we have both Brexit and Covid-19 being talked about as potentially escalating to the stage where the military could be called upon under the guise of helping to maintain social order.

    From my perspective here’s why I think this should be taken seriously:

    Before the original lockdown was implemented on March 24th, I saw first hand in my role as a supermarket worker how the usual lucid nature of shoppers rapidly gave way to palpable fear and hysteria. After weeks of wall to wall coverage on Covid-19 in the media, the threat of a national lockdown began to enter the narrative. People responded by rushing to buy up food and medical supplies. As a consequence supply chains were severely impacted with shelves lying empty for weeks on end.

    This demonstrated to me one inescapable fact. As much as people claim to distrust the mainstream media, what it actually showed was just how many continue to rely on outlets like Sky, the BBC and daily newspapers in guiding their perceptions. Their relentless messaging was undoubtedly a driving influence over the behaviour of people leading into the lockdown.

    What I witnessed was how the threat of being deprived of essentials triggered within people a survival instinct. After weeks of preparatory propaganda, they knew what was coming and were inspired to act. The UK’s ceremonial exit from the EU on January 31st was now no longer part of the news agenda. Months of discord over Brexit was consigned to history.

    But here’s the problem – the UK did not leave the European Union in any meaningful way on January 31st. Nothing materially changed in terms of the relationship. When those in support of Brexit declared on the morning of February 1st 2020 that the sky had not fallen in, they were at best being disingenuous.  This is primarily because the country remains a member of the single market and the customs union. The real point of exit, when the UK is due to vacate the institutions that make up the EU, is not set to happen until the end of 2020 when the transition period expires. 

    The arrival of Covid-19 rendered Brexit an afterthought. But with the end of the transition period less than 100 days away, this is no longer the case. People are beginning to think about Brexit again.

    My worry is that the public response to a likely no deal scenario will be met in a similar manner to how fears over a national lockdown were met. Boris Johnson’s deadline of October 15th for a trade deal, which coincides with a European Council meeting, is quickly approaching, as is the threat of a second lockdown.

    If Johnson keeps to his word and the 15th passes without agreement, the UK will declare their intention to move onto WTO tariffs come January 1st 2021. That would leave exactly eleven weeks before this became a reality. Plenty of time for the media to begin a campaign of fear based propaganda – centred around stories of food and medicine shortages – and for the government to promote a nationwide communications programme urging people to prepare for potential disruption.

    In truth it has already started. This week the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Michael Gove, warned that in a no deal scenario up to 7,000 port bound trucks looking to cross the channel could be delayed if hauliers do not have the requisite paperwork:

    Irrespective of the outcome of negotiations between the UK and EU, traders will face new customs controls and processes. Simply put, if traders, both in the UK and EU, have not completed the right paperwork, their goods will be stopped when entering the EU and disruption will occur. It is essential that traders act now and get ready for new formalities.

    With Christmas approaching, I suspect that warnings such as this will once again trigger within people the same fear that they felt back in March. There are already some signs, albeit isolated, of people starting to stockpile.

    But unlike six months ago, the British public now have more than Covid-19 to consider. On the one hand you have people observing social distancing rules, which were not a requirement during the first bout of panic buying. On the other are increasing concerns that supermarkets may soon see an upsurge in customer demand off the back of a potential second lockdown, supply chain disruption following a no deal Brexit and the yearly onslaught of Christmas shopping.

    It seems obvious to me that the media would portray a ‘second wave‘ of Covid-19 and a disorderly Brexit as a two pronged threat to the public.

    You can probably tell where I am going with this. If a second lockdown is implemented, I suspect it would occur in the weeks leading up to Christmas. As fears would mount over access to supplies and people began to pile into supermarkets to stock up, warnings would be abound that because of the uptake in custom people are failing to social distance resulting in the spread of the virus, which in turn would create a rationale within the media for a second lockdown. A economically ruinous lockdown that would largely be blamed on Brexit. And, of course, running beneath Brexit is the narrative of a rise in nationalism and protectionism, which global planners have cited as dangers to the post World War Two ‘rules based global order.’

    If you put aside any ideological bias you may have over Brexit, you begin to see how a chaotic separation from the EU is beneficial to global planners. This is something I have discussed in numerous articles over the past couple of years. Central bankers speak of the ‘post Brexit architecture‘ in terms of the the future make-up of the global economic system. Most recently the World Economic Forum launched their ‘Great Reset‘ initiative, which includes plans for a global economic reset that would likely encompass the recomposition of currencies, the introduction of central bank digital currency and a desire to replace ‘failed institutions, processes and rules with new ones that are better suited to current and future needs‘.

    One of those institutions just happens to be the World Trade Organisation, which was earmarked for reform back in 2018. The WTO would play the leading role in a no deal Brexit outcome, and if it is shown as being not up to the job then this strengthens the hand of global planners to either remodel or replace it entirely.

    As I have long argued, the most vulnerable aspect to Brexit is pound sterling, both in terms of its value and its role as a global reserve currency. Brexit can and I think will play a part in global planners attempting to reconstruct the economic system in their own image. In that sense it is why I believe they want Brexit to happen and in as disorderly a way as possible. Chaos is often advantageous to globalists, not detrimental. Especially when they have already laid out their solutions through Sustainable Development and the Great Reset. All they need is a sufficient number of crises in order to position themselves as the benefactors.

  • Justice Sleeps And "We, The People" Suffer: No, The US Supreme Court Will Not Save Us
    Justice Sleeps And “We, The People” Suffer: No, The US Supreme Court Will Not Save Us

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 09/25/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people.”

    – Justice William O. Douglas

    The U.S. Supreme Court will not save us.

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    It doesn’t matter which party gets to pick the replacement to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The battle that is gearing up right now is yet more distraction and spin to keep us oblivious to the steady encroachment on our rights by the architects of the American Police State.  

    Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.

    Although the courts were established to serve as Courts of Justice, what we have been saddled with, instead, are Courts of Order. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government interests than with upholding the rights of the people enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

    As a result, the police and other government agents have been generally empowered to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts.

    Rarely do the concerns of the populace prevail.

    When presented with an opportunity to loosen the government’s noose that keeps getting cinched tighter and tighter around the necks of the American people, what does our current Supreme Court usually do?

    It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern.

    More often than not, it gives the government and its corporate sponsors the benefit of the doubt, which leaves “we the people” hanging by a thread.

    Rarely do the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court— preoccupied with their personal politics, cocooned in a world of privilege, partial to those with power, money and influence, and narrowly focused on a shrinking docket (the court accepts on average 80 cases out of 8,000 each year)—venture beyond their rarefied comfort zones.

    Every so often, the justices toss a bone to those who fear they have abdicated their allegiance to the Constitution. Too often, however, the Supreme Court tends to march in lockstep with the police state.

    In recent years, for example, the Court has ruled that police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits; police officers can stop cars based only on “anonymous” tips; Secret Service agents are not accountable for their actions, as long as they’re done in the name of “security”; citizens only have a right to remain silent if they assert it; police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the roadside; police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime; police can stop, search, question and profile citizens and non-citizens alike; police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the “offense”; police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home; and it’s a crime to not identify yourself when a policeman asks your name.

    The cases the Supreme Court refuses to hear, allowing lower court judgments to stand, are almost as critical as the ones they rule on. Some of these cases have delivered devastating blows to the lives and rights enshrined in the Constitution. By remaining silent, the Court has affirmed that: legally owning a firearm is enough to justify a no-knock raid by police; the military can arrest and detain American citizens; students can be subjected to random lockdowns and mass searches at school; and police officers who don’t know their actions violate the law aren’t guilty of breaking the law.

    You think you’ve got rights? Think again.

    All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

    This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

    In fact, our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.

    In the police state being erected around us, the police can probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts.

    This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s the Fourth Amendment being inexorably bled to death by the very institution that is supposed to be protecting it (and us) from government abuse.

    Remember, it was a unanimous Supreme Court which determined that police officers may use drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during routine traffic stops. That same Court gave police the green light to taser defenseless motorists, strip search non-violent suspects arrested for minor incidents, and break down people’s front doors without evidence that they have done anything wrong.

    Make no mistake about it: this is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.

    These are the hallmarks of the emerging American police state, where police officers, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.

    Whether it’s police officers breaking through people’s front doors and shooting them dead in their homes or strip searching motorists on the side of the road, in a police state such as ours, these instances of abuse are not condemned by the government. Rather, they are continually validated by a judicial system that kowtows to every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how in opposition to the Constitution.

    The system is rigged.

    Because the system is rigged and the U.S. Supreme Court—the so-called “people’s court”—has exchanged its appointed role as a gatekeeper of justice for its new role as maintainer of the status quo, the police state will keep winning and “we the people” will keep losing.

    By refusing to accept any of the eight or so qualified immunity cases before it this past term that strove to hold police accountable for official misconduct, the Supreme Court delivered a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

    This is how qualified immunity keeps the police state in power.

    Lawyers tend to offer a lot of complicated, convoluted explanations for the doctrine of qualified immunity, which was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to rig the system, ensuring that abusive agents of the government almost always win and the victims of government abuse almost always lose.

    How else do you explain a doctrine that requires victims of police violence to prove that their abusers knew their behavior was illegal because it had been deemed so in a nearly identical case at some prior time?

    It’s a setup for failure.

    A review of critical court rulings over the past several decades, including rulings affirming qualified immunity protections for government agents by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order, protecting the ruling class, and insulating government agents from charges of wrongdoing than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

    Indeed, as Reuters reports, qualified immunity “has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.”

    Worse, as Reuters concluded, “the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police.”

    For those in need of a reminder of all the ways in which the Supreme Court has made us sitting ducks at the mercy of the American police state, let me offer the following.

    As a result of court rulings in recent years, police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless searches. Police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless arrests based on mere suspicion. Police can claim qualified immunity for using excessive force against protesters. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a mentally impaired person. Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits. Police can stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.  Police officers can stop cars based on “anonymous” tips or for “suspicious” behavior such as having a reclined car seat or driving too carefully. Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime.  Police can use the “fear for my life” rationale as an excuse for shooting unarmed individuals. Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes.” Not only are police largely protected by qualified immunity, but police dogs are also off the hook for wrongdoing.

    Police can subject Americans to strip searches, no matter the “offense.” Police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home. Police can use knock-and-talk tactics as a means of sidestepping the Fourth Amendment. Police can carry out no-knock raids if they believe announcing themselves would be dangerous. Police can recklessly open fire on anyone that might be “armed.” Police can destroy a home during a SWAT raid, even if the owner gives their consent to enter and search it. Police can suffocate someone, deliberately or inadvertently, in the process of subduing them.

    To sum it up, we are dealing with a nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat. In this way, the justices of the United States Supreme Court—through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency—have become the architects of the American police state.

    So where does that leave us?

    For those deluded enough to believe that they’re living the American dream—where the government represents the people, where the people are equal in the eyes of the law, where the courts are arbiters of justice, where the police are keepers of the peace, and where the law is applied equally as a means of protecting the rights of the people—it’s time to wake up.

    We no longer have a representative government, a rule of law, or justice.

    Liberty has fallen to legalism. Freedom has fallen to fascism.

    Justice has become jaded, jaundiced and just plain unjust.

    And for too many, the American dream of freedom and opportunity has turned into a living nightmare.

    Given the turbulence of our age, with its police overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, profit-driven prisons, and corporate corruption, the need for a guardian of the people’s rights has never been greater.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, neither the president, nor the legislatures, nor the courts will save us from the police state that holds us in its clutches.

    So we can waste our strength over the next few weeks and months raging over the makeup of the Supreme Court or we can stand united against the tyrant in our midst.

    After all, the president, the legislatures, and the courts are all on the government’s payroll.

    They are the police state.

  • The $88 Trillion World Economy In One Chart
    The $88 Trillion World Economy In One Chart

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:40

    The global economy can seem like an abstract concept, yet, as Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh notes, it influences our everyday lives in both obvious and subtle ways. Nowhere is this clearer than in the current economic state amid the throes of the pandemic.

    This voronoi-style visualization from HowMuch relies on gross domestic product (GDP) data from the World Bank to paint a picture of the global economy – which crested $87.8 trillion in 2019.

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    Editor’s note: Annual data on economic output is a lagging indicator, and is released the following year by organizations such as the World Bank. The figures in this diagram provide a snapshot of the global economy in 2019, but do not necessarily represent the impact of recent developments such as COVID-19.

    Top 10 Countries by GDP (2019)

    In the one-year period since the last release of official data in 2018, the global economy grew approximately $2 trillion in size—or about 2.3%.

    The United States continues to have the top GDP, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the world economy. China also continued to grow its share of global GDP, going from 15.9% to 16.3%.

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    In recent years, the Indian economy has continued to have an upward trajectory—now pulling ahead of both the UK and France—to become one of the world’s top five economies.

    In aggregate, these top 10 countries combine for over two-thirds of total global GDP.

    2020 Economic Contractions

    So far this year, multiple countries have experienced temporary economic contractions, including many of the top 10 countries listed above.

    The following interactive chart from Our World in Data helps to give us some perspective on this turbulence, comparing Q2 economic figures against those from the same quarter last year.

    One of the hardest hit economies has been Peru. The Latin American country, which is about the 50th largest in terms of GDP globally, saw its economy contract by 30.2% in Q2 despite efforts to curb the virus early.

    Spain and the UK are also feeling the impact, posting quarterly GDP numbers that are 22.1% and 21.7% smaller respectively.

    Meanwhile, Taiwan and South Korea are two countries that may have done the best at weathering the COVID-19 storm. Both saw minuscule contractions in a quarter where the global economy seemed to grind to a halt.

    Projections Going Forward

    According to the World Bank, the global economy could ultimately shrink 5.2% in 2020 – the deepest cut since WWII.

    See below for World Bank projections on GDP in 2020 for when the dust settles, as well as the subsequent potential for recovery in 2021.

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    Source: World Bank Global Economic Prospects, released June 2020

  • Secret Report Exposes CIA's Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary
    Secret Report Exposes CIA’s Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:20

    Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations.com,

    Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan’s take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document.

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    John Brennan, left, with Robert  Mueller in 2013: The CIA director’s explosive conclusion in the ICA helped justify continuing Trump-Russia “collusion” investigations, notably Mueller’s probe as special counsel. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

    The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.

    The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.

    The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

    RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower” whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.

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    John Durham: He is said to be using the long-hidden report on the drafting of the ICA as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence. Department of Justice via AP

    The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.”

    The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.

    These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.

    “They complained Brennan took a thesis [that Putin supported Trump] and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn’t have any real substance behind it,” said a senior U.S intelligence official who participated in a 2018 review of the spycraft behind the assessment, which President Obama ordered after the 2016 election.

    He elaborated that the analysts said they also came under political pressure to back Brennan’s judgment that Putin personally ordered “active measures” against the Clinton campaign to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying intelligence was “weak.”

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    Adam Schiff: Soon after the Democrat took control of the House Intelligence Committee, its review of the drafting of the intelligence community assessment was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

    The review, conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, culminated in a lengthy report that was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff took control of the committee in January 2019.

    The official said the committee spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA and interviewing analysts involved in crafting it, including the chief of Brennan’s so-called “fusion cell,” which was the interagency analytical group Obama’s top spook stood up to look into Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.

    Durham is said to be using the long-hidden report, which runs 50-plus pages, as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence while targeting the Trump campaign and presidential transition in an unprecedented investigation involving wiretapping and other secret surveillance.

    The special prosecutor recently interviewed Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents from the agency. Durham has also quizzed analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA.

    A spokesman for Brennan said that, according to Durham, he is not the target of a criminal investigation and  “only a witness to events that are under review.”  Durham’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

    The senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said former senior CIA political analyst Kendall-Taylor was a key member of the team that worked on the ICA. A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Clinton’s 2016 campaign, federal records show. In June, she gave $250 to the Biden Victory Fund.

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    Andrea Kendall-Taylor: A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and recently defended the ICA in a “60 Minutes” interview. “60 Minutes”/YouTube

    Kendall-Taylor and Ciaramella entered the CIA as junior analysts around the same time and worked the Russia beat together at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From 2015 to 2018, Kendall-Taylor was detailed to the National Intelligence Council, where she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. Ciaramella succeeded her in that position at NIC, a unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that  oversees the CIA and the other intelligence agencies.

    It’s not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. He was working in the White House as a CIA detailee at the time. The CIA declined comment.

    Kendall-Taylor did not respond to requests for comment, but she recently defended the ICA as a national security expert in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Russia’s election activities, arguing it was a slam-dunk case “based on a large body of evidence that demonstrated not only what Russia was doing, but also its intent. And it’s based on a number of different sources, collected human intelligence, technical intelligence.”

    But the secret congressional review details how the ICA, which was hastily put together over 30 days at the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper, did not follow longstanding rules for crafting such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies for their input, and did not include an annex for dissent, among other extraordinary departures from past tradecraft.

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    Eric Ciaramella: The Democratic national security “whistleblower,” whose complaint led to President Trump’s impeachment, was a close colleague of Kendall-Taylor. It’s not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. whitehouse.gov

    It did, however, include a two-page annex summarizing allegations from a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.  His claim that Putin had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign to help Trump win happened to echo the key finding of the ICA that Brennan supported. Brennan had briefed Democratic senators about allegations from the dossier on Capitol Hill.

    “Some of the FBI source’s [Steele’s] reporting is consistent with the judgment in the assessment,” stated the appended summary, which the two intelligence sources say was written by Brennan loyalists.

    “The FBI source claimed, for example, that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Secretary Clinton, whom Putin ‘feared and hated.’ “

    Steele’s reporting has since been discredited by the Justice Department’s inspector general as rumor-based opposition research on Trump paid for by the Clinton campaign. Several allegations have been debunked, even by Steele’s own primary source, who confessed to the FBI that he ginned the rumors up with some of his Russian drinking buddies to earn money from Steele.

    Former FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department’s watchdog that the Steele material, which he referred to as the “Crown material,” was incorporated with the ICA because it was “corroborative of the central thesis of the assessment “The IC analysts found it credible on its face,” Comey said.

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    Christopher Steele: His dossier allegations were summarized in a two-page annex to the ICA, but dissenting views about the Kremlin’s favoring Hillary Clinton over Trump were excluded. Victoria Jones/PA via AP

    The officials who have read the secret congressional report on the ICA dispute that. They say a number of analysts objected to including the dossier, arguing it was political innuendo and not sound intelligence.

    “The staff report makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump’s election,” said the second U.S. intelligence source, who also requested anonymity.

    Kendall-Taylor denied any political bias factored into the intelligence.

    “To suggest that there was political interference in that process is ridiculous,” she recently told NBC News.

    Her boss during the ICA’s drafting was CIA officer Julia Gurganus. Clapper tasked Gurganus, then detailed to NIC as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with coordinating the production of the ICA with Kendall-Taylor.

    They, in turn, worked closely with NIC’s cybersecurity expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been consulting with Democratic National Committee cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike to gather intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer system. (CrowdStrike’s president has testified he couldn’t say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to recently declassified transcripts.)

    Durham’s investigators have focused on people who worked at NIC during the drafting of the ICA, according to recent published reports. 

    No Input From CIA’s ‘Russia House’

    The senior official who identified Kendall-Taylor said Brennan did not seek input from experts from CIA’s so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the election to benefit Trump.

    “It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia House,” the official said. “It was just a small group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself … and Brennan did the editing.”

    The official noted that National Security Agency analysts also dissented from the conclusion that Putin personally sought to tilt the scale for Trump. One of only three agencies from the 17-agency intelligence community invited to participate in the ICA, the NSA had a lower level of confidence than the CIA and FBI, specifically on that bombshell conclusion.

    The official said the NSA’s departure was significant because the agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan’s preferred conclusion through its signals intelligence. Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump “didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources,” reportedly has been cooperating with Durham’s probe.

    The second senior intelligence official, who has read a draft of the still-classified House Intelligence Committee review, confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White House.

    “It wasn’t 17 agencies and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” as has been widely reported in the media, he said.

    “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan hand-picked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.”

    Brennan’s tight control over the process of drafting the ICA belies public claims the assessment reflected the “consensus of the entire intelligence community.” His unilateral role also raises doubts about the objectivity of the intelligence.

    In his defense, Brennan has pointed to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report that found “no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”

    “The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump,” argued committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.

    “Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and other conclusions were well-supported,” Warner added.

    “There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared.”

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    Brennan, ex-Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco and ex-national intelligence director James Clapper, interviewed by Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC, right, at a 2018 Aspen Instutute event.  Aspen Institute

    However, the report completely blacks out a review of the underlying evidence to support the Brennan-inserted conclusion, including an entire section labeled “Putin Ordered Campaign to Influence U.S. Election.” Still, it suggests elsewhere that conclusions are supported by intelligence with “varying substantiation” and with “differing confidence levels.” It also notes “concerns about the use of specific sources.”

    Adding to doubts, the committee relied heavily on the closed-door testimony of former Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, a close Brennan ally who met with Brennan and his “fusion team” at the White House before and after the election. The extent of Monaco’s role in the ICA is unclear.

    Brennan last week pledged he would cooperate with two other Senate committees investigating the origins of the Russia “collusion” investigation. The Senate judiciary and governmental affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan and other witnesses to testify.

    Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials are clamoring for the declassification and release of the secret House staff report on the ICA.

    “It’s dynamite,” said former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who reviewed the staff report while serving as chief of staff to then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.

    “There are things in there that people don’t know,” he told RCI.

    “It will change the dynamic of our understanding of Russian meddling in the election.”

    However, according to the intelligence official who worked on the ICA review, Brennan ensured that it would be next to impossible to declassify his sourcing for the key judgment on Putin. He said Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification.

    He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.

    Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan’s questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently opaque, the official said.

  • "Let Me Explain What Happens Next…" – A Reader Sums It All Up Very Ominously
    “Let Me Explain What Happens Next…” – A Reader Sums It All Up Very Ominously

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:00

    Authored by ‘Austrian Peter’ via The Burning Platform,

    A reader recently wrote me a long letter on how he feels about all this ‘Plandemic’ stuff.  I thought it would be good to share it as there is so much in it which rings bells of truth for me…

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    [emphasis ours]

    I’ve just woken up after reading ZeroHedge late into the night. I awoke with the conviction that Covid is being used to roll out a police state:

    They know it’s not deadly, it’s no longer spreading and Lockdown is killing off the few small businesses which remain viable. Yet Boris now insists upon banning the assembly of more than 6 people. He has recalled some petty bureaucrats to act as street enforcers and requested people become snitches who report on their neighbours for any breaches of these guidelines. This automatically means we must now all fear our neighbours, or strangers who take our car number. How better to destroy the mutual trust upon which society is built?

    Just think if one were to refuse to bend the knee.  In Australia and Spain the police have been caught using excessive force against those not wearing masks. Intimidating isn’t it? I’m thinking I may have to start using one. Yet the science is clear – masks offer no protection.

    So we know these new restrictions are not being driven by the authority’s concern for our health. And what is the difference between where we are now and making it normal for the police to come to your door and arrest you for a breach of their protocols? What is the difference between where we are now and an oppressive police state?

    There is only one difference between now and full-on state oppression:  A change in the Zeitgeist.

    They need an event that will change the mood of the people – an event or a series of events that make us afraid of ‘them’. A psychological shock that will give the police the conviction that things are so bad ‘a little force is necessary’ to ensure things don’t get out of control. And then, magically, the current ‘temporary restrictions’ become state oppression. What could that game changer be?

    Imagine this November: The US has 100 cities descending into what looks like the start of civil war as patriots turn out to stop Antifa burning down Middle America. Kamala Harris is calling for the army to ‘evict’ Trump because he refuses to leave the White House on the grounds that he won the popular vote while the mail-in ballots were fraudulent.

    For the Brits, Brexit has caused problems at the ports – among other things some foodstuffs are not getting through. Germany’s economy has cratered after the EU stopped them exporting cars to the UK (Trumps already tariffed them), and the EU’s bank has insisted Germany let the 500 non-viable, medium sized biz (currently kept alive with emergency funding) go bankrupt.

    Deutsche Bank collapses and this initiates a global banking crisis. Europe has no way of saving its banks as all the European economies are so damaged and 20% of workers have already been laid off.  It’s a Greek style banking crisis on steroids. People are pulling out cash in the expectation of daily cash limits. Physical gold will have already disappeared from the market place. So any biz with money in the bank is frantically buying bitcoin in an attempt to avoid their working capital being ‘bailed in’.

    The banks will have already pulled the plug on their most vulnerable customers – the airlines – so virtually no planes are flying. Dover is jammed up with lorries lining the approach roads. So no one can leave Blighty.  And if you did, the emergency measures intended to pre-empt Covid’s Second Wave require you to be kept in quarantine at your destination. Locked down in a hotel, under military guard (as in NZ), for 4 weeks at your own expense and with frequent testing to ensure you are not a carrier. With full bio-metric data being collected and filed on an EU wide register. In practice this means that travel becomes so fraught that escape from your homeland is just about impossible.

    You get the gist?  November could be the end of world as we know it’ (TEOTWAWKI).  But my point is this: Why are we looking at such a catastrophe if their goal is not a police state? No one destroys the globe’s economy and creates the conditions for a 10 year Greater Depression by accident. This has to be a planned, intentional destruction of much of global civilization.

    The evidence is overwhelming. This civilization has been purposefully destroyed. Right now we’re in an unreal time (like the beautiful summer just before WW1’s carnage).  It’s like Wiley E Coyote who has gone over the cliff, is still running but not yet started to fall. But when we fall, how will people react as they realize that they will never work again, never pay off the mortgage, never collect their pensions?  If we have state oppression and economic chaos by Christmas then what will be the next stage of their takeover?

    The world’s economy is already doomed. The already broken supply chains ensure it can only get worse.  Once the derivative market goes, and banks can no longer fund the credit lines crucial for importers and exporters, then trade will collapse and thus food supplies cease.

    It would seem to be inevitable that America is going to see more conflict as the Dems & Soros show no signs of wishing to abort their colour revolution. Maybe in 2021, maybe a year or two later, but there will come a time when a credit shortage leads to deflation. So the banks will print more and then rain down helicopter money which will lead to inflation. And then the currencies will start collapsing. Many people understand that this is inevitable. But what happens when people come to accept that money isn’t go to be worth the paper it’s printed on?  And thus keeping a job may not be worth the danger of leaving your house or of leaving safety.

    I summarise one of last night’s articles:

    “the beasts of burden don’t rebel, they just no longer show up. Not showing up can take a number of forms: early retirement, sick leave, a demand to work halftime, a workers’ compensation stress leave, and of course, resignation and quitting as in: “take this job and shove it”.  They slip noiselessly into the cracks and crevasses and once they’re gone, there’s nobody left to replace them.”

    “As the Vital Few 4% realize the system no longer works for them and opt out, this will have an out-sized effect on the 64%, most likely urban dwellers, highly dependent on increasingly brittle, fragile services that depend on the Vital Few for their functionality. Think of London’s tube train drivers phoning in sick – ideology won’t matter.

    Those dropping out may be Conservative or Progressive or they may have lost interest entirely in politics and all the other circuses that serve to distract the populace from the crises dissolving the glue that held the system together. “So I won’t get rich, that dream died a long time ago.”  What I’m interested in now is getting my life back and getting the heck out of Dodge as things fall apart.”

    The rich will escape to their holiday cottages. The poor will riot – but what then?  As the social facade cracks, and the economic system breaks, there is neither a society nor an economy to fall back on. By Christmas it will be obvious that normality has gone for ever.

    So what will ‘they’ do with millions of unemployed, frightened people?  If  ‘they’ leave the internet on then the people will start to organize – first politically – but when that doesn’t work, riots and then finally revolution. Turn it off and they will riot without being organized. Turn off phones and all hell will break out. Don’t turn them off and the kids will organize against the state – trash cars or burn down the local police station.  Have you noticed how some police stations look like forts?

    My point is that it’s very hard not to see ‘events’ hitting the fan this November. And once they do it’s very hard to see life ever going back to stability, let alone ‘normality’. Rather, there will be an overwhelming need to control {oppress} the population before they take over the state. But what do you do with millions of unemployed in a failed economy who are doomed to losing their currency, long term poverty and probably food shortages. There is only one thing ‘they’ can do. Kill them.

    Ideally, for the elite, Covid’s Second Wave will have a higher morbidity rate. Enough to steadily reduce the population but not so fast they can’t be buried in plague pits. It would have to be bad enough to justify a harsh Lockdown but it’s difficult to see that being feasible without giving the people electricity, internet & food and the money to pay for it. And even then it’s only a temporary fix as Lockdown can’t last for ever. Permanent Lockdown would soon destroy the currency which will mean no electricity or food.

    Maybe Covid-19 v1.0 was supposed to kill off more people but it failed. Or maybe it worked as intended – they didn’t want to risk killing off too many in case the Lockdown failed and we revolted. But I don’t see they have much choice now. ‘The Fourth Turning’ will be turbulent until 2025 and things won’t really be resolved until 2030. How are they going to manage us for another 10 years? How will they control us? Feed us?

    They can start a war but no one is going to turn up. Fight a war for the elite? Use a gun to kill people you don’t know?  That’s not going to happen. And they need to preserve the professional soldiers to ‘maintain the peace’ in the cities. So what options do they have but to release a more potent bio-weapon – nuclear war perhaps?

    One of the scary things about working through ‘their’ options is that they don’t have many. Things have gone too far – they’ve destroyed the world’s economy. The system is stuffed. What are ‘they’ going to do with 2bn unemployed people. Even if there is enough food but the US has a developing dust bowl, Africa’s suffered huge locust devastation, and China’s preparing for food shortages. How do unemployed people pay for it?  Who can give them money without destroying the currency or if the currency is already destroyed?

    A simple thing like the current fall in the number of sunspots is indicating an immediate future of colder weather and lower crop yields. Add into that, fuel shortages for agricultural machinery, lack of fertilizer – Nitrogen is made by burning lots of oil, lack of supply lines, and loss of credit lines. With people in Lockdown ‘they’ would be relying on a planned economy (not a free market) which is going to be inefficient. A planned economy is completely incapable of ensuring a stable food supply when there are shortages and the world is chaotic.

    It’s not even feeding our cities that will be prime problem. It will be feeding the cities in Mexico and North Africa. They can’t cope with food price inflation. But they won’t starve – they’ll flood into the USA or cross the Mediterranean – lucky us!  And what will Erdogan in Turkey do to feed his people – nothing good!  If there are real food shortages then note that there are huge Muslim populations in France & Sweden, Turks and refugees in Germany, Pakistani ghettos in UK and plenty more where they all came from.

    I’m feeling concerned. The problem is I can’t see Brexit solving our problems. Sure, it may not exacerbate them as much as I fear. November’s events may not trigger us into a state of oppression. But do you see my point?  Things have got so bad, they can only get worse. November is bound to see some changes and they may well trigger a change in the Zeitgeist, though how significant depends on ‘events, dear boy, events’.

    But whatever happens I think it’s virtually guaranteed that both the economy and society will keep on deteriorating.

    Do you think I’m right?

    Will November be the tipping point?

    Is there any way back?

    Will there be anything to go ‘back’ to?

    Or else, is it a case of:  “we’re doomed, I tell ya, doomed”.  And what happens when more people work out that the elites have created a situation where their only option is to rapidly reduce the population! Famine will lead to uncontrollable social conflict, perhaps with Muslims massacring whites in general or the local Jewish populations in particular. I think that much conflict could see ‘them‘ lose control.

    Thus it’s hard to see any other viable method than a bio-weapon. Agenda 21 could be implemented on schedule. And if not, the solution will need to be applied within a few years, certainly before 2025.  Timing may depend on vaccine production as there will have to be at least enough vaccine for essential workers, the police, the military and the management class if the elite are to retain control.

  • US School Districts Abandon Online-Curriculum Provider Over 'Racially Insensitive & Inaccurate' Content
    US School Districts Abandon Online-Curriculum Provider Over ‘Racially Insensitive & Inaccurate’ Content

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:00

    As children prepare for online learning to continue being part of their life for at least another 6 months to a year (ultimately, it will depend on when a vaccine can be distributed), embarrassing stories of incompetence by the companies who are running these programs have whipped up a firestorm of controversy in the media.

    Complaints about the Acellus Learning Accelerator, the program picked by the Alameda School District in California, and many others around the country, have piled up in local press reports.

    Earlier this month, the controversy was sparked by “racist” or “sexist” questions, including one that asked young students what’s the proper definition of a “family”, before showing several options, including a black single mother, and a traditional white family with a mom and a father.

    The answer was ‘the white family’. California’s liberals were apoplectic, and Alameda’s school district immediately severed its relationship with the program’s owner. One couple who said they paid the massively inflated home prices in Alameda in part for the schools. The fact that the district is spending money on programs with such obvious flaws is “frankly depressing”.

    “We bought a home here so our kids could enroll in these schools and to have them roll out something like that,” Eckman said. “It’s very disappointing.”

    Now, WSJ is reporting on more examples of the Acellus software’s egregious mistakes, including this error: ‘that Rosa Parks was arrested because she didn’t sit in the Blacks only section on a bus, instead of the correct answer, which is ‘she refused to give up her seat to a white ma’.

    Teachers have at times rebelled, telling supervisors that the content simply “isn’t suitable” and ceasing to use it in their classes.

    Over the past few weeks, Hawaii has emerged as a locus of complaints about the software, as thousands of parents signed a petition condemning the company’s content as racist, sexist and low quality. This fall, Acellus, which had previously only been used by some home schooled students in the state, had become the primary remote learning tool for 80k students across the state.

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    While school districts in Hawaii confessed that they didn’t thoroughly vet the product, one school district in Ohio rejected the software after finding several examples of “racially insensitive” content. The Delaware City School District in Ohio told parents it reviewed Acellus in greater depth after receiving complaints, and that the “racially and culturally insensitive material” had been evident.

    In one particularly startling example, a history lesson the southern plantations said that slavery was “important” to keep them going.

    As it turns out, while Acellus’s founders tout the software as “magical” and unlike anything else on the market, WSJ has discovered that three of the “PhDs” in charge of the company got their degrees from non-accredited institutions.

    Later on in the story, Acellus’s biggest backers admitted that the software’s main competitive advantage was its price: It cost just $100 per student for the school year, compared with $300 or $400 for competing products. Previously, districts mostly used it sparingly for kids who needed to catch up on course credits. The WSJ story also hinted at strange “religious” ties in the founder’s “background”.

    It’s almost hard to believe that America’s schools would make the mistake of contracting an “education” company run by three pseudo-“PhDs” who got their credentials from what’s effectively a diploma mill. But with the fiscal pinch and general chaos of the pandemic, school districts are finding it difficult to adapt.

  • "He Who Cheats Best, Wins?" – Bloomberg Backs Lawbreakers-For-Biden In Florida
    “He Who Cheats Best, Wins?” – Bloomberg Backs Lawbreakers-For-Biden In Florida

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 22:40

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

    In 2016 I told the few people who were listening to me then that I thought Trump would win Florida by around seven points depending on the level of cheating in Broward and Dade counties by now deposed and disgraced Broward Supervisor of Election, Brenda Snipes.

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    He wound up winning by three, so to me that says there was likely a fair amount of it going on. Argue with me all you want but I operate, normally, under the principle that U.S. elections of any import are determined by the maxim:

    He who cheats best, wins.

    Call it the Luongo Rule of Electoral Politics if you will.

    This year we know that the cheating will be systemic and of a kind that we’ve not experienced before.

    There is no more decorum about it. Only those truly naive or in the media will tell you otherwise.

    In this election the ideologues have been radicalized on all sides to view the threat of the other side winning as existential to their future. And, far be it from me to tell them they’re wrong, because when I’m being honest with myself, they aren’t.

    So that gives them not only motive, means and opportunity to cheat but also the fervent belief that they have to in order to save society itself. Well, at least, that’s what they are telling themselves as they go about doing it.

    What’s also very clear is that the oligarch class which animates the establishment wing of the Republican party is working with the whole of the Democratic party and the media to remove Trump from power by any and all means necessary.

    And while they are certainly signaling that they will use any and all means necessary to achieve this end, they would prefer for their actions to have the veneer of respectability, through some form of electoral mandate, even if that mandate is patent fiction.

    Now any political neophyte knows Florida is the most important state in the union today from an electoral college perspective. Without Florida both Trump and Biden have a very difficult path to victory.

    Those 29 (soon to be 31) electoral votes represent the pivot on which the entire election rests. I spent an hour recently with Joe Cotto of the Cotto/Gottfried Show talking about this from a uniquely Florida perspective which I think should give anyone pause who thinks Florida is actually up for grabs, because it isn’t.

    Caption: They even got mah Trump Face… must love YouTube!

    Looking back on the whole Coronapocalypse a tremendous amount of attention and pressure was placed on Governor Ron DeSantis to destroy the state economy.

    It seemed every five days or so I’d log into Twitter to see some version of #DeSantisMustDie trending. After six months of it it’s a little tiring.

    Then again, after a four-year temper tantrum electoral politics is pretty much tiresome.

    For most of this year the polls have all told us that Joe Biden was winning in Florida. And that may have been the case six months ago, you know, when no one gave a crap about the presidential election except people who make their living covering it.

    Guilty as charged.

    But in the wake of almost surreal violence and scenes of looting and, frankly, animal-like behavior all that was ever going to do was push the moderate voter in a state like Florida towards Donald Trump, not away from him.

    And now the polls, as flawed and dishonest as most of them are, have begun to reflect this basic truth. At no time in 2016 did Trump lead the polls in Florida. On election night I watched the faces of shitlibs from across the socio-economic spectrum of Alachua county go into paroxysms of despair as the results came in.

    I almost, for a minute, felt bad for them.

    So, this years, in my analysis, it doesn’t help that even the die-hard Democrat midwits I’ve known for most of my life are holding their nose to vote for Biden, not because he’s any good but because their own sense of self would be tarnished forever by voting Republican.

    That level of disgust is a not a motivator to vote, it’s a motivator to stay home and drink heavily. And it will not play well for Biden here, nor will it help him win Democratic strongholds by the same majorities Democrats usually win by in places like Broward, Leon (Tallahassee), Alachua (Gainesville) and even Miami-Dade.

    The fear that Florida will go big for Trump is so acute now Mini Mike Bloomberg and LeBron James are spending millions to pay off debts of black and Hispanic felons to restore their voting rights before the election hoping that translates into enough votes to push Biden to victory.

    Honestly, they should worry more about pushing him to the teleprompter lucid at this point.

    Now, don’t get me wrong, felons who have paid their way back to make restitution to their victims should be allowed to decide who rules over them. I think they should have their right to self-defense restored as well, especially non-violent felons.

    But what’s happening here is blatant electioneering and an in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign. It’s indicative of what happens when you invest too much power in the political process, the power corrupts everyone and incentivizes them to skirt the rules.

    Given that the entire political, legal and monetary system is designed to roll wealth up to oligarchs like Bloomberg it seriously distorts their power to alter the course of elections at a fundamental level.

    All libertarian critiques of why handing these people money, guns and laws is a truly terrible idea apply here.

    The problem with money in politics is that there is money in politics.

    And that won’t change until the systems themselves are decentralized and stripped of their power.

    That’s what is so seductively dangerous about the whole “Defund the Police” movement, it is highlighting a real inequity in our society. Police and prosecutors have too much power and too much immunity from the consequences of their actions and the use of their power.

    And I’m happy to have a real conversation about how to alter the path we’re on – End the Drug War, get rid of income taxes, tort reform, strengthen home rule of states, etc. But that’s not what Antifa and BLM are offering. It isn’t what the Democrats’ silent assent for their subhuman behavior will offer us if they return to power.

    And as far as I can tell very few people here in the state of Florida disagree with me on this.

    So, the last stand of American Marxists is on full display and they’ve brought not only their dirty money, like most of the money Bloomberg has made in his life, but now their racial Struggle Sessions to the streets of St. Petersburg.

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    And if anyone in that video had two operating brain cells to rub together to make a spark they’d realize this isn’t going to win them an election. And then the Soros/Brock bucks will vanish and they’ll just be more grist for the mill of oligarchs like Mini Mike.

    They have gone all-in on this strategy. Men like George Soros have spent billions in support of this push for the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. They aren’t going to allow such a little thing like the passing of a supreme court justice at the wrong time deter them from their goal.

    You don’t need to have a dog’s keen nose to smell the fear and desperation that clings to these people, however. It is palpable in their behavior, their rhetoric and their over-reaction to everything Trump does or might do.

    And their act is tiresome.

    The American people have fear porn fatigue. It’s showing up in the polls and its showing up in their hysterics.

    Regardless of how the election turns out, there will be no rest from the violence unleashed and the violence yet to come when millions of Americans come to the uncomfortable conclusion that they will never hold power again in their lifetimes.

    No matter how they try to buy our obedience in Florida. Because this is the Florida I know.

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  • Hedge Funds Flock To Florida As Wealthy Americans Seek Lower Taxes
    Hedge Funds Flock To Florida As Wealthy Americans Seek Lower Taxes

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 22:20

    Carl Ichan isn’t the only mogul moving to Florida for tax reasons.

    According to Bloomberg, a flood of hedge funds are planning to expand their presence in the Sunshine State, as wealthy residents from northern states contend with the threat of higher taxes.

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    Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. is reportedly considering opening a Florida office, as is Chicago-based Balyasny Asset Management, which has approximately $8 billion in AUM and plans to open an outpost in MIami, according to people familiar with the matter. 

    Adding to the list of firms which have already made the move is Bluecrest Capital Management, which just opened a Miami office for approximately 10 portfolio managers. Notably, Miami is offering companies up to $50,000 if they relocate downtown and employ at least 10 high-wage workers as part of their “Follow the Sun” campaign.

    The moves to Florida, which has no state income tax, come as locales with the highest number of hedge funds weigh tax increases on the rich. Last week, New Jersey adopted a millionaires tax, and a ballot measure in Illinois calls for raising taxes on the wealthy. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said such a tax could be possible if the U.S. government fails to step in with aid, and Connecticut’s legislature also has discussed a tax hike.

    “Every firm like Elliott is in the process of evaluating choices in how and where they work, including working from home and opening additional offices, but Elliott has not made any decisions,” said Stephen Spruiell, a spokesman for the New York-based firm. –Bloomberg

    According to Palm Beach Hedge Fund Association head David Goodboy, two or three hedge funds per week are asking him about making the move, vs. one or two per month during the normal times. 90% of them are from Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut – with popular destinations including Miami, Palm Beach and Boca Raton – the latter of which Verition Fund Management set up shop two years ago for a couple of portfolio managers.

    In 2015, David Tepper moved from New Jersey to Miami, relocating Appaloosa Management there the following year.

    As Bloomberg also notes, wealthy individuals have been drawn to Florida’s favorable tax laws for years – with the GOP-backed 2017 law capping deductions for state and local taxes on federal returns undoubtedly contributing to newcomers. Meanwhile, real estate in Miami and Palm Beach has been on fire – with sellers deluged by offers.

  • Is Insurance More Expensive In Black Neighborhoods?
    Is Insurance More Expensive In Black Neighborhoods?

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 22:00

    Via Priceonomics.com,

    This post is from Goodcover, a Priceonomics Data Studio customer.

    Amid the recent Black Lives Matter protests, much of society has been re-examining explicit and implicit sources of discrimination against Black people in America. What are the conscious and unconscious ways our society and economy harm Black citizens?

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    Housing and its associated cost has historically played a critical role in institutionalizing racism and segregation. Even insurance companies have historically discriminated against Black people through processes like redlining where they refused to write policies in certain neighborhoods, thus making housing more expensive or challenging to acquire.

    As an insurance provider ourselves, we wanted to examine data to see how race impacts the price of insurance. We asked: is renters insurance more expensive if you live in a predominantly Black neighborhood than if you live in a predominantly white one?

    We analyzed public data from the California Department of Insurance on how much companies charge for renters insurance in cities across the state. We also analyzed our own pricing for those locations.

    We found the higher the percentage of Black people living in a zip code or city, the higher the price of insurance on average. Across the industry renters insurance annual premiums were about 20% higher in predominantly Black neighborhoods than predominantly white ones. While we did not find such a correlation in our own prices, we recognize there is a lot of work left to do.

    The data and methodology

    Before diving into the results, it’s worth spending a moment on methodology. The California Department of Insurance requires all insurance companies operating in the state to publicly file the rates they would charge for a set coverage level in a given area. We analyzed this public data using defined coverage limits ($100k liability, $30k personal property, $500 deductible) for the top 10 most popular companies in the state and analyzed how much they charged in different zip codes and cities for renters insurance. Using US census data, we’re able to calculate the percentage of the population in those areas that is Black, and see how that correlates with prices.

    This analysis is focused on showing the difference in insurance prices for the same kind of housing that’s in a mostly Black neighborhood versus a mostly white one. Housing discrimination spans all races and ethnicities across our country, however for this research our primary focus is on Black communities in the state of California.

    In this analysis we haven’t identified any causal factors; It’s meant more as a jumping off point for further analysis examining potential causal factors which can range from discriminatory practices based on the racial composition of a neighborhood (i.e. redlining), to other factors that impact pricing like proximity to a fire station.

    This is a first analysis, meant to start a conversation about how racial inequities in finance and insurance. First, we must answer the question, is renters insurance more expensive if you live in a predominantly Black neighborhood?

    Cost of renters insurance in California

    To begin, let’s look at the average price of renters insurance in California and how much it varies according to the percentage of the population in a zip code that is Black. For context, in California 5.9% of the population is Black, and across the state the average renters insurance policy costs $183 per year.

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    Chart via Goodcover

    As shown above, companies charge more for renters insurance in zip codes where there’s a higher percentage of Black residents. If your zip code has more than 20% Black population, the expected annual price for renters insurance would be $210, which is around 20% more expensive than in zip codes where less than one percent of the population is Black.

    Next, let’s turn our attention to the average price of renters insurance across various cities in California and how it varies by the percentage of residents who are Black. The chart below ranks cities in California from most to least expensive annual policies and also shows the percentage of Black residents in that city. (One column represents the average price for the top 10 insurance providers, and next column are average Goodcover prices for those cities. Only cities with over 100k residents where the CA Department of Insurance publishes rates are included.)

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    Chart via Goodcover

    Across California, renters insurance is most expensive in Berkeley, followed by Oakland and Los Angeles. Each of the top five cities with most expensive renters insurance policies in California have a substantially higher percentage of Black residents than the state average of 5.9%.

    Is there any correlation between the percentage of Black residents in a city and companies charging more for renters insurance?

    Let’s see, the following chart plots renters insurance prices versus percent of population that is Black from the same list of cities as above.

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    Chart via Goodcover

    The above chart shows a 30%, statistically significant (p < 0.0001) correlation between higher prices for renters insurance and the percentage of Black residents living in the city. Virtually every city with a higher percentage of Black residents have insurance policies that cost more than the state average. And crucially, not just the average but also the minimum price among top California insurers is noticeably higher in every city with a higher than average percentage of Black residents.

    Examining our own rates

    Looking at the industry at a whole, we see a troubling correlation. Is Goodcover also more expensive in Black neighborhoods? To find out we looked at how Goodcover would rate for the same policy and location compared to the top 10 insurance companies in the state using the government pricing data. We found a far lower, statistically insignificant (p = 0.079) correlation as shown below.

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    Chart via Goodcover

    Furthermore, doing the same population segment analysis as earlier, our average annual pricing was $91, $91, $94, $92, for zip codes with percentage of Black population of <1%, 1-5%, 5-20%, and 20%+ respectively – a different trend than the increase of price seen for the top 10 companies which resulted in a 20% higher price for areas with the largest Black population.

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    Chart via Goodcover

    The data shows that the insurance industry charges renters in California more if they live in Black neighborhoods, but Goodcover doesn’t.

    We don’t have a good explanation for why this is happening. To be clear, we don’t believe the insurance industry is intentionally raising prices on Black neighborhoods because they have a higher percentage of Black residents. There are many potential causal factors, which is one reason why racial discrimination in housing is such a systemic problem.

    Our own pricing is based on statistical analysis that controls for factors that influence risks like fire, theft, water damage, liability (which together account for 85% of our price). This analysis shows that there should not be any real correlation between price and the percentage of Black residents in a neighborhood.

    A partial explanation for the discrepancy could be that our rates were computed and filed with the State of California in 2019, so we were able to evaluate risk as we see it now, rather than inheriting old rating structures and any potential biases.

    Continuing the conversation

    In this analysis, we have shown that there’s a wide variation in how much renters insurance costs across California and that prices tend to be significantly higher in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

    However we’ve also shown that from our own analysis of risk, which resulted in Goodcover’s rating, there is no readily evident reason why this correlation exists. Further study is warranted to understand why this is so.

    At Goodcover, we believe it is our responsibility both as a company and as an industry to understand and address our systemic biases. This begins internally – Goodcover is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion in our hiring practices, service and pricing. And then there’s more to be done in our industry – we must further examine rating for bias, increase use of digital servicing to remove biases such as linguistic profiling, reduce or eliminate installment fees that penalize policyholders living paycheck to paycheck, and simply lower the cost of renters insurance to make it more accessible for the 56% of Californians who still don’t have it.

    Eliminating pricing disparities because of the composition of a community is attainable, and the  right thing to do. Our industry needs to keep vigilant in re-examining our processes so we banish discrimination from the ways we serve our policyholders and the public.

  • Walmart Raises Pay – Only To Slash Hours, Bonuses
    Walmart Raises Pay – Only To Slash Hours, Bonuses

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 21:40

    Walmart last year said it was overhauling its stores to make them operate smoother and create more opportunities for employees to “do meaningful work.” The “Great Workplace” initiative, described by the nation’s largest private employer, said it would be “the key to winning the future of retail.” 

    Walmart’s new initiative, which includes restructuring the leadership roles at its Supercenters and raising pay for some of its salaried and hourly employees, also eliminated their quarterly bonuses, and now appearing to reduce workers’ hours while increasing workloads despite promises of greater opportunity. 

    The Guardian spoke with employees who were promised “greater opportunity for associates to lead and take more ownership in the business,” but, they said, none of that came to pass. Instead, some saw their hours reduced, making it more difficult impossible to pay bills and feed their families. 

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    Some staff said the retailer is accelerating internal restructuring plans as some workers have seen their hours “cut horrendously – making it very difficult” to survive on minimum wage. 

    Noted above, the plan, called the Great Workplace program, was rolled out in 2019 and promoted increased wages for those accepted into new management positions. About 11% of workers, or about 165,000 out of 1.5 million employees, are expected to receive pay increases. As for low-level employees, working on the floor, if that is restocking shelves, directing customers, or unloading delivery trucks, their minimum wage starts around $11 an hour and will remain unchanged. 

    The Guardian spoke with several former and current employees who confirmed “significant cuts to workers’ hours, pay cuts, and increased workloads.” 

    Kimberly Patrick Gray, a Walmart associate for four years in Tupelo, Mississippi, said her store saw a consolidation of “three departments into one and then expected all the associates from those areas to fight for hours.” 

    Gray said her schedule was reduced from around 35 hours a week on average to less than 20 hours this year, forcing her to quit because the reduction in hours made it “very difficult to pay bills.”

    A department manager at a store in Arizona, who wanted to remain anonymous, said Walmart’s new restructuring plan slashed pay by at least $2.05 an hour if they were not chosen for a leadership position. 

    “Those that are not offered a lead position or turn down a team lead over will have till 29 January to find another position,” they said. “Only those department managers that get team lead positions will receive a pay raise. The rest of us will be cut in pay. If I’m lucky I will only lose $2.05 an hour. It is possible that I could lose much more.”

    In Oklahoma, a customer service manager with three years at Walmart, said they would have to reapply for a different position if they’re rejected from a team lead position. 

    “My coworkers and I feel like we are being put against each other with this whole process because we feel like we have to fight for these positions,” they said.

    A cashier at a store in California said the restructuring has resulted in extra workloads, including restocking and front end inventory, which would have been done by a manager.

    “It’s more work for the same, or less money, unless you are one of the ones who roll into the new positions,” they said. “We are on a skeleton crew and there is zero time when there aren’t sales to ring.”

    Former part-time employee Eric Anderson, who worked at a Walmart supercenter in Mulberry, Florida, quit in Oct. 2019 due to restructuring changes: 

    “The first inklings of trouble came when my produce manager, who had 20 years with Walmart, said he was going to have to reapply for his job. Same with several more longtime employees,” Anderson said.

    He said departments were consolidated during the restructuring with no new hires, resulting in existing workers taking on more tasks. 

    “They all jumped through the hoops to reapply and none of them got to keep their jobs. Most were eligible for a severance for their years of service. At that point Walmart would not tell them when their last day would be, so they couldn’t apply for other jobs because they didn’t know when they could start,” he said. “When I saw how this company treated loyal long time employees, I decided I was done.”

    Gary Stevens, a former maintenance supervisor at  Walmart in Ticonderoga, New York, for nearly eight years, quit earlier this year as the Great Workplace program reduced his staff by 50%. 

    “Workloads increased and the management was pushing us to get more done than if I had a full staff. Not one of them knew how to do my job in stripping and waxing floors, but they would tell me how long it should take and yell at me and my crew if we ran behind the time they gave us,” Stevens said.

    Walmart also announced the closure of 63 Sam’s Club locations in 2018, resulting in 10,000 layoffs. In 2019, the retailer fired greeter positions at about 1,000 of its retail locations. Corporate jobs have also been axed; last year, it closed a corporate center in Charlotte, North Carolina, laying off 570 workers and outsourcing it to a firm in Arkansas.

    While virtue-signaling Walmart promised the world to its low-skill workers, and in some cases, greatly underdelivered, the company’s executives have spent billions of dollars in stock buybacks enriching themselves, shareholders, and fat cats on Wall Street. 

  • Iranian Drones Buzz US Aircraft Carrier; Helicopter With 'Russian PMCs' Crashes In Libya
    Iranian Drones Buzz US Aircraft Carrier; Helicopter With ‘Russian PMCs’ Crashes In Libya

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 21:20

    Submitted by SouthFront,

    A Libyan National Army (LNA) military helicopter that was transporting Russian private military contractors has crashed near al-Jufra Air Base in central Libya, Brig. Gen. Abdul Hadi Dara, a spokesman for the Sirte-Jufra Operations Room of the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), claimed on September 23.

    The helicopter, which was also carrying weapons, allegedly crashed near the town of Sawknah, to the southwest of al-Jufra. Several explosions were heard in the region. The GNA spokesman told Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency that at least four Russian PMCs lost their lives in the crash.

    These claims were dismissed by the Libyan National Army (LNA), which reported that the helicopter touched the ground with the main rotor during an emergency landing. The aircraft caught fire and burned as a result of the incident. However, there were no casualties.

    While a limited presence of Russia-linked PMCs in Libya is no secret, pro-GNA and pro-Turkish sources like to claim that almost every incident, crash or explosion involves the mysterious Russians and led to casualties among them. Likely, this approach is an attempt to compensate for the inability of the Turkish Armed Forces, GNA units and almost 10,000 Turkish-backed Syrian militants deployed in Libya to capture the port city of Sirte from the Libyan National Army. In fact, the mighty Turkish advance on LNA positions virtually ground to a halt after Turkish-led forces secured the countryside of Tripoli. The main reason for this being the red line drawn by Egypt, the main LNA backer along with the UAE, which warned that it will respond with direct military action if Sirte is attacked. At the same time, Russian participation in the ongoing standoff is mostly focused on distant diplomatic support to the UAE-Egypt block and diplomatic work with Turkey. Russian PMCs deployed in the conflict zone represent the interests of various Russian business groups rather than those of the state.

    According to the US, there are 3,000 Russia-linked PMCs. Later, AFRICOM even claimed that Russia deployed 14 warplanes in Libya. These warplanes, the US military says, are based out of Al Jufra and Al Khadim airfields. They are allegedly operated by Russian contractors and have engaged in “combat activities”. Nonetheless, the Pentagon provided no evidence to support these claims.

    On September 11, Rear Admiral Heidi Berg, AFRICOM’s director of intelligence, said that two Russia-deployed Mig-29 jets had already crashed: one on June 28, another on September 7. The statement came just a few days after an evacuation training video released by a Russian military blog was used by Turkish propaganda and MSM to claim that a Russian warplane had crashed in Libya. So, it looks as if the US military simply once again used sensational, unfounded reports to maintain an artificially created frightening image of Russia.

    On September 23, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released several close-up photos of the US Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its escort ships in the Persian Gulf. The photos were taken by an IRGC military drone that buzzed the US carrier strike group recently. The USS Nimitz passed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf last week.

    On the same day, 188 new naval drones and helicopters were officially added to the IRGC Navy’s fleet of aircraft. During the ceremony, three types of vertical take-off and landing drones, dubbed Sepehr, Shahab-2 and Hodhod-4, were unveiled for the first time. According to an IRGC Navy commander, all three drones can take off from ships. The batch of delivered equipment also included a number of Mohajer-6 combat drones. The Mohajer-6 has a range of 200 km and can be armed with up to four guided missiles.

    Iran insists that it has a full spectrum of means and measures that it can employ against US naval forces and bases in the Persian Gulf region in the event of an open military confrontation. In their turn, the United States regularly deploys aircraft carriers in the gulf as a part of its own power projection policy. In April 2020, US President Donald Trump even stated that he had passed an order to “destroy any and all Iranian gunboats” if they harass US ships at sea. Taking into account that Iran sees the Persian Gulf as a vital area of national interest and cannot leave US strike groups there without close monitoring, the sides are balancing right on the brink of a new open confrontation.

  • 20 Inmates And Accomplices Charged In COVID-19 Unemployment Fraud
    20 Inmates And Accomplices Charged In COVID-19 Unemployment Fraud

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 21:00

    Pennsylvania officials charged 20 inmates and outside accomplices in a scheme to fraudulently bilk some $300,000 in COVID-19 unemployment benefits, according to ABC News.

    The fraud ring operated across three state prisons, where inmates allegedly collected the personal information of other inmates and distributed them to their accomplices on the outside, who would then apply for pandemic relief funds in their names.

    Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said the arrests are linked to at least two existing rings of inmates who were busted in similar COVID-19 related fraud cases.

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    “After announcing our first round of arrests in these COVID unemployment scams, I promised that there were more to come,” said Shapiro. “Today, 20 more individuals have been charged with illegally taking benefits away from hardworking Pennsylvanians who are struggling during this crisis.”

    The investigation will continue, according to Shapiro. “These arrests are not the end of our investigation, and I’ll continue working with my colleagues at the federal level to track down those heading these schemes, along with those who are willfully participating and breaking the law.”

    The arrests were part of a broader operation, which included a roundup of arrests at state correctional facilities in Centre County, Correctional Institution Benner, and in Schuylkill County at the Mahanoy State Correctional Institution.

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    The Benner ring included two ringleaders — inmate James Neff Zonge and his girlfriend Adele Moore — as well as and eight additional inmates.

    Moore, a resident of State College, Pennsylvania, and Zonge were accused of helping start the ring. Officials said Moore successfully applied for COVID-19 unemployment benefits on Zonge’s behalf and began doing the same for others. Zonge allegedly received about $3,000 from the inmates for his help in filing the claims.

    Moore allegedly kept the majority of the money for her own personal use. She also received about $7,000 from inmates for filing the applications and from two of the inmate debit cards that she received for the inmates at her residence. Zonge, meanwhile, netted about $3,000 from inmates for his part in the scheme. –ABC News

    The ringleader of the State Correctional Institution Mahanoy scheme was allegedly Wendy Danfora of York, PA, and her inmate boyfriend Markal Munford – who is accused of applying for COVID-19 unemployment benefits, also using inmate names. While Danfora gave a portion of the fraudulently obtained funds to the inmates whose names she used, she kept the majority of the $109,900 in benefits to herself.

  • How Saudi Arabia Put OPEC's Future At Stake
    How Saudi Arabia Put OPEC’s Future At Stake

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 20:40

    Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

    OPEC’s 60th birthday should have been reason for celebration, but its largest producer Saudi Arabia is increasingly putting its own interests before the cartel’s objectives and has put the very existence of OPEC at stake on a number of occasions.

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    Founded 60 years ago this month by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) originated from a solid base of sensible values centred upon providing a collective voice for oil producers that were being exploited by the ‘Seven Sisters’ group of international oil companies. Its stated mission was to:

    “Co-ordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its member countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets, in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers, and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.”

    For nearly 55 years it was broadly able to achieve these aims, buoyed by its members accounting for around 40 per cent of the world’s crude oil output and about 60 per cent of the total petroleum traded internationally. In 2014, though, OPEC’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia placed its own interests above those of its fellow OPEC members, since which time the Kingdom has betrayed the group on two more notable occasions and jeopardised its very existence.

    Prior to 2014, OPEC had managed to turn the tables on the Seven Sisters group of major oil companies, comprising the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS), plus three iterations of Standard Oil (Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Standard Oil Company of New York), plus Gulf Oil, and Texaco. At one point, these seven companies controlled at least 85 per cent of the world’s petroleum reserves, having often paid the host countries a minimal percentage of the resulting sales profits in return.

    This compensation model dated from the first major oil discovery (the Masjed Soleiman field) made by a modern foreign oil company (the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) operating in the Middle East (modern-day Iran). Iran’s 16 per cent share of the profits from its oil before 1951 (when the Iranian parliament voted to nationalise the British company due to its paltry payout) looked positively generous when compared to Standard Oil’s payment of US$275,000 in April 1933 (equivalent to around US$6 million in 2020) to Saudi Arabia to secure the exclusive rights to drill across the entire country. As a portent of the geopolitics of the global oil market to come, the then-Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was removed in 1953 by a military coup – ‘Operation Ajax’ – organised jointly between the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service and the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency after he had nationalised the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s local infrastructure assets, and renamed it the National Iranian Oil Company. After the formation of OPEC, though, the influence of the Seven Sisters began to markedly decline.

    The real turning point for OPEC as an international commercial and geopolitical force came in October 1973 when OPEC members plus Egypt, Syria and Tunisia began an embargo on oil exports to the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Canada and the Netherlands in response to the U.S.’s ongoing supply of arms to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The spike in oil prices was exacerbated by incremental cuts to oil production by OPEC members over the period and, taken together, by the end of the embargo in March 1974, the price of oil had risen from around USD3 per barrel to nearly USD11 per barrel and then it trended higher again. This in turn stoked the fire of a global economic slowdown, especially felt in the West. In the process, the balance of power between the big developed market-consumers of oil and the big emerging market-producers of oil had shifted, as highlighted by the Saudi Minister of Oil and Mineral Reserves at the time, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani.                                                                    

    In 2014, though, at a series of high-profile meetings with bankers and fund managers in New York and London, various senior Saudi officials made it clear that, regardless of the economic and financial consequences to its fellow OPEC members, the Kingdom would instruct them to massively overproduce crude oil in order to crash oil prices in order to destroy the then-nascent U.S. shale oil sector. For the U.S., the instigation of this oil price war by the Saudis was an unforgivable betrayal of the trust in Saudi Arabia that had been implicit in the deal agreed in 1945 between the then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saudi King at the time, Abdulaziz. This deal had been that the U.S. would guarantee the security both of the ruling House of Saud and, by extension, Saudi Arabia, in exchange for which the U.S. would receive all of the oil supplies it needed for as long as Saudi had oil in place. After some initial success – the U.S. oil rig count in January/February 2015 saw its biggest period-on-period fall since 1991 – the Saudis found by 2016 that all that they had done was help to shape a much more cost-efficient U.S. shale oil sector that could survive above US$35 per barrel of WTI, compared to pre-2014 estimates of a US$75+ per barrel. In the process, according to the IEA, OPEC member states had collectively lost at least US$450 billion in revenues.

    By the time that the next oil price war rolled around earlier this year, instigated again by the Saudis with exactly the same strategy as the war of 2014-2016 (crude oil overproduction to crash oil prices) and exactly the same objective (to destroy or disable the U.S. shale oil sector) the U.S. was in no mood to – as one senior source close to the Presidential Administration told OilPrice.com at the time – “put up with any more crap from the Saudis.” In the run-up to the March 2020 oil price war, U.S. President Donald Trump had already repeatedly warned the Saudis that the U.S. would not accept any actions that would undermine either its economy or the continued development of its shale oil sector. At a 2018 speech before the U.N. General Assembly, he stated:

    “OPEC and OPEC nations are, as usual, ripping off the rest of the world, and I don’t like it. Nobody should like it,” he said, and shortly afterwards he underlined at a rally in Southaven, Mississippi, in October 2018:

    “I said, ‘King we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us.’”

    Finally, on 2 April, after the Saudis had further destroyed the finances of its fellow OPEC members, Trump telephoned Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and directly told him that unless OPEC started cutting oil production he would be powerless to stop lawmakers from passing legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from the Kingdom.

    Worse, though, is on the horizon for Saudi Arabia and OPEC. The U.S. has been so enraged by the Saudis trying to destroy its geopolitically and economically crucial shale oil sector yet again that any further moves by Saudi and OPEC to either push prices up over the US$80 per barrel of Brent level (regarded as economically harmful to the U.S.) or to below US$40 per barrel of Brent (seen as damaging for the U.S. shale oil sector) is highly likely to result in the passing of the ‘No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Bill’ (NOPEC). A version of the NOPEC bill managed to pass both houses of Congress in 2007 before it was shelved after President George W. Bush said he would veto the legislation. However, in February 2019, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee passed the NOPEC Act, which cleared the way for a vote on the Bill before the full House of Representatives. On the same day, Democrats Patrick Leahy and Amy Klobuchar and – most remarkably – two Republicans, Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee, introduced the NOPEC Bill to the Senate. It was only the intervention of Trump at that time that stopped the Bill being voted into law.

    This Bill makes it illegal to artificially cap oil (and gas) production or to set prices, which is a corollary function of OPEC, and it removes the sovereign immunity that presently exists in U.S. courts for OPEC as a group and for its individual member states. This would leave Saudi Arabia open to being sued under existing U.S. anti-trust legislation, with its total liability being its estimated US$1 trillion of investments in the U.S. alone, and to all other OPEC member facing the same legal action. It would also mean the end of OPEC in any meaningful form.

  • Seoul Outraged After North Korean Soldiers Shoot & Burn Body Of "Defector" At Sea
    Seoul Outraged After North Korean Soldiers Shoot & Burn Body Of “Defector” At Sea

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 20:20

    In a bizarre and alarming deadly incident in waters off Korea, a South Korean fisheries official was shot and killed by North Korean soldiers after the official was apprehended at sea. 

    South Korea’s defense ministry has confirmed the killing while condemning the “outrageous act” despite the belief that the South Korean man was trying to defect to the north.

    The official had reportedly disappeared from a boat close to the the western border island of Yeonpyeong, Yonhap news agency reports. He was reportedly set upon by a North Korean patrol vessel while wearing a life jacket. Seoul defense sources told AFP that “circumstances tell us that there was an intent to defect.”

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    North Korean boat patrol police file image, via Reuters.

    However, it’s clear the north considered the act deeply suspicious and likely considered he was a spy or attempting to infiltrate the border for nefarious purposes. 

    Shockingly, after his summary execution at sea his body was burned:

    “North Korean soldiers shot dead a suspected South Korean defector after interrogating him at sea, then poured oil over his body and burned it over coronavirus fears, Seoul military officials said Thursday,” AFP reports.

    “He was shot dead in the water,” a military official told AFP. “North Korean soldiers poured oil over his body and burnt it in the water.”

    The report describes that the man was questioned by North Korean soldiers while he was still in the water, after which they opened fire. The burning of the body is believed related to strict anti-coronavirus measures enforced by North Korea’s military.

    “We assess it was carried out under the North’s anti-coronavirus measure,” a military official in Seoul told AFP. And Yonhap said the presumed defector’s killing took place upon orders from higher-ups in Pyongyang.

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    “Atrocious act”: Lt. Gen. Ahn Young-ho of the South Korean military, via Yonhap/NY Times

    The north currently has “shoot to kill” orders in place in cases of illegal border breaches as part of its coronavirus lockdown.

    The South’s defense ministry “confirmed from the analysis of various intelligence that the North shot our citizen found in its waters and cremated his body,” according to a statement.

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    South Korea’s defense ministry said the killing is a huge and unnecessary provocation.  “We sternly warn North Korea that all responsibilities for this incident lie with it,” it said.

    The episode underscores that the two sides are still in an active state of war, and that even “defectors” from either side run the risk of being killed on the spot upon breaching the militarized border. 

  • Civilization Requires Collective Common Sense
    Civilization Requires Collective Common Sense

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 20:00

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via PJMedia.com,

    Without common sense in government, civilization cannot continue…

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    After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police. So-called crime experts often concurred. So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities. Looting and arson were often ignored.

    If you call 911 in a large American city, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer promptly and send out police to aid the endangered. So gun sales have soared. Some people who never before owned weapons, or even opposed the use of firearms, are now terrified to remain unarmed. Self-protection often outweighs abstract ideology.

    According to a recent Gallup poll, most Black Americans favor maintaining or increasing police presence. Often, city officials who support cutting back on law enforcement still expect their own homes and property to be constantly policed. The same is often true of activist elites who live far from the inner city.

    Large swaths of the American West are now charred by out-of-control wildfires. Some governors and many federal bureaucrats blame the conflagrations on climate change. But those who actually live within forests, or on mountains and foothills, that are historically vulnerable to wildfires know that the epic droughts of 2013-2015 killed or dried out millions of acres of trees and vegetation.

    Yet most of these decaying trees were never removed by authorities. They now predictably provide the fuel for the current wildfire Armageddon.

    A few veteran forest managers have been proverbial voices in the wilderness in recent years. They warned that ignoring dead trees, limiting the sort of domestic animal grazing that reduces dead brush and dry foliage, forbidding timber companies from harvesting decaying timber, and preventing periodic controlled burns were collectively a prescription for the very disasters that now cloud Western skies with fires, smoke, and air pollution.

    In other words, pragmatic people once understood that tens of millions of dead trees were not to be left alone as mulch for premodern ecosystems. In the present, the dried-up vegetation has served as veritable napalm, causing traditional fall wildfires to blow up into biblical conflagrations that consume homes, property, and people.

    The public trust in science depends on its consistency, its transparency, and its divorce from politics and ideology. There can be no left or right, liberal or conservative, blue-state or red-state slant if scientific expertise is to be taken seriously.

    Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the very opposite has sometimes occurred.

    The World Health Organization initially swore that the virus was not transmissible by humans, did not warrant travel bans or mask-wearing, and was not a significant global threat. The organization’s Chinese patrons had given WHO an unscientific party line. And its director then branded the propaganda with superficial scientific authority.

    American experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal health agencies were often inconsistent on travel bans, testing, masks, quarantines, and medical therapies, and intolerant of dissident medical research. Authorities rarely could consistently explain to the public how the virus was spread; why children, who were rarely stricken, were kept from attending school; and whether quarantines were aimed at flattening the curve of infection, eliminating it altogether or just waiting out the virus.

    The elderly were rightly deemed the most vulnerable. But then, inexplicably, they were often exposed to newly arriving infected patients in their long-term care facilities.

    When millions of people hit the streets to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, many health care professionals ignored the supposedly dangerous mass meetings that they had earlier insisted were major public health threats.

    • More than 1,000 health professionals, sympathetic to protests, even signed an open letter declaring that social activism was, for the moment, more important than social distancing.

    • When supporters of President Donald Trump then went to open-air rallies, many medical experts suddenly called these assemblies dangerous to public health.

    In truth, either both or neither types of public outings are dangerous.

    For six months, experts have given the American public contradictory and weaponized election-year directives on masks, social distancing, lockdowns, school closures, and workplace policies.

    All of these matters of public health reveal the disasters that follow when common sense is ignored and ideology reigns.

    • Most Americans know that only the police can protect the vulnerable in times of social chaos.

    • Most people instinctively sense that when vast swaths of dead trees are not removed from dense forests, they will eventually serve as kindling for raging firestorms.

    • And when scientific expertise offers ever-changing, inconsistent, and occasionally absurd public health advice, then people turn to their own instincts and innate common sense to protect themselves and their livelihoods.

    Experts, not common-sense citizens, have been failing America.

    *  *  *

    Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.

  • Iranian Tanker Loads Venezuelan Crude For Sale Abroad As US Threatens Seizure 
    Iranian Tanker Loads Venezuelan Crude For Sale Abroad As US Threatens Seizure 

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 19:40

    Last month US authorities seized the Iranian fuel aboard four tankers en route to Venezuela and diverted them to Houston over alleged sanctions-busting operations between the two countries. 

    Despite this incident and further threats by Washington to disrupt the growing bilateral trade between the “rogue states” – in US parlance anyway, Reuters has cited an internal company source and documents to allege state-run PDVSA is preparing a sale of 2 million barrels of heavy Venezuelan crude to Iran. Likely it will be sold somewhere in Asia.

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    Iran tanker file

    The sale is said to have been agreed to by the Venezuela’s PDVSA and the state-owned Iranian National Oil Company.

    Reuters reports that “The Iranian-flagged very large crude carrier (VLCC) arrived in Venezuela’s main oil port of Jose this month carrying 2.1 million barrels of Iranian condensate to be used as diluent for Venezuela’s extra heavy oil production, according to company documents.” And it plans to now ship the Venezuelan product abroad in defiance of US sanctions.

    The Iranian tanker is allegedly trying to conceal its operations:

    The tanker, owned and managed by National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC), made the whole trip from the Middle East to PDVSA’s port with its transponder off and has remained offline while in Venezuelan waters, according to Refinitiv Eikon’s tracking data.

    It’s as yet unknown when it plans to sail, but the US has threatened to conduct further oil and fuel seizure operations on the high seas, like what happened previously in August.

    No doubt the Iranian tanker is “going dark” under threat from US authorities or its allies. What’s more is that another few tankers are currently inbound with badly needed gasoline for Maduro’s Venezuela.

    Reuters records that “Three Iranian tankers – the Fortune, Faxon and Forest – are also crossing the Atlantic Ocean on their way to Venezuela, according to the Eikon data, carrying gasoline to help ease an acute scarcity that has kept Venezuelans lining up in front of gas stations waiting for fuel.”

  • "Confirmed" Has Become A Meaningless Word In Mainstream News Reporting
    “Confirmed” Has Become A Meaningless Word In Mainstream News Reporting

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 19:20

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Last week Politico published a major exclusive report that the “Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa” in retaliation for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani earlier this year, citing (you guessed it) anonymous government officials.

    The claim was nonsensical on its face; the idea that Iran would see the assassination of some random ambassador to an irrelevant country as a proportionate response to the killing of its wildly beloved top military commander would only make sense to someone with a very US-centric worldview who knows nothing about Iran. On top of that, the South African government published a statement that “the information provided is not sufficient to sustain the allegation that there is a credible threat against the United States Ambassador to South Africa”.

    The flimsy nature of this allegation was of course not enough to prevent bombastic Twitter threats from America’s manchild-in-chief that this nonexistent assassination plot “will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!” if carried out.

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    It also wasn’t enough to prevent the Politico article’s co-author, Natasha Bertrand, from falsely claiming that The New York Times had “confirmed” her reporting.

    “The NYT has confirmed Nahal Toosi and my reporting about Iran,” Bertrand tweeted today with a link to a new Times article, quoting the excerpt “Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack…Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.”

    The New York Times has in fact not confirmed Bertrand and Toosi’s reporting, and Bertrand omits a very significant portion of text from her excerpt. Here is the quote in full, bold mine:

    Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Mr. Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack, according to national security officials. But some briefed on the intelligence said Iran has not decided to directly target any American official, and other current and former officials accused the Trump administration of overstating the threat. Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.

    Awful lot of important information hiding in that ellipsis of yours, Ms Bertrand.

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    So NYT had in fact merely spoken to unnamed officials (probably some of the same ones) and found there to be misgivings about the claim Bertrand had promoted, and then Bertrand deceptively omitted text which contradicted the claim she was making that her report had been “confirmed”.

    It should surprise no one that Bertrand would abuse the trust of her followers in such a phenomenally sleazy way. As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explained after the Politico report was discredited by the South African government, Bertrand “built her career on hyping the Steele Dossier, a now-discredited document that made unverified claims about the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016.”

    But Bertrand’s slimy manipulation is also to be expected because she knows she can get away with it. The word “confirmed” has been misused and abused to such a spectacular extent in mainstream news reporting of late that it doesn’t actually mean anything anymore when they say it.

    When a news reporter announces that they have independently confirmed another outlet’s reporting, the reader imagines that they have done actual investigative journalism, traveled to the places about which the claims are being made, done deep digging and looked at the evidence with their own two eyes and found that the claim is true. In practice, all it often means is that they spoke to the same sources the other reporter spoke to and are in fact just confirming that the source did indeed make a given assertion. The reader assumes they’re confirming the source’s claim is true, but all they’re actually confirming is that the first reporter didn’t just make up the claim they’re uncritically parroting.

    Take when the anonymously sourced story about Russia paying bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for killing occupying coalition forces was first reported by The New York Times. We now know this story was completely baseless, but when it first broke there were a bunch of mass media reporters buzzing around claiming to have “confirmed” one another’s stories on the matter.

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    “The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have confirmed our reporting,” the NYT story’s co-author Charlie Savage tweeted after the story broke.

    “We have confirmed the New York Times’ scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan,” tweeted The Washington Post‘s John Hudson.

    “We matched The New York Times’ great reporting on how US intel has assessed that Russians paid Taliban to target US, coalition forces in Afg which is a pretty stunning development,” tweeted Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold.

    All three of these men were lying.

    John Hudson’s claim that the Washington Post article he co-authored “confirmed the New York Times’ scoop” twice used the words “if confirmed” with regard to his central claim, saying “Russian involvement in operations targeting Americans, if confirmed,” and “The attempt to stoke violence against Americans, if confirmed“. This is of course an acknowledgement that these things had not, in fact, been confirmed.

    The Wall Street Journal article co-authored by Gordon Lubold cited only anonymous “people”, who we have no reason to believe are different people than NYT’s sources, repeating the same unsubstantiated assertions about an intelligence report. The article cited no evidence that Lubold’s “stunning development” actually occurred beyond “people familiar with the report said” and “a person familiar with it said“.

    The fact that both Hudson and Lubold were lying about having confirmed the New York Times‘ reporting means that Savage was also lying when he said they did. When they said the report has been “confirmed”, what they really meant was that it had been agreed upon. All the three of them actually did was use their profoundly influential outlets to uncritically parrot something nameless spooks wanted the public to believe, which is the same as just publishing a CIA press release free of charge. It is unprincipled stenography for opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies, and it is odious.

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    Earlier this month The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald published an article titled “Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using ‘Confirmed’ to Mean Its Opposite”, about an anonymously sourced claim by The Atlantic that Trump had said disparaging things about US troops. An excerpt:

    Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

    Greenwald also documents how in 2017 CNN falsely reported that Donald Trump Jr had received an encryption key to WikiLeaks which let him preview the 2016 DNC leaks ten days before they were published, which we shortly thereafter learned was actually due to nobody involved in the story bothering to read the date on the email correctly. The whole entire story, in reality, was that Trump had merely received an email about an already published WikiLeaks drop.

    Greenwald writes the following:

    Very shortly after CNN unveiled its false story, MSNBC’s intelligence community spokesman Ken Dilanian went on air and breathlessly announced that he had obtained independent confirmation that the CNN story was true. In a video segment I cannot recommend highly enough, Dilanian was introduced by an incredibly excited Hallie Jackson — who urged Dilanian to “tell us what we’ve just now learned,” adding, “I know you and some of our colleagues have confirmed some of this information: What’s up?” Dilanian then proceeded to explain what he had learned:

    “That’s right, Hallie. Two sources with direct knowledge of this are telling us that congressional investigators have obtained an email from a man named ‘Mike Erickson’ — obviously they don’t know if that’s his real name — offering Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. access to WikiLeaks documents. … It goes to the heart of the collusion question. … One of the big questions is: Did [Trump Jr.] call the FBI?”

    How could that happen? How could MSNBC purport to confirm a false story from CNN? Shortly after, CBS News also purported to have “confirmed” the same false story: that Trump Jr. received advanced access to the WikiLeaks documents. It’s one thing for a news outlet to make a mistake in reporting by, for instance, misreporting the date of an email and thus getting the story completely wrong. But how is it possible that multiple other outlets could “confirm” the same false report?

    That’s three mainstream outlets — CNN, MSNBC, and CBS, all claiming to have independently “confirmed” a story that would have been recognized as false if even one person in any of those outlets had done the tiniest bare minimum of independent investigation into the claim that its source was making, namely looking with their eyeballs at the actual information they were being presented with.

    They didn’t, because that’s the state of the mass media today. That is its culture. That, in answer to Greenwald’s question above, is how this could happen: the western mass media are nothing but a bunch of lackeys mindlessly regurgitating incendiary narratives by those in power in their rapacious search for ratings.

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    Natasha Bertrand is acutely aware of this, which is why she feels comfortable falsely telling the world that her absurd reporting has been “confirmed”.

    So now you know. Whenever you see the mass media saying an important claim has been “confirmed”, just ignore them. They have no respect for that word, and it has lost all meaning among their ranks. The western media class does not exist to tell you the truth about the world, it exists to distort your understanding of the world for the advantage of the powerful.

    *  *  *

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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  • "I Was Never An 'Evil Monster' Until You Decided That I Was…"
    “I Was Never An ‘Evil Monster’ Until You Decided That I Was…”

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 19:00

    “I was never an evil monster until you decided that I was…

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    I never cared if you were ‘gay‘ until you started shoving it in my face, and the faces of my children.

    I never cared what color you were, until you started blaming my race for your problems.

    I never cared about your political affiliation until you started to condemn me for mine.

    I never cared where you were born until you wanted to erase my history and blame my ancestors for your current problems.

    I never cared if you were well-off or poor, until you said you were discriminated against, when I was promoted because I worked harder.

    I never cared if your beliefs were different from mine, until you said my beliefs were wrong.

    NOW I CARE!

    My patience and tolerance are gone.

    I’m not alone in feeling this way, there are millions of us who do and we have had enough!”

    *  *  *

    Source

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Sep 24

Today’s News 24th September 2020

  • Sweden Dominates Drug-Deaths In Europe
    Sweden Dominates Drug-Deaths In Europe

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 02:45

    As highlighted by the latest edition of the European Drug Report, Sweden is the country with the most drug-induced deaths per million of the population in Europe.

    In 2018, 81 people died per million inhabitants, ahead of the United Kingdom’s 76 drug-induced deaths per million. Finland and Ireland jointly had the third-highest death rate with 72 deaths per million.

    Infographic: Drug deaths in Europe | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As tragic as these figures are, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that they pale in comparison with the toll of America’s opioid crisis.

    In 2018, the U.S. experienced 314.5 drug-related deaths per million of its population and it lost more inhabitants to drugs than the next 20 countries combined.

  • Psychiatrist Testifies That Julian Assange Is "Preparing To Kill Himself In Prison"
    Psychiatrist Testifies That Julian Assange Is “Preparing To Kill Himself In Prison”

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    A disturbing testimony from a psychiatrist outlines that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in such a bad state in prison that he should be considered at ‘high risk’ of suicide.

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    The Daily Mail reports that Professor Michael Kopelman testified during an extradition hearing in London that Assange has “begun making preparations to end his own life including confessing to a Catholic priest, drafting farewell letters to his family and drafting a will.”

    Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, also said that Assange told him he experienced hearing voices in his head saying “we’re coming to get you.”

    “He reported auditory hallucinations, which were voices either inside or outside his head, somatic hallucinations, funny bodily experiences, these have now disappeared,” Kopelman said.

    “He also has a long history of musical hallucinations, which is maybe a separate phenomenon, that got worse when he was in prison,” the psychiatrist added.

    “The voices are things like, “you are dust, you are dead, we are coming to get you”. They are derogatory and persecutory,” he continued, adding “They seem to have diminished. Subsequently the musical hallucinations have also reduced, and the somatic hallucinations have disappeared.”

    Kopelman even noted that Assange “reported a near-death experience and wondered if the CIA would find a way to get him or mess with his head” noting that this “may or may not” be paranoia.

    Kopelman warned that “The risk of suicide arises out of clinical factors…but it is the imminence of extradition and or an actual extradition that would trigger the attempt, in my opinion.”

    Assange is languishing in Belmarsh, a notoriously horrid maximum security prison housing murderers and terrorists. For much of the time since being arrested on leaving the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange has been kept in solitary confinement. He is also heavily medicated.

    The wikileaks founder faces extradition to the US, where he would be charged with an 18-count indictment related to hacking computers and conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information.

    Professor Kopelman also noted during the hearing that Assange has been depressed “certainly throughout the time I’ve been seeing him.”

    “It’s fluctuated a bit, his appetite has fluctuated, he’s had persistent problems with sleep and his mood state is worst in the early hours of the morning and that’s stayed consistent,” Kopelman added.

    “Mr Assange was very reluctant to talk about his suicidal ideas and plans because he feared he would be put on constant watch or isolation,” the psychiatrist further explained.

    The report notes that the QC for the US government argued that Assange is ‘exaggerating’ his psychiatric symptoms and ‘self reporting’ suicidal ideas, and that Kopelman is an ‘advocate’.

    “I’m a psychiatrist, you’re a lawyer. I make my diagnoses on my criteria,” the professor is said to have replied.

    Assange’s QC reportedly read out a list of multiple times, at least ten, that Assange had requested the Samaritans suicide prevention helpline number between August and November 2019.

    Assange has been in the prison since April of last year:

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  • COVID World… Resist!
    COVID World… Resist!

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Iain Davis via Off-Guardian.org,

    COVID 19 is being used to create a global fascist dictatorship. From New Zealand to the the U.S, so called western democracies have adopted and developed the Chinese model of technocracy to create a single biosecurity State. This globalist corporate State is to be centrally controlled and administered by a distant global governance cartel of appointed bureaucrats. Tasked only to serve the interests of a tiny, disproportionately wealthy group we can call the parasite class.

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    Every aspect of your life will be monitored and controlled, as we move towards the ultimate surveillance State. Your ability to work, to socialise, to travel, conduct business, access public services and to purchase essential goods and services will be dictated to you, and restricted, by the State, based upon your biosecurity or immunity status.

    This transformation process is well underway. You are no longer a human being, you are a biosecurity risk. As such you may be removed to a military controlled quarantine camp as and when the State sees fit. Detention without trial will be the norm. All protest will be outlawed unless the protest suits the agenda of the parasite class.

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    You will not leave home without it.

    Your children will no longer be your own. They will belong to the State. Parental consent for medical procedures will be presumed or, in the case of mandatory procedures, not required. Once the biosecurity State is firmly established consent will be a distant memory.

    We have a diminishing window of opportunity to stop this global fascist dictatorship. Violent protest will not work. Not only are they morally indefensible, they are tactically naive.

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    Keeping you safe?

    Violence is the language of the oppressor. The global State holds total dominion over instigation of the use of force. To crack down, in response to a violent uprising, is the fervent hope of the oppressor. It allows the State to exercise more, not less, authoritarian control.

    In reality, to stop it, all we need to do is refuse, en masse, to comply. We must do this with our eyes open. It won’t be easy and many of us will face harsh punishment from a desperate tyrant. However, if we don’t stand up now, we are condemning future generations to unimaginable levels of slavery and misery.

    In order to foist this upon us, the apparatus behind it has invested billions in propaganda. The fascist technocracy, presently being being constructed at an alarming pace, requires our cooperation. Without it, the biosecurity dictatorship cannot gain its desired authority.

    Our representative democratic systems are not what our forebears gave everything to build. The parasite class have hollowed them out, replacing the organs of State with their own, leaving only the shell as a chimera to maintain our delusions and keep us believing that we have a semblance of control.

    It is a fools errand to attempt to use their system to win our freedom. It is designed to control us. Appeals to their courts will never deliver justice to us. Temporary, small victories will always be overturned. Nor can we vote harder expecting yet another of their puppets to save us.

    The purpose of the representative democratic apparition is to centralise all global power in the hands of the parasite class. This course is inexorable and, while we persist in our electoral folly, we will not alter it.

    We must build something new to replace it. The obvious solution is the decentralisation of all power to the individual. We must construct a voluntary society.

    Without us, without our obedience, the parasite class is currently nothing but a group of ineffectual, wannabe plutocrats, sat on piles of paper, created from nothing and worth nothing. If we don’t obey, there are no rulers.

    Should we refuse to use their monetary system, their usury will be fruitless; if we decide not to pay their taxes, we cut will off their economic exploitation and if we never vote for their bureaucrats we won’t consent to their nominated, elected aristocracy.

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    We just don’t know that we have all the power.

    We are the scientists and the engineers, the doctors and the nurses; we are the builders and the architects, the mechanics and the farmers; we are the soldiers who kill and die for their enrichment, we are the police officers who enforce their unlawful rules; we are the people who build and work in their factories, we are the office workers and bank clerks who administer their system, the shop workers, the programmers, the writers, the artists, the teachers and we are the people who, through our belief in their mythical authority, allow the parasite class to control us.

    We are the meek, we are the receivers of all knowledge and all wisdom. We possess all the technology we need and we are the experts. It is our world, leased from our future generations, not theirs. Without us the parasite class are utterly incapable of controlling anyone or anything.

    We must create, not destroy. We must liberate science, technology, art and knowledge itself from their occult control. We must build alternative decentralised systems, enabling humanity to live as a coexistence of free, sovereign beings. We must focus upon self sufficiency, we must support each other, turn our backs on the control systems of the parasitic State and build our own autonomous communities.

    We must refuse to comply with any and all attempts to centralise power. We can do this by rejecting, outright, the concept of authority.

    No one ever has any right to tell anyone else what to do. But nor does anyone ever have the right to cause any harm or loss to another human being. We can live in harmony because we are capable of respecting each other equally, without reservation. We know this.

    Not a single human being on this Earth has the right to order any other to obey their authority. None of us possess this power. Therefore, this power can never be derived from us. We do not have it to give. The State’s claim of authority, gleaned from their electoral anointment ceremony, is a charade. Their authority does not exist in reality, only in our imaginations.

    We don’t need anyone to tell us how to live. Nor how to deal with the tiny minority incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions. A voluntary society would be a society without rulers, not a society without rules.

    We don’t need their systems of authority to live in relative peace and harmony and we never have. Spontaneous order is all around us. We already live the overwhelming majority of our lives free from State control and without the need for anyone to impose any rulers upon us.

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    A disease, or a control mechanism?

    With a few exceptions, no State compels the farmer to grow crops, no State coerces labourers to pick the harvest or engineers to design and operate packing plants and no State forces anyone to transport the produce to market nor any consumer to buy it.

    This system isn’t controlled by any single authority. It is an intricate, often global, network of free individuals, each acting in their own best interests, creating a harmonious social order way beyond the operational control of any State. The State has no part in this social order of immeasurable complexity.

    This ordered social construct, bringing food to the family table, is entirely voluntary. Our society is built from millions of such systems and trillions of voluntary actions and exchanges that happen every day. The voluntary society already exists. All we need do is recognise it, and then seize it. The State is, and always has been, entirely unnecessary. It is a hindrance, not a utility.

    What benefit does the State and its regulation bring to our food supply chains? It claims to protect it. Protect for whom?

    It removes the free market to protect the profits of multinational corporations. It imposes taxes, raising everyone’s costs, to pay for its wars of neocolonialist exploitation. It forces wages down, it cuts the margins for everyone from growers to retailers, pushing some into poverty to be preyed upon by the same corporate State.

    Its food standard regulations, supposedly designed to keep us safe, effectively reduce food quality, creates massive waste, reduces nutrition, causes more sickness and lengthens the queues at the pharmacy. Again for the benefit of the parasite class and their pharmaceutical corporations.

    In a truly voluntary, free market what would a supplier gain from providing low quality, expensive produce to consumers? They would quickly go out of business.

    Only State regulations can possibly facilitate lowering quality, while raising prices, without anyone in the supply chain, other than the oligarchs at the top, profiting from it. Corporate profit is the bottom line and the State’s sole purpose is to protect it.

    Yet, somehow, we remain convinced that society could not possibly order itself spontaneously, without the forced coercion of the State. Despite the fact that, in great measure, it already does. We neither lack the ability nor the knowledge to build a voluntary society. We lack the confidence, because this pernicious system is purpose built to rob us of it.

    We are taught, practically from birth, that respecting authority is a virtue. To obey is to be good, disobedience is punished. What could we be if instead we taught our children to think critically, that all of us have equal, inalienable rights, never to cause harm or loss and to take responsibility for themselves because there is no claimed protection from any authority?

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    Respect their authority?

    Unfortunately, once we enter the education system the doctrine of authority is vigorously reinforced through perpetual repetition and the systemic application of reward and punishment. We are taught what we are allowed to know. This prepares us to be productive workers and responsible members of the State.

    We are then permitted to work until we are no longer productive, with every last ounce of profit milked from us, as we shuffle off to our graves on pharmaceutical life support, before the State swoops in to hoover up the remnants of our lives.

    This is not done for our benefit. We are programmed to believe in the farcical notion of a benevolent State. A State which exclusively serves the parasite class and one in which our lives are the real commodity.

    COVID 19 is not a high impact infectious disease, it has low mortality rates and is absolutely comparable to influenza. It isn’t even clear that is can be identified as a disease at all. Sadly, it seems the vast majority of us are so adapted to our authoritarian environment that we are incapable of ever questioning anything we are told by our superiors.

    COVID 19 is nothing more than a casus belli for the Third World War. As the representatives of the State openly admit, that war is a hybrid war. Just as there is no such thing as a healthy human being, nor is there any distinction between war and peace.

    All is war and we are the enemy. The military objective is to grind us into docile and compliant slaves, serving the new normal State.

    We must face reality. In the new normal, driven by the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” our labour is no longer required. We are destined only to consume, and that consumption is to be ruthlessly controlled. As are we.

    There is no black and no white, no right wing nor any leftists, there is no gay and no straight, no Republicans nor Democrats, no Conservatives nor Labour supporters. These are just some of the divisions forced upon us by the parasite class, and its compliant lapdog the mainstream media, to keep us divided and to stop us realising the truth.

    We are in this together. All of us. No matter where we live or what we believe. We are all part of a single, inviolable truth.

    Call it God, Allah, Yahweh, the Divine Spirit, the Universe, Mother Earth or Natural Law, there is one truth and we all understand it. Cause no harm, cause no loss, take responsibility for our actions and treat all with compassion and respect.

    We are not merely a random cluster of atoms. We are sovereign spiritual beings. We have purpose and every life has inestimable value. We stand together or divided we fall.

    You have a choice. Choose wisely.

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    Resist!

  • San Francisco Residents On Alert As Home Invasions Spike 42%
    San Francisco Residents On Alert As Home Invasions Spike 42%

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 23:40

    San Francisco residents are on edge and sounding the alarm amid a spate of brazen break-ins throughout the city, according to KPIX5, which notes that burglaries in the city were up 42% in the first nine months of the year vs. the same period in 2019.

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    “In the Northern District, which includes Pacific Heights, the Marina, North Beach, and Cow Hollow, it’s up 59%. In the Mission, 79% and in the Richmond up 50%,” according to the report.

    A recent example is a video posted on Nextdoor and given to KPIX 5 from one homeowner in the Cow Hollow neighborhood that shows a man trying to break into a house at 1:52 a.m. on August 22. It’s an image that’s creepy, disturbing and has shaken a sense of safety.

    The homeowner didn’t want his identity revealed, but others say these attempted burglaries have been rampant. –KPIX5

    “Our next-door neighbor got broken into and they had already experienced another break-in a month prior to that,” said resident Ginny Fang, who lives in the city’s North Beach neighborhood. Thieves stole four of her family’s bicycles several weeks ago in a breaking and entry.

    “You take a walk down the neighborhood and you see so many holes just punched into garages and wires, the same wire that was used to hook ours, you see them, laying around on the street,” she said.

    According to San Francisco Police, the department is getting more reports of garage break-ins recently.

    “We’re doing all we can to step up patrols and to ultimately arrest those who are committing these crimes,” said offcier Robert Rueca.

    “It’s so hard, the destabilizing feeling, and there’s already so much happening in the world and even the basic sanctity of your home,” said Fang.

  • The Great Conservative Migration And What It Means For The Future
    The Great Conservative Migration And What It Means For The Future

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 23:20

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    The signs really began to become visible at the end of January, 2020; there was an exodus of people brewing, and it was galvanizing fears on both sides of the political spectrum. The pandemic situation is cited by the mainstream media as the primary cause, but in reality the migration had started at least 3 years earlier. Americans were leaving certain states and cities behind by the tens of thousands, and these places were predominantly leftist in their policies and population. California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, etc.; all of these progressive states were bleeding residents since 2017, the pandemic just accelerated the situation.

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    There are a number of reasons given for the dramatic shift in population, but two specific reasons stand above the rest: Economy and political ideals. The pandemic itself is only a minor motivator. Consider the fact that residents of California left the state in droves for Texas over the summer DESPITE the problem of Covid infection spikes in major metropolitan areas of the Lone Star State. People didn’t care, they just wanted to get the hell out of California as quickly as possible.

    Again, a main reason given by former Californians was politics. They are conservatives or moderates that felt isolated or trapped in a far-left cesspool and they realized their future life prospects depended on them transplanting to a more free and less bureaucratic place.

    The fear among conservatives was that the pandemic would smoke leftists out of their hives and that they would spread to more conservative areas and “take over”. This does not seem to be the case. In fact, it appears that most leftists are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that their states are dying and are actively defending state policies on the web. Check out the angry and delusional comments from California progressives on this opinion article in Arizona telling them to leave their failed policies behind if they move to the state.

    These people are suffering from some serious saltiness, and the fact they they are still trying to claim that states like California are economically stable shows how truly delusional they are. Conservative states have nothing to worry about – The lefties are too dumb to relocate. They’re going to sit within the rotting corpses of the states they killed and pretend it smells like roses. This is what they do; when they are wrong or when they have failed they double and triple down. It’s their defining characteristic.

    In my state of Montana real estate purchases have surged over the past year. Recent data on school enrollment numbers are up 15% – 20% in cities like Missoula. This includes new students in public schools as well as those registered for homeschooling, and it’s a massive spike for the region. The majority of new students are recent transplants from other states. I have spoken with hundreds of these people personally and ALL of them said they were moving to Montana because they were conservative, many of them were preppers and many of them wanted to be around other conservatives in the event that the world continues on its current downward spiral.

    They do sometimes mention the coronavirus situation, but they generally are not worried about the virus itself. Rather, they are concerned about the virus RESPONSE. Meaning, they want to retain their freedoms, they do not like the draconian restrictions put in place in their former states and they are trying to escape the business lockdowns that are killing local economies.

    Some states like California have responded as leftists typically do, by seeking to punish people for walking away from the collective. This includes a new Wealth Tax law in the works that would require people with high incomes such as business owners leaving California to continue to pay taxes to the state for 10 years, even though they no longer live there. In other words, successful business owners who leave California will have to pay taxes to two separate state governments at the same time.

    California Assemblyman Rob Bonta, one of the people supporting the Wealth Tax proposal, asserts that the pandemic is the cause of California’s economic troubles including a huge surge in the homeless population. However, the spike in poverty and homelessness was escalating well before the coronavirus ever appeared. It was the hard-left policies of the state government that caused this mess; they can’t blame everything on Covid, though conmen like Bonta will certainly try.

    The fact that leftist states are poised to institute punishments or disincentives for leaving (which is unconstitutional, by the way), shows just how bad the migration has become for them. Frankly, these state governments need to be taught a lesson, and one of the only lessons they understand is the loss of tax revenues.

    It should not be surprising at all that conservatives are rushing for the exits, these places are on fire and progressive legislators are throwing Molotov cocktails for good measure. I’m only surprised by the speed and scale of the migration, the whole thing is happening so fast it makes your head spin.

    My point is, the migration is very real. No one can deny anymore that it is happening. But what does it mean for the future of America?

    As I have noted in previous articles, in my view the BEST case scenario we can possibly hope for as conservatives is a balkanization of the US based on ideals and principles. According to the economic data and social upheaval I am seeing, I think there is little chance we can save the whole country in the short term. Instead, conservatives organizing together regionally is the best bet in stopping widespread unconstitutional changes to our laws and usurpation of our culture.

    In rural areas in particular we enjoy far more freedom and the majority of people have no interest in abiding by lockdown restrictions. We ignore them. A friend of mine recently had family visit from California and they were astonished at how ‘normal’ daily life was in Montana. They said just being able to go to a restaurant and eat there, or walk into a store without being forced to wear a mask was a strange feeling, as if they were visiting a foreign nation.

    This is saddening to me. The coronavirus is certainly not worth this loss of liberty.

    I suspect that the conservative migration will lead to some interesting side-effects. First and foremost there will be continued attempts to stop it. Eventually, states like California will try to implement measures beyond tax punishment. They may even try to exploit the pandemic as a rationale for locking down state borders in the name of “protecting citizen health”. I would not be surprised if hard-left states actively try to physically stop residents from moving away.

    As the economy continues to decline and stagflation strikes, likely very hard in 2021 regardless of who is in the White House (you can thank the Federal Reserve for that), price increases will eventually prevent Americans from being able to relocate anyway. But, for the next six months at least I think the migration will continue to grow.

    The congregation of conservatives today is perhaps the first time in a long time that we have sought to build a unified front for preserving the American way of life, free from big government, free from bureaucracy and free from socialist subversion. Without the migration, we have zero chance of achieving this, but there are some who will argue against it.

    I have noticed that certain conservatives and moderates are claiming that by leaving places like California or New York the movement is “abandoning the fight” and exposing those regions to complete takeover. News Flash for these folks: You already lost those states. You lost that fight. They have been taken over. And, if you understand strategy in the slightest, you will wrap your heads around the need for a strategic withdrawal so that you can live to fight more winnable battles another day.

    This mentality reminds me of the people that were arguing that conservatives should not start their own social media platforms “because the real fight is on Twitter and Facebook”. This is naive thinking. Those platforms are OWNED by the extreme left, and there is no one on these websites that will be convinced by your arguments no matter how reasonable or factual. It’s time to build alternatives that are more free and stop wasting our energies on lemmings that cannot be saved.

    What I find most fascinating about the current migration is that it’s bringing together conservatives and moderates or “classical liberals” that have been alienated by modern social justice movements. In my opinion most moderate liberals are actually conservatives or libertarians and they’re just not ready to admit it yet, but I’m glad to see these people working together.

    The fight that is coming will require us to ally with people that do not necessarily share ALL our views, and that’s okay. The goal is to get to the truth, and to use what works best and to maintain a set of shared cultural principles that value freedom. Americans aren’t relocating anymore out of convenience or economic incentives – it’s actually rather inconvenient and expensive to relocate these days. They aren’t moving due to climate or job availability or wages. They are moving because they have a shared desire to be free. It’s really that simple.

    And, the sooner free peoples band together, the safer we will be from the statists and tyrants of the world. If that means the US is broken apart for a time in the process, then so be it. It’s better than having the entire country fall because rational people were isolated from each other.

    *  *  *

    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.

  • IRGC Taunts US With Spy Drone Close-Ups Of Nimitz Carrier In Strait Of Hormuz
    IRGC Taunts US With Spy Drone Close-Ups Of Nimitz Carrier In Strait Of Hormuz

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 23:00

    Iranian state media on Wednesday published a photo set showing the US carrier group led by USS Nimitz transiting the Strait of Hormuz which Tehran says was gained after domestic-build spy drones “intercepted” the carrier.

    State-run Tasnim reports: “In remarks on Wednesday, IRGC Navy Commander Rear Admiral Ali Reza Tangsiri said the homegrown drone has detected the US carrier strike group before the flotilla cruised through the Strait of Hormuz and into the waters of the Persian Gulf.”

    The Nimitz along with battleship escorts sailed through the area last Friday, according to separate reports.

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    Newly published Iranian military photos, via Tasnim News

    Tunsgiri made the remarks upon the occasion of a military ceremony marking the IRGC’s naval force receiving nearly 200 domestic produced drones and helicopters. 

    The IRGC Rear admiral described, “Monitoring and tracking all maritime movements in the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of ​​Oman will be made possible by these drones that will greatly increase our capabilities in this area.”

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    The US sail through appears to have occurred without incident despite the Iranian drone mission.

    The drone photo set had already been circulating among Middle East analysts and think tanks in the West, which confirmed their authenticity. 

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    Iranian media and officials are now hailing the domestic-produced drone spy mission as a success, and no doubt the reason the photo set has been released alongside English-language state media headlines is to display the IRGC’s advancing capabilities in “securing” Hormuz.

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    The Associated Press also confirmed the US carrier is in the Persian Gulf :

    The Nimitz, and several other warships, passed last Friday through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important chokepoint for oil shipments, the U.S. Navy had said in what was described as a “scheduled manoeuvr.”

    The US Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, however, has yet to comment on the Iranian drone monitoring mission or whether it observed the drone’s flight path last week.

    Should Iran continue with such provocative drone missions so near US ships in the vital gulf waterway, it’s only a matter of time before there’s escalation based on an incident, likely in the form of the US blasting Iran’s UAVs out of the sky. 

  • The Great Unbanking: How DeFi Is Completing The Job Bitcoin Started
    The Great Unbanking: How DeFi Is Completing The Job Bitcoin Started

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 22:40

    Authored by Paul De Havilland via CoinTelegraph.com,

    While most of us will prefer to forget the horrors of 2020, DeFi may well prove to be the guarantee of a better, more liberated future…

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    image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

    In a broad sense, 2020 has been the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As it charges toward 1 million deaths and over 30 million infections, governments have been found wanting. Our institutions have crumbled, leaders reacted too slowly, and all of the systems both in place and newly created to protect us — healthcare, aged care, testing, protective equipment supply chains, contact tracing, etc. — have collapsed. But 2020 has also very much been the year of decentralized finance, which has come to be known as DeFi.

    DeFi is crypto

    To understand why DeFi has captured the imagination of the entire crypto landscape is to understand that it is less about the outrageous returns offered to yield farmers and more about the future possibilities it presents.

    Cryptocurrency, and the technology behind it, has always been about future possibilities.

    When Bitcoin (BTC) was born to little fanfare in 2009, it was quickly recognized by those familiar with it as having the potential to be the future of money. 11 years on, Bitcoin, with its decentralized global system of nodes and miners keeping the network operational and secure, has met its promise and more.

    Not only is it a reliable and fast way for people to permissionlessly send money to each other, it has also become a genuine enterprise-grade investment vehicle, and its investment worthiness appears to be growing. Large and enterprise owners are holding onto it in anticipation of capital growth.

    “Bitcoin as an investment vehicle” aside, it remains, in essence, money — a new currency for a new, hyper-connected world.

    Bitcoin and/or DeFi

    “Bitcoin as money” still works like money insofar as it still relies on a financial ecosystem around it to keep it alive. But that ecosystem is somewhat limited; it consists of those that secure the network on which transactions are transmitted (miners and node operators), wallets, and exchanges where it can be exchanged for other digital and, increasingly, fiat assets.

    But a financial services architecture as we know it incorporates a whole lot more in terms of functionality: lending, borrowing, earning interest, paying interest, investing, etc. Bitcoin was never intended to cater to all those mechanisms — but DeFi is.

    The next logical step in the evolution of crypto’s gradual assumption of the roles played by traditional finance is being taken by the growing Ethereum-based decentralized finance ecosystem.

    DeFi, in many ways, is Bitcoin 2.0. And for that reason, DeFi — although based on Ethereum’s composability and smart contract functionality — furthers the Bitcoin narrative into the future that Bitcoin first allowed us to believe in. With each new DeFi protocol, that future is closing in on us: a world without banks as we have come to know them.

    DeFi demonstrates the complementary nature of Ethereum to Bitcoin. By recreating the financial system not from within but from the outside, Ethereum is hosting a movement that completes the circle Bitcoin started.

    The vampires aren’t even that bad

    Our banking system is as broken as our COVID-19 response was, but can DeFi actually replace it? The DeFi subsector’s most vocal critics would point to the emergence of food-meme protocols SushiSwap, Cream and Yam, along with many others, to suggest the movement resembles more of a circus than a legitimate threat to a giant financial services sector.

    Those protocols are considered vampire forks, which are forks of existing protocols, designed to suck liquidity from them. If vampire forks are destructive — and there is no certainty they are — a seminal Rolling Stone article helps put them into perspective. When running through the central role Goldman Sachs played in virtually every financial collapse of the last century, Matt Taibbi called the behemoth:

    “The great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

    DeFi’s vampires probably serve to further the ecosystem by stress-testing it. Legacy finance’s vampires have had only one function: to take money from everyone else to strengthen themselves.

    From the Great Depression, to the dot-com bubble and burst, to the housing crisis, the “great vampire squid” had self-serving financial destruction in mind and its tentacles on virtually every lever that produced those catastrophic episodes in our recent economic histories.

    The sector as a whole has long since stopped serving most of our needs. Checking accounts no longer pay interest, accessing money costs money, and large enterprises find financing easy, while small and medium enterprises are left floundering. Try getting a mortgage as an independent contractor without benefits or job security.

    Bitcoin democratized money by freeing us from it in its legacy form. Now, DeFi has captured the imagination of the crypto world as its natural extension — not just the democratization of money but the democratization of finance, promising a seismic shift in the way people bank in the future.

    That seismic shift will confer benefits on society we could only have dreamed of a decade ago.

    Enter the great unbanking.

     

  • China Pork Reserves At Risk Of 'Running Out In Months' As Prices Soar 
    China Pork Reserves At Risk Of ‘Running Out In Months’ As Prices Soar 

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 22:20

    China could be on the brink of exhausting its massive frozen pork reserves as the country’s pig herd is wiped out by African swine fever. 

    Declining reserves are particularly bad news for the Communist Party of China, which is worried that it might not be able to prevent another destabilizing surge in prices.

    For more color on China’s strategic pork reserves, Enodo Economics, a London-based consultancy firm, quoted by the Financial Times, said reserves fell by 452,000 tons from Sept. 2019 to Aug. 2020. This means the country’s pork reserves are at dangerously low levels.

    It’s unclear how much of China’s latest pork imports have been diverted to state stockpiles – but Diana Choyleva, Enodo’s chief economist, said China has about 100,000 tons of frozen pork left in reserves, and “at this rate, within two to three months they’ll be out.” 

    FT notes the reserve numbers provided by Enodo are in-line with a recent livestock report via US agricultural attaché in Beijing that said, “pork reserves appear to have been mostly depleted by the third quarter of 2020.”  

    China’s pork reserves have been CPC’s primary weapon against soaring wholesale pork prices this year – preventing prices from breaching Rmb 50. 

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    As prices continue to climb amid dwindling reserves, the CPC will need to increase imports of frozen pork from the US or Latin America, limiting supplies of fresh pork even further (Chinese consumers typically prefer fresh to frozen, and have been known to be suspicious of China’s frozen reserves). As tensions continue to complicate the trading relationship between China and the US, the pork shortage could become one of the most pressing domestic issues facing the world’s second-largest economy. 

  • What's With The Rich-Kid Revolutionaries?
    What’s With The Rich-Kid Revolutionaries?

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 22:00

    Authored by Zachary Yost via The Mises Institute,

    By now, readers are no doubt familiar with the sight of angry mobs smashing windows, looting stores, and harassing pedestrians and street diners around the country, supposedly in the name of advocating for the rights of black Americans. Around the country, these mobs are diverse and have diverse motives, ranging from simply wanting to loot and get free stuff to being driven by deeply held ideological beliefs. However, one can’t help but notice that in many places a significant number of those causing disturbances are not the subjects of the state oppression in question, but are often white and sometimes even affluent, and as a result are almost completely isolated from the consequences of their destructive sprees.

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    Portland, site of over a hundred straight days of protests and often violent rioting, seems like the poster child for this phenomenon. Portland is, in fact, the whitest big city in the US.

    In New York City, the Daily Mail reported on the recent arrest of seven members of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, a revolutionary Maoist group, after a rioting spree that caused at least $100,000 in damages. Every one of them appears to be white from their mugshots, and among them are an art director who has done work for Pepsi and Samsung, a model and actress, and the son of famous comic book writers. The New York Post profiled one rioter, twenty-year-old Clara Kraebber, and discovered that her mother runs her own architecture firm and her father is a psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University. The family paid $1.8 million in 2016 for their New York City apartment and also own a home in Connecticut with four fireplaces.

    Or consider Vicky Osterweil, the white author of the much-discussed book In Defense of Looting, who is also the daughter of a college professor. As Matt Taibbi reports in his review of the book, “there’s little evidence the author of In Defense of Looting has ever been outside” and “she confesses to a ‘personal aversion to violence,’ lamenting a ‘refusal to attack property’ that ‘does not lessen the degree to which I benefit from systems of domination.’” In Taibbi’s words “this is a 288-page book written by a Very Online Person in support of the idea that other people should loot, riot, and burn things in the real world.”

    Rioting by the affluent is not limited to white people either. Consider the case of the two nonwhite attorneys, one of whom received his law degree at Princeton, whose arrest for throwing a molotov cocktail at a riot in New York City made the headlines precisely because of their high-status, well-paying jobs.

    What all of these examples have in common is that the rioting and destruction, or advocacy for the same, is being perpetrated by people who have no skin in the game and will not be exposed to the long-term consequences for the people and communities that they are ostensibly trying to help. Neighborhoods that suffer through riots often end up economically depressed for decades to come, but people like Clara Kraebber will not have to worry about such things.

    In the last century, there has been a great deal of scholarship attempting to discover the roots of these kinds of widespread revolutionary movements. In Liberalism, Mises discusses the idea of a Fourier complex, where antiliberal revolutionary ideas are adopted by people as a means of dealing with their own inadequacy in the face of reality. Political theorist Eric Voegelin (who attended Mises’s Vienna seminars) also posits a similar, though more complex, explanation with his theory of gnosticism.

    The classically liberal sociologist Helmut Schoeck also makes a similar argument in his book Envy. Envy, Schoeck argues, stems from an individual’s reaction to a personal inadequacy and a desire to find a way to shift the blame to anyone or anything other than himself. Like Mises and Voegelin, Schoeck explores the ways in which this attitude is detrimental to society, but he also explores why some people engaged in revolutionary movements are themselves well off and not members of the toiling masses they seek to “liberate.”

    In these cases Schoeck argues that such people are not afflicted with envy, but rather with a fear of envy or the guilt of being unequal. He argues that “the guilt-tinged fear of being thought unequal is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche,” and that it can be observed everywhere from offices to schools in the way in which people who excel at something will consciously or unconsciously lower their performance. This phenomenon is unfortunate enough when it comes to the workplace, but when it comes to politics the consequences can be much more serious.

    Schoeck argues that such guilt may lead a person to forgo their old life in order to serve the less fortunate but that many times such a person does not seek to extirpate their guilt by leaving their own comfortable station, but rather by insisting that the entire world must join them in eradicating inequality. In his words “I have no doubt that one of the most important motives for joining an egalitarian political movement is this anxious sense of guilt: ‘Let us set up a society where no one is envious.’”

    No doubt even Schoeck would be impressed by the degree to which our current upheavals are driven by those wracked with the guilt of being unequal rather than those filled with envy itself. To be sure, there is no shortage of such envious people running around these days, but there can be no doubt about which group is the driving force.

    Hopefully, as social life slowly returns to normal and as the weather gets colder, the guilt-ridden rich kids will tire out from playacting as revolutionaries and return home. But until then, it seems that the rest of us will be forced to suffer as they work out their psychological problems through some window-smashing therapy.

  • "Kind Of Like QVC" – Mall Of America Embraces Live Real-Time Shopping
    “Kind Of Like QVC” – Mall Of America Embraces Live Real-Time Shopping

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 21:40

    Since the virus pandemic began, consumers have stayed away from shopping malls, including Mall of America (MoA), the largest shopping mall in the US, with more than 500 stores, located in Bloomington, Minnesota. Already, MoA’s owner, Triple Five, has missed mortgage payments this year. There is a push among MoA’s marketing department to revive the dying mall via a new “live stream shopping” experience. 

    Jill Renslow, the Senior VP of Business Development & Marketing at MoA, told KARE 11 that MoA has just partnered with Popshop Live.

    Renslow explained the app is “live real-time shopping through a digital channel. It’s kind of the new version of QVC.” 

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    She said it’s different than ordering from online retailers, as there is a digital shopping experience that is attached to it – something Amazon customers don’t experience.

    “You can interact with that host, learn about the products, and even ask questions and have them navigate through the store for you,” Renslow said. 

    She said app users can search stores and buy products, all from within the app; adding another feature of the app is whenever a mall’s shop goes live, consumers can watch a live show about the products.

    “It can be something for everyone. One day we might be able to sell toys to a certain customer, then we might be able to do apparel for women. It might be beauty products; the options are endless,” described Renslow.

    Here are several examples of Popshop Live broadcasts from retailers within MoA.

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    Cosmetic retailer Morphe is set to debut a live broadcast on Monday (Sept. 21).

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    The app could be a short-term solution to keep business flowing at MoA as many retailers are experiencing sluggish in-store sales with depressed foot traffic due to strict social distancing measures, a consumer not convinced brick-and-mortar stores are safe, and a timeline on vaccine commercialization for the masses that might not be until the second half of 2021.  

     “We really feel like this compliments brick and mortar really well, because not only can you continue to come and shop with us in person at MOA, but this is another way to engage with us in a really fun and dynamic way,” said Renslow.

    She said all purchases on the app would be mailed to the customer or available for curbside side pickup at MoA.

    The introduction of the online shopping app comes as owner Triple Five Group has fallen behind on at least three of MoA’s mortgage payments. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune recently said the mall is reportedly laying off 200 employees and could furlough up to 178 more. 

    Bloomberg said Triple Five missed a $7 million payment for June on a $1.4 billion mortgage.

    As readers may recall, the ongoing crisis in structured debt backed by commercial real estate has pushed Starwood Retail Property Trust 2014-STAR, a portfolio which is backed by an almost $700 million loan which is collateralized by several malls – including The Mall at Wellington Green in Florida – owned by Barry Sternlich’s Starwood Capital, and whose investors are beginning to take losses, to the verge of default. 

    MoA’s shift to move hundreds of its retailers to a live real-time shopping app might be too late as retail bankruptcies continue to surge.

    Could all of this suggest MoA’s days are limited? 

  • Colleges Nationwide Enforce Strict COVID Rules… Except During BLM Protests
    Colleges Nationwide Enforce Strict COVID Rules… Except During BLM Protests

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 21:20

    Authored by Robert Schmad via Campus Reform,

    Despite imposing bans on almost all other forms of large gatherings, and applying harsh punishments to those who disobey such bans, colleges and universities appear reluctant to call out student protesters for violating their COVID-19 safety policies.

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    Common trends among university coronavirus guidelines include mandates to remain at least six feet away from others whenever possible and restrictions on the number of people who can be in a given space at a given time. But recent Black Lives Matter protests on college campuses, inspired by a larger national movement aimed at combating perceived racial injustices, seldom comply with these requirements.

    Many schools, such as Ohio State University and the University of Vermont, have gone as far as to suspend students who violate such rules. 

    Such punishments, 330 at the University of Missouri alone, are often handed down after students are found guilty of doing things like ignoring mask mandates, attending parties, or bringing guests into residence halls. Though they appear to also violate university policy, there has been no such equivalent crackdown on student protests.

    In some cases, university officials have even voiced support for student demonstrations. 

    Following a racial incident that occurred during a Zoom event at Simpson College in Iowa, more than 350 students, faculty and staff spent all day protesting near the college’s Kent Campus Center. The event greatly exceeded the 10 person maximum allowed by Simpson’s COVID health guidelines and students can be seen ignoring social distancing in images of the protest.

    Campus Reform reached out to Simpson College to see if it considered the protest to be in violation of its policy as well as to ask how it rationalizes prohibiting other large gatherings but not the aforementioned demonstration.

    Cathay Cole, a spokeswoman for the college, told Campus Reform “Simpson College places the health and safety of our students, faculty and staff as a top priority” and that the school “firmly believe[s] the rally that took place Sept. 2 was in the best interests of the mental health and safety of our campus community.”

    Cole also stated, “those in attendance were masked and actively practiced social distancing throughout.”

    She went on to say “the rally allowed students of color to highlight their struggles with racism — on- and off-campus — and enabled the entire campus community to gather in support.” Cole concluded the college’s statement by asserting that the protest represented “a pivotal day in the history of our College, and one that did much to begin a healing process of another kind.”

    Though the University of Alabama has imposed even more stringent restrictions on students, protests at the university have also received a degree of institutional support. A recent protest led by Alabama’s head football coach Nick Saban attracted both a very large crowd and the support of other campus officials, including the university’s president who spoke at the event. 

    Though the protest violated the university’s ongoing moratorium on in-person events and images suggested a lack of social distancing, it still drew the support of the institution’s top administrator.

    The University of Alabama has struggled to contain the spread of COVID-19 with more than 800 students reported infected. To combat this, the university temporarily banned Greek life events, prohibited visitors to residential buildings, closed common areas, and extended a two-week moratorium on all in-person events, among other things.

    The University of Utah, Georgia Southern University, and the University of Chicago have all recently seen student protests that have ignored social distancing guidelines set out by their respective institutions and, at times, broken other rules. 

    There are no public reports of any of these schools disciplining the organizers of these events.

    When asked if the restrictions on in-person meetings apply to student protesters, the University of Chicago told Campus Reform “all members of our campus community must comply with the University’s health and safety precautions, including the restrictions on social gatherings noted in a recent message to all students.”

    A spokesperson for Georgia Southern University told Campus Reform that the student-athletes involved in the protest on its campus “are tested regularly and monitored closely” and explained that “the event was outside, attendees wore face coverings and were reminded about public health guidelines.”

    According to the statement made to Campus Reform, the protest was not in violation of the University’s health guidelines and organizers were not reprimanded, the spokesperson claimed. 

    “Students were exercising their First Amendment rights,” the spokesperson said. 

    The University of Utah was asked by Campus Reform whether it believes that protests should be subject to the rules set for students but did not receive a response in time for publication. 

    *  *  *

    ZH: COVID College Box Score: 48,299 Cases… 2 Hospitalization… 0 Deaths!

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    And as cases rise (cough colleges cough)… deaths tumble…

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    Source: Bloomberg

  • Pentagon Informs Congress It's Preparing To Have "Zero" US Troops In Afghanistan By Spring
    Pentagon Informs Congress It’s Preparing To Have “Zero” US Troops In Afghanistan By Spring

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 21:00

    With the Pentagon expected to reduce troops levels in Afghanistan down to 4,500 by the November elections, and with the still negotiated US-Taliban peace deal facilitating this, on Tuesday a Pentagon official told Congress it can expect American presence there to be completely ended by May 2021.

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    Getty Images

    Acting assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs David Helvey issued the ambitious timetable during a Congressional hearing:

    “I’d like to make it clear that [Secretary of Defense Mark Esper] has not issued orders to reduce military personnel below this 4,000 to 5,000 level in Afghanistan, although we are conducting prudent planning to withdraw to zero service members by May 2021 if conditions warrant, per the US-Taliban agreement.”

    In August Esper vowed “We are going down to a number less than 5,000 before the end of November,” in accord with President Trump’s wishes, who has ahead of the election talked up “brining our troops home” in various statements and on Twitter.

    Currently there are an estimated close to 9,000 US troops there, after in recent years as many as 14,000 had been deployed in America’s longest running war. 

    Critics have said that Trump’s vows and commitment to ending US “forever wars” have oscillated and have only ramped up again ahead of the election, given it’s a talking point popular with his base.

    Trump recently referenced the Middle East as “the bloodiest sand anywhere in the world” and reiterated that going to war there was the “single worst decision our country ever made.”

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    Iraq is also to slated for rapid and significant US pullout, however, neighboring Syria has just this past week seen more mechanized infantry units enter amid ongoing tensions with Russian patrols in northern Syria.

    Bradley Fighting Vehicles are now patrolling northeast Deir Ezzor region with greater frequency, an escalation in US posture compared to the lighter armored convoys previously seen “protecting the oil” – as Trump has put it.

  • An Open Letter To Stressed-Out Preppers Who Are Tired Of This Apocalypse
    An Open Letter To Stressed-Out Preppers Who Are Tired Of This Apocalypse

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 20:40

    Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

    Dear Friends:

    2020 has certainly been quite a year so far, and a defining one for the preparedness movement. No longer are our stockpiles of rice, beans, and hand sanitizer objects that make us strange. Our stashes of TP would make us the envy of the neighborhood if, of course, anybody knew we had it.

    So many of the things and beliefs that made us figures of mockery in the past are now proving their value. We’re learning, with a mixture of relief and perhaps dismay, that we weren’t so crazy after all.

    When the first lockdown began, we weren’t out there emptying the shelves in the frenzied throng (even though we’re the ones who got blamed for it.) We were watchful but for the most part, comfortable with our preparations. We understood before things went sideways that extended events can result in civil unrest, crime sprees, and chaos. We realized that we could be facing shortages.

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    And then time went on.

    And on.

    And on.

    This has been a year in which so many things have occurred that proved preppers have things right that it’s positively exhausting. We’ve had a pandemic, civil unrest, food shortages, increases in crime, exorbitant unemployment, and we’re facing an economic collapse, or at the very least, an economic crisis.

    And we’re tired.

    Maybe everyone doesn’t feel this way. Maybe you’re perfectly fine and you live on your back 40 and have been completely untouched by any of the above-mentioned crises. Maybe your finances are just fine, you never got out much anyway, and you’ve still got 8 years’ worth of food socked away to supplement the things you grow. Maybe you’re reading this as you spin goat hair into yarn from which you’ll make this year’s mittens. Maybe you have no relatives, friends, or loved ones in the path of danger. Maybe your area isn’t prone to a single natural disaster.

    If this is the case, I salute you. I really do. Good for you.

    But for most of us, this is not the case. A lot of us are tired.

    And I mean tired.

    I’m sure there will be plenty of folks in the comments who say, “Daisy Luther is such a whiner” but whatever. I’m just going to come right out and tell you how I feel about this.

    This year has been difficult.

    My life changed completely. The lives of people I love changed completely. I lost some people I cared for deeply to the virus. I watched people in my family frolic around blithely ignoring the virus for which they’re in a peak risk group for death. I watched my country get torn asunder by everything from the pandemic response to racial injustice to perceived insults or losses of rights. I have a family member who lives in a riot zone but due to work and finances, can’t just relocate. (Although those folks on the internet always make it sound so damned easy to just quit your job then up and move to the boondocks to raise sheep.)

    I have friends who have developed such extreme political views on either side that I don’t even know what to say to them anymore. I still love them. I still know they’re good people or we wouldn’t have been friends in the first place. But what the heck, y’all?

    Then we’ve got hurricanes and the worst wildfires ever in history and floods and droughts and snow in September and murder hornets and the Olympics got canceled and there was some radiation leak in Russia and police brutality, which you will say is alleged or real, depending on your personal perspective. Oh yeah, and the US Postal Service has gone to heck, a lot of kids can’t go back to school so they’re surfing the net while they’re supposed to be “distance learning” online, and Netflix is playing a child porn movie to prove that kids are getting sexually exploited. Our system is going downhill on a greasy slide.

    Our presidential candidates are (in my humble opinion) like a choice between your favorite sexually transmitted infection, syphillis or gonhorrhea. And regardless of whether syphilis or gonorrhea wins, all hell’s going to break loose (or break looser because it’s already pretty freakin’ bad in a lot of places) before and after the election that may not even happen the regular way because of the pandemic.

    And we preppers who were ready for an emergency are sitting here scratching our heads thinking, “Heck fire, I wasn’t actually prepared for ALL OF THE EMERGENCIES AT ONCE.”

    And it’s going on and on and on.

    And that’s the other thing.

    This stuff is going on and on and on forever. Ad infinitum. We are still in the middle of a global viral outbreak that we don’t completely understand and lots of places are still under major restrictions. A lot of folks don’t have their jobs back and a lot never will. We have been dealing with this particular disaster since at least February and the mental toll of dealing with the restrictions, the loss of income, the isolation, and the loss of freedom has been harsh for many people. There are folks who are just plain mad that they didn’t get the apocalypse they signed up for and they haven’t gotten to shoot any marauders and quite frankly, lockdown is boring as heck.

    Lots of us have family members and people in our inner circles who are chomping at the bit to get back to “normal” when things simply are not normal. We’ve got loved ones who want to head out to parties and who want to throw caution to the wind and who flat don’t give a hoot what they bring home to Grandma. We’ve got loved ones who are using this entire scenario to say how we’ve overreacted. We’ve got loved ones who still get aggravated when we bring home more toilet paper.

    When we were prepping for all this stuff most of us never expected that our families who were also prepping for this stuff might not be on board with this specific scenario. We never thought we’d have to argue with children and spouses and friends and lovers about things like quarantines and masks and not eating all five years’ worth of the good snacks like Oreos in the first 6 months. We didn’t consider that we might not be able to replace our Bluetooth headsets or that we’d need them for work or that we’d have to have our offices in our homes or that our kids’ teachers might see their BB guns in their bedrooms and send the SWAT teams after us.

    We can’t go to church but we can go to riots. We aren’t supposed to travel yet mysterious busloads full of “protesters” show up in other states and that’s just hunky-dory. The borders are closed except they’re not really and the restaurants can’t serve you except they can sort of and we can’t go to the beach but we can line up for a vaccine once the promised injection, untested for long-term side effects, is ready.

    This is the worst apocalypse ever because it’s so dad-gum boring and it’s going on for-freaking-ever. That’s the thing that nobody warned us about. This monotony just goes on and on and on. It would be one thing if we were out there fighting for resources but in reality, we’re all just standin’ in line at Wal-Mart with our masks on waiting for our turn to get zapped with a thermometer to see if we are allowed to go inside. If it weren’t for wifi we’d all be crazy by now. Or – let’s be real for a moment – maybe it’s because of wifi so many people are crazy right now. Social media is a jungle – an outright vicious and bloody jungle – and may the most audacious mofo win because those of us who still retain our human decency are not going to be able to hang with the people out there flinging wild ungrounded insults like poop in the monkey cages at the zoo.

    And folks – I hate to say it but we’re still on Round One.

    We’re going to be dealing with this bizarre altered reality for quite some time. This virus ain’t over yet or if you don’t believe in the virus, then consider that this government response isn’t over yet. We’re never “getting back to normal” and we’re going to have to adapt. We’re going to have to hope our children who are going to school in personal bubbles aren’t going to have OCD and chronic anxiety for the rest of their lives. We’re going to have to learn to make do without all the imports that no longer seem to be populating stores.

    We never really expected that a huge part of survival would just be waiting and adapting to the new world around us. Not this new world anyway. This isn’t one we can shoot our way out of or buy our way out of or wait our way out of.  We have to adapt to the new economy, the new precautions, and the new suspicions. We have to adapt to a different type of supply chain.  We have to move into survival mode as we watch civil unrest and riots break out in the most unlikely places, although it’s not really the survival mode we ever expected. We have to adjust to the nearly constant state of offense and unrest. We’re going to have to teach our children to be bold and fearless despite a system that wants them to be afraid. We’re going to have to forge a path through a labyrinth that is nothing like the one we expected when we began prepping for serious events because this event was so wildly unpredictable that nobody could have seen it happening the way it did.

    But this is what we do.

    We’re preppers. Preparing for the unexpected is our thing. Even when the unexpected is long-lasting, monotonous, boring, and stifling. Even when our family thinks we’re overreacting. Even when everything changes and things don’t get back to “normal.” Even when we’re just sitting there right on the edge of chaos wondering if today is the day that things will erupt in our neck of the woods.

    Every.

    Single.

    Day.

    For.

    Months.

    The way this unfolded isn’t the disaster any of us expected but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. How well we’re able to handle it will tell us a lot about how mentally prepared we actually are. How we manage our friends, families, and expectations will help us determine how things might go in a future, more Mad-Max variety of apocalypse.

    Take this as the learning experience that it is. And don’t be lulled by the boredom into a false sense of security.

    Because this is not over. Not by a long shot.

    Hang in there, my friends. Whether we have to pull our loved ones along by their collars, whether we have to buy our supplies and stash them away on the sly, whether we have to prepare all on our own, we have to deal with the apocalypse we’ve been given, emotionally and physically.

    It’s going to be a long haul, but we’ve got this. I don’t know if you’re feeling the same way that I am, but just in case you are, I wanted you to know – you’re not alone.

  • Possible Ballistic Missile Launcher Vehicle Spotted At North Korea Parade Practice
    Possible Ballistic Missile Launcher Vehicle Spotted At North Korea Parade Practice

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 20:20

    Weeks ago, in early September, we noted how North Korea was preparing for an “October Surprise,” one where the rogue nation could launch a ballistic missile(s) ahead of the U.S. presidential elections. 

    New commercial satellite imagery from Sept. 22 of North Korea’s Mirim Parade Training Ground, “reveals a probable missile-related vehicle at the secure storage compound,” according to a report by the website 38 North.

    “While imagery resolution is insufficient to determine exactly what the vehicle is, relative size and shape suggest that it may be a transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) for a large missile,” the think-tank said.

    The size of TEL suggests the vehicle is sufficient enough to carry a Hwasong intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). 

    The change in coloring going toward the cab suggests that there may be a missile on the transporter, and the light color may represent the missile or a light-color tarp draped over the missile airframe. However, again, the imagery resolution precludes a clear determination on this matter.

    A dark, irregular line perpendicular to the possible missile transporter is likely an assembly of equipment and/or troops.

    Beyond that activity, approximately 50 large troop formations can be seen around the parade ground, similar, but larger in number to those reported from the previous analysis. There is also another large, casual grouping of personnel, located at the plaza at the far west side of the complex. – 38 North 

    Figure 1. Possible TEL At Mirim Parade Training Ground

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    2020 Planet Labs, Inc. cc-by-nc-sa 4.0. h/t 38 North

    At the end of the report, 38 North acknowledged there “may be other possibilities about what this large vehicle is, such as a low-bed trailer with a Maz-like tractor, they seem unlikely in this particular location and circumstance.” 

    An October Surprise could be the launch of ballistic missile(s), either by land or by sea, ahead or during the Oct. 10 holiday, marking the 75th anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea. 

    The launch of missiles would signal the lack of progress between the Trump administration and North Korea in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. 

  • Trump Strikes A Second Major Blow Against 'Critical Race Theory'
    Trump Strikes A Second Major Blow Against ‘Critical Race Theory’

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 20:00

    Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

    President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to stop funding to federal government contractors who hold critical race theory training sessions.

    “The President signed an Executive Order to end training sessions based on race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating in the Federal workforce, the Uniformed Services, and among Federal contractors,” the White House said in an announcement.

    “This order will prohibit Federal agencies and Federal contractors from conducting training that promotes race stereotyping, for example, by portraying certain races as oppressors by virtue of their birth.”

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    In the executive order, titled “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” Trump wrote that many people are pushing an ideology that is a “different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.”

    “This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans,” Trump wrote, later calling the ideology “divisive.”

    The president provided a number of examples of such critical race theory trainings, which included a seminar recently held by the Treasury Department that promoted the message that “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism.” The same seminar was found to have told small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid the idea that Americans should be “more color-blind” or “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.”

    In another example, the Sandia National Laboratories, a research lab and a federal entity, was found to have stated in training materials for non-minority males that an emphasis on “rationality over emotionality” was a characteristic of “white male[s].” The training materials also asked the trainees to “acknowledge” their “privilege” to each other.

    The Argonne National Laboratories, a research center under the U.S. Department of Energy, was found to have stated in its training materials that racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America.” It also characterized statements like “color blindness” and “meritocracy” as “action of bias.”

    The executive order also pointed to the Smithsonian Institution in another example, where one of the museum’s graphics asserted that concepts such as “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work” being “the key to success,” the “nuclear family,” and belief in a single god are “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” and not values that would unite Americans. The museum also stated that “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear,” according to the order.

    “All of this is contrary to the fundamental premises underpinning our Republic: that all individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit,” Trump wrote in the order.

    Trump said in the order that such trainings “[perpetuate] racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint.”

    “Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars,” the president wrote. “Research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.”

    Trump’s latest action comes after the White House announced an order earlier this month to stop taxpayer-funded critical race theory training sessions to government workers in various U.S. executive branch agencies.

    In a statement on Twitter, the president announced late Tuesday: “A few weeks ago, I BANNED efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies.

    “Today, I’ve expanded that ban to people and companies that do business with our Country, the United States Military, Government Contractors, and Grantees. Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!”

    Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said on Twitter: “This is another important step that builds off his directive to agencies to stop trainings that push a radical anti-American agenda.”

    “In the face of lies meant to divide us, demoralize us, and diminish us, we will show that the story of America unites us, inspires us, includes us all, and makes everyone free,” Trump said in a statement.

  • JPMorgan Traders Complain Bank Didn't Warn Them About Recent COVID-19 Outbreak
    JPMorgan Traders Complain Bank Didn’t Warn Them About Recent COVID-19 Outbreak

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:40

    While the world’s biggest tech firms have come out in favor of working from home in perpetuity (or at least until next summer), JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs were among the earliest major American companies to start pushing employees to get back to the office. And already, both have endured trading floor outbreaks (albeit smaller than outbreaks they experienced back in March).

    But while JP Morgan’s ‘research’ showing young employees lose ‘creative intelligence’ when confined to their homes – denied the collaborative experience of working from a cubicle in Midtown – is certainly compelling, it looks like the bank’s employees have some trepidation about the push back to the office.

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    Specifically, they’re concerned about the bank’s policy of only informing employees who came into close, direct contact with anybody who tests positive of the virus. According to CNBC, an employee asked Troy Rohrbaugh, JPM’s global markets head, about the policy during a recent virtual town hall.

    The executive explained the bank’s policy is to inform only those who had been working on the same floor, or who may have had contact with the sick individual.

    But JPM isn’t alone in that: Goldman only discloses infection to workers who had meetings, or worked on the same floor, as somebody who got sick.

    Traders are reportedly angry that when there was a trading floor outbreak earlier this month, they only learned about it when they saw the story on their Bloomberg terminals.

    “Why did I have to read about this in Bloomberg?” said one trader who declined to be identified criticizing his or her employer, referring to an article on the matter.

    Looking to the CDC guidelines, the source of the conflict is clear. Guidelines clearly state that “employers should inform fellow employees of their possible exposure to COVID-19 in the workplace but maintain confidentiality as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.” “Exposure” is defined as “being within 6 feet of someone with the virus for 15 minutes or more”.

    That’s a change from the early days of the outbreak, when information about infections was more widely shared by both banks. Meanwhile, JPM said in an official statement that its protocols “go beyond just notifying those who are in close contact”…with the bank adding that “we notify a wide group of employees out of precaution.”

    CEO Jamie Dimon might want to give the issue a rethink if the bank still prioritizes recruiting the ‘top talent’ out of America’s rapidly emptying colleges. While big tech firms are known for their office ‘perks’, in the future, the most desirable ‘perk’ of all might be the ability to work from anywhere.

  • Germany Adds 11 Regions To "Coronavirus Watch List", France Closes Bars, Restaurants In Marseilles: Live Updates
    Germany Adds 11 Regions To “Coronavirus Watch List”, France Closes Bars, Restaurants In Marseilles: Live Updates

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:28

    Summary:

    • Germany adds 11 regions to travel warning list
    • France orders bars and restaurants shut in Marseilles, Paris on “high alert”
    • Head of FDA advisory committee recuses herself from COVID vaccine review
    • Irish outbreak worsens
    • Eiffel Tower reopens, Met Opera scraps season
    • CDC director hints at new guidance on aerosols
    • US nears 7 million cases
    • Post-LBW spike continues
    • Trump moves more money to ‘Operation Warp Speed’
    • NYC warns of new hotspots that require “urgent action”
    • Mayor de BLasio furloughs 9k workers
    • France to announce new COVID restrictions
    • Japan on track to approve new COVID drug
    • Indonesia reports another daily record
    • China, Japan to ease travel restrictions on foreigners

    * * *

    Update (1920ET): Germany on Wednsday evening announced it would add 11 regions across Europe to its list of “coronavirus risk zones”, according to a statement from Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, the agency in charge of Germany’s COVID-19 response.

    The list includes several popular tourist destinations across Europe, according to Reuters.

    Germany added regions in 11 European countries to the list of destinations it classifies as coronavirus risk zones, dealing a further blow to hopes for a revival of tourism as many countries brace for a possible second wave of the pandemic.

    Regions newly listed by the Robert Koch Institute health agency included major tourist destinations such as the French regions of Centre-Val de Loire, Brittany and Normandy, as well as the coastal region Lika-Senj in Croatia and the upland Primorsko-notranjska region in Slovenia.

    The Irish, Portuguese and Danish capitals, the Dutch province of Utrecht, Austria’s state of Vorarlberg, most of the Czech Republic, Gyor county in Western Hungary and Romania’s Covasna county were also listed.

    Listing as a risk area is typically followed by the Foreign Ministry advising against non-essential travel to the region in question.

    Germany warns against travel to regions within the European Union where the rate of COVID-19 infections exceeds the level of 50 per 100,000 population in a week.

    Adding regions to the list typically comes before an official travel advisory is issued.

    In other European news, French President Emmanuel Macron announced Wednesday in a much overhyped announcement that the French government would shut down bars and restaurants in Marseilles, the hardest hit city in the country. Meanwhile, the Paris region, which is also seeing a spike, even as tourist spots like the Eiffel Tower prepare to reopen, is on high alert.

    * * *

    Update (1750ET): Both the Trump Administration and the career scientists are working diligently to protect the ‘credbility’ of the FDA long enough to convince people to take a COVID-19 vaccine after an expedited review process. But conflicts like this don’t help.

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    And with that, the head of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee won’t have a say in approving any of the most important vaccine to be developed in decades.

    * * *

    Update (1340ET): Barely a day goes by, it seems, without Dr. Fauci, Dr. Redfield and other top officials from DHHS/the former White House coronavirus task force, testifying before Congress. Wednesday was no different, with both men testifying before the Senate. Redfield started off by blaming young people between the ages of 18 and 25 for the resurgence in cases over the summer, calling them “major contributors” to the spread of COVID-19.

    Later, Redfield was asked by one senator to offer some clarity on the CDC’s abrupt decision to retract recently changed guidance regarding aerosol transmission. He said the document that was posted was a “non-scientifically cleared” document.

    However, he’s readying another document that will be scientifically cleared, though Redfield didn’t offer any more insight on that.

    With vaccines again the big story of the day after the JNJ news, Dr. Fauci once again told lawmakers that a vaccine will likely be approved by the end of the year.

    Circling back the CDC guidance, scientists are battling over whether aerosol transmission – ie spread via tiny particles than can travel over 30 feet from a sneeze or a cough – is the primary cause of COVID-19’s spread. A growing group of scientists are pointing to super spreader events linked to choirs and concerts etc to argue the virus does primarily spread in this way, while surface contact and spread from close interaction are also important vectors, according to the Washington Post.

    Some scientists argued that the resistance toward officially classifying the virus as “airborne” is due to “historical bias”.

    Some other news from Wednesday: the Eiffel Tower will soon reopen to tourists for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

    Finally, an outbreak in Ireland has continued to worsen: The number of new coronavirus cases in the country will double every 12 to 14 days at the current rate, the nation’s health ministry warned on Wednesday, after the country reported 234 more cases on Wednesday, along with two new deaths.

    “We are unfortunately seeing continuing increases in all metrics of the disease,” Health Ministry advisor Philip Nolan told reporters in Dublin, adding it was too early to see the impact of new restrictions imposed on the country last week.

    Finally, here’s some more information on the NYC clusters noted earlier: Since the first week of August, the city has seen a 4.71% increase in Midwood, Borough Park and Bensonhurst, 3.69% in Edgemere-Far Rockaway, 2.24% in Kew Gardens and 2% in Williamsburg.

    * * *

    The number of new COVID-19 cases reported in the US on Tuesday accelerated to 39,345 (compared with +37,417 the prior day), as the post-Labor Day Weekend surge (something that BofA analysts insist is being driven almost entirely by increases in testing) continues. Mirroring the increase in cases, deaths increased by 438, compared with just 270 the day before. California saw cases climb 2,630 yesterday (compared with +3,294 for the prior day), while deaths increased by 53, vs. 31 a day ago.

    Meanwhile, the US death toll topped 200,000, a level that was once “unfathomable”, according to the AP.

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    “It’s completely unfathomable that we reached this point,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a JHU researcher. The AP also noted that 200,000 deaths from the virus is roughly equivalent to one “9/11” per day for 67 days.

    The newswire also noted that the milestone comes “six weeks before an election that is certain to be a referendum in part on President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.”

    Speaking on CNN, Dr. Fauci said “the idea of 200,000 deaths is really very sobering, in some respects stunning.”  President Trump, meanwhile, said last night that “if we didn’t do it properly and do it right, you’d have 2.5 million deaths”, while Democratic candidate Joe Biden took to twitter to proclaim “it didn’t have to be this bad” (then again, Biden also apparently believes the death toll is 200 million, several orders of magnitude higher than reality). Brazil, which essentially did let its outbreak run wild, is in second place with 137,000 deaths, though some critics believe that number underestimates the true death toll.

    Looking ahead, the US is roughly 2 days away from becoming the first country to top 7 million confirmed cases: As of Wednesday morning, the US had 6,897,756 cases, and 200,818 confirmed deaths.

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    In terms of the big US news on Wednesday, NYC’s health department identified a new cluster of cases yesterday in Brooklyn which it warned could be cause for “significant concern”. the hot spots have been traced to four areas in Queens and Brooklyn.

    Speaking Wednesday morning, Mayor de Blasio warned these new ‘hot spots’ require “urgent action” and that NYC will increase enforcement of social distancing rules and also bolster its testing efforts to try and stave off the new outbreak. The mayor also annonced a five-day furlough impacting 9,000 employees – a measure that will reportedly save the city $21 million.

    And as we noted earlier, JNJ announced its vaccine candidate would be starting Phase 3 trials, making it the fourth candidate to cross that threshold. Yesterday, UK PM Boris Johnson unveiled new measures to slow a resurgence in the UK’s outbreak. The PM also warned that if the measures aren’t effective, that the UK may return to lockdown, even as a team of BofA analysts warned that tighter COVID restrictions will “scar the UK economy further”.

    Wisconsin Gov Tony Evers announced new measures late Tuesday declared a public health emergency and extended an order to wear face masks into November.

    Finally, the Trump Administration according to Bloomberg is shifting billions of dollars to ‘Operation Warp Speed’, its vaccine effort which relies on throwing money at vaccine projects, and away from testing and masks. The shift shows the administration’s “increasing focus on a medical solution to ease the pandemic,” Bloomberg said. The new money will swell the program to $18 billion from $10 billion.

    “Escalating lockdown measures, fading stimulus measures and Brexit uncertainty will push the economy into contraction over the next two quarters,” said BofA’s Robert Wood, chief UK economist.

    Here’s a roundup of other important COVID news from Wednesday:

    Global cases have hit 31,615,836, while deaths have reached 971,116 (Source: JHU).

    Indonesia sets new daily record: The country reported 4,465 new cases, and another 140 deaths. This is only the fourth time Indonesia has topped 4k daily cases, and each instance has come during the last week (Source: Nikkei).

    Tokyo reports 59 cases, marking the lowest daily figure in nearly three months. The number was down from 88 on Tuesday and 98 on Monday, and the lowest since June 30, when 54 cases were reported (Source: Nikkei).

    Fujifilm announced that its Avigan drug reduced viral loads and symptoms of COVID-19 patients, clearing the last hurdle to emergency approval in Japan, following months of delays. The Phase 3 clinical study of 156 patients showed that those treated with Avigan improved after 11.9 days, versus 14.7 days for a placebo group (Source: Nikkei).

    Japan is finally planning to ease access for foreigners in October, though its restrictions will remain pretty stringent: Only 1,000 visitors will be allowed into Japan per day, and initially only those staying for more than 3 months will be allowed in (and they must quarantine for 2 weeks upon arrival) (Source: Nikkei).

    India reported 83,347 cases Wednesday, up from 75,083 on Tuesday, bringing its total to nearly 5.65 million. The death toll has jumped by 1,085 to 90,020. The country’s testing capacity now exceeds 1.2 million per day, by far the highest in the world, and more than 66 million tests have been conducted in total (Source: Nikkei).

    China reported 10 cases for Sept. 22, up from just six a day earlier. China is also planning to ease entry rules for foreigners starting Sept. 28 (Source: Nikkei).

    Australia sees just 15 new cases in its COVID-19 “hot spot” of Victoria, the country’s second-largest state, and home to its second city, Melbourne. Reporting just 15 cases and five deaths, compared with 28 cases and 3 deaths yesterday (Source: Nikkei).

    Goldman Sachs, HSBC and others have paused plans to return workers in London after PM Johnson appealed to Britons to work from home (Source: Bloomberg).

    Argentina reported a record 470 COVID-19 daily deaths, pushing its total to 13,952, according to the government’s evening report. It’s the second day in a row Argentina has reported a record rise in fatalities. Officials also confirmed 12,027 new cases, bringing the total to 652,174 (Source: Bloomberg).

    Finally, Goldman Sachs analysts have come up with the following chart to measure the level of COVID-19 restrictions in place in the US. Right now, it’s swinging back toward more restrictions as states move to curb an expected “fall surge” as college students return home.

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  • Military Generals Are Just Another Group Of Self-Interested Technocrats
    Military Generals Are Just Another Group Of Self-Interested Technocrats

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:20

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    The United States has always had a love affair with certain generals. George Washington, of course, was immensely popular, and thirteen US presidents were generals before they were president.

    But prior to the Second World War, generals as a group were not revered or treated with any particular veneration or respect. In fact, in the nineteenth century, full-time US military officers were often treated with suspicion and contempt. While state militia officers were regarded as indispensable night watchmen who preserved order, the full-time government employees who served in the federal military were often derided as lazy and otherwise unemployable.

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    But now those days are long gone.

    In recent decades, active generals and retired generals have grown into a group of politically influential technocrats who can be regularly seen on evening news programs and are habitually feted and promoted as incorruptible patriots. They are fawned over by media organizations while being paid enormous pensions. Moreover, upon retirement they are able to turn their former government employment into lucrative positions on corporate boards and throughout the private sector.

    The immense deference and trust placed in the opinions and alleged expertise of these men is far beyond what is warranted.  Like all technocrats—whether we’re talking Supreme Court justices or public health bureaucrats—the generals have their own interests and their own agendas.

    This was recently highlighted by the president’s new public feud with some generals.

    At a Labor Day press conference Trump averred:

    “The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t, because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

    It’s always difficult to guess Trump’s motivations and earnestness when he makes statements such as this, but the statement itself isn’t wrong. The generals—retired and not— are often deeply enmeshed with weapons manufacturers and tech firms that rely on Pentagon spending.

    The Generals’ Unimpressive Record

    It’s difficult to see why the nation’s generals enjoy such a stellar reputation.  The US military establishment has lost every major military endeavor since 1945 and has been shown to be fiscally inept at a level that could only be described as criminal indifference. The Pentagon has repeatedly failed audits and has “misplaced” trillions of taxpayer dollars.

    Yet in spite of this impressive record of failure and incompetence, generals continue to be held up by pundits and media organizations as the men who somehow care more about America than anyone else. Moreover, as is typical for technocrats, the generals are used by the establishment to provide intellectual and ideological cover to those who wish to forever expand US military adventurism and intervention. The alleged expertise of the generals—although apparently insufficient to actually win any wars—is said to offer us great insight into how American foreign policy ought to be conducted today.

    The Generals Are Hardly Objective, Unbiased Observers

    Needless to say, this view of the generals veers far from the reality. Moreover, the generals may now be morally and ideologically compromised by their deep ties to weapons manufacturers and the corporate boards on which many generals serve.

    In a blistering article published at the American Conservative last week, Hunter Derensis explains how the image of American generals as selfless public servants is long past its expiration date:

    Perhaps Trump learned the hard way that the generals of the forever wars don’t measure up to the twentieth-century soldiers he adulated growing up.

    For instance, when George Marshall oversaw the deployment of 8.3 million GIs across four continents in World War II, he did so with the assistance of only three other four-star generals. In retirement, Marshall refused to sit on any corporate boards, and passed on multiple lucrative book deals, lest he give the impression that he was profiting from his military record. As he told one publisher, “he had not spent his life serving the government in order to sell his life story to the Saturday Evening Post.”

    Contrast that to the bloated, top-heavy military establishment of today, where an unprecedented forty-one four-star generals oversee only 1.3 million men[-] and women-at-arms. These men, selected and groomed because of their safe habits, spend years patting themselves on the back for managing wars-not-won, awaiting the day they can cash in. According to an analysis by The Boston Globe, in the mid-1990s nearly 50% of three- and four-star generals went on to work as consultants or executives for the arms industry. In 2006, at the height of the Iraq War, that number swelled to over 80% of retirees.

    The examples are as endless as America’s foreign occupations: former Director of Naval Intelligence Jack Dorsett joined the board of Northrop-Grumman; he was later followed by former Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh; meanwhile, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright went to Raytheon; former Chairs of the Joint Chiefs—the highest ranking position in the military—William J. Crowe, John Shalikashvili, Richard Myers, and Joseph Dunford went on to work for General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and Lockheed-Martin, respectively.

    Just as former presidents are able to turn their fame into multimillion dollar fortunes (as the Obamas and Clintons have done) generals are able to engage in very similar activities. Derensis continues:

    General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, in between his forced retirement from the Marine Corps and appointment as Secretary of Defense, joined the board of General Dynamics where he was paid over a million dollars in salary and benefits. Returning to public life, Mattis then spent two years cajoling President Trump into keeping the U.S. military engaged in places as disparate as Afghanistan, Syria, and Africa. “Sir, we’re doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,” Mattis told his commander-in-chief.

    Left unsaid was that a strategic withdrawal would also lead to a precipitous decline in Mattis’ future stock options, which he regained after he rejoined General Dynamics following his December 2018 resignation.

    None of this proves generals are all amoral cynics, of course. It is quite possible to want a safe and prosperous America while also being an opportunist who’s always on the lookout for new ways to turn one’s life of living off the sweat of the taxpayer into some additional easy cash.

    But what this all shows us is that it’s time to start viewing the generals for what they are: lifelong bureaucrats who upon retirement are more than happy to use their easy and vaunted experience in government as a means to fame, adulation, and easy money. After all, in the modern world, generals don’t become generals through courage on the battlefield, or even through any particularly insightful thinking or expertise. It’s not 1944, and these guys aren’t exactly George S. Patton.

    Today’s generals are politicos, bureaucrats, and Washington insiders whose primary skill set lies in gaining influence in the halls of Congress and on cable TV shows. It’s very easy and rewarding work. If you can get it.

  • Tesla Sues In US Court Of International Trade To Block Trump's Tariffs On China
    Tesla Sues In US Court Of International Trade To Block Trump’s Tariffs On China

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:00

    Tesla, which we have long suspected to be getting awfully comfortable with China (see this piece and this one), isn’t exactly going out of its way to prove us wrong.

    Instead, in what appears to be a move putting Elon Musk’s interests and China’s interests ahead of that of the United States, Tesla has sued in the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, seeking an order that declares President Trump’s tariffs against China unlawful.

    The company is also seeking a refund, with interest, of tariffs it has already paid, according to Bloomberg.

    U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has been named as a defendant in the case. Recall, his office denied Tesla’s bid to avoid the 25% tariffs last year. The tariffs affect Chinese-made computer and display screens that are used for Tesla’s Model 3 electric vehicle. 

    Recall, we wrote at the beginning of August that Elon Musk’s distaste for the U.S. was starting to become palpable.

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    The Tesla CEO – who has made himself billions off the back of U.S. government subsidies and the U.S. taxpayer – took to the “Daily Drive” podcast earlier this summer and called the people of China “smart” and “hard working” while at the same time calling U.S. citizens “entitled” and “complacent”.

    He specifically called out both New York and California, states whose taxpayers have literally funded Tesla’s business with massive tax breaks amounting to billions. 

    When asked about China as an EV strategy leader worldwide, Musk responded:  “China rocks in my opinion. The energy in China is great. People there – there’s like a lot of smart, hard working people. And they’re really — they’re not entitled, they’re not complacent, whereas I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York.”

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Sep 23

Today’s News 23rd September 2020

  • Airbus Reveals Three "Carbon-Free" Commercial Aircraft For 2035 Flight
    Airbus Reveals Three “Carbon-Free” Commercial Aircraft For 2035 Flight

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 02:45

    On Monday, Airbus revealed three visual concepts for “zero-emission” commercial airliners powered by hydrogen, which could enter service by 2035. 

    The planemaker’s push for the world’s first zero-emission commercial aircraft is part of a much larger ambition for emission-reducing airliners as non-governmental organizations, such as the OECD, are urging industries and countries to begin the transformation to a green economy to power the recovery following the virus-pandemic downturn. 

    Three carbon-free commercial aircraft were unveiled, including a turbofan design, turboprop design, and “blended-wing body” design. Airbus said it’s “leading the way in the decarbonization of the entire aviation industry.” 

    “This is a historic moment for the commercial aviation sector as a whole, and we intend to play a leading role in the most important transition this industry has ever seen. The concepts we unveil today offer the world a glimpse of our ambition to drive a bold vision for the future of zero-emission flight,” said Guillaume Faury, Airbus CEO. “I strongly believe that the use of hydrogen – both in synthetic fuels and as a primary power source for commercial aircraft – has the potential to significantly reduce aviation’s climate impact.”  

    Turbofan Design 

    A turbofan design (120-200 passengers) with a range of 2,000+ nautical miles, capable of operating transcontinentally and powered by a modified gas-turbine engine running on hydrogen, rather than jet fuel combustion. The liquid hydrogen will be stored and distributed via tanks located behind the rear pressure bulkhead. 

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    Turboprop Design

    A turboprop design (up to 100 passengers) using a turboprop engine instead of a turbofan and also powered by hydrogen combustion in modified gas-turbine engines, which would be capable of traveling more than 1,000 nautical miles, making it a perfect option for short-haul trips.

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    “Blended-Wing Body” Design

    A “blended-wing body” design (up to 200 passengers) concept in which the wings merge with the main body of the aircraft with a range similar to that of the turbofan concept. The exceptionally wide fuselage opens up multiple options for hydrogen storage and distribution, and for cabin layout. 

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    Faury continued: 

    “These concepts will help us explore and mature the design and layout of the world’s first climate-neutral, zero-emission commercial aircraft, which we aim to put into service by 2035. 

    “The transition to hydrogen, as the primary power source for these concept planes, will require decisive action from the entire aviation ecosystem. Together with the support from government and industrial partners, we can rise to this challenge to scale-up renewable energy and hydrogen for the sustainable future of the aviation industry.”

    While it’s no secret the airline industry is attempting to find a way to remedy its carbon footprint, challenges still persist for storing volatile liquid hydrogen during flight. Airbus has dismissed concerns that hydrogen is a risky substance and has called for new investments in energy infrastructure.

    Global aviation accounted for about 2.4% of all emissions in 2018.

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    Paul Stein, chief technology officer for engine maker Rolls-Royce, told the AFP in early 2020 that the industry is “under significant pressure to improve its sustainability image.” 

    Airlines are “working with us to find pathways to increase the availability of sustainable fuels, look at how electrification can impact them… and also looking to more and more efficient engines and airframes,” Stein said. 

    And along with hydrogen, the airline industry is also attempting to revive supersonic flight. 

  • "No Medical Justification For Emergency Measures" – Open Letter From 100s Of Doctors, Health Pros Urges End To Lockdowns
    “No Medical Justification For Emergency Measures” – Open Letter From 100s Of Doctors, Health Pros Urges End To Lockdowns

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 02:00

    AIER reports that the following letter has made an impact on public health authorities not only in Belgium but around the world. The text could pertain to any case in which states locked down their citizens rather than allow people freedom and permit medical professionals to bear the primary job of disease mitigation. 

    So far it has been signed by 435 medical doctors, 1,439 medically trained health professionals, and 9,901 citizens.

    *  *  *

    Open letter from medical doctors and health professionals to all belgian authorities and all belgian media.

    We, Belgian doctors and health professionals, wish to express our serious concern about the evolution of the situation in the recent months surrounding the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We call on politicians to be independently and critically informed in the decision-making process and in the compulsory implementation of corona-measures. We ask for an open debate, where all experts are represented without any form of censorship. After the initial panic surrounding covid-19, the objective facts now show a completely different picture – there is no medical justification for any emergency policy anymore.

    The current crisis management has become totally disproportionate and causes more damage than it does any good.

    We call for an end to all measures and ask for an immediate restoration of our normal democratic governance and legal structures and of all our civil liberties.

    ‘A cure must not be worse than the problem’ is a thesis that is more relevant than ever in the current situation. We note, however, that the collateral damage now being caused to the population will have a greater impact in the short and long term on all sections of the population than the number of people now being safeguarded from corona.

    In our opinion, the current corona measures and the strict penalties for non-compliance with them are contrary to the values formulated by the Belgian Supreme Health Council, which, until recently, as the health authority, has always ensured quality medicine in our country: “Science – Expertise – Quality – Impartiality – Independence – Transparency”.

    We believe that the policy has introduced mandatory measures that are not sufficiently scientifically based, unilaterally directed, and that there is not enough space in the media for an open debate in which different views and opinions are heard. In addition, each municipality and province now has the authorisation to add its own measures, whether well-founded or not.

    Moreover, the strict repressive policy on corona strongly contrasts with the government’s minimal policy when it comes to disease prevention, strengthening our own immune system through a healthy lifestyle, optimal care with attention for the individual and investment in care personnel.

    The concept of health

    In 1948, the WHO defined health as follows: ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or other physical impairment’.

    Health, therefore, is a broad concept that goes beyond the physical and also relates to the emotional and social well-being of the individual. Belgium also has a duty, from the point of view of subscribing to fundamental human rights, to include these human rights in its decision-making when it comes to measures taken in the context of public health.

    The current global measures taken to combat SARS-CoV-2 violate to a large extent this view of health and human rights. Measures include compulsory wearing of a mask (also in open air and during sporting activities, and in some municipalities even when there are no other people in the vicinity), physical distancing, social isolation, compulsory quarantine for some groups and hygiene measures.

    The predicted pandemic with millions of deaths

    At the beginning of the pandemic, the measures were understandable and widely supported, even if there were differences in implementation in the countries around us. The WHO originally predicted a pandemic that would claim 3.4% victims, in other words millions of deaths, and a highly contagious virus for which no treatment or vaccine was available.  This would put unprecedented pressure on the intensive care units (ICUs) of our hospitals.

    This led to a global alarm situation, never seen in the history of mankind: “flatten the curve” was represented by a lockdown that shut down the entire society and economy and quarantined healthy people. Social distancing became the new normal in anticipation of a rescue vaccine.

    The facts about covid-19

    Gradually, the alarm bell was sounded from many sources: the objective facts showed a completely different reality.

    The course of covid-19 followed the course of a normal wave of infection similar to a flu season. As every year, we see a mix of flu viruses following the curve: first the rhinoviruses, then the influenza A and B viruses, followed by the coronaviruses. There is nothing different from what we normally see.

    The use of the non-specific PCR test, which produces many false positives, showed an exponential picture.  This test was rushed through with an emergency procedure and was never seriously self-tested. The creator expressly warned that this test was intended for research and not for diagnostics.

    The PCR test works with cycles of amplification of genetic material – a piece of genome is amplified each time. Any contamination (e.g. other viruses, debris from old virus genomes) can possibly result in false positives.

    The test does not measure how many viruses are present in the sample. A real viral infection means a massive presence of viruses, the so-called virus load. If someone tests positive, this does not mean that that person is actually clinically infected, is ill or is going to become ill. Koch’s postulate was not fulfilled (“The pure agent found in a patient with complaints can provoke the same complaints in a healthy person”).

    Since a positive PCR test does not automatically indicate active infection or infectivity, this does not justify the social measures taken, which are based solely on these tests.

    Lockdown.

    If we compare the waves of infection in countries with strict lockdown policies to countries that did not impose lockdowns (Sweden, Iceland …), we see similar curves.  So there is no link between the imposed lockdown and the course of the infection. Lockdown has not led to a lower mortality rate.

    If we look at the date of application of the imposed lockdowns we see that the lockdowns were set after the peak was already over and the number of cases decreasing. The drop was therefore not the result of the taken measures.

    As every year, it seems that climatic conditions (weather, temperature and humidity) and growing immunity are more likely to reduce the wave of infection.

    Our immune system

    For thousands of years, the human body has been exposed daily to moisture and droplets containing infectious microorganisms (viruses, bacteria and fungi).

    The penetration of these microorganisms is prevented by an advanced defence mechanism – the immune system. A strong immune system relies on normal daily exposure to these microbial influences. Overly hygienic measures have a detrimental effect on our immunity.  Only people with a weak or faulty immune system should be protected by extensive hygiene or social distancing.

    Influenza will re-emerge in the autumn (in combination with covid-19) and a possible decrease in natural resilience may lead to further casualties.

    Our immune system consists of two parts: a congenital, non-specific immune system and an adaptive immune system.

    The non-specific immune system forms a first barrier: skin, saliva, gastric juice, intestinal mucus, vibratory hair cells, commensal flora, … and prevents the attachment of micro-organisms to tissue.

    If they do attach, macrophages can cause the microorganisms to be encapsulated and destroyed.

    The adaptive immune system consists of mucosal immunity (IgA antibodies, mainly produced by cells in the intestines and lung epithelium), cellular immunity (T-cell activation), which can be generated in contact with foreign substances or microorganisms, and humoral immunity (IgM and IgG antibodies produced by the B cells).

    Recent research shows that both systems are highly entangled.

    It appears that most people already have a congenital or general immunity to e.g. influenza and other viruses. This is confirmed by the findings on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, which was quarantined because of a few passengers who died of Covid-19. Most of the passengers were elderly and were in an ideal situation of transmission on the ship. However, 75% did not appear to be infected. So even in this high-risk group, the majority are resistant to the virus.

    A study in the journal Cell shows that most people neutralise the coronavirus by mucosal (IgA) and cellular immunity (T-cells), while experiencing few or no symptoms.

    Researchers found up to 60% SARS-Cov-2 reactivity with CD4+T cells in a non-infected population, suggesting cross-reactivity with other cold (corona) viruses.

    Most people therefore already have a congenital or cross-immunity because they were already in contact with variants of the same virus.

    The antibody formation (IgM and IgG) by B-cells only occupies a relatively small part of our immune system. This may explain why, with an antibody percentage of 5-10%, there may be a group immunity anyway. The efficacy of vaccines is assessed precisely on the basis of whether or not we have these antibodies. This is a misrepresentation.

    Most people who test positive (PCR) have no complaints. Their immune system is strong enough. Strengthening natural immunity is a much more logical approach. Prevention is an important, insufficiently highlighted pillar: healthy, full-fledged nutrition, exercise in fresh air, without a mask, stress reduction and nourishing emotional and social contacts.

    Consequences of social isolation on physical and mental health

    Social isolation and economic damage led to an increase in depression, anxiety, suicides, intra-family violence and child abuse.

    Studies have shown that the more social and emotional commitments people have, the more resistant they are to viruses. It is much more likely that isolation and quarantine have fatal consequences.

    The isolation measures have also led to physical inactivity in many older people due to their being forced to stay indoors. However, sufficient exercise has a positive effect on cognitive functioning, reducing depressive complaints and anxiety and improving physical health, energy levels, well-being and, in general, quality of life.

    Fear, persistent stress and loneliness induced by social distancing have a proven negative influence on psychological and general health.

    A highly contagious virus with millions of deaths without any treatment?

    Mortality turned out to be many times lower than expected and close to that of a normal seasonal flu (0.2%).

    The number of registered corona deaths therefore still seems to be overestimated.

    There is a difference between death by corona and death with corona. Humans are often carriers of multiple viruses and potentially pathogenic bacteria at the same time. Taking into account the fact that most people who developed serious symptoms suffered from additional pathology, one cannot simply conclude that the corona-infection was the cause of death. This was mostly not taken into account in the statistics.

    The most vulnerable groups can be clearly identified. The vast majority of deceased patients were 80 years of age or older. The majority (70%) of the deceased, younger than 70 years, had an underlying disorder, such as cardiovascular suffering, diabetes mellitus, chronic lung disease or obesity. The vast majority of infected persons (>98%) did not or hardly became ill or recovered spontaneously.

    Meanwhile, there is an affordable, safe and efficient therapy available for those who do show severe symptoms of disease in the form of HCQ (hydroxychloroquine), zinc and AZT (azithromycin). Rapidly applied this therapy leads to recovery and often prevents hospitalisation. Hardly anyone has to die now.

    This effective therapy has been confirmed by the clinical experience of colleagues in the field with impressive results. This contrasts sharply with the theoretical criticism (insufficient substantiation by double-blind studies) which in some countries (e.g. the Netherlands) has even led to a ban on this therapy. A meta-analysis in The Lancet, which could not demonstrate an effect of HCQ, was withdrawn. The primary data sources used proved to be unreliable and 2 out of 3 authors were in conflict of interest. However, most of the guidelines based on this study remained unchanged …

    We have serious questions about this state of affairs.

    In the US, a group of doctors in the field, who see patients on a daily basis, united in “America’s Frontline Doctors” and gave a press conference which has been watched millions of times.

    French Prof Didier Raoult of the Institut d’Infectiologie de Marseille (IHU) also presented this promising combination therapy as early as April. Dutch GP Rob Elens, who cured many patients in his practice with HCQ and zinc, called on colleagues in a petition for freedom of therapy.

    The definitive evidence comes from the epidemiological follow-up in Switzerland: mortality rates compared with and without this therapy.

    From the distressing media images of ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) where people were suffocating and given artificial respiration in agony, we now know that this was caused by an exaggerated immune response with intravascular coagulation in the pulmonary blood vessels. The administration of blood thinners and dexamethasone and the avoidance of artificial ventilation, which was found to cause additional damage to lung tissue, means that this dreaded complication, too, is virtually not fatal anymore.

    It is therefore not a killer virus, but a well-treatable condition.

    Propagation 

    Spreading occurs by drip infection (only for patients who cough or sneeze) and aerosols in closed, unventilated rooms. Contamination is therefore not possible in the open air. Contact tracing and epidemiological studies show that healthy people (or positively tested asymptomatic carriers) are virtually unable to transmit the virus. Healthy people therefore do not put each other at risk.

    Transfer via objects (e.g. money, shopping or shopping trolleys) has not been scientifically proven.

    All this seriously calls into question the whole policy of social distancing and compulsory mouth masks for healthy people – there is no scientific basis for this.

    Masks

    Oral masks belong in contexts where contacts with proven at-risk groups or people with upper respiratory complaints take place, and in a medical context/hospital-retirement home setting. They reduce the risk of droplet infection by sneezing or coughing. Oral masks in healthy individuals are ineffective against the spread of viral infections.

    Wearing a mask is not without side effects. Oxygen deficiency (headache, nausea, fatigue, loss of concentration) occurs fairly quickly, an effect similar to altitude sickness. Every day we now see patients complaining of headaches, sinus problems, respiratory problems and hyperventilation due to wearing masks. In addition, the accumulated CO2 leads to a toxic acidification of the organism which affects our immunity. Some experts even warn of an increased transmission of the virus in case of inappropriate use of the mask.

    Our Labour Code (Codex 6) refers to a CO2 content (ventilation in workplaces) of 900 ppm, maximum 1200 ppm in special circumstances. After wearing a mask for one minute, this toxic limit is considerably exceeded to values that are three to four times higher than these maximum values. Anyone who wears a mask is therefore in an extreme poorly ventilated room.

    Inappropriate use of masks without a comprehensive medical cardio-pulmonary test file is therefore not recommended by recognised safety specialists for workers. 

    Hospitals have a sterile environment in their operating rooms where staff wear masks and there is precise regulation of humidity / temperature with appropriately monitored oxygen flow to compensate for this, thus meeting strict safety standards.

    A second corona wave?

    A second wave is now being discussed in Belgium, with a further tightening of the measures as a result. However, closer examination of Sciensano’s figures (latest report of 3 September 2020) shows that, although there has been an increase in the number of infections since mid-July, there was no increase in hospital admissions or deaths at that time. It is therefore not a second wave of corona, but a so-called “case chemistry” due to an increased number of tests.

    The number of hospital admissions or deaths showed a shortlasting minimal increase in recent weeks, but in interpreting it, we must take into account the recent heatwave. In addition, the vast majority of the victims are still in the population group >75 years.

    This indicates that the proportion of the measures taken in relation to the working population and young people is disproportionate to the intended objectives. 

    The vast majority of the positively tested “infected” persons are in the age group of the active population, which does not develop any or merely limited symptoms, due to a well-functioning immune system. 

    So nothing has changed – the peak is over.

    Strengthening a prevention policy 

    The corona measures form a striking contrast to the minimal policy pursued by the government until now, when it comes to well-founded measures with proven health benefits such as the sugar tax, the ban on (e-)cigarettes and making healthy food, exercise and social support networks financially attractive and widely accessible. It is a missed opportunity for a better prevention policy that could have brought about a change in mentality in all sections of the population with clear results in terms of public health. At present, only 3% of the health care budget goes to prevention. 2

    The Hippocratic Oath

    As a doctor, we took the Hippocratic Oath:

    “I will above all care for my patients, promote their health and alleviate their suffering”.

    “I will inform my patients correctly.”

    “Even under pressure, I will not use my medical knowledge for practices that are against humanity.”

    The current measures force us to act against this oath.

    Other health professionals have a similar code.

    The ‘primum non nocere’, which every doctor and health professional assumes, is also undermined by the current measures and by the prospect of the possible introduction of a generalised vaccine, which is not subject to extensive prior testing.

    Vaccine

    Survey studies on influenza vaccinations show that in 10 years we have only succeeded three times in developing a vaccine with an efficiency rate of more than 50%. Vaccinating our elderly appears to be inefficient. Over 75 years of age, the efficacy is almost non-existent.

    Due to the continuous natural mutation of viruses, as we also see every year in the case of the influenza virus, a vaccine is at most a temporary solution, which requires new vaccines each time afterwards. An untested vaccine, which is implemented by emergency procedure and for which the manufacturers have already obtained legal immunity from possible harm, raises serious questions.  We do not wish to use our patients as guinea pigs.

    On a global scale, 700 000 cases of damage or death are expected as a result of the vaccine.

    If 95% of people experience Covid-19 virtually symptom-free, the risk of exposure to an untested vaccine is irresponsible.

    The role of the media and the official communication plan

    Over the past few months, newspaper, radio and TV makers seemed to stand almost uncritically behind the panel of experts and the government, there, where it is precisely the press that should be critical and prevent one-sided governmental communication. This has led to a public communication in our news media, that was more like propaganda than objective reporting.

    In our opinion, it is the task of journalism to bring news as objectively and neutrally as possible, aimed at finding the truth and critically controlling power, with dissenting experts also being given a forum in which to express themselves.

    This view is supported by the journalistic codes of ethics.

    The official story that a lockdown was necessary, that this was the only possible solution, and that everyone stood behind this lockdown, made it difficult for people with a different view, as well as experts, to express a different opinion.

    Alternative opinions were ignored or ridiculed. We have not seen open debates in the media, where different views could be expressed.

    We were also surprised by the many videos and articles by many scientific experts and authorities, which were and are still being removed from social media. We feel that this does not fit in with a free, democratic constitutional state, all the more so as it leads to tunnel vision. This policy also has a paralysing effect and feeds fear and concern in society. In this context, we reject the intention of censorship of dissidents in the European Union!

    The way in which Covid-19 has been portrayed by politicians and the media has not done the situation any good either. War terms were popular and warlike language was not lacking. There has often been mention of a ‘war’ with an ‘invisible enemy’ who has to be ‘defeated’. The use in the media of phrases such as ‘care heroes in the front line’ and ‘corona victims’ has further fuelled fear, as has the idea that we are globally dealing with a ‘killer virus’.

    The relentless bombardment with figures, that were unleashed on the population day after day, hour after hour, without interpreting those figures, without comparing them to flu deaths in other years, without comparing them to deaths from other causes, has induced a real psychosis of fear in the population. This is not information, this is manipulation.

    We deplore the role of the WHO in this, which has called for the infodemic (i.e. all divergent opinions from the official discourse, including by experts with different views) to be silenced by an unprecedented media censorship.

    We urgently call on the media to take their responsibilities here!

    We demand an open debate in which all experts are heard.

    Emergency law versus Human Rights

    The general principle of good governance calls for the proportionality of government decisions to be weighed up in the light of the Higher Legal Standards: any interference by government must comply with the fundamental rights as protected in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Interference by public authorities is only permitted in crisis situations. In other words, discretionary decisions must be proportionate to an absolute necessity.

    The measures currently taken concern interference in the exercise of, among other things, the right to respect of private and family life, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association, the right to education, etc., and must therefore comply with fundamental rights as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

    For example, in accordance with Article 8(2) of the ECHR, interference with the right to private and family life is permissible only if the measures are necessary in the interests of national security, public safety, the economic well-being of the country, the protection of public order and the prevention of criminal offences, the protection of health or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others, the regulatory text on which the interference is based must be sufficiently clear, foreseeable and proportionate to the objectives pursued.

    The predicted pandemic of millions of deaths seemed to respond to these crisis conditions, leading to the establishment of an emergency government. Now that the objective facts show something completely different, the condition of inability to act otherwise (no time to evaluate thoroughly if there is an emergency) is no longer in place. Covid-19 is not a cold virus, but a well treatable condition with a mortality rate comparable to the seasonal flu. In other words, there is no longer an insurmountable obstacle to public health.

    There is no state of emergency.

    Immense damage caused by the current policies

    An open discussion on corona measures means that, in addition to the years of life gained by corona patients, we must also take into account other factors affecting the health of the entire population. These include damage in the psychosocial domain (increase in depression, anxiety, suicides, intra-family violence and child abuse)16 and economic damage.

    If we take this collateral damage into account, the current policy is out of all proportion, the proverbial use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

    We find it shocking that the government is invoking health as a reason for the emergency law.

    As doctors and health professionals, in the face of a virus which, in terms of its harmfulness, mortality and transmissibility, approaches the seasonal influenza, we can only reject these extremely disproportionate measures.

    • We therefore demand an immediate end to all measures.

    • We are questioning the legitimacy of the current advisory experts, who meet behind closed doors.

    • Following on from ACU 2020  https://acu2020.org/nederlandse-versie/ we call for an in-depth examination of the role of the WHO and the possible influence of conflicts of interest in this organisation. It was also at the heart of the fight against the “infodemic”, i.e. the systematic censorship of all dissenting opinions in the media. This is unacceptable for a democratic state governed by the rule of law.

    Distribution of this letter

    We would like to make a public appeal to our professional associations and fellow carers to give their opinion on the current measures.

    We draw attention to and call for an open discussion in which carers can and dare to speak out.

    With this open letter, we send out the signal that progress on the same footing does more harm than good, and call on politicians to inform themselves independently and critically about the available evidence – including that from experts with different views, as long as it is based on sound science – when rolling out a policy, with the aim of promoting optimum health.

    With concern, hope and in a personal capacity.

  • Chinese Property Tycoon Sentenced To 18 Years In Prison After Calling President Xi A "Clown"
    Chinese Property Tycoon Sentenced To 18 Years In Prison After Calling President Xi A “Clown”

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 01:00

    President Xi’s intolerance for criticism is widely known to the outside world – and feared within China.

    The Chinese internet was scrubbed of practically all references to the children’s cartoon “Winnie the Pooh” because some Chinese dissidents mocked Xi over his alleged ‘resemblance’ to the character, even using it as a code word (for the record, they call Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam “piglet”).

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    And in the latest example of the heavy handed punishments that await anybody who dares criticize the ‘dear leader’, a former Chinese property tycoon who openly mocked Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has just been sentenced to 18 years in prison on corruption charges.

    The sentence was handed down after Ren Zhiqiang, former chairman of the state-owned real estate group, disappeared in March after publishing an essay where he apparently called President Xi “a clown”. It was published after Xi unveiled plans for combating the virus.

    Of course, the official charges against Ren included embezzlement and accepting bribes, since Xi typically removes his detractors under the auspices of his anti-corruption drive.

    The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate Court found 69-year-old Ren guilty of embezzlement, bribery, misuse of public funds and abuse of power at a state-owned business, according to a notice released on Tuesday by the court. A real-estate developer for most of his career, he was known as a “big cannon” for his outspokenness and even earned the nickname “China’s Donald Trump.”

    The court accused Ren of embezzling $7.3 million in public money, and accused him of accepting bribes of more than $180,000, while misusing around $9 million. He also alleged abused his power and caused losses of more than $17 million at the state-owned enterprise, while he personally profited.

  • Hyperinflation, Fascism, & War: How The New World Order May Be Defeated Once More
    Hyperinflation, Fascism, & War: How The New World Order May Be Defeated Once More

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 00:05

    Authored by Matthew Ehret via the Saker Blog,

    While the world’s attention is absorbed by tectonic shifts unfolding across America as “a perfect storm of civil war, and military coup threatens to undo both the elections and the very foundations of the republic itself,” something very ominous has appeared “off of the radar” of most onlookers.

    This something is a financial collapse of the trans-Atlantic banks that threatens to unleash chaos upon the world. It is this collapse that underlies the desperate efforts being made by the neo-con drive for total war with Russia, China and other members of the growing Mutlipolar Alliance today.

    In recent articles, I have mentioned that the Bank of England-led “solution” to this oncoming financial blowout of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble is being pushed under the cover of a “Great Global Reset” which is an ugly and desperate effort to use COVID-19 as a cover for the imposition of a new post-covid world order operating system. Since the new “rules” of this new system are very similar to the 1923 Bank of England “solution” to Germany’s economic chaos which eventually required a fascist governance mechanism to impose it onto the masses, I wish to take a deeper look at the causes and effects of Weimar Germany’s completely un-necessary collapse into hyperinflation and chaos during the period of 1919-1923.

    In this essay, I will go further to examine how those same architects of hyperfinflation came close to establishing a global bankers’ dictatorship in 1933 and how that early attempt at a New World Order was fortunately derailed through a bold fight which has been written out of popular history books.

    We will investigate in depth how a major war broke out within America led by anti-imperial patriots in opposition to the forces of Wall Street and London’s Deep State and we will examine how this clash of paradigms came to a head in 1943-1945.

    This historical study is not being conducted for entertainment, nor should this be seen as a purely academic exercise, but is being created for the simple fact that the world is coming to a total systemic meltdown and unless certain suppressed facts of 20th century history are brought to light, then those forces who have destroyed our collective memory of what we once were will remain in the drivers seat as society is carried into a new age of fascism and world war.

    Versailles and the Destruction of Germany

    Britain had been the leading hand behind the orchestration of WWI and the destruction of the potential German-Russian-American-Ottoman alliance that had begun to take form by the late 19th century as foolish Kaiser Wilhelm discovered (though sadly too late) when he said:

     “the world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate aim of which is the ruin of Germany. England, France and Russia have conspired for our annihilation… that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but surely created by Edward VII”.

    Just as the British oligarchy managed the war, so too did they organize the reparations conference in France which, among other things, imposed impossible debt repayments upon a defeated Germany and created the League of Nations which was meant to become the instrument for a “post-nation state world order”. Lloyd George led the British delegation alongside his assistant Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Leo Amery, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord John Maynard Keynes who have a long term agenda to bring about a global dictatorship. All of these figures were members of the newly emerging Round Table Movement, that had taken full control of Britain by ousting Asquith in 1916, and which is at the heart of today’s “deep state”.

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    After the 1918 Armistice dismantled Germany’s army and navy, the once powerful nation was now forced to pay the impossible sum of 132 billion gold marks to the victors and had to give up territories representing 10% of its population (Alsace-Loraine, Ruhr, and North Silesia) which made up 15% of its arable land, 12% of its livestock, 74% of its iron ore, 63% of its zinc production, and 26% of its coal. Germany also had to give up 8000 locomotives, 225 000 railcars and all of its colonies. It was a field day of modern pillage.

    Germany was left with very few options. Taxes were increased and imports were cut entirely while exports were increased. This policy (reminiscent of the IMF austerity techniques in use today) failed entirely as both fell 60%. Germany gave up half of its gold supply and still barely a dent was made in the debt payments. By June 1920 the decision was made to begin a new strategy: increase the printing press. Rather than the “miracle cure” which desperate monetarists foolishly believed it would be, this solution resulted in an asymptotic devaluation of the currency into hyperinflation. From June 1920 to October 1923 the money supply in circulation skyrocketed from 68.1 gold marks to 496.6 quintillion gold marks. In June 1922, 300 marks exchanged $1 US and in November 1923, it took 42 trillion marks to get $1 US! Images are still available of Germans pushing wheelbarrows of cash down the street, just to buy a stick of butter and bread (1Kg of Bread sold for $428 billion marks in 1923).

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    With the currency’s loss of value, industrial output fell by 50%, unemployment rose to over 30% and food intake collapsed by over half of pre-war levels. German director Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse (The Gambler) exposed the insanity of German population’s collapse into speculative insanity as those who had the means began betting against the German mark in order to protect themselves thus only helping to collapse the mark from within. This is very reminiscent of those Americans today short selling the US dollar rather than fighting for a systemic solution.

    There was resistance.

    The dark effects of Versailles were not unknown and Germany’s Nazi-stained destiny was anything but pre-determined. It is a provable fact often left out of history books that patriotic forces from Russia, America and Germany attempted courageously to change the tragic trajectory of hyperinflation and fascism which WOULD HAVE prevented the rise of Hitler and WWII had their efforts not been sabotaged.

    From America itself, a new Presidential team under the leadership of William Harding quickly reversed the pro-League of Nations agenda of the rabidly anglophile President Woodrow Wilson. A leading US industrialist named Washington Baker Vanderclip who had led in the world’s largest trade agreement in history with Russia to the tune of $3 billion in 1920 had called Wilson “an autocrat at the inspiration of the British government.” Unlike Wilson, President Harding both supported the US-Russia trade deal and undermined the League of Nations by re-enforcing America’s sovereignty, declaring bi-lateral treaties with Russia, Hungary and Austria outside of the league’s control in 1921. The newly-formed British Roundtable Movement in America (set up as the Council on Foreign Relations) were not pleased.

    Just as Harding was maneuvering to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an entente with Lenin, the great president ate some “bad oysters” and died on August 2, 1923. While no autopsy was ever conducted, his death brought a decade of Anglophile Wall Street control into America and ended all opposition to World Government from the Presidency. This period resulted in the speculation-driven bubble of the roaring 20s whose crash on black Friday in 1929 nearly unleashed a fascist hell in America.

    The Russia-Germany Rapallo Treaty is De-Railed

    After months of organizing, leading representatives of Russia and Germany agreed to an alternative solution to the Versailles Treaty which would have given new life to Germany’s patriots and established a powerful Russia-German friendship in Europe that would have upset other nefarious agendas.

    Under the leadership of German Industrialist and Foreign Minster Walter Rathenau, and his counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, the treaty was signed in Rapallo, Italy on April 16, 1922 premised upon the forgiveness of all war debts and a renouncement of all territorial claims from either side. The treaty said Russia and Germany would “co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries.”

    When Rathenau was assassinated by a terrorist cell called the Organization Consul on June 24, 1922 the success of the Rapallo Treaty lost its steam and the nation fell into a deeper wave of chaos and money printing. The Organization Consul had taken the lead in the murder of over 354 German political figures between 1919-1923, and when they were banned in 1922, the group merely changed its name and morphed into other German paramilitary groups (such as the Freikorps) becoming the military arm of the new National Socialist Party.

    1923: City of London’s Solution is imposed

    When the hyperinflationary blowout of Germany resulted in total un-governability of the state, a solution took the form of the Wall Street authored “Dawes Plan” which necessitated the use of a London-trained golem by the name of Hjalmar Schacht. First introduced as Currency Commissioner in November 1923 and soon President of the Reichsbank, Schacht’s first act was to visit Bank of England’s governor Montagu Norman in London who provided Schacht a blueprint for proceeding with Germany’s restructuring. Schacht returned to “solve” the crisis with the very same poison that caused it.

    First announcing a new currency called the “rentenmark” set on a fixed value exchanging 1 trillion reichsmarks for 1 new rentenmark, Germans were robbed yet again. This new currency would operate under “new rules” never before seen in Germany’s history: Mass privatizations resulted in Anglo-American conglomerates purchasing state enterprises. IG Farben, Thyssen, Union Banking, Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil, JP Morgan and Union Banking took control Germany’s finances, mining and industrial interests under the supervision of John Foster Dulles, Montagu Norman, Averill Harriman and other deep state actors. This was famously exposed in the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremburg by Stanley Kramer.

    Schacht next cut credit to industries, raised taxes and imposed mass austerity on “useless spending”. 390 000 civil servants were fired, unions and collective bargaining was destroyed and wages were slashed by 15%.

    As one can imagine, this destruction of life after the hell of Versailles was intolerable and civil unrest began to boil over in ways that even the powerful London-Wall Street bankers (and their mercenaries) couldn’t control. An enforcer was needed unhindered by the republic’s democratic institutions to force Schacht’s economics onto the people. An up-and-coming rabble rousing failed painter who had made waves in a Beerhall Putsch on November 8, 1923 was perfect.

    One Last Attempt to Save Germany

    Though Hitler grew in power over the coming decade of Schachtian economics, one last republican effort was made to prevent Germany from plunging into a fascist hell in the form of the November 1932 election victory of General Kurt von Schleicher as Chancellor of Germany. Schleicher had been a co-architect of Rapallo alongside Rathenau a decade earlier and was a strong proponent of the Friedrich List Society’s program of public works and internal improvements promoted by industrialist Wilhelm Lautenbach. The Nazi party’s public support collapsed and it found itself bankrupt. Hitler had fallen into depression and was even contemplating suicide when “a legal coup” was unleashed by the Anglo-American elite resulting in Wall Street funds pouring into Nazi coffers.

    By January 30, 1933 Hitler gained Chancellorship where he quickly took dictatorial powers under the “state of emergency” caused by the burning of the Reichstag in March 1933. By 1934 the Night of the Long Knives saw General Schleicher and hundreds of other German patriots assassinated and it was only a few years until the City of London-Wall Street Frankenstein monster stormed across the world.

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    How the 1929 Crash was Manufactured

    While everyone knows that the 1929 market crash unleashed four years of hell in America which quickly spread across Europe under the great depression, not many people have realized that this was not inevitable, but rather a controlled blowout.

    The bubbles of the 1920s were unleashed with the early death of President William Harding in 1923 and grew under the careful guidance of JP Morgan’s President Coolidge and financier Andrew Mellon (Treasury Secretary) who de-regulated the banks, imposed austerity onto the country, and cooked up a scheme for Broker loans allowing speculators to borrow 90% on their stock. Wall Street was deregulated, investments into the real economy were halted during the 1920s and insanity became the norm. In 1925 broker loans totalled $1.5 billion and grew to $2.6 billion in 1926 and hit $5.7 billion by the end of 1927. By 1928, the stock market was overvalued fourfold!

    When the bubble was sufficiently inflated, a moment was decided upon to coordinate a mass “calling in” of the broker loans. Predictably, no one could pay them resulting in a collapse of the markets. Those “in the know” cleaned up with JP Morgan’s “preferred clients”, and other financial behemoths selling before the crash and then buying up the physical assets of America for pennies on the dollar. One notable person who made his fortune in this manner was Prescott Bush of Brown Brothers Harriman, who went onto bailout a bankrupt Nazi party in 1932. These financiers had a tight allegiance with the City of London and coordinated their operations through the private central banking system of America’s Federal Reserve and Bank of International Settlements.

    The Living Hell that was the Great Depression

    Throughout the Great depression, the population was pushed to its limits making America highly susceptible to fascism as unemployment skyrocketed to 25%, industrial capacity collapsed by 70%, and agricultural prices collapsed far below the cost of production accelerating foreclosures and suicide. Life savings were lost as 4000 banks failed.

    This despair was replicated across Europe and Canada with eugenics-loving fascists gaining popularity across the board. England saw the rise of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1932, English Canada had its own fascist solution with the Rhodes Scholar “Fabian Society” League of Social Reconstruction (which later took over the Liberal Party) calling for the “scientific management of society”. Time magazine had featured Il Duce over 6 times by 1932 and people were being told by that corporate fascism was the economic solution to all of America’s economic woes.

    In the midst of the crisis, the City of London removed itself from the gold standard in 1931 which was a crippling blow to the USA, as it resulted in a flight of gold from America causing a deeper contraction of the money supply and thus inability to respond to the depression. British goods simultaneously swamped the USA crushing what little production was left.

    It was in this atmosphere that one of the least understood battles unfolded in 1933.

    1932: A Bankers’ Dictatorship is Attempted

    In Germany, a surprise victory of Gen. Kurt Schleicher caused the defeat of the London-directed Nazi party in December 1932 threatening to break Germany free of Central Bank tyranny. A few weeks before Schleicher’s victory, Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency in America threatening to regulate the private banks and assert national sovereignty over finance.

    Seeing their plans for global fascism slipping away, the City of London announced that a new global system controlled by Central Banks had to be created post haste. Their objective was to use the economic crisis as an excuse to remove from nation states any power over monetary policy, while enhancing the power of Independent Central Banks as enforcers of “balanced global budgets”. elaborate

    In December 1932, an economic conference “to stabilize the world economy” was organized by the League of Nations under the guidance of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and Bank of England. The BIS was set up as “the Central Bank of Central Banks” in 1930 in order to facilitate WWI debt repayments and was a vital instrument for funding Nazi Germany- long after WWII began. The London Economic Conference brought together 64 nations of the world under a controlled environment chaired by the British Prime Minister and opened by the King himself.

    A resolution passed by the Conference’s Monetary Committee stated:

    “The conference considers it to be essential, in order to provide an international gold standard with the necessary mechanism for satisfactory working, that independent Central Banks, with requisite powers and freedom to carry out an appropriate currency and credit policy, should be created in such developed countries as have not at present an adequate central banking institution” and that “the conference wish to reaffirm the great utility of close and continuous cooperation between Central Banks. The Bank of International Settlements should play an increasingly important part not only by improving contact, but also as an instrument for common action.”

    Echoing the Bank of England’s modern fixation with “mathematical equilibrium”, the resolutions stated that the new global gold standard controlled by central banks was needed “to maintain a fundamental equilibrium in the balance of payments” of countries. The idea was to deprive nation states of their power to generate and direct credit for their own development.

    FDR Torpedoes the London Conference

    Chancellor Schleicher’s resistance to a bankers’ dictatorship was resolved by a “soft coup” ousting the patriotic leader in favor of Adolph Hitler (under the control of a Bank of England toy named Hjalmar Schacht) in January 1933 with Schleicher assassinated the following year. In America, an assassination attempt on Roosevelt was thwarted on February 15, 1933 when a woman knocked the gun out of the hand of an anarchist-freemason in Miami resulting in the death of Chicago’s Mayor Cermak.

    Without FDR’s dead body, the London conference met an insurmountable barrier, as FDR refused to permit any American cooperation. Roosevelt recognized the necessity for a new international system, but he also knew that it had to be organized by sovereign nation states subservient to the general welfare of the people and not central banks dedicated to the welfare of the oligarchy. Before any international changes could occur, nation states castrated from the effects of the depression had to first recover economically in order to stay above the power of the financiers.

    By May 1933, the London Conference crumbled when FDR complained that the conference’s inability to address the real issues of the crisis is “a catastrophe amounting to a world tragedy” and that fixation with short term stability were “old fetishes of so-called international bankers”. FDR continued “The United States seeks the kind of dollar which a generation hence will have the same purchasing and debt paying power as the dollar value we hope to attain in the near future. That objective means more to the good of other nations than a fixed ratio for a month or two. Exchange rate fixing is not the true answer.”

    The British drafted an official statement saying “the American statement on stabilization rendered it entirely useless to continue the conference.”

    FDR’s War on Wall Street

    The new president laid down the gauntlet in his inaugural speech on March 4th saying:

     “The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit”.

    FDR declared a war on Wall Street on several levels, beginning with his support of the Pecorra Commission which sent thousands of bankers to prison, and exposed the criminal activities of the top tier of Wall Street’s power structure who manipulated the depression, buying political offices and pushing fascism. Ferdinand Pecorra who ran the commission called out the deep state when he said “this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the United States.”

    Pecorra’s highly publicized success empowered FDR to impose sweeping regulation in the form of 1) Glass-Steagall bank separation, 2) bankruptcy re-organization and 3) the creation of the Security Exchange Commission to oversee Wall Street. Most importantly, FDR disempowered the London-controlled Federal Reserve by installing his own man as Chair (Industrialist Mariner Eccles) who forced it to obey national commands for the first time since 1913, while creating an “alternative” lending mechanism outside of Fed control called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which became the number one lender to infrastructure in America throughout the 1930s.

    One of the most controversial policies for which FDR is demonized today was his abolishment of the gold standard. The gold standard itself constricted the money supply to a strict exchange of gold per paper dollar, thus preventing the construction of internal improvements needed to revive industrial capacity and put the millions of unemployed back to work for which no financial resources existed. It’s manipulation by international financiers made it a weapon of destruction rather than creation at this time. Since commodity prices had fallen lower than the costs of production, it was vital to increase the price of goods under a form of “controlled inflation” so that factories and farms could become solvent and unfortunately the gold standard held that back. FDR imposed protective tariffs to favor agro-industrial recovery on all fronts ending years of rapacious free trade.

    FDR stated his political-economic philosophy in 1934: 

    “the old fallacious notion of the bankers on the one side and the government on the other side, as being more or less equal and independent units, has passed away. Government by the necessity of things must be the leader, must be the judge, of the conflicting interests of all groups in the community, including bankers.”

    The Real New Deal

    Once liberated from the shackles of the central banks, FDR and his allies were able to start a genuine recovery by restoring confidence in banking. Within 31 days of his bank holiday, 75% of banks were operational and the FDIC was created to insure deposits. Four million people were given immediate work, and hundreds of libraries, schools and hospitals were built and staffed- All funded through the RFC. FDR’s first fireside chat was vital in rebuilding confidence in the government and banks, serving even today as a strong lesson in banking which central bankers don’t want you to learn about.

    From 1933-1939, 45 000 infrastructure projects were built. The many “local” projects were governed, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative today, under a “grand design” which FDR termed the “Four Quarters” featuring zones of megaprojects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority area in the south east, the Columbia River Treaty zone on the northwest, the St Laurence Seaway zone on the North east, and Hoover Dam/Colorado zone on the Southwest. These projects were transformative in ways money could never measure as the Tennessee area’s literacy rose from 20% in 1932 to 80% in 1950, and racist backwater holes of the south became the bedrock for America’s aerospace industry due to the abundant and cheap hydropower. As I had already reported on the Saker, FDR was not a Keynesian (although it cannot be argued that hives of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians penetrating his administration certainly were).

    Wall Street Sabotages the New Deal

    Those who criticize the New Deal today ignore the fact that its failures have more to do with Wall Street sabotage than anything intrinsic to the program. For example, JP Morgan tool Lewis Douglass (U.S. Budget Director) forced the closure of the Civil Works Administration in 1934 resulting in the firing of all 4 million workers.

    Wall Street did everything it could to choke the economy at every turn. In 1931, NY banks loans to the real economy amounted to $38.1 billion which dropped to only $20.3 billion by 1935. Where NY banks had 29% of their funds in US bonds and securities in 1929, this had risen to 58% which cut off the government from being able to issue productive credit to the real economy.

    When, in 1937, FDR’s Treasury Secretary persuaded him to cancel public works to see if the economy “could stand on its own two feet”, Wall Street pulled credit out of the economy collapsing the Industrial production index from 110 to 85 erasing seven years’ worth of gain, while steel fell from 80% capacity back to depression levels of 19%. Two million jobs were lost and the Dow Jones lost 39% of its value. This was no different from kicking the crutches out from a patient in rehabilitation and it was not lost on anyone that those doing the kicking were openly supporting Fascism in Europe. Bush patriarch Prescott Bush, then representing Brown Brothers Harriman was found guilty for trading with the enemy in 1942!

    Coup Attempt in America Thwarted

    The bankers didn’t limit themselves to financial sabotage during this time, but also attempted a fascist military coup which was exposed by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his congressional testimony of November 20, 1934. Butler had testified that the plan was begun in the Summer of 1933 and organized by Wall Street financiers who tried to use him as a puppet dictator leading 500 000 American Legion members to storm the White House. As Butler spoke, those same financiers had just set up an anti-New Deal organization called the American Liberty League which fought to keep America out of the war in defense of an Anglo-Nazi fascist global government which they wished to partner with.

    The American Liberty league only changed tune when it became evident that Hitler had become a disobedient Frankenstein monster who wasn’t content in a subservient position to Britain’s idea of a New World Order. In response to the Liberty League’s agenda, FDR said “some speak of a New World Order, but it is not new and it is not order”.

    FDR’s Anti-Colonial Post-War Vision

    One of the greatest living testimonies to FDR’s anti-colonial vision is contained in a little known 1946 book authored by his son Elliot Roosevelt who, as his father’s confidante and aide, was privy to some of the most sensitive meetings his father participated in throughout the war. Seeing the collapse of the post-war vision upon FDR’s April 12, 1945 death and the emergence of a pro-Churchill presidency under Harry Truman, who lost no time in dropping nuclear bombs on a defeated Japan, ushering in a Soviet witch hunt at home and launching a Cold War abroad, Elliot authored ‘As He Saw It’ (1946) in order to create a living testimony to the potential that was lost upon his father’s passing.

    As Elliot said of his motive to write his book:

    “The decision to write this book was taken more recently and impelled by urgent events. Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, had a hand in this decision,… the growing stockpile of American atom bombs is a compelling factor; all the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greedy and desperate imperialism were my spurs in this undertaking… And I have seen the promises violated, and the conditions summarily and cynically disregarded, and the structure of peace disavowed… I am writing this, then, to you who agree with me that… the path he charted has been most grievously—and deliberately—forsaken.”

    The Four Freedoms

    Even before America had entered the war, the principles of international harmony which FDR enunciated in his January 6, 1941 Four Freedoms speech to the U.S. Congress served as the guiding light through every battle for the next 4.5 years. In this speech FDR said:

    “In future days, which we seek to secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

    “The first is the freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.

    “The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.

    “The third is the freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.

    “The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.

    “That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

    “To that new order, we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

    “Since the beginning of American history, we have been engaged in change–in a perpetual peaceful revolution–a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions–without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

    “This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.”

    Upon hearing these Freedoms outlined, American painter Norman Rockwell was inspired to paint four masterpieces that were displayed across America and conveyed the beauty of FDR’s spirit to all citizens.

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    FDR’s patriotic Vice President (and the man who SHOULD have been president in 1948) Henry Wallace outlined FDR’s vision in a passionate video address to the people in 1942 which should also be watched by all world citizens today:

    Churchill vs FDR: The Clash of Two Paradigms

    Elliot’s account of the 1941-1945 clash of paradigms between his father and Churchill are invaluable both for their ability to shed light into the true noble constitutional character of America personified in the person of Roosevelt but also in demonstrating the beautiful potential of a world that SHOULD HAVE BEEN had certain unnatural events not intervened to derail the evolution of our species into an age of win-win cooperation, creative reason and harmony.

    In As He Saw It, Elliot documents a conversation he had with his father at the beginning of America’s entry into WWII, who made his anti-colonial intentions clear as day saying:

    “I’m talking about another war, Elliott. I’m talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery!

    “Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again? Your son will be about the right age, fifteen or twenty years from now.

    “One sentence, Elliott. Then I’m going to kick you out of here. I’m tired. This is the sentence: When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.”

    This clash came to a head during a major confrontation between FDR and Churchill during the January 24, 1943 Casablanca Conference in Morocco. At this event, Elliot documents how his father first confronted Churchill’s belief in the maintenance of the British Empire’s preferential trade agreements upon which it’s looting system was founded:

    “Of course,” he [FDR] remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, “of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade.”

    He paused. The P.M.’s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.

    “No artificial barriers,” Father pursued. “As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition.” His eye wandered innocently around the room.

    Churchill shifted in his armchair. “The British Empire trade agreements” he began heavily, “are—”

    Father broke in.

    “Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It’s because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are.”

    Churchill’s neck reddened and he crouched forward.

    “Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England’s ministers.”

    “You see,” said Father slowly, “it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.

    “I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now—”

    “Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?”

    “Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation—by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”

    Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill’s aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.

    “You mentioned India,” he growled.

    “Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”

    “What about the Philippines?”

    “I’m glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they’ve gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down…”

    “There can be no tampering with the Empire’s economic agreements.”

    “They’re artificial…”

    “They’re the foundation of our greatness.”

    “The peace,” said Father firmly, “cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?”

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    It was an argument that could have no resolution between these two men…

    The following day, Elliot describes how the conversation continued between the two men with Churchill stating:

    “Mr. President,” he cried, “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that”—and his forefinger waved—”in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And”—his voice sank dramatically—”you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.”

    Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.”

    This story was delivered in full during an August 15 lecture by the author:

    FDR’s Post-War Vision Destroyed

    While FDR’s struggle did change the course of history, his early death during the first months of his fourth term resulted in a fascist perversion of his post-war vision.

    Rather than see the IMF, World Bank or UN used as instruments for the internationalization of the New Deal principles to promote long term, low interest loans for the industrial development of former colonies, FDR’s allies were ousted from power over his dead body, and they were recaptured by the same forces who attempted to steer the world towards a Central Banking Dictatorship in 1933.

    The American Liberty League spawned into various “patriotic” anti-communist organizations which took power with the FBI and McCarthyism under the fog of the Cold War. This is the structure that Eisenhower warned about when he called out “the Military Industrial Complex” in 1960 and which John Kennedy did battle with during his 900 days as president.

    This is the structure which is out to destroy President Donald Trump and undo the November elections under a military coup and Civil War out of fear that a new FDR impulse is beginning to be revived in America which may align with the 21st Century international New Deal emerging from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Eurasian alliance. French Finance Minister Bruno LeMaire and Marc Carney have stated their fear that if the Green New Deal isn’t imposed by the west, then the New Silk Road and yuan will become the basis for the new world system.

    The Bank of England-authored Green New Deal being pushed under the fog of COVID-19’s Great Green Global Reset which promise to impose draconian constraints on humanity’s carrying capacity in defense of saving nature from humanity have nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and they have less to do with the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. These are merely central bankers’ wet dreams for depopulation and fascism “with a democratic face” which their 1923 and 1933 efforts failed to achieve and can only be imposed if people remain blind to their own recent history.

  • 80% Of Americans Say Post-Pandemic Food Inflation Is Impacting Their Budgets
    80% Of Americans Say Post-Pandemic Food Inflation Is Impacting Their Budgets

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 23:45

    With its Beige Book, the Federal Reserve and its regional banks frequently gauge business owners’ subjective impressions of the overall economy. Recently, these reports have shown signs of permanent economic scarring, though the September report emphasized a different angle: That the economic revival – while not a straightforward “V” – was unfolding more rapidly than they had anticipated.

    Unfortunately, the central bank doesn’t focus on surveying consumers with as much diligence. This could be one reason why some economists have slammed the central bank for being “out of touch”. Not only does the central bank welcome inflation (just not too much of it), it relies on gauges of the phenomenon that have – falsely – suggested that consumer prices aren’t rising. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE numbers, exclude medical bills and other costs.

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    However, after years of “low” inflation, the virus has pushed prices of food and consumer goods higher. That’s why Powell tweaked the central bank’s inflation target to create more room for inflation to overheat – since that’s what it seems to be doing.

    While central bankers walk around with their heads in the clouds, a team at C+R Research has surveyed more than 2,000 American consumers to find out how they have “adjusted” to these higher prices, which have come amid a surge in unemployment. Their findings aren’t all that surprising: 85% of consumers said that their budgets had been impacted by having to pay more for groceries. Milk, eggs and meat are the top staples that Americans are paying more for.

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    But food isn’t the only source of rising prices: household goods like toilet paper and cleaning products have seen prices soar with the surge in demand. 75% of respondents said that these increases had impacted them.

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    What might be surprising for some is that  more than 75% of Americans are still having trouble finding cleaning products and certain food products that were readily available before the pandemic.

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    Finally, with millions of professionals (at least, those who still have jobs) still working from home, more than 2/3rds of respondents said they have been buying fewer hair-care products since the start of the pandemic, while 61% of people say they’ve been spending less on deodorant.

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    With nearly 90% of respondents saying they’re worried that prices for groceries will continue to climb, here’s what weekly grocery budgets are looking like since the pandemic.

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    As shoppers try to navigate life during hard economic times, more than half say they’re spending less on food, or have changed their diet, while more than 70% of respondents say they have been “stress eating” more often.

    Somebody should probably tell them to relax; don’t they know interest rates will be anchored to the zero-bound until 2023?

  • Canada's Speech From The Throne
    Canada’s Speech From The Throne

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 23:25

    Written by Keith Oland, Global Strategist at IceCap Asset Management

    On August 18th, 2020, the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau asked Governor General Julie Payette to prorogue Parliament.

    This means all parliamentary activity stops until a new session of parliament is opened with what is called a Speech from the Throne. This also means that all business conducted by the House of Commons must be restarted in the new session. A Speech from the Throne is where the government introduces its direction and goals.

    The Speech from the Throne is currently scheduled for September 23rd, 2020.

    It is our belief that the Liberal Government of Canada may introduce significant new spending programs in the upcoming Speech from the Throne, setting a precedent for other countries to implement similar programs.

    In the past few years there has been a major shift, particularly amongst western countries, towards expanded fiscal deficit spending. The current environment of historically low interest rates encourages borrowing to fund these programs. Canada has positioned itself to be one of the first major countries to rapidly expand spending, regardless of fiscal anchors such as the net national debt, and debt to GDP ratio. We could see the first indication of this shift in the Speech from the Throne on September 23rd, 2020.

    If major spending initiatives are announced without accompanying sources of income to fund them, we can infer that the national debt will surge. Markets will be watching closely, and if reactions to the anticipated shift are muted then this will give tacit permission for other comparable countries and sub sovereigns to do the same. This could also be a major step in bringing modern monetary theory (MMT) into the mainstream.

    The Speech from the Throne is significant because we will hear in detail what the Liberal Government plans to do with their time in government. We believe there is a real possibility of a significant shift to the left in government policy, accompanied by increased deficit spending. The reasons for this are as follows:

    1. The coronavirus pandemic, and the resultant need to stimulate the economy.

    2. Low interest rates where the cost of money is essentially free (0.25% nominal interest rates, and negative real rates).

    3. The need to shift attention away from the WE Charity scandal.

    4. The ability to displace the New Democratic Party on the political spectrum and position the Liberals in a place where they can expect to have success in the next election.

    5. Leaks to the media demonstrating the Trudeau government’s preference for increased spending, although messaging from the Liberals has become more mixed in recent days.

    This paper will give a brief overview of how the Canadian system of government works, what we expect to happen with the Speech from the Throne, and the impact on the national debt and the economy.

  • Iran Will Not Renegotiate Nuclear Deal If Biden Wins Presidency, Demands Compensation: FM Zarif
    Iran Will Not Renegotiate Nuclear Deal If Biden Wins Presidency, Demands Compensation: FM Zarif

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 23:05

    There’s little doubt that Iran’s leadership is quietly hoping that Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins the US presidency in November, given at the current rate of Trump’s maximum pressure campaign there seems no ‘off ramp’ or sanctions relief for the Islamic Republic.

    Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif issued some interesting statements on this subject Monday, saying of the 2015 nuclear deal previously brokered under Obama and his VP Biden, that Tehran will never renegotiate the deal even if Biden takes the White House. 

    He said at a virtual Council on Foreign Relations event that Washington must immediately return to the JCPOA agreement “without condition”. 

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    Via Newsweek

    Biden has promised that he would re-adopt the agreement, thus reversing Trump’s May 2018 pullout; however, he’s previously added just enough nuance to worry Iran, saying this would be conditioned on Tehran returning into complete compliance with its regulations. This is in reference to Iran ramping up enrichment following the US pullout from the deal. 

    Zarif told the Western think tank audience in his remarks this week:

    “The United States first must come clean, must get its act together, must come back to be a lawful member of the international community, start implementing its obligations, and then talk about the rest of the deal,” he said.

    “It’s immaterial for us who sits in the White House. For us, what is important is how they behave, and the United States has behaved extremely, irresponsibly, dangerously in the international community,” Zarif said.

    Perhaps the most interesting part of the remarks were related to the lasting impact of US-led sanctions, which are seeking to gut Iran’s economy, also after the Islamic Republic was among the earliest countries hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

    Zarif laid out that sanctions have resulted in multiple billions of dollars lost, and that upon re-entry to the deal any future American administration must provide appropriate compensation. 

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    “I think it is the United States that has to show that it’s committed to this deal that it will not violate it again, that it will not make demands outside the scope of the deal, that it will compensate Iran for the damages,” Zarif added.

    However, this issue of compensation would be a high bar for any administration, even if Biden were to take the White House, and thus extremely unlikely.

  • Taiwan's Military Says It Has The Right To Counterattack Chinese Warplanes
    Taiwan’s Military Says It Has The Right To Counterattack Chinese Warplanes

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 22:45

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    With tensions between Taiwan and mainland China on the rise, Taiwan’s military redefined its rules of engagement and said its forces have the right to “self-defense” and a “counter-attack” against Chinese warplanes. The statement came after Beijing flew fighter jets over the Taiwan Strait’s median line in response to a high-level US visit to the island.

    “In the face of high-frequency harassment and threats from the enemy’s warships and warplanes recently… the military clearly redefined the contingency handling regulations concerning the first strike as our right to self-defense and counter-attack,” Taiwan’s defense ministry said on Monday.

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    The ministry also said the military will follow guidelines to prevent the “escalation of conflict” and “triggering events.” It is not exactly clear from the statement if Taiwan’s military can now fire first at mainland warplanes, but sources have indicated to Taiwan’s press that this is the case.

    Military sources told the Taiwanese newspaper Liberty Times that defining the “first strike” as the right to “self-defense” and a “counter-attack” means Taiwan’s military would be able to fire first if they believed mainland forces intended to attack.

    The median line has served as an unofficial dividing line between Taiwan and China that Beijing usually avoids crossing. Official Beijing policy is that this line doesn’t exist, and Taiwan is Chinese territory, which was the response they gave to Taipei’s protests over the recent incursion.

    The display from Chinese warplanes coincided with a visit to Taiwan by US Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Keith Krach, the second high-level visit from a US official in recent months. US Health Secretary Alex Azar visited the island in August, making him the highest-level US official to visit Taiwan since Washington broke formal relations with Taipei in 1979.

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    Besides warming diplomatic ties, the US is making moves to increase its support for Taipei militarily. Recent reports say the Trump administration is preparing a major arms sale to Taiwan that would include up to seven types of weapons systems.

    The US military has also increased activity in the region, with aircraft carriers drilling in the South China Sea, and an increase in flights from US military aircraft. US spy planes are cloaking themselves as civilian aircraft near China’s coast, and experts warn, the practice poses a significant danger to actual civilian planes.

  • Delaware Police Seize Enough Fentanyl To Kill At least 75% Of State's Population
    Delaware Police Seize Enough Fentanyl To Kill At least 75% Of State’s Population

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 22:25

    On Monday, Delaware State Police and the FBI announced a two-year, multi-jurisdictional investigation that led to the arrest of more than two dozen people connected with a significant drug organization operating in Deleware, reported local news station WDEL. 

    Delaware State Police said the crackdown on the criminal gang resulted in the “largest seizure of fentanyl in state history.” 

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    A total of 28 people were arrested and are now charged with 252 felonies, including criminal racketeering, conspiracy, and drug dealing. 

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    Lt. Robert Jones of the Delaware State Police, who spoke at the news conference at Troop 2 station in Newark, said law enforcement seized seven-and-half kilograms of fentanyl. He said, given the potency of the drug, “it was enough fentanyl to kill 750,000 Delawareans.” 

    Delaware State Police Superintendent Colonel Melissa Zebley said it would be “hard to measure the full gravity this criminal organization could have had in our state.”

    Representatives from other police agencies, including the FBI Baltimore Field Office, and the Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings, also attended the press conference on Monday. 

    Jennifer Boone, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office, said:

    “Included in these results was the largest fentanyl seizure by Delaware law enforcement in the state’s history, making a major dent in the supply of fentanyl that would have been distributed on the streets of Newark and surrounding areas,” said Boone. “Alone, the quantity of fentanyl seized could have killed thousands and thousands of people.”

    Law enforcement officers also seized a quarter-million dollars in cash, 20 firearms, millions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin, crack, and marijuana, and five vehicles during the July raids of seven houses in Delaware and Philadelphia.

    Readers may recall, the Trump administration recently announced a large meth bust that had operations spanning across the entire US. 

    President Trump continues to hold his promise to the American people in his campaign against illegal drugs that continue to flow from foreign countries onto the streets of US communities. 

  • Did Global Warming Play A Significant Role In The Recent Northwest Wildfires?
    Did Global Warming Play A Significant Role In The Recent Northwest Wildfires?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 22:05

    Via Cliff Mass Weather blog,

    A number of groups and individuals are claiming that the recent major wildfires in the Pacific Northwest are predominantly or significantly the result of climate change produced by increasing greenhouse gases.

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    In fact, many have called these conflagrations “climate fires.” Did global warming (a.k.a. climate change) have a significant impact on the Northwest wildfires of the past few weeks?

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    Consider the key fires in the Northwest U.S. this month: the huge, rapidly expanding fires on the western slopes of the Oregon Cascades.

    The fires that not only burned hundreds of thousands of acres, but produced most of the smoke that engulfed the region for over a week.  As I will demonstrate, the catastrophic Oregon Cascade fires of the past weeks were forced by strong easterly winds, and such winds may well weaken under global warming.  And I will show that the weather of the past summer was relatively normal.

    Thus, although global warming will undoubtedly produce substantial changes in our climate in the future, the impacts of global warming on the recent Oregon fires were probably quite small.

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    Smoke reaches Portland.  Image by Tedder.

    I should note that BEFORE the recent fires I had been working on research and a paper on the meteorology of western Cascade fires and have a NSF grant to examine California wildfires.  Furthermore, I have worked closely with the Washington State Departments of Ecology and Natural Resources, as well as the USDA Forest Service, on Northwest wildfire meteorology and prediction.

    Fires on the Western Slopes of the Oregon Cascades and their Historical Context

    A series of major fires exploded on September 7-8, 2020, ranging from the Big Hollow Fire northeast of Portland, the Riverside, Beach Creek and Lionshead Fires east of Salem, the Holiday Fire near Eugene, and the Archie Creek, South Obenchain and other fires to the south.  Several of the western Cascade Range fires, which have spread over more than 350,000 acres, had been initiated by lightning in mid-August, smoldering until strong easterly winds caused rapid expansion.

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    Fires along the western slopes of the Cascades are infrequent but regular, with research studies using proxy information (such as charcoal remnants in the soil and tree ring/scaring data) finding stand-killing fires occur roughly every 250 years (e.g. this reference).   Importantly, during the past century, few major fires has burned over western slopes of the Oregon Cascades, with the most prominent being the Yacolt Burn (1902, 500,000 acres) and the Eagle Creek Fire (2017, 50,000 acres), both near the Columbia Gorge east of Portland.  Interestingly, there has been far more fire activity over the coastal mountains of Oregon than along the western slopes of the Cascades during the past 120 years.  Thus, many of the recent fires along the western Cascades slopes were burning across terrain that had not experienced major fires in over a century.

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    Fires and their sizes since 1900 over Oregon. Image created by Lynne Palombo of the Oregonian.

    Strong Easterly Winds Are Necessary for Major Wildfires on the Western Slopes of the Cascades

    It has long been known that major wildfires over the western slopes of the Oregon Cascades have been limited to periods of sustained, strong easterly winds (from the east).   To quote a classic paper (FREQUENCY of DRY EAST WINDS OVER NORTHWEST OREGON and SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON, Cramer 1957):

    The history of forest conflagrations in the Northwest is, for the most part, a history of the simultaneous occurrence of small fires and severe east winds.

    Most of the biggest fires along the crest and western slopes of the Oregon Cascades started with small fires, either natural or human-initiated, which without winds would smolder or very slowly grow.  But add strong easterly winds and they can explode as seen on September 8th.

    As part of my research, I determined every major fire on western side of the Oregon and Washington Cascades since 1900, and then examined the meteorology of each using observations, newspaper accounts, and the reanalysis grids (gridded analyses based on observation that go back to the 1860s).   EVERY such major fire, without exception, was associated with strong easterly winds.

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    The Tillamook Burn included a series of fires starting in 1933 that torched over 350,000 acres

    Why are strong easterly winds required for the megafires on the Oregon western slopes?  

    First, easterly winds tend to be very dry and usually warm, which helps desiccate surface fuels.  Westerly winds off the ocean are generally cool and moist, not only bringing high relative humidity but often moving fog and low clouds over the western Cascade slopes, both negatives for fires.  Easterly winds are from the dry, warm interior of the continent, and as the air sinks along the western slopes it is compressed and thus warmed as it moves to lower elevations (where pressure is higher).  Because of the warming, the relatively humidity plummets as the air sinks.   Very favorable for fires.

    Furthermore, strong easterly winds not only facilitate warming and drying but also provides oxygen to fires, allowing them to expand rapidly.  In addition, strong winds push superheated gases ahead of fires (which helps then move quickly) and strong winds loft firebrands and embers that produce spot fires ahead of the main fire line.

    The bottom line:  strong easterly winds are very important for starting fires on the western Cascade slopes, which are typically resistant to fire because of their relatively moist surfaces and extensive shading.

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    So the questions you must be asking at this point:   were the recent Oregon wildfires associated with strong easterly winds?   Is there a climate connection with such winds? Are easterly winds increasing as the earth has warmed the last 40 years?   And do climate models suggest that global warming will increase easterly winds over the western slopes of the Cascades?

    The answer to the first question is an emphatic YES.  The September event was associated with powerful and sustained easterly winds  over the Cascades, with some gusts reaching 50-70 mph (see map below of maximum gusts on September 8th in mph).  Enough to cause large numbers of power outages in Oregon.

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    Maximum winds on September 8 over western Oregon

    The balloon-launched sounding at Salem, Oregon for 5 AM Tuesday, September 8th showed strong northeasterly and easterly winds though the entire lower atmosphere (shown up to roughly 10,000 ft in the figure).

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    Bottom line:  strong easterly winds occurred over the lower atmosphere of western Oregon from late on September 7, peaking on Sept 8th, and continuing in weakened form during the event.

    Strong easterly winds are relatively unusual during the summer over western Oregon   So how unusual was this easterly flow event?   It turns out EXTREMELY unusual.

    To examine this, I searched gridded weather data (the NCAR-NCEP reanalysis) for a grid point on the western slopes of the Oregon Cascades.  Specifically, I examined the strength of the daily average zonal (east-west wind), looking for the days of strongest easterly wind.  For example, I checked surface wind (10-m above the surface) from 1950 to today for July through September–the relevant months– and found the top ten cases.

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    The grid point I used for this analysis

    The results show that September 8 had the strongest easterly surface wind over the period examined (more negative means more easterly), substantially exceeding second place (Sept 17, 1971). And Sept. 9 was also on the list.  Only one other multi-day sequence was on the list (Sept. 16-18, 1971) and there were major fires that period as well.

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    Results of one of my analyses

    What produced this record-breaking easterly wind event starting Sept. 7th?  An extraordinarily area of COLD temperatures and associated high pressure area that moved southeastward to the east of our region, coupled with an unusual low pressure offshore.

    Below is the pressure analysis at 5 AM on Sept. 8, with the solid lines indicating pressure (isobars) and the colors indicating differences from normal).  Strong high pressure was over Montana, while a trough of low pressure was along the coast.  Between these two features there was a large difference in pressure.  The colors indicate that the high pressure, centered in Montana was very unusual, with the difference from normal (the anomaly) being very unusual (4-5 standard deviations from normal for those of you knowledgeable about statistics)

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    Looking at winds at 925 hPa (about 2500 ft above sea level) at the same time, the strongest winds were over western Oregon, reaching over 6 standard deviations from normal.  Unprecedented conditions for this date.

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    Let me underline something I noted above: the anomalous high pressure was associated with very unusually cold air, air that would bring snow to Denver in the subsequent day.

    Is there a trend of more easterly winds over Northwest Washington in the operational record?  

    If one is interested in climate change, one MUST look at trends over time. Below is a plot of the top 10 cases of easterly wind at the grid point noted above–there is no evidence of an upward trend over time.    So with increasing temperatures as the planet has warmed, there is no apparent increase of easterly wind occurrence over the region.  This is a serious strike against the global warming/wildfire contention.

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    But let’s not stop there.  My group, in concert with Professor Eric Salathe of UW Bothell, are running a high-resolution climate model forced by increasing greenhouse gases–probably the most sophisticated local climate modeling in the country.  And we are doing this with an ensemble of many ultra-high resolution climate runs.  And we drove our regional climate model with global models forced with a very aggressive (and undoubtedly larger than expected) increase in CO2 (RCP 8.5).

    In these model how did the easterly flow near the crest of the Cascades change over time  (we picked a point near Washington’s Stampede Pass, but that is close enough)?

    The answer is found below.  The figure shows the number of days per year during July through September that the winds exceed a certain speed (6.6 knots) from the east.  The simulations extend from 1970 through 2100 and the black line provides the mean of all the simulations.

    Wow.  The number of strong easterly events….the kind that start fires…DECLINES under global warming.  Let me say that again, it declines.

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    This makes a lot of physical sense and is consistent with results found by others in California.  As the planet warms, the interior of the continent warms more rapidly that the ocean.   Warms results in less dense air and pressure falls.  Thus, pressure falls more rapidly in the interior than on the coast, which increases westerly flow and decreases easterly flow.  Warming would also lessen the amplitude of the cold highs, like the one that occurred two weeks ago.

    So we have observational data that shows that summer easterly flow over the Cascades did not increase during the last 70 years as the planet started to warm.  Furthermore, the gold standard in climate simulations shows late summer easterly flow declining under global warming.   

    So the absolutely key driver of major west side of Cascades wildfires–strong easterly winds– does not appear to be strengthened by global warming.  In fact, the OPPOSITE appears to be the case.  It appears to weaken.

    These findings profoundly undermines the hypothesis that the Oregon fires are “climate fires” forced by increasing greenhouse gases.   As a popular TV series might say, this hypothesis is “busted.”

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    But let me take this one step further to completely address the “climate fire” claims. To put the proverbial “final nail” into the “climate fire” coffin.

    How Unusual Were the Climate Conditions in the Months Before the Fire?

    Were the weather conditions in the months leading the September fires highly unusual?  And has there been a significant observed trend towards considerably worse (dry/hot) conditions as would be expected if climate change was contributing to the Oregon fires?

    To answer these question, let’s examine the precipitation over crest and western slopes of the northern Oregon Cascades—the region where many of the big fires originated and grew.  Below is a plot of the June to August precipitation over the region from the NOAA/NWS climate divisions data (Division 4 of Oregon) for 1900 to 2020.   The summer 2020 values is not exceptional at all (indicated by small arrow and the horizontal dashed line).  And there is little overall trend in the precipitation for that region.

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    Clearly,  precipitation in this region does not appear to be changing much with global warming.  Climate models suggests a small decline in summer precipitation (and an increase in overall precipitation) by the end of the century if we continue burning fossil fuels with abandon.

    Temperature?  As shown below, the summer 2020 temperature for the western slopes of the Oregon Cascades was neither a record nor even exceptional.  One notes a modest upward trend during the past 30 years of approximately 1F.  That could be the global warming signal.   In any case, such a small warming hardly explains the catastrophic wildfires of this summer.

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    Finally, let me show you the Palmer Drought Severity Index (produced by NOAA) for September 12th.  The Palmer Index combines temperature and precipitation to evaluate whether drying/drought conditions are present.  This index indicates normal conditions over the western slopes of the north Cascades.

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    The bottom line:  this summer was not one of significant drought or very unusual.  Until the September 7-8 fire initiation by the strong winds, the area encompassing fire was below normal in both Oregon and Washington.

    Thus, considering observations and modeling, both strongly supporting each other, the major fire/smoke outbreak this month was the result of very, very unusually strong easterly winds, NOT global warming or climate change.

    Those pushing the climate change narrative, including some politicians, activist groups and media are simply misinforming the public.

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    Such deceptive information undermines society’s ability to deal with wildfires in an effective way, such as improved forecast management (e.g., thinning, proscribed fires), more aggressive extinguishing of fires before dangerous situations like this month, and better warnings to move people out of harm’s way.

    Short Comment on Washington Fires and Global Warming

    Some individuals and groups have suggested that the explosive fires in Washington State that proceeded the Oregon fires, were the result of climate change.  This is also without any foundation.  Nearly all of the Washington State fires were grass fires (e.g., Cold Springs Fire–190,000 acres, Pearl Hills Fire–224, 000 acres) that were spread by extreme and highly unusual northerly winds.  Grass fires do NOT correlate well with climate, since grasses and small bushes inevitably dry out sufficiently to burn by early summer.  Even if the grass was not initially dry, it would dry out within hours under strong winds.  Such fires are controlled by the availability of ignition sources (often manmade) and strong winds and very powerful (50-70 mph) and unusual winds occurred on September 6th.

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    Grassland after fire in Eastern Washington this month.

    Courtesy WA State Department of Ecology

    *  *  *

    Starting September 30th I will be teaching Introduction to Weather (Atmospheric Sciences 101) online.    If you are over 60,  you can audit the class at very little cost through the UW Access Program.  More information on the class is here.

    KNKX Surrenders to Cancel Culture.  My blog on this is found here.

  • China Says US Spy Planes Posed As Airliners "Over 100 Times" & Put Civilians At Risk
    China Says US Spy Planes Posed As Airliners “Over 100 Times” & Put Civilians At Risk

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 21:45

    Earlier this month Chinese and Russian media began highlighting what was reported as a significant uptick in US spy planes changing their transponder codes in order to disguise themselves during operations near China. One known recent instance involved a US Air Force RC-135S Cobra Ball out of Okinawa attempting to observe Chinese PLA missile tests being conducted in the Yellow Sea by presenting itself on radar as a Malaysian plane.

    And Beijing has blasted the alleged US practice, now saying it’s caught the United States military doing this at least 100 times this year alone, and says it has radar evidence of spy planes attempting to conceal their identity in the region’s skies.

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    Airliner file image

    China says the radar evasion practice is incredibly dangerous given the ability of missile defense tracking on the ground to “confuse” threats, such as happened with the Ukrainian airline ‘accidental shootdown’ tragedy over Iran last January.

    China’s foreign ministry has called the concealment of American aircraft in the region a “serious security threat,” with Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin issuing the following statement: 

    “It’s a common trick for the US Air Force to impersonate the transponder code of civilian aircraft from other countries … It is of a vile nature,” the FM spokesman said earlier this week.

    “We urge the US to immediately stop such dangerous provocations, to avoid accidents from happening in the sea and air.” Wang described Chinese records of American spy plane activity in the area as “incomplete.”

    It was a Chinese think tank called the South China Sea Probing Initiative (SCSPI), based at China’s Peking University, that first observed the strange behavior of a plane which appeared on tracking radar on Sept.9 as a “mysterious Malaysian plane” soon after an Air Force jet “went dark” by allegedly switching off its transponder.

    This open source discovery drove headlines around the world at the time, and apparently Beijing is now confirming it has data showing this actually happens frequently.

    Regional media has warned about an untick in incidents this past summer, with SCMP saying: “Cases of mistaken identity have led to passenger planes being shot down in the past, observers warn.”

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    “This undoubtedly added up to great risk and uncertainty to international flight safety, which could lead to misjudgment (by ground air defence systems) and probably bring danger to civilian aircraft especially those being impersonated,” SCSPI stated previously in a public report based on open source radar.

    Earlier this month the communist-run country’s senior diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said charged the United States with “directly intervening in territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea due to its own political needs,” according to Reuters. 

  • New Jeffrey Epstein Flight Log Subpoena To Reveal Every Passenger On "Lolita Express"
    New Jeffrey Epstein Flight Log Subpoena To Reveal Every Passenger On “Lolita Express”

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 21:25

    Rich associates of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein are about to receive some (or more) unwanted attention, after the Attorney General for the US Virgin Islands, Denise George, subpoenaed the logs for every single flight made by Epstein’s four helicopters and three planes between 1998 and his death in 2019, according to The Mirror.

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    Epstein’s estate was named in a lawsuit filed by George which alleges 22 counts of illegal activity – including rape, child abuse, neglect, human trafficking, forced labor and prostitution.

    George is also seeking any “complaints or reports of potentially suspicious conduct,” along with any personal notes made by Epstein’s longtime pilots – and the contact information for anyone who worked for them and may have “interacted with or observed” Jeffrey Epstein or any passengers.

    In 2009, pilot David Rogers provided logs revealing that Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, Naomi Campbell and others were among Epstein’s high-profile passengers.

    A separate set of logs exist, however, from chief pilot Larry Visoski, Epstein’s pilot of 25 years.

    According to a legal source who spoke with the Mirror, “The records that have been subpoenaed will make the ones Rodgers provided look like a Post-It note,” adding “There is panic among many of the rich and famous.“

    According to the subpoena, Jet Aviation Holdings USA Inc. must hand over the documents within 30 days of being served, which reportedly happened on September 3rd.

  • House Passes Funding Bill, Averting Government Shutdown
    House Passes Funding Bill, Averting Government Shutdown

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 21:05

    After several days of terse negotiations, on Tuesday evening House Democrats readers a deal with Republicans on a stopgap funding bill to keep the government operating after restarting talks over disputed farm assistance. Shortly after, just after 8pm ET, lawmakers passed the bill in a bipartisan vote of 359-57.

    With government funding set to run out on Sept. 30, leaders of both parties had been working on legislation to continue funding most programs at current levels and thus avoid a government shutdown in the middle of a pandemic, and with the Nov. 3 elections fast approaching.

    House Democrats announced Monday they had filed the stopgap funding legislation to last until Dec. 11, which however angered Republicans by leaving out some farm money that Trump wanted.  The Monday version did not include the $21.1 billion the White House sought to replenish the Commodity Credit Corporation, a program to stabilize farm incomes, because Democrats considered it a blank check for political favors.

    Republicans had been furious at the omission. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Pelosi’s resistance to including farm aid in the bill had been “basically a message to farm country to drop dead.”

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    In response House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a subsequent statement announcing a deal with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Republicans on the continuing resolution, or CR, which included the farm relief as well as nutritional assistance sought by Democrats. Trump had promised more farm aid last week during a political rally in Wisconsin, a key battleground state in the Nov. 3 elections.

    The agreement struck between the two parties adds $8 billion in nutrition assistance programs and allows for the farm aid distributed through the CCC to continue, but with measures sought by Democrats to prohibit payments to fossil fuel refiners and importers.

    “We have reached an agreement with Republicans on the CR to add nearly $8 billion in desperately needed nutrition assistance for hungry schoolchildren and families,” Pelosi said in a statement, adding that “we also increase accountability in the Commodity Credit Corporation, preventing funds for farmers from being misused for a Big Oil bailout.”

    Separately, the funding deal prohibits financial aid to oil refiners that have been denied waivers from having to comply with biofuel mandates. The bill  prohibits the Commodity Credit Corporation or the Department of Agriculture from “providing payments or otherwise supporting fossil fuel refiners and importers.” This comes after Trump administration officials had been developing a plan to help small refiners who may have suffered financial damage after the EPA denied waivers they sought to avoid complying renewable fuel standard requirements

    The rest of the bill generally continues current spending levels. It would give lawmakers more time to work out spending through September 2021, including budgets for military operations, healthcare, national parks, space programs, and airport and border security.

    The Senate is likely to take up the bill – which will now set up a clash over government funding in the lame-duck session after the November elections – as soon as this week.

    Senate Republicans hoped to avoid a damaging potential government shutdown and instead are focusing on filling the Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday.

  • Tesla Tumbles After Underwhelming Battery Day As Musk Promises $25,000 EV In Three Years
    Tesla Tumbles After Underwhelming Battery Day As Musk Promises $25,000 EV In Three Years

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 20:45

    Tesla shares tumbled 12% in after hours trading after the much awaited Battery Day event showcasing the company’s technology on Tuesday evening, despite CEO Elon Musk promising a $25,000 vehicle that will be built as a result of advancements in battery technology.

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    “In about three years from now, we are confident we can make a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that is also fully autonomous,” Musk said at the event. “This has always been our dream from the very beginning.”

    Yesterday brought a solid hint that Battery Day would be a disappointment for Tesla fanatics after Elon Musk broke character and – dare we say it – offered up a bit of reality and reason as it related to timelines he would be discussing at today’s event.

    Maybe Musk was paying extra close attention the hot water Nikola CEO Trevor Milton has gotten himself into as a result of aggressive timelines and misstatements about products that may or may not exist – ironically, a move Milton likely took out of Musk’s playbook. That’s because Musk felt the need to set timeline expectations on Monday when he Tweeted: “This affects long-term production, especially Semi, Cybertruck & Roadster, but what we announce will not reach serious high-volume production until 2022.” 

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    Thus the fate of battery day was sealed before it even began.

    Perhaps market participants, after watching the Nikola One roll down a hill in the desert all week, are asking themselves where the Tesla Semi is? Perhaps instead of being excited about what likely would have been an aggressive timeline for the new $25,000 vehicle, traders are drinking a cold glass of reality about Musk’s three year timeline for the cheaper vehicle. Perhaps they are wondering where the $35,000 Model 3 is? And perhaps these same participants are asking themselves where the Roadster, Cybertruck, Full Self Driving and Solar Roof Tiles are, when they forked over deposits for them years ago. 

    Or maybe they recall that Musk already promised a $25,000 EV within 3 years – back in 2018 on a YouTube interview. 

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    Regardless, the market didn’t seem to take to battery day where the theme was getting the cost of batteries down: “One of the things that troubles me the most is that we don’t yet have a truly affordable car, and that is something that we will make in the future. But in order to do that, we’ve got to get the cost of batteries down,” Musk said, in what appears to be admission that demand for the “cheap” Model 3 is waning.

    The company said new “tabless” batteries and new materials inside its cells would allow them to “halve” the cost of their batteries, which would essentially put EVs on the same cost playing field as internal combustion engine cars. As the Verge notes:

    The price per kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the unit of energy most commonly used to measure the capacity of the battery packs in modern electric vehicles. Those prices have been falling dramatically over the last decade, from $1,100/kWh in 2010 to $156/kWh in 2019, a drop of 87 percent.

    Tesla is aiming to take packs that cost between $10,000 and $12,000 and reduce the cost to less than $6,000. 

    Musk also predicted Tesla could produce 20 million cars per year. That’s about twice what companies like GM and Volkswagen are producing currently. 

    At the company’s annual general meeting, which took place before the battery day event, Musk said he expected 30% to 40% growth in 2020. He also said: “The future is looking very promising from an annual profitability standpoint,” leading many to wonder if that was a tacit admission that a quarterly profit for the upcoming quarter is unlikely.  

    Recall, Musk proudly declared back in January: “Battery Day people. Wait until Battery Day. It’s gonna blow your mind. It blows my mind, and I know it!”

    Judging by the stock reaction, minds were not blown.

    We can’t help but wonder: if the Nikola fiasco hadn’t taken place what wild promises would have been made at battery day. Would a $25,000 vehicle have had a more aggressive timeline? Would deposits have opened up already?

    Regardless, for a stock that is fueled almost exclusively by hype, today’s reality check – even despite the muted promises – may reverse what has been a truly historic ascent.

  • Air Force Two Carrying Pence Strikes Bird Forced To Land "Over Engine Issues"
    Air Force Two Carrying Pence Strikes Bird Forced To Land “Over Engine Issues”

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 20:25

    CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports Vice President Pence’s plane has returned to the airport in Manchester after a bird strike during takeoff. 

    “Reporters traveling with Vice President Pence were just told Air Force Two turned around after taking off from New Hampshire because of an issue with the plane’s engine. Pence and staff are now taking a cargo plane back to Washington,” Collins tweeted. 

    She said, “WH official tells me Air Force Two hit a bird and they returned out of an abundance of caution.” 

    Here’s a video of Air Force Two striking a bird after takeoff at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.

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    *Developing 

  • Inflation & "Socialism-Lite" Are Just What The Billionaires Want
    Inflation & “Socialism-Lite” Are Just What The Billionaires Want

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 20:05

    Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

    After a bout of inflation and “socialism-light”, we could end up with even more extreme inequality when the whole rotten structure collapses.

    Imagine owning a Buffett-Bezos fortune of bilious billions, or even 10% of these mega-fortunes, i.e. between $5 billion and $20 billion. Heck, imagine owning 1% of these mega-fortunes, i.e. $500 million to $2 billion.

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    You’re extremely rich so you can buy the best advice. Your capital is mobile, and so are you. You can live anywhere and shift your capital anywhere.

    Your advisors have noted an increase in media chatter on inequality, for example: The Bill for America’s $50 Trillion Gluttony of Inequality Is Overdue, and they’re busy preparing plans to weather the storm and preserve your fortune come what may.

    It’s all too obvious that a claw-back of the trillions plundered by America’s 0.1% is now inevitable as the pendulum has swung to extremes of looting and parasitic predation that have destabilized the social and economic orders. So Job One is managing this claw-back politically and financially to leave the fortunes of the super-wealthy either unscathed or even more magnificent after the dust settles.

    The super-wealthy have two key weapons at their disposal: inflation and “socialism-light.” Once the world’s governments borrow and spend enough money supporting all the insiders, bread and circuses for the masses (Universal Basic Income) and giveaways to industry and construction (under the happy rubric The New Green Deal), inflation will be roaring higher in no time.

    What happens in runaway inflation? Tangible assets soar: land, timber, railroads, gold, mining companies and stocks of truly profitable enterprises (not zombies propped up with debt and bogus “profits” ginned up by accounting tricks).

    What do the super-wealthy own? Land, timber, railroads, gold, mining companies and stocks— all the tangible assets that will maintain or increase their value in runaway inflation.

    (Recall that “inflation” is not one dynamic; many are protected and others actually gain while the masses are impoverished: “Inflation” and America’s Accelerating Class War 9/18/20.)

    “Socialism-light” is equally beneficial to the super-wealthy. “Socialism-light” is my term for the Aristocracy’s management of the extreme inequalities of wealth, income, power and privilege. The basic idea of “socialism-light” is to spread a thick layer of gooey PR over the same old system of legalized looting, parasitic exploitation and neofeudal predation and then have the government borrow endless trillions to fund bread and circuses for the masses (Universal Basic Income).

    The irony will not be lost on the super-wealthy. As the state borrows endless trillions to send every household $1,000 a month, this borrow-and-spend orgy will push inflation higher, stripping away the purchasing power of the household’s income.

    In no time at all the $1,000 in “free money” will only buy $500 of goods and services. The cries for “more stimulus” will reach a crescendo and the bread and circuses will double to $2,000 a month.

    But this money-printing-to-the-moon will only increase real-world inflation (as I explained in This Is Why Inflation Will Rip Everyone’s Face Off 9/17/20), so the end result will be the $2,000 only buys $200 of goods and services.

    Meanwhile, the super-wealthy are minting fortunes as everyone desperately seeks a hedge against inflation, which is wiping out cash, low-interest bonds, etc.

    Banks–a core source of wealth and power for the super-wealthy–also anticipate this, which is why they immediately sell all the loans they originate to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and other bagholders whose losses will be stupendous once inflation shreds the value of low-interest rate debt.

    Banks won’t be able to survive unless they 1) grab the most valuable collateral underlying their loan portfolios and 2) move their lending into short-term debt so they can jack up interest rates to match inflation.

    Meanwhile the gooey, easily digestible PR will include a “wealth tax” that ends up being a pinprick on the total wealth of the super-wealthy who have sequestered their wealth in philanthro-capitalist foundations that are nothing but power grabs by other means, and various other forms of legalized looting.

    The “wealth tax” will end up stripmining professionals and entrepreneurs, not the super-wealthy. Those earning $1 million with a net worth of $20 million will be gutted, while those worth $5 billion will pay a pittance. This is the inevitable result of the best government money can buy.

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    Eventually the entire house of cards collapses and if there is no replacement of the current political power structure that actually changes the way currency is created and distributed, the pathways to ownership of capital and labor’s share of the economy, then the system will simply return to the existing inequality with a new currency.

    As I often say: if you don’t change the way money is created and distributed, you’ve changed nothing. If you don’t change the means of acquiring capital and political power, you’ve changed nothing. If you don’t change labor’s share of the economy, you’ve changed nothing.

    Money-printing, inflation and “socialism-light” are just what the super-wealthy ordered: so by all means spark runaway inflation with “free” (heh) bread and circuses, provide trillions in “stimulus”to corrupt insiders, industry giveaways (New Green Deal, carbon credits, etc.), and slap a feel-good “wealth tax” that mysteriously misses the super-wealthy but guts the tattered remains of the productive class.

    After a bout of inflation and “socialism-light”, we could end up with even more extreme inequality when the whole rotten structure collapses. Be careful what you wish for and cui bono–to whose benefit? To answer that, look beneath the gooey layer of PR.

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    It doesn’t have to be this way. My new book outlines a much different way of organizing capital, labor and the creation of money: check out the free bits: Excerpts of the book (PDF) The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.

    *  *  *

    My recent books:

    A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

    Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
    (Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

    Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

    The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

    Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).

    *  *  *

    If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

  • Tom-Tom Traffic Data Of Top US Metros Suggests "Sluggish" Recovery
    Tom-Tom Traffic Data Of Top US Metros Suggests “Sluggish” Recovery

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 19:45

    High-frequency economic indicators suggest “V”-shaped recoveries touted by the Trump administration across major US metro areas could be overhyped; after all, President Trump has an election to win – so pump away… 

    Given the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, where certain economic activities, such as travel and tourism, going to restaurants, and or just traveling to local shops, have been hampered not only by social distancing restrictions but also by consumer choices. 

    Without a vaccine, nevertheless, who in their right mind will take a drug with expedited clinical trials, the ability to convince the public to rush back to restaurants, movie theaters, and or retail stores will be a significant challenge for late 2020. More than likely, people will stay home this holiday season, adding to the increased downward pressure on the economy. 

    Conventional economic indicators do suggest unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus, in the trillions of dollars, was able to floor the crash in early spring – but now, heading into fall, the recovery is waning as a fiscal cliff enters the 49th day on Saturday (Sept. 19). 

    For more color on what high-frequency data suggests, TomTom Traffic Index data for the most populated US metro areas continue to show a sluggish recovery. 

    Analyzing traffic data of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia, the most populated cities in the US, a recovery in traffic congestion to post-virus levels has yet to be recognized. 

    New York City

    Los Angeles

    Chicago

    Houston

    Philadelphia

    Readers may recall, we shared a KPMG International report in July specifying “an unprecedented decline in travel” is ahead with “14 million fewer cars” expected on US highways.

    For further clues on the recovery shape, high-frequency data from Goldman Sachs’ latest Activity Tracker points to a recovery that has stalled, not just in the US, but elsewhere. 

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    Movie theater box office revenues show some signs of life in the US and other countries but remain below pre-virus levels. China appears to be an anomaly. 

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    US Department store sales remain on a virus low. 

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    US labor market recovery has stalled. Increasing permanent job loss is causing deep economic scarring. 

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    The virus pandemic is a defining event, more or less, a transitional period for the country, one where society, politics, and business will be reshaped, and the deep economic scarring today will result in a paralyzed economy, with the need for structural reform. 

  • China Is Spying On Millions Of People: And They Aren't In China
    China Is Spying On Millions Of People: And They Aren’t In China

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 19:25

    Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

    After years of constant media fear-mongering, a sizeable number of Americans continue to believe in the disproven “Russiagate” conspiracy theory.

    Putin, the story goes, owns Donald Trump and engaged in a massive propaganda campaign via social media, hacking elections, and other collusion forms to ensure that Trump was elected. Now, Putin sits like Cobra Commander in the Kremlin, directed Trump’s actions, and Trump does what he is told.

    Yet these same Americans harbor little fear of China, the nation to which America’s economy was sold decades ago and the only real aggressive empire (though admittedly the Russian bear is beginning to wake up) outside of the United States.

    Despite China’s imperial ambitions, leftists all across the United States reacted in outrage and mockery when Donald Trump announced plans to ban TikTok, the Chinese owned social media firm. According to them, the idea that China may be using TikTok for nefarious purposes is beyond the scope of reality. It is yet one more conspiracy theory conjured up by Trump and QAnons…

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    Except…

    Trump might not be so wrong after all.

    In a new report from VICE (not a Trump or Q sympathizer by any means) “China has Been Doing ‘Mass Surveillance’ on Millions of Citizens in the US, UK, Australia, and India,” Gavin Butler writes:

    A Chinese technology company with links to Beijing’s military and intelligence agencies has been compiling personal information on millions of people from the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India, and Japan.

    The database was put together by the private firm Zhenhua Data: a Shenzhen-based company that lists the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese Communist Party among its main clients.

    Contained therein were the names and personal details of some 2.4 million people, including 35,000 Australians, 40,000 Britons, and many high-profile figures such as senior politicians, royal family members, religious leaders, and military officers.

    Those details included dates of birth, addresses, marital status, relatives, political associations, and social media IDs. While a lot of data has been “scraped” from social media and other open-source material, some appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications, and psychological profiles and is believed to have been acquired via the dark web.

    According to the ABC, one intelligence analyst described the giant global database as “Cambridge Analytica on steroids,” At the same time, the Telegraph reported that intelligence sources described the scale of information as “frightening.” Both publications were among the international consortium of media outlets that the database was shared with, including others in Australia, the UK, the US, Canada, Italy, and Germany.

    Professor Christopher Balding, the US academic and cybersecurity expert to whom the database was initially leaked, described the revelation as “something akin to discovering the Holy Grail.

    “What cannot be underestimated is the breadth and depth of the Chinese surveillance state and its extension around the world,” Balding wrote in a statement on Monday. “The world is only at the beginning stages of [understanding] how much China invests in intelligence and influence operations using the type of raw data we have to understand their targets.”

    The intended use of the information contained in the database is not entirely clear. Still, Zhenhua Data—whose official website has since been taken down—claims it provides “services for military, security and foreign propaganda” and describes its mission as influencing the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

    The company’s chief executive Wang Xuefeng has also previously used the Chinese social media app WeChat to endorse waging “hybrid warfare.” A term that refers to unconventional methods such as cyber attacks, fake news, and electoral intervention to disrupt and disable an opponent without engaging in open hostilities.

    Is China using Psychological warfare?

    There are legitimate concerns here for those who sneer at the idea that China has amassed the deeply personal data of so many individuals outside of its borders. Note that China maintains the personal data of elected officials and that of “regular” citizens.

    The issue here is that China can use that data to manipulate those individuals through a professional understanding of their psychology (their desires, drives, biases, etc.). Even more so, it allows China access to data that those officials do not want out. In other words, it makes those officials susceptible to blackmail..

    Even “ordinary” citizens could be recruited as Chinese agents to keep some of their most private thoughts or actions secret.

    Don’t understand how this could happen? Just watch Black Mirror’s episode, “Shut Up And Dance.”

    Given America’s constant kowtowing to China and the American industry’s shipping to that country over the past 40 years, it appears someone is already dancing.

  • "I Was Truly Alone": Florida Waiter Laid Off Due To COVID Winds Up Homeless, Living In A Tent
    “I Was Truly Alone”: Florida Waiter Laid Off Due To COVID Winds Up Homeless, Living In A Tent

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 19:05

    Waiters and food service worker have arguably been hit the hardest by the pandemic, alongside of those who work in hospitality and tourism. Not only have their industries been the slowest to re-open, many who work as bartenders, waiters and waitresses often live day to day and have few benefits.

    While the government has been bickering with itself in an attempt to figure out how many more trillions it wants to print out of thin air and call a “stimulus package”, the rank and file restaurant workers continue to struggle mightily. And now, heading from summer to fall, outdoor dining will likely start to pare back.

    AP told the story of one such waiter, who went from working at a steakhouse chain restaurant – always with enough money for groceries and his car – to now being homeless.

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    42 year old Jeff Lello, who had been waiting tables his whole life, was laid off back in March as a result of the pandemic. He was clearing about $100 per night in cash at his job and “often picked up extra shifts”. He never had to rely on food stamps or unemployment his whole life, the article notes.

    But while he watched his savings dry up and he waiting for Florida’s backlogged unemployment system, he eventually couldn’t afford rent or his car. He went from living in an apartment with a roof over his head to literally living in a tent that he “purchased with his last $75”. 

    He had been living in his tent “deep in the woods” near “other homeless campers”. He had a cot with a sleeping bag and a shelf for food and belongings. He keeps one corner of his tent for clean clothes and the other for dirty. Most days he would wake up around 7AM and find a bathroom at a local store to freshen up and wash a shirt. From there, he would go to the food bank and grab a bag of pasta and sauce. Most of the food he would give away, since it required pots and electricity – but he would keep the peanut butter and granola bars. 

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    He spent his days begging for money, food or jobs. “6 weeks with no help. Please,” his sign he would hold on the side of the road reads. He said people weren’t exactly eager to help: “I think the most I ever got was one dollar and a bag of oranges.”

    He said: “I was truly, truly alone. I was going back to no one.”

    He spent most days of summer in the library, charging his phone, applying for jobs – and checking on the status of his unemployment claim. On his inability to get government benefits, Lello said: “I don’t understand what I did wrong. Why me? I had just lost all hope in everything.”

    One of his closest friends supported him by bringing him all of her spare change, allowing him to forward his mail to her and allowing him to shower at her home. Finally, at the end of July, she called him to inform him that his unemployment check had finally arrived: it was $4800 in back pay. Lello took her out to Dennys, then bought a van with AC, a roof, doors and an alarm to live in.

    “When you’re homeless, the hardest thing is to get something hot,” he said.

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    His experience is a microcosm of the rest of the country right now. There are 20 million people currently living paycheck to paycheck that spend more than 30% of their income on rent, AP notes. These people are “likely to experience homelessness at some point, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless”.

    Florida’s situation has been disproportionately worse. In fact, by June, the state had not paid 40% of its 2.2 million outstanding unemployment claims. 

    The National Coalition for the Homeless also predicts the number of people would could experience homelessness could rise by 45% due specifically to the effects of Covid. 

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Sep 22

Today’s News 22nd September 2020

  • Tour de France: Too Fast To Be Clean?
    Tour de France: Too Fast To Be Clean?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 02:45

    Tadej Pogačar made history on Sunday by becoming the first Slovenian to win the Tour de France.

    Winning the Tour a day before his 22nd birthday, Pogačar is now the second-youngest rider ever to win the Tour de France, trailing only Henri Cornet who was just 19 years and 352 days old when he won the second-ever Tour de France in 1904.

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    Pogačar, who rides for UAE Team Emirates, had only taken the lead on the penultimate day of the Grand Tour after outclassing his compatriot and friend Primoz Roglic in an individual time trial to the top of La Planche des Belles Filles. Flying up the hill in spectacular fashion, Pogačar had made up his 57-second deficit to Roglic way before the finish line, taking almost 2 minutes off his friend in the end.

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    While a finish like that would have made huge headlines during the Tour’s heyday two decades ago, it went strangely unnoticed this year.

    As Statista’s Felix Richter notes, many former fans of the Tour de France and cycling in general appear to have lost faith in the integrity of what is arguably one of the most doping-ridden disciplines in the world of sport.

    Infographic: Tour de France: Too Fast To Be Clean? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    With an average speed of 39.87 kilometers per hour (24.78 mph), this year’s Tour winner was only fractionally slower than Lance Armstrong was in his seven Tour wins between 1999 and 2005, begging the question if today’s riders really are as clean as every fan of the sport would hope.

  • Exposing War Crimes Should Always Be Legal… Committing And Hiding Them Should Not
    Exposing War Crimes Should Always Be Legal… Committing And Hiding Them Should Not

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    The Kafkaesque extradition trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues, with each frustrating day making it clearer than the day before that what we are watching is nothing other than a staged performance by the US and UK governments to explain why it’s okay for powerful governments to jail journalists who expose inconvenient truths about them.

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    The Assange defense team is performing admirably, making the arguments they need to make to try and prevent an extradition that will set a precedent which will imperil press freedoms and creating a chilling effect on all adversarial national security investigative journalism around the world. These arguments appear to fall on deaf ears before Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who has from the beginning been acting like someone who has already made up her mind and who has been reading from pre-written judgements at the trial regardless of the points presented to her (an unusual behavior made all the more suspicious by her supervision under Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who has a massive conflict of interest in this case).

    And while it is essential to fight this fight with every intention of winning, I’d also like to issue a friendly reminder that this entire trial is illegitimate at its very foundation.

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    Amid all the pedantic squabbling over when it is and is not legal under US law for a journalist to expose evidence of US war crimes, we must never lose sight of the fact that:

    (A) it should always be legal to expose war crimes,

    (B) it should always be illegal for governments to hide evidence of their war crimes,

    (C) war crimes should always be punished,

    (D) people who start criminal wars should always be punished,

    (E) governments should not be permitted to have a level of secrecy that allows them to start criminal wars, and

    (F) power and secrecy should always have an inverse relationship to one another.

    The Assange case needs to be fought tooth and claw, but we must keep in mind that it is so very, very many clicks back from where we need to be as a civilization. In an ideal situation the public should have governments too afraid of them to keep secrets from them; instead here we are begging the most powerful government in the world to please not imprison a journalist because he arguably did not break the rules that that government made for itself.

    Do you see how far that point is from where we need to be?

    It’s important to remember this. It’s important to remember that the amount of evil deeds power structures will commit is directly proportional to the amount of information they are permitted to hide from the public. We will not have a healthy world until power and secrecy have an inverse relationship to each other: privacy for rank-and-file individuals and transparency for governments and their officials.

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    “But what about military secrets?” one might object. Yes, what about military secrets? What about the fact that virtually all military violence perpetrated by the world’s largest power structures is initiated based on lies? What about the utterly indisputable fact that the more secrecy we allow the war machine the more wars it deceives the public into allowing it to initiate?

    • In a healthy world, the most powerful government on earth wouldn’t be trying to squint at its own laws in such a way that permits a prosecution of a journalist for telling the truth.

    • In a healthy world, the most powerful government on earth wouldn’t prosecute anyone for telling the truth at all.

    • In a healthy world, governments would prosecute their own war crimes instead of those who expose them.

    • In a healthy world, governments wouldn’t commit war crimes at all.

    • In a healthy world, governments wouldn’t start wars at all.

    • In a healthy world, governments would see truth as something to be desired and actively sought, not something to be repressed and punished.

    • In a healthy world, governments wouldn’t keep secrets from the public, and wouldn’t have any cause to want to.

    • In a healthy world, if governments existed at all, they would exist solely as tools for the people to serve themselves, with full transparency and accountability to the people.

    We are obviously a very, very far cry from the kind of healthy world we would all like to one day find ourselves in. But we should always keep in mind what a healthy world will look like, and hold it as our true north for the direction that we are pushing in.

    *  *  *

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

  • "A Black Box Of Unclear Motives" – World's Oldest Central Bank Blasted After Redacting BlackRock Bond-Buying Report
    “A Black Box Of Unclear Motives” – World’s Oldest Central Bank Blasted After Redacting BlackRock Bond-Buying Report

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 09/22/2020 – 01:00

    Ahead of today’s Riksbank rate decision, Swedish authorities are facing consternation from many market participants over the lack of transparency about its newly unveiled corporate-bond buying scheme.

    While Swedish officials are likely unphased by ‘outsiders’ questioning their decisions (after their controversial – yet successful – strategy in dealing with COVID), Bloomberg reports that initial enthusiasm by market participants as the world’s oldest central bank brought in consultants from BlackRock to help it move ahead with a controversial corporate bond purchase program.

    The Riksbank’s decision to start buying corporate bonds this month is turning into one of its most controversial policy moves ever.

    In response to Bloomberg’s request for information about BlackRock’s report, 19 pages of heavily redacted text was sent…

    “The Swedish corporate bond market exhibits a number of singularities when compared to other Anglo-Saxon markets,” the document showed.

    Almost everything else was blacked out.

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    Riksbank cited  a further 68 pages of the report couldn’t be shared at all, as they, “in their whole, are covered by secrecy.”

    As Bloomberg notes, the legal adviser to a parliamentary committee responsible for drafting a new Riksbank Act has suggested the program might be unlawful. And investors have warned that the purchases will distort bond prices in a market that’s already rebounded from the Covid crisis.

    “It becomes a black box, run by the Riksbank, with highly unclear working methods and motives,” said Andreas Halldahl, head of Swedish rates at Storebrand Asset Management.

    “It only brings more uncertainty and destroys another market that worked just fine without them.”

    The corporate bond program even raises questions about the Riksbank’s mandate when it comes to unconventional monetary policy, according to Par Osterholm, a professor of economics at Orebro University.

    “A relevant question to ask here is how much credit risk it’s reasonable for the Riksbank to expose itself to,” Osterholm said inan opinion piece in Svenska Dagbladet.

    The Riksbank said earlier this month that:

    “The Swedish market for corporate bonds is currently functioning in a satisfactory manner, but is assessed to still be vulnerable if the crisis worsens and unease increases.”

    One look at the market’s risk-pricing for Swedish corporate debt suggests all is not well as spread compensation has collapsed to almost record lows once again…

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    …as the bond-buying program is barely under-way…

    “They set out to ‘save’ a market, but can’t really define what the problem is and how they will make it better,” Storebrand’s Halldahl said.

    “Nor can they say what distinguishes the Swedish market from the foreign ones and in which areas we function so much worse.”

    The Riksbank started its corporate bond-buying program on Sept. 14, but hasn’t provided any details of actual purchases.

  • Kennedy's US-Russia Joint Space Vision Must Be Revived
    Kennedy’s US-Russia Joint Space Vision Must Be Revived

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 23:55

    Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    September 20th marked the anniversary of the last speech John F Kennedy delivered to the United Nations’ General Assembly.

    This event bears more relevance upon our present crisis than most people could possibly imagine. This is true not only because it is wise to pay homage to great ideas of the past which lesser souls allowed to slip away and get buried under the sands of time, but also because history provides many of the solutions to seemingly impossible problems in our own time.

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    During his short speech, Kennedy outlined the very same fundamental obstacles to survival faced by our own world 57 years later:

    The spectre of nuclear annihilation looming overhead, poverty and the evils of colonialism staining humanity on earth, and the dominance of destructive modes of thinking which have prevented honest dialogue between the west and east who have so many common interests and yet have been blocked from acting upon them for want of creativity, understanding and faith.

    Although it is far too rarely displayed in history, great leaders (those who are beholden to their consciences) recognize that there are solutions to every problem. From Plato to Cicero to Confucius and Christ in ancient times or Thomas More, Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, and Kennedy in our modern age, these rare but vitally important individuals demonstrate through their words and deeds that when the dominant social rules of the game prevent those necessary and possible solutions from manifesting, then only one course of action becomes possible: Change the rules of the game.

    The martyred Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin eloquently touched on this truth in 1992 shaking the hands with Yasser Arafat and advancing a two-state solution saying: 

    “The future belongs to those who have the courage to change their axioms.”

    Kennedy Breaks the Rules of the Great Game

    Such was the case of John F. Kennedy who recognized early on in his short-lived presidency that the geopolitical “closed system” thinking dominant among the military and foreign policy experts of the west held only the seeds for humanity’s destruction. In his speech of September 20, 1963, Kennedy revisited a theme which he first unveiled on the day of his inaugural address in 1961: A joint U.S.-USSR space program to transform the rules of the Cold War and usher in a new creative age of reason, win-win cooperation and boundless discoveries.

    In his 1961 inaugural speech, Kennedy ushered in the theme that would animate his next three years saying:

    “Together let U.S. explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah–to “undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free.”

    Ten days later, Kennedy re-iterated this idea during his first state of the Union inviting Russia “to join with U.S. in developing… a new communication satellite program in preparation for probing the distant planets of Mars and Venus, probes which may someday unlock the deepest secrets of the universe”.

    Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and other leaders in the east heard these words with a mix of hope and trepidation.

    The priests of the Cold War also heard these words… however hope was not among their feelings. Their hearts sank under the profound fear that the zero sum game theory models that they spent so much effort to bring online as substitutes for creative diplomacy would become obsolete in a new age of positive cooperation among sovereign nation states.

    These latter priests who were then led by such figures as the State Department’s Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Joint Chiefs’ head Lyman Lemnitzer and the powerful Dulles brothers lit dangerous fires on multiple fronts in an effort to kill JFK’s vision in the cradle.

    The form this attempted murder took was the Bay of Pigs Invasion of April 17-19 which was put into motion weeks before the young president had stepped into the White House. Even though Kennedy outflanked the Dr. Strangeloves among the Joint Chiefs of Staff by not providing air support for the invasion, grave damage was done to U.S.-Soviet relations. When he finally met Khrushchev on June 4, 1961 in Geneva, the president’s offer for space cooperation was rejected by the Russian leader who demanded America commit to arms reduction and other acts of good will before any positive cooperation could possibly take place.

    Did Khrushchev recognize that Kennedy’s November 1961 firing of Allan Dulles and his threat to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces demonstrated a potentially trustworthy partner during this period? We may never know for sure.

    Despite these setbacks, Kennedy’s requests for joint U.S.-Russian cooperation in space went on unabated and we do know that Khruschev’s letter congratulating the USA for putting their first man into orbit conveyed a strong reciprocal hope saying on February 21, 1962:

    “One more step has been taken toward mastering the cosmos and this time Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn, a citizen of the United States of America, has been added to the family of astronauts. The successful launching of spaceships signalizing the conquest of new heights in science and technology inspire legitimate pride for the limitless potentialities of the human mind to serve the welfare of humanity. It is to be hoped that the genius of man, penetrating the depth of the universe, will be able to find ways to lasting peace and ensure the prosperity of all peoples on our planet earth which, in the space age, though it does not seem so large, is still dear to all of its inhabitants.

    If our countries pooled their efforts—scientific, technical and material—to master the universe, this would be very beneficial for the advance of science and would be joyfully acclaimed by all peoples who would like to see scientific achievements benefit man and not be used for “cold war” purposes and the arms race.”

    On September 12, 1962 Kennedy electrified the aspirations of both Americans and the world delivering his famous “Moon Speech” at Rice University saying:

    “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war… We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

    This speech and the accompanying top down federal spending needed to realize these goals ushered in a momentum and excitement which was nearly destroyed by the greatest nuclear confrontation humanity had ever faced only one month later as America and Russia nearly unleashed hell on earth during the 9 day Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Although it took an immense effort, JFK overcame immense opposition from the Deep State to negotiate the test ban treaty on August 5, 1963 co-signed by the USA, the USSR, UK and joined by over 100 other nations prohibiting nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space. By that time, word was circulating among JFK’s closest staffers that the president was planning to visit Moscow either during his presidential campaign or in the earliest moments of his 2nd term in office.

    Never content to mechanistically focus on one policy at a time, Kennedy’s holistic approach to statecraft always opened multiple flanks simultaneously which was witnessed in his October 1963 efforts to pull America out of Vietnam with his NSAM 263, as well as his efforts to bypass the Federal Reserve by issuing Silver backed treasury notes to finance his growth policies both at home and abroad. A fuller exposition of Kennedy’s battle is outlined in the class “Montreal’s Permindex and the Deep State Plot to Kill JFK”:

    The September 20 Offensive for Cooperation

    This brings U.S. to the decisive moment on September 20, 1963 as Kennedy gave his loudest impassionate call for a U.S.-Russian joint space program with the goal of putting a Russian and American on the Moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy opened his speech acknowledging the existential dark threat wrapped tightly over humanity saying:

    “The world has not escaped from the darkness. The long shadows of conflict and crisis envelop U.S. still. But we meet today in an atmosphere of rising hope, and at a moment of comparative calm. My presence here today is not a sign of crisis, but of confidence.”

    Kennedy lays out the two opposing versions of peace (negative/deterrence vs positive/win-win) and clearly described which one was the only sustainable and legitimate form compatible with natural law:

    “If either of our countries is to be fully secure, we need a much better weapon than the H-bomb–a weapon better than ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines–and that better weapon is peaceful cooperation.”

    The president poetically builds an understanding within his audiences’ mind to understand the possibility and necessity for positive peace conceptions that would require an end to Cold War thinking and usher in a new age of reason saying:

    “In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity–in the field of space–there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries–indeed of all the world–cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.

    “All these and other new steps toward peaceful cooperation may be possible. Most of them will require on our part full consultation with our allies–for their interests are as much involved as our own, and we will not make an agreement at their expense. Most of them will require long and careful negotiation. And most of them will require a new approach to the cold war–a desire not to “bury” one’s adversary, but to compete in a host of peaceful arenas, in ideas, in production, and ultimately in service to all mankind.”

    How Did Khruschev Respond?

    Everyone knows that Nikita Khrushchev, who frequently battled leading figures among Russia’s politburo during his last years in power, was deposed in a coup in 1964. But it is worth asking: how did he respond to Kennedy’s final call to cooperation? As far as this author can tell, history largely remained silent on this point for many years, until Sergei Khrushchev (Nikita’s son) delivered a revealing interview to Space Cast magazine on October 2, 1997.

    In that interview, Sergei revealed that after the success of the partial test ban treaty and Kennedy’s UN speech, his father had decided to accept Kennedy’s offer saying: “my father decided that maybe he should accept (Kennedy’s) offer, given the state of the space programs of the two countries… He thought that if the Americans wanted to get our technology and create defenses against it they would do it anyway. Maybe we could get technology in the bargain that would be better for U.S. my father thought.”

    Sergei also reported to Space Cast that like Kennedy, Khrushchev “was also planning to begin diverting weapons complex design bureaus into more consumer and commercial, non-military production.”

    Sergei ended his interview saying: 

    “I think if Kennedy had lived, we would be living in a completely different world.”

    The Aftermath of Kennedy’s Murder

    Kennedy’s murder on November 22, 1963 ended this potential and pulled humanity back into the iron grip of the Cold Warriors who sought to keep humanity’s creative potential locked under the heavy chains of nuclear terror, consumerist decadence (today called Globalization) and never-ending wars that wrecked havoc upon the next five decades.

    Under this closed system paradigm, creativity’s power to change our carrying capacity through scientific and technological progress was all but banned as vast financial resources were redirected away from NASA (whose budget peaked in 1965 and was only strangled continuously thereafter) into the military industrial complex and the growing debacle in Vietnam. This war which both Kennedy and his brother had fought to stop went far in annihilating the spirit of optimism in the hearts of the young and old alike while CIA-sponsored drugs flooded the campuses of America ensuring the growth of a new ethic of escapism, anti-humanism, post-truth modernism and rejection of Judeo-Christian traditions that infused western society its moral vitality for 2000 years.

    Vital investments into nuclear fusion R & D were slashed and educational reforms under control of British imperial operatives steering the OECD (like Sir Alexander King) ensured that engineering/physics and other “practical sciences” were replaced with sociology and humanities courses which would be more “relevant” in a post-industrial Brave New World.

    Humanity’s Second Chance

    Second chances of this magnitude do not come often, but sitting as we are once more upon the precipice of nuclear Armageddon (the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday clock mere seconds to midnight), the choice of global annihilation or survival has again been put before U.S..

    Today, the spirit of JFK’s vision has come alive through the leadership of Russia and China who together have re-activated bold space missions to revisit the Moon with the full backing of the powers of sovereign nation states. This has manifested in the form of the Russian-China joint program to co-develop lunar missions, which have included the European Space Agency’s participation in the upcoming Luna 25, 26 and 27 missions to the Moon scheduled to occur between now and 2025.

    Roscosmos officials stated on August 27 that this program (which is open for the USA to participate in as an equal partner) “includes missions to study the Moon from orbit and surface, the collection and return of lunar soil to Earth, as well as in the future, the construction of a visited lunar base and full scale development of our satellite.” Roscosmos representatives went further to announce their plans to establish a permanent lunar base by 2030 with China following suite soon thereafter.

    This orientation obviously dovetails the American Artemis Accords which president Trump and NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine (a long time friend of Roscosmos’ Dimitry Rogozin) recently unveiled to promote international partnerships in lunar and mars development standing in stark contrast to the military industrial complex’s plans to militarize space.

    The spirit of JFK’s space vision has certain come alive in new and exciting ways, but one question still remains unanswered: Does America have the ability to withstand the forces seeking to dissolve the republic and join this new open system paradigm or are those forces which killed JFK and sunk humanity into an age of war and closed-system thinking too powerful to stop?

  • China Signals War Footing: PLA Minesweepers In 'Drill' To "Break Taiwan Sea Mines Threat"
    China Signals War Footing: PLA Minesweepers In ‘Drill’ To “Break Taiwan Sea Mines Threat”

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 23:35

    China’s state media has confirmed what is a very serious and direct escalation in waters surrounding Taiwan amid ongoing PLA military exercises in the area.

    PLA ships are engaged in ‘mock’ minesweeping activities “amid Taiwan’s attempt to deploy sea mines in the Taiwan Straits,” though it’s unclear the degree to which China’s mine-sweeping ships actually entered the contested strait.

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    State-run Global Times described the minesweeping ships’ exercises as “honing their capability to effectively and rapidly clear sea lanes from mines, and open passages for other warships and landing forces, amid Taiwan secessionists’ attempt to surround the Taiwan Straits with mines.”

    GT further claimed that it was a regular Taiwanese “tactic” to lay mines in the strait in order to “buy time for US reinforcements”.

    But the publication added this would not succeed due to the PLA’s thwarting the operations. 

    The PLA drills, described state media, are ultimately aimed at countering “Taiwan secessionists and the US, who have been ramping up tensions in the Taiwan Straits.”

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    Sea mine detonation illustrative file image.

    According to GT:

    An anti-sea mine flotilla consisting of the Liuyang, the Kaiping, and the Changshu affiliated with the PLA Southern Theater Command recently conducted a mine-sweeping exercise using live sea mines, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Sunday.

    The ships covered the calm sea, under which smart sea mines were hidden, as they would explode once they detect any sound or magnetic field change caused by ships passing by, the report said.

    The Monday threat comes days after Taipei hosted yet another top American diplomatic delegation, which Beijing has repeatedly warned against, noting a violation in the longstanding ‘One China’ policy.

    Multiple US advanced weapons sales are also currently in the works, which China also seas as a direct threat. All of this begs the question: were the Chinese minesweepers engaged only in mere “drills”? At the very least a clear signal has been sent.

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    Though in the past months and more broadly in the last year rhetoric centered on the Taiwan issue has grown more aggressive and bellicose, we’ve entered different territory – clearly one presenting a war footing and posture on the Chinese side – when active minesweeping operations near Taiwan are referenced, complete with a photo from the bow of the ship presented in state media.

  • Down The 1619 Project's Memory Hole
    Down The 1619 Project’s Memory Hole

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 23:15

    Authored by Phillip Magness via Quillette.com,

    The history of the American Revolution isn’t the only thing the New York Times is revising through its 1619 Project.

    The “paper of record” has also taken to quietly altering the published text of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism.

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    When the 1619 Project went to print in August 2019 as a special edition of the New York Times Magazine, the newspaper put up an interactive version on its website. The original opening text stated:

    The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

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    The passage, and in particular its description of the year 1619 as “our true founding,” quickly became a flashpoint for controversy around the project. Critics on both the Left and Right took issue with the paper’s declared intention of displacing 1776 with the alternative date—a point that was also emphasized in the magazine feature’s graphics, showing the date of American independence crossed out and replaced by the date of the first slave ship’s arrival in Jamestown, Virginia.

    For several months after the 1619 Project first launched, its creator and organizer Nikole Hannah-Jones doubled down on the claim. “I argue that 1619 is our true founding,” she tweeted the week after the project launched. “Also, look at the banner pic in my profile”—a reference to the graphic of the date 1776 crossed out with a line.

    It’s a claim she repeated many times over.

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    But something changed as the historical controversies around the 1619 Project intensified in late 2019 and early 2020. A group of five distinguished historians took issue with Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, focusing on its historically unsupported claim that protecting slavery was a primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. Other details of the project soon came under scrutiny, revealing both errors of fact and dubious interpretations of evidence in other essays, such as Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project piece attempting to connect American capitalism with slavery. Finally back in March, a historian who the Times recruited to fact-check Hannah-Jones’s essay revealed that she had warned the paper against publishing its claims about the motives of the American Revolution on account of their weak evidence. The 1619 Project’s editors ignored the advice.

    Throughout the controversy, the line about the year 1619 being “our true founding” continued to haunt the Times. This criticism did not aim to denigrate the project’s titular date or the associated events in the history of slavery. Rather, the passage came to symbolize the Times’s blurring of historical analysis with editorial hyperbole. The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles.

    Rather than address this controversy directly, the Times—it now appears—decided to send it down the memory hole—the euphemized term for selectively editing inconvenient passages out of old newspaper reports in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Without announcement or correction, the newspaper quietly edited out the offending passage such that it now reads:

    The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

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    Discovery of this edit came about earlier this week when Nikole Hannah-Jones went on CNN to deny that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with a new founding date of 1619. She repeated the point in a now-deleted tweet:

    “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”

    It was not the first time that Hannah-Jones had tried to alter her self-depiction of the project’s aims on account of the controversial line. She attempted a similar revision a few months ago during an online spat with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.

    But this time the brazen rewriting of her own arguments proved too much. Hannah-Jones’s readers scoured her own Twitter feed and public statements over the previous year, unearthing multiple instances where she had in fact announced an intention to displace 1776 with 1619.

    The foremost piece of evidence against Hannah-Jones’s spin, of course, came from the opening passage of from the Times’s own website where it originally announced its aim “to reframe the country’s history” around the year “1619 as our true founding.” When readers returned to that website to cite the line however, they discovered to their surprise that it was no longer there.

    The Times quietly dropped the offending passage at some point during the intervening year, although multiple screencaps of the original exist. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine suggests the alteration came around late December 2019, when the 1619 Project was facing an onslaught of criticism over this exact point from several distinguished historians of the American founding.

    It wasn’t the only edit that the newspaper made to further conceal its previous denigration of 1776. Prompted by the discovery of the first deletion, Twitter users noticed another suspicious change to the project’s text. The print edition of the 1619 Project from August 2019 contained an introductory passage reading:

    In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.

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    The website version of the 1619 Project now reads:

    In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.

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    This additional reference to the 1619 origin point, underlined in the original print version, is no more.

    Whatever the exact occasion for the changes, the Times did not disclose its edits or how they obscured one of the most controversial claims in the entire 1619 Project. They simply made the problematic passages disappear, hoping that nobody would notice.

  • Melbourne Police Surround & Arrest 2 Elderly Women Resting On Park Bench For 'COVID Violation'
    Melbourne Police Surround & Arrest 2 Elderly Women Resting On Park Bench For ‘COVID Violation’

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 22:55

    “Victoria Police have lost all commonsense,” one Australian eyewitness quipped upon posting a video showing police telling a 38-week pregnant woman she can’t sit down due to coronavirus and social distancing enforcement measures. 

    It’s one of many recent viral videos to come out of Australia’s southeast state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, showing absurd “crackdowns” by police for alleged coronavirus policy violators. “As a pregnant woman I can’t sit in the park?” the incredulous woman whose story was covered widely in local media asked the couple of officers who harassed her.

    Apparently not… because COVID. “You can only be out of your house for one of four reasons,” the officer responded. “One of those would be exercise. Sitting in a park is not one of the four reasons.”

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    The woman reasoned, “So, I’m pregnant and obviously my exercise is limited because I have to walk I’m now puffed out because I’m 38 weeks pregnant. So, even I can’t sit in a park, is that right?”

    “You can only be out for one of the four reasons,” the officer asserted, explaining that her designated one-hour of exercise outdoors still includes certain restrictions (as if free citizens are under a prison regimen!).

    But the above scene which unfolded earlier this month is nothing compared to another recent moment caught on video of police surrounding two old ladies resting on a park bench in Melbourne.

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    Daily Mail reported “Five officers swarmed two elderly women sitting on a park bench” earlier this month.

    This one made national media in Australia and is still going viral across the world after it happened during the first week of September:

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    Here’s how national news source news.com.au described the scene unfold:

    Dramatic footage has captured a bizarre stand-off between five police officers and two elderly women sitting on a Melbourne park bench.

    The video posted to YouTube on Sunday showed the officers surrounding the two women as one of them said firmly: “No, I’m not standing up”.

    “On what grounds am I under arrest? This is unlawful,” the woman said.

    The officers snatched a mobile phone from one of the elderly women as soon as she took it out to start recording the encounter.

    They were then threatened with arrest for allegedly refusing to show identification – all because police literally wouldn’t let them sit down to rest, supposedly in violation of coronavirus measures. 

    In yet another incident police entered a pregnant woman’s home and arrested her for merely planning an anti-lockdown protest on Facebook.

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    This also unfolded in Victoria.

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    Protests have sprung up in various major cities across the Australian continent over authorities’ ultra-restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures, which judging by these and other incidents are among the most stringent and far-reaching in the world. 

  • US Sends M2A2 Bradleys To Challenge Russian Forces In Northern Syria
    US Sends M2A2 Bradleys To Challenge Russian Forces In Northern Syria

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 22:35

    Submitted by SouthFront,

    The US military has reinforced its troops, supposedly mostly withdrawn from Syria, with a new batch of military equipment, this time M2A2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

    In an official comment released on September 18, the US-led coalition said that mechanized infantry assets, including Bradley IFVs, were positioned to Syria in order to “ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS”, “ensure the protection of Coalition forces” and “provide the rapid flexibility needed to protect critical petroleum resources”.

    The M2A2 Bradley is armed with a 25 mm chain gun, a 7.62 mm coaxial machine gun and a dual TOW anti-tank guided missile launcher. This makes the IFV the heaviest weapon deployed by the US on the ground in Syria.

    As of September 21, the newly deployed armoured vehicles were already spotted during a coalition patrol in al-Hasakah province, where the US has a network of fortified positions and military bases. US forces regularly conduct patrols in the area. Another area of US interest in Syria’s northeast are the Omar oil fields on the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Washington reinforced its troops deployed there with M2A2 Bradley IFVs in October 2019.

    The main difference is that, according to local sources, the vehicles deployed in al-Hasakah province will most likely be involved in patrols in the area and thus regular confrontations with the Russian Military Police and the Syrian Army.

    Just a few days ago, Russian attack helicopters chased US Apaches after they had tried to harass a Russian Military Police patrol. Earlier, the US military claimed that US troops sustained “mild injures”, when a Russian vehicle rammed a US MRAP in the al-Hasakah countryside.

    The US-led coalition regularly tries to limit the freedom of movement of Russian and Syrian forces in the northeast of the country and faces an asymmetric response. Now, US forces will have an additional argument in securing what they see as their sphere of influence.

    Syrian government forces have suffered even more casualties from ISIS attacks in the provinces of Homs and Deir Ezzor. On September 19, at least five members of Liwa al-Quds, a pro-government Palestinian militia, died in an explosion of an improvised explosive device near the town of al-Shumaytiyah. On September 20, an explosion hit a vehicle of the Syrian Army near al-Mayadin reportedly injuring several soldiers. Also, a field commander of the National Defense Forces was killed in clashes with ISIS terrorists west of Deir Ezzor.

    As of September 21, the Syrian Army, Liwa al-Quds and their allies continue a combing operation to clear the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert from ISIS cells. However, the strong ISIS presence is still a notable threat for the security situation in the central Syrian desert.

    In Greater Idlib, the Russian Aerospace Forces continue their air campaign targeting training camps, weapon depots, HQs and fortified positions of Turkish-backed terrorist groups. The interesting fact is that with the resumption of active Russian strikes on targets across Idlib, terrorists have decreased the number of attacks on the Syrian Army and civilian targets along the contact line. It would appear that the airstrike diplomacy has all chances to become an integral part of the Idlib ceasefire.

  • Last Ditch Olive Branch? Iran's Zarif Offers Full Prisoner Swap With US
    Last Ditch Olive Branch? Iran’s Zarif Offers Full Prisoner Swap With US

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 22:15

    As if offering a last ditch olive branch to the Trump administration the moment the US is busy ramping up the anti-Iran maximum pressure campaign just ahead of the November election, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Monday said his country stands ready to conduct a full prisoner swap with the United States.

    The offer was made during a virtual address to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, reports Reuters. A prisoner deal would include a handful of Americans who are among other Westerners languishing in Iranian political prisons, most in Evin prison outside Tehran, considered highly susceptible to the spread of coronavirus. 

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    A couple of high profile US prisoners which Washington has long sought to gain the release of include  Iranian-American father and son Baquer and Siamak Namazi. The latter is a businessman arrested in 2015 and given a ten year prison sentence for “collaborating with a foreign government”. The family was formerly in the US-backed Shah’s government prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

    Zarif also reiterated Monday that Tehran considers the 2015 nuclear deal “very much alive” even after the US pulled out of it in May 2018. Washington is still claiming authority to implement ‘snapback’ sanctions, however, which Iran has pointed out is backed by no one else. 

    The US has indeed remained isolated on the world stage as it attempts to uphold a full arms embargo on the Islamic Republic, which is set to expire in October. 

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    Zarif has over the last days been mocking Washington over its seemingly contradictory stance regarding the status of the JCPOA:

    Iran has mocked what it calls the Trump’s administration isolated stand on the question, and the other members of the U.N. Security Council, including U.S. allies, have vowed to ignore the administration’s declaration of a sanctions snapback.

    Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif taunted Mr. Pompeo on Twitter, predicting Washington will face a fresh humiliation as this weekend’s deadline approaches.

    “Wrong again, Secretary Pompeo,” Mr. Zarif tweeted. “Nothing new happens on 9/20.”

    Unphased, Pompeo has said “We don’t need any other country to go along with us.” 

    Given this latest offer of a “full” prisoner swap, which the Trump administration could gain a political boost from so near the election, it seems Tehran is hoping for an “out” before US-led sanctions escalate further. 

  • Should Scott Atlas Sue His Detractors?
    Should Scott Atlas Sue His Detractors?

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 21:55

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    Former Stanford professor and now White House advisor Scott Atlas has positioned himself against lockdowns and for widespread reopening of the economy, a position that is backed by high-prestige scientists around the world, including other colleagues at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, alongside many medical practitioners. 

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    For that matter, before all these wicked lockdowns hit, 800 top medical professionals warned against them. But that was before politics completely poisoned the debate. Gradually, it emerged that one’s positions on lockdowns followed partisan lines, as the lives of millions were shattered, at least in the United States. Meanwhile, scientists around the world are writing open letters pleading for a return to freedom. Even socialists have come out against lockdowns. 

    Some colleagues at Stanford released a stinging letter against Dr. Atlas. It included this broadside:

    To prevent harm to the public’s health, we also have both a moral and an ethical responsibility to call attention to the falsehoods and misrepresentations of science recently fostered by Dr. Scott Atlas, a former Stanford Medical School colleague and current senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public-health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy.

    What follows in the letter is a series of assertions that supposedly contradict views allegedly “fostered” by Atlas. Notice the vagueness of the term “fostered.” It can mean anything, including blaming him for whatever media misrepresentations of his opinion might be. 

    For example, the letter condemns “encouraging herd immunity through unchecked community transmission,” with a heavy implication that Atlas has pushed this. It’s completely ridiculous. He and many others in his position have favored an intelligent approach that protects the vulnerable, encourages therapeutics, while otherwise allowing normal social functioning as community immunity develops. It’s nowhere the case that anyone, to my knowledge, has ever encouraged “unchecked” transmission, except perhaps Governor Cuomo who forced Covid-19 patients into nursing homes. 

    The entire letter, in fact, seemed not about public health but rather political positioning, exhibit A in the politicization of science. Atlas had agreed to advise the White House: that was his crime and that is what prompted the letter, including the condescending demand that he, a highly accomplished and published scientist, should follow the science. 

    Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University wrote the Stanford Daily thusly:

    Dear Editor,

    In an open letter, 98 Stanford faculty members accuse their Stanford colleague and White House COVID-19 advisor Scott Atlas of “falsehoods and misrepresentations,” claiming that “many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science.” Surprisingly, the alleged falsehoods are not mentioned, making scientific discourse difficult.

    Among other things, the letter advocates handwashing, which Atlas obviously agrees with. So, what are the disagreements?

    While anyone can get infected, there is a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and young, and the risk to children is less than from annual influenza. Using an age-targeted strategy, Atlas wants to better protect high-risk individuals, while letting children and young adults live more normal lives. This contrasts with general age-wide lockdowns that protect low-risk students and young professionals working from home, while older higher-risk working-class people generate the inevitable herd immunity.

    The open letter ignores collateral damage caused by lockdowns. Being a public health policy expert, it is natural and reassuring that Atlas also consider plummeting childhood vaccinations, postponed cancer screenings, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health and more house evictions, just to name a few.

    Among experts on infectious disease outbreaks, many of us have long advocated for an age-targeted strategy, and I would be delighted to debate this with any of the 98 signatories. Supporters include professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University, the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist. Assuming no bias against women scientists of color, I urge Stanford faculty and students to read her thoughts.

    Martin Kulldorff, professor, Harvard Medical School

    Notice Dr. Kulldorff’s invitation to debate any of the signers of the letter. As yet, not one signer has taken him up on the offer, which is rather strange. They claim to believe in science and yet won’t consider debating a highly credentialed and widely published scholar who has a different view from the signers of the letter. 

    The original open letter, written most likely in haste and with politicized anger, was a smear. A defamation. A libel. Which is why Atlas has threatened to sue. 

    The signers responded by invoking their freedom of speech. 

    Who is right?

    One could argue that all libel laws are an unjust use of force against the freedom to speak. This was Murray Rothbard’s position. He said we do not possess property rights in our reputation. As cruel and wicked as genuine defamation is – and truly many people would choose to have their car stolen than to be widely smeared on the internet – it falls into the category of sin not crime. 

    There are also huge problems with enforcement. The court system is not cheap. It is expensive to sue for libel or slander, and the guilty parties don’t often have resources to pay compensation. It ends up going to mediation, where one party decides reluctantly to recant. But there is no guarantee that the recantation will be seen by the same people who saw the smear. 

    What’s the point of a sheepish admission on Facebook that what one person said was a lie? This brings no justice at all. The damage is already done. 

    There is an additional problem with defamation law: its very existence might lead people to have an unwarranted trust in what others say rather than holding a proper incredulity toward implausible claims – claims such as that which accuses a famous public health expert of ignoring the science. If there were no opportunity to use the law to sue someone for something they said, the public might otherwise develop a correct suspicion of all such smears. 

    That said, the laws do exist. Given that, and the widespread but incorrect supposition that actual libel would not go unpunished, I see no real objection to deploying these laws in the defense of truth if the resources are available and there is some hope that regaining one’s good name is possible. 

    In this case, it strikes me that Scott Atlas has a strong case that his old colleagues played fast and loose with his professional reputation for purely political reasons. If the courts get involved and decide against the signers of this document, I won’t shed too many tears for their free speech rights: after all, the upshot of their letter is to lend their professional reputations to violating everyone’s rights in the name of disease mitigation, and cover up their political motivations with the veneer of science. 

  • "Maniacal Laughing Vandal" Derails Manhattan Subway Train By Tossing Metal Objects On Tracks
    “Maniacal Laughing Vandal” Derails Manhattan Subway Train By Tossing Metal Objects On Tracks

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 21:35

    The debt laden and horrifically inefficient MTA, who has spent the better part of the last several months petitioning for bailout money amidst a historic collapse in riders, now has another problem on its hands after a Manhattan subway train derailed Sunday morning.

    The wreck was blamed on a “maniacal, laughing vandal” who reportedly tossed metal plates onto the tracks, according to The Daily News.

    The plates, called “D plates” were placed about 50 feet into 14th St. station. They are usually used to secure tracks to the roadbed and police say the ones that were thrown onto the tracks had been left behind by MTA workers. Three passengers were injured as a result of the derailment. 135 passengers were evacuated and the wreck tripped a breaker on the uptown express A train tracks between Canal and 34th Sts., leaving a second train without power. 125 people were on board and needed to be saved by a rescue train. 

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    30 year old Demetrius Harvard reportedly tossed the plates onto the tracks before a bystander jumped onto the roadbed to try and clear them off the tracks before a train pulled in. Harvard then throw more of them onto the tracks as the train pulled further into the station. 

    The train’s first two wheel sets were then thrown from the tracks causing the front car to slam into station pillars.  Frank Jezycki, acting senior vice president of subways at NYC Transit, said that “hundreds of feet” of rail was damaged or destroyed. 

    MTA chief safety officer Pat Warren said: “We’ve ruled out that this was any malfunction of our equipment or any inappropriate action of our crews.” 

    Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Tony Utano stated: “This was an all-hands on deck emergency with transit workers from multiple divisions responding to assist riders and then begin repairing the extensive damage. It’s a stark reminder that the MTA can’t cut its frontline workers even if the federal government fails to provide funding in a COVID relief package.”

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    Harvard was seen laughing after the train derailed, but Good Samaritans chased him down and held him at the station until the NYPD arrived. He was brought to NYPD Transit District headquarters at the Canal St. station and was charged with reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, assault and criminal trespassing.

    It is being called one of New York’s “most catastrophic train derailments in years”. Harvard also has an “extensive criminal history” according to The Daily News – which means Mayor De Blasio will likely have him released immediately and cleared of all charges. 

  • China Stock Shorts Soar To Record High
    China Stock Shorts Soar To Record High

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 21:15

    By Molly Dai, Singapore based macro commentator for Bloomberg

    With China’s equity market cooling in recent weeks, following its fastest rally in years, investors have pushed the value of Chinese stocks being shorted to uncharted levels.

    The balance of securities lending in domestic exchanges has jumped to a record 81.9 billion yuan ($12.1 billion), surging 8.8 billion yuan last week alone in the biggest one-week net increase ever, according to data compiled by Bloomberg dating back to late 2012.

    That suggests traders remain worried about further declines in Chinese shares as the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index fights to hold on to a series of support levels around the 3,300 level.

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  • One Bank Expects COVID Herd Immunity To Emerge By 2022
    One Bank Expects COVID Herd Immunity To Emerge By 2022

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 20:55

    Last week, Bank of America made a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation that roughly 12% of the US population had achieved COVID herd immunity, far below the 60% threshold that is necessary for the disease to be contained without fresh policy actions, prompting BofA to propose a vision for a world in which we get periodic covid flareups in the coming months, many of which could culminate in fresh lockdowns.

    Taking the initial thoughts from BofA, this morning Deutsche Bank published an extensive report analyzing what “Living with Covid” for the foreseeable future would be like (with an emphasis on Asian countries) since – like BofA – the German bank does not see herd immunity emerging as a factor until 2022 for advanced economies, and 2023 for the rest of the world, to wit:

    Although developments on the vaccine front have been promising, there is uncertainty over the uptake of vaccines by the public and thereby the pace of achieving herd immunity, which would better ensure a more full normalization of economic activity. Our baseline forecast now assumes that some economies will achieve herd immunity to Covid-19 in 2022, along with most advanced  economies. Other countries are likely to have to wait until 2023 to achieve the same. Risks around these forecasts are evenly balanced.

    Another key point that remains lost on many politicians both in the US and elsewhere is that “the tolerance for extended rigorous social distancing appears to be weakening, with new social distancing regulations being in most places milder and imposed for shorter durations. People appear to have learned how to protect themselves and to live with the virus better than during the initial outbreaks, as economic data are proving in some respects more resilient to the virus.”

    The bottom line, as we said many months ago, is that having done the calculus most economies are now willing to reopen their economies as the political and socioeconomic hit from lockdowns is far more adverse to the broader population – and especially the youth which is losing jobs by the millions – than enforcing full quarantine with spotty results while hoping to minimize new cases, something which can be seen most vividly in new cases in some countries like Spain and France, has failed to lead to a rebound in new deaths or hospitalizations.

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    Finally, reliance on a vaccine as some magic bullet that will magically cure the global economy appears largely misplaced, because as Deutsche notes, “although developments on the vaccine front have been promising, there are concerns about a possible low acceptance by the public of these new vaccines by the public. It may also matter importantly which vaccines are put into commercial production first – they vary significantly in cost and emerging economies could be at a disadvantage in acquiring enough vaccine.”

    The bottom line, according to the report’s authors is that until herd immunity has been achieved – some time in 2022/2023, “economies will remain hostage to the virus – shrinking with each new outbreak and expanding quickly as social distancing eases with the subsequent decline in infection risks.”

    One can only hope that after the US elections, the political angle of such decision-making will become moot, and policymakers can finally focus on the most optimal outcome without a preference for decisions that leads to who ends up in the White House, but rather what is truly for the benefit of the people.

  • NASA Is Paying For Moon-Rocks – Implications For Space Commerce Are Huge
    NASA Is Paying For Moon-Rocks – Implications For Space Commerce Are Huge

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 20:35

    Authored by Alexander William Salter via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    Commercial space enthusiasts, we have liftoff! On September 10th, NASA announced that it’s soliciting proposals for private entities to collect lunar rocks and soil. Basically, NASA is offering to buy these materials from the corporations that gather them. This project has enormous implications for the future of commercial space activities.

    “Today, we’re taking a critical step forward by releasing a solicitation for commercial companies to provide proposals for the collection of space resources,” announced NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

    One of his goals is to create “a stable and predictable investment environment for commercial space innovators and entrepreneurs.” 

    Furthermore, he clarified that NASA intends to take an “‘in-place’ transfer of ownership.”

    Translation: whoever harvests the moon materials needn’t bring them back to Earth. This initiative helps realize Congressional legislation to protect U.S. citizens’ property rights to celestial resources, and gives teeth to a recent executive order promoting the commercial development of space.

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    NASA is creating financial incentives for private companies to market lunar resources. This could be a first step to developing lunar mining capabilities. The biggest benefit of the program, though, is precedent. It puts the U.S. government’s imprimatur on space commerce. Given the ambiguities in public international space law, this precedent has the potential to steer space policy and commerce in a pro-market direction.

    The foundational document of international space law is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST). Drafted at the height of the Cold War, its chief function was to prevent a celestial arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. That’s why it didn’t include any specific provisions for outer space property rights. Article II of the treaty forbids “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” This calls into question the permissibility of private property rights. And Article VI states “activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision” by their governments. This suggests that commercial actors must be micromanaged by their governments.

    Subsequent treaties tried to clarify OST’s purposes. For example, the Moon Agreement of 1979 clearly frowns on property rights to celestial resources: It forbids making the moon or any of its resources the “property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person.” Fortunately, none of the major spacefaring nations ratified the treaty. Nevertheless, a significant portion of the international community supports it.

    With NASA’s announcement, the U.S. government decisively rejected this anti-commercial mindset. The U.S. government is not annexing lunar real estate, meaning it continues to affirm OST Article II. And as for Article VI, as space lawyer Laura Montgomery correctly notes, it is not self-executing. It isn’t “enforceable federal law” without Congress passing “domestic implementing legislation.” In fact, Congress passed such legislation: The previously-mentioned law to recognize and protect outer space property rights. It’s clear that Congress is comfortable with markets in space. Finally, because the U.S. government never signed the Moon Agreement, there’s no subterfuge.

    The position of the US government is clear: commercial activities in space are neither exploitative nor illegal. Given the vagueness of international space law on property rights, the precedents created by national space law will have a decisive role in shaping the future space environment. Hence, NASA’s actions can support a pro-business turn not just for the United States, but also for the international community as a whole.

    In ancient times, mankind extended the division of labor across tribes, turning enemies into friends. Later came trade across national boundaries, with similar largely peaceful effects. Now, humans are prepared to extend it still further: into the final frontier. Doux commerce is coming to the stars. NASA just made a “giant leap for mankind.” Everyone who cares about human wealth and welfare should heartily thank them.

  • "End School To Prison Pipeline" – New Kim Klacik Ad Highlights How Liberals Destroyed Baltimore 
    “End School To Prison Pipeline” – New Kim Klacik Ad Highlights How Liberals Destroyed Baltimore 

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 20:15

    Readers may recall, in mid-August, we pointed out Kim Klacik, the GOP congressional candidate from Baltimore, is attempting to take late Elijah Cummings’ congressional seat in Maryland’s 7th congressional district. 

    However, there just one problem, she’s a Republican, nevertheless, a young black millennial, who has been embraced by President Trump and top Republicans. 

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    For more color on Maryland’s 7th District, which covers the northern and eastern boundaries of Baltimore County, the majority of Howard County, and a decent chunk of eastern and western parts of Baltimore City, which have been dominated by Democrats for a little more than half a century. 

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    Klacik was propelled into the spotlight in August when her campaign released a video of her walking the streets of Baltimore. She showed people “the real Baltimore,” outlining how decades of Democratic policies have imploded communities:

    “Democrats don’t want you to see this. They’re scared that I’m exposing what life is like in Democrat-run cities. That’s why I’m running for Congress Because All Black Lives Matter Baltimore Matters And black people don’t have to vote Democrat.” 

    Two weeks later, in early September, Trump tweeted that he “fully endorsed” Klacik. 

    Now the Baltimore-based GOP Congressional candidate is out with another political ad bashing Baltimore liberals for destroying the city. She focused on Baltimore’s trash problems, dilapidated row houses, and the “black struggle of people in Baltimore.” 

    “I see a Baltimore that picks up trash,” Klacik said. “There are piles of garbage all around Baltimore. It makes life unsafe for our families. I’ll work with city leaders to get Baltimore Solid Waste Bureau the resources it needs to take out the trash.”

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    “Our streets should be a reflection of our leaders: clean, not dirty,” she said, adding that she wants to “end school to prison pipeline” and introduce the school choice plan, a program backed by Trump. 

    Klacik said there are more than 17,000 vacant row houses in the city, calling them a “scar on the face of our city” (read: “Baltimore Continues To Struggle With Thousands Of Vacant Homes”). 

    “A broken Baltimore doesn’t have to be our future,” she said. 

    Trump has criticized the liberal-run city for years. In 2019, he called the metro area, which is about a 40-minute train ride from Washington, D.C., a “disgusting” and “rodent-infested mess.” 

    Klacik’s new ad puts Baltimore Democrats to shame and points out their decades of failures. 

    Will Klacik one day be the new face of the GOP? 

  • Crazy College COVID Rules: Online-Only Student Who's Never On-Campus Suspended Indefinitely For Attending Party
    Crazy College COVID Rules: Online-Only Student Who’s Never On-Campus Suspended Indefinitely For Attending Party

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 19:55

    Authored by Robby Soave via Reason.com,

    It was a gorgeous August weekend in New York City, and Andy – a college senior at New York University (NYU) – decided to attend a rooftop social gathering with his roommates.

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    The party was consistent with New York City’s Phase 4 COVID-19 guidelines, which allow events of up to 50 people. Many attendees went mask-less, but Andy says he didn’t stand in close proximity to anyone other than his roommates—who are also students—and they left after a short while.

    But unbeknownst to Andy – whose name has been changed for this article to protect his privacy – someone at the party posted a video of the event on social media. Andy never saw this video, but he knows that he was visible in it. The video was reported to NYU administrators via the university’s COVID-19 compliance system. On Sunday, August 23—a day after the party—NYU Director of Student Conduct Craig Jolley sent an email to Andy accusing him of “threatening the health and safety of the NYU Community.”

    By 5:00 p.m. on Monday, NYU had suspended him indefinitely:

    To return to campus in 2021, Andy will need to write a reflection paper and beg for readmission.

    Resuming his education might be impossible, anyway, since he relies on a full-tuition scholarship that is now threatened by his disciplinary status.

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    Andy thinks NYU treated him unfairly. It’s hard to disagree. Importantly, he didn’t actually put anyone on campus in danger, because he had no plans to set foot on NYU property: He lives off campus, and all his classes were online.

    “I am not a student who will be staying at or near NYU housing, nor will I be entering Campus Grounds or NYU buildings as I am currently enrolled in all online courses,” Andy wrote in his appeal of the decision.

    The appeal was rejected.

    *  *  *

    The COVID-19 pandemic is a multifaceted disaster, casually crippling vast swaths of the U.S. economy, bringing social interaction to an unexpected and unprecedented halt, and of course, killing more than 200,000 Americans. The challenges are daunting for many people, organizations, and industries—U.S. higher education certainly among them.

    Colleges and universities have adopted a wide variety of strategies. Some have decided that in-person instruction is simply impossible: In May, California State University (CSU) became the first to announce that the fall semester would be online-only. Earlier this month, CSU made the same call regarding the 2021 spring semester.

    Many other universities, perhaps realizing that students will balk at paying full tuition for a series of glorified online tutorials, attempted to reopen in various stages and forms. But these reopenings were accompanied by tough restrictions on student social gatherings in dormitories, off-campus housing, and elsewhere. Evidently, administrators expected that students would be willing to come to class, learn, then hurry back to their residences—and stay there. At many campuses, near-perfect compliance with extreme social distancing requirements on the part of students was not merely a requirement, schools assumed they would comply.

    “Everything we have done – the months of planning to give our students the opportunity to continue their educational pursuits in person – can be undone in the blink of an eye with just one party or event that does not follow the rules and guidelines,” said Katie Sermersheim, Purdue University’s dean of students, in a statement detailing the school’s no-parties pledge.

    Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, likened Sermersheim’s admission that non-universal compliance will destroy the strategy to “an evacuation plan that will work perfectly as long as the building isn’t on fire.”

    “Why would anyone admit that their months of planning would collapse if students hold a single party?” he wondered on Twitter.

    Universities that believe they can ban many or all social functions for students are essentially conducting an experiment that has been run many times, from the era of Prohibition to modern abstinence-only education. The results of this latest experiment are in, and they are familiar: Students will party, COVID-19 be damned.

    The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, opened for in-person learning on August 10. By August 17, the school had decided to go online-only for the duration of the semester following a dramatic spike in coronavirus cases on campus. In an editorial, The Daily Tarheel, which reported numerous parties during the first weekend back at school, chided university leadership for failing to anticipate that students, “many of whom are now living on their own for the first time,” would be reckless. “Reports of parties throughout the weekend come as no surprise,” wrote the student editors.

    The social gatherings are entirely unsurprising. But that’s not because students are uniquely incautious. On the contrary, students are just like the rest of us—trying to manage risk while still living life, months beyond the point where most people expected they would be able to go back to normal. (Remember “15 days to slow the spread”?) These risks are not the same for all people—age and health status matter—and they are not equally significant in all circumstances—outdoor events are not indoor events. And people who take on some amount of risk do not always attract equal levels of moral condemnation. Assuming that virtually everyone would obey orders, not just to be more careful than usual, but to live a sad and isolated existence indefinitely—perhaps that was reckless.

    Events resembling what happened at UNC have transpired on dozens of campuses, and hundreds of students have already suffered suspensions. Purdue kicked 36 kids off campus for partying without masks. St. Olaf College in Minnesota suspended 17. Syracuse University suspended 23. Northeastern University learned that a first-year student had conducted a poll asking classmates whether they intended to party, despite the school’s restrictions. When more than 100 students responded in the affirmative, the pollster forwarded their names to administrators, who then threatened the students—and their parents—via email.

    “You have displayed a disregard for health and safety measures, jeopardized our chances to keep our community safe, and increased the possibility that you and others—including your classmates—might not be able complete the semester,” wrote the school, before demanding that they sign a pledge to improve their behavior.

    Northeastern eventually suspended 11 students for partying. They will be allowed to return in the spring. Their tuition for the aborted fall semester—a whopping $36,500—will not be refunded.

    *  *  *

    Andy’s financial hit is indirect but no less serious. His suspension is likely to result in the loss of his full-tuition scholarship, which means he would not be able to afford NYU, even if the administration lets him return. He also has a job offer with a bank that is contingent upon his successful graduation, he told Reason.

    “I considered looking at legal action, though I might be out of my budget,” he says. “I contacted a lawyer. She was just ball-parking some numbers and they seemed unreasonable.”

    Following their receipt of the social media video—emailed to covidcompliance@nyu.edu, the university’s hotline for reporting noncooperation—NYU administrators accused Andy of violating three separate aspects of the student code of conduct: Policy B1, which prohibits “threatening” behavior that compromises health and safety; Policy E1, which prohibits “disorderly, disruptive, or antagonizing behavior that interferes with the safety, security, health or welfare of the community”; and Policy E3, which obligates students to follow the new COVID-19 guidelines when on campus.

    “As you are likely aware, the University is responding swiftly and seriously to behaviors that threaten the health and safety of the NYU Community,” wrote Jolley, the student conduct office director, in his initial email to Andy. Jolley did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

    Andy was invited to plead his case on a Zoom call but was given just 24 hours to prepare for it. Jolley rendered his verdict swiftly: Immediately after the call, Andy says he was informed that he was suspended.

    Andy was devastated.

    “A suspension for me is more than just a semester,” he says. “This adversely impacts my entire life.”

    The university was unmoved.

    “Considering the importance of creating a safe environment during a global pandemic, the University will not tolerate conduct which intentionally and recklessly disregards the rules and threatens the health and safety of others,” wrote Jolley. “Your behavior in this situation is unacceptable.”

    Was it? Reasonable people can debate—and are debating, all over the country—what level of risk is acceptable, for themselves and others. Many people believe the decision to open campuses at all is reckless: Students and faculty affiliated with the University of Georgia’s educators’ union, for instance, held a die-in protest on the school’s lawn to oppose re-opening. Many educators with union protection expect to be paid, regardless of whether schools re-open, which gives them greater reason to lobby for additional delays. University administrators, on the other hand, probably realize that distance learning hurts their bottom line since it encourages customers—students and their parents—to explore other options. College reopening strategies around the country are based on profoundly misguided assumptions about human behavior.

    Andy says he didn’t put the health and safety of other students at risk—he lives off campus and takes all his classes online. He also thinks the COVID-19 rules, as written, only apply to people who are actually present on campus, or in NYU buildings.

    Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, says Andy has a point.

    “COVID-19 is not a computer virus, so unless this event involved a number of NYU students, any interest the university has in wielding its disciplinary procedures to deter the spread of COVID-19 among NYU students is pretty attenuated,” Steinbaugh tells Reason. “It’s hard to blame students for being surprised that this type of policy is being applied to their off-campus conduct.”

    Steinbaugh reviewed Andy’s case at Reason‘s request (and with Andy’s permission). He thinks NYU is overreacting, and unless the rooftop party was itself in violation of New York City’s public health orders, it would be tough to justify the suspension.

    “Universities appear eager to shift blame for ballooning COVID-19 infections to students,” says Steinbaugh, who notes that the reflection paper assigned to Andy in hopes of gaining readmission is supposed to “focus on the role young people have played in the transmission of COVID-19 in the United States.”

    ***

    For now, Andy is trying to enroll in a different online college so that the semester is not a total waste.

    “I’ve got to get some credit somehow,” he says.

    He regrets going to the party and says that it wasn’t characteristic of how he has conducted himself during the pandemic.

    “While it may not appear this way, I have been attempting to stay safe as best I can,” he wrote in his appeal. “My attempt to seek some feeling of normalcy was nothing more than a snap decision and I cannot emphasize how much I have learned from this process.”

    Indeed, going back to school during a pandemic is proving to be an educational experience for everyone, including and especially the educators. School administrators are learning that they can’t quite overcome students’ natural inclinations—all they can do is process their tuition payments. The faster, the better, probably.

  • Emmys Hit Lowest-Ever Ratings With Just 6.1 Million Viewers
    Emmys Hit Lowest-Ever Ratings With Just 6.1 Million Viewers

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 19:35

    The Emmys hit their lowest-ever ratings Sunday night, as Nielsen‘s Live+SameDay fast nationals for reveal the awards ceremony had just 6.1 million viewers, and a 1.2 rating in adults aged 18-49.

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    This is a drop of 12% over last year, which marked the previous all-time low, and represented a 25% dropoff in the key demographic, according to Variety.

    Perhaps it was host Jimmy Kimmel’s “Black Lives Matter” chant – which comedian Stephen Crowder ‘manipulated’ with clips of Kimmel’s old blackface routines.

    Last year marked a historic low for TV’s top awards show, as a host-less ceremony on Fox delivered a massive 33% decline from the year before, scoring a 1.6 rating and drawing only 6.9 million viewers. For comparison, the previous four ceremonies before that were watched by 10.2 million viewers, 11.4 million viewers (in both 2017 and 2016) and 11.9 million viewers. That 6.9 million figure was roughly one third of the total pairs of eyeballs the Emmys drew as recently as 2013. –Variety

    That said, Variety notes that Sunday night’s ceremony had competition from NBC‘s “Sunday Night Football” as well as the NBA Playoffs on the East Coast, which aired in the primetime window for the first time.

    What’s more, there was no red carpet lead-in this year, which “likely played some part in producing these low numbers.”

  • CNBC Screamfest Culminates With Muddy Waters Teasing Reveal Of New Short That "Makes Tesla Look Like Microsoft" 
    CNBC Screamfest Culminates With Muddy Waters Teasing Reveal Of New Short That “Makes Tesla Look Like Microsoft” 

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 19:15

    Sometimes, CNBC goes too far in trying to represent “both sides” of an issue – like when Scott Wapner put himself in the awkward position of defending taxpayer handouts to corporations that blew all their own money on stock buybacks.

    It happened against during Monday’s episode of “The Closing Bell”, when co-host Wilfred Frost became the latest to lose his cool on air during an interview with Muddy Waters founder Carson Block – inadvertently offering Block a golden opportunity to tease his firm’s next big short on twitter, instead of CNBC where it could have drawn far more eyeballs (and ad revenue).

    According to the Muddy Waters Twitter account, the firm will release its next big short on Tuesday.

    Block, who built his reputation by uncovering fraud and shorting Chinese companies trading in the US, was brought on to discuss the disaster at Nikola, when the discussion suddenly veered off course.

    After answering a few questions from Frost’s co-host Sara Eisen, Block was prompted to broaden his criticism after being asked about the sell-side analysts standing by Nikola. Block implied that sell-side analysts might be guilty of securities fraud, if it wasn’t for companies’ “safe harbor” statements.

    Expanding on this, Block explained his low opinion of sell-side research, claiming “they’re a highly paid dating service for institutional investors…the way that they really add value to the world – to the extent they do – is by arranging meetings between institutional clients and management. And it’s no secret that if an analyst isn’t pretty bullish on a company, most companies won’t allow the analyst to arrange the dates, and so that analyst is shut out.

    Then came the punchline: when talking about stocks, sell side analysts “should be taken about as seriously as your 5-year-old kid”.

    Frost was seemingly taken aback by this last comment (his seemingly genuine indignation reminded us of another classic CNBC moment that unfolded earlier this year). Responding with a hint of agitation, Frost insisted that he didn’t really appreciate that characterization and assured his audience that many analysts are “highly trained.”

    “I think that’s completely wide of the mark even though at times there are examples where they do get things wrong,” Frost said.

    “It’s hard for me to let that one lie Wilford,” Block said.

    Frost doubled-down, resolving to bash Block with his call to short Tesla.

    “Have you gotten every single call you’ve made absolutely right? Well have you?”

    To this, Block replied that he has “about as good a batting average as anybody does on the long side…but I’ve been doing it on the short side during the biggest bull market of your generation. So maybe you can cut me a little slack.”

    Then, the short-seller went for the jugular: “You’re the one who pushed back when I said Elon Musk was committing fraud…and then he settled with the SEC…do you actually read anything Wilfred…I know you’re a good looking guy with a British accent, but what do you read?”

    Frost responded by throwing Block’s Tesla call in his face: “You’re the guy who told viewers to short Tesla, then Tesla stock soared.”

    Then, Frost touched upon what just might be the true motivation for his anger: Sell side analysts are hard-working people and “a lot of them come on this network and give up their time to do so,” Frost said.

    Of course, practically everybody on Wall Street knows showing face on CNBC is literally part of the sell side analyst’s job description. But Block kept pushing, doubling down on his critique of sell-side research: “It’s largely toilet paper, there’s occasionally a sell-side analysts who are willing to go out a limb and say something unpopular…but they’re a dying breed.”

    As Frost stammered out a response, Block added “Do you understand that about Wall Street? That’s just baffling.”

    Of course, Block has a point.

    Those who understand this should also understand that for professionals, there is no “random walk down Wall Street”.

  • Another Bloody Chicago Weekend Sees Almost 40 Shot, With Homicides Up 50%
    Another Bloody Chicago Weekend Sees Almost 40 Shot, With Homicides Up 50%

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/21/2020 – 18:55

    Another grim weekend out of Chicago as the Sun Times reports at least 36 total shot, including 9 fatalities across the city after total figures were tallied Monday.

    This is slightly down from the prior weekend which included 42 people shot, 12 of which died of their wounds.

    The windy city has seen shocking numbers nearly every weekend over the past months, also earlier this month over a bloody Labor Day holiday weekend which saw a whopping 51 shot, including 10 deaths.

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    Via CNN

    The deaths remain relatively young black males, with this weekend’s homicides all being male victims between the ages of 17 and 47 years old. A 16-year old was also shot, but is expected to survive:

    The weekend’s youngest victim was a teenage boy critically wounded early Saturday in South Chicago. The 16-year-old was standing on the sidewalk about 2:15 a.m. in the 5000 block of West Monroe Street when someone fired shots from a dark blue vehicle in an alley, according to police. He was hit in the chest and taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition.

    Chicago police have that tallied shootings are up 50% compared to this time last year. Here are the numbers according to local reports:

    But, overall, shootings and murders are up 50% compared to last year, according to Chicago Police Department statistics. Through Sept. 13, police have recorded 544 murders in 2020 compared to 364 murders during the same time in 2019.

    The same increase applies to shootings. The city has seen more than 2,220 shootings in 2020 compared to about 1,500 over the same time in 2019, according to the statistics.

    The weekend period running late Friday into Monday morning remain the deadliest portion of the week, with warm weekend holidays typically witnessing the worst numbers. 

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    And this particular weekend, 30 among the 36 victims were reported shot Friday evening into Sunday morning alone in Chicago.

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